Good Company Interview: Lee Schrager, Founder of South Beach Wine & Food Festival
Lee Schrager has never met a no he couldn’t turn into a yes.
He’ll tell you that himself. When I asked what he wants people to say about him at his funeral, he didn’t hesitate: “No is just a starting place.” He thinks it might end up on his tombstone. I think it already explains everything.
Lee founded the Food Network South Beach and New York City Wine & Food Festivals. He’s Chief Communications Officer at Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, and he’s the closest thing this city has to a godfather of food. He’s also an old friend and I have been looking forward to sitting down with him since I started What’s Good Miami.
Lee grew up in Massapequa. I’m from Great Neck, different sides of the tracks according to him, but the place instilled in us a very similar hustle. He moved to Fort Lauderdale at 15, then went to the Culinary Institute of America with Anthony Bourdain, who later wrote the foreword to his first cookbook.
His externship story shows the whole man in one scene. He wrote to Glorious Food, the society caterer of the era, over and over and never heard back. He was in the city for a different interview when he walked past their 72nd Street townhouse, saw a window full of lemons, and walked in on a chaotic Saturday asking for the chef by name. The chef said, “You want the job? Start right now.” So he did. Within months he was working events for the Rockefellers, for Jackie Onassis and for the opening of the Kennedy Center.
Then he realized he didn’t want to spend his life in a kitchen.
Midnight Room Service
Back in Florida, while he studied at FIU, Lee ran midnight room service at the Bahia Mar. He took the orders, cooked them, delivered them and picked up the trays. He came in early just to watch the galas. When the catering director finally made good on her weekly threat to quit, Lee was in the GM’s office that Monday morning asking for her job. The GM had never met him, and Lee had no experience. “Give me 90 days at the same salary.” He was 21 and making $50,000, so he dropped out of FIU.
Omni moved him to Miami to open catering downtown. He didn’t know a soul there and didn’t speak Spanish. Then Ted Gould offered him $100,000 to run catering at the Pavillon, which is now the InterContinental.
Every job, he says, led to a better one.
The nerve didn’t come from his parents. He calls them “people who didn’t take chances,” and he says it with love. His dad sold women’s clothing, hated the commute to 1400 Broadway and never left. Lee paid for his own teen tour, his own Trans Am and his own first house. His parents gave him a washing machine for that house. He’s grateful for all of it.
South Beach, Before It Was South Beach
In the mid 1980s, Lee put up the money for a bar at 634 Collins and guaranteed the note. His partner died two months before opening. So Lee quit the hotel and ran Torpedo, one of Miami Beach’s first gay bars. It was in the same building where he’d eaten Chinese food with his grandparents as a kid. He barely drinks. It didn’t matter.
The neighbors taught him how not to get ripped off. Scratch was on one side, Warsaw on the other and Torpedo in the middle. That triangle was the night.
Lee picked up Gianni Versace at the airport on his first trip to Miami.
Versace took one look at the Sinatra suite at the Fontainebleau, shag carpet and all, and refused to stay. Lee called Chris Blackwell and moved the whole entourage into the Marlin, nannies included. The next morning he took Versace to breakfast at News Cafe. Versace ate breakfast there almost every day for the rest of his life, and the supermodels followed him to Lee’s bar after shoots.
