Wave

Contents

1. Roots: Family, Character, and the Making of a Man
2. A Hot Day in Queens: Coming to New York
3. Borrowed Money and No Regrets: Building Da Mikele Illagio
4. The COVID Years: Holding a Family Together
5. Capitale: Destiny, Faith, and the Deal of a Lifetime
6. The Price of Success: Losses, Lessons, and the Meaning of Money
7. Leadership: Team, Talent, and the Age of AI
8. The Value of an Experience: On Luxury and Price
9. Nights to Remember: FIFA, Google, and the Biggest Events
10. Tzedakah: Faith, Giving, and Blessing
11. Family: On Fatherhood and What His Children Taught Him
12. Survival: 2010, Forgiveness, and Mazal
13. Reflections: Happiness, Regret, and Advice to a Younger Self

Chapter I

Roots

If you could sum up Ilya Zavolun in one word, life would already be very boring, at least in his own world. His picture of life, he says, was always built twenty years ahead of where he stood. Not just a picture of leading, but of creating opportunities that would carry many people forward with him.

What quality did you get from your father?

To respect myself, to be honest with myself. There's a saying: on an airplane, before you put a mask on your child, you put the mask on yourself first. Because if you can't get enough oxygen, you can't help the person next to you. My dad taught me that lesson the hard way. I wanted to help my partner, and he told me: first set your own course, figure out what's right for you, and then move forward with him. I didn't fully understand him at the time. Over time, I heard him.

And from your mother?

Tenderness, patience, giving one more chance, and that's my mother. She's an OB-GYN, and she approaches everything more gently than businesspeople do. Love and tenderness, that's mom. Grit and drive, that's dad. My character was built by both of them together, and they continue shaping it to this day.

“If we respect ourselves, we will respect the people around us.”

Ilya describes himself as a relentless self-critic, someone who replays every conversation at the end of the day, who isn't afraid to call someone back the next morning to apologize or make a moment right. “It's like a salad,” he says. “It needs salt, and pepper, and sugar, and a little vinegar, and that's what gives it its flavor.”

Is your father your mentor?

Completely, from day one. When Ilya was around twelve, his father handed him a copy of Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. “That was the exact day I started changing myself completely from the inside,” he says. The lesson that took the longest to land was this: don't feel sorry for yourself when you're building something. Don't give up. Every mistake along the way is an instructive one, and by not giving up, you eventually reach the milestone you set out for. Sometimes you surpass it.

Chapter II

A Hot Day in Queens

Do you remember the day you first landed in New York?

Yes. It was a very hot day. Flying in from Vienna, landing at JFK, and driving out to Queens, Ilya admits he was disappointed at first. He'd pictured the skyline of postcards and instead found rows of brick buildings from the 1950s and '60s, uniform in color, nothing like the layered architectural history of Europe. “But that's America,” he says. “It works a little differently here.”

The family settled in what was then a small village in Queens, Forest Hills. “Today it's not a village anymore,” he says, “but in a broad sense, it's stayed roughly the same.”

If you had to start all over again today, would you choose New York?

Always. Ilya recalls asking a close friend from his Vienna years, a successful businessman who still lives there, whether he'd ever consider relocating. His friend's answer stuck with him: if he ever left, he'd want to be in New York, because New York has that spark, that feeling of being able to start everything over again.

“And there are more opportunities here than anywhere else in the world.”

Chapter III

Borrowed Money and No Regrets

Is it true that you had to borrow money to open the restaurant?

There is no successful businessman, Ilya says, who has spare money lying around, not even Elon Musk, who borrows to buy companies. “No one is born with money. Even if someone is born into it, they're still borrowing from their parents or relatives.” Yes, they borrowed. And they borrowed quite a lot.

Were you scared?

Fear belongs to a person who doesn't believe in God, he says, or in himself. What he felt wasn't quite fear so much as the awareness that in any construction project, something unexpected always surfaces. “That's what stops people,” he explains, “when they see the goal but not the scope of the effort required to get there.”

But if it hadn't worked out, what would you have done?

I never even considered that possibility. I knew it would work out, with God's help.

What was your personal price for that success?

“The strength of a tree isn't measured by its height, but by its roots. The cost of the root is still being felt today. I can't say exactly what it cost, because we're still growing.”

Chapter IV

The COVID Years

Ask Ilya about the hardest crisis of his career and the answer comes without hesitation: COVID. Not knowing, in the first weeks, that it would stretch on for nearly two years, he and his team tried to hold their staff together for as long as they possibly could.

“We create a team. The team creates the business. Losing the team, letting it fall apart, guarantees losing the business.”

When staffing eventually had to be scaled back, Ilya says the decisions were some of the hardest of his life. Everyone on his team had families, children. For the people they kept close, he did the shopping himself. He remembers putting on gloves and a mask, buying groceries, and personally delivering food to employees' homes so they'd have enough for the week, with a little extra cash tucked into an envelope.

But it wasn't really the food that carried people through, he says. It was knowing that someone would show up on a Monday or a Friday and wish them a good week. Week after week. “That's what created the greater success,” he reflects, “because that's what got us to where we are today.” While many competing catering halls and wedding venues closed permanently during and after the pandemic, several were eventually bought out by his company.

How many people work across your companies today?

More than 400 people, directly. Counting one additional dependent per employee, Ilya estimates his business supports the well-being of roughly 800 people, and, taking the broader family view, a couple thousand at minimum.

“Our goal is for people to feel a sense of corporate comfort. Not just comfortable at work, but knowing they have a future.”

Chapter V

Capitale

“We don't always get to choose the situations we end up in,” Ilya says of the building at 130 Bowery. “Sometimes we walk into what you might call destiny.”

Nearly eighteen years before he would come to own it, Ilya first inquired about Capitale, and was politely, firmly told to leave and never bring up the subject of a sale again. He walked out. Years later, after the building passed through bankruptcy proceedings and went to a court-supervised sale, Ilya found himself up against wealthier, better-financed bidders.

“I had a greater strength, a greater power. My power was in trust, in a successful conversation with God.”

Was there a moment you wanted to back out?

Yes, and it involved his father. Ilya asked his dad to go into partnership with him on the deal, something the family had always done together. This time, his father declined. “This is such a massive project,” he told him. “I wouldn't want to take that kind of risk, and I don't advise you to either.” For a family where, as Ilya puts it, a father's word is close to law, going against that advice was its own kind of crisis of conscience.

Ilya asked God for a sign. Waking early the next morning, before the deal had even closed, he received an email from a company inquiring about booking Capitale for 28 days at a number far beyond anything he'd imagined the building could command. A few hours later, his broker called about a second client asking about the following month, at a similarly striking figure. “That's when I understood,” he says. “God had sent me that information so I would see it. This was the place I was meant to take.”

His father's response, once the deal was done: “I'm happy with your choice, whatever help you need from my side, I'm with you.”

How much did Capitale cost?

“Capitale cost me forty-five years of experience. In dollars, it was twenty, really twenty-six and a half, million. But it was that experience that made it possible to acquire it at all.”

Perhaps the achievement Ilya is proudest of at Capitale is a quieter one: keeping the original staff. People who had worked in the building for twenty-plus years, through a change of ownership, a bankruptcy, and a pandemic, are still there today. “I consider myself, with God's help, a psychologist of my own business, and an engineer,” he says. “I gave them my vision, my speed, my way of directing the business, and that's a very important factor.”

Chapter VI

The Price of Success

Ilya has lost money at every stage of his life: $25,000 at fourteen, from a small textile business undone by unpaid bills, $200,000 at eighteen, half a million dollars at twenty-two to a partner he trusted “the way I'd trust myself,” six million dollars more recently to partners who mismanaged funds, and, by his own account, roughly ten million dollars in the stock market at a moment when he'd grown too confident in his own judgment.

“Nothing in this world truly belongs to us. You can't look at it and say, ‘I lost this.’ It was never mine. It comes, and it goes.”

He is careful, though, to draw a line between losing money and being defeated by it. People who cling to what they once had, he says, who measure themselves against a past version of their success, stop growing. People who let it go tend to grow younger. “They're still working, living, earning. Very successfully.”

Have you ever been deceived out of a very large sum of money?

Of course. But people deceived themselves, he insists; they didn't deceive him. “They betrayed my understanding, my trust in them. That person is simply no longer on my territory, on my platform. I move forward.”

“Money loves quiet, but money doesn't love sleep, so it has to work.”

Asked whether money is a form of energy, Ilya doesn't hesitate: “Absolutely. And it's one of the most powerful forms of energy there is. If water can generate electricity, money creates that plant, that water, everything else.”

Chapter VII

Leadership

Asked what keeps his companies at the top of a competitive industry, Ilya returns to a single idea: understanding what the client actually needs, and building a team that believes the owner can see the future.

“Success doesn't happen because someone was born successful. Success is created, built, hammered out. It's a core that has to be constantly maintained.”

How has AI changed the way you run your business?

Rather than using AI to shrink his workforce, Ilya says his companies have used it to train and elevate their entire staff, moving people whose roles could be assisted by AI into bigger, better positions, now that they have what he calls “an AI ally” working alongside them. Long before that, in an earlier chapter of his life, Ilya worked as a mainframe programmer, COBOL, DB2, building his own computers as a teenager. “I learned then that you can't go against the system,” he says. “You have to be inside it, and use it correctly for your own benefit.”

“There will come a time when people won't be able to run their business without AI. Better to start swimming and learning now, rather than being left standing on the shore.”

What do you look for when you bring someone onto your team?

Honesty, integrity, and the discipline to focus on doing better rather than watching what everyone else is doing. “I always tell all my staff: you represent me, I represent you,” he says. Many members of his team have stayed for five, ten, twenty years or more. “We become one big family. Sometimes we see each other more than our employees see their own families.”

Is it easy for you to part ways with people?

It's easy, he says, but he never lets it become easy to arrive at that point. “There are no bad people. They're either in the wrong flow, the wrong environment. We have to be the right conductors.” When it happens, he tries to leave the relationship on good terms. “I don't like leaving a burned bridge.”

Chapter VIII

The Value of an Experience

People say $350 for a chair is too expensive. Is it?

Ilya's answer starts with a reframe: in his business, nothing is simply cheap or simply expensive. Roughly 80% of clients planning an event, he says, are shaped by the same instinct: not wanting to appear as though they've done less than a neighbor or friend. He compares it to an architect being asked why a house is expensive, when the client is the one who specified every upgrade.

Since the onset of the war in Ukraine, he notes, food costs have risen 40 to 60%; the war involving Iran added another 40%; tariffs out of Europe and China added roughly 25% more. Altogether, the cost of goods has nearly doubled, while his venues have held pricing steady.

“What we provide can't be measured by food alone. Food is just an additional part of what we give; everything else has to be maintained and sustained.”

He estimates that, given everything included, lighting, sound, décor, staffing, parking, and year-round upkeep of gardens and terraces, his prices should really run about 20% higher than they do. “But we hold them down, because we function as an institution for our clients.”

There's a perception that you sell luxury. Do you agree?

You can't stop people from wanting to live luxuriously, he says simply. “My personal success in this business comes from the fact that our clients come back, knowing that we'll deliver what they expect: what they've been building up over twenty years with their thoughts, their money, their ideas, and we bring it to life on their day.”

Chapter IX

Nights to Remember

The largest event Ilya has produced at Illagio ran to roughly $1.5 million; off-site events have reached about $2 million. At Capitale, only nine months old at the time of this interview, the venue has already hosted a joint employee event for Google and TikTok, representing what Ilya describes, with some astonishment, as trillions of dollars of corporate presence under one roof.

“We're only nine months into the business with clients like that. It was amazing, and we were very proud to have reached that level.”

On the calendar next: an exclusive FIFA gala dinner following the World Cup games, produced in collaboration with partners from Europe and Dubai, with the president of FIFA and some of the sport's most recognizable players expected to attend. Tickets are priced from three to five thousand dollars, with a small number of premium seats, the first of which sold for $30,000 each.

Ilya tells a story his father once told him, about teaching a son the meaning of value: sell an old car at a flea market, and you'll get a small sum; sell it to a salvage buyer, and you'll get more; sell it to someone who understands it as a museum piece, and the number changes entirely. “You need to be where you're valued,” his father told him, “where people understand what you actually have.”

Chapter X

Tzedakah

Charitable giving, Ilya says, plays the single largest role in his life. He describes tzedakah not as an obligation to hand over money whenever it flows in, but as a discipline: reviewing what's actually left after real expenses, and giving a minimum of ten percent from that true, net total, rather than from gross revenue.

“Tzedakah is essentially a shield; it guarantees your success.”

He shares a personal story: on a recent Yom Kippur, he purchased the most significant blessing available at synagogue around 6:15 in the evening. Ten minutes later, a message arrived on his phone with an opportunity worth, by his estimate, roughly 500 times what he'd just given. “How else can you read that?” he asks. “It was simply given by God.”

Do you do charitable work?

The family recently established The Zavolun Foundation, and is in the process of forming a board of directors to guide its giving. Today, support goes directly to families: single mothers, children pursuing yeshiva education, people facing expenses they can't cover, as well as to the synagogue on 71st Street, the principal synagogue of the Bukharian Jewish community, of which Ilya is a member. “It feels more meaningful to give directly to a family,” he says, “than to go through an organization.”

Chapter XI

Family

What does it mean to you to be a father?

Being the father of a daughter, Ilya says, is a pure and clarifying kind of responsibility; being the father of sons is a different lens entirely. In both cases, he believes children mirror their parents, so holding yourself to the standard you want to set is the only way it works. “He'll see it in me, in his father's reflection, and he'll copy it.”

“The father gives skills. The mother gives the soul.”

What have your children taught you?

During COVID, Ilya was weighing an investment in a restaurant project in Miami. His son, nine years old at the time, asked him a question that stopped him cold: “Dad, how much do you need to earn to stop seeing us?”

“There's no amount of money that can replace time with your children. Blessed is the person who can strike that balance.”

It's a lesson, he says, that reshaped how he spends his time: intentionally, and without scattering it thin. “Everything we build for the future is for our children. If our kids don't grow up on the right path, everything we've worked for will end up meaning nothing.”

Chapter XII

Survival

In 2010, an attempt was made on Ilya's life, and on his father's. He speaks about it directly, without theatrics, and without hiding from how serious it was.

“At that moment, God didn't say ‘amen’ to it, so today I'm here, with you, doing this interview.”

The version of events, as he tells it, was simple: envy over the business's success, and, in his words, foolishness on the part of the people responsible. He remembers the entire ordeal clearly, including learning to walk again. What he has chosen to do with it since is, in his telling, the more important part of the story: he forgave the people involved, members of his own community, to the point of doing business with them again, exchanging blessings, shaking hands.

“You can't go through life not forgiving people. People spend more time thinking about the ones they haven't forgiven than the ones they have.”

Asked whether he believes in mazal, luck or fortune, Ilya says everyone has it, but everyone finds it differently. He traces his own back further than himself: to his great-grandparents, his grandparents, and the good they did in their own time. “I received that blessing,” he says, “and am alive today because of it.”

Chapter XIII

Reflections

What makes you happy today?

I'm content with what God gives me every day. I don't chase being richer for its own sake. There are people richer than us who aren't happy. Happiness is being satisfied with what you have today.

What do you regret?

What I didn't manage to do yesterday.

What would you tell your 30-year-old self?

Ilya says he would spend more time with his parents and grandparents, a byproduct, he explains, of the distances immigration created. He speaks to his own parents almost daily now, by phone or in person. But he never had that closeness with his grandparents, and didn't fully grasp, at the time, how limited that window really was.

“My grandmother put it this way: life is like the buzz of a bee. It just goes ‘zzz,’ and it's gone. Seventy or eighty years passed just like that.”

His closing thought is, in many ways, the thesis of the whole conversation: enjoy what you have. Live today. Plan for tomorrow. Learn from what happened yesterday, so you can make tomorrow better. But the living has to happen today.