Eagles GM Howie Roseman’s other unrelenting obsession: The perfect meal

Howie Roseman loves food.

“I like to say, passion for all the Fs. You know, food, football, friends, family,” he told unCovering the Birds.

Roseman’s day job as Eagles general manager might not let him pour as much energy and time into his foodie pursuits as his palate and belly would like. But make no mistake, he still finds a way.

“There’s something that, to me, is fun about doing that and going to a restaurant and kind of evaluating that,” Roseman said.

“Like everything else, I think he is obsessed at times,” said Jake Rosenberg, a former Eagles executive. “He eats a ton and loves trying everything.”

Rosenberg was one of Roseman’s top point people in the Eagles’ front office for more than a decade. He and others who worked closely with Roseman learned firsthand: His obsessions for football and food are intertwined.

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“These are similar traits to his obsession with football and building a roster,” Rosenberg said.

Whether it’s discovering a generational talent or the next great meal, Roseman has a ravenous appetite. In many ways, he operates like a chef himself in leading the Eagles’ five-star operation. Just how serious is Roseman about food?

“We critiqued food more than players,” Ryan Grigson said.

“He’s a huge foodie,” Joe Douglas added.

Grigson and Douglas are seasoned NFL personnel executives, and both worked with Roseman during stints with the Eagles. Grigson is the former GM of the Indianapolis Colts and is now the Minnesota Vikings’ senior vice president of player personnel.

He and Roseman met when Grigson joined the Eagles as a scout in 2004. Since then, they’ve grubbed a lot, even after Grigson left in 2011. Before Super Bowl LVII, Grigson spoke about their shared obsession for food, almost as if it were obnoxious.

“Us out to dinner together is like, no, I don’t think anyone would be able to stomach it because we expect to have the most perfect meal and service,” he said. “And every time we sit down, then we usually will grade the food, like put a scout grade, like an actual evaluation grade, like you’re grading a player on the food.”

Douglas was Eagles vice president of player personnel from 2016 to 2019. Most recently, he was the New York Jets’ general manager up until they fired him in November.

When Douglas and Roseman traveled together with the Eagles, he always kept his fingers crossed he’d make the cut for one of Roseman’s dinner outings. Within the organization, these meals have become a thing of lore.

“That’s always good to get an invite on the road because you know it’s going to be an outstanding place,” Douglas said. “You know it’s going to be top of the line. This is one of the most important things in life, and that’s food. And he’s looking for the best.”

Yes, to work and to be on the road with Roseman is to eat with Roseman. It can either be the ultimate coveted perk or a total pressure cooker. Rosenberg knows the drill. He was the Eagles’ vice president of football administration and Roseman’s right-hand man on contract negotiations up until last year. He left the team to start his own consulting business for college and pro teams.

Asked how many times he was Roseman’s dinner companion on the road, Rosenberg said with a laugh, “Oh, my God. ... A lot of meals.”

Does Roseman ever allow Rosenberg to pick a spot?

“There’s a lot of risk involved with picking the spot,” Rosenberg mused. “That’s an upside-downside type of thing, like, is the upside really worth it? Not getting a lot of pats on the back. But when the place is not up to standards or is disappointing, it’s a bad spot to be in. ...”

“Sometimes [for] a night game, where we have a meal and then want to try some other place, it’s like, ‘Can we run over there and grab something, either to shove in a bag to take to the game, or something just to try it?’ It’s an obsession, unrelenting obsession just to try more food.”

Roseman doesn’t shy away from his reputation as an obsessed foodie. His determination to find great places to eat began around the same time then-Eagles coach Andy Reid promoted him to vice president of player personnel in 2008. Early in the 2024 season, Roseman sat down with The Inquirer to talk about his love for food.

“Coach Reid’s like, ‘I want to see you go on the road and [scout] a bunch of schools,’ which was huge for me,” Roseman recalled. “But I’d ask our area [scouts], ‘Where should I go to eat?’ And I got to a point where I’m like, if these guys can’t evaluate the restaurants … Like, you either can evaluate or you can’t. ...

“I think at this point because I’ve been here so long, our scouts, anyone who recommends a place to me understands that it comes with responsibility because there’s judgment involved.

“It would be, ‘Well, I can’t find ...’ No, you can find a place. There has to be a place — even if it’s a sandwich shop and it turns up. So if you go to Mobile [for the Senior Bowl], if you go to Indy [for the NFL scouting combine], everyone knows, here are the spots that he’s going to go to in those places.”

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Roseman didn’t always have such a refined palate or penchant for fine dining. He was not a child of privilege. Both of his parents were teachers. He grew up in North Jersey.

“It wasn’t like we were going to some fancy places,” Roseman said. “I liked the creamy Italian dressing at Red Lobster, you know? I liked going and getting shrimp parm at the local Italian restaurant. So I think for me, as I’ve gotten older and gotten more exposed to things, I realized how much I really enjoy good meals, and it’s become an incredible passion.”

Would he have developed such a strong foodie side to his personality if he weren’t working in football? Who knows? But he liked the evaluating part of his personnel job, and pretty soon he started doing the same thing with his meals when he ate out.

“I like evaluating,” he said. “I like being in a position where I see what’s really good and measuring it up. We met with some kind of natural doctor at some point a long time ago [when] Coach Reid was here. And I remember [the doctor] said to me something like, ‘I can tell a lot about you. You like to eat.’ And I said, ‘I do like to eat.’ He goes, ‘One day, you’re going to become very fat if you don’t stop doing this.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to keep doing this.’ And that’s probably why I have to get my morning routine and workout so I can kind of eat whatever I want.”

Another factor that shaped Roseman’s path to foodism was his unconventional background, at least in the context of football circles. It’s not a stretch to say that in the early- to mid-2000s, when Roseman was rising to power and analytics and salary-cap management were becoming more in vogue in the NFL, he was viewed as the prototypical pencil-pushing “non-football guy.”

He has since shed that perception and proved all the doubters wrong. But Roseman was self-aware enough to realize what people were saying about him. “He never played football. He was a number cruncher. No way he could evaluate talent as well as someone who played the game.”

Roseman discovered that food was a way for him, not only to break bread with his peers on the Eagles and around the rest of the league, but also to break the ice. These outings helped him build bonds.

““A lot of how I developed my relationship even with Coach Reid was around food and my passion for food,“ Roseman said. ”Obviously, he shares a passion for that. And you think about who the personnel directors have been here, and even currently one of our personnel directors is a former O-lineman, and it’s just kind of been something that’s been natural, this passion for football and food.”

Just like he developed reliable sources for football intel, Roseman did the same with food.

“At this point, there are people [who] are proven evaluators, that are guys that I really trust when I have these conversations about things,” Roseman said. “There are people that have proven their worth evaluating really good restaurants.”

It didn’t take Roseman long to realize his words about food carried as much weight as his words about football. It was early in his tenure as general manager in 2013. He was at the scouting combine in Indianapolis and met Hall of Fame reporter Peter King for an interview at a place called Café Patachou. King wrote this account of the meeting in a Sports Illustrated column afterward:

“Why, oh why, have I missed the breakfast gem in downtown Indianapolis (with other locations in the area) called Patachou? Aptly nicknamed A Student Union for Adults, the wide-open breakfast room had NFL people there all weekend. “Shhhh,‘’ Eagles GM Howie Roseman said Saturday morning. “This is the best-hidden secret in Indianapolis.”

“It must be shared, Howie. I recommend the broken yolk sandwich with the Smoking Goose Apple Chicken Sausage.”

Roseman last season said he couldn’t remember if the next time he went back to Patachou was the next week or the next year. What he did remember was how the restaurant staff treated him.

Roseman joked: “Like, ‘Howie, thank you so much.’ And they’re like, ‘Here’s a muffin.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, here’s a muffin? I get the muffin?”

Roseman’s ascent in his front office just so happened to coincide with another transformative moment in Philadelphia’s history — the explosion of the food scene in the early 2000s. All of a sudden, a city that for so long had been able to hang its culinary hat on only a handful of buzz-worthy dining spots had become a breeding ground for some of the most innovative, exciting dining on the East Coast, or anywhere else for that matter — restaurateur Stephen Starr, celebrity chefs Michael Solomonov, Marc Vetri, Jose Garces, Marcie Turney, and many more. Philadelphia transformed itself into a foodie destination, and it hasn’t slowed down since.

At the same time, Roseman was experiencing his own rebirth. Freed from his exile during the Chip Kelly era, he had regained a top job in the Eagles’ front office. By 2017, he built his first Super Bowl roster. The team dropped off for a few years after that, but since then has roared back even stronger. After coming up just short in the Super Bowl two years ago, the Eagles reclaimed the title this year.

Roseman dines out plenty, even when he’s not on the road. In Philadelphia, he sees a city with loads of talent on the football field — and in the kitchen.

“We have such a great chef community,” he said. “And when I first got here, it wasn’t like that — obviously, a long time ago — but Philly has turned into such an unbelievable food center, the camaraderie between the chefs, how much they respect each other. And it’s almost like a little bit of the fraternity [of NFL general managers].

“It’s the same thing I feel when we make a trade, I want it to work out for us, for sure. But at the same time, I also want it to work out for other people so that they feel good about how they did, and they can get raises and promotions and job security. I’m not looking for their jobs. And so I think you see that the same way in the chef community. Like, they’re not rooting against each other.”

Over time, Roseman has become as much a student of the Philadelphia restaurant industry as he has a connoisseur. What Roseman won’t do publicly is name his favorites.

“I’m very close to the food community here,” he said. “I have a lot of friends that are in the industry that are doing a great job, but there are so many people doing unbelievable things here in this city and restaurant groups that I love going to. And so I would hate to leave somebody out and just start naming names.

“But I would say that for me, when you look at the cooking that’s going on in this city, you really have a huge range of food options. Sometimes you go to a city and it’s like, well, the Italian food’s not great, the sushi’s not great. But here there’s no type of food that you couldn’t go to that you wouldn’t enjoy.

“Certainly I don’t want to forget anyone and then all of a sudden I go to that restaurant …”

During his dining exploits, Roseman started noticing something else about the restaurant business, too. There’s a lot of overlap between his line of work — running a professional football franchise where the standard is Super Bowls — and running a high-profile restaurant that’s constantly in demand and the talk of the town.

One, you need a good team of people around you that can carry out your vision and strategy and build up.

“The most important thing that I do is hire people,” Roseman said. “That’s the biggest gift that I’ve given is that I’m able to hire people on and off the field. And I take that job really seriously, and at the same time empowering them, but also having a philosophy and a vision so that it’s not getting away from that. ... I think if there’s a vision in how you want to do something, you can keep alignment throughout.”

The second big parallel that Roseman pointed out between being an NFL GM and a James Beard-worthy head chef: finding the right balance between being hands-on and hands-off.

“I like to be involved, just like these [chefs] like to be involved,” he said. “And, you know, sometimes you’ll go to one of these restaurants and you’ll see them still cooking, and you can lose it. That’s why I like to still do the players and be involved in the contracts and do free agency at the end of the day because I think that that allows you to not have regret.

“And that doesn’t mean you’re not going to make mistakes. You’re certainly going to make a lot of them. And it doesn’t mean that someone can’t come to you and say, ‘Hey, I’m thinking about this a different way.’ And I tell our [staff] all the time, ‘If you tell me something and your opinion is different, I promise you I’ll think about it.’ There’s been a lot of times where I go, ‘You know what? I actually think your perspective is better than mine.’ The best idea has to win.

“And I know just from talking to these chefs, it’s the same thing. That they have a vision, they have a passion for this, and they want to be involved in it. But if you hire the right people, you can actually get better and you can continue to learn.”

But the biggest similarity Roseman sees between being a GM and running a restaurant is that you’ve got to have thick skin. This came up during a conversation he had in September with Solomonov and business partner Steven Cook to promote their second cookbook for the James Beard Award-winning Israeli restaurant Zahav at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History near Independence Mall.

Serving as the moderator, Roseman asked the restaurant duo why Philly is special to them, poking fun at himself about the flak he occasionally gets from fans.

“People are yelling at you sometimes when you’re cooking, aren’t they?” Roseman asked. “Or is that just when I walk on the field?”

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Solomonov told the story of a birthday lunch he had for an employee earlier that day at the cult favorite Pho 75 in South Philadelphia.

“I’m walking by, and this woman is eating by herself, and she grabs my arm,” Solomonov recalled. “And I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s a fan.’ She’s like, ‘I gotta tell you, I had a horrible meal at your restaurant.’ I was like, that’s the most [damned] Philly thing I’ve ever heard.

“And I was like, ‘I’m so sorry. Come back in.’ She was like, ‘It was for my husband. He has all these dietaries.’ And I was like, ‘This is my email address. Shoot me an email.’ And she was like, ‘But is it going to be, like, good?‘”

The audience roared with laughter, and Roseman added: “I was speaking at an event, and an 8-year-old got up and asked me a question. I think it’s going to be like, ‘Mr. Roseman…’ and he’s like, ‘Howie. Why’d you draft Jalen Reagor?’ And I’m like, ‘Sit down. Little man, sit down.‘”

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The Philly food scene might not have its own version of WIP, but there’s no shortage of places you can go to read reviews, give takes, or look up rankings. In this sense, websites, Reddit communities, and social media function for the food industry the same way sports radio does for sports teams. And oh, by the way, of course, all those things I mentioned exist in the sports world, too, especially in Philadelphia, where opinions or feelings are usually coming in hot. Roseman gets it. He’s been through it. He knows what it’s like to be called out, to constantly face pressure and scrutiny.

“It’s almost like I’m a character in the show that is Philadelphia,” said Roseman, 49. “And I’m kind of used to that, you know? I think it was a little surreal to my kids when they were younger. Now they’re older, and this is what they know. But to see kids coming up with their dad and like, ‘Howie …’ And people here, they’re open, you know? So they’ll say things.”

Roseman doesn’t envy chefs and restaurateurs like Solomonov and Cook.

“When they get reviewed, and they get Instagram, and they get the emails, and so it’s basically like, there’s a lot of the critics,” Roseman said. “And I’m like, ‘Do you really read that? Do you read the reviews? Do you read the comments?’ Certainly, I can’t really function well that way, because, as you know at heart, I am a fighter, and so if I see something, yeah, I’m going to react in a certain way. So I know myself well enough to know that I’m on a need-to-know basis.

“And it’s funny when I have these conversations with these guys, and they’re like, ‘No, I read it all, and I see it all, and I’m on Instagram and the comments on that.’ ... These guys, they feel it the same way … And they got thicker skin than I do.”

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After three Super Bowl appearances and two titles in the last seven years, the pressure on Roseman is probably as low as it’s ever been. In 15 years on the job, he has learned winning players and teams come in different forms — just like the best meals or dining experiences.

Sometimes, the moment might call for something splashy or the $$$$ variety.

Other times, you stumble upon something surprising, or unexpected.

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In the end, for pro sports teams and restaurants alike, it’s a bottom-line business. They say, “Tape don’t lie.” Well, neither does taste. Howie Roseman knows that as well as anyone.

“We don’t always find the fanciest place in whatever city,” he said. “We just try to find something that’s really good. It makes me proud, just like it makes me proud to see our players do well. To see our staff go somewhere and do well. It makes me proud when we go to a meal and the people walk off and they say, ‘That was really freaking good.‘”