A big part of accepting the Peak Cafe in 1990 was to have the cash reserve for Stars given the earthquake-destroyed Civic Center surrounding Stars restaurant.
The city government took a year to assess the damage and announce plans for its future. Some buildings, such as the state building next door to Stars that produced for us about $600,000 a year in bar and food business, never opened again after that fateful afternoon. That was bad enough. Worse was news from the mayor’s office that the Civic Center would close in its entirety in 1994. The government would be moved elsewhere; the opera, ballet, two other performing arts halls, the library, the museum, in short 60 percent of Stars’ business would be gone. Stars had brought life to the center of San Francisco in 1984. Now the Civic Center was going to suck the life out of Stars.
CAFES
A ray of hope appeared in the form of developers who wanted to raze the block on which Stars stood and turn it into a 6-million-square-foot city offices and law building right next to a huge new courts building. So when I realized that a spot around the corner from Stars was coming available, and that it was the only corner in the Stars block that was not going to be razed, I held a meeting of the restaurant’s board. We could wait it out in total chaos while they built around and above us, or we could sell Stars to the developers for their proposed $3 million in cash, void the current lease, write a new one with the city, and come back in three years to operate Stars as the major tenant in the new city office building, the restaurant designed and fitted out at their cost. I proposed the way to keep the Stars name operative in San Francisco while waiting for the new Stars to open was to franchise and move the cafe to that corner, then look at moving Stars as a franchise to the up-and-coming Silicon Valley. It was a whole new concept, with 70 percent Stars Cafe and 30 percent Stars instead of the other way around. That formula, I told them, would survive any recession.
And high six-figure cash coming in from Hong Kong would be gravy.
I told the board that the reconstruction was backed by my pal the mayor, that the only snag would be the Board of Supervisors. They had said they were in favor, but I knew what a nightmare that board could be. I had just seen the current president, Angela Alioto, as she presided over the highly emotional smoking ban hearings, flipping through a magazine, berating smokers, and then in the corridor bumming a cigarette from Tosca Cafe’s Jeannette Etheridge and me. In San Francisco anything could happen, and if it was self-righteous enough, it usually did. So all faces were turned silently toward me in the Stars boardroom after I asked them to make a decision. Perhaps the silence was because of my closing remark. I said that if we were to proceed as planned with our project at the mercy of the supervisors we could be screwed. “Royally!”
San Francisco government resists change. It took another twenty-seven years for the development of the Stars site on Golden Gate Avenue, seventeen years after I sold it. But at that time our business plan was to have a building with a main restaurant and a cafe, each with its own kitchen, but with the old formula for space allocation reversed. Stars would have fifteen line cooks and ten prep cooks, a large menu, and serve sixty seats. Stars Cafe would have five in the kitchen, a small menu, and serve two hundred seats. Stars would have the cachet and reputation, a training ground for all the cooks. The cafe would be the cash flow, kept full by Stars’ reputation and recognizable value. We would have gross sales similar to those we’d had before, but with a million shaved off our currently $3 million annual payroll.
We decided to go ahead and move both Stars Cafe to the corner and take Stars to Palo Alto, where a local developer, Jim Baer, wanted the franchise. He had lost Wolfgang Puck as a first choice—a piece of news that I listened to since I was pretty convinced that Wolfgang didn’t do bad deals. I called Wolfgang to ask about Baer. He said nothing was amiss. When I heard the Napoleonic-size Baer say in a meeting two weeks later that “I have never made anything less than a perfect decision,” I should have headed for cover. But by that time the franchise deal and management contract had been signed.
It didn’t help that I was traveling a lot.
TRAVEL BUG AGAIN
The new decade had opened with the Peak Cafe in 1990. I began commuting to Hong Kong, not only to operate the cafe, but to look around in Southeast Asia for someone to buy Stars, in case the plan for a closed Civic Center Stars and later a new one didn’t get signed.
Stars was still very profitable in the early nineties, so why not find someone to pay me $8 million? Then pay himself what so far had been a guaranteed 15 percent return on $10 million (1990 dollars) annual revenue? I looked at a site on the river next to the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok and in Sydney on the way out to the Opera House. And I stepped up all the public relations I could get my hands on, no matter how much it kept me away from Stars. One such trip in 1996 was a true PR marathon. I flew to Saint Martin in the Caribbean to join the maiden voyage of a Viking Line ship that was to host two hundred American food journalists on a three-day voyage to Miami. I gave a lecture on my plans for Stars. First I did a demo for some press at Cap Juluca in Anguilla, then caught the ship, survived the press dinner the first rough night out, did cooking demos the next day, gave the lecture, and managed to cook the press dinner the night before docking in Miami. From there I went straight to New York to see the Michael McCarty’s new-new Michael’s on West Fifty-Fifth Street, before getting on a plane that night for Berlin for the three-day In Flight Catering Association conference. There in front of two thousand delegates I gave a talk on California cuisine, and looked for a buyer, setting off a small flood of German press, like essen & trinen magazine calling me the voodoo priest of American cooking, and talked to Die Welt about Stars’ plans for the next five years. There was no buyer in Germany, so I flew on to Hong Kong. I cooked a press lunch the day I arrived at the Regent Hotel. I had dinner with Australian food magazine press to excite any would-be buyers there, and flew that night to San Francisco. The evening of the day I arrived, we cooked for the Academy of Friends. Three days later we cooked a lunch in Napa for a hundred of Beaulieu Vineyard’s friends and press, and the next day I went to Las Vegas to check out an offer from the Howard Hughes Corporation.
So far no bites on Stars.
Then there was.
One involved the plans for reconstruction of the Civic Center. Just as I was lining him up, San Francisco changed mayors. Our deal was dead. We would have to survive the emptied-out Civic Center after all, in isolation except for the hordes of homeless, mentally ill, and drug dealers who poured in to fill the unsupervised void. The area was no longer civic, and it was the center of nothing. What was to be a wait for our 1997 triumphant victory march return now turned into a long wait for that year to arrive. I had thought I could sell Stars to a Japanese group, perhaps to the new Stars groups forming in Singapore and Palo Alto, or at least to Canadian Pacific Hotels, for whom I was consulting. But now the dangers of the Civic Center would be obvious to all. When the San Francisco old guard’s Prentis Cobb Hale died, the inner part of me that lived happily in the old order vanished. With Prentis gone there was no one to tell me how full of shit I was, when I was. I started to make real mistakes.
In an attempt to understand the changing times, the first ones came from listening, not to my instincts but to my handlers who ruled the times: publicists, personal assistants, insurance companies, and human resources experts. I continued my international search for a buyer for Stars. My business card, which in 1990 read Twinkle Inc., the Turk Street Group, and Free-dragon Ltd., in Chinese as well as English, in 1996 had a single name, Stars, in English only, and even that was soon being fitted for the emperor’s clothes.