Boqueria’s founder on twenty years of small plates, hard math, and the people who kept showing up.
By Yann de Rochefort
A month after we opened Boqueria in 2006, Giorgio DeLuca came in for dinner. Yes, that DeLuca, the one who opened Dean & DeLuca, the SoHo grocery that turned selecting an olive oil into an important status ritual. I watched him study the room, so I went over. He asked questions in the bluntest way possible. Who are you? What is this? Why did you do this? Then he looked around one more time and said, “This is just about fucking perfect.” Minutes later I told him I planned to stock the shelves with groceries from Spain, and he told me I was out of my mind. He had tried it for years at his Spring Street restaurant, and it never worked. In one conversation, the man who had reinvented culinary retail in New York City praised my restaurant as perfect and panned my plan as doomed.
He was right on both counts, and I’ve spent the last twenty years balancing those two prophecies.
We opened in a remarkable year. Half the city was scheming for a table at the new re-opened Waverly Inn or elbowing into Ssäm Bar. Frank Bruni came in that first year and gave us two stars in the Times. New restaurants arrived every week back then, and twenty years later, many are gone (along with the for sale signs on the Spanish groceries on our shelves).
It’s easy to understand why. A restaurant is one of the few businesses that makes everything it sells in the same spot where it sells it. Zara is not sewing clothes in the back of the shop before hawking them up front. Nearly every other type of business on a New York block sells something produced somewhere cheaper. Restaurants run the factory and the showroom under one roof, on one payroll, twice a day, every day with perishable merchandise, open flames, and freeflowing booze. What could go wrong?
While raising money for my first restaurant, I read Kitchen Confidential, and Bourdain’s advice was clear: do not open a restaurant if you are not already in the business. I ignored it, of course, even though I give the same advice today to anyone who asks. The drive to do this comes from somewhere beyond just a P&L. Is it passion or delusion? That depends on what day you ask me.
The number I trust most is the simplest one we track: how many people are walking through the front door. I tell everyone who works with me the same thing: as long as people keep coming, everything else can be figured out. Rising food costs, a broken walk-in, a brutal review, a “no call, no show”: all problems with solutions. The real problem starts when people stop walking in the door.
In March of 2020, they stopped everywhere at once, and I was forced to lay off nearly the entire company on a group Zoom call. I kept it together long enough to deliver the news and sign off, but then I broke down. Against the advice of HR and legal, over the next few months we held a call every two weeks for any employee in limbo who wanted to hear what was happening and how we planned to come back. When we reopened, about half of them returned.
Some have been with us since the beginning or saw careers blossom and grow. José walked in looking for work just days before opening night and has been in the kitchen ever since. I don’t believe he has missed a shift in twenty years. Aziz arrived at SoHo with no restaurant experience, took a dishwashing job, and became one of our best chefs de cuisine. Simone arrived a few months after Flatiron opened to help me with marketing. Twenty years later, she keeps operations seamless across eleven restaurants. There are few businesses left in this city where someone can walk in asking (for a minimum wage job) and end up as the boss, making six figures. I’ve watched it happen more than once. Years ago, one of our fry cooks was badly injured on the line, and while I drove him to the hospital, he told me, through real pain, that what worried him most was losing his job! I think about that from both directions: what these jobs mean to the people who hold them, and what we owe back.
Every one of our dining rooms has its regulars, and we knew some of them by their order before we ever knew their names. Twenty years is long enough to watch a first date at the bar turn into a wedding, and the kid in the booster seat move from juice in a sippy cup to happy hour sangría. They’ve watched their favorite server become the General Manager. We’ve watched them eat the same plate of jamón serrano by candlelight during Hurricane Sandy and surrounded by a bar full of elated fans when the Knicks took game 5 last June.
I’ve grown along with them. When Flatiron opened, I was single. Now, I walk in through that same squeaky metal door, with my wife and two sons, and despite a life that has evolved, find a place essentially unchanged since day one: packed, lively, lone diners striking up conversations at the bar, couples leaning across the two-tops, servers engaging in a long-practiced and familiar choreography. The Spanish call it “Buen Rollo”. Good vibes, roughly, though the Spanish carries more warmth. It’s the magic I hoped for in 2006, and I’m grateful it endures.
A few of our classmates from that year made it through too. Lucali keeps baking pies in Carroll Gardens in the oven Mark Iacono built by hand. The Little Owl still packs its tiny corner of Bedford Street. Cafe Cluny anchors the same block of the West Village it opened on. Each of us found a different way through. Twenty years, it turns out, comes in several styles.
Every restaurant ends someday. Whenever Boqueria’s day comes, I want one thing to have been true the entire time: that we made people’s lives a little better, staff and guests both, and that the name brings a smile when people hear it. Twenty years in, people are still walking through the door. Everything else, we can figure out.