Ahmass Fakahany, From Merrill Lynch to Restaurants

Excerpt from an article in

The New York Times

Sunday, April 01, 2012

Ahmass Fakahany, From Merrill Lynch to Restaurants

By SUSANNE CRAIG  

ONE afternoon in February, Ahmass Fakahany, a financier by training, was contemplating the economics of forks.

Baguette forks, to be precise — two silver ones on a table at Osteria Morini, a redoubt of one of New York’s pasta gods, the chef Michael White.

To the untrained eye, the forks looked identical. “The difference,” Mr. Fakahany said, reaching for one, “is this one costs $4.50 less.”

It’s not what you might expect in this refuge of Emilia-Romagna, where the talk tends more toward lumache al verde and petroniana than to the price of flatware. But then, Mr. Fakahany isn’t what you might expect here, either.  

After a lucrative — and quite controversial — career at Merrill Lynch, Mr. Fakahany, 53, is bringing a Wall Street sensibility to a business that can make investment banking seem easy by comparison: running restaurants. And, so far, he’s been very, very good at it.

In three years, he and Mr. White have a swiftly growing restaurant empire rivaling those of the celebrity chefs Mario Batali and Daniel Boulud. Mr. Fakahany and Mr. White now run acclaimed Manhattan restaurants like Marea, on Central Park South, and Ai Fiori, tucked away on the second floor of the luxurious Setai Fifth Avenue hotel. They have expanded to Hong Kong, and there is talk of Istanbul, too. This year, they hope to open at least five more restaurants, in locations as varied as the East Village of Manhattan and the Las Vegas Strip.

What is so remarkable about their success is that, in the restaurant game, failure is as common as kitchen burns. Nationwide, most new restaurants close within their first year — industry experts put the failure rate at anywhere from 60 to 80 percent.

How have these guys done it? It helps that Mr. White is widely considered to be one of New York’s hottest chefs. But it also reflects what Mr. Fakahany, the money man in this operation, is doing outside the kitchen.