Rick Rosenfield is the co-founder and former CEO of California Pizza Kitchen, a global restaurant company that generates nearly a billion dollars a year in revenue. Rick joins Adam to share his unique journey – from criminal defense lawyer to one of the restaurant industry’s most successful entrepreneurs – and his best lessons and advice. Rick and Adam discuss a wide range of topics: entrepreneurship, leadership, hiring, culture, resilience, partnership, and much more.
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Read the full transcript of Adam’s conversation with Rick Rosenfield.
Episode Summary
Rick Rosenfield spent twelve years as a federal prosecutor and defense attorney in Los Angeles before he and law partner Larry Flax turned a stray observation into California Pizza Kitchen. After years of talking about leaving law to start a business, the two finally decided to act following a long trial in San Francisco. At a Los Angeles restaurant, they noticed customers ordering pasta kept grabbing a plain slice of pizza on the side, and driving back to their Beverly Hills law office, they began combining the two ideas into a California-style pizza concept. Their friend Bob Mandler, who owned the newly successful Chin Chin restaurant on Sunset Boulevard and had once shared a law office with them, suggested they build it in the same style as his restaurant, but Italian. By the end of that single afternoon they had a concept, though still no name and no menu, only a decision to sign a personally guaranteed lease and borrow two hundred fifty thousand dollars against their law practice. Rick’s business plan staked out a third American pizza tradition alongside New York and Chicago, before barbecue chicken pizza, the dish that would define the brand, even existed.
Twenty-three phone calls to friends in a single afternoon produced twenty-two yes answers, money raised on reputation rather than restaurant experience. That trust in Rick and Larry as people, not as restaurateurs, became the seed of the culture they later formalized as ROCK: respect, opportunity, communication, and kindness.
The real test of that culture came within the restaurant’s first year, when Rick and Larry fired their original chef, a Spago veteran they clashed with from the start, after he wrongly accused a server and made her cry. The three of them, Rick, Larry, and Rick’s wife Esther, sat on the floor of their law office afterward and cried, certain they had just gutted a restaurant that was already succeeding. A line cook named Gary Beauregard stepped into the gap and spent the next twelve years building CPK’s menu alongside them.
Rick and Larry ran the company together for twenty-five years and never once said “I told you so” to each other, a discipline Rick credits to neither of them being invested in being right. That discipline was tested hardest when PepsiCo took a majority stake and pushed CPK to open fifty to one hundred restaurants a year, far outrunning the infrastructure that could support it. Rick describes the low point plainly: watching a manager’s skeptical reaction to a promise about quality he was no longer sure he could keep, then calling Larry to say they were in real trouble. A contract clause their attorney, Bob Kahn, had negotiated ended up protecting the company when PepsiCo exited the restaurant business, and new private equity partners eventually gave CPK room to recover.
What You’ll Learn
- Why Rick believes promoting almost entirely from within is what let CPK keep employees for 15, 18, and 20 years by the time the company sold.
- A Navy SEAL turned bestselling author, Jack Carr, gave Rick a simple piece of advice, “trust your instincts,” that shaped how Rick decided who inside CPK he could actually trust.
- Why Rick believes the real question to ask before choosing a business partner is about yourself, not about the person you’re considering.
- Why Rick’s first hire at CPK was a server named Julie Carruthers, discovered while she waited on him and Larry at lunch, and why they never really conducted interviews, only sales pitches.
- Why Rick and Larry adopted “do the right thing” as CPK’s core mantra, a principle Rick traces directly back to the moral gray areas he navigated as a criminal defense lawyer.
- Rick compares his decades-long partnership with Larry to a great marriage, crediting one specific habit, never going to sleep angry at each other, for why their endless debates never turned personal.
About Rick Rosenfield
Rick Rosenfield is the co-founder and former CEO of California Pizza Kitchen, which he and law partner Larry Flax started in 1985 after twelve years together as federal prosecutors and defense attorneys in Los Angeles. He grew up on Chicago’s South Side, studied at the University of Illinois and DePaul law school, and began his legal career writing U.S. Supreme Court briefs for the Department of Justice at twenty-four. Rick and Flax ran CPK together for twenty-five years, building it around the ROCK culture: respect, opportunity, communication, and kindness. Rick is the author of the new memoir, The California Pizza Kitchen Story.
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