Nick Valenti: Super Chef Master?

By JULIETTE ROSSANT This Monday, Nick Valenti, CEO of Restaurant Associates (RA), will be serving up to 650,000 tennis fans at the US Tennis Open August 30-September 12 at the National Tennis Center in Queens. He can juggle, too -- like juggling Compass Group PLC (UK)'s acquisition of RA back in 1998. Nick Valenti is a master of ceremonies which produce results -- bottom-line results, like money -- and, I am coming to think, he may be well on his way to becoming a master of super chefs. Nick Valenti, master of super chefs? Look at his forays into the super chef world over the past five years. In 2000, he cut a $40 million deal to buy out Joachim Splichal's Patina Group (read the excellent online expose about this deal in Inc. magazine). Now, Joachim Splichal is one of many "borderline" super chefs. In his case, all he lacks is Media buzz. No question, he is a master chef, a four-year student of Jacques Maximin and, earlier, of chef Louis Outhier at L'Oasis (where as chef he overlapped one summer with a young apprentice-to-be-super-chef named Susan Feniger -- see p. 136 of Super Chef). No question, Joachim is an able entrepreneur -- I have a whole chapter waiting to be part of "Super Chef II" about one of the most dramatic come-backs in modern American chef history, including an in-depth look at the pre-RA buy-out that resulted in a buyable Patina Group. What Restaurant Associates continued to lack, however, was branding. "We Foodies" know RA well and respect it, all the way back to the presidency of Joe Baum, but the rest of America knows usually of a handful of RA restaurants -- not the firm itself. Enter Wolfgang Puck. Before Wolfgang entered RA, RA entered Wolfgang, in the publicly known form of someone whom I suspect has been Valenti's inside man all along: Carl Schuster, president of Wolfgang Puck Catering & Events (WPCE) -- and also former head of RA in LA. In fact, as Carl described to me at length (related in Super Chef, pp. 39-40), Wolf was very attracted to bringing Carl on-board in the first place precisely because he was competing against him as RA's LA man. Schuster's expansion into the museum restauranting business -- the area that grabbed RA's attention in the Patina Group just a few years earlier -- seems to me a deliberate attempt to attract RA's deal with WPCE earlier this year. Insider job? Perhaps the more relevant question is, does anyone care? I don't think so, not among these gents at any rate. Just recall that Compass also owns 49% of in Chicago-based Levy Restaurants, which whom Wolfgang Puck just pulled off a global deal with Philip Anschutz's AEG (see "Euro Puck"), and the picture becomes even clearer. Add further the fact that Compass owns Au Bon Pain as well -- which just happens to be run by the former president of the Wolfgang Puck Food Company (now rolled in under the Wolfgang Puck Worldwide umbrella), Frank Guidara, and Compass/RA has a formidable arsenal of well acquainted colleagues indeed. Some may argue that Compass Group North America's CEO Gary Green is the grand master, which I will not deny, but for my money, Nick Valenti is the brainstormer. Further, from my interviews with him, I believe he is fully cognizant of the array of resources which Compass encompasses and that he is Green's COO when it comes to these deals, because the most connections (that I can find) lie between WPCE and RA -- Schuster and Valenti -- and these two know the value of branding and have added the "Wolfgang Puck" brand to Compass/RA's arsenal along with the likes of the nationally recognized Au Bon Pain. And now Wolfgang Puck has created his own museum restaurant dining brand, "Puck's" -- no coincidence, that.