Philippe Massoud: Built to Last 19 Years

**Josh Kopel** (0:00)
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**Philippe Massoud** (0:53)
I said to my staff, this could be 1939, the Great Depression. And I told my staff, we're going to shut down the restaurant and we're going to run a 60-seat restaurant. And all of you stay employed. Everybody's taking a 20% pay cut and we're going to stay and we're going to rebuild one guest at a time and stay the course for as long as we can without letting go anybody.

**Josh Kopel** (1:13)
Welcome to FULL COMP, a show offering insight into the hospitality industry, featuring restaurateurs, thought leaders and innovators served up on the house.
What if the reason your restaurant isn't built to last is because you designed it to survive instead of dominate? Philippe Massoud opened Illy in November of 2007, a 10,000-square-foot Lebanese restaurant in New York City with nearly $7 million worth of debt in the middle of a financial crisis with critics questioning whether anyone even wanted Lebanese fine dining at that scale. Nineteen years later, the restaurant is still breaking records. In today's conversation, we get into why going smaller and safer is often the riskiest move an operator can make. Philippe grew revenue 30% annually for five consecutive years after weathering the financial crisis. And why running a restaurant with two guests in mind changes everything. If you're building something real in a market that keeps getting harder, this is the episode you need to hear.

**Philippe Massoud** (2:24)
So, I'm third generation in the business. It started with my grandfather as a young 14-year-old who was the son of a stone mason who said that he was going to have none of that, who eventually ends up playing a huge role in the culinary world of Lebanon, bringing in Austrian pastry chefs to teach the Lebanese how to make pastries because back then we were just coming out of the Ottoman Empire and everything was clotted cream, fried dough and simple syrup with rosewater and orange blossom.
He did an amazing job doing that and on his way there, he was a butcher and so on and so forth. He ended up owning this amazing catering store with a pâtisserie, ice cream store, a chocolate store, all of it in downtown Beirut in the Hades. Subsequently, we end up in the hotel business and I end up becoming a refugee in one of these hotels, that hotel actually, the last hotel that we ended up in. And I'm four years old, I'm in a very nasty neighborhood, bombs being lobbed, terrorists, militiamen coming in and out of the place. But really me as a kid and kids are very resourceful, I end up creating my own Disneyland, which was the kitchen and the maintenance department of the hotel.
And I had a blast, I had food on demand, I had breaking things and putting them back together on demand. So I was loving every minute of it and I was absorbing all of that, not knowing that I would end up using it at the later stage in my life. In 1981, so we're talking almost seven years after the war had started, we move into an apartment and I go food shopping for the first time in my life. I go to a supermarket because I had lived in a hotel. So I was eating with the employees, I was eating staff meal. I loved staff meal. I loved sitting around the table with all the staff and hearing the chef speak and the reverence that the chef was getting and the front of house and the back of house and the banter and all that. I was watching all of that since I was with my diapers on. We go to the supermarket and we come home and we make one of those ready-made cakes and I tell my mom, I'm like, what the hell is this? This is not going to work. I'm eating freshly baked cakes and croissants and making bread and creme patissiere on demand and grabbing ice cream that's coming out of the ice cream maker and you want me to eat this? This is not going to work. I pick up the phone and I call the chef and I said, Chef, I need to make this dish. Can I have the recipe?