Illinois alumni Magazine

By Joan M. Lang

“I’m pretty right-brained,” says successful restaurateur Phil Roberts of the eclectic dining environments he's come up with over the years. “I’m always rummaging around in the toy box.” (Photos courtesy of Parasole )

Bonjour, mes amis, and welcome to Salut Bar Américain, where Minneapolis meets gay Paree. The tablecloths are checkered, the awnings are bright red, and the wine bottles are stenciled with the designations “3 – Good,” “2 – Decent” and “1 – Cheap.” Though the restaurant is rife with the trappings of an authentic French bistro – zinc-topped bar, black-and-white wicker chairs, escargots on the menu and servers in long white aprons – one of the top sellers is a burger, albeit called “Le Cheese-burger Royale.” A sign on the wall, attributed to fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, spells out the spirit of the place: “I like the French. They taste like chicken.”

It’s all about making the customer feel at home.

And it’s also classic Phil Roberts ’61 FAA. One of the most prolific and highly regarded restaurateurs in the country, Roberts has developed a string of crowd-pleasing places that play directly to the diner’s self-image and drew in an estimated $31 million in sales for 2007.
           
In fact, the co-founder and front man for Parasole Restaurant Holdings of Minneapolis – with a clutch of different restaurants in the Twin Cities, from café-casual Muffuletta and healthy Good Earth to globe-trotting Figlio and meat-loving Manny’s Steakhouse – has a knack for creating restaurants with a sense of playfulness that allows patrons to feel both comfortable and even a bit morally superior. “I’ve been in too many restaurants where I felt intimidated because my suit wasn’t expensive enough and I couldn’t pronounce the words on the menu,” says Roberts. “That’s not my style.” After all, who could feel intimidated in a restaurant like Manny’s, which promises that “Life is good at the top of the food chain”?

It’s a formula that has worked many times for Parasole, which Roberts founded in 1979 with University of Illinois buddy Peter Mihajlov ’62 ACES, the financially savvy yin balancing Roberts’ creative yang. Together with partner Kevin Kuester, who joined the company in 2003, Roberts also runs Idein (“idea-in”), a company that he describes as “a concept incubator” for new restaurants.

A native of Kewanee, Roberts admits that he wasn’t a great student. While drawn to sculpture, painting and design at Illinois, he said, “I didn’t really find my niche until I figured out that I could specialize in industrial design.” The era was a fertile time for the applied arts, when Detroit was churning out finned behemoths and Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen defined the marriage of mass-production and fine arts and craftsmanship. “They made things like furniture and architecture really cool,” says Roberts, who spent his first postgraduate years designing retail interiors before discovering his true passion – creating restaurants.

He’s a foodie not a chef, and other people do the designing now, but that sense of place and space has served him well.

Roberts is perhaps best known as the creator of Buca di Beppo, the wildly successful Southern Italian restaurant that is so deliberately tacky that it borders on the politically incorrect. Designed to resemble somebody’s overdecorated basement rec room, it’s a “paisan” extravaganza of year-round Christmas lights, huge family-style portions, Sinatra music and kitschy white plaster statues. First launched in 1993, Buca was an immediate sensation, with both customers and the press. It had grown to 20 units by the time Parasole sold it off to investors in 1999, and, despite a few expansion-related hiccups, there are now more than 90 Buca di Beppos, from Albany to San Diego, including a popular location on Chicago’s Near North Side.

As well as Buca, Roberts has been present at the birth of The Oceanaire Seafood Room, a showy, ’30s-style supper club that opened in major cities across the U.S. after he sold it to expansion-minded investors in 2001. But Roberts really has no interest in how such offspring multiply. He is into seeing how people tick, then figuring out how to put together a restaurant that will appeal to them.

“It’s as much about who’s at the next table as it is about whether there are leather booths and white tablecloths or Chianti bottles and bare wooden tabletops,” says Roberts. “You have to create a strong sense of place, so customers walk in and say, ‘I am somewhere.’” (And – more importantly – “I belong here.”)

With locations in St. Paul, Minn., and the Minneapolis suburb of Edina, Salut offers a French bistro atmosphere – plus cheeseburgers and minus the snooty attitude. (Photos courtesy of Parasole )

That, for Roberts, means understanding human nature. “How do people dress, where do they shop, what kind of car do they drive?” he prompts. “Do they go out on Tuesday night or only on the weekends? Will they spend $4 for a cup of coffee? You have to have a sense of all of this before you ever put pencil to paper.”

Out of these observations comes everything significant about a dining concept – the telling little details that constitute what he calls “the DNA” of any restaurant.

Take Salut, which is one of Parasole’s latest creations. A committed Francophile, Roberts wanted a casual neighborhood joint with the same place in customers’ hearts as a beloved Parisian bistro but none of the snooty attitude. “Most French restaurants, even here in the States, take themselves way too seriously,” he says.

Salut’s “DNA” would thus have to be irreverent and self-deprecating and certainly not intimidating. So, the logo is a spotted frog sporting a beret and smoking a Gauloise – a gentle poke at French peccadilloes. The menu is heavy on classics like steak frites, seafood towers, onion soup. There’s a daily special, in the style of a plat du jour, right alongside that Cheeseburger Royale. And – sacre bleu! No one’s drinking the “1 – Cheap” wine. “People will come in with their kids and let them color on the placemats, but they’re too self-conscious to be seen with the cheap stuff on the table,”  Roberts says with a laugh.

Good business sense, sure, but it also reveals something deeply empathetic in Roberts’ character. In today’s uncertain economy, especially, the customer’s self-esteem is paramount.

The story sounds apocryphal, but it’s typical of Roberts: “We were two days from opening the first Oceanaire, and we’d spent months trying to create this swanky, supper-club atmosphere – Stork Club meets the Queen Mary. I looked out across this sea of white tablecloths and thought, ‘God, it’s too fancy. We’ll do business on Friday and Saturday night, but we’ll starve the rest of the time.’”

The fix was disarmingly simple. “We went out and got a dozen cases of Heinz ketchup and put a bottle on every single table,” says Roberts. “The ketchup bottle is a cue that it’s OK to come in dressed in jeans.”

This flair for the non-threatening is the secret of his success. Of Buca di Beppo, Roberts says, “We really were going for kitschy and tasteless, to make the guest feel superior. I thought it would be great to do a place where the guest would look down on the restaurant, not the other way around.” He knew he’d nailed it when he heard a woman on opening night tell her husband, “I’d never have that statue in my house, Eddie.”

Then there’s Chino Latino. With an urbane menu of street food from Thailand, Korea, Mexico, Jamaica and Polynesia, Chino had no precedent in the Minneapolis area, and Roberts and Mihajlov knew they’d have to get residents talking about it.

What followed was an escalating series of billboards calculated to attract attention, from the relatively innocuous “Morning Wood (Brunch with Chopsticks)” to the edgy “Aw, Phuket. Let’s Get Takeout.” By the time “Happy Hour: Cheap as a Bangkok Brothel” ran, the PC crowd was incensed, school officials were up in arms, and every newspaper and magazine column-ist in town had weighed in.

Needless to say, the place took off like a shot: Roberts knew that uptown hipsters would trip over themselves to get to Chino Latino, and he only fanned the flames by referring to his critics as “the print-skirt, gauze-blouse, Birkenstock crowd” in an editorial in the local paper. Then he turned around and commissioned the same copywriter who did the billboards to craft a series of fortune cookies that were as witty as they were irreverent (“Later, when blame is assigned, tonight’s lapses in conversation will be attributed to you” and “You will marry the like of your life”).

Roberts and his wife, Joanne Franck Roberts ’61 ACES (the couple married during their senior year), travel the world looking for the next big idea and all the little details that go into it. Now closing in on 70 and a veteran of the restaurant business for three decades, Roberts has less interest than ever in the mechanics of building a chain, but he’s still full of ideas for new concepts. That passion gets fed by Idein, which now shares billing with Parasole. “There are all sorts of ideas out there,” says Roberts. “More than I’ll ever have time to pursue.”

Besides being a creative flex of muscle, another benefit of consulting for Roberts is drawing on the pool of Parasole employees to help get other projects off the ground. “I have plenty of people here who know how to button up all those behind-the-scenes details that make a restaurant financially successful,” he says. “That helps me be dead serious about having fun.”

A veteran restaurant reviewer and observer of the national dining scene, Lang lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, with her Italian husband and their pooch, Otis.