The Gjelina New York Friends & Family Program and the Ultimate Restaurant Perk

Talking old school hospitality and Blackbird's new Friends & Family program with Gjelina Group CEO Shelley Armistead

One of the perks I have never had at a restaurant but always wanted is a house account. I have heard about them existing at some of the places I would call myself a regular, but I’ve never been offered one. I’ve seen people with house accounts sign their checks and leave, and wept with envy. They are so old school, so subtle, so silky smooth. Gah! If you have a house account, you’ve made it. Maybe because I serially use technology to manifest the hospitality things I am positive should exist, we have been working on developing house accounts as a part of the Blackbird technology platform. If we have our way, someday soon there will be house accounts for you and me as far as the eye can see.

Meanwhile, Shelley Armistead, CEO of the Gjelina Group, and I were sitting at Raf’s on Elizabeth Street for breakfast a short while ago. Gjelina Group, of course, owns both Gjusta and its older sibling Gjelina, two restaurants that have done most of the heavy lifting in the last two decades in defining the Los Angeles dining aesthetic. Gjelina is a heavyweight; Shelley, though she keeps a lower profile than some of her peers, is big time. This is a lady with house accounts plural.

Not far into our Uovo in Purgatorio Amatricianas (no guanciale for me, the full show for her) she told me that she was short the capital required to finally open Gjelina New York (reopen, actually; it was open for 30 days last year before a fire took it down). To which I suggested that maybe there was a way Blackbird could help, since we’ve raised money for restaurant openings before.

So, now, we are proud to be partnering with Shelley and Gjelina on their Friends & Family program, which gets a very limited number of supporters of the project access to the earliest days that this restaurant will be open, ongoing priority reservations access, up to 100,000 $FLY, and, yes, a house account. The program drops on Blackbird this week, and you ought to stop reading and claim your account now. But, if you must, please enjoy this conversation Shelley and I had yesterday — on hospitality, technology, and the power of saying, “I got you.”

Ben Leventhal
I want to start by talking about old school hospitality, and specifically about how you’ve approached hospitality. In many ways, Gjelina has defined itself by doing things a little bit against the grain. For instance, for a long time, you didn’t take reservations. 

Shelley Armistead
No, and we only do now because we learned how to use Resy. I should mention that you're not speaking to the most tech savvy person, which is something that we can layer into this conversation [laughs]. But we certainly didn't take reservations during the day. And we didn’t take reservations at Gjelina New York during the short period that we were initially open. It was all walk-ins.

BL
Right, and that spontaneity and sense of a community of regulars seems to be essential to your recipe for hospitality. What does hospitality mean for you, and how does this Friends & Family program that we're working on fit into that?

SA
The way I see hospitality is twofold. One: it's creating a space where people can have experiences. That doesn't matter whether it's a grocery store or a sleeper train or a dental office. It doesn't matter. It's the way the space feels. That's something that is at the heart of everything that I do. I really want to create a space where people can have experiences, but I do not want to be dictatorial about what those experiences need to be. I'm not in control of anybody's mood, what they've just navigated five minutes before, what they're going through in their lives, but I do believe in creating a space where people can be the architect of their own experiences. 

The other component of hospitality, which derives from the same Latin word as hospital, is to care for people, to give warmth to strangers. That’s sort of old Webster's definition. I believe that to be true to the core of what hospitality should be. So for me, hospitality doesn't need to exist necessarily in a food and beverage space. If somebody offers you a cup of tea, to me that’s hospitality.

What I always want to do, is combine that element of caring for somebody, and to do it in a space where somebody gets to decide their own experience. What's important for me is that every space we create can offer somebody something at any time of day during any week of the year. If you want to come into Gjelina in the morning and read the paper and have a cup of coffee, cool, blow your hair back. If you want to come in and have your father's 80th birthday party, we got you. You want to go to Gjusta to have a whole bagel lox spread or you want to buy it and pick it up and take it home, great. I don't really care how you use the spaces as long as it feels good to you.

BL
The hard question to me is, how do you deliver warmth to strangers in the context of the cold hard requirements of running a commercially viable restaurant in a city like New York, where sometimes it is risky to welcome strangers? Especially when there's 10 people who want every seat.

SA
I think it's more of…look, I might not got you now. It might be tomorrow at 2:30 p.m., but I got you. It's not about making somebody feel inadequate for not being able to do something at a time that they really want. I think it's totally about the “I see you” component. I can see that you're hungry. I'm sorry your table’s late, or you're on the waitlist, but here's the deal: I'm going to keep communicating with you. Or can we get you in tomorrow at this time? At Gjelina, we really talk about the fact that consistency builds trust. You need to consistently build trust with the neighborhood.

BL
It's funny that you use that phrase, “We Got You,” because we use it all the time, too. It’s actually part of our branding. I always say, in the end, I could never have a reservation for the rest of my life if when I walk into a restaurant they say, “we got you, don't worry.” That's the whole thing in the end. 

SA
Exactly. And that comes from having a relationship with the staff and being part of the community. I'm the least important person in the room. It’s all about the way you treat the people at the door. Treat them well, and they'll see you on the back of a line, and be like, “oh my God, I got you.” 

BL
I couldn't agree more. So let me ask you, given how you think about hospitality, and this “I got you” mindset, how are you hoping that this Friends & Family program that we're working on together fuels that?

SA
When I opened Soho House, we obviously had a founder member period, right? And that founder member period is intrinsically how I was trained. For an extensive period of my life, that founder member period was kind of like 150 to 200 people. The first three months were the most critical for me. It wasn't just critical for me getting to know the members, it was critical for me to be able to introduce them to each other so that they built their own internal community of regulars. This is why I say I want to know every single person that's joined because I personally want to reach out to them. I personally want to get to know them. I'm not going to force myself on anybody, but it allows me to start categorizing stories in my head about who they are, which allows the introduction to each staff member to be more personal. And I make sure to give this information to my staff, because it’s not sustainable if I hold all of the information. I always used to say, “listen, if I get run over by a bus tomorrow this company's got to thrive and that doesn't happen unless you all have all of the information.” I now say “if I won the lottery and I decided to buy an island” because it feels a little bit more upbeat. Out in LA you've got to manifest, right? 

But for this project, for our project, 150 seemed like the right number. That is sort of my capacity zone. It really comes down to my own personal capacity.

BL
It's building community in a very purposeful and deliberate way.

SA
Yes, absolutely. 

BL
Regarding this program, obviously when someone pays for something they’re likely to be more engaged. It's just how humans are. So, I think on the one hand we've set the price in a way where it's not going to be for everyone, but I think we're going to see that the people who do engage are going to be really engaged, which is exciting because that's ultimately what this is about. It's, sort of a…find-your-regulars initiative.

SA
Yes, and I'm hoping for people who do the Family Tier, that it's because their day-to-day sort of needs them to be in restaurants, right? They need to be taking meetings in restaurants and it's something that's going to be incredibly useful to them over a 12-month period. I hope the kind of person that's buying it isn’t doing so just for access. That's why I love the pivot about these house accounts: it’s not just about access; you actually get back everything that you put in. And, by the way, the generosity of what you guys have done with $FLY, well it’s just silly. It's childish. It's so good.

BL
[Laughs] Hey, we got you…

One thing I recently read by a restaurateur who did house accounts back in the day, was that beyond the convenience passed onto the consumer, what these accounts really did was further strengthen the intimate bond between restaurants and their best guests. 

SA
I love it, that idea of, “put it on my tab.” Sometimes you still see it in a small town butcher, where somebody will go and say “put it on my tab” or “put it on whatever account.” It just feels like what I'm witnessing is, these two people trust each other. I'm like, I want to be that person. They've got a relationship. It just feels so trusting and I love that.

BL
It's the intimacy of that, absolutely. 

Which brings me back to tech. Something that I've been thinking about, and we've talked a lot about, is if technology and the persistent pace of technological innovation are at odds with this human-driven old school hospitality. Is technology working for or against you when it comes to delivering that old school hospitality and magic?

SA
I think that's a tough one for me to answer right now because you use the word old school hospitality, and nothing was better than a pencil and an eraser and a giant book at the desk.

But here's what I think tech does: I think it frees us up for a transference of information that everybody has access to, and that builds the old school hospitality. It allows for way more effective communication between leadership.

I don't know how the hell Jeremy King does it in London. He is on every single night and he knows every single thing about everybody and I think it's beautiful. People expect to see him and they want to see him, but I think it must be exhausting. He's one of my mentors. Short of being Jeremy, I don't know without technology how you're able to transfer information so that that person gets consistent. 

BL
Lastly, if someone doesn’t purchase a house account, what’s the best way for them to become a regular at Gjelina?  

SA
I absolutely love Gjelina dinner. You'll have people coming from all over. But breakfast is where you get to know the people in the neighborhood. Which is why breakfast is my favorite shift to work. For me, if there's a shift that I choose to run it's always breakfast. I'm there at 6 a.m. That's the best way to get to know people. So between these Friends & Family house accounts and the breakfast shift, that's how I'm really hoping to build our community.

For instance, during those first 30 days when we opened in New York last year before the fire, we had the same gentleman come in every day. We opened at 8 a.m. every morning, and there he’d be at 7:58. He’d come in and enjoy a little pre-shift. He couldn't sit. He had a back injury. So he would stand at the bar. He would get a frittata and then he would have a cappuccino, a flat white, and then he would leave on his bicycle for the day. Every single day.

BL
God bless him, you love to see it. Thanks, Shelley.