Crains New York - October 8, 2012 - (Page 1)

CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS ® VOL. XXVIII, NO. 41 NEXT WEEK: 25 YEARS OF 40 UNDER 40. A SPECIAL REUNION ISSUE WWW.CRAINSNEWYORK.COM OCTOBER 8-14, 2012 PRICE: $3.00 Starwood, BR Guest marriage woes A $150 million deal signed at market top falls far short of its original goals BY LISA FICKENSCHER The 2007 marriage between restaurant group BR Guest Hospitality and private-equity firm Starwood Capital Group brought together two powerhouses that vowed to turn out dozens of trendy hotels and restaurants around the world. Starwood Capital, the original investor behind Starwood Hotels & Resorts, was going to develop its own hotels and populate them with BR Guest’s proven restaurants, including Dos Caminos and Blue Water Grill. Its plan called for BR BR GUEST Guest to open as RESTAURANTS many as 80 eateries, in New York, New up from 16, in just a Jersey, Florida couple of years. and Nevada Source: BR Guest That was, of course, before the economy tanked. Since then, the partnership between Starwood Capital’s chief executive, Barry Sternlicht, who created Starwood Hotels & Resorts and left that company in 2005, and BR Guests’ Stephen Hanson has turned into a more modest operation, falling far short of its original goals. BR Guest has grown to just 26 restaurants, and now the clock is ticking on the partners’ future together: The fund that Starwood Capital set up to underwrite BR Guest’s expansion is nearing the end of its five-year term, according to sources familiar with the deal. Starwood Capital would not confirm details about the fund, including its timeline, but Chief Operating Officer Daniel Yih said in an interview, “We typically exit investments [in] five to 10 years.” He added that “we continue to assess when to exit the HOT 26 POPULAR DEMAND: Director Glenn Lowry will keep the museum open seven days a week. As attendance soars, Museum of Modern Art shoots up the ranks of city’s top cultural orgs BY THERESA AGOVINO Photographer Cindy Sherman’s provocative images, film director Tim Burton’s quirky drawings and nude performance artists featured in Marina Abramovic’s memorable exhibit have helped the Museum of Modern Art become an ever more popular attraction for locals and tourists alike in recent years. Demand for MoMA’s shows has become so overwhelming that the museum announced last month that it will be open seven days a week instead of six, starting next spring. Attendance at the midtown institution has averaged nearly 3 million visitors a year, double the approximately 1.5 million visitors it hosted in 2004, when it reopened after a two-year renovation. During the same period, membership catapulted to 140,000 from 30,000. “We were maxed out as far as our attendance, so it became an easy decision” to open seven days, said Glenn Lowry, the museum’s director, who sat in his office looking quite corporate in his dark suit, though violet socks peeking from his pant legs hinted at See HOT MOMA on Page 12 See STARWOOD on Page 19 NEWSPAPER THE NYC’s Largest Cultural Institutions P. 13 LIST bloomberg news

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Crains New York - October 8, 2012

IN THE BOROUGHS
IN THE MARKETS
THE INSIDER
BUSINESS PEOPLE
CORPORATE LADDER
FROM AROUND THE CITY
OPINION
GREG DAVID
THE LIST
REAL ESTATE DEALS
CLASSIFIEDS
SMALL BUSINESS
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
SOURCE LUNCH
OUT AND ABOUT
SNAPS

Crains New York - October 8, 2012