Exonian Profiles
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Eight years ago, Michael Eberstadt ’85 was the program coordinator for a soup kitchen and food pantry for Project Hospitality on Staten Island, NY. Now he owns three restaurants in Harlem that serve paying customers and, more important, provide paying jobs. After five years of working for social service programs—including being a care worker for homeless people with AIDS—and having completed a masters of public administration program at Columbia University with the goal of some day working for the New York City government, Eberstadt decided to change tack. He wanted to “go beyond handing out food and try creating jobs instead.” A native New Yorker, Eberstadt knew and enjoyed Harlem. He grew up on the Upper East Side and now lives on the Upper West Side with his wife, Nina Beattie, a lawyer, and their children, Max, 3, and Zoe, 14 months. He points out that though he grew up only two miles from Harlem, those were a long two miles. With the dual goal of running a successful business and creating jobs in that neighborhood, he opened his first brick-oven pizzeria—Slice of Harlem, at 2527 Frederick Douglass Boulevard, near 135th Street—in March of 1998. Slice of Harlem II and Bayou, a Creole restaurant, opened at their shared location, 308 Lenox Avenue, near 125th Street, in April of 2000. The three restaurants employ nearly 50 people, most of whom, from waiters to managers, live in Harlem or the Bronx. “I have very little staff turnover because I pay well by industry standards and believe in training and promoting,” says Eberstadt. “Also, a lot of restaurants have a seat-of-the-pants, cocaine-sniffing, out-of-control atmosphere, and mine are very sedate. It’s a place to work hard, get paid and go home, which was always the kind of place that I liked to work in when I was an employee.” Eberstadt opened his Lenox Avenue location with loans from a Clinton Administration urban renewal project that targeted upper Manhattan (one of six such empowerment zones nationwide) and the New York City Investment Fund. His pizza and Creole restaurants offer consumers an alternative to the prevalent soul food establishments in Harlem. He began catering to mostly neighborhood residents, but after some good press—President Clinton, whose new office is nearby, has eaten at Bayou twice—and customer reviews, his restaurants are becoming destinations. A May 31, 2000 review in the New York Times called Bayou, whose chef cooked at “an exceptional insider’s restaurant in New Orleans” for 10 years, “the real thing.” Not much in Eberstadt’s past would seem to have pointed him toward becoming a restaurateur. At Exeter, he relished theater, film making and foreign languages, captained the lacrosse and squash teams and was a proctor in Cilley Hall; at Dartmouth, he majored in English and captained the squash team. Throughout college and for three years afterwards, Eberstadt pursued the goal of playwriting. “Playwriting was something I loved and now miss,” he says. “But I realized at the time that the chance for success was too small. Maybe one day I’ll go back to it.” Now he finds himself using his French and Spanish with African and Latin-American employees, turning to his soup kitchen experience to manage a food-related business, and drawing on his leadership skills to become a better boss and manager, “which, in the end,” says Eberstadt, “is about motivating people.” —Laura Chisholm |
