Sidework

As Dan Holzman—the energetic and wry co-founder of NYC’s Meatball Shop—put it to me, “I should’ve taken the fucking money.” Twice during his ten years of meatball glory, the opportunity came up to sell some equity in what seemed like a booming restaurant brand. It wouldn’t have been “retire comfortably” money, but it would’ve been something. The first time, his hubris got in the way. The second time, someone else’s did. Now in LA and building out his third location of Danny Boy’s Pizza, he has found his peace with it: “I came to the conclusion that it was a hundred percent my fault, because if it’s not a hundred percent your fault, then you have no control over your destiny.”

Dan grew up in New York on the Upper East Side and started working in restaurants in the early 1990s at the age of thirteen as a pizza delivery boy. By fifteen he was working weekends and summers at Le Bernardin, where he ended up staying for almost five years. That was followed by culinary school, an externship at Palladin, and jobs in Las Vegas and LA. In 2001, he landed at Campton Place in San Francisco, where he was hired by one of Ripert’s best pals, Chef Laurent Manrique.

It was at Campton Place that Dan and I first met and worked together. After Manrique moved on to the Aqua group, Dan went to the Fifth Floor (Laurent Gras’s kitchen at the time) and on to a series of chef jobs around California. He opened SPQR in San Francisco with Nate Appleman, saw that restaurant through a successful start, and after one more chef gig working for a successful multi-unit owner-operator in the Bay Area, moved back to NYC in 2009 with a determination to stop being other people’s chef and start being an entrepreneur on his own terms.

The sensible decision at that point was, of course, to start not just one but two complex businesses. QB’s, launched around 2009 with some friends, was a frozen dessert product involving a marshmallow and puffed rice treat stuffed with ice cream. Or, in Dan’s words, “a fabulous disaster.” Money was raised, expensive equipment was purchased, manufacturing challenges were bravely tackled, and an underdeveloped product was overpromised to too many stores. Dan learned a valuable lesson: “If you lose money with every product piece that you manufacture, the faster you manufacture, the more money you lose.” Furthermore, that a business needs to be somebody’s full-time job and not several people’s part-time hobby (see last month’s newsletter for more on that!) The QB’s venture went flat.

Then came the Meatball Shop in 2010, developed with his old friend and fellow restaurant veteran, Michael Chernow. TMS was their effort to open a chain restaurant with good food, reasonable prices, and a fun work environment. It worked spectacularly—for a time—in what amounts to a valuable case study for restaurant entrepreneurs. The first few locations were scrappy and very successful. The next ones took more money to build than expected and an investor who’d pledged to fund their growth died suddenly. Their bank covered the gap with loans and would fund a few more new locations too. Then another investor came in for a significant equity stake and the founders started to lose control of the vision. Sales starting declining, debt service became a challenge, they were top-heavy with above-store management, in-store managers weren’t properly supported, and new locations were failing to take off. Along the way, Dan had his chances to take some financial rewards but first he wouldn’t and then he couldn’t—“I had a tiger by the tail and I let it slip away.”

But Dan Holzman is a tenacious and stubborn guy, so after some deep post-meatball reflection, the path was obvious. Danny Boy’s brings together the NYC pizza culture that Dan has loved since he was a teenager delivering pies in the UES and the “10-year PhD program in restaurant management” that he graduated from with The Meatball Shop. Plus, it seemed to Dan that LA was lacking in a proper NYC-style slice shops and that this was a culture that he could share with the city. Most importantly though, Danny Boy’s is an opportunity to manage according to a new maxim of his: the best team is the team you have. Or, in his characteristically profane phrasing, “unless you want to be the guy making the goddamn meatballs, appreciate the guy making the fucking meatballs because you want 'em there making the goddamn meatballs.”

If you’re in LA, you can find Danny Boy’s at their DTLA or Westwood locations.