FOOD & DRINK

Cooking up an empire

At 26, this Austin native is a force in four local bar and restaurant ventures (and counting): Lamberts, Perla's, La Condesa and Malverde

By Mike Sutter
AMERICAN-STATESMAN RESTAURANT WRITER
Wednesday, March 11, 2009

You'll forgive Larry McGuire if he comes into Lamberts a little bleary-eyed on a recent Sunday morning to get ready for brunch service. He was up until 3 that very same morning helping to christen Malverde, the new cocktail lounge across the street in which he has a business interest.

The new Mexican restaurant below Malverde, called La Condesa? McGuire has a piece of that action, too. And across the river on South Congress Avenue, he's cooking up a seafood and oyster place called Perla's in the building where Mars used to be.

But all that will have to wait, because it's 10:15 a.m., and there's asparagus to blanch and dress, smoked salmon to plate, biscuits, bacon and sausage to pull out of the oven. The choreography of the popular $28 buffet brunch at Lamberts Downtown Barbecue swirls around McGuire. Bartender Adam Bryan is setting out olives, cucumbers, blackberries and jalapeños for midmorning alchemy. Fellow chef and co-owner Tom Moorman Jr. is trimming meat for hanger-steak-and-eggs Benedict. Menus get wiped down, napkins folded, bottles of barbecue sauce put on tables.

It's unnaturally quiet in this compressed time before the 11 a.m. unlocking of the front door, beyond which a small crowd is already queuing up. The kitchen is small in this boxy, two-story shotgun-shack of a historic building with music mainly upstairs and food mainly downstairs. But McGuire is sanguine about working in tight quarters, even as his staff executes a dodgy ballet around him. "You don't make any money off kitchen space. You make money off seats," he says.

McGuire, who as co-owner and chef gets to pick his shifts but likes working brunch, isn't one of those shout-at-the-devil chefs. Even when he corrects someone (a container of simple syrup had been left out; McGuire spilled it), he's even-toned and direct, speaking in plural pronouns, saying "we" whenever he's not using first names because this is a team. And McGuire's getting his apron dirty with everybody else.

On another morning, Moorman runs the lunch prep while McGuire deals with a La Condesa espresso-machine vendor with memory issues, the design studio working up a graphic identity for Perla's and the pressing matter of vanilla ice cream. "I always want there to be vanilla ice cream for dessert, even if it's not part of a dessert that night," he tells pastry chef Alexandra Manley.

There's so much to take care of behind the scenes that cooking is almost beside the point for this 26-year-old entrepreneur with a deceptively long list of managing and cooking credentials. "You have to be where your talent is best utilized," he says. Cooking can never be far from his mind, though, because those maple and coriander-crusted ribs aren't going to smoke themselves. But he's not worried about being missed in the kitchen.

"The better things get, the better people we can hire in all the spots," he says, pointing out that with 75 employees, the operation is hardly a one- or two-man show. One of those recent hires is Joshua Hines, an accomplished chef in his own right with whom McGuire once worked at Austin's Starlite restaurant.

So it's off to see Jett Butler at Föda Studio, which also handled the look of Lamberts' logos and menus and the graphics for Malverde.

"We start from a menu, and everything goes from there: the furniture, the sign, the tiles on the floor," McGuire says. And he's not talking about how the menu looks; he's talking about what's on it. "It's part of being a chef-driven restaurant."

At Perla's, the menu starts from the sand up, if an early look is any indication, trawling the waters with moderately priced items ranging from fresh oysters to rock shrimp pozole verde to a half-dozen fish preparations under the heading "Fresh and Simple." Bold treading for a man who just one hour before he looked at the Perla's menu mockup had said, "I love barbecue and Mexican food probably more than anything else in life." But seafood is hardly an alien concept for McGuire and Moorman at Lamberts, where scallops, salmon and oysters are routine guests, and for which the men had dressed fleshy chunks of monkfish and a whole octopus that same morning.

McGuire said the idea behind Perla's is part South Congress Avenue hangout, part "best casual seafood restaurant in town," along the lines of New York City spot Mary's Fish Camp (whose Web site declares "as far as protein goes, we're full-tilt fish") and Bryan Caswell's Reef in Houston, which the Houston Press declared that city's best restaurant in 2008. And the custom, flowing script of the Perla's logo at Butler's studio has a big-city feel, evoking the hand-lettering on a vintage yacht, or at least a mod magazine devoted to vintage yachts. An older version of the design keyed on old-school surfing longboards, with bold stripes in a mix of hot and cool colors. But McGuire had steered the look toward a simpler sand-and-water approach. But even that evolved during the meeting with Butler, who said McGuire has a rare conceptual gift.

"He's one of the few clients I've worked with who has eidetic vision, who can see a concept in his mind before it hits the paper," Butler says.

The clock is ticking, though. Before what McGuire hopes will be an April opening for Perla's, he has to make some choices. The placement of "starters" and "mains" and prices on the lunch and dinner menus, for example, not to mention the final size. "Is this big menu obnoxious?" he asks. Then there's the sign and the trim around the sign, business cards, a Web address, busboy T-shirts, matchbooks, coasters. They talk about fabricating steel for a screened-in porch at Perla's. McGuire has his own steel guy, Ed Barbee. Baseball hats? Furniture? He has guys for that, too. He's Tony Soprano over there, running a restaurant business.

And like any connected guy, McGuire likes to keep things local. Lamberts is a local operation, from its home in the old J.P. Schneider & Bros. building at Second and Guadalupe streets to its booking of Austin bands upstairs to the hiring of sign-painting icon Greg Jones, the bearded guru of Chuy's fame who comes in periodically to hand-letter the chalkboard menus above the kitchen. Married to his work but single otherwise, McGuire even lives just across the street from the place in the downtown AMLI apartment development.

Staying local is nothing new to the native Austinite, who graduated from Austin High School in 2000 and studied economics and business at the University of Texas before bolting in 2003 to embrace the restaurant business full time.

His interest in cooking started early. "My mom was macrobiotic when I was growing up, so if I wanted to eat, I had to cook it myself," McGuire says. It's hard to tell if he's joking.

At 16, he started working kitchen prep in the summer for Lou Lambert's Liberty Catering, the beginning of a long career stretch with Lambert that ran through the pizza spot Liberty Pie to the old Lambert's restaurant on South Congress Avenue to a move to Houston in 2003 and later to San Antonio to work with Lambert managing food operations for Crestline Hotels and Resorts.

McGuire, who cooked in and ran huge hotel kitchens and other operations for Crestline, said he grew weary of the corporate environment and in 2005 moved back to Austin. Right away, entrepreneur Michael Terrazas hired McGuire to work at his Starlite restaurant. During that one-year stretch at Starlite, and with Lambert's blessing, McGuire wrote the business plan for Lamberts Downtown Barbecue. With Terrazas and Lambert, McGuire teamed with Moorman and music booker and high school friend Will Bridges to raise funds and secure permits to put their "fancy barbecue" joint in the Schneider building. Lambert is no longer an active presence at the restaurant, outside of licensing his name, but he clearly left McGuire with a wider sense of the restaurant business.

But why so many new ventures now, when restaurant obituaries could have their own section in the newspaper? The way McGuire sees it, a closure for one person is an open building for another, and good talent needs somewhere to go. And Lamberts has taught him something about risk: "When we opened Lamberts, people were like, `Fancy barbecue? Who do they think they are?' Everybody wants to hate it for the first 18 months. If you survive that, then they come around."

For the near future - besides keeping an eye on Malverde and La Condesa, where recent New York star René Ortiz is handling the cooking - McGuire said he and Moorman plan to split their cooking time between Lamberts and Perla's when the new place opens. But their fancy-barbecue firstborn will always hold a special place, McGuire says. "This one's kind of our baby."

msutter@statesman.com; 912-5902

Larry McGuire's world

• Chef and co-owner (with chef Tom Moorman Jr., businessman Michael Terrazas, chef Lou Lambert and music promoter Will Bridges) of Lamberts Downtown Barbecue (401 W. Second St. 494-1500, www.lambertsaustin.com). Opened in December 2006.

• Partnership in La Condesa, an interior Mexican restaurant at 400-A W. Second St. 499-0300, www.lacondesaaustin.com. Opened in February.

• Partnership in Malverde, a cocktail lounge above La Condesa. www.malverdeaustin.com. Opened in February.

• Chef and co-owner (with Moorman and Continental Club owner Steve Wertheimer) of Perla's, a seafood and oyster bar at the former site of Mars restaurant at 1400 S. Congress Ave. Scheduled to open in April.