In the span of two years, a reluctant investor went from personal injury lawyer and a harness racer to the owner/operator of his own tiny restaurant empire. This is the story of how a whirlwind investment and a surprise turn of events left Howard Taylor Philly’s unlikely king of Creole.

Up until about two years ago, Howard Taylor’s restaurant-related work experience was as follows: First, he really, really liked food. Second, he met his wife at a bar, (she was a bartender at the time). Third, he had always loved the old Tom Cruise movie, Cocktail. And fourth … actually, that’s about it.

So how did Taylor, a personal injury lawyer who’s better known in horse-racing circles than among the Food and Wine crowd, end up at the helm of both a Main Line institution, Bryn Mawr’s Carmine’s Creole Café & Blues, and a sprawling new Center City Philadelphia endeavor, Les Bons Temps restaurant and bar?

It’s a long story—one that involves unlikely partnerships, strange twists of fate, bitter disputes, criminal allegations and, along the way, a great deal of jambalaya.

Some of what really happened remains murky—or at least hushed up. But one thing’s for sure: Taking sole responsibility for two restaurants was not what Howard Taylor had planned.

“This wasn’t my intention,” Taylor said recently, glancing around the dramatically cavernous space at 12th and Sansom streets in Philadelphia, where he is now what you might call an accidental restaurateur.
“Before what happened happened, my intention was to have a restaurant—just one, I don’t know how I got talked into a second—where I would be more than an investor, because restaurants are not typically great investments, but where I could be semi-active, where I could be as active as I wanted to be, when I wanted to do it. And now it’s pretty much a full-time job.”

Taylor, 49, grew up in Penn Valley and Bala Cynwyd, the son of a Philadelphia lawyer. So there was never much doubt that a Philadelphia lawyer was what he, too, would be. “I’m a lawyer,” he says, “I’ve always been a lawyer. My father was a lawyer. My mother’s father was a lawyer. My mother’s father was actually prosecuting attorney at the Nuremberg trials.” So, after law school, Taylor joined his father’s Center City practice; which he still runs, though his father has now gone into semi-retirement.

Taylor is a sensible kind of guy. He’s the kind of guy who keeps his dad’s law practice going, no matter what. He’s the kind of guy who has never moved more than three miles from his childhood home, and whose kids—Aubrey, 15; Haley, 13; and Lindsey, 10—now go to the same school he did, and study with some of the same teachers. He’s the kind of guy who says stuff like, “Everybody says they have the greatest kids, but I really do have the greatest kids.”

He’s not the kind of guy you’d expect to jump headlong into the restaurant business.

Still, it’s not the first passion Taylor has parlayed into a career. His parents were fans of harness racing—to clarify, that’s a type of horse racing you’d find at Chester, not at Devon, in which the driver rides in a cart behind the horse. They spent a great deal of time at the track and, when Taylor was 12, they bought a horse of their own. So he began working with his parents’ horse at the track over summers. And now, he too horses, about 70 of them—“I have a couple that are among the best in the country,” he says—mostly stabled in Freehold, N.J. He even races them himself, at tracks across the country, places like Chester, Meadowlands and Yonkers where large amounts of money are won and lost.

Then, maybe 20 years ago, Taylor took on a case from a harness-racing acquaintance. “There was a big criminal investigation, seven drivers were indicted, six went to jail and by dumb luck I represented the seventh. People started talking about how well I did and how good I am, and now I’m the biggest in the country for representing trainers and drivers who get in trouble. I represent more people in these kinds of problems than everybody else combined—which is not necessarily a good thing.”

Like serving Creole-Cajun food in Philadelphia, serving as legal counsel to the harness-racing crowd is a niche so specific and so overlooked it might be easy to dominate so long as you don’t screw up. But that’s about where the similarities end.

So how does a guy who spends his days handling contracts for stallion breeding and defending drivers who test positive for drugs, get into the restaurant game?

Taylor blames his wife.

Taylor had never even heard of Carmine’s until then-owner and chef John Mims moved it from its original location in Havertown to its second home, a tiny row home on residential Woodbine Avenue in Narberth. But Taylor happens to adore Cajun food—and when he discovered Carmine’s, he more than loved it.

“I just thought, ‘This is the greatest food I’ve ever eaten,’ and I was going literally every week to eat there.” Literally. He took his family there so often that his then-6-year-old daughter—a finicky eater who would order nothing but steak—began complaining she was tired of Carmine’s filet mignon.

So, as regulars, Taylor and his wife became familiar faces at the then-40-seat BYOB, often waiting two hours for a table. “[Mims] had an open kitchen so he’d be in there, he’d fling pans around and put on a little show. So we got friendly with him, going there every week for a year,” Taylor explains. “And then one day he said to my wife, ‘You know this is killing me. The food’s great, but the space is so small I’ve got people waiting two hours. And it’s spicy food which lends itself to liquor, but I don’t have a liquor license.’ So my wife said, ‘Do you want a partner?’ —out of the clear blue without even asking me. Because she knew I had always had a fantasy of opening a restaurant.”

The way Taylor tells it, Mims said, “yes,” and “the next thing I knew Carmine’s had moved to Bryn Mawr, and we had opened a [second] restaurant together. So that’s how I did it.”

It was just that easy.

Except it wasn’t, as Taylor found out soon enough.

What really happened last August, just a few months after Les Bons Temps opened in April, has been a subject of much speculation, rumor ,and on- and off-the-record comments from all sides.

Taylor’s official line is this: “John and I had a parting of the ways. And he’s not associated with either restaurant, and he won’t be.”

Mims’ comment is sort of similar: The split, he says, “is not to be public. We’re still in litigation. Let’s just leave it at that.” (Taylor says there’s no such litigation, and Mims—now chef and owner at the former Freehouse pub and restaurant in Wayne—didn’t offer any details on the case.)

Meanwhile, the rumors circulating the restaurant community are a bit more specific. One anonymous online commenter claimed Mims “had been embezzling thousands and thousands of dollars;” when a blogger for phillymag.com asked Taylor about that commenter, he responded: “I don’t know who she is, but she certainly knows what she’s talking about. There were some problems, and some things went missing.”

Whatever happened between the partners, the result is known: Taylor found himself, with almost no restaurant experience, trying to get Les Bons Temps a-rolling again.

And there were some realities to deal with—fairly harsh ones for a guy who, at heart, only really wanted two things: to play Tom Cruise behind the bar from time to time, and to ensure his favorite dish was always on the menu.

But while Carmine’s was running as usual, at Les Bons Temps, business was not good. Employees were not happy. Much of Philadelphia not only didn’t know about Les Bons Temps, but they couldn’t even figure out how to pronounce the name.

So, Taylor has attempted a sort of re-launch of the Les Bons Temps—not an easy feat when the restaurant is already more than half a year old and the reviews have already been written. (The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Craig Laban gave it a particularly grudging two bells in July).

“I wasn’t all that involved when John was running things, and we would only have 10 to 15 customers a night. There was complete mismanagement top to bottom when we first started,” Taylor confesses.

He left Carmine’s kitchen under the purview of former Ritz-Carlton chef Christopher Van Ness, and recruited a former general manager from a Ritz-Carlton in Jupiter, Fla., to run Les Bons Temps.

And he kept Les Bons Temps’ seven-man kitchen in the hands of 23-year-old wunderkind chef Brett Naylor, whose résumé includes Morimoto and Marigold Kitchen, but who admits, “I really hadn’t experienced Cajun food before I started working here.”

“But,” Naylor adds confidently, “I’ve a read a lot about it. My background is more classic French cooking, so I’m experimenting with what I’ve read about Cajun food and pairing that with what I know of French techniques.”

In fact, the food part seems to be the least of Taylor’s problems. Baby-faced Naylor has been working in Philadelphia kitchens since he was 14, and his focus on local produce and meats, line-caught fish and fresh seafood seems to be serving him well, through innovations like eggplant beignets and crawfish spring rolls, as well as classic gumbo, crawfish etouffee and jambalaya, and desserts like a decadent bread pudding made from fresh sticky buns he buys from Amish vendors at Reading Terminal market.

Still, Taylor has to admit, when it comes to opening your first restaurant, “You don’t know what you’re getting into when you do it.”

It was easy enough to put up the money for the space, and Taylor’s wife decorated both restaurants herself. But actually filling a building the size of Les Bon Temps—which most recently was home to the TPDS nightclub—is a neat trick when you’re trying to appeal to the bottle service and $30-per-entree crowd. In November, Taylor was lamenting a failed Halloween party the restaurant had hosted—a party promoter had talked them into it, promising crowds of 200 or more. Barely 70 people showed up.

“Some of the problems I’ve had,” he confesses, “are not the problems I expected: problems with the staffing, from the point of infighting. People don’t work together well. I’ve always run businesses—my law firm, the stable—like a family. I want everyone to like to come to work. And that’s a challenge. But we’re getting there.”

Still, there’s something about that philosophy that rings a little more of naivete than of reality.
It’s not that Taylor doesn’t take the business seriously, because he does: He’s at Carmine’s almost every Friday and Saturday night, and at Les Bons Temps most evenings during the week. “I try to spend as much time as I can at the restaurants,” he says. “I like talking to the customers; I like to convince them.” And he recognizes that the restaurants are very real venture for his employees: “I was thinking about that the other day, about all the people that work for me. A couple years ago I didn’t have anybody… But now, with the law firm and the two restaurants, it’s scary how many people depend on me for a living. We have probably 15 people [on staff at Les Bons Temps] and 20-something people at Carmine’s. It’s a lot of responsibility.”

So it’s not that he doesn’t take it seriously. It’s just that, when Taylor talks about the restaurants, he sounds a lot more like a guy who’s living out some kind of far-fetched fantasy than like, say, Stephen Starr.
For example, he expects his favorite dish—the crab claws—to be on the menu at all times: “There are things on the menu that I like, so I want to make sure they are there when I get there,” he remarks.

And then, there’s the whole bartending thing.

“More than owning a restaurant,” Taylor says, “I always, always wanted to be a bartender. You’ve seen Cocktail, with Tom Cruise? I saw that and fell in love with the movie and the concept. So after I saw that, I always wanted to be a bartender someday.”

And now, of course, he can—even if he has no idea what the hell he’s doing. “We were a little slow one night, so I got behind the bar and said, ‘I want to make the next drink.’ I thought I would just pull a beer or make a simple drink—I can make a great Bloody Mary. And these two women sat down, and one asked me for a drink, something I had never heard of. I asked the bartender how to make it, and I gave it to them. The woman said, ‘This is really good, what’s in it?’ I told her, but the bartender was listening and said, ‘That’s not what I told you to put in—it’s not even close! What are you doing?’ And it was like a joke but people kept ordering them. So the bartender said, ‘We have to put it on the menu.’” Taylor told him to name it anything but Counselor: “John used to call me ‘Counselor’ all the time, and I didn’t love it,” he explains. “So they came up with ‘Not Guilty,’ and actually at Carmine’s it’s our best selling drink.”

Call it serendipity—but serendipitously is the way things seem to go for Taylor.
And now, he says, even at Les Bons Temps, everything is starting to come together. The staff are coming into their own at both restaurants.

At Carmine’s, Taylor shows up to schmooze the regulars and in a pinch, his wife, Linda, the former bartender, fills in behind the bar. And their daughters, Aubrey and even 10-year-old Lindsey—pitch in bussing tables whenever the restaurant finds itself short-staffed.

And at Les Bons Temps, he says, “Every week is better than the week before. It’s been a little bit of a struggle first of all informing people of what we are, and then convincing them to try it. But everyone who tries it raves about it.”

(He includes himself in that number: “I’m my own best customer,” he admits, “and I have the waistline to show for it. I put on 15 pounds in the last year.” So he’s just put himself on Atkins, which could limit his visits to Carmine’s—though, on second thought, he notes, “a lot of it is Atkins-friendly, because they use so much butter you cannot believe.”)

But beyond just enjoying the perks, Taylor is starting to think that getting into the restaurant business may not have been an accident after all.

“My father started the law firm and I’ve been working there my whole adult life and it’s all mine now, so I don’t have the heart, the guts, whatever to let that go,” he says. “But in a perfect world I would devote all my time to this. It’s funny because I didn’t think I would love it as much as I do. But I would love to have the time just to do this.”

1. [...] You can read the article here. [...]

   Posted by Howard Taylor - an accidental restaurateur - Tear Sheet - Pictures To Look At | January 16, 2009, 10:57 pm

2. This man is a great man, and I wish him the best with this new venture.

   Posted by La | February 17, 2009, 9:19 am

3. [...] the strange saga that between John Mims and former partner Howard Taylor we can’t say we’re overly surprised. But we love that space and sure would like to see [...]

   Posted by Foobooz » Blog Archive » Les Mauvais Temps | April 17, 2009, 8:27 am

4. I lost $50 buying a gift certificate to Les Bons Temp. I was planning to go for my son’s birthday and found it has closed.

   Posted by Barbara | August 8, 2009, 1:26 pm

5. I lost $50 buying a gift certificate to Les Bons Temp. I was planning to go for my son’s birthday and found it has closed.

   Posted by Barbara | August 8, 2009, 1:26 pm