While Everyone is Posting 2016...
10 years of big restaurant energy.
I’ve been thinking a lot about opening restaurants. What it means, to us, to me.
This came after a few things. Annie Shi’s piece on what no one told her about opening restaurants, Kerry Diamond’s new So You Want to Open a Restaurant series- - starting with her story of quicksanding into this beautiful and complicated world. Chef Ryan Bartlow’s two-part series on being compelled to open Bartolo in the West Village.
But mostly, it’s because the last few months I’ve ruminated over spending ten years with my current partners, at our restaurant group, GHM (COTE + COQODAQ).
It’s funny how ten years suddenly feels very present right now. Everywhere on social media, people are posting photos from 2016: old phones, old haircuts, old versions of themselves. A collective time capsule cracking open. And it made me realize that 2016 wasn’t just another year for me. It was the beginning of something I’m still very much inside of.
It’s been ten years since Simon Kim first hired me to be his wine director for the, now closed, PIORA, in the West Village. I had just left Marea, where I was a sommelier for billionaire’s row, and he gave me my first opportunity to buy wine. Not just sell, as a sommelier does, but buy. Curate a wine program and be responsible for at least thirty, if not forty percent, of a restaurant’s revenue and budget.
(PIORA, 10 years ago - I was always building Champagne towers! Also, do you remember how big Instagram boomerangs were in 2016!?
At the time, I knew how to sell. I could sell anything to anyone. But buying wine—really buying—was different. It required conviction before consensus.
Since then we’ve gone on to become partners and open many restaurants, together.
COTE Flatiron in NYC in 2017- we were babies! COTE Miami in the Design District in 2021, when I was pregnant with my own actual baby. COTE Singapore in 2024, legit a couple weeks apart from COQODAQ in NYC - don’t recommend doing that. The mighty COTE Vegas just a few months ago in 2025.
And now, this week, we posted that we are hiring for our new spot: 550 Madison. Which is, actually, quite a few spots.
By the end of this year, we’ll have eightish restaurants around the world.
So, what does it mean to open a restaurant? What does it mean to open many restaurants? Many times, over many years?
Well, I suppose it means many things. But mostly, it means only as much as the people you do it with. You see, restaurant openings are anything but glamorous. They’re sort of like a dirty high. Sure, you might all be wearing freshly cut suits and you spent $800 on a swirly decanter- - but at the same time you’re trying to seduce the Con Edison woman on the phone into giving you an earlier appointment so they’ll turn on the gas.
It’s devastating that you can sit in an empty, two-million-dollar restaurant, just waiting for the bureaucratic red-tape people to come in and perform a five-minute inspection, while everyone is already on payroll, and you’re anxiously twiddling your thumbs. And unless you know people—and can pull strings, and even then—you still end up dealing with someone from a government-adjacent agency, absolutely high on the power they have over you, calmly explaining that yes, the absolute earliest they can come by is seven weeks from now, a Thursday, at 4:15 p.m.
You have to build a Dewey-Decimal-System-like inventory for the wine cellar with tiny bin stickers that inevitably end up stuck in your hair. You have to search for the right words to tell a server they can’t work in a crumpled shirt pulled from the bottom of a backpack; and spending, all at once, so much money you don’t yet have.
But we love that dirty high. Us restaurant people. And we love doing it together.
Maybe that’s why Annie’s line stuck with me, that it takes ten years for a restaurant to really open. Not soft open. Not press open. But to actually hit its stride.
For our ten-year anniversary a few months ago, I gave Simon a bottle of vintage Champagne. His favorite producer. Definitely one of mine, too. I chose this particular bottle not only because it was a favorite and delicious but because the wine was only released after ten years. The house waited ten years before declaring it ready.
Which is to say: maybe that’s the point of all of this. Ten years in, after all the opening and reopening and building and rebuilding—we are just now ready to drink.
Behind the paywall:
The 2016s that are ready to drink now, and my favorites. Including that Champagne I gave Simon.
