On a rainy winter Tuesday night, Chez Sardine, a tiny “quasi Japanese” restaurant in the West Village that opened in December, is packed.
An uncommonly polite hostess glances between her tablet and the well-heeled, 30-something guests lining up and quotes wait times of 60 and 90 minutes. Just around the corner, Fedora, an elegant basement lounge with a retro vibe, is slightly less packed but still has an hour wait for a table. A few blocks south at Perla, a rustic Italian spot, it’ll be an hour and a half, and there’s not even room to grab a drink at the bar.
Welcome to Gabriel Stulman’s West Village. At 32, the bearded, slightly disheveled young restaurateur has opened five buzzing downtown restaurants in a span of 3 ½ years (he’s also behind Joseph Leonard, with new American fare and plenty of candles in glass jars, and Jeffrey’s Grocery, an oyster bar) and created a micro-neighborhood of sorts.
In early March, just a few months after Chez Sardine’s debut, he’s set to open yet another new spot, a French restaurant called Montmartre with Tien Ho, formerly of Momofuku, at the helm. Still, Stulman tells The Post he’s not scared of expanding too quickly. Rather, he says “the worry is the constant fear and insecurity I have with any opening, is this the one that people hate? Is this the one where we fail?”
In Stulman’s — and his Little Wisco restaurant group’s — section of the Village, the wait times may be long, but the service is friendly and the environs are charming — whether they are sleekly modern or chock-full of mirrors in antique frames. “He’s got a real feeling for the neighborhood,” says Curt Gathje, Zagat’s NYC editor. “He’s like a latter-day Keith McNally.”
To hear him tell it, Stulman didn’t mean to open so many restaurants in such quick succession.
“Jeffrey’s is the last space I looked for,” he says. A downtown landlord who liked dining at Joseph Leonard approached him about opening a restaurant in one of his spaces. That became Perla, which opened in early 2012.
The Montmartre space, poised to open in Chelsea on Eighth Avenue between 17th and 18th, has a similar story. “The landlord is my childhood friend’s uncle,” he says. The landlord was looking for a new tenant so he “called his nephew and said, ‘Hey, don’t you have a friend from elementary school that does restaurants?’ ”
Those in the industry say it’s not just quaint personal connections that have landlords clamoring to give Stulman keys to choice storefronts. “He’s very sought-after, because he’s got a proven track record,” says Faith Hope Consolo, chairwoman of the retail group at Douglas Elliman, who notes that Stulman beat out the Il Mulino team for the Fedora space. “It’s like with Danny [Meyer], he can do a bistro concept, when one concept doesn’t work, they convert to another.”
While Stulman’s style is much more casual than Meyer’s — there’s a steady soundtrack of pop music, from Beck to The Beatles, that plays at his establishments — much has been made about his service-focused approach. But he does it his own way.
A Virginia native, Stulman went to college and first started working in restaurants and developed his ideas about hospitality in Madison, Wis. — hence the name of his restaurant group. He’s hired a number of college buds to work with him.
“Everybody’s always friendly,” enthuses Jennifer Topper, 41, who had been into both Jeffrey’s and Perla recently. A West Sider who used to work in restaurants, she says “I’m a disciple of Gabe Stulman, I drank the Kool-Aid.”
Others speak with similar enthusiasm. “They’re doing things perfectly,” says James Nankervis, 30, a Joseph Leonard regular and a sous chef for Andrew Carmellini. “I haven’t had one overcooked or undercooked dish here.”
It’s not every young restaurateur who is spoken about in such cultish terms, but there’s a bit of mythology that surrounds Stulman. He was called “the Doogie Howser of New York restaurateurs” after he opened his first place, Little Owl, at the age of 25 to much acclaim. He and his business partner later split, and he now looks back on it as an “unsavory” learning experience.
It was a tiny, 10-table hit that quickly morphed from a neighborhood joint to a critical darling where those in the hood had no chance of scoring a reservation. He and his business partner later split, and he now looks back on it as an “unsavory” learning experience. “I had never run a restaurant before,” he says. “Once it started, we didn’t know how to stop it.”
Now he only takes reservations on half of the tables where he offers bookings. And he laughs off comparisons to teen doctors and bristles when his expanding business is referred to as an empire. “Empire is a word I would never use,” he insists. “I would call it a small collection of tiny restaurants.”