by Shep Gordon
We found a location way, way upcountry, on a pineapple plantation called Hali’imaile. An old general store for the workers was empty. We rented it for maybe two hundred dollars a month, got a set designer to make it look good for cheap, and called it Hali’imaile General Store. Beverly was a complete unknown as a chef, and Hali’imaile was way out in the country, a forty-five-minute drive from the nearest hotel. We had to make it a destination. I started driving my celebrity friends up there to eat—Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Willie Nelson, Alice—more guilt by association.
Meanwhile, whenever I was around my Hawaiian chef pals we kept dancing around the subject of ACR. They didn’t want to ask me how the agency was doing because they didn’t want to hear it, and I didn’t want to tell them because I didn’t want to make them jealous. Finally it occurred to me that this was an opportunity for another win-win. I proposed that we start a Hawaiian regional cuisine movement. A few of them were agitated that it would include Beverly, a newcomer in every way, but I said she was part of the deal, or no deal. My idea was that if we could make this movement work we’d make Beverly and Hali’imaile famous and successful quick, and get us all our money back.
We began meeting at my house: Roger Dikon, Sam Choy, Mark Ellman, Peter Merriman, Roy Yamaguchi, Jean-Marie Josselin, Alan Wong, Philippe Padovani, Gary Strehl, George Mavro, Amy Ferguson, and Bev. I had chef jackets made up for all of them, with HALI’IMAILE GENERAL STORE on them, because that was what I wanted to promote. I got Dean Fearing, as a founder of southwestern cuisine, and Roger Vergé, as a founder of nouvelle cuisine, to come talk to us about how to make a regional movement work. They both told us the same thing: Regional cuisine is dependent on local farmers. But if you go to your local farmer and say, “I want you to grow arugula for my restaurant,” he will take out his shotgun and chase you off his property. Why? Because ten years ago some hotel chef came to him and asked him the same thing. The farmer grew a bunch of arugula, and nine months later brought his boxes of arugula to the chef. And the chef said, “Oh, thanks, but we’ve moved on and arugula isn’t on the menu anymore.” So you have to find a way to guarantee the farmers that they will be paid for what they grow for you. Then you can have your regional cuisine.
We had another meeting on the Big Island, at the hotel where Peter Merriman cooked. Peter brought local farmers and a representative from the state’s department of agriculture, and we talked it out. Within a few months the department of agriculture agreed that if we couldn’t pay the farmers for what they grew for us, the state would. They saw that promoting a new Hawaiian cuisine movement could be great for the state’s tourism industry.
So the Hawaiian regional cuisine movement (HRC) was born. Now I had to go to work and make people understand why it was important. The way to do that was to get all the Hawaiian papers writing front-page stories about it, then all the papers in the world. As I was thinking about all this, sitting in my Jacuzzi smoking a joint one day, I got an invitation from Arnold Schwarzenegger to come to his new restaurant in Santa Monica, Schatzi on Main. I thought, Hmm, maybe there’s a play here.
And I did what I do. I got the Hawaiian tourism department to pay for my chefs to fly to the mainland. I got Arnold to agree to introduce Hawaiian regional cuisine at Schatzi. I got Vergé to come and cook with them, to get HRC some international attention. And I got as many celebrities as I could possibly get to come to the event.
It was the hottest ticket in L.A. The crème of Hollywood was there—Michael and Alice and Stallone, James Cameron and Linda Hamilton, I think Luther came, even Sam Shepard, who never went to anything. I put them all in leis and chef’s jackets that said MAUI VISITORS BUREAU, because they paid for them. Hawaiian tourism sent Miss Hawaii to do the hula. It was a great night, and win-win in all directions: for Arnold, for HRC, for Hawaii and Maui, for Vergé, for all of us.
Over a few years, just as nouvelle cuisine and southwestern cuisine spread around the world, so did Hawaiian regional cuisine. In restaurants everywhere now you see seared ahi tuna or mahimahi in Thai sauce on the menu. Both started out as signature HRC dishes.
I was still thinking of ways to create new income streams for chefs. No matter how great a meal they cooked, the bill was always going to be eighty, a hundred dollars. How could we increase the perceived value of what they did? I was managing performers who made a quarter of a million dollars in one night. Maybe we could make what chefs did more of a performance. But there was a hitch. When Alice went to a city to perform, there was a stadium or arena there ready for him. When chefs went on tour, there was no such facility. If Wolfgang wanted to come to Maui, he couldn’t just take over somebody else’s restaurant.
But there were hotels. Hotels often had chefs come and cook for special events. They did it for free, which I thought was nuts. When Vergé did his Master Wine Class, for example, people paid $2,500 to attend, and the hotel paid him nothing. It seemed to me there must be a way to take that to another level and make it a win for everybody—the customers, the hotel, and the chef.
All my chefs had large local followings in their own cities. These were people who liked and could afford to travel. What if we targeted a chef’s hometown fans and offered them an opportunity to come to Maui with him? We could package their rooms, meals, cooking classes, entertainment, beach time. All I had to prove was that a celebrity chef could draw the people. If the hotel booked the event during one of their normally slow periods, they’d fill rooms that were usually empty and maximize their annual profits.
I knew Chuck Sweeney, owner of a beautiful hotel in Maui called the Kea Lani, right on the beach. But next door were a Four Seasons and a Grand Hyatt, brands known internationally, with huge ad budgets. He had asked me, “Can you think of anything I can do to differentiate us from these guys and compete with them?” There were probably a lot of hotels in that position. If I could prove it worked for Chuck, I’d have a model program I could use to build a circuit. I could have these guys traveling around the world. If we could fill fifty hotel rooms for four nights, that’d be $100,000 the hotel made. The chef could take a percentage and be making real money instead of being treated like an indentured servant.
Chuck liked it. I went to American Express and Hawaiian Airlines and they liked it. So we became what we call in Hawaii a hui, a group or association. Chuck and I had a beautiful outdoor kitchen built, so you could sit outside, leave your table, and come watch while the chefs were cooking. We brought in all the great chefs—Vergé one time, Charlie Trotter another, Nobu, Emeril, Alice Waters, etc.—and paired each with an HRC chef and music. Willie Nelson and Leon Russell were our first guest artists. We had 150 people at a time, and they loved it, and it was a wildly successful kickoff. Again, a win for everybody. Over the next three or four years, we did it in Hawaii, in California, and even in India (I’ll come back to that), and it worked beautifully every time. We got the chefs two first-class airline tickets, a luxury car, the best rooms in the hotel, and maybe $2,500 for the weekend. All the perks and benefits they had never gotten before.
I also got involved in some restaurant chains in Hawaii. After the success of Carlos’n Charlie’s in L.A., I invested in a couple more in the San Francisco area, so I had some experience in franchising. When I moved to Maui there were one or two Maui Tacos locations, owned by chef Mark Ellman. We built that into a national chain of something like thirty-two locations, including a great one in Newark International Airport, then sold it to Blimpie.
I’m particularly proud of another one of those projects. One day Chuck Sweeney told me he’d just bought a shopping center in Honolulu, the Aloha Tower Marketplace, in a beautiful location right on the water. He thought it would be a great location for me to do a restaurant. At first I thought about putting a Trader Vic’s there. Then I had a better idea.
Outside of Hawaii, I guess Don Ho is remembered only as the guy who did “Tiny Bubbles,” which was a pretty inescapable hit record in the mid-1960s. But in Hawaii, Don Ho was the Man. I mean the Man. I
had only met him peripherally, but I thought what could be better in Honolulu than a Don Ho version of Arnold’s Schatzi? It was a no-brainer. I went and met with him, and we got along really well. He was one of the most amazing human beings I’ve ever met in my life. Funny, loyal, solid. I can’t say enough good things about him.
The result was Don Ho’s Island Grill. I felt we needed to start it with a really nice statement to the local community, so on opening day we fed the homeless, with celebrity waiters: Alice Cooper and Albert Finney, who were staying at my house, and my Maui neighbors Willie Nelson and Magic Johnson. As we were flying over, we all started telling our favorite Don Ho stories. In Hawaii, everybody has a Don Ho story. Everybody. Either they first made love to Don Ho’s music, or they were conceived to it, or he proposed to her at a Don Ho concert, something. So we all told our Don Ho stories—except Albert.
When we arrived at the Grill, Don ran over and gave Albert a huge hug. I didn’t even know they knew each other.
Don said, “Albert, you never told them the story?”
Albert looked sheepish, so Don told it for him. When Tom Jones came out in 1963, it was Albert’s first starring role, and it made him a matinee idol around the world. The fame started to get to him, so he went to Honolulu to get away from it for a while, and got friendly with Don. Don put him up at his home and set him up with a woman he knew. One night Albert went to the woman’s home with her, and they were in bed when her husband came home. Albert jumped out the bedroom window, naked. The only other person he knew in Honolulu was Don, and Don was giving a show that night. So Albert Finney walked naked into Don Ho’s show. That was his Don Ho story.
I loved Don. As I write this it’s been eight years since he died, and I miss him a lot. He was as solid a partner as I’ve ever had in my life. Never said no, always with a smile. Loved food, loved life. Just a great, great guy. I don’t think I ever saw him in a pair of long pants. Only shorts.
20
ONE DAY IN THE MID-1990S I walked into a restaurant in Phoenix with Roger Vergé and ran into Joan Bickson, mother of my friend Raymond, the general manager of the Mark who was so gracious to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Joan lives in Honolulu and is like family to me. She was sitting with a man from India named Ratan Tata. In introducing us, Joan told him that one of the things I do is ask my clients what their dreams are, then try to make them happen.
“I have a dream,” Tata said instantly. He spoke about the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an international pact to ban the spread of nuclear weapons that started in the 1960s. Over the years, nearly two hundred nations signed on, including the United States. But India, Israel, and Pakistan, all of which have nukes, never signed. India refused because it said the treaty created “nuclear haves and have-nots.” Tata believed that the disagreement over the treaty had prevented the United States and India from enjoying the type of relationship they should have. As the two biggest democracies in the world, we needed to be closer.
“So my dream,” he concluded, “is to build a bridge between India and America again.”
“That’s way beyond my pay grade,” I said with a smile. But it did give me an idea. I had just read that for the first time, culinary tourism in Italy was larger than culture and history tourism. Maybe one small piece of his bridge could have to do with promoting India as a destination for American foodies.
He got very interested. It turned out he had something to do with hotels, but it wasn’t clear to me at that point what that was.
“Come to India,” he urged me. “Help me build a bridge.”
I had no idea at that moment what an amazing opportunity he was presenting to me, so we left it there.
A morning or two later, I was in New York, staying at the Mark, and got a call from the front desk.
“There’s a very nice Indian fellow in the lobby. He’s come here to take you to India.”
What?
I went down to the lobby, where this man was waiting for me.
“My boss, Mr. Tata, said to bring you to India.”
“No,” I said, “I can’t go to India.”
“You just met him. Mr. Tata.”
“Yes,” I said, “but I’m sorry, I can’t go to India.”
We batted it back and forth a little longer, then he gave me his business card and left. I went back to my life and forgot all about it.
A year later I was having dinner with my friend Tom Pollock of Universal Pictures. He said he was on his way to India because they had targeted someone there who was a potential source of financing: Ratan Tata.
“That’s so funny,” I said. “I actually met him in a restaurant in Phoenix about a year ago. He wanted me to come to India.” And I told him the story.
Tom said, “You didn’t go? Are you out of your mind? Do you have any idea who this guy is? Ratan Tata is the number-one industrialist on the planet. And one of the world’s biggest philanthropists.”
No, I hadn’t known that. I just thought he was a nice man with a lofty vision who was somehow in the hotel business. I researched him, and holy cow. Ratan Tata was the chairman of the Tata Group (he has since retired), a vast global conglomeration headquartered in Mumbai. It had huge interests in all sorts of economic sectors. It was, for instance, the largest employer in England, owner of Jaguar, Land Rover, Tetley tea, and British Steel. It owned Tata American Express in India, Tata Starbucks in India, Tata Swatch. It had subsidiaries in energy, engineering, chemicals, communications, banking. And it owned the Taj Group of luxury hotels and resorts, something like 150 locations, mostly in India but also around the world. In all, the Tata Group accounted for something like 6 percent of the gross national product of India. It was also one of the largest philanthropic entities in the world, putting an incredible two-thirds of its enormous annual profits into various charities and nonprofits, millions and millions of dollars for hospitals, the arts, scientific research, and so forth.
Thanks to Joan, I had first met the man who ran all this. Thanks to Tom, I now began to understand why I met him.
My wheels started turning. This was a very, very powerful man, but also a man with a vision I could get behind, and what looked like limitless resources to try to achieve it. I was a little Jew from New York, but I saw a small role I could play. We got back in touch and talked more about culinary tourism.
“The first hurdle we have to jump,” I told him, “is that when I talk to Americans who could afford to come to India and stay in your hotel, within thirty seconds they say, ‘I’m not going there. You get sick from the food.’ It’s that common a perception in America. We have to break that perception.”
“How do we do that?”
“You get the greatest chefs in the world to come to India. Take advantage of this culinary movement around the world. If I’m an American and I hear that Jean-Georges Vongerichten or Nobu has opened a restaurant in a hotel in Mumbai, I think, Oh, maybe now I can go to India. There’s at least one place I can eat.”
We also talked about the idea of Vergé creating an Indian fusion cuisine. Could you take Indian food and combine it with French techniques and come up with something really exciting that would bring in Western culinary tourists? Maybe Tata could send me and Vergé around to his hotels in India; Vergé could meet his chefs, give lessons, exchange ideas.
“Yes, yes, yes,” Tata said. “Come to India. We’ll work it all out.”
So I went to India with Vergé. Tata treated us exquisitely. We stayed in huge, gorgeous suites at the five-star Taj Mahal Palace, the Mumbai hotel that would be made famous around the world in 2008 when it was attacked by Pakistani terrorists. But in the 1990s it was perfectly safe, rated one of the top five hotels in the world. Everyone stayed there: Beatles, Jackie Onassis, the Clintons, the Obamas, royalty, Oprah, and now Shep and Vergé.
We had our first meeting in a library on one floor of the hotel. Sitting with Tata was Krishna Kumar, who ran the hotels, and the corporate chef, Hemant Oberoi. It started off horribly when it became cle
ar that Kumar had no idea who Vergé was. Not a clue. Ten minutes into it, and we were already heading in the wrong direction. I looked at the shelves of books behind Vergé, and a title leapt out at me: The Great Chefs of France. I had never seen this book before, but I took a chance.
“Before we go any farther . . .” I said. I stood, took the book off the shelf, flipped it open. Of course Vergé was all over it. I showed it to them, and that turned the meeting around, luckily. It was just the first step in a years-long journey. I’ll give you a few of the highlights.
First, Vergé and I went on a tour of seven or eight of the Taj hotels around India. He met with the chefs, while I met with farmers to make sure we could get produce. Eventually we started some organic farms. I realized early on that we couldn’t pair wines with dishes the way Vergé would at the Moulin. Most Indians don’t drink alcohol, so wine with meals just was not in the culture. Even though we wanted to create a French-Indian fusion to appeal to Western tourists, wine would be inappropriate and inauthentic. Indians do drink a lot of tea, however, and Tata is the largest producer of tea and coffee in the world. Why not match teas instead of wine with dishes on the menu? I convinced Kumar to let me bring in a tea sommelier. The concept was very new. It was nonexistent in India, and there was only one tea sommelier in America: James Labe. We hired him away from a chic restaurant in New York to come work for the Taj chain in India.