What if the smartest thing you can do for your restaurant is refuse to rush it?
Nick Wong spent twenty years in kitchens like Momofuku and UB Preserv while peers opened their own places at 28. He waited until 40, and his partner Lisa Lee left a tech career at companies like DoorDash and Facebook to build it with him. Together they opened Agnes and Sherman, an Asian American diner in Houston, on their own terms: two days off a week and staff benefits from day one.
In this conversation, we get into why patience beats FOMO in a fear-driven industry, how they engineered product-market fit for a category of one, and why they invested in their team before profitability made it easy.
If you’re rushing to prove something, this one will make you slow down.
That’s Nick Wong and Lisa Lee. To learn more about Agnes and Sherman, visit agnesandsherman.com.
The Playbook Takeaways
- Patience beats FOMO. Nick spent twenty years in kitchens like Momofuku and UB Preserv while peers opened their own places at 28. Waiting until 40 meant opening on his own terms instead of on the industry’s fear-driven timeline.
- Engineer a category of one. Agnes and Sherman is an Asian American diner in Houston — a deliberate product-market fit exercise, not a concept borrowed from whatever happened to be working elsewhere.
- Invest in the team before profitability makes it easy. Two days off a week and staff benefits from day one were built into the model at open, not added once the numbers allowed it.
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Keep going: how to build a restaurant business plan, restaurant concepts worth building, and what actually drives restaurant profitability.
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About the Author: Josh Kopel is a Michelin-awarded restaurateur and the host of the Full Comp podcast. He helps independent operators build more profitable, more durable restaurants — more about Josh or learn with Josh.
