Restaurant Man

by Joe Bastianich

  I go to the kitchen and pull open a couple of lowboys to make sure the inventory is being circulated. Restaurant Man is always following the product and following the money through the cycle—receiving, storage, processing, bulk processing, fine processing, application of heat. Customer comes, pays for it, leaves. The money goes in the register, you buy more shit. You have to be part cop, part paramedic—at every point in the process there are people who want to waste stuff, steal from you, make it less profitable, and ultimately throw it all in the garbage can, and your job is to keep it tidy. You have to be brutal to keep the margins from bleeding out. Ultimately, Restaurant Man’s job is to stop the people who want to fuck him from fucking him.

  The other thing I like to do in the morning is check the reservation book. See what’s on for lunch, see what’s on the book for dinner, see who’s coming in, and start thinking about who sits where. The seating chart is very important. Is anyone famous or infamous coming in? And I don’t necessarily mean celebrities. I mean customers who are either real heavies, meaning real spenders, or complete douchebags. You want to know. Famous film director is coming in with a four top. Likes to be on Table One. Fat opera diva is coming in at eight-thirty. She needs extra space. Ex-president and do-gooding rock star coming in together. Don’t keep them waiting.

  Just as a reality check, sometimes I’ll mark a couple of random bottles before I leave the restaurant at night. When I come back in the morning, I’ll check on the fill levels, see what the staff was drinking the night before. You need to know what the staff drinks, if they’re drinking Patrón or Grand Marnier—that stuff is not free. If they’re going to be drinking, you hope at least they’re drinking from the rail.

  You would like to have a no-drink policy, but the people who work in restaurants…well, they drink. It used to not matter quite as much. We made a lot more money on the bar—liquor was cheaper, and customers would drink more. Now everything is superpremium, and it costs superpremium. Back then it was gin, vodka, Canadian whiskey. A big shot trying to show off might say, “Gimme a Cutty on the rocks.” You used to pay $7.00 for a bottle of Cutty, but even in 1978 you were getting $3.25 for that drink, so 50 percent of your bottle cost was in the glass. Not anymore. You sell someone a Grey Goose martini, even at wholesale, it’s $32.00 a bottle, something like $2.00 per ounce. These days what’s a pour? Three, three and a half ounces? All of a sudden, you’ve got $7.00 of vodka in the glass, and what are you going to charge? Eleven, twelve bucks? I hate those margins. It’s not like it used to be, buying the bottle for seven and selling the glass for three and a half. Now you’ve got to sell three or four drinks to get your money back on the bottle as opposed to two.

  I’ll check out the bathrooms and the locker room, usually the most disgusting part of a restaurant. For me, restaurants are always about maintenance and cleanliness, about cleaning and upgrading, then upgrading some more. My father drilled this into my head from the time I was six years old. He used to say, “We don’t run this place like a fucking Chinese restaurant.” You know, down in Chinatown sometimes they treat the restaurants as if they lived there. Have you ever seen three space heaters with the cords all duct-taped together, plugged into one cheap extension cord, along with the TV, which the whole family is watching at a table? And the boom box and the Christmas lights are also plugged in there, and the place looks like a half-finished basement that somebody’s trying to make festive? It’s like building a nuclear power plant on a fault line.

  Before lunch you set up the dining room. My dad used to chalk the tablecloths to save a few cents—he’d go through the tablecloths from the night before, and for the ones that weren’t so dirty he had a little piece of white chalk to chalk out the marinara stains and refold them and use them again. If one was too dirty to use as a topper, it could always get a second showing as an underliner. Linens are a sore point for Restaurant Man, because they’re one of the big expenses for which you don’t get anything back. My dad had a drawer behind the bar where he kept one napkin. He would use it for a week or two. The same napkin. No kidding, Restaurant Man hates linen. Bev naps—the square napkins you get from the liquor companies for free—are Restaurant Man’s secret artillery. When the staff is eating, I make them use the bev naps. I take them home and make my family use them at dinner. I clean the windshield of my truck with them.

  After lunch is over, when the last table leaves, you clear it off but keep the same tablecloth. Maybe turn it over. Back in the day, the owner ate first, maybe with the coat-check girl if he was banging her. Or the bartender, or one of the head captains, or the manager. To sit at that table, you had to be made. Sometimes Restaurant Man would have the cook fix him something special, which is a real kick in the balls, to force someone to cook after lunch is over, but even then he was watching the cost. He wasn’t going to have a steak and a shrimp cocktail while everyone else ate veal scraps and spaghetti marinara, which was a typical family meal. This was Restaurant Man basking in his success but still living on the margins.

  At Buonavia in the seventies, between lunch and dinner everyone would be either asleep or getting drunk. Here’s an image for you: There’d be three or four tables put together, with people lying on top wrapped in tablecloths, sleeping in their underwear, with their stinking feet dangling off the table in their black suspender socks. The rest were smoking cigarettes and reading the Racing Form, also in their underwear, or they’d be out at OTB, hopefully with their pants on, betting on the ponies. All the lights are off. The first thing we did when the lunch customers were done was turn the lights off. Restaurant Man hates the electricity bill almost as much as he hates linens.

  Between lunch and dinner was when the drinkers would start to get a load on, and then they’d basically stay drunk throughout the night, stealing a glass of wine here or there. One of my jobs at Buonavia as a kid was to salt the wine—if I didn’t put two tablespoons of salt into every gallon of cooking wine, everyone in the kitchen would be completely shitfaced.

  These days we have a formal family meal. We have a meeting, and it’s a little bit more legit. At four o’clock at Babbo, we set up the upstairs, put a couple of picnic tablecloths down on the tables, and bring up some trays of food. At Babbo there’s always a vegetarian option. Everyone sits down and eats together, and we have the waiter meeting. The manager comes up and addresses the staff, the wine guys come up, they pour a wine or two, they talk about the wine. The maître d’ does the roll call—who’s coming in, who’s famous, where are they going to sit, who’s who, what their deal is, what they need to get. Usually they’re regulars, so it’s pretty standard. Then the managers talk about the specials and anything else that needs to be addressed, and the kitchen will send in a couple plates of food. After the family meal, the chef will come up and talk a little more about the dishes.

  Being a good waiter these days is all about communicating a lot of detail—the ingredients, the spirit of the dish, the expectation of it, why it’s relevant to the restaurant. Waiters are how you communicate with your public. They’re an essential part of the experience, the true bridge between Restaurant Man and the customer.

  We have an arsenal of possibilities at our disposal, and it’s the restaurant’s responsibility to take that cache and custom-craft an experience that will match or exceed your expectations as a diner. Not every experience fits every diner, and it’s the waiters’ job to interpret the experience and match it to the diners’ needs and expectations. That’s a pretty high level of the game, but that’s how we play.

  The battle is always between the front of the house and the kitchen. Luckily, I’m in business with Mario, who is 100 percent old-school Restaurant Man. He is famous for policing the garbage—if you throw it out, you can’t sell it. We’re two cheap fucks from way back. He’s a genius at being showy but not spendy. Show is free—baby carrots cost three times as much as big carrots, but if you carve big carrots down to look like baby carrots, it’s the same thing. You have to pay the guy shaving them, bu
t it costs much less than buying the baby carrots.

  You have to strike a perfect balance between being a cheap motherfucker while still being selfless when it comes to the quality of your customer’s experience, which is really our goal. But it’s very delicate, because if you favor either side, it can throw off the whole equation. Being able to ride the fine line between them is one of the most important skills a restaurateur can have. You have to make sure your parsimony is invisible. You have to appear loose to the point of being opulent—but really, when you’re giving from the front, all you’re doing is pulling from the back, and you have to be careful. You can’t win this game by giving stuff away.

  Every time I put a price on a menu item, I think about it three times. And then I think about it at night when I should be sleeping. I think about the markup, I think about the margin, and then I think, regardless of margin, what is it really worth in terms of the experience? I think about it in both directions.

  My personal rating system for restaurants isn’t really activated until I get my American Express bill at the end of every month. I go down the bill and see where I’ve eaten. Dinner at Da Silvano? Let’s see, that was six hundred dollars, and there were four of us. I think we drank some good wine, but was it worth six hundred dollars? Was it a transformative experience? I’m deciding a month later. If it passes that test, it’s a winner and I’m going back.

  I think that people look at a menu and don’t squabble so much about whether the veal chop was thirty-two dollars or twenty-eight. But when they sign that check, when the coffee and sambuca are done and the tip is in and then they’re looking at it—a couple bucks for a dinner for two, or five hundred or a thousand dollars for a dinner for four—that’s the price of the experience, and I think that’s really what it’s about.

  What fuels my mentality—from the perspective of being a Restaurant Man—is the all-in check average. “All-in” meaning average spent per person, including tax and tip. That’s your spend. That’s what it cost you for the experience. That’s where the rubber meets the road, and that’s how I look at my restaurants. I’m always thinking, Well, dinner at Del Posto these days is a hundred-and-eighty-dollar check average. Fucking A, if you’re spending a thousand bucks for four people, we had better give you some kind of experience. You could buy a 1978 Buick LeSabre for a thousand dollars and have a great time wrecking it. You always have a choice.

  Actually, at Del Posto, lunch we pretty much give away. It’s the best deal in town—twenty-nine dollars for the fixed-price three-course lunch, no gimmicks. The duck breast is epic—and no supplement for that either. We fill the place—just fifty or sixty covers a day—but there’s no motivation to do more than that, because we don’t make any money on it. It creates goodwill and Internet chatter, a lot of people talk about it. But you’ve got twelve dollars of linen on that table. You have a dollar a head in bread, plus Italian butter and house-cured lard that takes two years to make. You haven’t even ordered and I’ve spent fifteen bucks and two years on you, and that doesn’t even include the fancy stemware, the lights, the sommelier who is going to take care of you like a doctor, a very large staff of top-shelf waiters, busboys who are like ninjas, not to mention a chef who’s got more stars than Hollywood Boulevard and a pastry guy who talentwise is somewhere between Wayne Gretzky and Pablo Picasso.

  And you’re going to spend twenty-nine dollars for all this? Now, hopefully not everyone is a cheap fuck, and a twenty-nine-dollar prix fixe turns into a sixty-dollar lunch-check average. Still, this is not Restaurant Man’s preferred formula for success. Actually, the best thing to do at Del Posto is go on Friday afternoon, make a one-thirty reservation, and stay till six. You’ll drive everyone crazy, and they’ll hate your guts, but it’s basically like having an early dinner. You can have a couple bottles of wine and still get the full Del Posto experience without spending a Buick. Bring five friends, whoop it up all afternoon…Wait, I forgot to put the piano player on the bill. We have live piano music at Del Posto, even at lunch, and he’s a hundred sixty bucks a shift, divided by fifty covers, so that’s about three dollars a head in music. Guess maybe restaurant math isn’t all that easy. But when you can do it, it works, although it reminds me of the Marx Brothers routine from Animal Crackers:

  GROUCHO: What do you fellows get an hour?

  CHICO: For playing, we get ten dollars an hour.

  GROUCHO: I see…. What do you get for not playing?

  CHICO: Twelve dollars an hour.

  GROUCHO: Well, clip me off a piece of that.

  CHICO: Now, for rehearsing we make a special rate. That’s fifteen dollars an hour.

  GROUCHO: That’s for rehearsing?

  CHICO: That’s for rehearsing.

  GROUCHO: And what do you get for not rehearsing?

  CHICO: You couldn’t afford it. You see, if we don’t rehearse, we don’t play. And if we don’t play, that runs into money.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Queens Boulevard

  My parents opened their first restaurant on Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills, Queens, New York, in 1970. Queens Boulevard is the magic road that goes from near JFK to midtown Manhattan, and more people get killed trying to cross it than any other street in the world. Forty years later it looks almost exactly the same.

  The restaurant was called Buonavia, and it started as a typical seventies red-sauce joint, with velvet wallpaper and fake paintings of Venice and women with large breasts playing violins. The first incarnation was small, maybe thirty seats. My dad, Felice, ran things, both in the front of the house and in the kitchen. He made the deals, he bought the food, he hired and fired. For me he was the original Restaurant Man.

  My mother, Lidia, never came on as a player when they started—she was the cashier, she worked the bar and kind of stayed in the background. She had a great interest in food and in cooking—she’d learned to cook from her grandmother in Italy, and we made these fantastic trips to Italy every summer that always involved seeking out great local specialties—but she really only evolved as a chef after the restaurant had opened. Later, of course, she would become quite famous.

  The food at Buonavia was the typical Italian-American stuff of the day. We had a chef who had a mustache like Juan Valdez who could make piccatas, veal parmigiana, chicken scarpariello, hot antipasto, and, naturally, spaghetti with meatballs, but better than the competition’s. It was all very good.

  The place instantly drew long lines. Forest Hills had a large population of Jewish folks who appreciated a good meal and a good deal. Many of these people were immigrants themselves, so their affinity for a hardworking young couple making delicious food is easy to understand.

  Once in a while, Lidia would get in the kitchen and whip up dishes that were more ethnic and authentic to her. My parents came from a kind of unusual place in Italy, near the city of Trieste in the northeast, on the Adriatic, not far from Venice, at the top of the Istrian Peninsula, bordering what is now Slovenia and Croatia. Besides their Italian heritage, they had also been exposed to lots of Slavic and Austrian cuisine as well as some Hungarian and Jewish influences. That region had always been something of a cultural crossroads, what was sometimes called Mitteleuropa.

  Lidia would braise some tripe or make gnocchi or a guazzetto sauce, and she began serving that to people. Polenta and risotto seem so common now, but in 1971 this was the first time people had ever tasted dishes like these in a restaurant. And there was a great clientele for it in the early seventies—everyone in Forest Hills had, or was, a Jewish grandmother. A lot of them came from Central and Eastern Europe and had a real sensibility for this kind of homemade European food and a real taste for what was authentic.

  We made wine and vinegar and grew tomatoes in the back. My mother always reminds me of the time when I was three or four and cut all the flowers off the new tomato plants to give to my grandmother as a present, pretty much killing all the tomatoes from our garden for that year. She’s laughing now, but you can bet that there isn’t an It
alian mom in the world who would have thought that was funny at the time. So it was a good dose of the Old World right there in Queens.

  Eventually she took up the role of chef and my dad stayed in the front of the house. He was a hard-core Restaurant Man, a real blue-collar restaurateur. He woke up every morning and got into his truck and headed out to Hunts Point in the Bronx to the meat markets and downtown to the Fulton Fish Market. He’d buy the vegetables, buy the chickens, he knew how to save money on paper goods, you name it. We bought black-market cigarettes from the mob—my father would empty the cigarette machine in the restaurant and fill up canvas bags with the quarters, and he could tell just by lifting one exactly how much money he had collected. He’d just pick it up and tell you: “Thirty-seven fifty.” He never missed.

  I was born in Astoria in 1968, and moved to Bayside, Queens, a few years later. But we didn’t go home after school—we’d go to the restaurant in Forest Hills. I had a little desk on some tomato boxes in the dry-storage room, and I’d sit there and do my homework. Sometimes I would take a nap on the flour bags and then go upstairs and have dinner.

  I had my first job at eleven years old, washing dishes, and I loved it. Eventually I graduated to the dining room at night, seating people. After hours I dug into the banquettes to find coins, making a few bucks on the side. I liked hanging out with the cooks. They were these bad-ass motherfuckers, much cooler than me and my grade-school friends. They always had the best cars, with eight-track stereos. One guy drove an Eldorado. But that’s all they were—cooks. They didn’t have any fancy names. There was no sous-chef. There was a salad man. And a grill man. I was always friends with the salad man, since he was also in charge of desserts.