Danny Meyer continues his NYC takeover with Maialino

What’s your goal for the new restaurant?
We’re trying to capture the soul of why people use restaurants in Rome. Gramercy Park, which this restaurant looks out onto, has a community formed around it—it’s like its own tiny village within the city. That’s not too dissimilar from the piazzas one finds in Rome, where the local trattoria is adopted by the community. So we want to create a trattoria for the Gramercy Park community.

How do you decide when it’s time to open a new place?
We go pretty slowly with fine-dining restaurants; they take a long time to nurture. There’s a need to open a new one every so often, because there’s a backlog of talent on the team. When there’s somebody really wonderful who wants to stay with the company, it can be the biggest motivation for opening a restaurant.

And what about your more casual places, like Shake Shack?
I don’t want Shake Shack to oversaturate and feel like a chain. There will naturally come a point where we will want to keep growing it—we’d like to grow Blue Smoke, too—and we’ll have to figure that out.—Daniel Gritzer

Maialino is slated to open at the Gramercy Park Hotel in November.

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Fall Preview 2009
There's something–no, a zillion things–to look forward to this coming season.