Latest news with #QualityBranded
Eater
13-06-2025
- Business
- Eater
They Said ‘Don't Join the Family Business.' They Did It Anyway.
When Michael Stillman checks his mailbox, he often finds a large yellow manilla envelope stuffed awkwardly inside the small slot. The 45-year-old CEO of Quality Branded — the restaurant group behind Quality Meats, Italian spots Bad Roman and Don Angie, and Asian fusion-y Twin Tails among others – knows who it's from: Alan Stillman, his 88-year-old father and the founder of Smith & Wollensky. Inside are newspaper clippings, magazine stories, and a print-out of the restaurant group's latest P&L, highlighted in neon yellow with hand-written notes. 'Quality Italian's wine sales were highlighted with a note: 'This isn't as good as it should be.'' says Michael. 'He wasn't wrong.' The restaurant business often draws kids into the family legacy. Many go off on their own rather than work with mom and dad on a daily basis. Danny Meyer's daughter Hallie is the founder of Caffe Panna and Marguerite Zabar Mariscal, the granddaughter of Eli Zabar, is the CEO of Momofuku, for example. Some take the more complicated route of working alongside their baby boomer parents. Michael Stillman followed in his father Alan's footsteps. Massimo Lusardi has several restaurants with his dad Mauro, who made a name for himself on the Upper East Side decades ago with Lusardi's. George Spiliadis works with his father Costas, founder of Estiatorio Milos. Bilena Settepani runs her family's namesake restaurants and bakeries with her parents. These are their stories. Alan Stillman, who founded T.G.I. Friday's and Smith & Wollensky, didn't encourage his son to follow in his footsteps when he was younger. Michael, a Brown grad, considered politics but ended up in the restaurant business first with Danny Meyer at Tabla. That led to a job with his father, opening Smith & Wollenskys across the country. 'You're 25. Go have a good time and open restaurants and learn the business,'' he says. In 2006, Michael convinced Alan to hand over Manhattan Ocean Club to him, transforming a onetime seafood power spot that had lost is luster into Quality Meats. He enlisted chef Craig Koketsu and design firm AvroKO, selling off restaurant art to fund the project. From there, Michael built Quality Branded, which now has 12 concepts in New York and Denver. Alan credits his son's creativity and risk-taking. 'We are 40 years apart, and that age gap allowed him to take risks and to make mistakes that I didn't.' Massimo Lusardi started as a teen coat checker at Lusardi's, his father Mauro's Upper East Side mainstay since 1982. While Mauro didn't push him toward the business, Massimo was all in — working the floor, trying the kitchen, and learning every part of it. Like Alan, Mauro did not encourage his son to join the business. 'This industry is not exactly what you wish for your child. You are always working: not around for the holidays, you miss things.' But Massimo was all 2005, when Massimo was 22, they expanded the Second Avenue footprint, opening Uva, a wine bar a few blocks from Lusardi's. In 2021, they opened Uva Next Door, and then Massimo branched out on his own (with his father's support) to open the speakeasy cocktail lounge Keys & Heels with his partner Jayne Moore, and most recently, a bistro called Nightly's, which shares a wall with Lusardi's. All are on Second Avenue, between 77th and 78th streets. There are conflicts, but Massimo says they don't derail the process. 'It's like when you're playing jazz. You know when it's someone's turn to play rhythm and when it's someone's turn to play lead.' Costas Spiliadis, who opened Milos in Manhattan in 1997, told his son George to finish university before touching the restaurant world. But George spent summer breaks waiting tables and staging in the kitchen. After graduation, he officially joined the team. At his father's encouragement, George built his own strengths, developing Milos's wine program and championing Greek winemakers. In 2024, he became chief business officer. The Spiliadises now run 12 restaurants globally, including in Athens, Dubai, and Singapore, and have recently opened Milos and Milos Wine Bar in Hudson Yards. A Midtown mezze spot is on the way. Bilena Settepani grew up in Settepani, her parents' Williamsburg bakery (1992) and Harlem restaurant (2000), where the chef packed her school lunches she developed an entreprenurial streak by selling her family's focaccia to friends at school. At the time, her father Nino, a Sicilian baker, and her mother Leah Abraham, an Ethiopian-Eritrean restaurateur, discouraged their children from joining the business. But both Bilena and her brother Seyoum both work with the family. For Bilena, it wasn't always that way. After Leah was diagnosed with cancer in 2020, Bilena quit her job in the fashion industry to help with the Harlem restaurant. She urged her dad to focus on the Brooklyn bakery, and her mom on healing. Then she enrolled in culinary school at night to build her pastry skills. Bilena has since added to the bakery's line of cannoli, torta del nonna, sfogliatelle, and launched a panettone of the month with modern flavors like Nutella, almond, and rainbow cookie. She has also helped develop the company's ecommerce and social presence, and began a monthly partnership with Massimo Bottura's Refetorrio. Seyoum has created partnerships with About U and the Harlem Jets, which create opportunities for youth and promote community growth. In addition to the original Settepani bakery in Williamsburg and the restaurant in Harlem, the siblings help has allowed the family to branch out to Brooklyn's Time Out amid the intensity of work, Leah says they keep their priorities clear. 'At the end of the day,' says Bilena, 'we are family.'
New York Post
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
NYC has an amazing new Southeast Asian restaurant in Twin Tails
Did I dream that I was eating fabulous Vietnamese beef satay and Lao-style grilled chicken, not at Indochine or Tao Downtown, but on the achingly sterile third floor of Deutsche Bank Center, aka the former Time Warner Center? Nope, it was all real — and one of the year's happiest restaurant-world surprises. After a mixed-results launch last fall, Twin Tails has hit its stride and is the new culinary star of the Columbus Circle mall. The sprawling Southeast Asian place from the Quality Branded team blows away ghosts of three flops that preceded it on the third floor. Quality Branded runs venues from tiny Italian trattoria Don Angie to giant steakhouse Smith & Wollensky to Middle Eastern-themed Zou Zou's. This is the group's first foray into Asian fare and it's surprising great. 6 The Night Market chicken at Twin Tails is one of the best poultry dishes in the city right now. Tamara Beckwith 6 The stylish, dimly lit interiors make you forget you're in a mall. Tamara Beckwith While the crowd-pleasing, gently cosmopolitanized Southeast Asian fare is reminiscent of clubby downtown spots, Twin Tails stops short of being a party scene. It's crafted for grown-ups — and for grown-ups' finances, with small plates priced up to $29, most main courses in the $39-65 range and a few esoteric meat dishes costing up to $130. Yet, not once did waiters annoy us with the standard 'all our dishes are made for sharing' upsell pitch, even though — get this! — they all were large enough to be shared. The antiseptic mall mood vanishes once you step through the brass doors. Twin Tails boasts 300 seats including the bar, a lounge and private rooms, but what most diners will experience is the 140-seat main dining room, which is sectioned by design firm AvroKo into five intimate areas separated by low-rise planters. It wears its faux-exoticism lightly; there are no temple motifs or jade elephants. Mirrored walls are pink and amber, banquettes are upholstered in deep yellow. Table tops are of burled rosewood, each with its own small shaded lamp that lets you see what you're eating even if you don't happen to be seated under custom-made amber glass chandeliers. The menu is divided into various categories, such as satay, small plates, fish, shellfish, steak, and pork and fowl. There are tons of spices, but no red-hot chilis to blow off the roof of your mouth. 6 Twin Tails stops short of being a party scene, but there's still a great energy in the space. Tamara Beckwith The 'Night market' grilled chicken — a reference to the flavorful grilled meats found in the night markets of Thailand — was one of the best poultry dishes I've had in recent memory. The leg, thigh and breast are brined in fish sauce and lemongrass; spiced with cumin, garlic and ginger; then grilled and roasted. It's served in a pan with broth made from the drippings. The white meat was as juicy and tender as the dark. In a city full of dry, boring chicken dishes, it's a showstopper. The restaurant can be packed at night, but I had the place nearly all to myself for a recent lunch, where I was bowled over by the pork cha gio rolls. A mineral-rich grind of meat and umami-rich cloud ear mushrooms are encased in super-crisp spring roll wraps. They burst with flavor on their own, but wrapping them in lettuce leaves and dunking them in tangy, fish sauce-based nuoc cham takes them even higher. 6 The red curry sea bass shows the kitchen's skill with seafood. Tamara Beckwith I was skeptical of red curry sea bass after several under-performing seafood choices in the restaurant's early days. But chef/partner Craig Koketsu and executive chef Chad Brown now have the kitchen cracking. The familiar fish is marinated and wrapped in banana leaf, then grilled and roasted with pungent hints of galangal and lime. Strangely, the only flop was a dish the waiter said was the house pride: crispy garlic shrimp 'Lotus of Siam'-style, named for a famous Las Vegas restaurant. Maybe I caught them on a bad night, but the shrimp were almost inedibly chewy and tough when extracted from their shells, and they turned hard and cold after just minutes. 6 Crispy shrimp were the only flop that The Post's Steve Cuozzo had a Twin Tails. Tamara Beckwith 6 Desserts, such as a rainbow sherbet cake, end things on a fun note. Tamara Beckwith The fun returned with desserts such as multi-color rainbow sherbet cake layered with guava, Makrut line, pineapple chili and graham-cashew crunches. Remarkably, the flavors don't merge into a sweet blur but stand up for themselves individually. Twin Tails might not be Saigon or Bangkok, but it's a shorter trip to Columbus Circle — and exactly what the southeast Asian-deprived junction point of Midtown and the Upper West Side needed.
