Eugene Remm Puts Food First as Catch Hospitality Rapidly Expands
This isn’t about 1 a.m. at Tenjune anymore. It’s about lines down the block at 5 p.m. It’s about caviar-topped lobster rolls, dry-aged rib caps and zucchini brûlée. It’s about finding great chefs, giving them the best infrastructure, trusting their culinary visions and getting out of their way.
After the success of The Corner Store and The Eighty Six, Eugene Remm is ready to solidify his standing as one of New York’s—and the country’s—most important and prolific restaurateurs. In February, Remm, Tilman Fertitta and Catch Hospitality Group will unveil their latest restaurant, Or’esh, across the street from The Corner Store in SoHo. Then they’ll dive into the extensive renovation of Catch in New York and Los Angeles, with both locations reopening this spring. After that, there’s a to-be-announced all-day West Village restaurant that’s slated to debut in the fall. And then there’s the fall opening of The Corner Store at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas.
Remm is moving from big, clubby restaurants into more intimate destinations where the food takes center stage, even when Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter are dining together. Catch in New York, for example, is turning its fourth floor into an event space and transforming from a 350-seat restaurant to a 120-seat restaurant, Remm tells Observer.
“We’ll reintroduce Catch to people who haven’t been in a while and people who maybe have never come,” Remm says. “And now we’re doing it through a lens of culinary. We’re keeping the DNA of everything that people love about Catch, but reintroducing it with a food-first approach as opposed to a party-first environment.”
After seeing how Catch culinary director Michael Vignola’s dishes dazzled guests at The Corner Store and The Eighty Six, Remm is eager to see what his kitchen team comes up with next. Remm has long been front and center at Catch, which also has locations in Las Vegas, Aspen, Miami and Scottsdale, but he realizes that it’s good to take a step back and just let his people cook.
“I have the utmost trust in chef Michael Vignola,” Remm says. “The Eighty Six was 100 percent his creation with his culinary team. That was the first project where I was not anywhere near as hands-on as the other ones.”
Or’esh, a Mediterranean restaurant with a focus on Levantine cuisine, will also be a chef-driven endeavor. It’s led by Nadav Greenberg, who previously was executive chef at Eyal Shani’s Michelin-starred Shmoné.
Instead of serving pita and hummus like countless other Mediterranean restaurants, the 75-seat Or'esh will offer a Jerusalem bagel with baba ghanoush, matbucha, mint tzatziki, olive oil and za’atar. Zucchini brûlée with sheep’s milk yogurt, mint and a crispy slice of challah will be a new riff on bread and dip that’s simultaneously warm, cold, sweet, sour, savory and slightly spicy.
Or’esh’s coal-fired kitchen, with a custom grill, will showcase dishes like a 67-layer wagyu flatiron skewer, lamb kebabs, sweetbreads, dry-aged butterfly dorade and salt-baked whole branzino. There will also be coal-kissed Ora King salmon crudo, charred greens, chicken liver cigars, house-made pasta and crispy potatoes with caviar.
“The Mediterranean is a big region, and we’re more focused on the Levant,” Greenberg, who spent six months working with engineers to create Or’esh’s grill, tells Observer. “It’s the east side of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s focused on the flavors of the olive oil, the za’atar, the fire, the flame, the ocean, the lamb you have in the Mediterranean.”
At the same time, Greenberg is so enamored with seasonal cooking that he’ll be changing vegetables in his market salad every month. Along with cucumbers and tomatoes, there might be turnips or kohlrabi as the year progresses.
“I want to be honest with you,” Remm says. “Two years ago, I didn’t know what Levantine meant. The only reason I’m doing this restaurant is Nadav. When I ate his food, it made me excited. It made me jealous. I wanted something like that within our portfolio. This project is solely based on the heart and soul of what I think Nadav stands for. Nadav is a huge front person in regards to how he interacts with the guests, and how he interacts with his cooks, and how he interacts with the front of house. I look at him like a 360 curator. When I meet special people like Nadav, it makes me want to do something.”
At this point in his career, 20 years after he and Mark Birnbaum opened Meatpacking District nightclub Tenjune and set off on a path that led to the creation of Catch a block away in 2011, Remm wants to be the hardware while having his chefs be the software.
His hot spots have helped seed a new generation of top-tier operators, including Adam Landsman (co-founder of Sunday Hospitality), Pavan Pardasani (the newly appointed global CEO of JKS Restaurants) and Eric Marx (chief operating officer for food and beverage concepts at Think Hospitality). And Remm is now on the hunt for killer apps in the form of great culinary minds.
“The way I look at it is like, I want to be the iPhone,” Remm says. “But Nadav could be Instagram.”
Remm says he’d love to open French and Italian restaurants if he finds the right people. He’s open to the idea of a second restaurant with Greenberg, which could be anything from an all-day destination to a concept that’s more high-end than Or’esh.
“This is a part of the business that I believe is the biggest opportunity of growth, where we can put on chefs who are amazing at what they do,” Remm says. “We are very good at what we do, which is making sure that the place is built on time, making sure that everything works properly, so that the chef and the operator can be who they need to be. And that, I think, is a business model that you could do until you’re 100 years old, and continue to create a platform for people to execute their dreams. What’s better than that?”