| Life
of the Party
Whether she’s hosting a holiday party at home—or
commanding the area’s most successful catering
firm—Ridgewells’ Susan Lacz Niemann lives
life one way: all out, all the time
By April Fulton
Susan Lacz Niemann
is a perfectionist. A principal and the public face
of the venerable Ridgewells catering firm in Bethesda, Niemann is a tough businesswoman,
an engaging salesperson and a taskmaster in the kitchen
and with the servers. “I would kick ass on ‘The Apprentice,’”
she says.
By all accounts, Niemann,
45, is driven. She sleeps little, sends e-mails to her
staff at 4 a.m, and has her
thumbs almost permanently affixed to her BlackBerry.
“I was on my BlackBerry in
the delivery room,” she says.
Since she and partner Tom Keon
took over in 1997, Ridgewells,
known for its upscale service and ubiquitous purple
trucks, has never been more profitable. Jose Valado, a 36-year Ridgewells veteran,
who joined Niemann and Keon
as a partner in 1999, gives her much of the credit for
turning a $12 million business in 1997 into a $30-million-plus
business today. He praises Niemann for expanding the business nationwide by landing catering
contracts with the Preakness,
U.S. Open golf tournament and the Super Bowl. “She’s
extremely aggressive,” he says.
To her longtime friends, Niemann’s
drive and success come as no surprise. “In college,
while some of us were recovering from hangovers, she
was up at 7 in the morning, running, saying, ‘You’re
wasting the day,’” says her best friend, Jane Bidwick
of Olney, who has known Niemann
since a mutual friend introduced them one summer when
they were teenagers.
Niemann can be demanding,
brusque and likes to be the center of attention. But
people who know her well say
she has a huge heart. “She will not say no to anybody
or anything that needs help or assistance, whether charities
or employees,” Valado says.
Niemann regularly mentors
Girl Scouts on the art of meal presentation, serving
guests and table conversation. She prepares hot meals
for the homeless and raises money for Bethesda’s Imagination Stage. She once wrote a $500 check to a girl
playing violin in downtown Bethesda,
who was raising money to study in Europe.
Niemann speaks adoringly
of her sons, Nathan, 14, and Ayden, 3. She gets her
kids off to school most mornings, and insists on being
home for dinner with them most nights. “I think it’s
important to sit as a family, to have dinner together…At
6 o’clock, everyday, when I was growing up, we sat around
the table and had dinner. And if you weren’t there,
you had to have a pretty good reason why you weren’t
there. I believe that, too. I don’t like the TV on during
dinner. I believe in conversation.”
Niemann is divorced from
her first husband and separated from her second, but
says she maintains good relations with both.
Perched on a tailored beige sofa in the sunny living
room of her home, Niemann
gestures with a striped cocktail napkin that coordinates
flawlessly with her colorful scarf belt. She is thin
and tanned, speaks quickly and to the point. She talks
frankly of the brain aneurysm that almost ended her
life at age 21, and of the melanoma that was discovered
and treated eight years ago.
Niemann exercises daily in
her home gym and has lost 20 pounds since January. “I
just bought a size 2 pair of golf shorts,” she says.
She says she takes nothing for granted since her aneurysm
and melanoma. “I never let them [the illnesses] get
me down,” she says.
She bought her home in 2000 in “The Hamlet,” a relatively
modest section of Chevy Chase,
and has tastefully doubled its original size by building
out the back. The unpretentious front entrance opens
into a wide foyer. The front hall leads to a gleaming
dream kitchen where she says guests linger over wine
chosen from the built-in wine chiller, as they rest
their elbows on the black granite and high-lacquered
teak island.
She has a spacious dining room that seats 24 and features
her Polish grandmother’s antique breakfront. The house
has a sloping back yard leading down to an amphitheater-style
patio with a barbeque grill and the woods beyond. Her
dream project is to add an outdoor kitchen with a stone
fireplace for cooking.
Several closets and drawers in the house contain an
orderly stack of coordinating plates, glassware and
linens so she can throw a party at a moment’s notice.
Fine china and boxes of Old El Paso Taco Mix are tucked
together in her pantry.
“Hey, I’ve got kids,” she says.
Niemann was born and raised
in Wyckoff, N. J., and is the youngest of three children.
Wyckoff is 26 miles from New
York City, in a small, affluent town made up mostly
of Irish, Italian, German, English, Dutch and Polish
immigrants. She identifies strongly with her Polish
ancestry, credits her grandmother for her passion for
entertaining and her parents for her professional drive.
The following, in her own words, is Niemann’s
story:
Growing up Jersey
She [my mother] wasn’t a horrible cook. She
just didn’t cook a lot and she didn’t like to cook.
Mother was a reading teacher. She had a master’s degree.
I really didn’t realize how smart my mom was until I
moved out. She’s extremely organized.
My dad was starting a professional engineering and
architectural firm. He worked six days a week, then
after church on Sundays. He spread everything out on
the kitchen table. Sometimes when I would get up at
4 or 5 in the morning, I couldn’t sleep,
my father was there, always working.
At an early age, I got a job working at the Wyckoff
Deli. I had time for my friends after that. Back then,
we weren’t loaded down with soccer and cheerleading
and piano and Tai Kwan Do, we just played kickball.
As a result of my mom working, my grandmother kicked
in a lot…She would come on Wednesdays and cook us dinner.
Pork chops or chicken, she was just an excellent cook.
My grandparents had a fabulous house and it was truly
an entertaining house. Sometimes they entertained with
150 people there. I have such fond memories of my babcie
and dzadzie, which is Polish for grandmother and grandfather,
and everybody getting together. The kids would play
horseshoes and go fishing.
My grandmother had this huge tablecloth that every
year they [the guests]would
sign and all my ciocies
[aunts] would embroider all the signatures on it.
The parties would last all day and all night.
After my grandfather died, my grandmother moved in
with us. I shared my room for what seems like years
with my grandmother. My grandfather died… when I was
in fourth grade. My grandmother died when I was in high
school.
I wish she was still here with me now.
Move to Washington
I came down here to go to college at Marymount College (now University)
in Arlington,
and I never went home.
It was scary at first. I was 17 years old and living
alone in a three-bedroom apartment. I knew I didn’t
want to be back in Wyckoff because Wyckoff was too small of a town
for me, and I totally knew I didn’t want to be in New York City.
I worked as a bartender in Rosslyn.
I was always selling, whether it was a pastrami sandwich
at the Wykoff Deli or martinis at the bar.
My friend, Peter Cieszko,
who’s Polish and who I grew up with since we were babies,
and I decided to have a party in Washington
[during college]. It was called the First Annual
Polish Boat Race. So, we rented a boat, I did the invitations,
I cooked all the food, and the ironic thing was, there
was only one boat so that’s why it was Polish.
A turning point
At the age of 21, I had an aneurysm. When I was
working in the bar, where my best friend Jane [Bidwick]
and I worked, I would complain to the same customer all
the time: “I can’t get rid of this headache.” It was months.
I was driving to work one day and all of a sudden…things
were spotty and it made me a little nervous. I…woke
up the next morning [and felt] like someone had taken
a sledgehammer to my head and I started throwing up
blood. It was excruciating pain. My roommates were freaking
out. I called my mother who happened to be visiting
that weekend.
I was in intensive care for two weeks. They didn’t
know what was wrong with me. My whole family rallied
around me. They finally figured out a vessel had popped
in my brain and it was bleeding. They had to wait to
operate on me because my brain was so swollen. They
transported me to Georgetown University Hospital.
A couple of things could have happened. I could have
not survived the surgery. I could have come out blind,
because it was the part of the brain that controlled
my sight, or I could come out fine.
The morning of the surgery my father came in, and he
broke down in tears. I was out of it. He said, “You’re
going to be OK, Susie.”
It was an all-day surgery. I came out of it and I was
in the recovery room and asked to see Jane. She comes
in, and I say, “Jane, you need to have major brain surgery.”
“Why?” she said.
“Because you know that zit I had on my chin? It’s gone
now,” I said. Then she started laughing and crying.
It was a long recovery. I took a year off of school.
I was bald. My head had been shaved for the surgery.
I went back to work at the bar about four months later.
My hair was very short. When I went back to work, I
said to Jane, “I don’t want to wear a hat or a wig or
anything.”
She said “Whatever, Susan.” That was me.
I started living every day as if it were my last.
The road to Ridgewells
I sold microcomputers for a year and half right
out of college, and I was not happy.
I loved to entertain, loved to coordinate, loved to
organize and I loved to design, and I knew there was
a job for me somewhere, doing that.
I knew I wanted to get into catering and I wanted to
get to Ridgewells. It was the biggest and the best and still is.
I interviewed with my now partner, Jose Valado,
and he said, “You have no experience, come back.” So
I went to Clyde’s in Tysons Corner as a catering manager
there, and that was a dead-end job. Then I worked for
another small catering firm. During that time I kept
going back to Ridgewells.
I had six interviews! I think he finally hired me because
I was driving him crazy.
They gave me a sales goal for my first year of $250,000.
I sold that in the first three months. That was in 1986.
The next year, I sold $1 million.
Around this time, Ridgewells
was going downhill…Competition was really taking over
our market share. We weren’t being innovative, we weren’t
being creative, we weren’t
being smart.
As an insider, I knew what it would take to turn the
company around because so many of these people had been
dedicated employees and had worked here forever. When
we celebrated our 75th anniversary two years ago, we
had 40 employees that represented 800 years of experience.
The good news, is, we got
Ridgewells for a great price. The bad news is, we had a lot to do to get it back to where it was in its
heyday.
A new path
When I first bought the company, someone said
to me, “Ridgewells. Oh, you’re the ones that put the jelly on the
roast beef.” You know that old-school style of jelly—aspic—people
put on beef to keep it from turning? That comment kind
of rang in my head. We had to get away from our heritage,
our blueblood Washingtonians, and get a younger, hipper,
crowd.
I know what I like and I know the image I am trying
to project at Ridgewells,
and some of that may not coincide with our traditional
clients.
Really the food industry is a lot about the design.
What’s hot in the stores, on the mannequins, is going
to be hot on my tables.
We can still do the very traditional damask tablecloths,
the cut crystal, the Beef Wellington, but if somebody
wants a quad of sushi, sesame-crusted salmon and a miso
salad, we can do that as well on a fluorescent green
tablecloth.
Where the jocks are
I started the division that took Ridgewells
on the road to major sporting events.
Ridgewells catered the Kemper
Open for years. The gentleman who ran it was Ben Brundred,
who was the general chairman of the PGA Championship
in 1989. He said he couldn’t get anyone in Chicago
to do the stuff we were doing for the Kemper, and wouldn’t
it be great if he could get us to come out there [PGA
Championship]. I realized there was money to be made
here.
From there, our reputation helped us. The same corporate
sponsors sponsor the PGA as the Super Bowl. They weren’t
looking for a hot dog caterer, they were looking for a high-end caterer.
Another health scare
In 1997, we bought Ridgewells,
my divorce was final, and I was diagnosed with melanoma.
The melanoma was on my foot. There was a little Cindy
Crawford mole here that was just cute and I had it all
my life. I went and got it checked. I got a call from
my doctor at 9 o’clock that night. He said, “You’ve got
melanoma.”
I called my parents. They didn’t even know I had the
mole removed. They freaked out. Dad did some research,
and got me into Sloan-Kettering. I got operated on and
went through some pretty aggressive treatment up there.
My sister came out to help me. I was on crutches for
11 weeks and Mom came and stayed with me at the time.
The melanoma took a back seat to everything else. Most
people would stop their lives with an illness like this.
But I was buying Ridgewells, was newly divorced, and was starting my life over.
I didn’t let it get me down.
Entertaining at home
I love to entertain. I could probably go home,
and if you were to…say 10 people are coming to dinner,
I would probably have everything I need at my house in
the pantry and in the freezer.
I entertain a lot at home for work. I love to entertain
at Christmas. I do a Christmas party every year for
family and friends, and then impromptu parties. I love
to entertain outside, throw stuff on the grill. I’ve
got a great back yard.
On cooking
Cooking to me is therapy. Before I had kids,
I would spend all day, every weekend, in the kitchen,
just making things.
Do I cook [for parties]? It depends. If
it’s for Ridgewells, no.
If it’s 24 people, no. If it’s
10 to 12, yes.
I hate to clean up. I always have someone help me with
that.
Most stressful moment
At President Bush’s inauguration, this recent
one, I ended up serving [Secretary of State] Condoleeza
Rice’s table, because I didn’t feel like the server that
was on top of the table was the best one. So here I am
in my ball gown, serving her table, just to make sure
everything’s OK.
I’m in the service business and that’s what I do. If
I have to pick up trash, I pick up trash. If I’ve got
to make a fajita, I make a fajita. I chip in, whatever
I need to do. I think that’s why I get the respect of
everybody because I would never ask anybody to do anything
that I wouldn’t—or that I haven’t—done myself.
Balancing life with work
I call coming home my second shift. I think all working
women face that. I am pretty organized. The business tool
I can’t live without is my BlackBerry,
for personal and professional reasons.
When you own your own business, you’re always working.
I may, after Ayden goes to bed, catch up on my reading
until I fall asleep. Sometimes I get up at 4 in the
morning and return voice mails or e-mails. It depends.
I may leave the office at 3 o’clock, but I’m still working.
I take a shower and go out to another event.
I’m out, business networking, at trade events, or Girl
Scouts about two nights a week.
I feel like I’m a better mom because I’m working. When
I come home to focus on Ayden and Nathan, they get my
attention. Once they’re all settled in, I get back to
work.
I did the 24/7 at Ridgewells.
I worked for 15 years, seven days a week. I don’t feel
guilty when I’m home on a busy Saturday with my family.
I am still good friends with my first husband Rick [Gersten] and his wife, Vicki. Our kids play all the time.
We co-parent terrifically. We have joint custody of
Nathan. We support each other in our parenting decisions,
and we see each other often.
Favorite local restaurants
Centro. They have
great apple martinis and the guys are great. Grapeseed
has wonderful food, but I like the atmosphere at Centro
better, and Mon Ami Gabi. I love their trout and the
kids love steak and fries, and it’s got a good atmosphere.
It’s got to be kid friendly for me.
Brush with fame
Jerry Seinfeld headlined the Leukemia Society
Ball a few years ago. We did these taxicab cookies,
you know, shaped like a taxicab. I got in line to get
my picture taken with him. I asked him to bite the cookie.
He smiled, but through closed teeth, he said: “I’m not
biting the cookie.” We went back and forth. I held up
the cookie in the picture. It was like a Seinfeld shtick.
Favorite song
“Paradise By the Dashboard Light” by Meatloaf. I can sing the whole thing.
I sing both the male and female parts. It reminds me
of the carefree days of high school [at Ramapo High
School in Franklin Lakes, N. J.].
TV
I watch Fox News and I’m a big Katie Couric
fan. Sometimes I watch it [the “Today” show] in the
morning to see what she wears and it inspires me to
see what I should wear. But she’s getting a little frumpy
for me
Temper
I don’t think I have a temper, but others may
say differently. I want perfection. I want to walk into
an event at the Corcoran and make sure that the servers
are standing at attention, the bartenders are ready
to go and they look good. I want excellence. If it’s
not, I go to the right person to talk about why it’s
not perfect and how we can avoid it in the future.
The to-do list
I’d like to speak French fluently and play
the piano.
Regrets
I have none.
April Fulton is a freelance writer in Washington.
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