Restaurant Man

by Joe Bastianich

  Forest Hills was a classic Queens neighborhood. Sam Heller owned the Knish Nosh across the street, next door there were Koreans who owned a stationery store, and there was a beauty salon, and a Sterling savings bank on the corner. Eventually Buonavia got so popular that we expanded, first taking over the stationery store, then the beauty parlor. We could seat 120 people, and there were still lines outside waiting to get in.

  Ethnicity was very important when we were growing up. My father taught me that the Jews worked in the banks and the Italians worked in the restaurants and that the Irish were cops, and you never wanted a Jewish doctor, but you wanted a Jewish accountant and make sure you have an Italian lawyer. It was a simple view of things, but we lived in a diverse neighborhood of immigrants, and the first thing you knew about people was their religion and their ethnicity. Everyone got along, but this is what you used to size them up. I realized that there was us and the Jews and the Irish, and then there were the Puerto Ricans, who were somehow different from us. But I was hanging around with a pretty mixed crew—Angelo Sorrentino was Italian; the Grimaldis, Italian; Brain O’Flaherty, Irish; Paul Putski (known as the “Polish Hammer” for his ability to pound a six-pack of Bud in record time), Polack. Eric Vilando, Filipino. Havel Blapk, Czech. Nicky Vakovic…I don’t know what the fuck he was. Maybe Serbian.

  My Jewish friends were more affluent. They belonged to pool clubs, they had the nicer cars. They lived in the nicer part of town. We were different. The kind of crew I ran with, we all went to Sacred Heart, a Catholic school. The Jewish kids were more society than we were; you got that feeling at a very young age. They were the shop boys—they hung out at the shopping center, what we used to call “the shop.” Sometimes we’d cross lines to play roller hockey together, but not really too much, not until later when we all discovered that we liked to smoke pot together. That was a great unifier.

  And then there were other Italians. They weren’t Mafia, but definitely more well-to-do people. They had swimming pools and these Mock Tudor castles, and at some point you had to know that it was all about money. That’s what distinguishes how well people live.

  Of course, the identity politics of little kids in Queens in the 1970s seems like something out of the Stone Age, but it was a different world. We were all very much defined by our last names. Later, in a much different way, this would become one of the most positive messages my mom could teach me: Being tied to where you came from makes you who you are, and with a strong family there is nothing you can’t do.

  I worked hard, and I learned about how food travels, from hoof to plate. I would go with my father to the market early in the morning. Up at Hunts Point, they were slaughtering veal and beef. There were a lot of carcasses, thousands of pounds of meat hanging from those rolling racks of hooks, vats of blood everywhere. It was the complete process—the good, the bad, and the ugly. It could be very intense.

  Hunts Point was a three-ring circus, the land of wild dogs roaming fields where the mob buried people. In the middle of the night, there would be bonfires in barrels on the street corners. Did you ever see The Bronx Is Burning? You better believe it. I’d see dozens of toothless prostitutes on the corner, naked. I mean, really naked. It was unbelievable. Truly a meat market in every sense of the word.

  At the Fulton Fish Market, it was no less crazy. This was one of the biggest fish markets in the world, and it was largely mob controlled back then. I met a lot of characters in those days. Herbie Slavin was one of the masterminds of the wholesale-fish business, and he was there every day shaking hands and kibitzing with anyone who would listen. A little guy, a multimillionaire who would fuck your sister for a two-pound grouper. He sounded like Popeye. He used to tell people, “I’m like the pope…. People see me and bend down and kiss my ring. I don’t have a ring, I have a fishhook, so they kiss my hook.”

  I learned from my father that when it came to buying food, it was mano a mano. They were out to fuck you, and you were out to fuck them. That was how you got your product; that’s how the cycle began. It was about negotiating the best price and getting the best margin you could. It’s like being a commodities trader—in many ways that’s what the restaurant business is all about. As I say, it’s not a trick: We buy it, we fix it, we sell it for a profit.

  In the summer we would go buy chickens, and thanks to my dad I now have this incredible aversion to poultry. We would drive to the market in his Jeep Cherokee—the big ol’ family car with the Apache heads on the side and the full wood paneling—and in the back was this giant stainless-steel tray to put cases of chickens in, which were packed in crushed ice. If you didn’t catch the melting chicken water in the pan—which was the foulest liquid in the world, all greasy and bloody, real butcher-shop effluence—not only would it get into the truck, it would rust out the bottom. It was a disaster waiting to happen. Never mind that it smelled like rotting death. Naturally, it was my job to ride in the back of the truck with the chickens and all that disgusting, melting ice, with all that crap floating in it. Just imagine a giant pool of bloody red chicken juice on a ninety-degree day—and then Dad would hit the brakes and a tsunami of that shit would come splashing out of the tray, completely submerging me. It was like the last ten minutes of Carrie. Welcome to the restaurant business.

  My other job was to manage the loading and unloading of the truck back at the restaurant. My dad was also very big on cleaning the sidewalk with lye. To give you an idea of how nasty this stuff was, Brad Pitt uses it to burn Ed Norton in Fight Club. It is part of the same happy family as lime, which is what the mob uses to decompose bodies. It would burn through your Timberlands. If you weren’t careful, it could blind you. And this is what we used to keep our place clean. We had a big deck brush, and I scrubbed the sidewalk and the curbs until they were bright. I don’t even know if this is legal anymore.

  I was always at the restaurant. Monday was a big night. We’d close the restaurant and go out as a family to eat at someone else’s place. It was always the same five or six joints. I had two uncles, actually close family friends, who had restaurants. Ezio Vlacich had Piccola Venezia in Astoria, Cesare Dundara had Giulio Cesare’s on Ellison Avenue in Westbury, and Bruno Viscovich had the Café Continental in Manhasset. And since we were closed on Mondays, Ezio closed on Tuesdays and Bruno took off Wednesdays.

  A few years later, Felice and Lidia bought their second restaurant, Villa Seconda, in Fresh Meadows, and then in 1980 they sold them both to open Felidia on Fifty-eighth Street in Manhattan. That’s when Lidia became more of a public figure and eventually a media star and a genuine celebrity—an icon, really. But my father was never particularly interested in that kind of life. When he started, you would never want the customer to even see you. Being a restaurant owner, a Restaurant Man, was like the bluest of the blue-collar jobs. There was a servile mentality. We were servants to the people who came into the restaurant—it was a venerable place reserved for customers. No restaurant owner would ever want to be seen enjoying food in his place the same way customers did. Back then the owners wouldn’t even eat in their own places, not when anyone was there—you sat there between lunch and dinner when there were no customers and had your family meal on dirty tablecloths. Now to run a restaurant you have to be media-savvy. Chefs have become like rock stars. It’s all about glam and glitz. But back then restaurants were for customers, period. Just regular people. This was hard-core, blue-collar work. It wasn’t fabulous. People worked their asses off. I can remember being embarrassed telling my friends that my family was in the restaurant business—that my father was a Restaurant Man. It involved a lot of sweat and hard work, and your hands were always burned and bleeding. It was not a job that anyone could possibly aspire to, certainly not me.

  We never really had friends come to the restaurant—it wasn’t encouraged. My father always said that friends made lousy customers. But there were a few customers who over the years crossed the line and became close to the family. There was this guy Gino who was just tremendously, fl
amingly gay. This was in the early seventies when it wasn’t really accepted for a man to prance around the outer boroughs. He hung out at the bar at Buonavia drinking Canadian Club and 7UP and ended up becoming a close friend of my parents’—he even came over for holidays. But he was one of the few. There was another customer, a fat guy who smoked White Owl cigars with the white plastic tips and drank Cutty Sark all day who was with us when we went to see the first Star Wars in Times Square. I think he sold stereo equipment. I remember he sold my dad a Betamax player, which is how I saw my first porno movie, The Analist (which was also a life-changing experience). Star Wars in Dolby, and The Analist on Betamax in my living room. Yeah, the world was changing very quickly.

  My mother came to the United States in 1958, when she was twelve. My dad, who was seven years older, came over a couple years before she did.

  After World War II, and after a lot of haggling over the border, the Istrian Peninsula was given to the newly formed Yugoslav Republic. The Italians, through Mussolini, had sided with the Nazis, so when Italy was carved up after the war, the Allies gave huge swaths of land to Tito in Yugoslavia, since he was instrumental in fighting the Nazis. Italians from the region fell under Communism and became political refugees. My mom and her family were forced to live in a political refugee camp for two years.

  They were eventually brought to New York by the Catholic Relief Services, who got them their first apartment in New Jersey and got my grandfather his first job there at a Chevrolet plant. Soon after, they all moved to Astoria, where they found a large community of displaced Istrians.

  My father was an accordion player, and he would hang out at the Istrian social club. When I was a kid, he’d take me there on Sundays, and there’d be Italian and Austrian oompah music. Everyone would get really drunk, and there was a lot of dancing and singing. All the children were taught how to waltz. There was a boccie court in the back. Those were the things that were important to Felice.

  My mother’s values were a little different. My father was very practical. You want to be a Restaurant Man? Then you had to get up really early in the morning and go to the market, fight to not get screwed, and beat your competitors on quality and price. My mother was more educated and terribly smart. She had a full scholarship to Hunter College, no small feat for a woman who didn’t even speak English when she’d arrived in the States.

  Eventually, when my parents had a bit of success with Felidia, I was able to go to a private high school, Fordham Prep in the Bronx. There was an early-admissions program, and if you got in, you got to skip the eighth grade. I was still going to Sacred Heart in Bayside with all my pals, and I had no idea why we needed to skip the eighth grade, but I took this admissions test and somehow got in and started to go to high school in the Bronx.

  Fordham Prep is located on the campus of Fordham University, and that was my first formative experience of the world outside Queens. People were very different. There were always Jews and Italians and Irish in my neighborhood, and Puerto Ricans and blacks—but I had never met preppies or Wasps or people like that, guys wearing wide-wale cords and moccasins. Top-Siders? What the fuck was that all about? It’s not like we went to school on a fucking boat.

  The standard uniform in my neighborhood was black jeans or blue jeans, white thermal shirt, and then the blue hoodie zip-up sweatshirt under the painted jean jacket for the summer, under the leather MC jacket for the winter, and Timberlands. I wore the same outfit every day. My jean jacket had the cover of the Doors’ L.A. Woman painted on it. I bought it at a head shop and paid a lot of money for it. It was sweet.

  I was a well-accomplished pot smoker before arriving at Fordham Prep in 1981 for the ninth grade, and since I skipped a year, I was only twelve years old. I remember that the same day as the first time I got stoned, I heard about a guy getting a blow job, which really kind of blew my mind. I had actually seen that before in a porn movie on the Betamax, but I didn’t really think it actually happened to real people. Someone said, “Hey, did you hear that Colleen O’Shaughnessy gave Mike Moresky a blow job?” I thought about it for a really long time.

  We’d buy cigarettes and go down to the Cherry Valley store—back in the day, the first Koreans who came here to open up delis and bodegas would sell beer to a twelve-year-old. They didn’t give a shit. We carried a big boom-box cassette player and listened to Morrison Hotel and a lot of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Then touch football in the park, just horsing around, and then home to try to act normal for dinner. It was pretty harmless, actually. But when I came home, my grandmother was there waiting. Soft and corny as it sounds, there was always a sense of love and warmth, of coming back to a home that’s really a home. And you still couldn’t wait to get the fuck out, to go back to the park and get wasted the next day. But the economy of the lifestyle was clear—there was a lot of value to both things.

  For my lunch Mom would make real Italian food, the kind her mother made when she was a kid. Fried zucchini and eggplant sandwiches, all of this ultraethnic food. The other kids up in the Bronx had roast beef and peanut butter and jelly; we had tripe and innards. We ate everything, and that was another important lesson: Nothing was wasted. Years later, after we opened Babbo and Mario become somewhat infamous for rescuing celery tops and other flotsam that he deemed delectable, it didn’t seem weird to me at all.

  Every Saturday, while my buddies were out playing stickball by P.S. 41, I’d take the bus from Bayside to Fresh Meadows to go to work at Villa Seconda as a busboy. The kids used to call me Bus Head—I had the black polyester pants, the shiny black shoes, white shirt, pressed, also polyester, and a black bow tie with an elastic neckband. That’s what I looked like. Fucking Bus Head. And I used to have to walk across the schoolyard, taking their abuse, with my lame crumber in my pocket.

  By then the novelty of working in the restaurant had worn off. I wasn’t a little kid anymore, feeling like a big deal because I got to work around adults. The whole thing had become my personal family nightmare. Some days I felt like I was going to be the fucking Bus Head until the day I died.

  But I was always thinking about how to make money. When I was ten, I had a paper route delivering the New York Post. I had to buy the papers from Turtle, this guy who had stubs where his fingers were supposed to be. His office was a wooden shack with no electricity and broken floorboards and a leaky ceiling, and all the paperboys came around to see what they could hustle. I’m sure most of these guys are now in the Fortune 500. It was like the Aspen Institute for up-and-coming machers.

  Turtle chain-smoked Pall Malls, lighting the next one from the last, and he always had a bottle of whiskey on his desk. He was the distributor. You bought your papers from him, and then you were basically in business for yourself. When you started, he’d float you the papers, but he charged you a vig. Fucking cocksucker—loan-sharking to grade-schoolers so they could run a paper route. But then when you turned it around and you became cash-positive, you’d get a discount for paying up front.

  I started with the Post and then moved up to the New York Times, but eventually I did both. I was in seventh grade, and I delivered two routes. The Post I’d have to pick up at Turtle’s place, but the Times was actually delivered to my house—a truck would come and dump off the papers while it was still dark outside, and my grandmother and I would get up and start wrapping them.

  On Fridays I went out collecting. Some people would give good tips and some wouldn’t. How could you not tip the fucking paperboy? It is incomprehensible to me. There was an interracial couple who were the biggest tippers. The paper cost $2.35 a week, including the big Sunday paper, and they would give me a fiver. I remember I had so much love for them, just that little act of humanity. I used to deliver to the Bagel Den in Bay Terrace, dropping off all the papers for the shop. It was run by a young guy who would get me stoned in the morning. It was my first stop, and he would already be completely wasted. I used to take a few hits to get through my run. I wound up working for him. One morning we were smoking a joint, an
d he asked me, “How much are you getting for the paper route?” I was like, “I don’t know. Eighteen, twenty bucks a week?” He said, “Why don’t you come bake bagels for me?” He told me he would pay me twenty bucks a shift. I told Turtle to go fuck himself and got started in the bagel business.

  The Bagel Den was the first food-service job I had that was not for my family. On Saturdays and Sundays, I’d wake up at five in the morning and go to work. Back then it was all hand-rolled bagels. We used to roll them on the wooden tables and put them in the refrigerator. I wanted to do the baking, but that was for the more advanced stoners. It was the classic seventies bagel shop—we sold Philly cream cheese in the different-size silver packs, coffee, we’d cut the bagels and put either butter or cream cheese on them, wrap ’em in waxed paper, mark the prices with a grease pencil, and it was never less than ninety degrees in there.

  There were lines of bitchy old ladies who always suspected that you were trying to get away with something, like shorting a dozen, as if there were any percentage in that—bagels cost ten cents each. Plain bagels got the biggest bin, because they were the most popular. After that it was a dead heat between onion and sesame, followed closely by poppy, and then trailing were salt and garlic bagels—the garlics had to be put in a separate bag unless you wanted one of these old yentas to come back to the store screaming to chop your fucking head off. Eventually I was stoned enough that they let me start baking.

  There is no doubt that I invented the “everything bagel.” This is where stoner mentality meets Restaurant Man’s instinct to be cheap and find ways to use shit you would normally throw out in order to innovate and create a superior product.