YOU CAN LIVE in New York for decades and still remain an outsider, blocked from the main action and the big rooms. You know there's a party—now and then, you hear the music—but you can't find it. In this, New York is like the great cities of yore, London, say, or Venice, where hordes of moneymen passed through long enough to make a fortune and a name but remained forever at a remove from the core. In fact, only a handful ever truly possess the place, an elite who were formed by the city and transform it in turn. They do not announce themselves, but if you happen to meet one of them, you'll know it right away.  Take, for example, Phil Suarez, the 73-year-old adman-turned-restaurateur, partner with French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten in some of the best eateries in New York—JoJo, Spice Market, Patria, ABC Kitchen—Tony-winning producer of Kinky Boots and a charmer of all trades. It's not his wealth or accomplishments or connections that put Suarez in that rarefied air. It's his manner, his risk taking, his smile, suits, failures and strokes of genius that make him less a businessman than a personification of his town. "It's the way I take shots," he told me, "push it all back on the table and say, 'Roll 'em.' "  Suarez is at a table at the Inn at Pound Ridge, one of the newer restaurants in his stable, at a nearly 200-year-old country inn in northern Westchester County. Vongerichten has a weekend house nearby, so it was his idea—Suarez tends to stick to Manhattan. The restaurant is still having its soft opening, and this is the closest I will come to a convocation of that secret elite, a few dozen family and friends who are tasting everything and putting the staff through its paces. Martha Stewart is at a banquette 50 feet from Richard Gere, who talks to Tommy Mottola—probably about Buddhism and how to escape the wheel. But if you were in this place, eating this food, why would you seek any other existence?  Suarez had a classically old-time Manhattan childhood, the sort of story line that Leonard Bernstein might have scored. He grew up at 188th and Amsterdam, in one of those apartment houses that seem to sag beneath the sunset. His parents were Puerto Rican immigrants; he has three siblings. "I didn't grow up in a neighborhood where half of my friends died of an overdose and the other half went to prison," he says. "I lived in a neighborhood that was filled with the sons and daughters of transit workers and cops, Irish, Italian, Jewish. We used to sing doo-wop on the yeshiva steps. When you walked out of your house, your folks said, 'Come back before dark.' And you played great games: kick the can, Johnny-ride-the-pony, hide the belt, three steps to Germany."  "Yeah, one kid hides a belt and the other kids look for it. The kid that finds the belt gets to whack all the other kids till they make it back to home base."  Suarez went to George Washington High School, where he excelled in baseball, basketball and being cool. Even then, he was good to look at, less handsome than sparkly, alive. In his office, he has a picture of his junior high class, where all the '50s kids look the same. But you spot Suarez right away, awake in a crowd of sleepwalkers. In back stands the sternest-looking adult I've ever seen. "Who's that?"  "A teacher who told me, 'You've got potential,' " Suarez said. "It was his way of saying, 'Sorry about the D.' "  Suarez went to college on an athletic scholarship. Iowa. Cornfields. Country girls. A longing for cement. He was soon back in New York, taking classes. When I asked what he might have done had he not gotten the big break, he said, "I probably would've taught school. Or been a coach. Or hustled. I was good at selling and hustling. I could have run a craps game."  In the summer of 1963, Suarez was playing softball in Washington Heights, an ace pitcher with a nearly unhittable fastball. Meanwhile, a friend was working at Papert, Koenig, Lois, an ad agency headed by the visionary designer George Lois—several of his Esquire covers are in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection—who, for whatever reason, had become obsessed with the advertising softball league. The friend took Lois aside: You want to win that trophy? I know a way.  "So my friend Dennis Mazzella, an art director at the firm, calls me and says, 'What are you doing this summer?' Now remember, I never went below Central Park. I go to 625 Madison, one of those addresses, and it's like, Wow! I see beautiful gals, suave-looking Italian art directors, Jewish copywriters, WASPy account execs. Like Mad Men—exactly like that.  "I pitched every week. We won three, four years in a row. Our infield was making more than the Yankees. We had legendary advertising guys—Sam Scali and Carl Ally—playing first, playing third. Eventually they saw I had brains and some interest. I said to myself, 'This is not bad, this place.' They put me in the television production department, and George [Lois] became my mentor. He looked after me. What a tremendous break. Just that one conversation. 'What are you doing this summer?' " Phil Suarez is the ringer who stuck around.  From there, he lived the classic up-from-the-streets story of American ascent: title to title, triumph to triumph. In the early 1970s, he started a production company with Bob Giraldi, whom he'd met during a basketball game. ("We had a fistfight, so we remembered each other.") Giraldi/Suarez Productions carved its place with unforgettable commercials and videos, including the Miller Lite "tastes great, less filling" campaign, the Bob Uecker "I must be in the front row" commercial and Michael Jackson's "Beat It" video. "First year, we won seven Clios," Suarez said.  The move into restaurants, which to some might seem an illogical leap, makes sense to anyone with a basic understanding of the advertising business, where almost every pitch is made over a meal. "I did a lot of entertaining," Suarez explained. "I had four reservations every day: a standing reservation at La Grenouille; my own table at Gallaghers. The Palm had my picture on the wall. I went place to place. Boom-boom. So in 1976, a friend from Fire Island calls and says, 'Phil, you do a lot of entertaining. The restaurant out here stinks.' It was an ice cream parlor where the idea of food was Cheez Whiz with Ritz crackers. So I said, 'I don't know anything about restaurants, but I'll give it a shot.' We called it Le Dock. It's still there."  When you bank a restaurant and it succeeds, you quickly become known by everyone in that business as a guy who can finance dreams. In 1980, the owner of Patroon called. " 'Phil, I have a great location—20th and Park Avenue South. It would be the only restaurant between 14th and 23rd.' I said, 'OK, I'll take a shot.' Then, just when we were ready, he's out. For whatever reason. I said, 'You know what? I'm doing it anyway.' We'd made commercials in Positano, so I said, 'I'm gonna do an Italian restaurant called Positano.' I went to Italy and interviewed chefs. Everyone recommended the same kid, a handsome Italian right out of a De Sica movie. I liked his name: Luigi Celentano. I flew him to New York, sent him to Berlitz to learn English, had him work at Da Silvano and Tre Scalini. One day he comes in and says, 'I think we should change the ambience.' I thought, Holy s—. He's already got command of the language and soon he's going to negotiate a new deal! He's still with me to this day. We have two restaurants: Gigino at Wagner Park and Gigino Trattoria in TriBeCa."  YOU KNOW, IT'S FUNNY, but my love of food really began with George Lois," Suarez said. "We used to play other agencies in basketball. And after every game, George took us to La Fonda Del Sol. This place, it was way ahead of its time, the beginning of everything. George would always order a bottle of Chablis Grand Cru and a bottle of Nuit-Saint-Georges. I didn't know if I was drinking Old Mr. Boston or what, so the first time I took a client to lunch, I ordered what George ordered. The check comes. I almost fell off the chair. The lunch was $9.50, the wine was $46.80. I didn't have it. My salary was $75 a week. I called the office and said, 'Send somebody up here with cash.' That's how I found out George had been serving us the best wine in the world. That began my interest in food. I thought to myself right then, I better look into this further."  The relationship that changed Suarez's life, that moved him out of advertising for good, began with friends insisting he accompany them to Lafayette, the restaurant in the Drake Hotel where a young French chef was working magic. "This guy is cooking an amazing new type of food," his friends said. "No butter, no cream. He cooks with infused oils and carrot juice."  "Jean-Georges had the first open kitchen," Suarez told me. "He walked around, very handsome. A four-star chef. I hired him as a consultant. One day, out of the blue, he called and says, 'Phil, would you be—' Before he finished the sentence, I was at his door. He wanted to open his own place. I wrote a check for $250,000. Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom. We opened JoJo. The food was utterly new."  In the ensuing years, Suarez and Vongerichten built an empire upon which, in the way of its British predecessor, the sun never sets. Thirty four- and five-star restaurants scattered around the globe: Spice Market, WD-50, ABC Cocina and the Mercer Kitchen in New York; Market in Paris and Los Cabos, Mexico; Kauai Grill in Hawaii; J&G Steakhouse in Scottsdale, Arizona; Fern in Bahia Beach, Puerto Rico; Prime Steakhouse in Vegas; Lagoon in Bora Bora; J&G Grill in Park City, Utah; Pump Room in Chicago; Jean-Georges and Mercato in Shanghai.  I asked Suarez how he knows a location is good. "Gut feeling," he said. "Smells right. Then we talk. We like to go in without a handicap. I don't want a gorilla on my back. I want a clean deal. Affordable rent. For instance, when I opened Spice Market in the Meatpacking District, we were the second people. Pastis, then us. The rent was nothing. It smelled right."  For those lacking confidence in Suarez's gut, consider Kinky Boots. One day, he got a call from a guy looking for investors in this musical. His wife, Lucy, loved the movie, so Suarez figured, what the hell, and took a small position. His accountant said, "Are you out of your mind? The only business worse than restaurants is Broadway." So Suarez decided, "He's right. I'm taking a big position." If you're on thin ice, you might as well dance. "I called 'em and said, 'Up my thing.' If I'm gonna do it, I might as well really do it. A few months later, I'm on TV accepting a Tony. Am I an aficionado? Do I know what the heck I'm doing? No. But I took a shot. Like I've taken shots all my life. It's what I do. I take shots."  I asked how the restaurant business has changed. He laughed. He told me that the critics used to be everything. They'd come to the restaurant in disguise, but you usually found them out. "One night, I got a call from my guy at Positano. He said, 'Phil, we have a credit card here someone forgot.' Whose? ' Ruth Reichl!' Ha! I called her; she'd already canceled it." (Reichl was the New York Times restaurant critic; her credit card hangs in Suarez's office.) "Now, it's all about the bloggers, tweeters, Facebook posters."  Suarez looked at his watch. It was suddenly very late. The restaurant was empty. Midnight in Westchester is 2:00 a.m. in Manhattan. Suarez stood, turned and took a last loving look at the room.  "It's gonna work," he told me.  "How do you know?" I asked.
The longtime partner of chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten and producer of "Kinky Boots" has a simple prescription for greatness: Take many shots.