Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Lisa Lee And Nick Wong. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Lisa Lee and Nick Wong, appreciate you joining us today. Looking back, do you think you started your business at the right time? Do you wish you had started sooner or later
We often talk about how we started our business right on time at the ripe age of 40. While the exact reasons between the two of us are different, they all trace back to using the time we had wisely to answer a few fundamental questions: who we are, what kind of life we want to lead, and what we want to contribute to this world.
Nick:
Career wise, I was ready to take the next step to owning my own business prior to opening Agnes and Sherman. I had spent the prior years being the Chef de Cuisine at Momofuku Ssam Bar in NYC, and then as the executive chef at UB Preserv in Houston. I had known early on in my career that opening my own restaurant was going to be the ultimate goal and my trajectory has always headed in that direction. While I had never really had the confidence to strike out on my own, working for these larger restaurant groups as a head chef really put me in a place to hone my operational skills as well as to start to find my own creative voice. Life wise, I took time to recharge and to train to open Agnes and Sherman. Preparing myself both physically and mentally for this venture has been the newest and most radical way of thinking about how to open a restaurant. It has given me a more holistic view of how our restaurant fits into my own life and also the greater community at large
I really feel like I hit the sweet spot of opening the restaurant at the right time of my life. I have enough experience to have gained the skillset necessary to open a restaurant, but more importantly, I have the awareness to understand my primary motivation for the restaurant is not because I have something to prove, but instead, it’s because I have something to say. I didn’t have that kind of self-awareness/confidence in my 20’s or for most of my 30’s.
Opening this restaurant later in my life could have been possible, but being able to have this very personal space named after my parents while they are still alive to see it and enjoy it has been meaningful in a way that I could not have imagined.
Lisa:
Prior to opening Agnes and Sherman, I was the Vice President of Global Culture and Belonging at DoorDash. I was on an upward trajectory to take on a C-suite role but I was burnt out. I always knew that one day I’d launch my own business. Maybe it’s because I am the daughter of entrepreneurs, and maybe it’s because I’ve always felt an innate fire that I could lead better than a lot of people I’ve come across in my career. With this motivation in mind, everything I did in the last decade was with an eye towards this dream, including selecting the companies at which I worked and contributed my time, obtaining financial and psychic security (the attachment to who and what you’re supposed to be is so real), and cutting my teeth on solving seemingly impossible problems so that I’d have the reps, the confidence, and fearless attitude to step out on my own.
Bottomline is, I needed all of that career and life experience to get ready to make the greatest leap of my life. I’m sure if we started sooner or later everything would’ve been just fine, if not great. However, I really felt that starting when we did allowed us the time and space to build exactly the restaurant that we’ve always talked about. Starting sooner would’ve felt financially and psychologically risky, which would’ve increased the pressure we felt and would’ve been a recipe to make mediocre decisions. Starting later would’ve been exhausting, because I felt completely depleted by my previous career and missed my own spark. Could we have still gone for it? Absolutely. But would it have felt as energizing and meaningful as it does now? It’s hard to say. We love where we are and that means loving the journey that we’ve been to get here.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
We first met at UC Berkeley in an Asian American student theatre group. Our passion for building community and bringing people together under a shared cause was a foundational part of our friendship from the beginning.
Post college, Nick moved to New York for culinary school while Lisa stumbled into Silicon Valley. Coincidentally and in parallel, we were drawn towards Momofuku and Facebook, two companies that were defining the cultural zeitgeist of their times. We pursued our careers there relentlessly like we had something to prove. Working our way up the ranks to Chef de Cuisine and Vice President of Global Culture and Belonging of top companies, we knew that we were a part of something that would change our lives. We executed fast, failed even faster, and learned how to pick ourselves up over and over again.
The discipline to continuously outdo ourselves resulted in us leading in renowned restaurants and companies respectively, all the while having sleepless nights about how we can build better than the ones we followed. Known to be builders and fixers, we questioned norms, pushed boundaries, and sought to elevate people who were often marginalized by the systems we learned to operate in. Throughout it all, we’ve had to dig deep to find our own motivations and define for ourselves the meaning of success when we saw so little representation of what we stood for – accountability, community, creativity, sustainability, and joy.
Our career trajectories led us to realize that we don’t have to prove, but we do have things to say, and the best way to do that is to create something special of our own, together, which is how Agnes and Sherman was born.
We want Agnes and Sherman to feel real and honest, that what feels disparate and distant can be brought together on a plate and in our space. We want to reflect people’s experiences back to them and say, “heard,”; at the same time, also present a new context where we’re promoting a freedom to just be. In this sense, we are creating the most authentic version of ourselves and the “American experience.”
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
Nick:
In the Houston market, I got a bit of a boost upon arrival by working for the Underbelly Hospitality Group, which already had a large following. Through the restaurant where I was a chef, I was able to expand my network and just meet people because I had a very open and nothing-to-lose mindset. I literally moved to Houston knowing only one person, so I had no history with other chefs or restaurants in the area. This allowed me to really open up the doors and meet folks from all parts of the hospitality industry here, from quick service operators to fine-dining chefs, from barbecue pitmasters to craft cocktail bartenders, and everything in between. After I left the company in early 2022, I took some time off to recharge and began to work around town in my friends’ restaurants. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement, as labor still hadn’t bounced back post-covid, and I was looking to just work without the commitment of being a head chef so that I could work on my own project. In addition to my work ethics and letting my food speak for itself, working with all of these folks from different parts of the industry all over the city allowed me to really show folks a deeper side of my personality and my character.
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
Nick and I first did a realistic calculation of how much money we would need to raise. This is a very important first step because we needed to be able to speak to the line items behind the number.
We funded 60% of the business by ourselves through a combination of our own savings and major gifts from our family. This was seen as a really positive move because it showed that we have a horse in the race, aka we believed in our own venture so much that we were willing to put in our own money. We then raised the rest of the capital by selling a small percentage of the business and to a handful of carefully selected investors. The most important lesson that we learned — and was repeated to us again and again by those who came before us — is to bring on investors who are betting on us as people and leaders. Because restaurants are inherently risky, and because we are first time entrepreneurs, everything that we share is projections. While we can show all the work that we did to achieve a realistic projection, there is no guarantee. Therefore trust, whether it’s from the investors in us or us in our investors, has to be the foundation to our business relationship.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.agnesandsherman.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agnesandsherman
- Other: https://maps.app.goo.gl/s8gVeKFJnuMm77BMA
https://www.opentable.com/r/agnes-and-sherman-houston
Image Credits
Picture of Lisa and Nick – Annie Mulligan, courtesy of Eater
Picture of food – Vivian Leba
Picture of space – Jenn Duncan
Picture of neon sign – Arturo Olmos