Danny Meyer was only 27 when he opened his first restaurant, the Union Square Café, in New York in 1985, yet the CEO of what is now one of the world’s most dynamic restaurant groups easily recalls his original design concept. He told Larry Bogdanow to “create a restaurant that will look like an architect never set foot in it, with a design that is so timeless it won’t be dated in a couple of years.” That architect specialized in glamorous residences at the time, but Meyer wasn’t going there. “I knew exactly what I wanted,” he says. “I had visited trattorias in Italy, bistros in France, and liked the casual 1980s bar-and-grill culture of San Francisco. I’d been collecting ideas for years that I recorded in a notebook.”