NEW YORK CITY
Fall 2014
Later that day, we stopped by our restaurant. How could we not? It’s our baby. B. hadn’t been there for two months and the staff was thrilled to see her. But they looked a little wrung out: it had been a challenging fall.
I felt bad for Dana, coming up to take over the place just as B.’s condition worsened. Not having B. at the restaurant every night was a blow to business—not one you could measure in dollars and cents, exactly, but in the loss of spirit, the flame snuffed out.
It hadn’t taken Dana long to realize she had even bigger problems. We’d loved moving from B.’s first space on Eighth Avenue over to Restaurant Row in 2000. Restaurant Row! But the fact was, Restaurant Row’s glamour was fading. The old French restaurants on the block catered to an ever-creakier clientele. Joe Allen’s still bustled, and Orso drew a tony post-theater crowd, but the neighborhood was changing, and not for the better. A lot of theatergoers bypassed it altogether for the cheap Asian/fusion restaurants and edgy new places in Hell’s Kitchen to the west. As if all that weren’t enough, a major new hotel was going up across the street. Construction stopped by the time we opened each night for dinner, but the site was an eyesore.
You could spin it different ways. Restaurants had their moments, and sometimes those moments passed. The Great Recession had hurt us bad, as it had the whole restaurant business. But even with the tough years that had followed, I’m confident we would have kept all three venues going—hung on until business bounced back—if not for B.’s condition.
Every night, as B. slept beside me, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, thinking of ways to make it all work out. By 6 a.m. I was emailing and texting, working up ideas. But I could see the challenges ahead. B. Smith’s was B.: the restaurants, the lifestyle books, the syndicated television show and radio shows, the four hundred products at Bed Bath & Beyond.
I did know now, from all I’d seen of how people related to B., that she was more than a brand: she stood for a way of life. Our mission statement, from back in the early 1990s when we’d started out, was “bringing people from all walks of life under one stylish umbrella.” My goal now was to carry on the essence of who B. is, and what the brand stands for, in a time of racial division and animosity. We had a new mission statement, we agreed: B. Smith is about bringing people together—period. Not just for a restaurant meal or socializing at the bar. Bringing them together to help one another.
That felt like the right way to go—and doing this book would be a first big step in that direction. People from all over would rally around B. I knew how many people loved her; I had felt the power of that love. I wasn’t just thinking about bed and bath products; I was thinking beyond. The humor of that hit me as I lay there, and I started cracking up. Bed Bath &…Beyond! No doubt the founders of the chain, in dreaming up that name, had meant it to refer to other rooms of the house. I was looking at it differently. “Beyond” to me meant getting the word out about Alzheimer’s, getting people to rally around B., and coming together, black and white, Hispanic and Asian, to fight this disease together.
Meanwhile, I had a restaurant to keep alive, and one overstressed daughter to help me do it. As much as I loved and admired Dana, I had more faith in getting to the big Beyond than I did in keeping B. Smith’s on Restaurant Row from closing its doors after fourteen years. Privately, I thought we might squeak through the Christmas season, and shut down after that. We just weren’t making enough to support it, and the losses were growing each month.
Fourteen years! It seemed like a moment ago.