Corrections or additions?
This article by Pat Tanner was prepared for the October 18, 2000
edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
Ryland’s Shelton, Chef/CEO
He likens himself alternately to a football coach,
an orchestra conductor, a drill sergeant, a parent, a child playing
at being a grown up, and the CEO of a Fortune 100 company. To most
of the world he is simply New Jersey’s most acclaimed chef. Craig
Shelton of the Ryland Inn in Whitehouse has graced the cover of
Gourmet
magazine, was named best chef in the mid-Atlantic region by the James
Beard Foundation, and is one of only eight American chefs dubbed
"Relais
Gourmand" (and only one of 60 named worldwide) by the prestigious
international rating organization, Relais & Chateaux.
Since Shelton took over the reins of the Hunterdon County restaurant
in 1991, it has consistently captured top slots in "best of"
lists of every major restaurant survey. Yet in a recent conversation
at the famed "inn," Shelton claims that the one thing he never
envisioned for himself was operating a restaurant in the hinterlands
of New Jersey.
"I was never looking to open a stand-alone restaurant outside
of New York City," says Shelton, emphatically. "The truth
of it is there is no logical reason that there should be fine dining
outside of major metropolitan cities. It makes no sense; it is failure
by design."
This situation, he says, has nothing to do with a lack of
sophisticated
clientele — a widely held idea he calls "benighted" —
and everything to do with economics. The only way it works, he says,
is for a restaurant to be attached to a hotel, and cites as an example
the Inn at Little Washington in Virginia. The Ryland Inn, despite
its suggestive name, offers no accommodations.
"Our economic formulas between hotels and restaurants are so
debased,"
Shelton continues. "In America, a dinner must cost one-third to
one-half the price of an equivalent dinner in France. Lunch? We expect
it to be about one-tenth of what Europeans pay. On the other hand,
Americans happily pay $3,000 for a luxury hotel suite — of which
$2,500 is pure profit — while complaining bitterly about a $250
meal." He claims that it is not unusual for a successful
fine-dining
establishment to expect only a 10 percent profit, and that in many
instances the cost of goods exceeds price. "Gastronomy in America
is a loss leader," he exclaims. "Few, if any, four-star
restaurants
are not highly subsidized."
"In the 1980s and 1990s quality restaurants were failing at a
high rate. Maybe one out of ten made it, and they were making a 10
to 20 percent profit, at best. It’s not a leverageable business like,
say, computer software. It’s an artisanal craft." Shelton bemoans
the fact that, "no matter how many racks of lamb I make, I’m going
to have the same labor and materials costs." And these costs,
he adds, will be as great as, if not more than, those for restaurants
in major cities.
So what forces impelled Shelton, despite these daunting conditions,
to take on in 1991 a struggling establishment with a middling
reputation,
just off Route 22? That’s the focal point of our interview, which
is scheduled for one hour at Shelton’s restaurant, housed in a
200-year-old
white clapboard structure in a rural setting but still within sight
of busy Route 22. For the first 20 minutes of the allotted time, this
reporter waits for Shelton in a comfortable private dining room. When
Shelton finally arrives and learns that the reporter is interested
in the business side of the operation as much as the food, he moves
the interview to a conference room, where, he says, "there are
hard surfaces" for making charts and diagrams. The interview lasts
more than three hours, beginning with the question about the move
from New York to New Jersey.
"I had been chef de cuisine at Le Bouley for three years. An
investor
there proposed to invest in me. I looked at several hundred spaces
in New York City. Simultaneously, I was looking in New Jersey, where
I had a dream of having a country restaurant or a small luxury hotel
with a boutique restaurant," Shelton begins.
"I went to some friends who worked on Wall Street," Shelton
explains, "I told them I needed a location with massive corporate
support nearby." He had concluded that was the only way a
stand-alone
fine-dining venture could succeed. "I asked them to name the three
or four industries that would grow over the next decade." They
named financial services, telecommunications, and pharmaceuticals.
"So I asked them, where is the world epicenter for each of these
industries. They told me they were all at the same place — the
crossroads of Routes 287 and 78 in New Jersey. Bonanza! I drew a
compass.
The Ryland Inn is four miles from those crossroads."
Simultaneously, the land developer who had bought the Ryland Inn and
50 surrounding acres in 1989 was struggling. The developer had made
an initial investment of $2.5 million, followed that with a $5 million
upgrade of the restaurant, and then, says Shelton, the market had
"tanked." The partners hired Dennis Foy, a restaurant
consultant
who was known for a restaurant in Chatham, the Tarragon Tree, that
was highly regarded. Foy referred the partners to Shelton, then at
Le Bouley and still in search of that restaurant. They made an offer
to make him an equal partner if he could merely make the restaurant
break even. There was no financial plan. "Thank God I was young
and stupid," Shelton says today.
The hard part, Shelton claims, was not affording the Limoges, the
Riedel glasses, or the set of Bourgeat pots for the kitchen. It was
inculcating a four-star frame of mind into the brigade of 12 chefs,
all male, that staffed the small, dated kitchen.
How did he do it? He playfully mentions a paddle the
size of an oar. Shelton tells of making one cook wear Teflon-lined
oven mitts for days on end for every task, including mincing shallots,
because the poor fellow had complained about singeing his hands.
"In the European model, you have one cook for every three patrons.
But I promised not to lose money, which meant that on Saturday nights,
when we would have several hundred covers, I would have one cook for
every 25 seats.
"I needed to get 1,000 percent productivity out of my cooks,
without
affecting quality," he says. "My main job is managing human
resources. I don’t consider what I’ve accomplished as extraordinary;
what our team has done is extraordinary."
This is where he mentions football and the Oliver Stone movie,
"Any
Given Sunday." "Every day we had to work on speed and quality.
I screamed every day. I told them, we’re going to pick up 26 plates
in four minutes. If at the end of four minutes only 25 plates are
up and one is missing, I will throw all 25 in the garbage. I did
it!"
he says, eyes ablaze.
Asked why any cook would tolerate such treatment, he mentions the
Navy Seals. "That is what a four-star kitchen is like. Exhaustion,
cuts, blood, people passing out from the heat," he says. "But
at the end of the day, you’ve tested your mettle, you’ve looked to
your core."
Shelton, now 40, grew up in Rye Beach, New Hampshire.
He cites his father as his role model for strong ethics and a
commitment
to integrity. The father of two himself, Shelton describes his father,
who worked on navigation systems for submarines at the Portsmouth
naval yard, as "a strong disciplinarian and a Yankee through and
through."
His passion for cooking, on the other hand, comes from his mother,
who is French. "My grandmother still lives in France. My
grandparents
had a restaurant in Cognac; she cooked and her husband ran the front
of the house," he says. "My strongest emotional memories are
of sitting in that restaurant." To this day he has dual
citizenship.
Shelton graduated from Yale in 1982 with degrees in molecular
biophysics
and biochemistry. He had been pre-med at Yale but — as he has
explained — his passion for cooking simply took over. By the early
1990s, Shelton had trained with the finest European chefs, including
Joel Rubochon and Paul Haeberlin, and in top American establishments,
such as Le Bernardin, Bouley, Le Chantilly, and the Rainbow Room in
New York.
Shelton is proud of the care he takes in thoroughly training his
staff,
and takes a parent’s pride in the many who have gone on to establish
names for themselves, such as James Laird of Restaurant Serenade in
Chatham and Patrick Yves Pierre-Jerome of Stage Left in New Brunswick.
Ryland Inn alumnus Michael Schlow captured this year’s Beard award
as best chef in the Northeast for his work at Radius in Boston.
The accomplishment, other than mentoring, of which Craig Shelton is
most proud does not, surprisingly, center around his food, or even
the inn’s acclaimed three-acre, certified organic garden. "I have
been able to equalize demand throughout the week," says this
businessman.
"In the beginning, demand was just for Saturday nights — and
only peak hours. Now we try for 150 personal dinners every night,
and we’re coming real close to that. It’s a miracle — I can
finally
have a right-sized business," he concludes.
Much of that midweek business comes from those pharmaceutical,
financial
services, and telecommunications giants that surround the Ryland Inn.
Shelton identifies with the CEOs of those companies, and has put into
place a tripartite organization matrix that rivals that of any Fortune
500 company.
Tellingly, the top administrator is David Merves, the chief financial
officer, who has an MBA and came to the Ryland Inn 18 months ago.
Shelton estimates that these days he spends no more than 20 percent
of his time in the kitchen, but he considers this his "play"
time. Cooking, he explains, allows him to appear grown up, even though
he feels he hasn’t in actuality. (Shelton has two children, Olivia
10, and William, almost 2. His wife, Isabelle, also assists at the
restaurant.)
Having a stable customer base has allowed Shelton to refine the scope
of his food and, he believes, improve its quality. The Ryland Inn
menu currently centers around three tasting menus: traditional,
vegetarian,
and gourmand. Each menu contains 8 to 10 dishes, including such
exotica
as cock’s combs, monkfish livers, and a Marguerita of white chocolate,
lovage, and thyme. Each has a base price ($88 for the traditional
menu), but it can increase to as much as $150 per person if diners
opt for one of two suggested wine packages.
Reflecting on the path that led to this point, Shelton says, "it
some ways, it was a happy accident. I wound up looking for a country
place, somewhat in distress. We agreed upon a risky venture —
a self-financed project. We made no apologies for being in the
country.
We found an extraordinary group of (mostly) young people who would
work for less money in order to hone their skills and for emotional
fulfillment."
"Yet," says this highly acclaimed chef and successful business
professional, "I’m still disappointed. I’m still far away from
my creative peak. I hope I’m capable of a lot more."
— Pat Tanner
Top Of Page
CRAIG SHELTON
He likens himself alternately to a football coach, an orchestra
conductor, a drill sergeant, a parent, a child playing at being a
grown up, and the CEO of a Fortune 100 company. To most of the world
he is simply New Jersey’s most acclaimed chef. Craig Shelton of the
Ryland Inn in Whitehouse has graced the cover of Gourmet magazine, was
named best chef in the mid-Atlantic region by the James Beard
Foundation, and is one of only eight American chefs dubbed "Relais
Gourmand" (and only one of 60 named worldwide) by the prestigious
international rating organization, Relais & Chateaux.
Since Shelton took over the reins of the Hunterdon County restaurant
in 1991, it has consistently captured top slots in "best of" lists of
every major restaurant survey. Yet in a recent conversation at the
famed "inn," Shelton claims that the one thing he never envisioned for
himself was operating a restaurant in the hinterlands of New Jersey.
"I was never looking to open a stand-alone restaurant outside of New
York City," says Shelton, emphatically. "The truth of it is there is
no logical reason that there should be fine dining outside of major
metropolitan cities. It makes no sense; it is failure by design."
This situation, he says, has nothing to do with a lack of
sophisticated clientele — a widely held idea he calls "benighted" —
and everything to do with economics. The only way it works, he says,
is for a restaurant to be attached to a hotel, and cites as an example
the Inn at Little Washington in Virginia. The Ryland Inn, despite its
suggestive name, offers no accommodations.
"Our economic formulas between hotels and restaurants are so debased,"
Shelton continues. "In America, a dinner must cost one-third to
one-half the price of an equivalent dinner in France. Lunch? We expect
it to be about one-tenth of what Europeans pay. On the other hand,
Americans happily pay $3,000 for a luxury hotel suite — of which
$2,500 is pure profit — while complaining bitterly about a $250
meal." He claims that it is not unusual for a successful fine-dining
establishment to expect only a 10 percent profit, and that in many
instances the cost of goods exceeds price. "Gastronomy in America is a
loss leader," he exclaims. "Few, if any, four-star restaurants are not
highly subsidized."
"In the 1980s and 1990s quality restaurants were failing at a high
rate. Maybe one out of ten made it, and they were making a 10 to 20
percent profit, at best. It’s not a leverageable business like, say,
computer software. It’s an artisanal craft." Shelton bemoans the fact
that, "no matter how many racks of lamb I make, I’m going to have the
same labor and materials costs." And these costs, he adds, will be as
great as, if not more than, those for restaurants in major cities.
So what forces impelled Shelton, despite these daunting conditions, to
take on in 1991 a struggling establishment with a middling reputation,
just off Route 22? That’s the focal point of our interview, which is
scheduled for one hour at Shelton’s restaurant, housed in a
200-year-old white clapboard structure in a rural setting but still
within sight of busy Route 22. For the first 20 minutes of the
allotted time, this reporter waits for Shelton in a comfortable
private dining room. When Shelton finally arrives and learns that the
reporter is interested in the business side of the operation as much
as the food, he moves the interview to a conference, where "there are
hard surfaces" for making charts and diagrams. The interview lasts
more than three hours, beginning with the question about the move from
New York to New Jersey.
"I had been chef de cuisine at Bouley for three years. An investor
there proposed to invest in me. I looked at several hundred spaces in
New York City. Simultaneously, I was looking in New Jersey, where I
had a dream of having a country restaurant or a small luxury hotel
with a boutique restaurant," Shelton begins.
"I went to some friends who worked on Wall Street," Shelton explains,
"I told them I needed a location with massive corporate support
nearby." He had concluded that was the only way a stand-alone
fine-dining venture could succeed. "I asked them to name the three or
four industries that would grow over the next decade." They named
financial services, telecommunications, and pharmaceuticals. "So I
asked them, where is the world epicenter for each of these industries.
They told me they were all at the same place — the crossroads of
Routes 287 and 78 in New Jersey. Bonanza! I drew a compass. The Ryland
Inn is four miles from those crossroads."
Simultaneously, the land developer who had bought the Ryland Inn and
50 surrounding acres in 1989 was struggling. The developer had made an
initial
investment of $2.5 million, followed that with a $5 million upgrade of
the restaurant, and then, says Shelton, the market had "tanked." The
partners hired Dennis Foy, a restaurant consultant who was known for a
restaurant in Chatham, the Tarragon Tree, that was highly regarded.
Foy referred the partners to Shelton, then at Le Bouley and still in
search of that restaurant. They made an offer to make him an equal
partner if he could merely make the restaurant break even. There was
no financial plan. "Thank God I was young and stupid," Shelton says
today.
The hard part, Shelton claims, was not affording the Limoges, the
Riedel glasses, or the set of Bourgeat pots for the kitchen. It was
inculcating a four-star frame of mind into the brigade of 12 chefs,
all male, that staffed the small, dated kitchen.
How did he do it? He playfully mentions a paddle the size of an oar.
Shelton tells of making one cook wear Teflon-lined oven mitts for days
on end for every task, including mincing shallots, because the poor
fellow had complained about singeing his hands.
"In the European model, you have one cook for every three patrons. But
I promised not to lose money, which meant that on Saturday nights,
when we would have several hundred covers, I would have one cook for
every 25 seats.
"I needed to get 1,000 percent productivity out of my cooks, without
affecting quality," he says. "My main job is managing human resources.
I don’t consider what I’ve accomplished as extraordinary; what our
team has done is extraordinary."
This is where he mentions football and the Oliver Stone movie, "Any
Given Sunday." "Every day we had to work on speed and quality. I
screamed every day. I told them, we’re going to pick up 26 plates in
four minutes. If at the end of four minutes only 25 plates are up and
one is missing, I will throw all 25 in the garbage. I did it!" he
says, eyes ablaze.
Asked why any cook would tolerate such treatment, he mentions the Navy
Seals. "That is what a four-star kitchen is like. Exhaustion, cuts,
blood, people passing out from the heat," he says. "But at the end of
the day, you’ve tested your mettle, you’ve looked to your core."
Shelton, now 40, grew up in Rye Beach, New Hampshire. He
cites his father as his role model for strong ethics and a commitment
to integrity. The father of two himself, Shelton describes his father,
who worked on navigation systems for submarines at the Portsmouth
naval yard, as "a strong disciplinarian and a Yankee through and
through."
His passion for cooking, on the other hand, comes from his mother, who
is French. "My grandmother still lives in France. My grandparents had
a restaurant in Cognac; she cooked and her husband ran the front of
the house," he says. "My strongest emotional memories are of sitting
in that restaurant." To this day he has dual citizenship.
Shelton graduated from Yale in 1982 with degrees in molecular
biophysics and biochemistry. He had been pre-med at Yale but — as he
has explained — his passion for cooking simply took over. By the
early 1990s, Shelton had trained with the finest European chefs,
including Joel Rubochon and Paul Haeberlin, and in top American
establishments, such as Le Bernardin, Bouley, Le Chantilly, and the
Rainbow Room in New York.
Shelton is proud of the care he takes in thoroughly training his
staff, and takes a parent’s pride in the many who have gone on to
establish names for themselves, such as James Laird of Restaurant
Serenade in Chatham and Patrick Yves Pierre-Jerome of Stage Left in
New Brunswick. Ryland Inn alumnus Michael Schlow captured this year’s
Beard award as best chef in the Northeast for his work at Radius in
Boston.
The accomplishment, other than mentoring, of which Craig Shelton is
most proud does not, surprisingly, center around his food, or even the
inn’s acclaimed three-acre, certified organic garden. "I have been
able to equalize demand throughout the week," says this erudite
businessman. "In the beginning, demand was just for Saturday nights –
and only peak hours on that night. Now, we try for 150 in personal
dinners every night, and we’re coming real close to that. It’s a
miracle — I can finally have a right-sized business," he concludes.
Much of that midweek business comes from those pharmaceutical,
financial services, and telecommunications giants that surround the
Ryland Inn. Shelton identifies with the CEOs of those companies, and
has put into place a tripartite organization matrix that rivals that
of any Fortune 500 company.
Tellingly, the top administrator is David Merves, the chief financial
officer, who has an MBA and came to the Ryland Inn 18 months ago.
Shelton estimates that these days he spends no more than 20 percent of
his time in the kitchen, but he considers this his "play" time.
Cooking, he explains, allows him to appear grown up, even though he
feels he hasn’t in actuality. (Shelton has two children, Olivia 10,
and William, almost 2. His wife, Isabelle, also assists at the
restaurant.)
Having a stable customer base has allowed Shelton to refine the scope
of his food and, he believes, improve its quality. The Ryland Inn menu
currently centers around three tasting menus: traditional, vegetarian,
and gourmand. Each menu contains 8 to 10 dishes, including such
exotica as cock’s combs, monkfish livers, and a Marguerita of white
chocolate, lovage, and thyme. Each has a base price ($88 for the
traditional menu), but it can increase to as much as $150 per person
if diners opt for one of two suggested wine packages.
Reflecting on the path that led to this point, Shelton says, "it some
ways, it was a happy accident. I wound up looking for a country place,
somewhat in distress. We agreed upon a risky venture — a
self-financed project. We made no apologies for being in the country.
We found an extraordinary group of (mostly) young people who would
work for less money in order to hone their skills and for emotional
fulfillment."
"Yet," says this highly acclaimed chef and successful business
professional, "I’m still disappointed. I’m still far away from my
creative peak. I hope I’m capable of a lot more."
— Pat Tanner
Corrections or additions?
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