Jeff Zalaznick, Co-founder of Major Food Group

**David Senra** (0:02)
I want to start the conversation with one of the craziest stats I've ever heard. You've started 77 restaurants and bars, and 76 are still operating and profitable.

**Jeff Zalaznick** (0:12)
Yes.

**David Senra** (0:12)
Can you tell us about the one that we're sitting in right now?

**Jeff Zalaznick** (0:16)
So right now, we're sitting in one of my favorites. This is the pool we're sitting in right now, which is probably the most historic restaurant in America. You know, it was originally opened in 1959, built in 1959 by the Seagram family. And at the time, these were the two most over-the-top, luxurious restaurants ever built.
And they were designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, one who was the most famous architect of the time and one who was soon to become the most famous architect of his time.
And this room we're sitting in today is one of the only interior landmarks in America. In fact, it's the only interior landmark restaurant in America, where we had to restore this entire room to what it was in 1959, when we took over about eight years ago. So what you have here is you have the most incredible restaurant history. And, you know, we've been able to be the custodians of that history and take it into kind of the new next generation. But that pool behind us has been sitting here since, you know, 1959 And we really just brought it back to life.

**David Senra** (1:25)
So tell me about what you had to do to restore it. Like, what was it, who owned it? And like, how did you come into ownership of this? Because you knew about this place when you were what, 13?

**Jeff Zalaznick** (1:35)
Yeah, I mean, I grew up in New York City. If you grew up in New York City and you cared in any way, but like you, I was obsessed with restaurants and food and what I do today for a living since I was a child. You know, I was watching cooking shows when I was 10 on PBS before there was any cooking channels or anything like that. And I was aware of what was going on in the big picture of New York restaurants. And if there was any restaurant that you would know of as like, one day I want to go there, it was The Four Seasons, which is not related in any way to the hotel. The original Four Seasons was a restaurant, which is where we're sitting right now. This was called The Four Seasons. That was called The Grill Room. This was called The Pool Room, which is where we're sitting right now. And that was really the most kind of incredible aspirational restaurant that you would want to go to, that you would have a chance to go to. Maybe I had a chance to go there for, I think I came here, I actually sat in this corner for my grandmother's 75th birthday or something like that. This was a place that you would come for major special events, in my case.
Or if you were one of the kings of New York, you would be having lunch in the grill every day. That was really where Power Lunch was invented.
There's a huge history of both what this restaurant means in terms of food, because it does have an incredible and an interesting history in terms of food, being the first restaurant that ever had seasonal ingredients, the first American restaurant that ever wrote their menus in English, right, versus in French.

**David Senra** (3:15)
Wait, tell me about that.

**Jeff Zalaznick** (3:16)
So this restaurant, in 1959, before this place opened, anything that was fancy and expensive was French, and you would go to fancy French restaurants and the menu would be written in French.
The Four Seasons was the first restaurant where that was written in English. And so this was really the first example of American fine dining. It was the first time that American as a cuisine was actually thought of and celebrated. So it didn't exist before then. There was no such thing. American was a hamburger and fries.
It didn't exist in terms of the luxury fine dining world. And so this was revolutionary in that sense, and it was a guy named Joe Baum who was a great restaurateur of his time, the best restaurateur of his time, and someone who I've always looked up to and we've always studied his process, who came up with this creation and created this place. And it was also the first restaurant where the design was equally at the time important to the actual restaurant. So the food was something that was new and spectacular. It introduced the ideas of seasonality, it introduced the ideas of foraging, it introduced the ideas of American cuisine. The list goes on of how many things were created in this room.