Jean-Georges Vongerichten Never Stands Still

12 Minute read

31 Oct 2025

Journalist

The chef behind one of dining’s largest empires keeps adapting, expanding, and asking what might come next.

“When you’re a chef, you have to be on time,” Jean-Georges Vongerichten says. “If you open at twelve, you better be there at five to twelve—or the soufflé deflates.”

He laughs, but it’s not really a joke. Few chefs have mastered timing quite like Vongerichten. Over five decades, he’s turned punctuality into philosophy, building a global restaurant empire on precision disguised as ease.

Vongerichten arrived in New York in the mid-1980s to helm Lafayette at the Drake Swissôtel, where a four-star New York Times review made him one of the city’s youngest culinary stars. A few years later, he opened his first restaurant, JoJo—after his childhood nickname—a townhouse bistro that still draws regulars more than three decades later.

Today, he owns and operates more than forty restaurants worldwide, including three Michelin-starred addresses in New York. “I’m predictable, right?” he jokes. He says it lightly, but predictability—routine, timing, rhythm—is exactly what’s kept his empire steady through decades of change. “I just love opening restaurants.”

Of all those openings, JoJo remains closest to his heart. “That was my first baby,” he says with affection. “I still go twice a month to have dinner or look at the menu and make some changes.” The restaurant has evolved through three iterations but never strayed too far from its origins. When he tried to replace longtime favorites, diners protested.

“When we changed the menu, people said, ‘Where’s my chicken with olives?’” he says. “So now we rotate old dishes back in as specials—chicken with olives and chickpea fries on Monday, another classic on Wednesday. It makes people come back. Sometimes it’s easier to open a new restaurant than to change the menu.” He says it with a smile, but the line could double as a credo. Change, for Vongerichten, is always deliberate, never reckless.

The attachment people feel to JoJo shaped the way Vongerichten thinks about every other restaurant he opens. Familiarity, after all, is its own kind of control. “Every neighborhood is different, and we try to cater to the locals first,” he says. “You have to be in touch with your zip code. If you have a snowstorm or an economic crisis, people aren’t going to cross town. They’ll go somewhere they already know,” he says. “In New York, everyone walks. People count on you when you open, they come from five or ten blocks away. If you serve them well, they come back.”

The Mark Hotel: The Upper East Side’s Living Room

That neighborhood-first mindset comes to life uptown, where Vongerichten’s partnership with The Mark Hotel has become one of his most enduring relationships. The restaurant serves as both a neighborhood canteen and a celebrity magnet, often doubling as the unofficial pre-party for the Met Gala.

“The Mark is the living room for the Upper East Side,” he says. “People come two or three times a week. Nobody cooks at home in that area.” He sounds amused, but beneath the joke is a blueprint: observe how people live, then build around their habits.

Regulars return for tuna tartare with avocado and truffle cheeseburgers, while the Mark Haute Dog Cart has been a fixture outside the hotel for more than a decade. “People line up, and it sells out. The beef one goes first,” he says.

During the pandemic, his team turned the block outside into a seasonal experiment: a Swiss chalet in winter, a vegan ABCV pop-up in summer, and a clam bar with lobster rolls and caviar from next door’s Caviar Kaspia. “Every season we try to use that street,” he says. “It’s worked very well.”

The Mark proves that Vongerichten can build community one corner at a time. The Tin Building, his sprawling project at the South Street Seaport, asks a bigger question: can the same precision that defines a single neighborhood restaurant work across an entire city?

At the Seaport, he’s turned a two-story market into a map of New York’s appetites. “It’s little villages,” he says, “Italian, Chinese, French, Japanese, with all the seafood from the East Coast. It’s all the great neighborhoods [of New York] under one roof.”

Rather than an homage to France or Italy, the Tin Building is his love letter to the city’s variety, and yet, another exercise in control. Every counter and dining room, from House of the Red Pearl to ABCV and the Oyster Bar, feeds into a single ecosystem where ingredients arrive fresh each morning, ninety percent from local farms. “Whatever you see at the market, the fish or the vegetables, comes in fresh every day,” he says, sounding less like a chef than a conductor keeping time.

Evolving Taste: From Vegetables to Validation

When Vongerichten opened ABC Kitchen fifteen years ago, his focus on seasonal, sustainable cooking felt radical. The restaurant’s success led to ABCV, a fully plant-based spinoff that opened eight years later near Union Square. “We had so many vegetable dishes that people kept saying, ‘You have to open a vegan restaurant,’” he recalls. “It was one of a kind.”

The decision wasn’t ideological so much as observational—a chef noticing how guests were eating and adjusting with precision. That instinct links him to peers like Daniel Humm, who recently shifted Eleven Madison Park back from an all-vegan tasting menu. “Daniel came for lunch at ABC,” Vongerichten says. “Everyone was asking him, ‘Where’s the duck?’ His vegan food is fantastic, but you have to give people what they’re asking for.”

For Vongerichten, adaptation has always been about control—knowing when to evolve and when to return to what works. That same balance between change and restraint extends to his flagship at 1 Central Park West, which earned three Michelin stars when it opened in 1997. “We’re still fighting to get our third star back,” he says. “Every year we try to reinvent ourselves.”

That fight, for him, isn’t bitterness; it’s discipline. “When you lose a star like that, it’s more about the team, because it’s a group effort.” He’s betting on a new generation, led by chef Joseph Rhee, winner of the 2024 Michelin Guide New York Young Chef Award.

Even as the restaurant evolves, certain classics can’t be touched. “People are creatures of habit,” he says. Guests can now order a tasting menu called Old School 1997, featuring seven dishes from the restaurant’s early years. “Every night we sell about twenty of them,” he says. “People are nostalgic.”

Exploring New Roots

After decades spent mastering consistency, Vongerichten still finds his sharpest inspiration far from home. Travel, he says, is how he resets his senses. “When I travel, I get inspired,” he says. “If you look at meat and fish, there are limits. But when you look at plants, spices, and herbs, there are thousands and thousands of species. The combinations are endless.”

Fresh off a trip to Brazil, he’s been experimenting with roots he describes as “a sweet potato meets a carrot meets a parsnip.” He even brought back seeds for his farm team to plant. “Every trip, I come back with twenty dishes we’ll create and forty more ideas,” he says.

Wherever he goes—from Shanghai and Singapore to London and Paris—he returns to New York with new ways to season the familiar. “It’s still an organic chicken,” he says, “but if I season it with licorice or lemongrass or some new spice, it becomes something else.”

For Vongerichten, curiosity isn’t a departure from discipline; it’s proof of it. The impulse to explore keeps his system alive, ensuring that order never turns into stagnation.

Always Moving

Even after fifty years in the kitchen, Vongerichten shows no signs of slowing down. Business was up across his New York restaurants this year, from JoJo to The Mark, proof that his local-first philosophy still holds.

He splits his time between New York and a handful of cities where his name is part of the skyline—Miami Beach, Philadelphia, Nashville, and Las Vegas—and travels regularly to Asia and Europe to visit his teams.

His Los Angeles chapter ended in 2023, when his contract at the Waldorf Astoria wrapped. “It was a wonderful time there,” he says. “But one day we’ll be back. I don’t know where yet, but we will return.”

He says it lightly, but it’s classic Jean-Georges—already plotting the next opening, the next neighborhood to understand, and the next star to earn.

31 Oct 2025

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