Birth Of A Culinary Icon
When immigrants John Ganzi and Tio Bozzi opened their first American restaurant on Second Avenue in Manhattan in 1926, their plan was to serve the cuisine of their home in Parma, Italy. In fact, they intended to name it Parma, but the business license office heard Palm, and so it was.
While the Italian dishes were popular, when a customer wanted a steak, they were accommodated, with chef Ganzi literally running to a nearby butcher shop to buy a cut of beef. Over time, the restaurant’s emphasis switched from red sauce to red meat, though classic Italian dishes remain on the menu to this day. It was third generation owners Wally Ganzi and Bruce Bozzi who debuted the four- to eight-pound lobsters in the 1970s, and the giant crustaceans have ridden a wave of fame ever since.
Every Palm follows the menu blueprint honed over the years, but individual restaurants are permitted—encouraged even—to adapt to the tastes and cater to the requests of their market and customers. Often, those dishes end up being added to the standard menu, most famously when the Los Angeles Palm gussied up the Gigi Salad by adding iceberg lettuce, avocado, roasted pepper and egg, thus creating a distinction between the West Coast Gigi and the East Coast Gigi.
In Nashville, the first thing to go was the relish/crudités plate that had been a Palm standard for years, set on the table along with menus and water. “Our customers just didn’t care for it,” says Charlene Walker, the Nashville Palm’s opening general manager.
What Nashville did want was a burger, a chopped steak plate and fried asparagus; the burger and chopped sirloin steak (with a Bordelaise sauce) are listed only on lunch menus, the asparagus fritti among the sides.
Though The Palm is proud of its reputation for upscale dining, it does its best to accommodate a range of customers. The $17 Business Lunch Menu is respectful of more prudent expense accounts in today’s corporate climate, while dining duos have made the Summer Lobster Special for two the restaurant’s most successful promotion ever. The Prime Bites Bar Menu not only elevates “bar food” to a new level, it delivers the fine fare at irresistible prices during Prime Time (weekdays from 5-7 p.m. and after 9) when all bites are just $3.50 each.
The Palm, Nashville
The next time you find yourself at The Palm with a bottle of cabernet and a juicy 32-ounce prime aged bone in ribeye steak, sitting at the bar for a martini before a Predators game, or enjoying a brandy after a concert at the Ryman, you might want to raise your glass to Mark Bloom. Bloom isn’t the owner of the legendary family-owned steakhouse, but he’s just two degrees of separation away and key to the opening of the company’s 23rd location at Fifth Avenue and Lower Broad. The Nashville real estate developer knew somebody who knew somebody—who just happened to be third generation owner Wally Ganzi Jr., grandson of John Ganzi, who founded Manhattan’s original Palm in 1926 with partner Pio Bozzi. Not only would Bloom not take no for an answer when a proposal was offered to open a Music City Palm, he ultimately made Wally Ganzi and Bruce Bozzi—Pio’s grandson—a deal they couldn’t refuse.
The Nashville Palm timeline begins a decade ago, with a group of friends and business colleagues sitting at a table. Bloom, with longtime partners Ronnie Scott and Larry Papel, was developing the Hilton on Fifth Avenue South with Turnberry Associates. The group knew they needed a nationally recognized restaurant for their significant investment, and one night Bloom was brainstorming over dinner with Turnberry principals Tommy Baratta, Don Soffer and Soffer’s son Jeff. “Tommy says, ‘How about The Palm?’” Bloom recalls. “I said, ‘The Palm?’ Tommy said yes, that he and his friend Jack (as in the Jack Nicholson) were good friends with Wally Ganzi and he’d give him a call. A couple days later, I get a call from Wally. He told me they weren’t really interested in Nashville, but that as a favor to Tommy, he would come down and let us show him the city and the project. We took him around town, he saw the arena, the hotel site and where the restaurant could be—the stadium had just been finished. He basically said that while he liked the city, he didn’t see a Palm in its future.”
Still, he agreed to get an expert opinion and had the consulting firm The Palm uses go to Nashville to conduct a feasibility report. The results were not good. “Wally called and told me he had bad news, that in the consultant’s opinion, Nashville would not work. That lunch would fail within six months, and that they could expect a Palm here to do no more than $2 million a year. We felt very differently. We were confident in Nashville, and we asked Wally to reconsider. He came back and told us that if we would sweeten the deal some, they would do it. We did and they did, and it’s my understanding that the Nashville Palm has been outperforming all expectations ever since.”
During this period, Bloom and Baratta frequently dined at Morton’s, where young Charlene Walker had assumed the position of assistant GM after several years with the company. One night, Walker asked Bloom about progress on a restaurant for the Hilton, and he mentioned The Palm; admittedly, she was skeptical. The following afternoon, seated in the bar with one of her captains, eating pizza and going over numbers, she saw two gentlemen walk in, look around the restaurant and then come into the bar. Since the kitchen wasn’t yet open, ever-gracious Walker offered to share her pizza with them. They declined but sat for a drink, where they were joined by Tommy Baratta. Charlene remembers, “I asked Tommy what the story was on a Palm for the hotel. Tommy turned beet red but one of the gentlemen with him asked me what I thought of the idea of a Palm in Nashville. I told him I thought it would be a sign that Nashville was becoming a metropolitan city. Tommy asked me what I knew about The Palm, and I reeled off five minutes on Palm history. The guy who asked me the question puts out his hand and says, “I’m Wally Ganzi, one of the owners of The Palm.” When they left, I told my captain ‘I either just made a complete fool of myself or I got myself a job with The Palm.”
Ganzi later told Walker that when he left Morton’s, he turned to Baratta and said, ‘There’s our new GM.’
Walker was indeed hired to be GM—one of The Palm’s youngest ever, and the first to come from outside the company. As construction and build-out of the restaurant proceeded, she began working with The Andrews Agency, the local PR firm owned by Susan Andrews, which had been retained by The Palm. One of their first and most important assignments was to compile the list of 200 Nashvillians whose faces would be immortalized on the walls of The Palm. The caricatures have been part of the restaurant’s lore and integral to its story since the start, when an arrangement was made with artists and cartoonists who worked in the neighborhood to draw on the walls in exchange for dinner. Though the first faces were fictional—Beetle Bailey and Popeye among them—eventually the concept was broadened to include caricatures of regular customers and celebrities who dined at the Second Avenue Palm in Manhattan.
As The Palm began to open restaurants in other cities under the leadership of Wally Ganzi and Bruce Bozzi, the caricatures became key to personalizing those outposts, making them feel as familiar to locals as any homegrown restaurant, as well as generating excitement and anticipation as to who would make the cut.
“Every Palm has nationally known celebrities on the walls who are regular customers at the New York and Los Angeles locations,” explains Andrews. “What we did was come up with a list of 200 local people to be included. We had it broken into categories—music business, media, politics and government, business, education, community leaders, social and even one we called ‘characters.’ What worked out really well was that Charlene knew one group of people through her time downtown, and we knew another segment of the community, and we’re natives, so together, we had the bases covered. When we got our list together, we sent out letters to those people inviting them to be on the wall, and asking them to send us a head shot.”
Not surprisingly, no one declined, but what Andrews and Walker were not prepared for was the intense lobbying by people who were not on the list to snag a coveted spot. “We had people dropping off their photos, writing letters, having their friends call. It was unbelievable!” Andrews remembers.
As important as the caricatures are to every Palm’s personality, so too are the members of the staff hired to carry on the tradition of top-notch professional service in the front of the house. Walker remembers that the home office was concerned about Nashville’s labor pool, as well as the timing of the December opening.
“We were essentially asking people to leave their jobs in the middle of their most profitable season to come to The Palm and train eight hours a day for two weeks,” Walker explains. “But I felt sure we’d be able to assemble a spectacular staff. We had a cattle call and when I got there that morning there was a line outside the door and down the block. We interviewed for three days. The senior VP of operations was dumbfounded. And when corporate came in to train, they were amazed. When I went to the annual meeting a month after we opened, they said it was the best opening team they’d ever had. That’s a real tribute to Nashville service workers. The Palm is a full-time job. It’s not something you do while you’re going to school or waiting on your music career to take off. It is your career. The Nashville staff were not only total pros, but they are just so warm and friendly. That really impressed corporate.”
With the 200 caricatures being painted by the husband-wife-son team of artists retained by The Palm and staff hired, the next order of business was the opening party, and Andrews knew it had to make a splash. “The invitations were printed on a card designed to look like an olive, and we tied them to a martini glass. Then we hired an actor, dressed him in a tuxedo like Agent 007, put him in a black Jag, had him deliver all the invites personally and pour a martini. It even made the evening news!”
It certainly wowed Stacie Standifer, founder and publisher of Nashville Lifestyles, which was then still finding its niche in the media marketplace. “We were in our first year, and still working out of Murfreesboro,” Standifer recalls. “I couldn’t believe it when this guy in a tuxedo walks into my little office in Murfreesboro and pours me a martini!” That invitation was the start of a partnership between The Palm and Nashville Lifestyles that has helped generate hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity over the years.
Standifer’s response to the invitation was shared by everyone on the guest list, and Andrews says they got an unprecedented 98 percent acceptance. On the night of the opening, snow fell on the red carpet that led 650 people into the restaurant. Nothing was left to chance as The Palm introduced itself to Nashville. Says Andrews, “We had people outside on the red carpet with headsets, and I was standing behind Charlene at the front desk with a headset. As people got out of their cars, one of my people would tell me that the governor had arrived, or the mayor had arrived. So when they walked in, Charlene was able to say, ‘Welcome to The Palm, Gov. Sundquist; welcome to the Palm, Mayor Purcell; welcome, Coach [Jeff] Fisher; welcome, Mr. and Mrs. [Alan] Jackson.’ It really set the stage for the hospitality The Palm is known for.”
As well known as The Palm is for its steak, seafood, classic Italian dishes and beverages, it is professionalism, warmth and hospitality that define every experience within its caricature-covered walls, from intimate dinners for two to the buy-outs for non-profits that have become highly anticipated annual events. The Men’s Event is a company wide event that benefits a non-profit in each restaurant’s city; in Nashville, it’s the Minnie Pearl Cancer Foundation. Nashville Lifestyles sponsors and works closely with The Andrews Agency and The Palm on two locally generated events—Kevin Carter’s Waiting for Wishes and Hazel and Charlie Daniels’ Painting A Bright Future. NL and The Palm co-host the annual Style in the City party every November to thank the restaurant’s top 100 customers and the magazine’s top 50 clients.
Amid all of the high-roller tales and celebrity sagas, one of the favorite Palm stories of Andrews, Standifer, Walker and Sales Manager Paige Dixon is the one they co-wrote for the wife of a marine stationed in Iraq. Dixon remembers, “We got a letter from this marine telling us his wife’s birthday was coming up and that he wanted to do something special for all she was doing to support him while he was in Iraq. He asked if we offered a discount to service people. I read the letter to Charlene, Stacie and Susan and everyone got to work. We contacted her, arranged a spa day, hair, make-up, nails and a trip to The French Shoppe for an outfit. We had a limo go pick her and three girlfriends up and bring them to The Palm. It was right in the middle of CMA Festival, so we had already gotten Troy Gentry and Eddie Montgomery to agree to pick them up and take them backstage that night. Then they spent the night in a suite downtown. It was fantastic, and when her husband came home, they came to The Palm for dinner. They said they’d never forget it, but neither will we.”
On any given night at The Palm, the faces on the wall are also the faces in the booths, tables, private rooms and bar. As importantly, the faces at the door and on the floor have remained remarkably familiar. Seven people have been on board since opening night—bartender Grit Greer, and Gene Zane, Michael Chelius, Michael Pauley, Danny Sivilay, Michael Trenticosta and Darrell Maggard.
Cheery manager/maitre d’ Rae Krenn was in the opening crew, took a short sabbatical in California, but has been back at the front desk in Nashville for five years, backing up Scott Denney, who took over as GM when Charlene left to marry and start a family four years ago.
Still, some habits are never broken. A few times a month, you’ll find Charlene Walker Pratt in the bar having a girl’s lunch with Andrews, Standifer and Dixon. And 365 days a year, you’ll find her caricature on the wall where you’d most expect it—behind the hostess stand, right beside Tommy Baratta, Mark Bloom and Jack Nicholson.