Steak Frite: be warry

Take the owner out back, beat the crap out of him.

I use to work there too. Andrew is a psycho. The money sucks! Save yourself, don’t work there!!!

I got hired at another Silverman restaurant and was hired to make over the place cuz his nephew was poorly running it. After I made changes, that the staff liked, he wouldn’t fire his overweight manager who did nothing, used the waitresses as his babysitters and would pull them off the floor, and then changed everything back to how it was originally. After missing 2 meetings with me, I walked out. The guy is a douche bag and I hope he gets everything coming to him. His biz partner Ross is an ass too.

Andrew Silverman is the biggest joke in the restaurant industry. After not paying his staff for 2 weeks (a regular occurence at his restaurants), this loony bin shut down Steak Frites last Labor Day weekend for renovations- without alerting his GM or Chef! The staff showed up as usual & were informed by the Chinese construction company “Closed, no work today.” When the Chef went in to see what the hell was going on, he found someone in his walk-in freezer who said that he was the new chef! Silverman the A**hole didn’t return any phonecalls to his chef & managers, & instead posted an ad on CL saying that Steak Frites was hiring an all new staff for its ‘re-opening.”

The punchline is that Lucy Brownes & City Lobster (Silverman joints) have already declared bankruptcy, & soon enough Steak Frites will soon too…

Y’know, I had kind of figured by now that EVERYONE was wise to Andrew’s shit. So sorry to see he’s still fooling people into working for him.
I was briefly the chef of Lucy Browne’s, and was truly amazed at what I saw there. The manager was actually a pretty nice girl, but was obviously given NONE of what she needed to run the place, least of all stuff like INFORMATION. I remember there was a “bookkeeper” who came in every week to (basically) hide what money WAS coming in from the myriad creditors.
I remember that they wanted me in the first place because I was getting good press for making one of nyc’s best burgers (I like getting good press, but still think that was one of new york’s more unfortunate “food fads”) and they wanted me to “make-over” their signature house burger (lots of “making-over” with this place). When I called my meat purveyor (a pretty famous one, these days) he said that ONLY because he and I had a good, long-standing relationship, would he agree to sell to Silverman for me, but it had to be for cash, and I had to PRE-PAY. Andrew’s credit and reputation are THAT bad.
I finally bailed because he managed to (conveniently) ABORT payroll for about a month and a half. My sous chef finally came to me and said “I like working with you, chef, but I can’t spend time here doing work for which I KNOW I won’t get paid, when I could be out spending my time more effectively looking for a job where I WILL get paid”. I gave the guy a good recommendation, too. What really got me, though, was that Andrew was STILL paying me. He would show up in some sort of manic whirlwind, scream at everybody, stuff an envelope of cash in my hand, and run out the door before anybody had regained their senses enough to confront him about the 50 different ways that he was f**ing up the restaurant and F**ing over all his employees. It got too much for my karma to take. Besides, there’s just a sick feeling you get when you have to go to work every day to a place that is such an unmitigated s**tshow, and, for that matter, one that you wouldn’t be surprised to see padlocked on any given day.
To my knowledge, Andrew still has a piece of: City Lobster, City Crab, Steak Frites, BLT Burger, and (possibly) Brothers’ Barbecue. My advice would be to approach employment, either front or back-of-house, for any of these establishments with EXTREME caution.

I have a friend that sold advertising to him. He was such a jerk to her. He refused to pay his bills and would make her shlep down to his restaurants and he would not show. He made her run all over NYC to collect on his advertising and never paid.

He yelled at her. Made her boss cry. He is a very bad man. Don’t sell him an ad because he wont pay. The only legit owner is Dean Palin who is an honest restaurant owner. Andrew Silverman is a crooked wretch and never pays his bills.