Drew Nieporent was for decades a leading and groundbreaking restaurateur, primarily in New York City. He opened more than 40 restaurants, including Nobu, Montrachet and Tribeca Grill, each groundbreaking, each ahead of its time, and, despite the big name appeal, each driven by quality in both food and wine.
Nieporent wasn’t just a glad-hander or finance guy or maître d’. He did everything from jotting down concepts on cocktail napkins to finalizing menus with culinary talent he discovered to developing ambitious wine lists to … well, you name it. Now that he is down to part-ownership of three restaurants and the wine store Crush, he has taken the time to stop, look back and write it all down.
If you know Drew, as I do, you will find the title of his memoir funny. I’m Not Trying To Be Difficult (Grand Central Publishing, $30) sounds a little bit like the old playground claim: He hit me first. But in this highly enjoyable and personable book, Nieporent repeatedly shows exasperation with others’ behavior, and he does seem mostly justified in that. At the end of the day, hospitality is full of human beings.
Nieporent is a larger-than-life character. A sharp dresser, often on the stout side (which is meaningfully covered in the book) and with a statement beard, he seems always to recall everyone’s name. Though his voice comes through in the book, co-written with Jamie Feldmar, I could not pass up an opportunity to call him to discuss it more.
A New Yorker from Birth
One of the first things Nieporent said in our interview was, “I’m a New Yorker. And everything about my life is centered around New York City. I walked to PS40 elementary school. I walked to Stuyvesant High School.” His book brings a kind of vibrancy to his middle-class, city childhood.
He was locked into restaurants when he was young. “My father worked for the State Liquor Authority licensing restaurants,” he said. “He took us to [dine in] restaurants because he did things that maybe weren’t that kosher so that immigrants could open restaurants. Keep in mind, it’s the ’60s. So these immigrants were so beholden, so thankful, to my father. We’d go to the best French restaurants, Italian restaurants, you name it. And I’m exposed to all this shit. I’m eating like a king. I love to eat. If you had a piano in the house, your parents put you behind the piano. So [restaurants were] what I was going to do from an early age.”
He dreamed of being a chef or working in restaurants in Europe, but in high school he needed money. Lucky for him, a McDonald’s opened a block from his family’s apartment. As he writes, “It’s not like I aspired to work at McDonald’s forever, but as a kid who wanted to run restaurants, I considered McDonald’s a fertile training ground. If they could make a thousand dollars an hour, they had to be doing something right. I applied immediately. It was my first restaurant job, at $2.75 an hour, and to this day, it’s one of the greatest gigs I’ve ever had.”
He marvels now how far he’s come. As he told me, “Now I’ve done the hamburgers at Madison Square Garden for the last 12 years, and by the way, they are delicious. I did 2,000 a game. I mean, it’s unbelievable how good they are. And I’m not bullshitting you about that. They are good, you know?”
On the Ground (and on the Water) Training
Nieporent’s mother learned of Cornell’s hotel school, the country’s top destination for hospitality students. Despite a lackluster high school record, Nieporent got in. He did not love the university but threw himself into work of every kind, during school and after graduation.
“I had a very clear path. I wanted to get good work experience,” he said. “I traveled. I was a waiter on a cruise ship—15 cruises to Russia, Copenhagen. Then I worked for Warner LeRoy at Maxwell’s Plum and Tavern on the Green. There was no greater proving grounds than those two restaurants, and they were magnificent.”
[article-img-container][src=2025-12/wt_drew-nieporent-tavern-120125_1600.jpg] [credit= (Courtesy of Drew Nieporent)] [alt= Drew Nieporent with his parents at Tavern on the Green in New York City.] [end: article-img-container]
LeRoy was a larger-than-life impresario. He was one of those Warners—his father produced The Wizard of Oz. Maxwell’s Plum epitomized the burgeoning singles scene, and Tavern was a volume-based destination. One fun element of the book is Nieporent’s interactions with celebrities, which begin in this section and only grow later. One crucial lesson from these years was that too often, “the inmates run the institution,” meaning the boss’ wishes were not always respected, especially by chefs.
During the next couple of years, Nieporent did a tour of duty with what he calls the Le’s and La’s, venerable French places with tuxedoed staff. As he writes: “The style of service was fussy, formal and frankly condescending if you didn’t abide by the restaurant’s rules. Prices were high, dress codes were strict, and guests paid for the privilege of being talked down to.”
His passion for wine began to take flight during this period. He met Daniel Johnnes, who would be key to his wine programs later. He also met the woman who would become his wife, in a story right out of a sly rom-com.
Taking a Chance in Tribeca
By 1985, he was ready to open his own place but lacked money, a space and a chef. He found a space he could afford in Tribeca, then a desolate neighborhood but just a few years away from booming. He took on a couple of friends as investors and hired a young chef whose food had wowed him and his future wife in San Francisco: David Bouley.
Montrachet shifted dining in New York. Front- and back-house staff had formal uptown training but were now able to relax, be warmer. Gone were the tuxedoes; in was youthful vitality. And though the minimalist aesthetic of the room was praised, it was in fact simply the result of the team putting all the money on the tabletop, including locally grown organic produce that was only just appearing in New York restaurants. And they kept prices low, giving the dining room a democratic air.
When the New York Times gave the team three stars—praising the modern French food, pared-down look, and even the wine list, which had a fair number of American selections—the restaurant took off. It soon became the hottest ticket in town. “We got three stars seven weeks after we opened,” said Nieporent. “That’s like you win the lottery without being able to collect the cash. Bouley was amazing, but he wanted to take the three stars, put them in his back pocket and walk across the street, and he was overt about it. But the real problem was he couldn’t get the food out of the kitchen, just couldn’t do it.”
Robert De Niro lived nearby and became a regular. When he bought a building to convert into the Tribeca Film Center, he asked Nieporent to be his partner on a big convivial restaurant on the ground floor of the former industrial building. Tribeca Grill also became a hot ticket, not only as a celebrity magnet but as a longtime Wine Spectator Grand Award winner. With the work of wine director David Gordon, who Nieporent first met as a waiter at Tavern on the Green, Nieporent maintained that award—one of three Grand Awards his restaurants earned—until Tribeca Grill closed this year.
[article-img-container][src=2025-12/wt_drew-nieporent-deniro-120125_1600.jpg] [credit= (Courtesy of Drew Nieporent)] [alt= Drew Nieporent with Robert De Niro at Montrachet in New York City.] [end: article-img-container]
Some of the stories in the book have long arcs. De Niro and Nieporent had both wanted to work with Nobu Matsuhisa, who was serving broadly inclusive Japanese food to Hollywood elites. After years they convinced him to open Nobu in Tribeca. It took off too and now has some 50 locations around the world.
Drew’s restaurants are too numerous to cover here; in fact they are too numerous to include in the book, which has a fascinating appendix listing all of them and their principal talent. It is a Who’s Who of decades of the restaurant world. It might be too much to say that he discovered all these people, but he certainly gave a lot of them their first real attention-getting venue. And he has always had a magical ability to synthesize real estate, chefs, menus, staff and all of the other elements in a restaurant, each with a different mass and gravitational field, into a perfect solar system. High praise indeed to say his very different restaurants always just made sense.
There is some measure of this. As he says, “Everything I did stands the test of time. My wine store, Crush: 20 years. Unbelievable. Tribeca Grill, 35 years. Nobu, 31 years. Montrachet, which became Corton, 38 years. I mean, who can say that? Nobody.”
One story that appears in a distressingly high number of restaurant memoirs is a chef or restaurateur being pushed out of a business they helped build when it begins to take off. Drew is no stranger to that. He was pushed out of most of the Nobu business, leaving a probably staggering amount of money behind. He seems strangely sanguine about it: “I named Nobu. He said no to us three fucking times. But you know, I have a great wife, I have great kids. They’re not pissed. So what am I going to do? My whole life is always that you do battle to the best of your ability. That’s it.”
As for that book title? “My whole story is I’m not trying to be difficult,” said Nieporent. “No way you can open 40 restaurants and be difficult. The whole point is they were difficult. (I didn’t do the title, by the way.) And I’m like, why am I difficult? But I realized all those chefs, all those partners, even Cornell for that matter, were difficult, but they found me difficult. You understand? I’m the difficult one.”
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