​​Restaurateurs of Manifesto: Isaac Starobin, From Chef to Business Owner

“Products don't sell themselves. Getting people in the door for the first time is horrendously difficult.”

The first video episode of the Manifesto Academy features Isaac Starobin, an American-born legend of the American BBQ in Prague, working within Manifesto since 2018. Soon to introduce his concept to Berliners. 

Isaac, how would you describe the current gastro world? What's your approach?

What we do in the gastro world is, we do things that have already been done many, many times. We try to do them a little bit better, and a little bit more consistently. Some of us are more creative than others. You know, I don't try to be too creative. I try to do the food that we do as well as we possibly can. The recipes that we use are mine. But they've also been passed down through generations and generations of barbecue people.

 

You are the owner of Dirty Dog Southern Smokehouse. A true icon of the American BBQ in Prague. How was your transition from Chef to successful owner?

I would say that the number one thing if you're looking to go from chef to owner or from general manager to owner is to remember that products don't sell themselves. It doesn't matter how good your product is, whether your product is food, cocktails, or the service of the atmosphere you provide, none of that sells itself. So getting people in the door for the first time is horrendously difficult. If you're good at what you do, once they come in, they'll come back and they'll tell their friends and you'll build up momentum and you'll build a self-sustaining machine. But getting people in the door that first time is horrifically difficult. And it's not remotely connected to any of the skills that we learned with our boots on the ground actually working in restaurants and bars. 

 

Isaac, tell us a bit about yourself.

I was born and raised in New York and I lived in New Orleans for a few years, which is where I got my love for Southern cooking. Then I moved back to New York where I went to culinary school and worked in some really fantastic restaurants, for some amazing chefs. I did my apprenticeship at Craft restaurant, which is owned by chef Tom Colicchio, one of the most famous chefs in New York. And the guys who worked for him and who trained me there were just phenomenally talented. Then I worked for the Soho House, a multinational chain, kind of private clubs for the entertainment industry, and then for Cephalon to another at BLT Steak. And in all those places I was always working for such talented people. I was very lucky that so many of them took the time out of their days, out of their busy schedules to take me under their wing and teach me and really took an interest in my career.

 

Wow. Tom Colicchio. What did you take from that experience? 

He was about 12 levels above me. He owned several restaurants at that time. I think I only met him once or twice to be completely honest. But it was the guys who worked for him. His chef de cuisine, senior sous-chef, junior sous-chef, cooks, all the way down to little apprentice like Isaac. And those are the guys whom I spent the most time with.

 

Dirty Dog is what you are in love with. How did you get to Prague?

After a number of years of working in kitchens in New York, I decided to take a little bit of a break, and travel for a bit. And my plan was originally to spend about six months, maybe a year travelling through Europe, and then go home and really focus on my career. I don't know what the hell happened there. 13 years later, I'm still here. So I moved out here and I got a job teaching English. And that was okay for a few months, maybe a couple of years. But there's not much future in that. And it's certainly not the job that I was trained to do for most of my life, but certainly not anything that I'm in love with.

 

Isaac, so you are a successful gastro entrepreneur right now :-)

Well, if you're calling yourself a gastro entrepreneur, I certainly hope you have at least some experience working for successful gastro entrepreneurs. I don't like the word entrepreneur. When somebody calls himself an entrepreneur, I assume they're doing something in tech, or they're building a startup and trying to disrupt something. And that's not what we do in my world. That's what Manifesto does. Manifesto is a wonderfully disruptive force in the startup world doing things that nobody has ever done before. Nobody has done what Manifesto has done. It's disruptive. But it's amazing. That's not what we do.

I consider restaurant owners to be small business owners. And even if you own 10, or 20, restaurants, it's still a small business owner in my mind, which means that your job is to get incrementally better every single year, and show some incremental growth every single year.

 

What makes a successful restaurant? Can you share any example?

It doesn't matter how good your food is. If your service is off, if your atmosphere is off, if your interior is off, people will not come back. And we've seen it over and over again. Even in New York, which is a city that's really focused on good food, restaurants with good food where everything else was bad close. Whereas restaurants with bad food where everything else is tight and works, they're more likely to succeed. From a chef's point of view, that sucks, but it means that we need to get out of our bubble of only focusing on the kitchen. And thinking that this is all that matters. And we need to see the whole big picture.

 

Is there anything you would like to advise “new” chefs?

It means that we need to, and that's especially tough for those of us who were raised in kitchens, we need to learn how to use computers better. We need to get comfortable with our office. We need to understand that the higher you get, and the better the more successful you get, the less time you're gonna spend in your kitchen with your kitchen crew, which is, for me at least, the reason I got into this business. That's what I love. But as you move on, you get to be more comfortable with spreadsheets than with the grill. 

 

Interview conducted by Klara Olivova.