Alexandra Shapiro Doesn’t Want the Hottest Restaurant on the Block

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“My parents really didn’t want me to go into it, actually.”

That’s a pretty common statement I hear from restaurateurs who are following in their parents’ footsteps. This time, though, it’s coming from Alexandra Shapiro, who’s sitting across from me in a corner booth of her Upper East Side restaurant Flex Mussels. Yet the specifics of her family’s restaurant legacy, and her personal plan to shepherd it into the future, are anything but conventional.

“Specifically, my mother said, ‘Please go to law school. I’m begging you, go to law school,’” the 40-year-old Shapiro says. “So I went to college with the intention of being a lawyer. But you know, [restaurants] are a passion. It’s an industry for really deranged people. I could not escape it. I was bitten by the bug.”

When you hear Shapiro wax poetic about her childhood, it’s no wonder she ended up in the family business. Not only did she grow up in her parents’ New York City restaurants, but food has always been the fulcrum on which their life balanced. “All of our vacations were inspired by food,” she says. “We never went to Aruba or had a regular beach vacation. They’d be like, ‘Kids, we’re getting in the car and going to Connecticut to try all the pizzas.’”

One monthlong road trip through New England ended up on Prince Edward Island, a lush Canadian province that’s famous for its red sand beaches, Anne of Green Gables and namesake PEI mussels. The Shapiros loved it so much that they came back again and again.

On one of those subsequent trips, they ate at a small seafood cart. Alexandra’s father, Bobby, told the owner he was an NYC restaurateur and that they should make the cart a restaurant. And so the first Flex Mussels was opened in Charlottetown, the capital of Prince Edward Island, in 2002.

An Instant New York Classic

How exactly does a Canadian seafood shack find its way to the bustling streets of NYC? From the outset, the Shapiros always wanted to open a location in Manhattan but were waiting for the right opportunity. 

“I was here running my parents’ Mexican restaurant [Zocalo], and it was one of those nights in the restaurant business when everything goes wrong and everything is breaking,” Shapiro tells me. “I called my dad at the end and said, ‘We’ve got to close, everything is broken in here.’ And he was like, ‘Okay, do we close and reopen, or do we do Flex?’”

“I said, ‘Let’s do Flex. Let’s make it new,’” Shapiro adds. “So I had a party with my friends. I drank all the tequila. The next morning, I came in, took a sledgehammer and started knocking down walls. Then that Monday, the stock market dropped 777 points. The recession started. And we were like, oh my God, we just closed a successful restaurant. What have we done? We wound up renovating and opened Flex six weeks later in November 2008. It was a huge success.”

It’s this kind of instinct that makes Shapiro so good at what she does. That and the understanding of what people actually want when they dine out, especially in this era of overly buzzy restaurants driven by social media clout. 

“I never want to be the hottest place on the block,” she says. “I want to be wonderful, serve the neighborhood, be approachable and accessible. I never want to be the restaurant no one can get into. Because then, one day, people stop coming because there’s a new hottest place.”

I used to eat at a former Flex Mussels location that was open for a number of years on West 13th Street. The vibe was always lively but unpretentious, the kind of place where you could spend hours without feeling hurried. I dined on fresh oysters and big pots of mussels, some dressed traditionally with white wine and garlic, others done up in global flavors like lemongrass and coconut. Nothing was too fancy; everything was delicious.

That explains why Flex has a steady stream of neighborhood regulars, some of which have been eating in the Shapiros’ restaurants for decades. “My mom used to say, ‘It’s like having a dinner party every night,’” Alexandra says. “You’re hosting regulars that you’ve seen on their first dates. And then they get engaged. And then they get married. And then they have kids. And now their kids are coming in. We have people I’ve known my whole life that come into these restaurants. That makes it really special.”

The Revival of an Upper East Side Darling

In February 2022, a fire forced the original Flex Mussels location to close for repairs; it moved practically across the street, to its current address of 1431 3rd Avenue. Although the restaurant was planning to move anyway, now it was crunch time to figure out what the family wanted to do with the vacant space at 174 East 82nd Street. 

“I started looking on Etsy, and I found matches from my dad’s original Hoexter’s,” Shapiro says.

Hoexter’s Market (pronounced “Hexter’s”) was a restaurant with an adjacent butcher shop that the Shapiros opened in 1978 and operated for about a decade before they sold it in the late ‘80s. Alexandra took a picture of the matches she found online and sent them to her father, asking if they were from his former restaurant. When he said yes, she told him what she wanted to do with the empty Flex space — reopen Hoexter’s. “I asked him, ‘Is it bad juju?’” Shapiro says. “And he wrote, ‘No, it’s the best juju.’”

The new iteration of Hoexters (without the apostrophe in the name) opened in late 2023. People who dined at the original are still coming through, enjoying a couple of beloved dishes — like the restaurant’s signature gorgonzola garlic bread and flourless chocolate cake — that Shapiro decided to keep. The rest of the menu is full of simple, well-made classics, the types of plates that everyone loves. 

“I wanted it to be the food people like to eat,” Shapiro says. “So I surveyed a million people and asked them what they always order in a restaurant. I knew my things: fish dip, steak tartare, a steamed artichoke, a good steak. It was a nonnegotiable that we were going to have roast chicken. Nothing too fussed with, nothing too fancy, nothing too expensive.”

Up Next: Global Domination?

Restaurateurs are a special breed. They rarely slow down or feel comfortable where they are. There’s always an eye on improving, growing, expanding. “Ultimately, I’m thinking of global domination,” Shapiro laughs when I ask her what’s next. “But I also really want to expand these two concepts. I think I have two really good, really different places we can replicate and that can serve different neighborhoods.”

Although the restaurant business is always a whirlwind, some eras are more hectic than others. Shapiro is finally in a place where things feel a bit settled, at least until the bug for something new strikes again. 

“This is the first time in five years I’ve had a minute to breathe, not going through COVID or building this or building that,” she says. “So I don’t even know what to do with myself. I’m thinking what’s next now.”

Photography: Johanna Stickland for InsideHook, except where noted