Meet the Maker: Larry Kurofsky

We sat down with Larry Kurofsky, founder of Purple Café to talk about Purple, the inspiration behind it, and what it offers for the downtown wino.

WINO: The downtown Purple…Inspired, right?

LK: Yeah, you know, it was a big step for us to go downtown. We had a restaurant in Las Vegas that was similar in style, you know, wine bar concept, but then we moved up here and it was the same sort of philosophy that we wanted to use to approach Purple up in this market. And then, it was really a suburban neighborhood restaurant, and then our next step after we opened Kirkland, we thought we’d look at other suburban neighborhoods and maybe a more urban population, and this space became available, our broker found it. We looked at it, got along with the landlord, and it evolved. We thought, let’s try it, let’s see what it’s like in a downtown neighborhood.

WINO: When you saw this space, were you like, “We have to make this work”?

LK: Honestly, we were looking at this space and another suburban neighborhood in town, and we were looking at different options, but this one was just so different and so amazing. … Our architect is a good friend of mine, he came up and was just like, “This is amazing.” It’s just a glass box, and I think with the development of this space, it’s not that it was difficult, but I think that we definitely knew that we needed to show restraint when it came to the design. You can do a lot of things you can do with a big open box, but it was these huge glass windows and transparency, it’s like a fishbowl. We don’t feel like we did a lot architecturally with this space, nor did we need to do a lot. The tower, of course, is something that’s relatively dramatic, but there’s not much more there.

WINO: What made you think of the tower?

LK: It was really an inspiration from our architect. If you look at our other locations, if you’ve been in Kirkland before, there’s a really mini-tower in the back bar, so it was kind of taking that and adapting it to this space. And it’s elliptical shaped like a grape, and there are some cross-references there.

WINO: Is Purple as a concept something that was inspired by your previous restaurant ventures, or was it like you decided, “I want to do food and wine.”

LK: Well, that was the previous restaurant venture, and the way it all came about for me was that I was in graduate school in Boston getting my MBA, and thinking—I was never in the restaurant industry before—but I was thinking, “I like food and I like wine,” and at that time, this was like the mid-nineties and there was this perception of wine prices being totally inflated in the restaurant industry, and it was something I really started looking at, thinking that that doesn’t make sense. Then I was looking at wine bars, and I didn’t really see any examples of a wine bar with a really significant full-service food menu. So, why not bring the two together, bring the pricing down, maybe add a little retail element to it, and that was the inspiration for the restaurant we had in Las Vegas. We decided to go after it. … About two years into it, I realized I didn’t want to be in Las Vegas, we had a kid, we travelled up here on vacation and loved it, so we decided to sell our interest and then move up here and start over. So, we took the same foundation, and started looking around in this market, became familiar with wine country here in Woodinville, found this little space, and just started over. … It took a while, it was a struggle, and then we realized that for me and my personality, and for the business in itself, we needed to grow it a little bit for us to do what we wanted to do with it, and that was the inspiration behind Kirkland.

We entered into a discussion of the wine industry, and we told Larry a little about the mission of WINO Magazine.

LK: That was really—back to how we got into it—pricing was part of that, but there was also the pretentiousness of “scary,” you know, wine being out there and “Oh I don’t want to ask a question because I’ll look stupid as a guest” or making everyone feel very comfortable with it and more approachable.

WINO: Is that why you don’t have any sommes walking around?

LK: Kinda… I mean, it’s funny, we were talking earlier about this. We revisit this every so often, where, hey maybe we need to hire a somme for Seattle, and it doesn’t work for us, versus having our staff educated as well as we can. It’s very challenging, especially with our list ever-changing and being so big. And our managers. We want our guests to feel that when they’re on our floor, our staff is educated enough to get through and to offer up good advice to get through that experience, and then there should be someone at any given time who’s more of a specialist like a somme, and I’m saying this like it’s pretentious, but it’s not so much like that anymore. We really want people to understand what we’re trying to do, and if they can walk away feeling like they’ve learned something too without shoving it down their throat, that’s a huge benefit for us as well.