This week's guest is Leo Robachiek, who joins us from London, England. Leo is the vice president of Food and Beverage and Head of Bars at Seidel. Leo has been responsible for concepting, developing, and leading the food, beverage, and cocktail programs and teams at all Nomad properties. Leo has also helped lead to the cocktail apprentice program at Tales of the Cocktail for a decade.
We have a great conversation with Leo and a story from the time he started working in the industry to where he is now is a fascinating journey you'll want to hear. Enjoy the show. Welcome back to another episode of the industry podcast. I'm your host, Kip.
This is the producer extraordinaire, Dan Soretta. What's going on with you? I'm not too much. Just joined the last days of the nice warm summer weather.
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Let's talk to Leo Robojczyk. All the condoning us here from London, England. How's it going, Leo? Going well.
How are you? We're doing all right. Thanks for joining us. It's a little later for you.
And apparently we dragged you away from a dinner meeting. So we appreciate that. Thankfully read through the notes and it said have a drink or two and I've had six. That's great.
Perfect. That's amazing. Okay. So Leo, I was going to dive right into this because you've had like an incredible career here.
But I kind of like to start at the beginning. You're from Venezuela. So how did you originally break into the service industry? I mean, like a lot of other people just buy sheer luck and mistake.
You know, I was born of it as well. I grew up in the States. I moved to Miami when I was about five. And then after college, my way to New York City.
And I guess I had what I call my quarter life crisis. I decided to leave, you know, the banking world and decided to go back to school. And in that meantime, one of my coworkers was an investor in bar restaurants and got me a job there while I was taking courses at night. I'm sorry, during the day.
So I started working in hospitality. I did it a bit when I was in college, but I was not a great bartender back then. I mean, I basically got my first industry job at 16 with a fake ID. I was a host and then I got my first bartending job at 17 when I was in college with a fake ID.
Somebody they were like, Hey, who knows that a bartender raised my hand and had no clue what I was doing. But there was an old plate boys bartender's manual there. And those are all the ones. And that was Miami at the time.
But in the second turn of the bartending world, I was lucky enough to work in this baseball sushi samba that was run by basically one of the guys who tripling brothers and he was their better director and he had been a state mandatory sake beer wine classes. And everyone else sort of used to get pissed off that they had to do this. I secretly loved it. And I thought I knew a little bit about booze and a little bit of wine, but I realized that you know, thing and started my journey while I was in school taking all the science courses so I could do a post back to playing in school.
From there, I worked in a few other places and decided that I wanted to work in a place that they treated me nicely instead of, you know, those trendy places that might have been a little bit more intense and started working for Danny Meyer at 11 Madison Park. And that was before 11 Madison Park was 11 Madison Park was zero Michelin stars, two near time stars, no critical claim in any way. And I was lucky there because nobody was really paying attention to the bar program and had been open for about seven years and actually really enough, I've been freemanded opening menu and nobody had done anything since then. So I just started playing around with things when people weren't really paying attention.
And I got to create my own first cocktail list. I think started there in 2005. I created my first list in 2006. It was a pretty mediocre list if I say so myself.
Yeah, back then, I would just basically pull any cocktail book that I could, which was maybe about three of them widely available, which was like Jerry Reagan's and Deodor Graftson. I found a few old vintage books and I just tested them out. And I remember I think my first list had a last word on it, but I inherited this whole liquor room and I only had VP chartreuse, so I was selling a last word with VP chartreuse. I do nothing.
It's amazing. If only I'd known that then. Yeah. But things sort of change.
And, you know, I always loved food and beverage. And I've always been, I don't know, I guess just a little bit OCD, very like analytical, a bit of an overthinker, but also touch and secure because I was never trained or I never had a great barman tour. So any time I would do anything, I would just ask myself that that was the best way that I could do it and why did I do it that way? And I would just go back and always think about what I was doing.
And from that sort of camera and style. And then about a year later, or a few months later, a gentleman by the name of Daniel whom started as a new chef and guy by the name of Wilketera started as an UGM and they sat me down one day and said, Hey, we want to make this one of the best bars in the world. And I sort of laughed and they're like, we're not kidding. And I was like, Okay, and we went on our way.
And I'm not saying that we did that, but we definitely got a bit of a claim for what we were doing. And you know, before long, I was really proud of things that we were putting out. I was also really lucky to work for a chef that realized that cocktails were important in a time that a lot of my friends were opening bars around the city in restaurants that were getting more recognition than actual the chefs. And they were getting fired for having a good cocktail.
So I had like a lot of support and to me, the kitchen taught me a lot into becoming like my biggest ally, but also my biggest scratch and that I learned at proper kitchen etiquette. I learned how to use pretty much all the fancy equipment they had there. And I had a beautiful pantry of really amazing food available to me that was really hyper seasonal and delicious. So, and so, okay, so at that point, you're now as far as getting and now restaurant's getting incredible claim, you start getting the critical claim at that point.
And you're sort of growing with the restaurant at the same time. Yeah. Yeah, totally. You know, we got the New York Times review to us and gave us three stars and we got four stars and we got a mission star.
And then we sales the cocktail came around and they had the first ever best restaurant bar award and we were nominated and ended up winning, which was pretty amazing. And I guess after that, you know, brands started paying attention a little bit more. And then we got really lucky in that this gentleman by the name of Andrew Zobler, who now I work for him, he's actually her CEO and one of my partners in Sidel, which is part of the Nomen Sports, the Nomen Sports, but he approached us in 2010 and said, Hey, we want you guys to be partners and create this new hotel with us. And it was like the most insane timing because I had about one semester left in my post back.
The way post back's work is then you have a gap year in between because it's too late to apply for med school and then you start med school following year. And Wilghedara, who was just a GM then, sat down with me. I don't mean just a GM, but he was a GM. And he said, Hey, what do you want to do when you grow up?
And I was like, I'm going to go to med school. I spent a lot of money. I'm going to do it. And he's like, let's pretend that didn't happen.
What would you do? And I was like, no, it's going to happen. He's like, no, let's pretend. And I was like, well, I've always been super enamored by history of New York and I would pick up any book that talked about New York and the turn of the century.
And they always mentioned all of these amazing hotel bars, like the Oak Room at the Plaza or the Gongwen. And I remember going to all these places when I moved to New York and while they existed, they sadly didn't exist in the glory that they did when they were in their heyday per se. So I always thought it would be cool to open hotel bar that was for the community in New York City that was the modern version of hotel bar the past. And at that time in New York, there wasn't really a lot of hotels that people would frequent the bars.
There was a few, but it's not like London where the community would really go to hotels for dining over beverages. And he took me on a walk with him the next day and he said, hey, this guy named Andrew Zobler wants us to build this hotel and he walked me to what is now the number, well, not anymore, but what was the No Med New York? And said, hey, he went over to the hotel with us. And that sort of hell, No Med came along.
Oh, that's crazy. So I've opened some bars, but I've never actually opened a bar in a hotel. And I also went enamored with those old with the London hotel bars and the New York hotel bars and if you trace the history of craft cocked, it always comes from these hotel bars. So talk to me about the, what are the main differences of saying opening a bar that's attached to a hotel as opposed to, and the aesthetic you were going for with it being a classical hotel bar as opposed to opening just a car on a corner?
Yeah. Well, I mean, I obviously have a very specific view and opinion because I only work for restaurants and hotels at that point, or now. But I think at the end of the day, the availability of amazing resources and the availability of vacant connections with guests is so much more than just at a cocktail bar. So at that point, there was mostly just the key keys in New York City.
I guess it wasn't really any other major cocktail programs that weren't sort of like a speakeasy that was obviously Pegu and Milkenhani, which is now out of way. And I think PDT was definitely open. They opened around the same time. No, they were definitely open.
Death in Company was open, Flatiron was open. But they were all speakeasies that had a ton of rules and that honestly are incredible incredible bars and paved the way. But they had a lot of limitations because they didn't have whole kitchens. They didn't have the availability to amazing wine lists.
They didn't have the money to purchase incredible spirits. They didn't have the money to or even the space to create like these incredible brand new bars with like incredible decor and all of those places are places that inspire me and inspire me back and so inspire me today. But when you're doing a hotel bar, you have to think about quite a lot of things, right? It's something that is for the restaurant, it's something that's for the hotel.
But for us, it was also something that's part of the community. So we had to think about how are we going to get people from the community in New York City that generally do not frequent hotels to come into a space. And then how is this also going to serve hotel guests and how is this going to serve restaurant guests because that's a whole other layer of hospitality you have to think about. And a lot of these places, the bars are basically meant to be there as an amenity for hotel guests and they're usually not busy.
When we opened our doors, we were really lucky that we were insanely busy. So we weren't expecting to be as busy as we were, which actually led to a lot of issues because we had complaints from people staying in the spaces that he couldn't get in the bar. Oh, that's a good problem, though. I mean, it's not, you know, you sort of learn a lot because in the beginning, you're like, well, why does that matter?
And then you're like, oh, yeah, that definitely matters. But we were really lucky that the building next to us went up for sale and we were able to buy that and build the Nomad bar. So we had elephant bar in the Nomad, and then we built the Nomad bar, which was able to be connected to the space. So we ended up having two other bars, which a bar that was double the size, which were for not only overglow, but just became a bar with its own identity.
When are we talking about capacity-wise, where like pre like the original elephant and then when you added the second space? Yeah. So when you went open, you would walk like it was very much designed after the cost or inspired by the gentleman that did our designs at Jacques Garcia. He did actually the cost, which is in Paris.
And what's really cool about that space is that their lobby is actually working lobby, but it's their food and beverage space. And you sort of travel through and it's like full of all of these amazing, quirky people and it's like a scene. So you would have to walk through our restaurant to walk into the bar, which is fun because it adds a lot of vibrancy and a lot of life to the space, but also it could be annoying when you have so many people trying to get to the bar. And people are planning elephant bar had a capacity of 12 seated at the bar about another 12 that could see the remaining areas and then standing over about 60.
So it wasn't huge, but then we also had the library next to it that had a capacity of 47. So altogether about 100 people could fit between those two spaces. And we maybe about a month after opening, we had what we call the door host, which is a fancy name for somebody who is like a security guard because of overcapacity and the fire marshals kept getting upset. So we had to like take games and for people to walk into the building.
So when we opened the Nomad, we had capacity for about another 140 people between the two bars. And so altogether about 240 between the two bars. No, that's crazy. And especially in like, I can imagine rental or real estate prices in New York City at any time, but like, so you pretty much got to make sure you're busy.
Yeah. I mean, we were busy like, and we just got getting busier, which is crazy. We were open for about 10 years. And sadly, you know, post pandemic, we lost our lease.
We bought a business partner out and he decided to convert it into the net and he had the ground lease and kick us out. But we just got busier and busier year over year, which is pretty rare for a bar restaurant hotel, which was amazing. And I remember I would love it. Like when we would open the door to Nomad bar, we'd open at 5 p.m.
We'd have anywhere between 1570 people waiting outside to come in in the whole bar with one once. And it was one of my favorite moments, but we would just finish, you know, or pre-shift meeting and everyone would go to their areas and I would open the door and see all of these friendly faces walk in. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah.
I mean, that's a rarity in any place really to have like that, like just kind of extended upon by that many people at once when you open. That's awesome. Yeah. We were looking so many ways.
I mean, we opened in this one area in New York City that didn't really have a name. It's actually now called the Nomad. We were trying to name the area. We made up a story.
I don't know if you know a lot about New York, but a lot of the names are acronym. So like Soho is south of Halston, no Hose, north of Halston. Like Dumbo is directly under Manhattan Bridge, underpass or something like that. Like they all mean something specific.
So we called it Nomad because it meant north of Madison Square Park. Okay. And it was this area that didn't really have a name. A lot of people called it like a little Africa because there was a lot of stores that sold like fake t-shirts and like African products or like or like they care and that was just what it was dubbed.
But it was also surrounded by amazing parts in New York City and one side you had Chelsea right below it. You had Madison Square Park and the Flatiron. You had Marie Hotele the right and this area was just sort of the shit area that had that was pretty high in crime. And it's funny because it's only a few blocks, but they had a really bad heroin problem at the time.
And thankfully that definitely changed as you know the ace came in and we came in and that whole area changed and the area became known as a Nomad. Almost you are detriment because all the hotels and the bars and restaurants that would open nearby would have Nomad in their name. So like this little band and it was called the Smith Nomad and people make reservations thinking that they were making reservation in our space. Oh, we had to climb up and we're like take parties with that size.
Oh man. But it was also amazing because a lot of it grew into like a big food of every area and you know sort of as it tied rises all but it's right. So just kept getting busier and busier and more people kept coming in the area and it was amazing. So yeah, I thought that's crazy.
So okay, what point do you sort of move up the food chain and you're sort of looking after opening a bunch of different restaurants for this company? Yeah. So I started as a bartender became bar manager. Then when we started this project I became bar director so I was ever seeing 11 Madison Park in Nomad and I deferred you know med school for a year and then ended up not going obviously.
So and then after that we really only had those two properties that I was overseeing and we were trying to grow but you know when you start working in development and you learn about making deals you realize that you know you pitch them 100 deals and you're lucky to get one. So I didn't really know back then but it was a lot of heartbreak because we thought we were going to open and then we never got the property. So we tried for five years to really find another property. I mean we were really banking on London that was the next place that we wanted to go to.
And then we decided to extend our reach and we put a lot of eggs in a lot of different baskets and all of them ended up hatching by mistake when that's more. That's not always the way it works right? You can't get anything and then you get it off. So we got LA, Vegas and London all those properties basically around the same time.
Luckily the London one fell through at that time and I say luckily because the space that we have now here I just think things are meant to happen for a reason and it's significantly better than that other space. But we opened LA and when we did that I got a promotion to managing partner and I was so bar director for the company so I became partner with Will and Daniel and this guy Jeff and set away to open all of these different spaces and as I grew obviously our team grew and it's pretty amazing. Yeah that's crazy I mean I think that the whole time and like at this time right up until this point you're thinking you're going to be a doctor at some point and then this just swears and you like just and now you're doing this amazing job. I'm just using this with a viable job like I remember turning schools with my mom in like 1997 and we went to Cornell as one of the schools and they tore this through and they showed us in hotel school and I remember looking at my mom being like who would ever go to school to like work in a hotel in a restaurant.
I should have done that because I would have saved lots of money heartache and years of my life. That's interesting question though Leo because like okay so we're going to school instead for a med school this whole point. Now a lot of people go to school for a hotel and restaurant management or however they describe the programs always different whatever school you go to. You obviously didn't need to do that you just sort of did it on the job training.
Yeah I mean I was lucky though because I got a finance degree before. So I didn't understand the management side but I had a really good mentor with Bogadera and then also we were just a little nutty like all of us were over achievers and we were underdogs and we all just invested time in like trying to better ourselves as a company. So when we went well in Daniel bought 11 minutes apart from Danny Meyer we really had to think about what we were going to be as a company and I actually remember in the beginning we were just like emulating every restaurant that we loved and we were trying to become this fine dining restaurant to like become this hopefully you know four years time short restaurant and we got our first review which was actually a better review than we ever deserved. It was by the New York Observer which is not a huge newspaper or even really relevant when it comes to food and beverage but for us it was probably the most relevant or the most impactful review that we got because we got four out of five stars and I remember the reviewers said that we needed a little bit more Miles Davis.
What the fuck is that? That can mean so many different things. I knew who he was obviously. First we went to the Google machine and typed in Miles Davis and started doing research and then we sort of we had all these strategic planning meetings and we realized like hey what are we trying to do like we're not going to become the best restaurant that we want to be or the best bar by emulating other places that are doing it.
We obviously love those places and want to respect those places but we started looking into all of the companies that we loved. So American Airlines, JetBlue back then you know American Express, you know Google and this was in 2010 and we started reading about what they do so for a lot of those places they had a very specific culture that wasn't that was unique to them so we realized that what we needed was a vocabulary to who we wanted to be. So we came up with a mission statement we came up with 11 words that really emulated what the 11 Madison Park was at that time and then we came up with 11 words that became nomad and everything that we did we put through the lens of those words and you know we started coming up with our culture and our company ethos and that just kept evolving and I think a big part of it was for us you know endless reinvention was one of the words for I know it's more than one word but it was one of the words for part and everyone that worked with us you know had a voice and every year we would do this big strategic planning meeting where every single staff ever had a calm no matter if you were you know dishwasher porter or if you were executive sous chef everyone sat in broke up in the groups and we had a whole bunch of different concepts that we had sort of make presentations for and a lot of our best ideas came from there from people that didn't even work in those apartments and we still sort of live that way today we everyone that starts we let them know that they're here for a reason that they have a voice and they can impact what we do and you know not to be cliche but if you see something say something and you know not always do we make changes based on their opinions but at least it's a conversation that we can have and at least it allows us to understand even more why we do what we do and you know I think a few years later we started really changing the way that we trained and started training the people that worked for us about the why versus just the how and the what. Actually you got a question for you.
So you got a pretty solid corporate structure then so what's it like trying to get into your company to work for you is a lot of series of interviews or is it yeah how does that go. It's funny it sounds like we have a solid corporate structure and we do we have a good corporate team but we have such a small team everyone thinks that we're like this huge business but we're not like currently in our executive team and we have five people and in our corporate team we have about nine. That's how we keep us on site but it was different pre pandemic when we had more properties there was about 60 people but as we sold some of the properties as we sold some of the hotels it's sort of that smaller but the good part about being you know having a corporate structure is that you do have a lot of these things laid out like you know teeny policies and stuff like that but we're not corporate enough that we have a lot of red tape if we want to make decisions we make them whenever we want. So in order to work for us it's actually super simple we don't hire people based on resumes resumes are obviously important in that we can read who you are and what you've done but we hire people based on who they are as people and what they want to do so some of our best hires have been people that either never worked in hospitality or have worked in places that would not be deemed the right places by most businesses to you know to be hired.
I remember one of the best interviews I had and one of the best hires I've had was this gentleman named Jim Betts who ended up becoming our bar director at 11 Madison Park and is only two hospitality credits in his resume were a dinder and jillies. But those places teachers are good basics better than anyone else that's for sure. Yeah I mean maybe never really seen their training manuals but you know he just had never encountered finding or like hired in hospitality but he was just a standout person and he came in he was super prepared and you know it was also just the way he talked his mannerisms he was like a real person he wasn't robotic he genuinely cared and also he spent a lot of time with these people so it's like hey did you get a good vibe do you want to hang out with this person at the end of the day not that you need to hang out with it when you work with by any means but it's just about hiring people that are just generally good and that like want to do something not because of money but they want to help people just because that's where they are as people. So at one point obviously Nomad Group the Nomad Group becomes a Boba Siddell.
How does that was that like a sort of an investment or did they buy your company or how did that work? So our company was called Make it Nice and that was you know Will Jeff, Daniel and I and then obviously other people worked with us and we always were partners with Siddell and Siddell owned the Nomad brand and we managed our food and beverage and the pandemic happened and then sadly there was a split between like all the Mom and Dad which was well in Daniel and they just had their differences and decided to part ways and when that happened obviously it was tough because the company that was built on this relationship between dining room and kitchen and this like you know sort of having the pendulum be in the middle and having this team make all the decisions that wasn't sort of a chef driven restaurant it wasn't a restaurant or driven restaurant was missing half of the equation and sadly for whatever reasons Daniel and Andrew which is the CEO of Siddell weren't seeing eye to eye and you know Will stepped out of the company and Daniel kept the spaces and you know at the end of the day Daniel didn't really want the Nomads he wanted to focus on a lot of Madison Park and his other you know Clarity project and other things were happening and I had to make a really tough decision because we had three Nomads another one in the works and like I worked with them for 15 years I had people that at this point have worked with me for eight nine ten years and I couldn't really step away from the brand so I chose to leave Make it Nice and join Siddell and Siddell started doing food and beverage in house and I got to have even a bigger role which you know Andrew's grade because he sees people's skillset he allows people to maybe have roles that they're not fully ready for that they've got done but it's sort of sinkerswim and he has support in every way and I got that opportunity to head up food and beverage with the company yeah it was amazing yeah and it was awesome because I got to retain a lot of my team and a lot of my staff and sadly three months later COVID happened but you know we're still here and we're still talking along and I'm happy to say that we still have some staff members that were with us from day one oh that's good because yeah like obviously the big news and service industry during COVID is losing all the staff right everybody left so it's good you're able to retain some key people yeah I mean we lost a ton of people and honestly for me you know it's I'm I love when I come back to New York I mean well New York is my home but I've been lending for a bit but I love when I come back to New York and I get to see all the places that my different teammates have like spearheaded open or work at and for just like an extension of the family but when you know when we when COVID happened and I'll use I guess a COVID where we had a pivot we started making meals for people in need working with World Central Kitchen and for me it was really important to give back to the community but also it was important that I could bring some of my teammates back and give them health insurance so the bus you know came in every day and made you know 15,000 meals a week for people that needed it and you know a lot of those people one other ways and open other places like one of them is Maddie Sterling that you know just opened a great restaurant in Hudson Yards and you know sadly a lot of those people didn't stay but when we reopened in a bigger way some people came back and then we reopened when we opened London but a few teammates that have worked with me in New York or LA decided to move over here to open the project that's cool great experience for them as well right like in London where basically the whole craft cocktail scene began that's that's an amazing experience no it's pretty incredible and like you know we were the first or one of the first big openings post pandemic which had a lot of its own hardships but to me it was really special because we were like this we can't like at the end of the tunnel showing that this industry that everyone thought was dead isn't that yeah obviously there's still a lot of changes that need to have an industry a lot of changes to have an industry you know definitely for the better but it was like to open something so big that was planned before in such a big city just felt so amazing and so special and I find that I think people needed hospitality the most. Absolutely well you get out here you get us a lot of time but I just wanted to be remiss by didn't ask you one more thing I just came from tales of the cocktail this year was my first visit to that and it was I was my first I've been a New Orleans several times but I never been to tales of the cocktail it was so fun learn so much got to try so much great shit but you were part of the apprentice program like in the sort of more mentor role there so we've interviewed a few people who've been part of the apprentice program but nobody was sort of done the mentoring so that was about your experience doing that I got so lucky like I said I applied for the first ever apprentice actually the second apprentice program in 2009 and I was chosen the first year was 2008 where it was like a bunch of misfits and I call misfits because all of them are friends but it was an organization it was like a bunch of misfits coming together to put on this event there was a little bit more structure to the second year and they had John Deragon and and Don Lee and and Jeff that were running the apprentice program and I came on and it was super hard it was insane hours and it was so eye-opening in so many ways I got to meet all of these people in the industry that I looked up to for so long and I got to work basically 18 to 20 hours a day for seven days you know batching cocktails and and juicing and running these events and I loved it but the biggest thing that I loved about it was I guess I mean I don't want to use this term but it felt like I was going to war and I think the bond that you make with people when you're like in the shits so badly and you just need to make things happen is a bond that's pretty unbreakable and what I think we noticed after that was how like how great not only the networking was but this chance to like mentor and meet so many amazing people from around the world that were all coming together for the same purpose so the next year they asked me to come and be part of the program in a bigger way and help run it and then I helped run it for another nine years and we know sort of kept refining and building the structure and we got a higher group of 70 people every year from around the world that were bartenders and we know not only was it just this craziness we started making it a lot more educational I think the tales crew and at the time did a good job at like showing us New Orleans but then we started bringing in a lot of these amazing speakers or speaking ourselves and giving seminars to the actual apprentices that were more relevant about the things that they were doing every day and it just became this huge group of people from around the world that have this like kind of this like relationship that to me it's it's it's almost like family so I know that I can go in any of these cities look up any of the other apprentices and I have somebody there and vice versa and for me it's also been great because anytime I open a place I know that there's a solid group of people out there that you know I could pull from to help support and I did it for ten years it was some of the best times in my life it was some of the hardest times in my life I would do it again in a heartbeat but you know it's sort of sad that 70 changes happened with tales and I was really happy this year to see that it came back in a bigger way because for me it was something that was still life-changing and that really solidified my desire and my love for this career you know we get to take care of guests every day and and I don't know I love what I do because I love the nobility of what I do I love that people come in every day and we get to create a safe space for them to create memories and I love that I get to be sort of somebody's part of somebody's life story even if I may not remember them and the apprenticeship program to me was that but with the industry I got to like create these bonds and these memories and like give a little bit of myself and what I've learned to a group of younger like bartenders that were coming in and I felt like I'd inject myself a little bit into you know the world or community but also the amount that I learned from them you know it was a lifetime of memories that forever shaped me and I know it shaped a lot of those people as well. That's amazing.
Okay Leo thanks so much for doing this tell us a little bit about what Tyler listeners were doing follow you on social media and what's coming with Nomad and what we need to know for. So I'm on Instagram mostly it's at L Robitchek that's L R O B I T S E H E K I'm currently opening the last bar in London which is called Common Decency it's like our big set training cocktail bar here where Nomad Bar New York was sort of our cocktail bar that was shaped after an old school pub but like their modern day lens that was a craft cocktail bar this is sort of shaped after like a lounge that has you know DJs and music but at the same time still has that same old like fun feeling of going to a cocktail bar but that's a little bit more rambunctious and that actually opens next week on the 28th or maybe the week before this airs on the 28th. Yeah yeah. We're going back in time.
Yeah exactly. We're also working in a few other projects we're working on Nomad I don't even know if I'm going to say these things but we're working on Nomad and Copenhagen. Wow. Nomad and Vienna and we just opened a project in Williamsburg called the Penny which will have a Freedom Beverage component opening in the beginning of the year.
We also have Nomad Windwood opening in about two years and that's in Miami but it's our first ever residences that'll have a big Nomad bar on the rooftop that'll have live music and hopefully fingers crossed we can sign on a new project in New York that I can't really talk about just yet. So look out for that. We'll have you back on when that one's getting ready to open. So we can talk about it.
Thanks so much for giving us your time Leo. You're a super busy guy and we really appreciate it. Thank you. Amazing.
You're the one that's running for mayor. I mean that's... Yeah. I'm going to say I'm younger bears than that.
Well yeah there's a big difference between running and winning. But yeah. I'm actually not shy. Yeah exactly.
Well thanks again Leo. We really appreciate it man. Keep up the good work all your bars and sound amazing and we're looking forward to all the new ones opening up. Yeah thank you.
Thank you so much for having me. Have a good night. Have a good night. Bye.