Liz and I have just opened registration for our 40th Women's Leadership Workshop - exclusively for women in the commercial real estate industry
This professional development workshop is designed specifically for women at all stages of their careers!
When: March 27, 2018
Where: Midtown Manhattan
Time: 12:30 - 4:30pm with wine and cheese networking immediately following!
Develop
and enhance your professional presence, confidence
and personal brand
· Hundreds
of commercial real estate industry women have attended our unique Women’s
Leadership Workshops – Across the U.S. and in London
· Highly-interactive
program incorporates valuable exercises and thoughtful group discussions
You’ll
take away powerful tools and tips for continual self-development!
Attendance is limited.
To learn more, read feedback from participants and
register -
please click here.
Visit our website to read about all services offered by Felix / Weiner Consulting Group.
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Michael Whiteman has spent the last 40 years as a
developer, creator and operator of restaurants, as well as consulting for food
and beverage companies around the world.
His company – Baum & Whiteman International Restaurant
Consultants created two of world’s largest-grossing restaurants - The Rainbow
Room atop Rockefeller Center in New York, and the legendary Windows on the
World, which was atop the former World Trade Center. He also developed three of the world’s first
food courts – in Japan, Europe and the United States; produced five three-star
New York restaurants; created high-profile hotel concepts around the globe for
Starwood Hotels, Taj Hotels, Raffles Hotel Group, and Regent Hotels, and
masterminded Equinox for the Raffles Hotel Group, a rooftop extravaganza in
Singapore which was named one of the best hotel dining rooms in the world.
He is well known for creating groundbreaking visitor
experiences at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Prudential Center in
Boston, Queen Victoria Building in Sydney, Crown Center in Kansas City, Six
Flags Theme Parks, and the John Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Michael’s range of work spans retail food (Kings
Supermarkets, Dean & Deluca), cultural institutions (National Gallery of
Art), private clubs (Yale Club, Princeton Club), theme parks (Sesame Place) and
mixed-use developments, as well as individual restaurants around the
globe. In recent years, Mr. Whiteman’s
work took him to Mumbai, Singapore, Qatar, Delhi, Abu Dhabi, Israel, Canada, Spain
and around the United States.
Known as the industry’s most prescient food trends analyst,
Mr. Whiteman is a frequent speaker on trends, design, service, and the
foundations of creating a successful business in food and hospitality. He has twice been keynote speaker at the
Culinary Institute of America’s food conferences, and has run trends seminars
for Starwood Hotels, Taj Hotels, Les Dames d’Escoffier International, Club
Corporation of America, Angus Beef Growers, the Ferdinand Metz Foodservice
Forum and the Food & Drink Innovation Network.
He lives in New York with his wife, Rozanne Gold, a
four-time James Beard award-winning chef, consultant and author.
Michaels involvement in
commercial real estate has been as an owner, operator and consultant in the
global restaurant / hospitality industry.
As such, over the years, he and his partners / clients have paid a lot
of rent to the owners of commercial real estate. That qualifies him right there for this
interview series. N’est pas?
How Michael and I met:
In the early / mid 1980’s
I worked for Mall Properties (now called Olshan Properties). We owned and operated Cortana, the major
regional mall in Baton Rouge, LA. As
retail competition started realizing Baton Rouge was a good market, we bought a
400-acre property at the intersection of I-10 and Siegen Lane. This property was adjacent to the huge
complex owned by evangelist Jimmy Swaggart.
Our plan was to build a second regional mall on that site.
Along with Mort Olshan
and his partner Dick Steinberg I was invited to get involved on that
project. We wanted to do something
different than the traditional food court that was popping up in malls across
the country. Enter Mr. Michael
Whiteman. I remember he and I first
meeting in Dick’s office when Michael was retained as our consultant to advise
us on the food court concept. Michael and I took a market research road to
Louisiana to do research on the market, identify potential local restaurateurs
who might be interested in taking a plunge of opening some type of food
operation in a mall. He and I hit it off
right away. He is a wonderfully dry sense
of humor, way dryer than me.
At the time I was
recovering from some virus and I had to watch what I ate. However, at our first
dinner together I realized this was going to be a very special road trip and…
what the heck! We visited some
restaurants in New Orleans where Michael knew the chef / owner.
I must relate one story: we’re in
a one nice restaurant. Michael orders for the both of us. A little while later
our food comes out, followed by the chef himself. “I thought it was you,” he says, shaking
Michaels’ hand. “When I heard the fish
order included ‘leave the head on’ I figured there aren’t too many folks that
ask for that.” Michael is clearly known
far and wide. It was a great trip. As a
result, he and I became and remain good friends.
Q. How did you get your start in the restaurant
industry?
A. I got my start in the restaurant industry but utter indirection.
After the army, I was doing graduate work in economics when a publisher of
Chain Store Age, a group of retail trade magazines, enquired if I'd start a
restaurant business newspaper for them. That was, ummmm, 1967, and
Nation's Restaurant News was born and it quickly became the industry's largest
publication and probably still is. Around 1970 or '71 I lost a boardroom
battle over editorial policy and resigned.
Almost simultaneously, a chap with whom I later became partners, lost a
boardroom battle at Restaurant Associates where he'd created restaurants like
The Four Seasons, the Forum of the XII Caesars, La Fonda del Sol and a flock of
early "theme restaurants” that profoundly altered the direction of restaurants
in America. That was Joe Baum. He departed his former company with a
consulting contract in hand to plan all the restaurants in the 10 million
square foot New York World Trade Center, then little more than a hole in the
ground. He recruited me to join his radically creative tea,
optimistically thinking I knew something about running restaurants.
We created and opened Windows on the World which was just part of a
250,000 sq.ft. Food and beverage assemblage, perhaps the largest and most
complex project in the industry. It included the first food court/food
hall in the United States called The Big Kitchen.
Windows on the World got all the press attention, but it was The Big
Kitchen that caught the eye of real estate people. So we were hired as
consultants to create the first food court in Europe, in the City2 shopping
center in Brussels; the first food court in Japan, Anderson's in Hiroshima, and
the first suburban food courts for couple in United States shopping center
developers. As a result, I was invited to I give presentations to the
ICSC (International Council of Shopping Centers) in Paris, Rio de Janerio,
Brazil and Las Vegas.
Joe and I did work for Hines, for Prudential Insurance (now PGIM), for Rockefeller's
properties, Trizec, Taubman, Citicorp among others.
Q. What career advice would you give someone who
has a passion for the restaurant industry?
A. I can only speak to getting
started in either the restaurant industry or becoming a restaurant
consultant. As for the latter, I discourage people who want to join my
boutique consulting firm because, as I warn them, there's no money in it
anymore! Unless there's a thorny problem to be solved (which is our
specialty), consultants are rarely needed these days in hotels and office complexes.
As for getting into the restaurant business, today you need serious educational
and vocational skills along entrepreneurial guts and the ability to work
marathon hours.
Q. As you look back on your career is there
something you wish you had done differently?
If so, what?
A. I never really wanted to run restaurants, so I began as a consultant,
took partial ownership and operational responsibility of ventures such as
Windows on the World and the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center, and today am
just doing consulting around the world -- In Mumbai, Sao Paolo, Dubai,
Chandigarh and New York in recent years. I wish I'd been wise enough to
market my company better so that it would remain in business after I hang up my
hat, which, by the way, I'm not inclined to do.
Q. Who have been the greatest influences on your
career? How?
A. Joe Baum, who was the most
creative forced in the restaurant industry in the 20th Century. Milton
Glaser, one of the world's great graphic artists and deep thinker. The
architect Hugh Hardy who failed to instill upon me the art of not getting angry
during meetings, even though he demonstrated how. Rozanne Gold, who is a
terrific chef, consultant, clairvoyant, author, four-time James Beard Award
winner and, incidentally, my wife.
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A poster I thought you'd like |
