Hospitality Design - August 2012 - 71

interview: peter karpinski
By Stacy Shoemaker Rauen

perspectives

sage words
As co-founder and COO of the Sage Restaurant Group, Peter Karpinski has mastered what many hotel brands today are trying to showcase: independent, unique, community-centric, design-driven F&B anchors for the hotels within the Sage Hospitality portfolio. In just ﬁve years, he has launched nine restaurants including the Corner Ofﬁce Restaurant + Martini Bar and Second Home Kitchen + Bar in Denver; Mercat a la Planxa in Chicago; Temple Downtown Restaurant + Lounge in Providence, Rhode Island; Urban Farmer Steakhouse, the Original Dinerant, and Departure Restaurant + Lounge in Portland, Oregon; Braddock’s American Brasserie in Pittsburgh; and Toasted Oak Grill & Market in Novi, Michigan. New concepts like Oceanside Fish House in Oceanside, California, are on the horizon, and he plans to replicate existing brands in new markets (for instance, there’s an Urban Farmer planned for Cleveland), even toying with the idea of standalone outposts. Here he chats about his brief stint with the army, lessons learned, and attaining life fulﬁllment.

HD: What are some of your rst memories of restaurants?
PK: Growing up with four siblings, my parents probably couldn’t afford to take us to nice restaurants and knew they wouldn’t enjoy the experience (nor would others around us) acting up the way we usually did. There were a couple restaurants I remember—the Hollywood, Balloons, the Hoffbrau, Curley’s, Lum’s, and Connie’s. My parents would know just about everyone who worked or was dining in these restaurants when we walked in, and we would spend twenty minutes saying our ‘hellos’ before sitting down. A small diner called Hunter’s Dinerant was a late-night joint I would go to with friends and order chocolate milkshakes and cheeseburgers. I got the inspiration for our property, the Original Dinerant, from there.

HD: Did you always know you wanted to go into hospitality?
PK: Although I did not come from a family in the hospitality industry, I found myself washing dishes at a diner when I was fourteen, and have basically been in the business, in some form or fashion, ever since. During that period I juggled a few jobs at once—a paper route, cleaning ﬁsh tanks, mowing lawns, and washing dishes. The dishwashing job was by far the hardest, and I remember getting really beat down verbally by the cooks and the waitstaff, but for some reason found it the most rewarding experience and stuck with it.

HD: Your career, though, began in hotels, starting with Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration.
PK: Cornell was very familiar to me—several of my family had gone there (my mother, grandmother, grandfather, a couple uncles and aunts, and a few cousins). In fact my grandmother was one of the ﬁrst women to get a master’s degree from the university—she did her dissertation on pressure cookers in the Home Economics department. As a child, we’d often drive down for football games in the fall and the stadium was right next to the hospitality school, and I was always intrigued by the program. After my junior year of high school, I only applied to two schools—West Point and Cornell. I was a lacrosse player and both programs were interested in me playing for them. I got into both and decided I couldn’t pass up the

Temple Downtown Restaurant + Lounge, housed in a historic Masonic Temple in Providence, Rhode Island. www.hospitalitydesign.com

August 2012

http://www.hospitalitydesign.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Hospitality Design - August 2012