“I’m Not Trying to Be Difficult”: Drew Nieporent Reflects on Four Decades in Hospitality

7 Minute read

18 Sep 2025

Journalist

The legendary New York restaurateur opens up about his new memoir, lessons from forty restaurants, and what hospitality really means after decades in the business.

Drew Nieporent’s I’m Not Trying to Be Difficult isn’t merely a wild romp of a memoir—it’s a rambunctious primer on New York City restaurant history told by someone who opened a staggering forty restaurants. It’s littered with personalities, from jaw-droppingly fabulous (Nieporent’s longtime business partner was Robert De Niro) to deeply problematic (read the book to find those).

And it’s an education: it should be a must-read for anyone entering the restaurant industry, whether front of house or back. It’s peppered with astute observations—why there should be a central bar, curved banquettes, a dish pit at the front of the kitchen—and advice on how to speak to guests and business partners (“My partner cannot be my competitor,” he writes at a crucial juncture). I started jotting down these tips in case the madness to re-enter the industry ever overtakes me; frankly, they deserve to be laminated and plastered in employee-only spaces.

I sat down with Nieporent over a video call that ran long—I never wanted it to end—to ask the questions that arose while reading the book. He packed nearly as many stories (and bits of wisdom) into our conversation as into his chapters.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

KA: Tell me about the process of writing this memoir. What was it like working with a co-author?

DN: There’s a lot of things that aren’t in the book, so I’m glad people are getting a lot out of it. I’ve opened forty restaurants and I only talk about a handful of them.

The book was completed a year and a half ago, and took about six months. My ghostwriter is Jamie Feldmar, who had never written a book, but she did co-write the Don Angie cookbook and Naomi Pomeroy’s cookbook. I had never met Jamie so there was a lot of blind faith. She did the lion’s work, but it’s my story. I had a stroke about eight years ago, and lost some memory, although I seem to be at a pretty good moment, especially when telling stories.

When I first read what Jamie wrote, there was a curse word on every page. I say, “Jamie, I don’t curse like that. She said, ‘No, you do.’”

“A spoken mother f-er is more powerful than a read one. So take out as many curses as you can,” I said. So she did. And the most important thing is that she found my voice. It was amazing. And when the audio book comes out, it will also be my voice.

KA: How did you dredge up all these memories?

DN: I have 75,000 photographs on my phone. And if you were with me, I’d be showing them to you. I have photographs with Colonel Sanders, Muhammad Ali, Obama, and Bruce Springsteen. I never threw out a single piece of publicity. If you came to Tribeca Grill, we had 150 boxes of all this memorabilia when we closed in March. But honest to God, I didn’t refer to it for the book. I asked ICE (International Culinary Institute) to take it. I said, “Throw it out but please just take it off my hands.” My wife won’t let me bring any of it home. I wrote the book because I did so much. It was important not to let it just go away. So I put it all down on paper.

KA: As a former chef and restaurateur, I realized that this is the most amazing resource for someone early on in their hospitality career. This should be required reading for anyone entering the restaurant industry, front or back of house. Was there any intention that this memoir would be a resource like this?

DN: Jamie thought she was writing something like Setting the Table by Danny Meyer. She pushed me. I don’t want to tell people what to do. I just want to tell my story. It’s to her credit that she put in these nuggets, but I’m not a preacher. There are all these guys now talking about hospitality and that’s not for me.

KA: So she distilled your memories into these lessons.

DN: I want to walk the walk, talk the talk when I have to, but I couldn’t get up there and articulate how you can be nice to a customer because I can be nasty to a customer if I want to.

When you’re a restaurateur, you’re like a director of movies. You can do several movies, you don’t have to do just one. A chef’s vision can be just to do one.

I always get the cliched questions of what would you tell a young person going into the business now? I did it because I grew up in it.

KA: I’m dying to know—in the book you wrote that after David Bouley custom-built a rotisserie at Montrachet and you received a cord of firewood—800 logs—what happened to all that firewood?

DN: I think it’s probably still there.

KA: What?

DN: I remember that night of the firewood like it was yesterday, but it was forty years ago. It was the NCAA Championships. Villanova was playing. And David shows up with all this wood. We didn’t have a basement at Montrachet but we had a staircase where the changing room was, which was like a closet and we put all this wood in there and I missed the game, which you couldn’t even tape back then. Every fire engine in New York City showed up because the exhaust couldn’t pull the smoke out of the air.

And the wood stayed there for years. I’m sure when we did Corton, twenty-two years later that they probably moved it.

KA: Has anyone contacted you objecting to how they were portrayed in the book?

DN: One dead person.

When I first wrote the book, my wife said, “You’re really tough on Bouley.” I said, “What do you want me to do? That’s what I lived.” We eased up, cleaned up some stuff, and then David died.

My wife read it again and said, “You’re still too hard on Bouley.” I said, “But he’s dead!”

Then I got an Instagram DM from David’s account—his wife, she’s terrific and it went something like “I hear the book’s coming out and maybe you should rethink what you wrote about Bouley.” But I had just done a podcast about who was the most important person in your career. I could have named anyone, but I named David Bouley. David was a very complicated guy, as are most chefs.

KA: Over the years, has it gotten easier when it comes to reading your reviews? Do you still react as viscerally?

DN: It never gets easier. I take everything personally.

KA: You described some pretty horrifying story, peeing into the dregs of a bottle of wine and getting punched in the face. Is restaurant life for you still like that?

DN: You read the book.

KA: Of course I read the book.

DN: I’ve been interviewed several times now and everyone purports to read the book but nobody has read the book.

Anyway, when you have a restaurant that drives so much volume, there’s going to be something ridiculous. We just had an incident the other day. A customer came in as we closed for lunch and transitioned to dinner. One of their children had been stung by a bee and they asked to sit down. And for whatever reason, the hostess did not treat the customer as they wanted to be treated and they became unbelievably abusive.

There’s always something. There’s always some catastrophic, crazy thing. It doesn’t matter how many restaurants you open.

18 Sep 2025