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LOAD-DATE: July 9, 2008
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Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

602 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 9, 2008 Wednesday

Late Edition - Final

A Road Rally for the Rich and Richer
BYLINE: By MICHAEL BRICK
SECTION: Section D; Column 0; Sports Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1869 words
DATELINE: SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.
They came to the desert to drive. They turned loose the high-octane gasoline power of thousands of horses spread across half a hundred internal combustion engines to cover 2,925 miles of interstate highways, switchbacks and lonesome dirt places of the calcifying country in seven days for no reason better than to drive.

Two by two, the drivers came from Dallas, Los Angeles, Vancouver, British Columbia, and parts removed, bird-dogging the fumes of the great American road rally a generation past its prime, lining an arc through the latter-day landscape of ski resorts, American Indian casinos and trailer parks that connected the majestic cities of the West.

They called this recent motor-sports rally the Bullrun, not for the San Fermin festival of Pamplona nor the Cannonball Runs of old, but rather for the Wall Street term for a surging stock market. They cast themselves as entrepreneurs, risk-takers and traveling salesmen bound by some unspoken calling to make the country grow and, once a year, to inspect it from the road.

Together they arrived as a caravan of cross-promotion in machines festooned with a dozen logos. Cameras captured their every maneuver for international television, where they knew the wrecking of a heavily branded, $100,000 sports car would look ugly in any language.

''In the '70s, sex was safe and racing was dangerous -- as opposed to now, when sex is dangerous and racing is safe,'' said Nicholas Frankl, 36, a driver whose father rode the Cannonball Run popularized in Hollywood films.

The road had been made dangerous, they said, not by serious drivers but by a lazy car culture of suburban bargain-takers yammering into their cellphones, screening their onboard DVDs, appeasing their offspring, applying their lip varnish and slurping their syrupy coffee concoctions.

The Bullrun drivers waved at those people from the open tops of their muscle cars as they passed at speeds of 80, 130 or even 160 miles an hour, carefully choosing their velocity by the traffic, the grade of the roadway and the reading of the radar detector. Time and again they were stopped, interrogated, ticketed and sometimes arrested. But no matter what, they drove on.

The itinerary for the event -- officially not a race, although some drivers treat it as one -- was prescribed by two British cousins: Andrew Duncan, a finance executive, and David Green, a television producer. Spending more than $1 million to book five-star hotels, hold parties, lure celebrities and coordinate a transcontinental jaunt, Duncan and Green had inaugurated the Bullrun in 2004 as a ''luxury lifestyle rally.''

In the intervening years they had positioned their annual jaunt as the centerpiece of a promotional forum that included television shows broadcast overseas and a separate cable series shown in the United States. They had attracted sponsorship from glossy magazines, makers of energy drinks and all corners of the auto after-market, an industry term for rims, glow-lights and anything else sold to fancy up a factory-made car.

''This is what's happening these days,'' Duncan said. ''People's cars are becoming an extension of their personality, how they identify themselves as part of a community.''

By that logic, the organizers had found it unnecessary to pay their drivers. To the contrary, they had succeeded in charging a $20,000 entry fee, minus discounts for returning participants and marketing partners. Aside from drawing revenue, the high cost of entry had served to eliminate participants lacking the good sense of self-preservation.

''Drivers can get overzealous,'' Duncan said, ''but we make it very clear to them that if we feel they're getting dangerous, we'll throw them off the event.''

Old-Fashioned Road Rally

Affording themselves some plausible deniability, the organizers had plotted a course navigable within the posted speed limits. They had designed a series of cards to direct the drivers on an outsized scavenger hunt through checkpoints that included Big Sky, Mont.; Aspen, Colo.; Park City, Utah; Las Vegas; Los Angeles and Tucson before doubling back slightly to the finish line here.

And they had done all this at a time ripe for testing the relevance of the old-fashioned road rally. Like some relic from the heyday of Santana, Evel Knievel and Daisy Duke, the notion of rolling across America like bats out of hell had suffered from the advent of speed traps, vehicles the size of tanks and $5 premium gasoline. Even speedway racing had been losing its audience.

Against this backdrop, the drivers set out from the closed streets of Calgary, Alberta, on the summer solstice, 55 teams of two piloting customized Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Porsches and still more exotic conveyances.

Among them was Richard R. Rawlings, a flamboyant Texan who had stirred controversy by claiming to have broken the cross-country speed record in an earlier rally. There was Chris Smith, a towering, bald Londoner in a 2004 Le Mans Special Edition Corvette, flying the colors of New Orleans in tribute to a friend.

''Who wants to own a muscle car, a Ferrari or a Lamborghini, and drive them at the speed limit?'' Smith asked.

There was Gautham Sastri, a software executive driving a 2009 Aston-Martin known as the James Bond car. There was Rachel Deadman, a onetime model from New Zealand looking like trouble in flip-flops at the controls of her black Lamborghini.

''All in the name of good fun,'' said Deadman, who had ended her modeling career to pursue other thrills because ''my husband doesn't like me prancing about in my knickers anymore.''

There was the quiet reformer, Matt Weekly, a cardiologist from Colorado following the others across the most punishing terrain in his Smart Car. And there was the court jester, Mitchell Gordon, a self-styled ''crazy Aussie'' in a bolo tie and a 10-gallon hat, hauling his beer cooler in a convertible pink Cadillac outfitted with enormous steer antlers, leis on the headrests, a phony radar detector forged from a Budweiser can and water guns in place of a working air-conditioner.

Finding it mechanically impossible to exceed the speed limit, Gordon held little hope of victory, a shortfall he compensated for by throwing a wedding for his passengers on the way through Nevada.

''We've got wind in our hair, we're covered with water,'' Gordon said. ''We might as well be at home yacht racing.''

For the drivers, bragging rights were at stake at each checkpoint. Bringing up the rear in an air-conditioned RV was a contingent of young women from Santa Barbara, Calif., unreformed flirts attired in willowy cocktail dresses at all hours.

After five days of travel, this remarkable convoy crawled along Sunset Boulevard toward a gala in West Hollywood. The drivers parked alongside a red carpet, admired dripping ice sculptures and posed for crews representing outfits that included Wealth TV.

''Give me some craziness!'' one cameraman suggested. As dance music and Japanese beer primed the crowd, publicists worried over the guest list. The comedian Bill Maher made an appearance at the end of the night. Then the party ended. The next morning, the drivers and camera operators and young women in cocktail dresses climbed back into their vehicles for the long straightaway to Tucson.

J. P. Clinging, 36, a professional driver for the Spyker automotive company of the Netherlands, jockeyed a black C8 Spyder convertible with a turned aluminum dashboard, exposed gear linkage and inboard shock absorbers. Among 76 of its kind in the United States, the car had no radio, no vanity mirror and no distractions. Its speedometer topped out at 220 m.p.h.

Inside the cockpit, Clinging seemed to embody a sort of worldliness absent from the road rallies of earlier times. Here he was in California, an Irishman married to a Laotian woman living in Canada hired to ride the American roads for a Dutch company.

Sun, Suburbs and Pictures

A 10-and-2 style driver who had grown disenchanted with the racing business, Clinging executed the roadster's three-step ignition sequence, accepted cheek kisses from the young women and roared onto State Route 91. He took the machine dancing through traffic at the speed limit as the sun burned through the morning haze. Out in the suburbs, women took pictures from the next lane.

''I'd like to think they're looking at me,'' Clinging said. ''But that's just me fooling myself.''

At the day's first checkpoint, a well-known body shop in Corona, Calif., inflatable banners greeted the drivers. Workers waxed the cars. Energy drinks were dispensed by young women. Everything was on display by brand, down to the pink spray bottles of cleaning liquid.

The drivers peeled out in a thunderous display of machismo and exhaust. They followed the path of freight trains heading east, quitting the tall palm trees and shopping centers of the exurbs for the parched foothills of the San Gabriel Valley. The thermometer measured 108 degrees.

''I love cars,'' Clinging said. ''All kinds of cars. Old ones, new ones, beat-up ones. I always wonder about where a car's been, the people who were in them. Did that minivan take a baby home from the hospital?''

The sun fell all pink and orange on the mesas of the Harquahala Valley, and the road led straight to Tucson. Outside the next checkpoint, a resort hotel, the Corvette team was already celebrating.

''We came in first,'' said Smith, the Corvette driver, ''so I'm buying the beers.''

'No Cops, Open Roads'

The next morning the cars massed in the parking lot for the final stretch. Vacationers stared. Nicholas and Annabelle Frankl, British twins born to a Cannonball Run driver, set out in a Mitsubishi Lancer with custom tires and a Union Jack decal. As Nicholas pulled out of the parking lot, Annabelle took destination instructions from an organizer and started plotting a short cut. With a pack of other showboat cars leading the way, the Frankls were expecting a significant police presence.

Burdened by a leaking tire, they stopped to fill the tank, make repairs and buy gifts at a state prison store. They missed the lunch checkpoint. To compensate, they cut loose on the winding Apache Trail through the Superstition Mountains, earning a bonus medal from a rally worker waiting in Tortilla Flat. Making up for lost time, Nicholas accelerated past 130 m.p.h. across a two-lane highway.

''That's the way we like to drive,'' he said. ''No cops, open roads, beautiful scenery.''

Still, the Frankls were among the last to arrive at the penultimate checkpoint, Firebird International Raceway in Chandler, Ariz. In the heat of the afternoon, the drivers challenged one another on the track while the young women called ahead to the hotel for spa treatments.

At 4:30, the cars lined up three rows deep, covered in dirt, engines idling, brake lights glowing red. Cameras panned the scene. On a signal, the drivers blew their horns and made for the city through rush-hour traffic. Passing day labor centers, retirement homes and commuters craning into rear-view mirrors, they announced their arrival in raucous splendor on Main Street, where they smiled for the cameras as the sickly sweet smell of gasoline burned off under the desert sun.

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LOAD-DATE: July 9, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Race over, time to party: A Bullrun car, above, outside Barcelona, a restaurant and nightclub in Scottsdale, Ariz., where rally drivers and crews held a final party on June 27. The race started in Calgary, Alberta, on June 20.(PHOTOGRAPHS BY LAURA SEGALL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

The finish line in Scottsdale, Ariz., the end of the 2,925-mile, seven-day road rally over Interstates, switchbacks and dirt roads.

Michelle LaFrance, above at far left, and Chelsea Cordner of Santa Monica, Calif., drove hard but stayed in five-star hotels along the route. The rally attracted thrill seekers, above right, at the end of what organizers called a ''luxury lifestyle rally.''(PHOTOGRAPHS BY LAURA SEGALL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. D3)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

603 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 9, 2008 Wednesday

Late Edition - Final

EMC Replaces the Chief and Co-Founder of VMware, Silencing Talk of a Spinoff
BYLINE: By STEVE LOHR
SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 5
LENGTH: 742 words
For the last month, several reports from Wall Street analysts have debated whether EMC, the big computer storage company, would sell off its 85 percent stake in its crown jewel, VMware, a fast-growing software star.

EMC seems to have given its answer with a dramatic gesture on Tuesday. It fired VMware's chief executive and co-founder, Diane Greene. She is being replaced by Paul Maritz, a former senior executive at Microsoft who joined EMC this year when it bought his Web start-up.

Ms. Greene was fired after she refused to resign or take another position at VMware, according to a VMware manager who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

The point of conflict, the person said, was that Ms. Greene had been pushing hard for VMware to be spun off early next year. After five years of ownership, a subsidiary can be sold off in an essentially tax-free transaction. EMC bought VMware for $635 million in cash in December 2003.

A spinoff was the preferred option on Wall Street, where some analysts suggested that EMC might be pressured by shareholders to do so. In a report last month, A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, wrote: ''We believe an activist shareholder could pressure EMC management to completely spin off VMware.''

After the announcement that Ms. Greene had been ousted, VMware shares fell 24 percent to $40.19, down $13. EMC shares dropped nearly 12 percent on the news, or $1.75, closing at $13.39.

In addition to the management change, the VMware statement also said that it expected the company's revenue growth for 2008 to be ''modestly below'' its previous guidance of 50 percent -- perhaps an indication, some analysts said, that VMware was slipping in its execution.

In an interview, Joseph M. Tucci, EMC's chief executive, said EMC had ''no plan to change the relationship with VMware.'' Mr. Tucci, who is also chairman of VMware's board, said VMware would continue to operate independently from EMC, with its own sales force, for example.

Mr. Tucci said that the issue of spinning off VMware had ''nothing to do'' with Ms. Greene's being replaced. Ms. Greene could not be reached for comment.

Mr. Tucci praised Mr. Maritz as an executive with the background and skills needed to ''lead VMware to its next stage of growth and development.'' Last year, VMware's revenue increased 88 percent to $1.33 billion, while its profit more than doubled to $218 million.

In his 14 years at Microsoft, Mr. Maritz led product development and marketing groups including Windows, rising into the upper tier of management. When he left in 2000, Mr. Maritz was effectively the No. 3 executive at Microsoft, behind Bill Gates and Steven A. Ballmer.

In an interview, Mr. Martiz called VMware a company with ''great fundamentals'' in terms of its products, technology and people. Yet as a company that now has more than 5,000 employees and is growing rapidly, management, he said, could benefit from the ''the experience that comes from having seen this movie before,'' as he did during Microsoft's high-growth years.

VMware, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is the clear leader in so-called virtual machine software that allows a computer to run different operating systems, or several versions of the same operating system, at the same time.

In corporate data centers, this means more chores can be juggled on fewer computers, reducing spending on hardware, electricity and maintenance. Microsoft's Windows and the open-source operating system Linux run on VMware's virtual machine software.

Microsoft last month introduced its own virtual machine software, and it will fold it into future versions of its Windows server software, as it did on the desktop by bundling Internet browsing software into Windows.

VMware, according to industry analysts, is facing the challenge of moving successfully beyond its pioneering entrepreneurial stage. ''One way or another, they were going to bring in new management,'' said Thomas Bittman, an analyst for Gartner, a market research firm. ''But I am surprised Diane Greene left, instead of putting people under her or around her.''

With the sharp drop in VMware's stock price, the financial appeal of a spinoff is more ''muted,'' according to Mr. Sacconaghi of Bernstein. Before the drop, VMware's market capitalization was about $20 billion, but at the market close on Tuesday the company's value had dropped by nearly $5 billion.
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LOAD-DATE: July 9, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Diane Greene, the chief executive of VMware, a business software maker, was replaced by Paul Maritz, an ex-Microsoft executive.(PHOTOGRAPH BY BRENDAN MCDERMID/REUTERS)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

604 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 9, 2008 Wednesday

Correction Appended

Late Edition - Final
Restless Pioneers, Seeding Brooklyn
BYLINE: By DONALD G. MCNEIL JR
SECTION: Section F; Column 0; Dining In, Dining Out / Style Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1865 words
WITH a trunk full of cod, brisket, blackberries, arugula and antifreeze, Alan Harding drives down Smith Street, past American Apparel, past the Michelin-starred restaurant Saul and past Patois, the bistro he helped open 11 years ago.

Back then the neighborhood was a more likely destination for drug deals than dinner. Patois, where he was the chef, is often credited with seeding the culinary flowering of Brooklyn.

Does he ever quietly congratulate himself and say, Hey, I made this street?

''Naw,'' he answers with gruff bravado. ''If we hadn't done it, somebody else would have. But I just wish they'd thank us instead of chasing us through the streets with pitchforks.''

The ''we'' is himself and his partners in restaurant genesis, Jim Mamary, 49, and, to a lesser extent, Jim's brother Paul, 48. As a shifting team often with other investors and chefs, they have opened more than a dozen Brooklyn restaurants. Some have tablecloths onto which servers place dishes like seared skate with brown butter. Others seem banged together with driftwood in parking lots, and slosh out Sixpoint Ale and hot dogs.

The ungrateful ''they'' are Brooklynites who've come to see Harding-Mamary creations as a chain, where you can get it venti in a ramekin with creme fraiche or slushed with guava and salt on the rim. The ones with pitchforks are residents near Union and Hoyt Streets, one block off Smith, trying to stop Mr. Mamary's Black Mountain Wine House from adding an oyster bar.

Mr. Harding, 46, cooks at Black Mountain, but is not a partner. In a reflection of local ill will, he sometimes wears a white coat reading: ''I Am Not the Owner.''

If Brooklyn is a frontier, where a free-ranging chef can throw down his bag of knives, stake out a liquor license and fillet the roaming buffalo -- or at least a little brisket -- then the frontier is beginning to close. It's not as much fun, and 10 times as stressful as it once was.

Not that there aren't new Dakotas to explore. Neighborhoods with few restaurants for the growing gentry seem grateful when they arrive.

Jim Mamary just opened a French bistro, Pomme de Terre, 12 blocks south of Prospect Park in a former bodega. The first entry on a Ditmas Park blog after plans for the restaurant were announced was: ''Yaaaay! Good news! My hubby and I have been dying for this place to open. We can't wait! Yum yum yum.''

Cafe Enduro, a Mexican cantina he opened two years ago in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, east of the park, is beloved by locals.

But from Brooklyn Heights to Smith Street to Park Slope, where rents have soared and streets are growing more crowded, resentment is keen.

The oyster bar struggle involves decades-old zoning and dueling predictions over whether it will attract a few discreet slurpers of Sancerre and Wellfleets or hordes of smoking and retching yobbos to a quiet street.

Delays and legal fees have cost $20,000. Community board hearings have been nasty. And the partners have been soured by rants on Carroll Gardens blogs, particularly one calling Jim Mamary an ''opportunistic idiot'' and ''slob'' who ''ruined my neighborhood.''

Even if he gets a liquor license, Mr. Mamary said, ''I'd never open another place on Hoyt.''

Mr. Harding, more blunt about the complaints, wants to see if he can seek revenge by keeping chickens in the wine bar's yard. ''We'll give eggs to orphans,'' he said. ''We'll have a petting zoo.''

More conciliatory, Mr. Mamary waves his hand as if to calm down his friend and cautions, ''I'm not sure we want to say that.''

They have been partners since 1997, when Mr. Mamary, who grew up in Bay Ridge and had already owned several restaurants, had a falling out with his chef at Sanzin and 131 Duane Street.

He asked Mr. Harding, who had cooked haute health food at Nosmo King and Olde New York-style oyster stew and pork chops at 9 Jones Street, to take over until he could find buyers. Mr. Harding agreed on the condition that the Mamarys help him open a place in Brooklyn.

At the time, Smith Street was ''a horror show, a place parents would tell their kids not to walk down,'' Mr. Mamary said. Subway work made it an open trench and drug gangs had been warring in the nearby projects.

But the rent was $900, and they spotted Saabs and Prada bags in the street.

At first, Patois had so few competitors that people were willing to wait two hours on the wooden deck out back, nursing glasses of wine. In winter, they had a wood-burning stove there, under a tent.

''If you tried that nowadays they'd take you away in cuffs,'' Mr. Mamary said. City inspectors are tougher, and the fines higher. So are the rents -- that $900 space would now cost about $5,000.

Now, ''we're the Drew Nieporents of Brooklyn,'' he joked, referring to the man who enlivened once-desolate TriBeCa with restaurants like Montrachet, Nobu and Tribeca Grill. ''The second tier. But we're under the radar.''

Admittedly, there were other Brooklyn pioneers between the eras of Gage & Tollner and Harding & Mamary.

Michael Gross, for example, opened the New Prospect Cafe with partners on the fringe of Park Slope in 1983, when many other Flatbush Avenue addresses were boarded up. After a ''laid-back couple of years,'' he said in an interview from his restaurant Relish in Sparkill, N.Y., the neighborhood actually got worse because of the crack epidemic and friction between blacks and Hasidic Jews.

His window was smashed twice while people were eating, he said. He was robbed at gunpoint ''and homeless people would lay down on the banquettes and say, I'm not leaving till you give me some bread.''

He sold in 2000 because old customers had cashed out of their brownstones and his wife wanted a life outside the city. But he credited Mr. Harding and Mr. Mamary with ''raising the bar.''

The duo have opened multiple restaurants, with no set formula except low prices.

The decor is often junk-shop scrounge: old magazine pages, beer signs, stuffed deer heads. There may be a fireplace. The kitchen is often visible, but never the centerpiece, and may have no more than a couple of gas burners. Tables and chairs may be secondhand, but money goes into lights and dimmers.

Mr. Mamary is obsessive about watching every plate go out and come back. He's been known to chase a customer to the bathroom door to ask why she didn't eat her sardine. (She said, ''It had little bones in it.'')

Some projects foundered. Uncle Pho, serving Asian food, did well, then faded. They put the tiki-themed Zombie Hut in one half, then sold the other to an Indian chain.

In Red Hook, which Mr. Mamary still shuns because it has no subway, Mr. Harding opened Pioneer Bar-B-Que in 2005 and closed it in 2007.

''That's the gamble,'' Mr. Harding said, ''when you go off the grid and look for really low rent.''

By contrast, Ben Schneider, who opened the Good Fork in Red Hook with his wife, Sohui Kim, in 2006, has made it work so far.

Like Mr. Harding, he lives in Red Hook. He overestimated the number of locals who would come, he said, but survives ''because we became a destination place that people would travel for.''

''After the sun goes down in winter,'' Mr. Schneider said, ''there's not a lot of people on the street here.''

Over the years, Mr. Harding's cooking has changed too, getting relentlessly simpler and simpler.

''It's a lot of fun when you're by yourself and you have all these frilly bits and complications,'' he said. ''But if the kid cooking for youhas just graduated from cooking school and is a little shaky, you want to keep it simple.''

For example, his Gowanus Yacht Club chili recipe is canned chili, orange soda and spices, thickened with crumbled Doritos.

''You don't have to worry about cross-contamination or anything,'' he said. ''Open the can, put it together, you're good to go.''

Despite some setbacks, they are still looking. Once a neighborhood gets hot, Mr. Mamary said, ''you need to grab every space that becomes available, or somebody else moves in. It's like Coke and Pepsi.''

Ditmas Park is ''ready to pop,'' he said, and he knows about ''a diamond in the rough on Coney Island Avenue that I'd take right now, but I don't have the right guy to run it.''

Besides cheap rent, he looks for properties already zoned for commercial use with some outdoor space, far enough from churches and schools to allow a liquor license. An existing kitchen helps, as does a one-story building -- no complaining upstairs neighbors. And, since taxis shun most of Brooklyn, a subway stop.

In the future, he said, ''Crown Heights looks pretty interesting. And I like Staten Island. It's not ready for Manhattan style, but there's room for the kind of establishment we have.''

However, like a graying sodbuster, he admits he's been worn down.

Having opened a restaurant a year for almost 20 years, he said he now considers his oeuvre as more of a stock portfolio than a family of loved ones.

''I enjoy the conceptualizing, the designing, the building, the bringing it to day one,'' he said. ''I enjoy the opening. But 30 days down the road, my attention lessens. Personally, if I could just build and design and still support my family, I would never walk into another restaurant again ever. Never.''

Builders of an Empire

SINCE joining forces in 1997, Alan Harding, Jim Mamary and Paul Mamary have been involved in the following Brooklyn restaurants, singly or together, sometimes with other investors or chefs.

PATOIS (French bistro) 255 Smith Street, Boerum Hill. Opened 1997.

UNCLE PHO (Asian) 263 Smith Street, Boerum Hill. Opened 1999. One section was converted to the Zombie Hut 2002 and the remainder closed in 2003.

THE RED RAIL (American brunch) 502 Henry Street, Carroll Gardens. Opened 2000, closed 2003.

GOWANUS YACHT CLUB AND BEER GARDEN (beer and hot dogs) 323 Smith Street, Carroll Gardens. Opened 2002, summers only.

ZOMBIE HUT (exotic cocktails) 273 Smith Street, Carroll Gardens. Opened 2002 at 261 Smith Street, moved in 2004.

SCHNACK (burgers, sausages and beer) 122 Union Street, Carroll Gardens. Opened 2003, closed 2008.

UNION SMITH CAFE (American with Italian and French dishes) 305 Smith Street, Carroll Gardens. Opened 2003. Designed by Jim Mamary, who is not an owner.

PACIFICO (Mexican) 269 Pacific Street, Boerum Hill. Opened 2003.

LA ROSA & SON (pizza) 98 Smith Street, Boerum Hill. Opened in 2003; absorbed by Pacifico in 2008.

SWEETWATER (Bistro with French, Italian and Spanish accents) 105 North Sixth Street, Williamsburg. Opened 2004.

PIONEER BAR-B-QUE (Southern barbecue) 318 Van Brunt Street, Red Hook. Opened 2005, closed 2007.

GRAVY (diner) 102 Smith Street, Boerum Hill. Opened in 2005; absorbed by Trout in 2007.

CAFE ENDURO (Mexican) 51 Lincoln Road, Prospect-Lefferts Gardens. Opened 2006.

THE FARM ON ADDERLEY (seasonal American) 1108 Cortelyou Road, Ditmas Park. Opened in 2006 by Jim Mamary and Mr. Harding, who later sold their ownership stake.

TROUT (seafood) 269 Pacific Street, Boerum Hill. Opened 2007.

BLACK MOUNTAIN WINE HOUSE (wine bar) 415 Union Street, Carroll Gardens. Opened in 2007.

POMME DE TERRE (French bistro) 1301 Newkirk Avenue, Ditmas Park. Opened in 2008.