Richard Rosenthal’s future in the restaurant business might have been nonexistent if he hadn’t graduated from college during the 1970s recession when good jobs were hard to find.
Although Heublein Inc. hired him when he graduated from Bentley College with a bachelor’s degree in marketing and management, the job was put on hold until the nation and the company recovered from the recession.
So Rosenthal returned to the one place where he had worked throughout high school and college –- a restaurant. He realized that he really enjoyed working in restaurants, and soon enrolled in a New York City culinary school to become a chef.
In 1986, after working at several restaurants in New York City, Rhode Island and Connecticut, Rosenthal opened his first restaurant, Max on Main in downtown Hartford. Today, Rosenthal is the CEO and owner of the six-restaurant Max Restaurant Group.
Although his very first job as a 12-year-old was as a paperboy in the West Hartford neighborhood where he earned $18 a week to deliver 100 newspapers each day, it wasn’t until high school that Rosenthal got his first real restaurant job. Like many other high school kids of that era, Rosenthal earned $1.85 an hour making burgers for the local McDonalds.
He worked there for about a month until he learned that his high school buddies were earning significantly more at a nearby steak house at Bishops Corner. Rosenthal got hired at the steak house, and although he still earned $1.85 per hour, his wallet was $20 thicker from the tips he earned each night.
It was at that job when he began to realize that he liked the restaurant business. While working at the steak club, the restaurant owner needed some help unloading cases of glasses from the back of his Cadillac.
“I grabbed a couple of cases of glasses, and he flipped me a ‘fiver,’” Rosenthal reminisced. “I said, ‘This is my kind of job.’”
Another turning point that moved him even closer to a career as a restaurateur came during the summer of his senior year in high school.
His father, an accountant, asked Rosenthal to accompany him to Simsbury where he needed to visit a client who was opening up a restaurant – One-Way Fare — in an old train station. Following that meeting, Rosenthal called the owner and asked him for a job.
He was hired to work on Saturdays as a “schlep,” which meant he did whatever the owners needed him to do – as a dishwasher, prep cook, and a barback.
“Actually, it was a great job, if you didn’t mind getting dirty. It was a very small and extremely busy and a fun place to work,” Rosenthal recalled. “I was fascinated by it. … It definitely started me thinking that I might want to do this.”
