This is the full, speaker‑labeled transcript of Restaurant Technology Guys episode 352, California Pizza Kitchen Scaled on Culture — Rick Rosenfield. Jeremy Julian talks with Rick Rosenfield, co‑founder of California Pizza Kitchen and author of The California Pizza Kitchen Story: How Two Federal Prosecutors Changed the Way America Eats Pizza.
Episode summary
Rick Rosenfield and his law partner Larry Flax were federal prosecutors turned criminal defense attorneys when they signed a personally guaranteed lease in Beverly Hills with no name, no menu and no restaurant experience — funded by a quarter of a million dollars borrowed against their law practice. The chef they hired away from Spago lasted about a month. What survived him was barbecue chicken pizza, and Rick’s morning read of the Remanco sales printout told him everything he needed to know: of roughly 200 pizzas sold in a night, about 150 were barbecue chicken. In this conversation Rick walks Jeremy Julian through how California Pizza Kitchen defined California‑style pizza, why the company put its restaurants inside the best malls in America rather than freestanding boxes, how the open kitchen came out of a pasta cafeteria in Glendale and a Chinese restaurant called Chin Chin, and where the term “wood fired pizza” came from. The back half is the part Rick calls his favorite topic: ROCK — respect, opportunity, communication, kindness — the culture he and Larry built in 1985 to break down the front‑of‑house and back‑of‑house divide, and the reason a company that reached 14,000 employees could scale from Beverly Hills to Honolulu without losing itself.
Jump to a section
- Who Rick Rosenfield Is and How California Pizza Kitchen Started (00:18)
- From Federal Prosecutors to a Beverly Hills Lease With No Name and No Menu (02:55)
- How Barbecue Chicken Pizza Created a New Category (07:13)
- Why CPK Put Its Restaurants in the Best Malls in America (10:49)
- What the Nightly Sales Report Told Rick About What America Wanted (13:40)
- How CPK Turned Its Pizza Flavors Into Signature Salads (19:10)
- The Pasta Cafeteria That Became CPK’s Open Kitchen (22:49)
- What an Open Kitchen Demands of a Restaurant Team (28:01)
- ROCK: The Culture Rick Says Made CPK Scalable (29:02)
- Why “Nobody Will Ever Care Like Me” Is the Wrong Reason Not to Expand (36:39)
- Why Rick Wrote The California Pizza Kitchen Story (37:55)
- The Egg Salad Pizza, and Where to Find the Book (41:22)
Who Rick Rosenfield Is and How California Pizza Kitchen Started (00:18)
Jeremy Julian: Today’s episode is brought to you by Restaurant Technologies Incorporated. They are the leading automation for cooking oil system out there in the market. If you’re not familiar with them, they’ve been on the show a few times to share some of the unique and cool things they continue to do with oil management. I recently had their newly appointed CEO on the show, and they built an end-to-end closed loop automated oil management system that delivers, monitors, filters, collects and recycles your cooking oil. It sounds like they do a ton, but it really is a cool system that I think everybody should be considering looking at. They clean up one of the dirtiest and dangerous jobs in your kitchen. So if you haven’t heard of them, I would encourage you to check them out. rti-inc.com, or you can call them at 888-779-5314. They’ve helped over 50,000 customers in the United States with their cooking oil. So clearly they are doing something right. And now back to the episode. Welcome back to the Restaurant Technology Guys Podcast. I thank everyone out there for joining us today, and you’ll get to hear the excitement of my voice here in a few minutes. Rick and I were talking before hitting the record button. But I’m super excited to talk to one of the co-founders of — genuinely, and I’m not saying this because he’s on the call — one of my favorite brands that I’ve ever been to. So, Rick, why don’t you introduce yourself to our listeners real quick? And anybody that’s watching on video, they can see over your left shoulder the book that you wrote and kind of what we’re going to be talking about. But who is Rick? Talk a little bit about where you came from, and what our topic is for today.
Rick Rosenfield: So yeah, I’m Rick Rosenfield and I’m co-founder of California Pizza Kitchen, along with my great friend and law partner Larry Flax. And we started CPK forty-one years ago in Beverly Hills, after being federal prosecutors. The title is The California Pizza Kitchen Story: How Two Federal Prosecutors Changed the Way America Eats Pizza. And I think that does say it all. It’s not a very humble title, but I believe it’s a truthful title.
Jeremy Julian: Yeah, so talk to me a little bit, just because I think it’s interesting. And again, I have studied the CPK story and I have not yet had a chance to read the book. I’ll have to pick it up — and any longtime listeners know I’m a huge book guy. But where do you come from law to deciding that you’re going to start a very unique brand that really sets some trends and moved the industry in ways that didn’t exist prior to you guys starting the brand?
From Federal Prosecutors to a Beverly Hills Lease With No Name and No Menu (02:55)
Rick Rosenfield: Well, Larry and I, after meeting as federal prosecutors, were criminal defense attorneys for twelve or thirteen years, but we always had one restaurant idea or another. We actually met Tony Roma’s when he had one unit, but he had already sold out to Clint Murchison, who owned the Dallas Cowboys. We approached Clint Murchison through an intermediary and said, we would like to be franchisees. And he turned us down and said he didn’t want any lawyers as franchisees. Years later I was speaking at a national conference, on a panel, and Clint Murchison’s son came up to me afterwards and said, I think dad made a mistake. Then we were going to do a rib concept. Then something else. But it actually has to do with the fact that I was defending a union boss in Miami and traveling back and forth from LA to Miami, and we became friends with a hotelier, Burton Goldberg, who owned the Mutiny at Sailboat Bay, which is quite famous — or infamous, depending on your point of view. And we started creating menu items for him, and then Burton sold out. This is in the book, and how it starts, but I think it’s how we got there. And Burton became a really close friend, and he invited my wife and I, and Larry, to Saint Tropez for the summer where he had rented a villa. I said, we can’t go, Burton. We’re going to trial. And he said, you chicken lawyers — are you going to practice law your whole life? Or are you going to go do what you want to do? And he kept pushing, and we went to that trial and came back from the trial and said, you know what? We’re going to do it. But now getting to the real relevant part: at that moment there was an emerging style of pizza called California style pizza. It was created by Chez Panisse in Berkeley, by Alice Waters, and she started with goat cheese and fresh vegetables, this idea of a single serving pizza. And then Wolfgang Puck brought it down to celebrities with Spago, and it was duck sausage pizza and smoked salmon pizza — they called it Jewish pizza. And that was the state of California style pizza. Pre-CPK, pre-barbecue chicken, right? So we liked that idea. We thought, there’s a lot you can do with that concept. And we started developing it in our mind. It literally happened in one day. And we just said, let’s do it. So we ended up signing the lease. We had no name, no menu, no anything, no experience, signed the lease in Beverly Hills, personal guarantees, and borrowed a quarter of a million dollars from the bank on our law practice, and then tried to figure out the concept. And we ended up hiring Wolfgang Puck’s original pizza chef, who had left, and he created the original menu for us. It was rabbit sausage and lamb sausage and radicchio, pine nut and grape leaves — but barbecue chicken pizza.
Jeremy Julian: Which really I think is the part that I love — I think you guys created that category. For those that are less familiar, Spago and your guys’ original store in Beverly Hills are not super far from each other. Is that a fair statement? So you guys are kind of in this — and I guess from my perspective, and again, many of the listeners will know I grew up in Southern California. So for me, I got to watch you guys continue to build the brand and create things that didn’t exist. The part, Rick, that I’d love for you to talk a little bit about is how do you get this super high-end — Chez Panisse is not something that you just kind of walk into in shorts and a t-shirt type of place, nor is Spago. But you really were able to take the brand and take the product and normalize it to everyday Americans. Talk me through that journey, because you almost had to educate America on the fact that you can get to this level, and you really created almost a genre of dining that was very unique.
How Barbecue Chicken Pizza Created a New Category (07:13)
Rick Rosenfield: Well, thank you. It was the genre of dining. The barbecue chicken pizza was the hook. So that chef only lasted a month or so. We got along like oil and water. He thought you lawyers should stay out of the restaurant and leave it to him, and that was never our plan. He lasted a month. Now here we were on our own. But he had brought in a guy from Spago, Gary Beauregard, who could run the kitchen. From there, the concept from the beginning, before we had barbecue chicken pizza, was we wanted to create an upscale family restaurant where kids and parents could agree to go. I had a three-year-old daughter in Beverly Hills and a 15-year-old son. And where do you go that the parents want to go to and the kids? So if you remember Hamburger Hamlet — in our mind it was Hamburger Hamlet without the bar and the whole thing, but that concept. I would have lunch at Hamburger Hamlet in Century City where our law office was, and I’d go home and take my wife and family to dinner at the Beverly Hills Hamburger Hamlet. That was the concept. And we said, every upscale community in America needs a restaurant like that. So we created it in that friendly way. And then the other thing we did from the beginning is we said, we don’t want to be a bar. We want a place that women are comfortable. So let’s do a food counter but not make a bar. It’s a place where a woman can come in, get a salad, a pizza, and not feel intimidated. Very welcoming. But in that growth — remember, our second location was Beverly Center, the vertical shopping mall, 1.8 miles away. Third one was Topanga Plaza in the valley next to Nordstrom. And then Lenox Square in Atlanta was coming for us. And Lenox was the premier mall in the southeast. And they gave us literally a site in the center of the mall with three levels. Centre Court at Wimbledon is the way I described it: open kitchen, no walls, yellow smokestacks straight up the center and out the top of the mall. And people could look down at us. And all of that triggered what we said: let’s put these in the best shopping centers in America. And from there we created relationships with the mall developers — with Simon and Taubman and General Growth. And in our earlier talk before we got on, you mentioned the Mirage in Vegas. So Steve Wynn actually became our biggest investor when we had one restaurant, before the second one. And when he built the Mirage, he said, make me a franchisee. Well, we didn’t want to franchise domestically. But Steve Wynn wanted to be a franchisee in the Mirage, which at the time was the most expensive hotel in the world. So we made that exception. That Mirage restaurant became a billboard — I call it a billboard that paid us.
Jeremy Julian: It was packed. I remember growing up, every time I went to Vegas, it was like you were waiting forever to get into CPK when you were out there.
Why CPK Put Its Restaurants in the Best Malls in America (10:49)
Rick Rosenfield: There were two lines, one VIP line and one regular line. They’d take one from one line and one from the other. But let’s put that into the broader strategy. Here we had this great platform and hook that we were doing, and we got rid of that chef because — in our view, and I don’t want to sound too egotistical about it — we concluded pretty early that there was no national market for Spago pizzas. Nobody cares about duck sausage pizza or smoked salmon pizza. They care about barbecue chicken pizza or Thai chicken pizza or BLT, and they care about mushroom, pepperoni and sausage and traditional cheese. So we found out we were like Baskin-Robbins, where their Jamoca almond fudge was number one, but two, three, and four were vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate. So Larry and I did it both ways. We wanted traditional pizzas and we wanted the others — we never liked the word gourmet. We thought of things that people could identify with, that you just hadn’t tasted on a pizza before. But more importantly, we saw this opportunity early for upscale shopping centers. And that became a business. We claimed what the restaurants were going to be, and the Taubman company disputed it — their view was that a restaurant is just a restaurant. We said, no, this is going to be the future. Restaurants are going to be the mini anchors of the future. Of course, we didn’t predict the demise of the big anchors.
Jeremy Julian: You guys were anchoring a lot of those big shopping centers. You were a draw.
Rick Rosenfield: But then we were there when everybody shifted, which made sense to us — to lifestyle centers, with clusters of restaurants. But if you think about it historically, CPK, P.F. Chang’s, Cheesecake Factory, we all did that ourselves. So I really never thought of them as competitors. I’d say we were sort of the first out there, then they would come to our best locations, and then we would return the favor and know where they’re doing well.
Jeremy Julian: Well, I joke about it. We do business with Cheesecake Factory, twenty plus years, and I tease about it. It’s like you always see at the malls, there’s a CPK, there’s a P.F. Chang’s, and there’s a Cheesecake — at the biggest malls in the country, right?
Rick Rosenfield: In later days I got really clever. If I didn’t know a city, I’d charter a helicopter and fly over the malls at five o’clock to see what the Cheesecake Factory parking lot looks like in one location versus the other. Get the traffic.
What the Nightly Sales Report Told Rick About What America Wanted (13:40)
Jeremy Julian: Well, Rick, talk to me a little bit about introducing this upscale casual, because you guys were such an innovator. And I know the first time I heard of barbecue chicken on a pizza, it kind of shook me. And again, this is going back what, 40 years? But I remember going, this is really an interesting concept. And you talk about Thai chicken pizza and BLT, and there’s such unique — I get that they’re not unique flavors. Obviously you’ve had barbecue chicken all over the place. You’ve had Thai-style chicken, pad Thai type of flavors. You have them in different experiences, but then you guys use the medium of pizza to deliver that. And I guess I’d love for you to talk a little bit about how do you introduce that to people? Because at one point I heard barbecue chicken pizza was a very large percentage of the menu mix in the early days. And so I’d love for you to explain that, because I think when people see pizza they come in going, it’s sausage, it’s pepperoni, it’s cheese, it’s kind of the basics. It might be mushroom, it might be some olives, but it’s not barbecue chicken on it. And then you see it and you go, wow — and then getting somebody to taste it is always the challenge.
Rick Rosenfield: Well, it’s interesting. When we borrowed the money from the bank — so this is before we had the name, before we had a menu — I had to write a business plan. Well, I had no idea. I’m not just a lawyer, I’m a criminal lawyer. I’m a prosecutor and a defense attorney. I wasn’t a businessman, but I was a writer, and I sat down on my word processor and typed out our business plan. I said there were going to be three types of pizzas. And this is before barbecue chicken pizza — important to understand that in context. So before we had a menu, but with this idea, I wrote that California style pizza would become the third most important pizza in America, along with Chicago, where I grew up, and New York. They’re each individual styles. But I said that in the future, California style pizza would be defined by whatever California Pizza Kitchen says it is. And we ended up doing that. I didn’t know that at the time, but when we introduced barbecue chicken pizza, that was the light bulb. I lived about five blocks away and I went running every morning up at Beverly Hills High School. It was on my way, so I’d look at the Remanco printout from the night before. From a technology standpoint, I studied it to make sure a lawyer wouldn’t get ripped off by employees, and I figured that out through Remanco. But in any event, I’d look and, let’s say we sold two hundred pizzas — a hundred and fifty of them were barbecue chicken, and twenty of them were mushroom, pepperoni and sausage, and ten were traditional cheese, and then the other one was rabbit sausage, or none. I go, it’s pretty easy to understand what the world’s interested in. So that was Larry’s and my light bulb. That led to the Thai chicken pizza. Why that? For just what you described. You could identify with it. When you would go to a Thai restaurant, you would order chicken satay. When you ran out of chicken, you would take the naan and dip it in the sauce. We said, you know what? Anything that tastes good on bread should be good on a pizza with a nice crust and mozzarella. And that opened it up. Larry loved mayonnaise, so he had to get the BLT, which I don’t know if you remember it, but it went in as a cheese and tomato pizza, came out as a cheese and tomato pizza, and then it got topped with chilled chopped lettuce, mayonnaise and tomato. And now that’s evolved over the years into the California Club, which has avocado on it. So a lot of those items — my wife and I came up with the Santa Fe chicken, which had guacamole and salsa. That’s evolved into the tostada over the years. So again, the idea is things that people could identify with and taste in their minds. That’s how Larry and I would think about it: what can they identify with and taste in their minds, and would be good on a pizza? Now the one that drove Larry crazy — I’d gone out for a meeting and I came back very early. And he says, I got it, I got it, the cheeseburger pizza. So I take a bite of the cheeseburger pizza and he says, what do you think? I said, no, doesn’t work for me. Makes me want a real cheeseburger. Because now you’re looking for something else. You’re looking for this mouthfeel — the whole different thing. So that didn’t really work in my mind. But that’s the fun that we had with it. The Peking duck, which didn’t sell very well, was on the menu for years because people would love to talk about it. But it was great, right? It tastes like Peking duck. The hoisin sauce made sense for what we were trying to do.
Jeremy Julian: I’ve had that one before too. That’s so funny.
Rick Rosenfield: So CPK in March celebrated its 41st anniversary.
Jeremy Julian: So I knew it was in that forty-year time frame, because like I said, I’ve been going for a really long time.
Rick Rosenfield: And the great news is there are new owners with capital that are very committed to it. So this is fun for me, because frankly, I have not had contact in fifteen years since we sold the company — which has been a little hard for me and for Larry.
How CPK Turned Its Pizza Flavors Into Signature Salads (19:10)
Jeremy Julian: I’m sure. And especially since you guys — I mean, genuinely, and I’m not saying this just because you’re on the call — the fact that you guys created a genre of food that didn’t exist prior to you creating it forty plus years ago. Rick, talk to me a little bit about the transition. One of the other things that I always loved about CPK, and I still love about CPK, is the fact that you guys also translated a lot of those flavors to salads. For those that aren’t carb friendly, or are looking for something a little bit lighter than a pizza that day. So the barbecue chicken salad is fantastic. So is the Thai chicken salad. And I think about it — it’s fresh, it’s innovative, it’s cravable. One of the big things that I always thought about is there’s so many cravable flavors, and you almost get to the menu and go, my gosh, which one do I want today? So you guys translated a lot of those same approachable flavors from different genres over to salad. So I’d love to hear, how did you guys get there?
Rick Rosenfield: That’s a great question, because we haven’t talked about that in a long time. So the original menu, again with this chef — first of all, we had no time for salads, because we hired him about two weeks out. That’s all in the book, the problems we had with him. We had one Caesar salad and one other salad I’m forgetting. Larry and I always wanted to do salads. The famous salad — still famous today — was the La Scala Boutique Italian chopped salad. So we would always go to La Scala, but when we would add turkey to it, it was an upcharge. So I couldn’t wait to get CPK’s original Italian chopped salad on the menu. Now I have to tell you, forty-one years later, I had that for lunch yesterday. I love that salad. So we did our twist on it. Then, exactly because we were so bent on women as our customers, we evolved very early, right after we started, into expanding the salad menu. The big home run you hit upon — Larry will have to listen to this interview, because that is Larry’s home run creation. Larry loved to create. I had other hobbies. I was a golfer in particular. Larry had one hobby, and it was menu creation. And he loved to tinker. And he created both the barbecue chicken chopped, which was a complete blockbuster, and the Thai Crunch. He created that as well. But you used the term cravable. That’s how Larry and I thought about menu creation. We wanted to create cravable items — you were music to my ears, because that really is what we did. That’s how we thought about it. And we never had a chef again after the first month or two. In the history of CPK there were only three people who were ever really in charge of food service or creative development. And when Larry and I were there, we would work with them. Brian Sullivan was there thirty years, Gary Beauregard was the first fourteen years, and now Paul Pszybylski, who’s been there for eighteen years. And they all worked together each time. So the food has been very consistent for forty-one years.
Jeremy Julian: And again, to my point — cravable. It makes my mouth water. I think about it often.
Rick Rosenfield: Makes me want to go back again today, too.
The Pasta Cafeteria That Became CPK’s Open Kitchen (22:49)
Jeremy Julian: So Rick, I’m going to pivot a little bit because I want to talk about the growth of the brand. One of the things that I also found unique, and you alluded to it earlier, is your guys’ open kitchen design, which didn’t fit the normal restaurant box. When you think about when you guys created the concept, almost every, if not every single CPK I’ve ever been into has the open kitchen where you can see the staff moving around. And that was so different, especially back 41 years ago. But even today, you don’t get that in the majority of them — where you can watch the staff preparing your food in a casual dining environment. So it probably made not just the build-outs different, but also where you selected them, how the ingress and egress of the restaurant came about, and even how you staffed them. So I’d love for you to talk a little bit about that as well, Rick, because as you grow, you can’t just stick up a box like you might at McDonald’s where they all kind of look the same, regardless of what part of the country you’re in. You guys were a little bit unique about build-outs, and I thought it was a cool thing to talk through as you were scaling the concept.
Rick Rosenfield: You’ll know, as a Southern Californian, that this actually started as a pasta cafeteria. It was something my brother showed me in Chicago right before that last trial. At that time I was running marathons and carbohydrate loading was in, and this was a place where they had fresh pasta in the case — and fresh pasta was the rage in the mid eighties. And you would just go down the line, sort of like a build-your-own pizza concept today. But this was with pasta. You chose your pasta, you chose your sauce, you went down the line. I thought that was great. So we came back from our trial, called a friend of ours, Bob Mandler, who owned Chin Chin.
Jeremy Julian: Okay — love Chin Chin. The dim sum and then-some combo.
Rick Rosenfield: We used to share offices with him. He had just opened Chin Chin a year earlier. And he tells us there’s a place like that in Glendale Galleria. We go out to Glendale Galleria and we see, yep, that’s it — but everybody’s getting a slice of pizza. So, okay — let’s put pizza in the concept. Somewhere on the way back to our law office we said, no, let’s do Chin Chin. Let’s do the open kitchen. Let’s put that wood-burning oven in the center of the room. And that was the end of the pasta cafeteria. We did our casual version of Chin Chin. So as we built — second, third, fourth; the fifth was Brentwood. Sixth, we went to Honolulu, Kahala Mall. And now we had all these developers coming after us. So that drove our real estate strategy. It was completely opportunistic. Not done by businessmen, not done in spreadsheets, not done with the due diligence that you would do today — study all the demographics, look at clustering. Nope. If you offered us Prudential Center in Boston, we were there. Lenox Square in Atlanta, we were there. We were taking the best malls in the country because we were being offered them. And that was the strategy. The strategy was driven by the developers coming to us and us choosing them. We didn’t want them to be cookie cutters, but we did want — the line I use in the book, because Larry always said it — we want to own yellow. That’s one of our mantras from day one, from the day we created that original logo. And part of the fun of our story is that I created the term wood fired pizza. It did not exist. We were sitting with our logo designer, talking about it. I said, why don’t we use the term wood fired? And we put that on the original logo — CPK, the diamond — and it said wood-fired pizza. And that, by the way, created the conditions by which wood fired pizza became popular. And then our oven maker, Wood Stone in Bellingham, became the number one manufacturer of wood-burning ovens in the world, because we let them put their brand on our ovens and everybody knew where we were getting them. And then we switched to gas because it was more effective. Now they’re the largest manufacturer of gas ovens in the world. So that’s a little trivia.
Jeremy Julian: That’s really funny. I didn’t know that.
Rick Rosenfield: There’s a little more to it in the book that’s fun. They were great vendor partners as we grew. But that was our strategy. The way I think about it, it was opportunistic. When people said, are you going to Walnut Creek? Or, are we going into Northern California? I’d say: Walnut Creek, Walnut Creek, or Walnut Creek. And finally Broadway Plaza offered us a freestanding site, and we were there. So that’s how we did it — the real estate opportunities drove our decisions.
What an Open Kitchen Demands of a Restaurant Team (28:01)
Jeremy Julian: And the thing that I always love, Rick, is just how open it was — you get to see that experience. Nowadays it’s less so.
Rick Rosenfield: You know what’s not thought about — which we didn’t think about then, but we did soon thereafter? Employees love it. They’re not confined to the back kitchen. The bad news, which we did know right away, is you’re out there exposing everything to people. Therefore it’s mandatory that you be clean and the vegetables be fresh. And then in the original restaurant we had one older Italian chef who got a little crazy and threw pans across the kitchen. So there’s a bad side and a good side. I like the good side of it, and employees loved it. Imagine the guys and women who work there — they feel part of it. They’re not confined to the back kitchen.
ROCK: The Culture Rick Says Made CPK Scalable (29:02)
Jeremy Julian: And the interaction with them was always fun, especially when I would go for a business lunch and it was just myself. I’d sit up at the bar and end up talking to them. It was a great experience. Last line of thought, Rick. You talked about your guys’ growth, and a lot of restaurant brands I’ve watched over the years, they’ll typically grow — and you mentioned Chin Chin, or Hamburger Hamlet. They never really expanded beyond Southern California. They might have gotten one or two stores outside of Southern California, but then they struggled, because expanding your culture, expanding your experience beyond the four walls of where you can touch — where you were driving by or running by the store in Beverly Hills. You could see every employee every day if you wanted to. Once you get to a second store, it’s harder. A third store, harder still. And then as you get to Hawaii, you’re not on a plane to Hawaii every week to talk to that staff. You’ve got to figure it out. You guys built a very strong culture. I’ve been to the corporate headquarters of CPK a few times, and they bleed the culture. I’d love for you to talk about when that started and how you continued to grow it. Because I want restaurant operators to hear this — outside of the fact that I want them to pick up the book, I want them to hear this: you’ve got to build a strong culture before you expand outside of your core market. I’ve seen way too many restaurant brands struggle when they don’t. So why was it so important, and how did you execute it?
Rick Rosenfield: Jeremy, you just hit my favorite topic. Other than barbecue chicken pizza. You hit the topic, and you introduced it the way it should be introduced, which is: why didn’t the others do it? And the reason, in my view — think about this. We’re these lawyers, we come up with this concept, we’ve got this tiger by the tail, we open this thing. The chef is a disaster. We have to fire him within a month. Larry and my wife Esther and I sat on the floor the night we fired him in my law office, and we cried. Now we were in this business. So for the first time I realized that this is not going to be successful as a concept. It’s just a concept. And now we have this tiger by the tail. It needed to be a business. And here we had the front of the house and the back of the house, in nineteen eighty-five, hating each other. It was endemic in the industry, and let’s face it, it was cultural. The back of the house was primarily Hispanic males, and the front of the house was primarily Caucasian male and female. And they just didn’t naturally get along under the tensions of the restaurant business. We saw that and we panicked. But seriously — we didn’t define culture then. We didn’t even know the word culture. What we knew is that this was not going to work. We couldn’t be successful in one restaurant with these kinds of tensions, let alone hundreds. The way we defined it — we got everybody together and said, listen, we have to get along. CPK, we are colorblind, we are gender blind, we are religion blind, we’re education blind, we do not care what your background is. We care that you can carry our brand. So Larry and I learned to delegate. And we delegated, so this team was on fire, as you know from those early days. People loved to work for us because we fostered a culture — again, before we talked about it in those terms — where people felt part of the team and wanted to work together. And we did break down those barriers. We forced them to break down. Larry stood as an expediter — a big guy in a small restaurant — between the front of the house and the back of the house. And that’s how it started. And Esther was the hostess. So we were hands-on and we figured it out. Here’s what it evolved to, over the years: a culture we called ROCK. R‑O‑C‑K. R for respect, O for opportunity, C for communication, and K for kindness. And that’s how we evaluated everybody. And by coincidence, not by plan, we had ROCK stars. We didn’t plan that. But the issue is really not, can you talk the talk. Can you walk it? And people believed in ROCK because Larry and I believed in ROCK.
Jeremy Julian: Well, you guys fostered it and you guys grew it, and you go to the corporate headquarters, there’s a big ROCK — I mean, years ago.
Rick Rosenfield: And we insisted on kind people. We insisted on communication. Here’s the way we felt: we wanted to be around people that we like to be around. In the restaurant industry, or any business, one bad attitude makes everybody not want to come to work. We had just the opposite. And we promoted from within. When we sold the company the last time, fifteen years ago, we had 32 regional directors who had been with us an average of fourteen years. And they averaged about 36 years old. Literally. And many of them were Hispanic men who came up from the kitchen, because they had earned the respect. We were homegrown. People liked working for us. People were proud to work for us. And we trained. I did a podcast with Lydia Hu, a Fox Business analyst, a couple of weeks ago. She’s a lawyer turned news journalist. And she said, between college and law school I wanted to get a job at CPK in Boston, but I couldn’t take the time to study. And I said, it’s like a friend of mine who said his son studied harder for his finals at CPK than for his finals at Harvard. So that weeded people out. We made servers understand every single item on the menu. So only the people who were willing to put their heads into it and wanted the job badly enough were the ones that made it. So it was a self-perpetuating thing that we ultimately did call culture. It was not a mission statement. But people today still talk about ROCK. I’m on LinkedIn now and a lot of former employees — it’s a lot of fun for me to see people who worked for us so many years ago talk about how ROCK was real.
Jeremy Julian: That’s what it is, and it’s felt. I shared with you before hitting the record button: I got to spend a couple of months in the Studio City store. And you could feel the passion for the brand, you could feel the passion for the products, you could feel the passion for each other, you could feel the passion for the clientele. And having known quite a few people at CPK, you guys did a great job of creating something that was fostered and really became part of who the brand is.
Why “Nobody Will Ever Care Like Me” Is the Wrong Reason Not to Expand (36:39)
Rick Rosenfield: Jeremy, let me add something on that line, triggered again by your question. A year or two ago I was watching some program and saw some restaurateur or YouTuber claim, you know what, I can’t expand because I’ll never get anybody to care like me. And my response was: then you shouldn’t expand.
Jeremy Julian: Yeah — if that’s your perception, if that’s your view, then you shouldn’t.
Rick Rosenfield: As an owner, you will never get anybody to care like you do. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get people to care. We have people that care plenty, and there are ways to make them care. They care about working for an ethical company, they care about being paid fairly, they care about being part of something. And the other part is, it’s a team sport — people being part of a winning team.
Jeremy Julian: Nobody can do it alone.
Rick Rosenfield: And we’d open in these new cities, and the best people who could travel — who didn’t have ties holding them home — would go for a month to a new city and meet other CPK people. It was an extended family. When we sold it, it had fourteen thousand employees.
Why Rick Wrote The California Pizza Kitchen Story (37:55)
Jeremy Julian: Well, congratulations on such success, Rick. Talk to me a little bit about the book. Why the book? Why now? Talk to me a little bit about where the book idea came from. And selfishly — I said it earlier, I have yet to take a chance to read it. This interview came up very recently, and I knew the book just came out. So where did the book come from, and what should people expect if they pick it up?
Rick Rosenfield: Well, I guess the interesting thing is that people have always thought of me as a storyteller. I like to tell stories. So for years people have said you should write a book. But what they’re talking about is not only CPK — the stories that I prosecuted major mobsters, I defended mobsters, and I grew up on the south side of Chicago. So there are lots of different aspects. But the most important reason was the one we last talked about. At this point in my life there are things I can give back. And the anecdotes, the stories, my personal stuff, that’s all fun — fun to write about, fun to think about. But what we just talked about was my message. It’s the culture, and how you grow a business based on culture. That’s the main reason I did it. The book is called The California Pizza Kitchen Story, so the book is structured around this story. But I also wanted to tell some of my law stories — the prosecution and the defense — and I didn’t want people to get lost in that, so I put all of that in a prequel. So basically it says: if you’re done with the CPK story and you’re not bored, and you want to know how I got to this position, or how Larry and I got to this position, then read on if you want. It was fun, it was very cathartic, but it did have a purpose. And doing this is my purpose. It’s having a voice. Not my story — having the story told. And getting the culture out and helping people, which I can do. Because to understand that CPK story and the stuff we went through — there are ups and downs in there, the Pepsi period, the private equity guys. The story is that we went through a lot to hold on to the things that mattered most. The perseverance — that’s part of the story. And it’s about getting it out. I really enjoyed this, Jeremy. You’ve asked great questions, it’s been a great conversation, and you touched upon the things that I care about.
Jeremy Julian: Well, I appreciate that, and I appreciate you writing the book. One last question for you, Rick, before we sign off and you let people know where they can go find the book. What is your oddest CPK product that you eat? Most people that have been in the restaurant business for any number of time — my wife grew up working at In-N-Out, and she eats her French fries there differently than anywhere else in the world. You spend enough time in the kitchens, you end up making up these items that might not be on the menu. So I’d love to ask, what is your go-to weird menu item that people just go, where did this come from, Rick? And you’re like, well, one night we’d had a couple too many drinks and we decided to throw a couple of things together, and it became my go-to.
The Egg Salad Pizza, and Where to Find the Book (41:22)
Rick Rosenfield: Well, I’m going to answer it. I don’t know that I have one exactly like that, but I think a different story would be my partner Larry, the creator. He loves mayonnaise and he loves egg salad. So he created an egg salad pizza. It was, unfortunately, right before the cholesterol scare over eggs many years ago. And actually the egg salad pizza was really good — if you liked egg salad. So a couple of people ordered it. But not many. And we had to quickly take it off the menu. And over the years, seriously, when people would say to my partner, what’s the biggest disaster that ever happened at CPK? He would say, it was the egg salad. I said, Larry, having to make a couple of quarts of egg salad and throw it away is not a disaster.
Jeremy Julian: That’s hilarious. I can say I’ve never had the egg salad — never even knew it was on the menu.
Rick Rosenfield: It wasn’t around long enough for you to buy it.
Jeremy Julian: Well, thank you so much. Where can people find the book? Tell listeners where they can find the book, and what’s one thing that we didn’t talk about on today’s show that they can expect to find if they go pick it up.
Rick Rosenfield: It’s available for pre-order. It’s coming out on July twenty-first, but it’s available now on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and the publisher, Amplify, et cetera. You can go to rickrosenfield.com and that link will give you your choice of how to order. And I think it covers so many things for so many people. For what you talked about earlier, Jeremy — so many people have CPK stories. Not only people who worked for CPK. It just seems that people had their first date there, or some event in their life, or something with their family. So it’s a family story. CPK was — and hopefully still is — a family.
Jeremy Julian: Thank you again so much. I appreciate you sharing, Rick. Thanks for writing the story down, and congratulations on the success of not just the brand but getting the story put together. Thank you for being on the show. To our listeners: like I said at the onset, I know you have lots of choices. So thank you for hanging out. If you haven’t already done so, please subscribe to the show and have a great day.
Listen to the full episode
Watch or listen to episode 352 on the episode page: California Pizza Kitchen Scaled on Culture — Rick Rosenfield. Rick’s book, The California Pizza Kitchen Story, is available at rickrosenfield.com.
