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The Billionaire’s Happy Meal

Tilman Fertitta takes New York ? Ester Werdiger

The owners of The Corner Store on the border of Soho in downtown Manhattan have always seen opportunity in times of crisis. In his Art of the Dealrip-off Shut Up and Listen! the billionaire restaurateur Tilman Fertitta outlines how he dodged financial ruin during the savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s, building his hospitality empire with millions he held interest-free as the small Texas banks that lent him money went under. He settled his debt years later—much like Donald Trump—for pennies on the dollar. On the day of the Lehman Shock in 2008, Eugene Remm and Mark Birnbaum put down their collective life savings on a massive three-story space in the Meatpacking District that would become the first in their long line of expense account clubstaurants catering largely to the architects of the Great Recession. In hindsight, the trio were destined to go into business with each other.

The Corner Store—the first new concept from Catch Hospitality Group since Fertitta bought 50 percent of Remm and Birnbaum’s company in 2017—opened last September. It was Fertitta’s first splashy opening in New York, introducing himself as a force in the upper echelons of the city’s restaurant industry after decades building his fortune with schlocky chains. While it promised “a mature adult setting,” critics were quick to point out that The Corner Store’s menu of apple hand pies and “sour cream and onion” martinis was clearly “adult cuisine as imagined by children.” It’s “no better than it needs to be and no worse than that of many other places,” decreed Matthew Schneier of New York magazine. It “feels like it could be exported to any corner, anywhere. Which, naturally, seems to be the point.” Taylor Swift visited twice in the first five weeks; it’s been all but impossible to get a table ever since.

A scalable “concept” presented as an inaccessible, gilded clubhouse for the celebrity and influencer class with open contempt for the majority of their would-be clientele, The Corner Store serves up infantilizing haute populist American cuisine designed, above all else, to be photographed. These are features—not bugs—of the establishment, and embody par excellence Fertitta and Catch Hospitality’s grim vision for the future of dining out.

“I’m Tilman Fertitta. According to the Forbes 400 list, I’m ranked the 153rd richest person in America.” So opens the second paragraph of the introduction to his aforementioned book, published in 2019, which gives the reader a clear sense of Fertitta as a writer, and how he views himself and what’s important in life. It’s also no longer accurate. In the years since, his ranking may have slipped—to 220—but his fortune has only swollen, to $10.9 billion, making him, still, as he likes to boast, the “World’s Richest Restaurateur.” Fertitta is the CEO and sole owner of Landry’s Inc., which runs every type of hospitality establishment under the sun, across every price point, from luxury casinos and hotels to generic strip-mall steakhouses and shithole airport kiosk chains. The sixty-seven-year-old Galveston native and former host of the reality show Billion Dollar Buyeralso owns the Houston Rockets, and serves as both the chairman of the Houston Police Foundation, and possibly by the time this reaches you, the U.S. ambassador to Italy.

Fertitta didn’t always want to go into restaurants. After dropping out of college, he tried his hand at a number of businesses, including discount women’s clothes, vitamins, arcade games, and construction, all funded on credit when cash was very cheap. At the end of 1986, as his house of debt began to collapse, he bought Bill and Floyd Landry out of their two popular Houston seafood restaurants—the first Landry’s and a Cajun restaurant called Willie G’s—and began to scale up.

As a restaurateur, Fertitta has exhibited no specific taste other than for the bottom line. And he has shown no interest in cultivating an atmosphere of hospitality, unlike, for instance, the New York institution Danny Meyer. “I’ve learned how crucially important it is to put hospitality to work,” Meyer writes in Setting the Table, “first for the people who work for me and subsequently for all the other people and stakeholders who are in any way affected by our business in descending order, our guests, community, suppliers, and investors.” This is of a piece with the holistic, more humanistic approach Meyer takes to his restaurants like Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Cafe. It’s his conviction that for a restaurant to be successful—but more importantly worthwhile—the necessary care and attention to detail has to flow from the point of contact with the guest, which of course are the people who work for you. Contrast this with Fertitta’s central argument in Shut Up and Listen!: “You can measure your success only by how much money you make.”

If Fertitta could be said to have a talent, then, it is his ability to identify already successful restaurants to acquire or plagiarize. Then, with a Ray Kroc-like second sight, he strips away all the idiosyncrasies—from food and how it’s seasoned down to the décor—until the establishment has become the most generic, inoffensive version of itself in order to appeal to the widest possible swath of middlebrow consumers. In a 1997 profile for Texas Monthly, Robert Draper, a former classmate of Fertitta’s, explains how Fertitta “fixed” Landry’s. “The restaurants he fashioned are the product of a consolidator,” he writes. “He hung on to the names—suing Floyd and Bill Landry when they attempted to open restaurants featuring their last name or the name of their father, Willie G—but nothing else was sacred. He squeezed the Cajun spicing from the dishes (‘Cajun food was a fad,’ he says), scrubbed away the funky interior of Willie G’s, and starched the waitstaff’s appearance.”

Call it focus-grouped tyranny. “When I test products against other products, I require an 80 percent result to justify any sort of change,” Fertitta writes. “For instance, if we’re testing a new salad dressing with ten participants, a minimum of eight out of ten of those folks need to say they prefer the new dressing for us to even consider a switch. That high level of approval gives greater certainty to any decision that’s made.” This is a safe governing principle if you’re trying to sell toilet paper rather than food and hospitality, which at least on the level Corner Store aspires to, has historically been the product of an individual, a chef and general manager with a specific palate, aesthetic, and philosophy. Taste, in other words.

But when it comes to Landry’s chains like Bubba Gump’s, or even their upmarket steakhouses like Del Frisco’s, success is often less about offering a distinctive experience than it is about consistency, however uninspired. For decades, the bulk of Landry’s revenue came from fine-tuning this model. But Fertitta saw a gap in the company’s portfolio: the kind of one-off fine dining establishments that have generally been insulated from Fertitta and all the dreary corporate restaurant raiders by independent, esoteric talent. To cross into this echelon of the restaurant world, he needed an operator who could understand and appease the hyper-informed-and-very-wealthy trend-seeking crowd.

Fertitta found two. “We relate to our customers, because we are them,” Mark Birnbaum told the host of the podcast Studio 22 in 2023. He went on to explain how in his twenties, he and his partner Eugene Remm were club rats. As they got older, their interests shifted from places like Tenjune, the conventional, dance-on-the-couch Meatpacking nightclub they opened together in 2006, to Abe & Arthurs, the restaurant they signed a lease for in 2008, that ported in the bottle-serviced version of nightlife that still reigns supreme in the neighborhood. The pair’s genius was applying a nightclub’s selectivity, ginned up scarcity, and the luster of celebrity to the restaurant. They cut their teeth at what was arguably New York’s first clubstaurant, STK, before opening Catch, “a restaurant with a department store’s dimensions and a night club’s twitchy heart,” in the words of New York Times critic Ligaya Mishan. The atmosphere was that of “a theme park with no discernible theme,” the food “technically flawless but lacking soul.”

It is hard to know if the rise of Catch Hospitality would’ve been possible without the advent of social media, but it certainly helps explain the group’s success. They, and their chefs, take what can be described as a Silk Sonic approach to menu design, cobbling together gimmicky menu items that borrow from a blandly poptimist vision of culinary history and/or bodega junk foodstuffs that look good when delivered via screen narrated with vocal fried bray by a food influencer. Think cocktails inspired by breakfast cereals and entrees drawn from grade school cafeterias but executed by a Michelin pedigreed chef. They have a flair for presentation, often throwing in some completely superfluous tableside service or DIY element that can inject cinematic action into a thirty-second video you edit on your phone. Because these places are hard to access, because their interiors are lavish and the food is photogenic, your presence there denotes the occasion is special, and by extension, so are you.

Since opening The Corner Store with Birnbaum and Remm, Fertitta has been on a buying spree in the Big Apple, adding jewels to his crown. In November, he spent $30 million to acquire the beloved Midtown steakhouse Keen’s. He is also rumored to be in talks to acquire a number of Scott Sartiano properties, including the super exclusive members-only social club Zero Bond, and Sartiano’s namesake restaurant in the Mercer Hotel, which Grub Streetdescribed as a “Members-Mostly Club.” There has been some alarmist response to these acquisitions which could be read as Manhattan elitism, a city looking down its nose at an interloping Texan dipshit buying up venerated institutions he doesn’t respect or understand. But the panic may not be overblown: if you’ve done your homework on Fertitta’s career, a longtime Keen’s regular could justifiably fear he’ll give it the Landry’s treatment, sapping the place of its charms and traditions if it doesn’t pass his 80 percent market test.

With Fertitta’s backing, Catch Hospitality has also been vacuuming up some of the city’s most coveted, highly regarded addresses like Monopoly squares, including the former Chumley’s. They have announced a new “Mediterranean” restaurant down the street from The Corner Store with the Israeli chef Nadav Greenburg. It’s hard to know when the trio will decide they’ve had enough, or what will remain of the city’s restaurant scene once the dust settles.

Nationally, the restaurant industry is devolving rapidly, as a result of Fertitta and incurious restaurateurs like him. Food and culture journalist Meghan McCarron recently wrote an impassioned eulogy to what she refers to as “The Middle Class Restaurant,” sit-down chains like Pizza Hut and Red Lobster, the types of places Fertitta made his fortune opening en masse. As she explains,

The conditions that had fueled [chain restaurant] growth also marked the beginning of a new economic order in which wealth increasingly concentrated at the top. By the 2000s, the middle class these restaurants had been custom-built to serve was shrinking as wages stagnated and neighborhoods grew more segregated by income. The chains began to falter, too. Worsening economic conditions in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis softened restaurant sales, and the subsequent recession hit casual dining chains the hardest.

With this in mind, perhaps there is more than vanity motivating Fertitta’s pivot to finer dining in major metropolitan areas. A high-volume Landry’s tourist trap like Rainforest Cafe, which at its height boasted fifty-nine locations, is currently down to just sixteen. It could be a case of the billionaire recognizing another crisis, that the heartland mid-tier chain restaurant and its middle class clientele that Fertitta juiced for his billions has been depleted, so like a remora, he’s moving onto the next most logical host.

I went to eat at The Corner Store recently. I felt I had to, and to be honest, I wanted to see what it was like, to dress up, to be surrounded by beautiful people in a handsomely appointed space, to have the experience so many people I share the city with, either as neighbors or visitors, are desperate for. To try and understand the secret to Tilman & co.’s success.

As is the case with a disturbing number of internet-hyped hot spots, making a reservation at The Corner Store has proven notoriously difficult, if not impossible, even weeks in advance. Getting a table has, in fact, produced an entire genre of TikTok videos in which aspiring food influencers go to increasingly absurd lengths to try—and ultimately fail—to secure a spot. My first attempt was on a weekend night after work, stopping by the restaurant to see if I could potentially find solo bar space to order a drink and dinner. It was around 10:30 p.m., and while the restaurant advertises it is open until midnight, I was turned away by a polite enough bouncer who told me I’d missed the last seating. With some pressing, he acknowledged that I “might have had a better shot” if I had brought a date with me.

But I was not going to be discouraged, so the next day I walked back to the former Dos Caminos location at the corner of Houston and West Broadway eighty minutes prior to opening with a book. There were seven people already ahead of me. At five they began letting guests put their names down on a list. After two parties were seated, we were told the restaurant was fully committed for the evening but that a select few of us were free to put our names on a cancellation list. Several parties later, the bouncer announced the list was full, and the rest of the line was turned away. Two hours after that, miraculously, I was offered a seat via text.

The experience of the wait, the bouncer, the hostess, the eventual entry, the proximity to privilege made me feel my complete and total lack of clout acutely, which I realized was by design. Seated in the labyrinthine space, I perused the menu while a soundtrack of dusty soul that had been sampled by nineties boom bap and Meet Me in the Bathroom-era New York indie rock took turns. I ordered what constitutes their most representative dishes: elevated pizza rolls ($19.95), a pig in a blanket-sized lobster roll garnished with a bump of caviar ($19.95), Caesar salad ($23.95), and disco steak frites au poivre ($48.95).

As the plates and cocktails streamed out from behind the bar and the basement kitchen, they radiated comfort, familiarity. I, for one, already knew the dishes intimately because I’d seen them recur so often on my phone. Note the TikTok-ready details: chips plucked out of opened eight-ounce bags with tweezers and placed in a silver ramekin served alongside the martini; the tableside pour of au jus into a crystal goblet for sandwich dunking; the bespoke wooden honey dripper to ladle hot honey over the pizza rolls.

But I’d be lying if I said the unimaginative food and service weren’t serviceable, nor was it egregiously expensive for New York, with the obvious exception of the fact that I spent $19.95 on three oversized pizza rolls. But after settling up, what struck me was the safety of Corner Store’s concept. In the design and execution, I could feel and taste the other newish, better burger and martini restaurants chef Michael Vignola was referencing—Cecchi’s, Gotham Burger Social Club, 4 Charles, etc.—an increasingly prevalent genre that mines the city’s history to earn a quick cynical buck. The Corner Store has been a resounding success among a certain class of New York City diner and tourist; soon, it could be everywhere—or at least in other major cities like Miami and Los Angeles. The strategy is simple: place a bet on the vanity and incuriosity of the American dining public, and keep hitting it over and over again.

This is why as I ate and sipped, I couldn’t shake the sensation that I was witnessing the new normal of New York dining: a tallow- and gin-soaked wannabe chain restaurant for the city’s wealthiest adults. I wondered, like the middle class and the middle class of restaurants he’s sucked dry, what crisis might follow when the proprietors of Corner Store and the corporate overlords like them lose interest in an artform they’re carelessly dabbling in. And I realized Tilman Fertitta has at last evolved from capitalizing on times of crisis in America to manufacturing them.