“I need somebody to come out and park my car,” Stephen Starr commanded into his phone one drizzly September evening. “I don’t have time to park.”
The prolific restaurateur swept down the narrow streets in his black S-class Mercedes before pulling up to Borromini, his buzzy new Philadelphia trattoria. Mr. Starr strode through the double doors and was greeted by a young man in a suit who looked like a host — welcoming diners with a warm nod — but turned out to be a Secret Service agent.
Joe and Jill Biden were celebrating a grandchild’s birthday at a long table on the restaurant’s first floor, lined with antique mirrors and bathed in honeyed light.
Mr. Starr has hosted the former president several times, and the men greeted each other like old pals, Mr. Biden’s hand disappearing into Mr. Starr’s beefy double grip.
How many places was Stephen up to now? the former leader of the free world asked Mr. Starr, hand on the shoulder of the restaurateur’s Zegna jacket. Was it 42?
“No,” the former first lady chimed in. “It’s 43 now, isn’t that what you said?”
She was right: Forty-three restaurants in six cities. Nine were among the 100 highest-grossing independents in the country last year, with Parc in Philadelphia and Pastis in New York alone grossing nearly $100 million. And more — always more — are in the works.
After the glad-handing, Mr. Starr retreated upstairs to an intimate table in the 320-seat, $20 million restaurant that he had opened barely a week ago. A few weeks earlier, he had opened a Pastis location in Nashville. A few weeks later, he planned to reopen Babbo in Manhattan. The reimagined version of Mario Batali’s former restaurant — once the most acclaimed Italian kitchen in the United States, before multiple accusations of sexual assault derailed Mr. Batali’s career — will have the Batali protégé Mark Ladner as its chef.
Only a restaurateur of such outsize ambition might venture to resurrect a New York City brand as vaunted as Babbo, and only a businessman with such blinkered force of will would attempt to do so with one so stained by scandal.
“That’s not our story,” he said flatly of the Batali issue.
Mr. Starr is betting he can start anew, and he has reason to trust his odds. A noted perfectionist, Mr. Starr has created restaurants that draw presidents and celebrities, yes, but also Florida tourists, Philadelphia Eagles pregamers, the bridge-and-tunnel crowd in New York. And while his name can draw eye rolls from the hip restaurant set, he is a man whose empire generates $400 million a year in revenue, who employs some 5,000 people and who paused midsentence at Borromini because, “Wait, this is the wrong playlist.” (It was not; the song was just one of the few he had not handpicked.)
Drew Nieporent, a founder of Nobu and a force in the hospitality industry, thinks Mr. Starr is the greatest restaurateur in America. “He’s not a meeter, seater and greeter,” Mr. Nieporent said. “He is a creator.”
Building the Band
Mr. Starr, 70, began his career in the music business, and he has an impresario’s touch, spotting talent, signing chefs and putting on a restaurant show. And in much the same way that musicians’ back catalogs are being packaged and sold, Mr. Starr has made a big business of identifying restaurant intellectual property — the taste of Keith McNally, the culinary virtuosity of Mr. Ladner, the hospitality knack of Nancy Silverton — and bringing it in-house, before taking it on the road, to Miami, Washington D.C., or Nashville.
Several weeks before Borromini’s debut, Mr. Starr was in Nashville, tasting gazpachos with Mr. McNally. In a few hours, the two would be was opening yet another Pastis — their fourth such outpost since partnering in 2017 to revive and expand Mr. McNally’s beloved Manhattan brasserie.
Mr. Starr wore, as always, a dark crew-neck T-shirt, a blazer and sneakers — a uniform that, in combination with his perpetually deep tan, shorn dark hair and boss energy, suggests a record executive, if that executive’s lapel is occasionally dusted with baguette flour.
Opening nights, Mr. Starr said, are his saddest moments. The dreaming, planning and designing is over. Everything after that is just work. Once the restaurant fills up and everything is running smoothly, he said, “I just want to go home.”
But on this warm June night in Nashville, he looked happy enough to stay, gabbing with Mr. McNally about the evening’s soundtrack. He discoursed on the lighting levels; he yelled at a hostess for not greeting a guest properly; he swapped stories with a server, a musician who was going on the road the next day. He cracked dad jokes with the staff. (Mr. Starr, twice-divorced, is the father of four, with two children from each marriage. His daughter Sarah Starr, 34, is his director of development and procurement.)
Mr. Starr has a well-documented habit of speaking in the terms of the music trade. A restaurant is like an album. A menu needs a few hits. A dish that isn’t quite working is like Paul and John, toward the end.
So it pleased Mr. Starr to hear that a fellow restaurateur in Philadelphia had compared him to the famed record producer Rick Rubin — a man whose genre-spanning success has been fueled not so much by musical ability as (in Mr. Rubin’s telling) by absolute confidence in what he likes, and doesn’t.
Mr. Starr certainly brings his collaborators money and infrastructure. But nearly everyone who has worked with him mentions his instinct for what diners want.
This is a talent that didn’t truly reveal itself until his late 30s.
Finding an Audience
Raised in “a gray-collar” family in Gloucester County, N.J., Mr. Starr came from a decidedly nonculinary background. “Sometimes we went for Chinese?” he recalled.
What he loved, early and consistently, was music, and especially the disc jockeys who played it; his teenage jobs were on-air, spinning rock records. After leaving Temple University short of a degree, he switched to documentary film and video production.
But at 21, he changed course after a girlfriend dumped him for being broke. Mr. Starr resolved not to be so broke, and over the next decade started a succession of show-business ventures in Philadelphia.
“The motivation to do a lot of these things was to, one, get her back, and two, show her,” Mr. Starr said.
He did not get her back. But his hospitality lightbulb moment came with a visit to Global 33, a New York martini bar. He loved the feel, and the young, good-looking crowd. He could bring a sexy place like that to decidedly unsexy Philly, he thought. Mr. Starr came home and opened his martini-themed Continental in 1995, about a minute before the movie “Swingers” brought the classic cocktail back into the zeitgeist for a new generation.
The place was small and the lines were long. “Like Studio 54,” Mr. Starr said.
Ed Rendell, the former mayor, once told The Philadelphia Inquirer that the Continental was a “shock of electricity” that ignited a restaurant revolution in the city.
Three years later, he’d go bigger, opening the original Buddakan. The $1.5 million restaurant was a few blocks away from the Continental but a world away in vibe: dark, moody and resplendent with its larger-than-life golden Buddha centerpiece, an indoor water cascade, the Asian-fusion menu. The place drew much attention, and celebrities. (Oprah! Mick Jagger! Robert De Niro!)
Philly was enamored. And Mr. Starr had found his niche.
“It wasn’t so much that I was that good, it was that things here in Philly were very boring,” Mr. Starr said. “And I had an eye for design, so design kind of became my main thing.”
Mr. Starr would go on to open more than 20 additional restaurants in Philadelphia over the next two decades, hiring some of the most respected designers in the world to bring his immersive concepts to life and cementing his status as a founding father of the city’s modern food scene. He paved the way for some of the city’s more successful restaurateurs, including Michael Solomonov, Aimee Olexy and Jose Garces, who worked for Mr. Starr in the mid-2000s.
(The size of his reputation has its downsides, too. This past July, his name landed in the news when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders signed onto a boycott of his Washington restaurants, where a local union is trying to organize workers. Mr. Starr declined to comment.)
Josh Mann, who recently opened Fleur in Philadelphia after several years as a manager for Starr Restaurants, said his former boss’s obsessive attention to the “holy trinity” of ambience — music, lighting, temperature — is still so ingrained in his consciousness that even in Mr. Mann’s home, “every light has to be on a dimmer switch.”
Mr. Starr expanded his culinary multiverse to the biggest restaurant stage: New York. In 2006, he spent $29 million to plant his flag in the meatpacking district with the celebrity-cheffed Morimoto and a second vast, theatrical Buddakan, establishing him as a national name.
But not everyone was impressed. A New York Magazine reporter pointed out to Mr. Starr in a 2006 interview: “People say big, expensively designed megarestaurants kill off smaller, better-quality restaurants.”
The headline of that piece? “Mr. Big Box.”
The Starr System
If Act 1 of Mr. Starr’s career was about pleasing the crowds, Act 2 was about earning the respect of the culinary cognoscenti. He wanted to be taken seriously, 10-foot gold Buddha statue and all.
“You can’t do everything for the masses,” he said. “Look at the Beatles. Every album was different. Every song was different.”
And so Mr. Starr grew his repertoire. By early 2016, he had opened a smattering of smaller, auteur-driven restaurants to mostly great reviews when he decided to partner with the chef Daniel Rose on Le Coucou in SoHo.
This was a major turning point: The New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells named Le Coucou the city’s top new restaurant that year, writing in a three-star review that “smart diners lick the sauces from the heavy, scrolled, silver-plated tablespoon set to the right of the gold-rimmed plates, waiting for just this purpose.”
The next year, Le Coucou won the James Beard award for best new restaurant, and Mr. Starr won for outstanding restaurateur — his first win after five nominations. The year after that, another culinarily ambitious Starr restaurant, the Clocktower, earned a Michelin star. Le Coucou followed suit in 2018.
It was time for Mr. Starr’s Act 3: pleasing himself.
Sometimes this means playing the role of I.P. manager, expanding the right concept (Pastis, most notably) into new markets. Other times, he’s nostalgic, set on reviving and refreshing grand old one-of-a-kind classics. (Babbo, Occidental in Washington, D.C.) And still other times, he is a highly opinionated collaborator to some of the country’s best culinary talents.
Ms. Silverton, the chef and co-owner of the California-based Mozza Restaurant Group, opened a Washington location of Osteria Mozza in 2024 with Mr. Starr. She said, “He’s deserving of every accolade.”
She recalled the two of them at an impasse over whether a breast or thigh worked better in one of her chicken sandwiches. Mr. Starr, on Team Breast, pulled in passers-by, asking for their opinions. “And everyone voted for the sandwich he liked, for the reasons he liked it,” Ms. Silverton said.
The breast ended up on the menu.
It might be a bit annoying sometimes, she said, but “I don’t think I’ve ever been around a person who has their finger on the pulse more than he does.”
But, Mr. Starr, by his own admission, gets bored easily.
Right now, he has four restaurants — beyond Babbo — at some stage of development, including a Mission Chinese revival with chef Danny Bowien, which he’ll open in Philadelphia “at some point,” after Mr. Bowien revamps the menu at the 20-year-old Buddakan. Also on the horizon is Lupa, another former Batali institution in New York that Mr. Starr intends to revive.
He’d probably be worth more if he slowed down, Mr. Starr said, if he didn’t plow so much of his nine-figure revenue into the next project, if he weren’t so obsessive.
“Any Wharton professor would say, ‘That’s dumb. You should have kept the money,’” he said. Should have spent less on things like the $90,000 hand-painted, two-story fresco at Borromini, or replacing the antiqued mirrors that Mr. McNally thought didn’t look quite aged enough.
“But Keith is right,” he added. So what if it’s going to cost $20,000? “We have to do it.”
So he replaces the mirrors, spends the money. And he keeps working at breakneck pace. A new partner here. A new restaurant there.
The night after Mr. Biden’s visit, the movie director M. Night Shyamalan dined at Borromini. He and Mr. Starr, longtime acquaintances, got to chatting. “We actually talked about opening a restaurant,” Mr. Starr said, an Indian spot. He can see it now. He thinks he could make it happen.