Chef Sam Hazen quits new five star Park Hyatt on eve of opening, decrying inadequate kitchen.

          Chef Sam Hazen picked up his knives three weeks ago and quit the kitchen on the opening eve of The Back Room at One57, the restaurant at the new Park Hyatt Hotel in the soaring tower that aspires to be Manhattan’s tallest building. 

          Hazen must have seemed the ideal candidate to run feeding operations at the new Park Hyatt, the first new five star hotel in Manhattan since the Mandarin Oriental opened ten years ago. As the chef of Tao’s 58th Street and Las Vegas locations, he served 1.17 million meals a year and oversaw the two top restaurants in sales in the country. When he was in the kitchen at Tavern on the Green in the mid-1990’s, it was also one of America’s busiest and top-earning spots. He’s taught at his alma mater, The Culinary Institute of America, and had just come off a rewarding stint reviving the frail Veritas to win one of Times restaurant critic Sam Sifton’s few three star rating.

          So, it was a shock when Hazen quit with no public explanation, so close to opening. “I couldn’t see the tunnel to see the light at the end of the tunnel,” said the 57-year-old veteran. It started, he said, with a poorly designed kitchen, inadequate walk-ins for refrigeration and culminated in too much input from Hyatt and Virtuoso Hotel & Resorts. “The bathrooms are bigger than the kitchen,” Hazen insisted. “And the kitchen consultant refused to put in heat lamps because he said, ‘We don’t use heat lamps in Germany.’”

          “It’s a $2 billion building and a $700 million hotel. It’s beautiful,” he said. “I needed 54 people to do what they wanted me to do and they budgeted for 17. They grudgingly raised it to 39. Everything was based on how it works in some other Hyatt. The walkins were full even before provisions for opening day were delivered. And everyone from every corner of the company had to approve my menus.” The hotel union had yet to be heard from. No one seemed to have given that any thought, he said. “I didn’t need to stay there and fail.”

          “I can do anything,” Hazen said. “That was not the problem.” The kitchen at Veritas was extremely limited, he said. “I designed a menu that we could turn out in that kitchen.” That was the three-star menu Sifton applauded. Veritas closed abruptly in October, 2013, because of “ongoing rent issues with the landlord,” Hazen said at the time. Hazen exercised his instinctive pop touch with pizzas, pastas and an irresistible pork shank at Lugo across from Madison Square Garden in 2010.

          Sebastien Archambault from the Blue Duck Tavern in D.C. was rushed in to the Park Hyatt. His new menu for The Back Room is spare and simple, with lots of steak options.It’s actually Hazen’s menu reduced 30 percent. “The bucatini with uni, candied lemon, fennel and black garlic is a wonderful pasta,” Hazen assures me. 

          Offers have been coming in, he says, but won’t say which way he’s leaning.