Difficult? You bet. The trailblazers usually are. Over his 40-year-career, Drew Nieporent has created and operated some 40 restaurants, including several of the most lauded and popular dining destinations in New York City—Nobu, Tribeca Grill, and Montrachet. More than that, Nieporent has helped to reshape the New York restaurant scene, redefining how and where New Yorkers eat.
These days, Nieporent is taking a moment to reflect, having written a memoir, I’m Not Trying To Be Difficult, that will come out September 23. We sat down at his home in Piermont and immediately delved into his origins as a restaurant guy.
“I have my parents to thank,” he says. “My father worked for the New York State Liquor Authority helping restaurant owners get their liquor licenses, and our family was welcomed at pretty much every place in New York City. My mother was a big influence, too. She was an actress earlier in her life, and she loved the restaurant scene. To her, it was like going to the theater. I picked up on that and gravitated to restaurants immediately. By the time I was eight or nine, I was hooked.”
Nieporent grew up in Manhattan and went to Stuyvesant High School, a few blocks from his family’s apartment in Peter Cooper Village. For college, he went upstate to the prestigious Cornell School of Hotel Management. “Cornell was a whole new experience for me,” he says. “I met people from all over the world. And I got an opportunity to go overseas for the first time, serving food on a Norwegian cruise ship that was going to ports all over the world.”
At the time, Drew knew next to nothing about food service. “My first day on the ship, I was the only one out of 60 waiters wearing a blue shirt. Everybody else was in white. To go back and forth to the kitchen, we had to take an escalator carrying a heavy tray, and I could barely carry mine. I’m lucky I didn’t kill anyone,” he says.
Despite the first-day mishaps, being one of the few English speakers on a boat full of Americans worked in his favor. “I got along great with the guests,” he says. “I went back to Cornell with much more confidence and knew I had a future in this business.”
The Le’s and the La’s
After four years at Cornell, Nieporent headed back to New York City, where he got work at one of the biggest and buzziest restaurants in town—Maxwell’s Plum, owned by the theatrical Warner LeRoy, the son of Mervyn LeRoy, the Hollywood mogul who produced The Wizard of Oz. From there he went to another major LeRoy establishment, Tavern on the Green. And from there, he worked for two years as a captain at several of the city’s great French temples of gastronomy, which Drew describes in his book as a tour of the “Le’s and the La’s.”
“It was a fantastic learning experience,” he says. “I worked with some legendary chefs and learned so much about fine food. But very often the staff I was supervising hated me. As an American, I was an outsider in their European world, and they expressed their feelings by playing pranks on me.”
Such as? “As a captain, it was my job to sauce certain dishes after they were set in front of the guest. The waiter would hand me the sauceboat, and I’d go into my fancy service routine and find out he’d handed me a fork instead of a spoon. I made sure the guests didn’t know what was happening, but I’d find ways to get revenge on the waiter.”
For the guests, the experience could be intimidating and exclusive. The menus were all in French, and only one of them would have the prices listed on it. Back then you’d give that one to a man at the table, never a woman. He was expected to order the wine, and of course pay for the meal.”
When it was time for Nieporent to open his own restaurant, he had something very different in mind. He envisioned a French restaurant that was serious about the food and wine but casual about everything else. The restaurant he opened in 1985, Montrachet, had no dress code for the guests. The waitstaff wore black shirts, not white. The menus were in English. The wine was from France and California. Montrachet’s first chef, David Bouley, was classically trained but took a radically different approach to traditional French cooking. “In 1985, no one was cooking like Bouley,” says Nieporent. “We served great food that didn’t use heavy creams and sauces. It was a sensation.”
He also located Montrachet downtown, in Tribeca, which at the time was not a food destination. “It had untapped potential, and the real estate was much less expensive than Uptown, so I could offer our customers real value,” he says. Indeed, the prix-fixe three-course dinner was $16.
Less than seven weeks after it opened, Montrachet received a glowing three-star review from The New York Times, and the restaurant was an instant hit. “Suddenly, I could have filled Yankee Stadium!” says Nieporent. “The phone was ringing off the hook. I had to recruit my mother to help us out.”
That’s when Robert DeNiro came along, and things really got interesting for Nieporent. “Bob lived in the neighborhood and wanted to see what the fuss was all about,” he says. “He loved the place and started coming in regularly, and we got to know each other.”
Striking Lightning
It turns out DeNiro had more than a good meal in mind. He had his eye on an old factory building just a couple of blocks from Montrachet, and he wanted to convert it to a film center with a very large, 150-seat restaurant on the ground floor. He approached Nieporent about the restaurant project, and a fruitful, 35-year partnership was born.
The restaurant, Tribeca Grill, was not just Nieporent’s biggest project to date; it was a big event in the city, with DeNiro the headliner and several more celebrity partners in supporting roles, including Sean Penn, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Christopher Walken, and Bill Murray. When the Grill opened in 1990, there were paparazzi lined up on the street, scoping out the stars. It remained a hotspot for 35 years until the curtain finally came down in March 2025.
In 1994, the partners launched their biggest culinary phenomenon—Nobu. In the world of Japanese restaurants, Nobu changed everything. Chef Nobu Matsuhisa’s cuisine was bold and innovative, incorporating ingredients and ideas from South America. The first Nobu in New York, developed under Nieporent’s supervision, was dynamic and theatrical—a far cry from the traditional sushi bar. “All of a sudden, sushi was fun,” says Nieporent. “And we struck lightning.” That’s for sure. Nobu is now a global brand, with 56 restaurants worldwide.
For most of his career, Nieporent has had an office in Tribeca, but he was seldom in it. With two mobile phones in hand, he roamed his corner of Tribeca day and night, overseeing his ever-growing neighborhood empire. When the phone rang, he’d answer, “Headquarters!” If you walked around the neighborhood with Nieporent, there’s a good chance you’d see someone recognize him and shout: “Hey, it’s the mayor of Tribeca!”
His impact has reached well beyond Tribeca, too. For 14 years, he ran a restaurant in San Francisco with another set of celebrity investors that included Francis Ford Coppola and Robin Williams. He is a partner in Nobu London and travels there regularly. His company, Myriad Restaurant Group, has launched many restaurants around the country and, for the last 12 years, has operated The Daily Burger in Madison Square Garden.
Along the way, Nieporent has helped launch and further the careers of dozens of chefs and front-of-the-house managers, many of whom are now leading figures in the culinary world. He also lends his support to industry stalwarts like the James Beard Foundation, Cornell, and the Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park. In 2019, he received the CIA’s highest honor, the Augie award, which recognizes the most accomplished people in the industry. “I love the CIA,” he says. “I’ve seen it grow by leaps and bounds, and it’s now recognized as the premier culinary school in the country. It’s an important part of what makes the Hudson Valley such a great area.”
The Difficult Restaurateur
Aside from the accolades, over his long career, Nieporent has also gotten a reputation for being a bit difficult, as his memoir makes clear. He has confronted food writers who he felt had wronged him. He has called guests who didn’t show up for a reservation. “I’d ask them what they did for a living,” says Nieporent. “Oh, you’re a dentist? How would you feel if I made an appointment at your office and didn’t show up?” He has argued with esteemed architects who, he felt, didn’t know much about restaurant design. He has faced down grouchy guests. Once, when a man complained about his table, Nieporent said: “Sir, you make the table. The table doesn’t make you.”Nieporent doesn’t deny he has earned his reputation for being difficult, though he’d like to explain. “This is a tough business and getting tougher. Do you know how hard it is to open a restaurant and keep it open?” he says. “You need to have a strong will and a strong ego, and I have both. And I’ve never been afraid to speak my mind—to anyone. I really don’t mean to be difficult, but sometimes, well…”
As we were parting, I asked him: “Are you done being difficult?” To which he replied: “I’m winding things down, as you know. But I’m still fired up about the projects we have going. We’ll see…”
We’ll see? There’s no way Drew Nieporent is done feeding people—and stirring up a bit of trouble along the way.
