A spread from La Pecora Bianca. Photo: Liz Clayman
Hi there. Thanks for weighing in last week on your favorite restaurant neighborhoods. We loved hearing from you and learned a lot from your answers. We’ll have more giveaways in the future, but I hope you’ll consider weighing in in the comments when we don’t have giveaways, too. Today I’m spotlighting swishy La Pecora Bianca opening in Lincoln Center. It dovetails with Brasserie Boulud that opened nearby a few days ago. I didn’t know much about the owner, Mark Barak, so I thought I’d reach out and learn more about him and his businesses, where he says he offers benefits that are a challenge to secure for most independent restaurants. Read on for more. — Melissa McCart, lead editor, Northeast
Photo: Liz Clayman
La Pecora Bianca opens its largest location yet on Monday, October 19, at 61 Columbus Avenue, across from Lincoln Center. The two-story restaurant has more than 250 seats and dishes you won’t find at the other locations. Those include mafaldine with roasted butternut squash, brown butter, and crispy sage as well as swordfish cacciatore. A 50-foot lemon orchard mural by artist Kimmy Quillin runs across both floors.
It’s the eighth La Pecora Bianca in New York. It’s also the third restaurant founder Mark Barak has opened this year, after Giulietta in the MetLife Building in February and La Pecora Bianca in the Theater District in May. And he’s working on opening his first restaurant outside of New York in Florida in two weeks.
Barak, a former investment banker who worked for former NBA commissioner David Stern, opened the first La Pecora Bianca in Nomad in 2015. He credits the pace of business growth to his staff. What brings them in? He claims to offer benefits he says that few independent New York restaurant groups offer: matching 401(k)s and family health insurance.
Earlier this week, I talked to him about Bolognese and why he models his growth on Hillstone restaurants. Read on for more.
Melissa McCart: You’ve been opening restaurants at a pretty brisk pace.
Mark Barak: We are currently in a very big expansion mode. Between January of this year and March of next year, we’ll have gone from seven to 12 restaurants.
Photo: Bryan Ferry
How did you get here?
I spent the first part of my career in the corporate world. I graduated from Wharton with an MBA in finance, and I was at Deutsche Bank in mergers and acquisitions for media companies. Then I went in-house in finance and strategy at EMI and then at the NBA. I left all that in 2012. In every corporate job, I would either resign out of frustration with my boss or get fired, because I would try to take their job. I realized I had a problem with authority. I needed to do my own thing, and the only idea I had was to open a restaurant.
What made you want to run the businesses differently?
When I started working in the restaurant industry to get experience, there were so many things that didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense to me that restaurants weren’t offering their teams things I took for granted in the corporate world, like a 401(k) match, family medical coverage, and structure for career growth. And yet everyone complained about turnover. Isn’t commitment a two-way street? If you’re not giving people long-term financial security and medical security, and you’re really offering them a job and not a career, why would they stay?
What do your employees get?
We have about 1,000 employees now, and we’ll be at 1,200 by the end of this growth. Every single one of them can enroll in a 401(k) with a 6 percent match, and all of them can participate in a family medical coverage plan. Right now, we cover it at 75 percent for managers, but my goal is to extend that.
Let’s talk about salary.
We were sharing an entire salary matrix for all positions with our team before we had to, because we wanted them to see their growth potential. Our managers and sous chefs make between $80,000 and $100,000 a year. Our executive chefs and general managers generally make over $120,000 a year as a base. Last year, we doubled our bonus program.
How does that connect to opening five restaurants in a year?
There’s a direct link. It’s the team we’ve built and been able to retain, because of how we treat them and what we offer them. That lets us develop a bench that can go in and open the restaurant. In a way, we’re not scaling the restaurant; we’re scaling the culture. Culture isn’t what you say at an orientation; it’s what’s in your paycheck, what’s in your benefits, what happens when you go to the doctor.
How do you keep 12 restaurants from feeling like a chain?
My vision from the start was to have an overarching brand but to design each location as if it had a different name, the same way Pastis and Balthazar have a lot in common but are different restaurants. La Pecora Bianca Soho is a completely different restaurant from La Pecora Bianca Bryant Park. They all look and feel totally different and hopefully have the same DNA: a place that feels warm and accessible and bright, that you can go to multiple times a week.
A lot of groups go to a commissary as they grow. We have not done that. Every single pasta is made in-house, in its own restaurant.
What’s your go-to order?
At lunch, the Toscano salad or a Caesar with chicken. At dinner, our Bolognese. A real ragu in Bologna is not a bunch of ground beef with tomato sauce. The color is almost orange, with a light touch of tomato and a little bit of cream. Our tagliatelle is hand-cut, not extruded. We tried both, and you really feel the difference. To start, the meatballs or the whipped ricotta. Then the tiramisu for two.
Tell me about Giulietta.
The owners of the MetLife Building loved what we do at La Pecora Bianca. They had this massive space, and they wanted us to take the DNA of La Pecora but do something exclusive to them. Giulietta is a love letter to the Italian holiday. It’s a little more romantic and cinematic and coastal.
What comes after New York?
La Pecora Bianca opens in Coral Gables in two weeks, and we plan to open more restaurants in South Florida. We’re also opening a Giulietta in Dallas. Hillstone was an inspiration to me. It’s always consistent, and you can go multiple times a week. It has multiple locations, but it’s perceived as a brand, not a chain. They’re privately held, and we’re founder-led. I don’t have private equity owners forcing me to open a lot of restaurants every year. This year sounds crazy, but over 11 years, we’ve opened 11 restaurants. That averages one a year, which is what Hillstone has done over 50 years.
Going forward, it’s Florida, Texas, and other markets at a measured pace. Giulietta will be a one-off flagship in each market, and we might have a few La Pecora Bianca locations in every city. The restaurant industry is littered with groups that tried to grow too fast outside New York. If you can’t scale your culture, you can’t scale. And you can’t keep up consistency while doubling the size of your group every year.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Photo: Bryan Ferry
Dining and Cooking