Restaurant

Cooking With Kindness: Bruce Bromberg's Unique Approach to Leading Blue Ribbon Restaurants

Anonymous — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Cooking With Kindness: Bruce Bromberg's Unique Approach to Leading Blue Ribbon Restaurants Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/16/2024 - 00:00

Sarah Kuta

Reality TV shows often depict chefs as cruel, heartless tyrants, willing to make their staff cry in pursuit of the perfect bite. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Just ask Bruce Bromberg (Anth’88). For the last three decades, he’s led a team of extraordinarily loyal staffers at Blue Ribbon Restaurants, the growing restaurant group he co-founded with his older brother Eric Bromberg in 1992.

Blue Ribbon started with one intimate eatery at the edge of New York City’s SoHo neighborhood. Since then, the company has expanded into different concepts — from sushi to bowling — and opened more than 20 locations nationwide.

Through it all, intentional leadership has been paramount to the team’s success.

“We wanted to create an environment where people flourished and wanted to come to work and wanted to learn, not just punch the clock,” said Bromberg. “We found that once we had that environment in place, everyone excelled.”

The results speak for themselves. Diners keep coming back to Blue Ribbon night after night — and so do its employees. Eleven of the 14 staffers who worked the restaurant’s opening night are still with the company more than 30 years later. Now, they’re all part-owners, too.

“[Eric and I] both worked in France in very oppressive and abusive kitchens,” said Bromberg. “They exist in America, they exist everywhere. But it was the last thing we wanted to have happen in our kitchens. There’s a better way.”

Bromberg’s own culinary journey started in his hometown of Morristown, New Jersey, where he grew up in a “very food-centric household.”

“Whether it was my grandmother and her traditional cooking or my father’s obsession with everything French, food was a really strong element in our childhood,” he said. “My father had a home in the south of France, and we would travel there in the summer and he would take us on day trips to every restaurant he could think of.”

Though many of his peers attended East Coast colleges and universities, Bromberg decided to head west. He enrolled at ��ƷSM��ӰƬ and majored in anthropology. When he graduated in 1988, he didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do next — only that he didn’t want a desk job — so he moved back to the East Coast. His brother, meanwhile, had studied at Le Cordon Bleu, the famed cooking school in Paris, and was running a restaurant in the Hamptons.

One evening, a chef where his brother was working called in sick, so Bromberg offered to pitch in and help.

“That was really it,” Bromberg said. “I spent that first night in the kitchen with Eric and was instantly enamored by the whole process.”

Bromberg followed his brother’s footsteps and headed to France to study at Le Cordon Bleu. When he returned, they went into business together and opened the first Blue Ribbon, a 48-seat “little hole in the wall,” he said. The name is a nod to their culinary training: Le Cordon Bleu means “the blue ribbon” in French.

The eatery was an overnight success, partly because it was open until 4 a.m. each day, attracting musicians, chefs, servers and other people who worked in hospitality and entertainment. The food, of course, was also a big draw.

Over 30 years later, Blue Ribbon’s sweeping success has only bolstered the brothers’ commitment to their people-first leadership approach.

“As a chef, I am a teacher. I’m constantly teaching. You have to be patient and respect every single individual in your environment until the last moment.”

For more information on Blue Ribbon Restaurants visit BlueRibbonRestaurants.com.

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Photos Courtesy Blue Ribbon Restaurants

Bruce Bromberg (Anth’88) and his brother Eric founded Blue Ribbon Restaurants in 1992, and prioritized leading their employees in a productive and welcoming environment. Some staff members remain with them more than 30 years later.

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Ramen King

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 18:56:00 +0000

Ramen King Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/01/2017 - 11:56

Christie Sounart

Ramen wasn’t Ivan Orkin’s calling. At first.

In 2006, Orkin (Jpn'87) was living in Tokyo with his family, jobless and restless. The U.S.-trained chef tried for three years to fit in with the Japanese culture he adored, but struggled to find his place in Japan as a Jewish Long Islander.

“I felt quite hopeless,” said Orkin, who had worked at top New York restaurants, including Lutèce. “I felt like I was never going to find my way.”

His wife, Mari, a native Japanese, suggested he open a ramen shop.

“I didn’t have a clue how ramen was made,” said Orkin.

But ignorance was no obstacle.

Orkin developed a unique twist on traditional ramen — thin noodles served in a piping-hot meat or seafood broth, sometimes with other toppings — a hugely popular dish in Japanese cuisine. Tokyo alone has thousands of ramen shops.

Located in Tokyo’s western suburbs, Orkin’s 10-seat restaurant, Ivan Ramen, drew media and locals who were curious to sample an American chef’s take on ramen. Orkin offered homemade noodles (rare in Japanese ramen), aromatic flavors, few (but choice) toppings and light double-broth bases made with chicken and pork. Obscure-to-Japan ingredients like roasted tomatoes and rye flour added to the soup’s appeal.

In a glowing 2009 review titled “Ivan Ramen: Artisan ramen with NY accent,” The Japan Times wrote: “You will not taste anything like this anywhere else in Japan.”

Acclaimed Japanese ramen critic Hiroshi Osaki — who claims to have eaten more than 23,000 bowls of ramen — called Orkin’s ramen “amazing” and “delicious.”

Success in Japan has since led to two other ramen restaurants and a pizza restaurant in New York, a Netflix documentary and a new life back in the United States.

As The New York Times put it in 2013, “Ivan Orkin appears to have pulled off a chain of unprecedented feats.”

A Love for Japan

Orkin’s infatuation with Japan began when he was 15 years old and worked as a dishwasher in a sushi bar in Syosset, New York. He reveled in trying new dishes, which were radically different from the frozen meals he ate, and hated, at home.

When it came time for college, he chose ��ƷSM��ӰƬ, which offered both a dramatic mountain escape from New York and a Japanese studies program.

At CU, academics weren’t really Orkin’s thing — “I would make breakfast for my friends and they would do my homework,” he said — but he enjoyed the Japanese program.

“It’s one of my great memories of college,” said Orkin. “I learned just enough about Japanese grammar.”

After graduating, he moved to Japan and taught English for three years, a job he found unoriginal and uninspiring. He met his soon-to-be first wife, Tamie, and the couple moved back to the U.S., where Orkin studied at the Culinary Institute of America in New York. There he met his eventual business partner, David Poran.

“He was like Woody Allen on 12 cups of coffee,” Poran said of the young Orkin.

Afterward, Orkin worked under Bobby Flay at Mesa Grill and at Lutèce in New York. When Tamie became pregnant with their son Isaac Orkin (Jpn’19), he accepted a more stable, higher-paying job with Restaurant Associates, a New York-based hospitality company.

In 1998, when Isaac was two and Tamie was pregnant with the couple’s second child, she died of a sudden illness. Devastated and eager for his son to remain rooted in his mother’s Japanese culture, Orkin began taking him on annual trips to Tokyo. On one of these trips, in 2002, he met Mari over a bowl of ramen, and married her three months later. The couple settled in Tokyo, and Orkin began feeling his way into the future.

After Ivan Ramen took off in 2007, Orkin added a second restaurant in Japan and created a popular line of instant ramen.

“Ivan’s very analytical, he’s extremely intelligent and he’s slightly OCD,” partner Poran said. “I think that’s a combination for success.”

By 2012, ready to return to the U.S., Orkin and Mari moved their three sons to New York. He opened Ivan Ramen Slurp Shop in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood and his flagship restaurant Ivan Ramen in the Lower East Side. They, too, were instant hits. The New York Times refers to him as “an American ramen master.”

These days, he stays out of the kitchen. Mostly.

“I still work on recipes, I still train people, but I don’t have a spot in my restaurant,” he said. “But when there is something for me to do, I’m there all day and all night.”

A Call from Chef’s Table

Last year, the crew behind Netflix’s Chef’s Table, a documentary series profiling renowned chefs, came calling.

“Netflix was the first time I ever really allowed a television camera to see my life that closely,” he said, adding he filmed five days in New York and five days in Tokyo. “It was hard telling everybody your innermost secrets.”

After the episode aired in February 2017, Orkin’s name, and food, grew more famous still.

“It’s completely been one of the most wonderful things that’s ever happened to me,” he said.

These days, Orkin, who lives in the Hudson River Valley north of New York, is exploring potential new ramen restaurant locations elsewhere in the U.S. Meanwhile, he’s also dabbling in the pizza world. He and Poran opened Corner Slice inside the Gotham West Market to rave reviews.

“The pizza business is a big deal for us,” said Poran. “We have big expansion plans.”

There’s never really any telling what’s next for Orkin.

“If there’s anything I’ve learned in this life," he said, "it's when I get tired of doing something, I’ll just do something else.”

Photos by Daniel Krieger

Japan went crazy for Ivan Orkin's ramen. Now America has the fever.

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