Opening a restaurant is an insane thing to do.
You spend years obsessing over details nobody should reasonably care about. You argue about chairs. You move light fixtures three inches. You hold entire meetings about a shade of red. Somehow that bathroom doorknob is a matter of life and death.
You debate neighborhoods and foot traffic. You sign leases and personal guarantees that make you quiver. You sigh as construction budgets go over, knowing profit margins are always razor-thin.
But somehow you convince a group of people to believe in a vision that exists only in your head. Then one day you open the doors, inviting strangers to come in and decide its future. It’s insane, but it’s exactly how things should be.
The truth is I love restaurants. I love running them. I love the thousand moving pieces that come together into something that feels alive. Restaurants are the place where those obsessions over details are useful.
I’m someone who never finished high school, so restaurants were the places where I found people who made sense: artists, athletes, dreamers, and even misfits belonged. We begin with great ingredients and try not to get in their way. Over the years New York brought artists and craftspeople into my life. Humm is a restaurant built by my friends. Their work fills these rooms.
Photograph by Adrian Gaut
As my third restaurant, Humm, opened last week, I’m still reflecting on how I ended up here. I wanted to create the kind of restaurant that could grow and change with New York City, but also that restaurant I was searching for — that reminded me of home and the lessons my mother taught me about cooking.
She wanted to taste the ingredients first. If she had a religion, it was that everything deserved dignity. Carrot, rabbit, lettuce, chicken: no hierarchy. You don’t bully a carrot into being a rabbit. You respect every ingredient equally and coax each thing to become itself.
Dining and Cooking