YouSaid · the spoken record

Sean Feeney

lines on the record: 113
first: 2025-09-05
most recent: 2025-09-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Have a quick bite and read a book and then work the room and work the floor and build this team and company. I guess the greatest gift is the courage she gave me. And I'll be forever grateful. And I hope that you find belief in yourself a lot when others believe in you. I didn't have that belief in myself until someone truly believed in me like I believed in Missy. Like we believed in Missy. And when that happens and you do have that courage, you get that gift. It can buy a ticket to some place you just never knew even existed. That's the gift she gave me.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“York Times, and we were certainly going to be very successful. We could tell. I said, yeah, I am. She said, good, because you really, I haven't seen anybody this good on the floor and you're really leading us. I said, okay. And I remember leaving Missy. And I had eight stairs up to my apartment. And it was like two o'clock in the morning. I woke Marie up and I told her about this. And I apologized because two years before that, I said I wasn't going to be this. And she didn't hesitate. And she just said, let's go. Let's move to Williamsburg. And we left this awesome apartment that we dreamed of and we moved into this really small apartment that was very temporary and 4.45 in the morning until I would let the pastry chef in 5.30 be at my desk at Anchorage, 5 o'clock. I would take the L train to Bedford and see Maria and Biela.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Her love has been relentless, and the belief, I remember the night Missy and I were driving home in an Uber from Lily, it was six weeks after it opened, I had been going to Anchorage every day. I did that for three years and then went to the restaurants. But that wasn't supposed to be my role. And I was just doing it because I loved it. Even though I told Maria two years before that wasn't going to be the case and I wouldn't be absent dad or husband. But six weeks in I was. She was coming to Anchorage really quickly to say hello with my daughter Biela or she would go to family meal at Lilia just so we could kind of cross paths before she had to go back home with Biela to West Village. And Missy told me in the car ride home, like, will you keep coming to the restaurant every night? And it was after our review of the new...”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say Maria, my wife, I get teased a lot because I call her my rock wrapped in rose petals. She truly is. I say it a lot every day's a good day. She's my reason that I believe that that is the case.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what I've seen people that work with us are this is their profession, but inside of this profession, there's now these other opportunities to be what you want. We have people who are on our team for eight years, who are doing the same job, who are extremely happy in life. And we can't be more happy with them being on our team. But we've seen people that have started as a hostess who are now creating some of the greatest food content. I mean, I send it all to Brian McGinn. Like, what do you think about this? It's like, this is awesome. And we now have people who are teaching themselves how to edit video the same way we have people teaching themselves how to make bagels. It's a great surprise for me and it's a tremendous reward to be able to see that.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Walls are there is a great wild wild west out there for brands that have been built in restaurants that is exciting and surprising. But I think the craziest, the best surprise that I've gotten is the best reward is watching people who start with us in a job that find their thing. And I'm able to say like, yeah, we need that. We can support that now too. So that's been just an awesome surprise because the hospitality industry is one that I think was viewed always and to some sort it still is. It's an industry of people that are looking to do something else, especially in New York City where they could wait a few tables during the week and still be able to go to their auditions in Broadway or get time to practice their musical instruments.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another camera for her to do video. She had never done video before, but she's like, I'm excited about this. I'm going to start doing it. And she crushed it. She started making all these videos. And that brought us to this next level where other restaurant groups couldn't even have thought of doing so much different styles of content. And now she's created a role for herself. She wrote her own job description. And then I think about all these other people who are in our company now who have written their own job description, our best decision is when someone comes and says, I want to do this. That has been a great surprise to me, but also an amazing reward. So I guess there are surprises about how inefficient the restaurant industry still is, how disjointed the opportunities outside that for.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so she started doing the photography, the posting on Instagram. Then because she was with us, all my people knew that she was important to us. They started emailing her for reservations instead of me. And she became kind of like our VIP guest relations person. And then this Instagram and content thing became such a massive job. She was like, I can't work the floor anymore. I can't be the maidre D. Okay, great. And then a couple months later, I'm just so busy taking all this content and doing social media. Like, I can't take your reservations all the time. Okay, don't. And then in 2020, one in the summer, we were on Governor's Island. It was awesome. Like we were doing these dinners every night. And I was thinking like, wow, we have the ability to create content in a new way. I bought a drone.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And figuring out a way to let people warmly feel like can happen right now, but we want it to happen is an art. And the moment you get hit and you're back on your heels, it's game over. And I was watching her get hit on her heels and not feeling confident and in control of saying, no, going through that process with her and then watching her become our first major D, asking her along this process, why are you even here in New York, photography school? Oh, guys like see your stuff. Yeah. Wow. We open Missy our second restaurant two years later. I could not be the 25-year-old female Instagram voice anymore. She happened to be. And I said, well, can you start taking pictures for us? Because I don't have time. She did. So she was like, I also want. To be the opening matrix at Missy too. Great, do that”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is going on? She was telling people that didn't have reservations who wanted to dine, that it was going to be a three and a half hour wait, or I'm sorry we can't see you tonight. And they didn't like that. New Yorkers don't like to be told they can't have. I would just stand next to her for a bunch of nights watching these interactions, realizing that she didn't like telling people no either.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That force can be watching people change overnight because something's clicked inside of them and what that can do. It's infectious. That has been something I never really truly thought of until seeing it in front of me has been a great reward of watching others become just confident in who they are and then applying that to what gets them truly excited. Our director of content, she started as a host at Lilia. And in the first six weeks she quit six times every single night she would come to me crying, I'm done. I can't do this. I can't do it. And I didn't understand because I thought she was awesome. And then I would read in the morning all these Yelp negative reviews about her. And I'm like.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think early on understanding the business side of restaurants, the operational side of restaurants, and how extremely archaic things still are. I think the thing that is the greatest reward, it's not a surprise, but the reward of understanding that one person or two people are not going to create your dream. Missy could not have done this on her own. I would have never dreamed to do this on my own. Together we could not have done what we've done alone. The reward has been watching people who believe in what we're saying and doing and want to be a part of that and understanding how powerful.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To think about what that must take to run, I want to keep it simple. And Missy has been a great inspiration for me in that phrase keep it simple. The most important ingredient is the one that is left out. I'll never forget our first conversation we had about possibly being partners after she immediately said no to me. She did sit down with me. And I asked her, what is the advice that you have been given them has meant the most to you? And her boss, Tony Montuano in Chicago, said this beautiful phrase, the most important ingredient is the one left out. And it is the way she cooks. You look at the menu, there's never more than four ingredients, but it has hit me so hard in life. And then the way I think about building a brand, how do you get all the noise?”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we open Missy, it really made me think hard about that. And I didn't think about that going into Missy. It's a machine. It has double the seats that Lilia has, but it is delicious and extremely specific and direct. And I think about growing up in Jersey and excited to go to diners after soccer tournament games and how cool it was to go to that diner for breakfast after a 9.30 game to get a pork roll egg and cheese sandwich and waffles play a game and then come back and get a BLT and a burger and then come back at night to get a big Sunday and a chicken alfredo big bowl of chicken alfredo and i'm like oh my god that is the scariest restaurant ever to operate and own and like the menu was a bible it was like a book and although it brings Me back great memories.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Balanced. And then you think about the overall space. How can you create a smaller space that's still warm and intimate and fun and exciting with a smaller team? Because when you look at the challenges we all face in the industry is things are big. At Lilia, we have 100 people on our team. At Missy, we have 100 people on our team. not just from the financial standpoint of challenges, it is human capital challenges. And that's what keeps me up at night, the people. And I believe that the future of these restaurants are just smaller. It's the thing that excites me. Smaller footprint, smaller menu, smaller teams, I think impact neighborhoods and communities just as big as some of these other bigger restaurants.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, we realized that it is an amazing business when you are so specific and intentional with the concept. And for me, going forward in this industry, anytime I'll get excited about a potential restaurant, it's how dialed in can you be? How intentional and direct with your vision can you be? The perfect restaurant to me is a missy, is a Finie, is a red hooked tavern where you could have five items on the menu and every single item on the menu is so delicious and so cravable. And at the end of every night, when you look at the numbers of what people are ordering, it is so.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Missy menu. It was a separate restaurant, similar styles. And I was excited about the opportunity thinking back when she was on Weight Watchers in our apartment and we were tasting that food that she was creating on the point system. I had never tasted vegetables like this in my life where it's all I was eating for meals. And I felt so fulfilled. And I didn't become a vegetarian, but I could see, I could see it. And it was delicious. So to me, I got it right away. We were going to have 10 vegetables and 10 pastas off menu steak. And that was it. And then we were going to create six gelatos. And everybody was like, you're crazy. Nobody's going to come to that because they could get that at Lilia. Well, I also didn't share that we had 5,000 people on our waitlist and like they'll come to Missy.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of people, when I told them what Missy was going to be, they thought I was insane. Missy is one mile away from Lily, and we decided early on that we're selling a lot of vegetables and a lot of pasta, Lilia. It became our most sought after items. And originally, we only had four pastas on the Lilia opening night menu. We were really trying to make it about protein and wood fire. But it seemed from the very beginning and because what she really loves is pasta, that's kind of what resonated with people. And so when we did Missy, it was like, let's just focus on vegetables and pasta. And I thought it was genius because nothing was ever going to be replicated from Lilia. There was not going to be a menu item from Lilia on.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was just awesome and greater. And I think that helped me gain confidence in myself and give me momentum that I could be the best partner for Missy. I could confidently say, I know you're going to be the greatest artist. I'm going to be the greatest operator. And together now, we're going to treat people the right way. Because I could close my eyes and look at these numbers and know how we're doing. She can close her eyes and create what she wants to create. It's what we know we can do in our sleep. And then we're able to now come together and treat every single human the way they should be treated by us.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Church tried to start my own pod. I was sitting in it and I think that time, every time I would feel that, it was like, well, maybe there's something else. And then there's this person in my life who I believe deeply in. And then I went and did it. And I think when I decided that that was going to be the time to do it, I was then trying to start putting intentions down on a piece of paper where it wasn't just an idea now. Okay, I said it out loud. Now, how am I going to put this on a piece of paper? How do I start this journey in a thoughtful way? And it was putting little, small attainable goals on paper and watching myself cross them off. And as I would cross them off, I would set new ones. And over time, I would look back on those small attainable goals. And what I was now trying to achieve.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A deep belief in somebody like that to say, I want to do something completely different than what I've ever done before, start a business with you. And I think it was because in that moment of my life in 2014, I was starting to feel comfortable with who I was in finance. I was doing a job at Anchorage Capital. I knew I was very good at. I knew that I could probably do it forever. It was the first time ever where I felt like if they stopped the music, they were still going to need me at Anchorage to be that relationship execution trader because I truly was very good at that job. But I knew that I was not going to get like better. They weren't going to name me a PM or a partner or I'd never wanted to go start my own finance company, but that was okay. I was sitting in that feeling of stagnation and I wasn't making a rash decision. I wasn't calling Blue Mountain up or Citadel or Millennium.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moment of stagnation, plateau, or maybe just not being that great. And I thought that jump could change things for the better. But over time, I realized that sitting in that period, sitting in that feeling, knowing that maybe you're not that good at something, or I'm not getting better at something instead of making a decision like rash and going to another place to do the same thing, sit in it and find that feeling. And whenever you feel that moment of stagnation or frustration, how do you take that negative energy and push it towards something more positive? Like, how do I grow from here? And that led me to for some reason blurred out to Missy Robbins someday. I want to do this with you. I want to be a partner. I would have never in my wildest dreams have.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have an event in a couple days. I don't think they're going for pizza at 8 thirty in the morning. What would you want to do? What would you be excited about doing and letting him get excited about something and take his genius and lean heavily on it? I also think when I look back on all the times in finance where I felt stuck, where maybe I was even asking myself, why am I even doing this? I'm not that extraordinary at this. I learned early in my career I would try to go somewhere else. I would try to take that same job somewhere else if I was not doing a great job at Goldman Sachs. Maybe I could do that same job at Deutsche Bank and they'll appreciate me more. And I made some decisions in my career there where I was in that.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's been fun feeling what's working and not afraid to admit when something doesn't and to study both of those feelings. And when you know you've got something that feels right, how do you replicate that feeling, not just the outcome? So the Bagel example, I didn't tell my partner Will make a bagel. I didn't tell Will to make a white pizza and where you would squeeze lemon on it. That became the most popular pizza in New York City. I didn't say that's what I want. It was knowing that I had someone who was extremely talented and feeling like he was in a zone of finding his true self and saying”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fortunate to feel every single night, whether you're having dinner with 72 other people in our restaurant or 20 other people in a private dining room of them or in a room that no one even knows exists or on an island three months of the year, four nights of the week where people just can't even imagine someone having dinner looking at the statue of liberty and it all being cooked on a wood fire. How many creative and cool locations can we create for people to have memorable moments? And it could be things people can book. It could be things people don't even know. But I think that excites us to think about how many ways we can do that.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One forever. And I never tell someone to bring a gift on their first time. I want them to see it. I want them to ask me about the stories of everything. And then I want them to think about what they're going to contribute to it the next time. We've had some amazing nights back there and some incredible moments.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“a private party, holiday party, investor dinner, media dinner, you could use this space. And sure enough, they started texting me like, I didn't even know you had it. I was like, oh, come and check it out. So they would come and we have this beautiful shelf built. And nothing was really on it except for books that I love and pictures that have inspired me over some time. And I remember the first night somebody brought something for the shelf and it has now turned into the friends of Feeney room. And that's the friends of Pheni's shelf where it's almost like the 21 club used to do where all those toys in the 21 club, you're kind of like a part of the club. And to me, it is my biggest supporters, the people that have been with me from they.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that next Sunday on Marathon Sunday, 72 hours later, we put out on Instagram bagels at Feeney, and we sold out. We had 300 bagels made. It was insane. We put like a pre-order for bagels for Marathon Sunday, sold out. And that became sort of like a test kitchen. And then as we started getting our footing with the pizzeria, I realized that my friends were always asking me for reservations for Lily and Missy. They then started asking me for private dining room at Missy for work functions. A lot of times I wasn't able to give them the reservations that they wanted because the room was already taken. And I sent out a text to a group and said, if you ever want to have...”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then November of 2, we are right in front of the New York City marathon. It runs right by us. And I knew that people would be lined up outside early in the morning and they weren't going to eat pizza at 8.30. So I looked at Will, my partner, and I'm like, what are we going to serve on Sunday? This was Wednesday. And he's like, oh, okay. He started looking on YouTube how to make bagels. Two hours later, he started making bagels.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was so cool to think about we had this beautiful sunlight coming in. And then I'm like, well, I have these amazing creatives on our team here. So of the first Fini, we had 20 people on our team, five of them were chefs at our restaurants, creatives. And I was fearful that at some point they might get bored of just making pizza, Caesar salad, and Italian ice. So I'm like, well, maybe we put a little kitchen in here and use it as like a test. And I was like, well, if we're going to do that, maybe we create my version of a space that I wish my tiny apartment in Brooklyn would have. So I created basically a living room with a bar and a beautiful kitchen. And I did not even know what that was going to lead to. When we first opened, we were so busy that it couldn't really do anything other than me working during the day”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I believed that the numbers made sense for just that front slice shop. And I would have some time to think about what I was going to do with this back room. Now, I had never had an office in my life. I started in finance. I was on a trading floor the whole time. I never got to a point where I was important enough to have an office. I was always on that trading floor. And then when I had the restaurants, I would use the dining rooms as the office. And for the first couple hours of the day, I would still go to the restaurants really early before anybody was there because I loved waking up early and doing it. But then at like 10 o'clock, 10.30, 11 o'clock in the morning, that's when restaurant teams start coming in for that night. And that privacy was not really there. And I would get pulled in different directions. And so I was like, all right, well, I'll just use that space as my office.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the day that I went on the tour of the space, I thought it was just little square of a box. I'm like, this is perfect. It's the perfect little slice shop. And then the person who brought me through the space said, you want to see the back room? And I was like, yeah, sure. So we go into this room and it was all white cinder blocked, floor, ceiling, and wall. And it was the backyard of this building. It was a townhouse and this was the backyard. And the person who bought the townhouse, instead of keeping the backyard, built this little room in the back with this beautiful skylight. And I'm sitting there like, I don't want this to be the pizzeria because I got that perfect little box in front. And I'm not exactly sure what this is going to be, but I still want this space.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a long time, that's where we got our talent. And you had to be in New York City to really be a part of it. And New York City is still the number one dining destination in the world. But there are certainly a lot other cities in the world now that have invested heavily in culinary arts and hospitality. And I think a lot of people would say that talent pool is not as great as it once was because other cities are taking from New York City. But I think it's even better than it was because we now have the youth of New York City who want to serve, who want this to be their profession, who will never leave New York City. And that is exciting to be able to build something with them in it. And hopefully help them build their own thing eventually.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This high school since 2019. And we're essentially building a company around these young New Yorkers who have this miraculous passion to serve others. And we now have 470 team members in all of our businesses. And probably, I think at this moment, 91 of them are between the ages of 16 and 21 and they have come from this high school. It's a really awesome thing when you can impact the community and with people in the community, like New Yorkers working in this industry of hospitality, that profession, and they're never going to leave. I think for a long time we've had people in the industry of hospitality in New York City come from other cities in the world. They come to earn their badge and put the names of the restaurants they worked in on resumes.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never one time that experience is not to me a quick thing. It's a real relationship. A lot of the people that we have working at Feeni are high school students. They go to school at this food and finance high school in Ell's Kitchen. It's the only culinary high school in all of New York City. It's something that we've invested.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Men's basketball teams from Brooklyn high schools. And it was awesome. So now this year we're going to do six teams, but we're also going to do women's teams. And we're not going to just do Williamsburg, but we're going to do it at the Berkeley Center outside of it and create a beautiful day. And whoever wins that tournament, they get pizza for life. They get a little coin. And then you get one slice of pizza free every day for the rest of your life. And they'll be announced, the winners will be announced at the halftime at a Liberty game. And it's creating cool things, moments like that, where you come into the restaurant and it's not just that moment with us.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Martin Scorsese's mean streets and like put it out on Instagram, got people excited. And now we have like a clean streets menu item where you could buy $208. And we've had five guests by 15 of the five guest, fifteen of the cans have been purchased by guests of ours, which is like awesome because it proves you could do it. You could do it. And then if others join, it could be this beautiful call to action. It's not to say like we want press about it or we're doing this. What can you do? Just doing something you believe in and then hoping that others get involved in it. And that's kind of what Feeney has been. It's we started to do youth basketball tournaments in the summer where this park got redone in Williamsburg and I was really proud of the park. It's awesome. It's beautiful. My boys play. My daughter plays on it. We should get to like a high school basketball tournament here in the summertime. And we got a brand around it and just created a beautiful day in Williamsburg where we had a round-robin tournament with four.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tish sat with her, brought the violations. It's like, what's going on here? I'm trying to help her. It's our money. It's the revenue of our business. And after an hour conversation, she gave me the blessing and tore up the tickets. And what was cool about it, she just said, just send me all the locations that they're going to be at. And the reason why you got tickets is because they weren't up against the buildings. They have to be three feet or closer to the building. A lot of these were like on the curb. We can't have that. So I was like, okay, I'm sorry. We won't do that. So we had the rules and just send me wherever you're going to put these things. And now we have like 75 cans in Williamsburg and downtown Brooklyn with our logo on it, our little crown logo. It's working. Quietly just building this thing. And it's really neat. We put a can, a Feeney clean streets. We called a clean streets after.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start buying trash cans. And we went online and found these awesome green, feeny green, 208 cans. We ordered five of them. We put one outside our restaurant and then a couple outside other businesses around the neighborhood. I saw every day it was being used. And that trash that was not in that can was definitely getting thrown out into the street if that can wasn't there. So it was working. So we bought five more. And then in three months, we bought five more. And then after four months of doing it, I started getting all these fines from the city, $4,000 worth of fines. And I'm like, what's going on right now? And I'm like, well, I'm not going to stop this. The neighborhood's a little cleaner here. I'm not going to stop. And I reached out to the Department of Sanitation and got a meeting with the commissioner, Jessica.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“was eight years have ten really successful, consistent pizzerias that just made the neighborhoods better, that made people proud to come in and excited to come back and then just really go hard on the community aspect of it and be intentional about it and to get people excited about that. Hopefully so inspired that they want to be involved in it. We did this cool thing where the first six months we were open, we were trying to figure out what the community needed. And we pulled people 94% of 1,200 people said they really wanted Williamsburg to be more clean. And I agreed. Everybody that worked with us agreed. You walked around Williamsburg and there was a lot of trash. There was not a lot of cans. And I figured bullets.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A brighter future, you get a 25% discount like FDNY and NYPD and any educator that's possibly helping our neighborhood's future or safety right now. These ideas were exciting to me. And then I just had this amazing creative partner who had been with us since he was 20 years old at Lilia and was now 27 looking for a new challenge in his adult life. giving him the opportunity to be an owner of a business was exciting and he got excited about that and we did it and it's just been an awesome run of putting that plan into action and in that one year of finally opening in 2022 we were able to open three others i don't know how many we will do i don't think about it like that my hope my dream”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether they meant it or not, the impact they had on their neighborhoods. And I always loved being on a soccer team or a basketball team that had the name of the pizzeria on the jersey. I thought it was so cool that a pizzeria would give $200 to a biddy basketball league and I got that t-shirt. And I was thinking of, well, what if we took 3% of our revenue and put it really back into the neighborhood? And then there's things that we could do that actually don't cost money, but shows the neighborhood that we love them. Like if you read three books in a month, show us the titles and write two sentences. You get a free pizza for your family. If you show us proof that you did a neighborhood volunteer project, you get a free pizza for your family. If you are protecting our neighborhood or are trying to make”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think so. And he goes, What are you going to do? And I was like, pizza. And he goes, yeah, fuck yeah. Pizza. Do pizza, man. So that drove me. I went to Lilia that day. I called the number on lease sign. The next day I walked in and I was like, I'm taking this. And my hope was that we could create a pizzeria that could be scaled from a neighborhood pizzeria on three things, delicious, consistent pizza that people craved and Italian ice. Number two, it was a pizzeria that when people walked into, they were greeted with hello, they were greeted with a welcome back. How's your day? It was a conversation. It was hospitality. It was the same language we used at our other restaurants. Now in this little pizzeria. And number three, if we could do those two things really well, what I loved about pizzeria is growing up.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because every time I would bring up pizza to Missy, she would say no. And I knew when not to push. But during the pandemic, around the end of 2020, I knew that our company was going to be okay. And I was able to start thinking about what is next. And I got excited about this little space three blocks away from my home. Every morning I would walk from my house to Lilia and I would stop in front of this location and just stare. I don't even know why. It was like a mental health practice I had. And I would just stare into this little white box of a space. And for a good three months, I would do it every day. And this man by the name of Papo, who's basically the mayor of Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, yells across the street, hey, are you going to take this space or what? And it was 7 30 in the morning. I looked back and I'm like”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feeney was a dream that I've always had since we open restaurants. I've grown up in New Jersey and I love pizzerias. It is a place where I would go celebrate with my parents. It's a place where we would have birthday parties. It's a place where we would go after funerals. It was just neighborhood pizzerias were very comfortable places. And I loved them not just because of the pizza they served, which I obsess about, but I loved what they meant to the neighborhoods that they were a part of. They brought them together. It was a place unlike any other restaurant that I had ever been to where a little less formal, a little casual, but people came to be a part of something and they felt comfortable inside of them. It was during the pandemic for a couple years I was putting it off.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pan out of it is extremely exciting to think about around hospitality brands. And it's an exciting time to be in an industry that creates experiences that everybody desperately wants. And those experiences can be created in person inside of four walls. They can be created outside of those four walls, whether that's your home, on an island, in a villa in Italy, or on a screen. And how do you continue to create those moments in different mediums, but make people feel the same? I think it's possible and it's exciting to experiment with.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like that. How can we grow this brand in our authentic way that is true to us and not like everyone else always has done it? And to us, it was never just restaurants. There was something about our brand that people loved and we were an Italian restaurant just like Reyos, just like Carbone, very popular, hard to get into, serving very similar food, but very different brands. I think about that because I think they can be grown differently and especially in this day where the potential around media and content, the potential to put the pen and the microphone and the camera in your hand and the”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“paths DMX and JZ could wrap forever until they weren't popular anymore because that happens. And DMX took his talent and continued to steal radios out of cars in LaGuardia Airport or JFK Airport. And Jay-Z looked at his brand and was like, I want to do more than just be a rapper. I want to start a business. I want to be an agent. I want to be an owner of a basketball team. I want to think about how to stream music. I want to get into liquor and instead of taking fees to be a sponsor, how do I own brands? And I got extremely inspired by that. I started looking at Michael Jordan, how he did things differently with Nike, the deal that he made, and then looked at LeBron James and how he's done it differently than Michael at your early age. And I thought about our brand.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think about it when we had these two restaurants, we owned and operated and they were everything we imagined and more, I would get this question, what's next? What's next? What's next? Always, what's next? I think people just assumed that it would just be more restaurants. And Missy and I, those four months, she told me no every day. We talked about what the future could look like. And the future looked more than just restaurants. It was how do we scale a hospitality brand? How do you scale making every day a good day for others? That was exciting to think about. And it brought me to a place where I thought about Jay-Z and DMX, two of the most famous rappers of all time. And at one point, DMX was bigger than JZ. And I looked at their”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's probably what I'm most inspired by with Brunello. He's doing that. He's creating something great, but it's much more than just these amazing garments.”
2025-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source