Stuart Miller
speaker
308 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Stuart Miller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Of course, I knew nothing about restaurants, but I figured it was a casting exercise, just like most other things. So I was like, okay, so I need to find... A chef.
And the other thought I had was that the percentage mindshare that Chez Panisse has in Berkeley, like if I lived in Berkeley, being able to walk to Chez Panisse and having that one woman in a house totally disproportionately impacts that whole place's sense of itself. Like there's such leverage to really good food. culinary and more than culinary, just neighborhood experience.
I aspired to bring that in some way to Santa Barbara and Montecito. And this restaurant spot came up. It ended up taking about a year to get the lease. It ended up being a sublease, but a long one. And then I started trying to figure out what distinguished different chefs. And I interviewed a ton of chefs.
And the reality is that for a chef to get leverage, they need to open multiple locations and then most often not be in the original location. And so I had several potential licensing deals with very fancy chefs because everybody seemed to agree once I had this lease that this was an amazing lease.
But I realize there's something about when you're in a restaurant and the chef is there versus... Jean-Georges number 10. Yeah, yeah. That it just feels different and it doesn't feel like a neighborhood place. And I wanted this to feel like a neighborhood place.
I kept looking for either someone younger, this was going to be their first breakout restaurant, or someone for whom it made sense that they would actually be in the restaurant. And I interviewed a ton of chefs. And one of the co-founders of BlackRock, Keith Anderson, owns a restaurant called Community Table in Litchfield County. And I was speaking to him about it.
I was speaking to him on a reference on a chef that had worked at Community Table back when he started it. And that chef, Joel Vealhand, ultimately we hired. And I'm super excited. He's moving to Santa Barbara in July. And we're going to open this restaurant.
But there's a dynamic between the general manager and the chef that is very delicate because one runs the front of the house and one runs the back of the house. And one theme that people who own restaurants have is chefs are artists. They're only going to last three to five years. So you actually want the stability of the general manager and having it be an experience first and the food second.
And I wrestled for a while with that trade-off and ultimately decided I didn't want that trade-off. And I was going to try to, we'll see whether it works, try to have it both ways. But this particular chef, I had interviewed him early in the process. And he was so, Joel was so knowledgeable and wise about the business without being cynical.
It was like this knife edge of, I interviewed so many chefs who were burned out. This is particularly probably a post-COVID experience. They had gotten slightly cynical and victimized feeling about the profession and how restaurants fared during COVID. And Joel didn't have that.
And then I was looking, so he's an Enneagram 6, which my wife is, and is the loyal skeptic or the, if you were to have a headline, it would be, winter is coming. So there's this underlying fear to it, but there's an excellence. The fear coexists with this excellence and judgment. And then our general manager I'd known for a while, she grew up in the business.
Her parents ran a restaurant in Santa Barbara. Her name is Jane, and she's an Enneagram 8. And I have a working theory that eights and sixes do really well together. The eights provide stability, the sixes are loyal, but also skeptical in a great way and alive in their decision-making. So I ended up thinking, like I introduced the two of them, sometime Joel did not want to be the general manager.
He knew in his old restaurant, at one point he'd had to act as general manager and he hated it. It's a little bit like if you had a failure, It's actually better sometimes because somebody prices themselves correctly. He prices the value of the general manager, in my view, correctly. Oh, interesting.
And values it. And I feel like there's a good chance it'll be a very long-term thing for that reason. And so I guess the other element... in Santa Barbara is the housing is so expensive. And so a couple of years ago, when I started this project, I knew that the toughest thing, if I was going to recruit somebody from outside of Santa Barbara, was going to be the housing.
And the biggest carrot I could provide somebody would be a great housing setup. And I also wanted the feel of the restaurant to be of somebody of that neighborhood, not somebody who's commuting an hour in, but to serve somebody else, but somebody who's grounded in that community. So I had bought what at the time was the cheapest house in Montecito and redid it.
It's right near a great public school and it's a three-minute walk to the restaurant. And so I was able to get him. The reason I'm so lucky here and the reason I know why it's a good setup for him, he's going to live in this house, his kid's going to go to the school, he's going to walk to the restaurant. And so all those elements came together. And then the final one was
I was kind of debating whether to have a ton of investors in it and pass the hat to the community or just kind of keep it simple and either just fund it myself. And I ended up finding a friend who's a partner at Sequoia, Brian Schreier, who he and his wife have a real interest in hospitality and have done other projects kind of like this.
And they met Joel, met Jane, were extremely excited about it.
Six.
You're right. It is that it's a casting exercise. It's so compact. This year we had 32 speakers. There was 32 choices that I did together with Paulino Lopez and a number of other friends on the host committee. And then one of the East Rock team, Brian Waterhouse, did Next Wave, which is how I started with Sewn 10 years ago.
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