Restaurant Man

by Joe Bastianich

  RESTAURANT MAN

  ALSO BY JOE BASTIANICH

  Grandi Vini:

  An Opinionated Tour of Italy’s 89 Finest Wines

  Vino Italiano:

  The Regional Wines of Italy

  Vino Italiano Buying Guide:

  The Ultimate Quick Reference to the Great Wines of Italy

  Joe Bastianich

  RESTAURANT

  MAN

  Viking

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Joseph Bastianich, 2012

  All rights reserved

  Photograph credits: Insert page 4 (bottom), 7 (bottom), 8 (middle and bottom): Photo: Barbara Kaufman; 5 (top three), 6 (all): Photo: Kelly Campbell; 5 (bottom): Photo: Lydia Gould Bessler and Glen Coben; 8 (top): Photo: Evan Sung. Other photographs courtesy of the author.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Bastianich, Joseph.

  Restaurant man / Joe Bastianich.

  pages cm

  ISBN: 978-1-101-58354-8

  1. Bastianich, Joseph. 2. Restaurateurs—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  TX910.5.B373A3 2012

  647.95092—dc23

  [B] 2011048874

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in ITC Berkeley Oldstyle Std Medium

  Designed by Francesca Belanger

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.

  In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;

  however, the story, the experiences, and the words

  are the author’s alone.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  For Olivia, Miles, and Ethan.

  This is your legacy.

  Embrace it.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER ONE: Restaurant Man

  CHAPTER TWO: Queens Boulevard

  CHAPTER THREE: Joe Stalin’s Stratocaster

  CHAPTER FOUR: Eat to Live/Live to Eat

  CHAPTER FIVE: Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

  CHAPTER SIX: From Blue Nun to Barolo

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Don’t You Know? Busboys Run the Show.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Babbo: Primi

  CHAPTER NINE: Babbo: Secondi

  CHAPTER TEN: Heroes and Villains

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Sour Grapes

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Romulus, Remus, and Me

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Pirate Love

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The Curse of Restaurant Man!

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN:

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Don’t Shoot the Piano Player

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: No, You Can’t Sit Down

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: That’s Right, the Women Are Smarter

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: Game Changer

  CHAPTER TWENTY: Closing Time

  Acknowledgments

  Writing a book, much like the journey of a Restaurant Man, is not a solitary venture, and I am indebted and grateful to everyone who has been so supportive and enthusiastic.

  Mike Edison was invaluable in helping me get the story onto the page and keeping the energy and spirit cooking over almost three years of working together to make this book a reality. Mike entered the world of the Restaurant Man with a dinner of tripe soup and toxic white wine at the Istria Club in Queens with the original Restaurant Man—my father—and me, and since then his selflessness and total immersion in the project (not to mention his practically criminal love of food, wine, and Led Zeppelin) have helped me find the confidence in my own voice to write this book without compromise. Mike is a great collaborator, a great writer, and a great friend.

  Alessandra Lusardi shared our vision and edited this book with a level of understanding, thoughtfulness, and sensitivity that I have rarely encountered in any business. Her own distinguished Italian restaurant lineage (and love of Led Zeppelin) helped to make writing this book an extreme pleasure. If someday the publishing thing doesn’t work out, she could be a great Restaurant Woman.

  Thanks to Rick Kot, without whose leadership and tenacity this book would still be living in the realm of ideas, and to everyone else at Viking.

  As always, thanks to my tough-as-nails agent, Jane “Give ’Em Hell in Chanel” Dystel of Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, to whom I am more grateful than she’ll ever know.

  Thanks to Cass Bird for capturing the spirit of Restaurant Man in his stainless-steel lair, to Lisa Eaton for designing the cover (and most of my life), and to Jessica Meyer for finding order in chaos.

  Very special Restaurant Man thanks to my assistant Kim Reed, whose patience, spirit, charm, and organization (and ability to persuade the manager of Duane Reade to carry Pabst Blue Ribbon tallboys) kept this train a-rollin’.

  Love and thanks to all the busboys, coat-check girls, maître d’s, dishwashers, hostesses, bartenders, cooks, waiters, sommeliers, captains, runners, and everyone else who worked with me over the years to create this incredible world, and especially to our fantastic customers, who supported our dream—you are the reason all of this can happen.

  And of course special thanks, deeply heartfelt gratitude, and profound love to my mom, Lidia, for letting me fly and catching me when I fell; to my grandma Nonna Mima for everything she has taught me and for providing balance and family values to a stoned youth; to my partner Mario Batali for being a cheap fuck (and Led Zeppelin fan) from way back and keeping it real; and to my astonishingly patient and beautiful wife, Deanna, who stood with me from the Balkans to Babbo. I think you knew what you were signing up for….

  CHAPTER ONE

  Restaurant Man

  Here’s everything you need to know to open a restaurant.

  Your margins are three times your cost on everything. Some things you make more, some things you make less. You have loss leaders on the menu—veal chops and steak might cost you 50 percent of the ticket price on the menu. Pasta and salad you can run closer to 15, just as long as everything works out to 30 percent.

  Bells and whistles like appetizers and desserts bring down the cost. Desserts are almost pure profit. Wine by the glass is usually marked up four times, although we don’t always do that. At Babbo we get about three times cost for a quartino, or sometimes even two times, so our wine cost is 30 to 50 percent.

  Thirty percent of your mo
nthly take is going to be your food and wine cost. Thirty percent is going to be labor, 20 percent is miscellaneous, including the rent, and 20 percent is your profit. Your rent per month should be your gross take on your slowest day.

  And that’s it. Restaurant math is easy. If you need to gross ten grand in a day, then it’s about having two hundred people coming in and spending fifty bucks apiece. And within that $10,000, you should have $3,333 going to the cost of goods sold, $3,333 going to labor to execute that, and 20 percent miscellaneous, including the linens and insurance and bug spray and anything else. That leaves 20 percent profit. Like I said, it’s very simple. There are a lot of more complex models, but this is the basic way of doing it.

  Anything you give away for free is bad. Linen is the number-one evil, because it is expensive and no one pays for it. Same with bread and butter. You don’t mind paying fifteen bucks for a veal chop you sell for thirty dollars, but paying a dollar and a quarter for a tablecloth and thirty-five cents for each napkin that someone gets dirty before they even have their first drink is a drag.

  In a typical Manhattan fine-dining restaurant, between 10 and 20 percent profit is an acceptable margin. Twenty percent if you’re a stud, 10 percent if you’re just doing okay. But every little thing will eat into your margin. A spoon that goes into the garbage is coming out of your pocket. A pot of coffee no one drinks costs you money. How close the chef cuts the fish to the bone will make a big difference. In this business, to make money you have to save money.

  My dad taught me that. He was a restaurant man. That’s what he called it: “Restaurant Man.”

  He taught me at an early age the enigma of the business—you have to appear to be generous, but you have to be inherently a cheap fuck to make it work. He taught me how to make money—it’s a nickel-and-dime business, and you make dollars by accumulating nickels. If you try to make dollars by grabbing dollars, you’ll never survive. It comes down to a very simple concept that my partner, Mario Batali, and I live by in all of our restaurants: We buy things, we fix them up, and we sell them for a profit. That’s been our mantra since we started. We’re not full of ourselves. We can’t afford to be. This is a business that will always see more failure than success. We are very passionate about what we do. We live to pleasure our customers. We want to bring them to gastronomic orgasm, and we want to be there to bask in the afterglow. We’re the luckiest guys in the world to have this job. But really, what we do is very simple: We buy it, we fix it, we sell it for a profit. That’s the restaurant business.

  At Babbo, our first truly celebrated restaurant, we had a low fixed cost—when we started, our rent was only about $12,000 a month, and we had 110 seats. We were lucky; a comparable location could easily have cost two or three times that. We figured we’d take in about forty or forty-five bucks a person and turn the place one and a half times a night—that’s 155 covers a night, which is $7,000 a night, about $50,000 a week. It’s a nice little $2.5- or $3-million-a-year operation. If we’re doing well, all told we make 20 percent, $600,000. But these days utilities cost more than rent. It’s crazy—you have to have extremely high revenues. You have to be busy all the time.

  Most people who open restaurants will fail, because they lack the fundamental understanding of restaurant math. Either they think they’re superstar cooks or they think they’re superstar hosts. They do it for ego, and they don’t realize that without making money it’s nothing but bullshit. You are in the business of marketing, manufacturing, and customer service, all at once, every day. If you don’t break it down into these elements and take each one of them for what it’s worth, if you think you’re some sort of glorified dinner host or some artistic cook, you’re not going to last a week.

  If you’re counting on your friends when opening a restaurant, you’re fucked. That is not how you build a business. This is another lesson my father taught me: He always preferred the unmuddied Customer–Restaurant Man relationship—you come here because I give you a product at a fair value and, hopefully, exceed your expectations. You’re happy to pay for it. I’m nice to you because I’m making money. You enjoy, you leave, you come back again. You say thank you, good night, and maybe I buy you a drink.

  Friends feel entitled. They keep you away from what you should be doing with the customers who really matter, and you have to send them free shit. Friends fuck up your night—and your margin.

  Walking into the restaurant every day, you’re basically looking for opportunities to make money. And how do you make money? By stopping money from going out the front door.

  First thing is, your restaurant has to have a scale at the front door, because every meat purveyor and fishmonger knows whether you do or do not—they all have a checklist of their restaurants that don’t have scales. You weigh everything as it comes in, then check your invoices. Your chief porter is usually going to be doing that. In the case of most restaurants, he’s a dishwasher, but he’s evolved. He’s your boy. You watch out for him—if that guy is on the take, you’re totally screwed. He has got to be on your team, because he’s at the pulse. And you have to make sure he’s aggressive, not only weighing everything but making sure you’re not getting stabbed for ice weight, or water weight on fish, or box weight on meat. There are so many ways that you can get fucked. You’ve got fresh produce and dairy, and if it goes bad one second before you’re ready to sell it, that’s coming right out of your profits. You’re taking credits on the linen deliveries. You have to buy lightbulbs, toilet seats, stemware, flour, sponges, you name it, and if there’s a way to skim on it, someone is going to try. If the vendor thinks he’s going to be a wise guy, he gives your guy at the door an envelope, a couple hundred bucks in cash every week or every other week, and then your guy is going to sign for any kind of invoice. That’s classic. You have to make sure your man is as incorruptible as a parish priest.

  The magical point of the restaurant, where you make money, is not at the table when the check comes. It’s at the door when you sign in that invoice, for whatever it is. Because when you get it and you’re signing it and it’s still on a double-ply receipt, if you mark a credit for dirty napkins or dirty tablecloths or weight on a fish, they’re going to take back your marked receipt and you’ve still got an angle. When you sign off and take your half of the ticket and now you only have your invoice left and later you find out you’ve been ripped off, the road to getting that money back is much longer. So that’s the real pressure point—when you still have the delivery guy there and your guy there and you can still mark that invoice and put up a stink if you have to—Fuck you, I’m not paying for this, fifty cents on the dollar for this—you still have leverage. Once you sign off on it, you’re done. People will try to cheat you all the time. It’s like Monty Python’s Life of Brian—if they didn’t try to cheat you and you didn’t try to haggle, everyone would be disappointed. It’s part of the game. Once you have a relationship with vendors, you hope you can trust them. But it’s definitely a crawl—they’ll nickel-and-dime you until nickels become dimes and dimes become quarters.

  Then there are the people who actually want to steal from you. Sleazy waiters like to steal cash, but these days when everything is done on computers, it’s tough. It used to be that they could give a customer a fake check without running it through the register and then pocket the money off the books, but that’s very risky. If they’re in cahoots with the bartender or whoever is taking the cash, that’s a better way to steal. That requires two people cooperating, though, and a little honor among thieves. But at least that way they might have a chance.

  I remember closing up one night, at Buonavia, my parents’ restaurant in Queens in the 1970s. I was about ten or eleven. My father would close the place himself every night, which was a real bitch. That’s a lot of long nights, hanging out, waiting for the drunks to finish, having a couple glasses of wine, flirting with the coat-check girl. It’s where good goes to bad. You’ve got to be supervigilant at a time when your instinct is to have a few and call
it a night. Back then my job was to pull the gates down and put the padlocks on, usually around three in the morning, freezing my ass off. On this particular occasion, I looked over where the garbage was being picked up on the street, and the garbage bags were moving. It was like a horror movie, totally weird. We cut one open, and it was full of lobsters. It’s very simple to sneak food out with the garbage, then swing back later and pick it up to resell for easy money.

  Then there are the people who aren’t actively stealing but are eating expensive product and wasting stuff. They’re wasteful because they don’t give a shit, and ultimately they’re fucking you. They don’t care if you lose money or make money.

  There’s an old joke in the business: The restaurant owner has just hired a new bartender, and it’s his first night of service. The owner is up on the second floor looking down at the bartender, keeping an eye on the new guy. Some people come in and order two Budweisers and two shots of Jack Daniel’s. It comes to thirty bucks, and the bartender puts fifteen in the drawer and fifteen in his pocket. The next guy orders a round and it’s forty bucks. Twenty in the drawer and the bartender puts twenty in his pocket. The boss is upstairs watching the whole thing. The next big order comes in. Shots all around, beers, a few cocktails, sixty-dollar tab. The bartender puts twenty in the drawer and forty in his pocket, and the boss loses his shit. He says, “Goddamn it, I thought we were partners!”

  That’s the way it is—you’re just happy to know what people are stealing from you. After that it’s how much you’re willing to tolerate.

  Being Restaurant Man means being there in the morning. It’s a drag—you closed late the night before, you were probably drinking too much and trying to lay the coat-check girl—but you have to shake it off and start all over again. You sip your espresso at the bar, maybe have a little Fernet-Branca to kill the hangover, and take a look at what happened the previous night. You survey the land. You check out what’s been coming in the door and what’s been going out. You look in the coat-check room, because that’s where people leave the good stuff. You always go behind the bar, because that’s kind of like the cockpit of the restaurant—that’s where the cash register is, and usually that’s where you can see the door. You check the bartender’s tip jar, because that’s where they leave the evidence—blow, money, theft, phone numbers. Whatever happened the night before, the story is going to be right there in the tip jar.