Hospitality Design - August 2012 - 79

interview: james brennan
By Stacy Shoemaker Rauen Photography by Chantelle Photography and Chris Orsatti (Burlap)

perspectives

ultimate host
James Brennan ﬁrst made a name for himself redeﬁning the nightlife scene in downtown San Diego with Side Bar (the ﬁrst New York-style lounge with bottle service) and Stingaree, a multi-level restaurant, club, and event space. Now he’s bringing his nightlife mentality to restaurants with Enlightened Hospitality Group, a partnership with Top Chef alum and fellow San Diegoan, Brian Malarkey. Since 2009 they have opened ﬁve restaurants and a catering company in the San Diego area all based on the “fabric of social dining”: there’s ﬁsh restaurant Searsucker; Asian cowboy-inspired Burlap; ﬁsh and steakhouse Herringbone; neighborhood diner-like hangout Gingham; casual seafood spot Gabardine; and catering outlet Campine. And that’s just the beginning. They are rolling out the concepts nationwide (Searsucker Scottsdale opens this fall) and by 2017, Brennan has his sights set on having roughly 15 outposts up and running. Here he talks about creating one-stop entertainment, what he learned from Danny Meyer, and offering customers more.

HD: How did Enlightened Hospitality Group come about?
JB: I had known Brian [Malarkey] since he moved to San Diego. When just hope for the best and jump in headﬁrst. We work incredibly well together. He has blind faith in me on the business side of things, and I have complete blind faith in him from not only a culinary aspect, but also a concept development aspect. He is extremely talented, above and beyond just being able to helm the kitchen.

HD: And the name Enlightened?
JB: That was a name that I came up with when I read Danny Meyer’s book [Setting the Table]. He talks about ‘enlightened hospitality’ and that was something that I had always bought into in the nightclub industry. It’s really the concept that we prided ourselves on and when my life was changing and I was looking more into restaurants, I really enjoyed that book, especially being a New Yorker. I remember when he took over Union Square Café. I went to high school on sixteenth

Guests feel like they are dining outside at Herringbone thanks to olive trees and a retractable roof.
he got here we were just opening up Stingaree and we got to know each other pretty well. He was down the street and would stop by after the kitchen closed and we gabbed along the way about potentially doing something together. Post Top Chef there were grumblings of trouble on the horizon for Oceanaire [where he was executive chef] and he came over to the ofﬁce and sat down and said, ‘let’s do something.’

street and I used to walk past that place when it was just a crappy diner. And then all of a sudden—what felt like overnight—you’d have lines to get in; you couldn’t even walk through the front door.

HD: The idea of fabric-named restaurants. Where did that stem from?
JB: It started when we were trying to name Searsucker, a little less than three years ago. We had a couple of ideas out there, and Brian was stuck in trafﬁc heading up to LA. It was right after the [Del Mar] racetrack had closed [for the summer] and he said to himself or his wife, ‘Gosh, I didn’t even get to go to the track once this year and bust out my seersucker suit.’ And so that’s literally how it was born—there wasn’t really any thought of the fabrics, it was just a cool, catchy name. But I’m a big believer that names are an important part of your

HD: So it was a good match from the start?
JB: It’s funny because you never really know what you’re going to get in a partner. And a lot of times you don’t really get the luxury of a dating phase, like you do in real life with a real-life partner—sometimes you

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