Restaurants
Passot opened La Folie on Polk Street in 1988, with his wife Jamie and brother Georges. A small brasserie in the Polk Gulch section of the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, it opened at a cost of $45,000 with no outside investors. His wife conceived the name, which means "craziness" or "folly" in French, referring to the difficulty of opening a new establishment in San Francisco's competitive restaurant scene. Still a family business, his brother serves as sommelier, and his wife as General Manager.
Instantly successful, La Folie steadily gained in reputation and refinement until by 2000 it was one of only several restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, to earn a "four star" review from the San Francisco Chronicle, from the city's most recognized food critic. It still had that distinction as of 2008. Avoiding "fusion" influences, the establishment is a conventional contemporary French restaurant, with classic French use of stocks and sauces but lighter than traditional French and with attention to local ingredients.
Despite the restaurant's renown it was not significantly profitable due to small size, low number of "turns", and high ingredient and operation cost (with 24 employees for 60-70 seats, and 21⁄2 to 3 hour reservation slots at an average "tab" of $75 per guest, it grossed only $1.7 million in 1998). In 1994, with partner Ed Levine, a Stanford Business School graduate who had been CFO of the Il Fornaio chain, Passot opened the much larger (220 seat) Left Bank restaurant in Larkspur, California, as a more casual alternative to La Folie. The second Left Bank opened in Menlo Park, California in 1998, and then San Jose in 2003. Left Banks are warm, vibrant brasseries offering quality French inspired cuisine. The restaurants serve a style of home-style cooking Passot calls "Cuisine Grand-mere". In 2009 the Left Bank restaurant group opened LB Steak, a modern American Steakhouse, in San Jose's premier Santana Row. LB Steak is a casually elegant American Steakhouse reflecting the distinctive charm of Santana Row's surroundings and neighbors. Featuring USDA Prime Beef, they are known for a diverse selection of 10 prime steaks and Sunday night Prime Rib dinners.
Read more about this topic: Roland Passot
Famous quotes containing the word restaurants:
“restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.”
—Eric J. Hobsbawm (b. 1917)
“In the United States all business not transacted over the telephone is accomplished in conjunction with alcohol or food, often under conditions of advanced intoxication. This is a fact of the utmost importance for the visitor of limited funds ... for it means that the most expensive restaurants are, with rare exceptions, the worst.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)