Restaurant Man

by Joe Bastianich

  When you bake bagels, first you boil them, then you put them on wooden slats, and then you blast them with whatever is their destiny in life: poppy seeds, sesame seeds, that weird onion shit, whatever. Underneath the slats is like a big metal trough that catches everything that doesn’t stick to the bagel, which quickly becomes a mess of poppy seeds, sesame seeds, that weird onion shit, and everything else. You can see where this is going. One stoned day your newly minted bagel baker was just stoned enough to see the future—and voilà, everything bagels. Thank you.

  Even then I realized that to make money in the food business, you needed to sell things that had greater value than bagels. You sell a bagel for ten cents, how much are you really going to make? There’s no margin in bagels. I realized then that selling dinner for fifty bucks a person might be a more interesting proposition than selling bagels at a dime a pop. Maybe there was something to the restaurant business after all.

  But I liked the bagel gig. I used to bring free bagels home to my grandmother every day. It was a good perk—as many bagels as you could take. And there’s nothing like a garlic bagel with butter in the winter when you’re young and stoned. Plus, it was my first time tasting one of those store-bought soft-baked cookies. That was kind of mind-blowing, too.

  After being brought up by immigrants who lived through wars and faced starvation, I felt incredibly decadent getting wasted. Well, decadent or stupid. It’s so far from the values you’ve been taught. You think you’re getting away with something that your parents would never understand. This is the beginning of the generation gap—the immigration gap, really—and this is how it starts. It’s the first hard right turn off the bridge. The hope is that you will expand your mind and it will bring you back onto the path with a few lessons learned. If you’re smart enough to let it, I guess. Some of my friends and family started the same way, except they never came back. Now they’re like forty-year-old degenerates. One of them specifically could never seem to reel it in. It happens. I’ve seen it a lot. People get stoned and they stay stoned. My favorite antidrug commercial of all time is, “I’ve been getting stoned for thirty years, and so what? I haven’t done a thing.”

  It’s all balance, right? I lived with my parents and my grandmother, and I saw how hard they worked, and I knew I had to work and go to school every day. We got wasted on weekends, but there wasn’t a whole lot of fucking around—no one could afford it. I always had the idea I was fighting for something, although I didn’t yet know exactly what. I was no genius, but I learned pretty quickly that I had to perform at a certain level, that there was no other choice—it was the mandate of every immigrant’s kid: Do better than your parents. Restaurant Man was the Old World, and I was the next generation, headed for something different—I could feel it every time I listened to the Who or Zeppelin, something my parents would never understand. I didn’t know exactly where I was heading, but there was definitely money and girls involved. This is what you got by working hard, I was sure of it. And when all the cylinders were firing, the weed and everything else were lubricants that enhanced the overall performance of the machine. When I got to college and got into the whole Doors of Perception thing, that didn’t hurt either. Years later, when Mario and I were walking around Greenwich Village reimagining Italian food and trying to guess how a Sicilian lifeguard would cook his calamari, then basing an entire restaurant around that concept, just a touch of imagination went a long way. So I’m a bit of a hippie. So what? Just don’t tell my kids. And besides, as my friend Sharky likes to say, a little madness keeps the big madness away.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Joe Stalin’s Stratocaster

  When I was a child, every summer we’d pack up the car, drive out to JFK Airport, unload the car, drag all our bags through the old Pan Am international terminal, which always seemed to me like where Batman kept the Batplane. My sister and I followed my mother and father like chubby little ducks, complaining the whole time, getting ready to fly off to Italy for the summer.

  We’d been doing these trips since I was at least eight years old, but by the late seventies, things began to change. My parents had the idea of doing an ambitious, high-end, authentic Italian restaurant, which would become Felidia. They sold both of the Queens restaurants—Buonavia and Villa Seconda—more or less at the same time in 1980 and bought the building in Manhattan at 243 East Fifty-eighth Street, between Second and Third avenues. It had been a white stucco Spanish restaurant, with wrought-iron window bars and brick accents. This was their dream.

  Felidia would open up in 1981, so there were two years in between with no restaurant and not much money. That’s when the trips to Italy started getting really intense. We’d rent a car and drive all around the country—it would not be abnormal for us to start in Rome and drive every day, stopping at restaurants and wineries over the whole peninsula, and wind up in the northeasternmost city in Italy, Trieste, then wander across the border to Communist Yugoslavia, where some of the old family still lived. It was about total immersion—my mom was into exploring this incredible culture of Italian food, absorbing it, and then executing it back home. She knew exactly what she wanted to do. She was a pioneer, bringing back wines that were mostly unknown outside their regions, and re-creating that authenticity in New York. That was the action—she wanted to be a gateway to Italian culture. Felidia was going to be about creating the experience of real Italian food, just like what you would have in Italy. She figured that everyone had had enough veal parmigiana and spaghetti and meatballs for a fucking lifetime—that was the bet.

  We’d eat and drive, eat and drive, for two or three weeks without a break. We would be looking at several gigantic meals a day—I love to eat, but this was fucking ridiculous—plate after plate of food, and the whole time you could just see the wheels in my mom’s head spinning. We’d have a four-hour lunch at a restaurant, meet the owner, take notes, get in the car, drive, and then sleep on the side of the road in the car with no air-conditioning. It’s 120 degrees in Italy in the summer. We were exhausted and didn’t have a hotel room, and we were on our way to another dinner in three hours.

  Spending all day in restaurants was torture for a little kid. My sister is four years younger than me, and we’d fight constantly—it was only the threat of serious physical violence from our parents that made us sit at a table and eat everything in front of us, day after day. But we were going to incredible places—Sicily and Amalfi and Sardinia—and meeting these fantastic, larger-than-life people. Some of them wound up having a big impact in my life. This was like the upper crust of seventies, eighties Italian restaurants. It wasn’t family style—this was fancy shit. In that way Italy was kind of like America at the time. Taking root in Italy was this nouvelle cuisine, it was all about painting plates and what was of the moment and trendy. Of course, that’s not what my folks took to Felidia, but it was definitely what was happening in Italy during that period. Seems kind of silly now.

  One person would introduce you to another person. The winemaker would take you to a restaurant because they made this salami or they made this special ravioli, they braised this beef a certain way, they cooked the tripe like this, they knew the ins and outs of every part of a pig. I was twelve years old when I went to my first three-star Michelin restaurant. What the fuck did I know? But you can always feel it when something is that good. Quality tells.

  The first people who made a strong impression on me were the winemakers—we met the gods of that world. It was the late seventies, and there was this transformation happening—the Italian wine industry was becoming very commercial and producing a lot of industrial crap, but there were still people producing great shit. Angelo Gaja and Bruno Giacosa were making great Barolos. Carlo Mastroberardino was making soulful wine in Campania, and we were out there visiting all of them. The first time I saw a white truffle was at the house of Giacomo Bologna, another wine baron. Now when I buy white truffles (which is kind of like a drug transaction—the guy comes in with Ziploc bags filled with them
and weighs them on a gram scale), I always think about that. I didn’t know what the hell they were then, but I could tell they held some magic.

  Going to visit these men at home was very much a holy-shit experience—forget about what my parents were doing, I wanted to be them. They had this incredible life. The places were beautiful, they entertained guests, they were like the Pablo Escobars of Italy. It was obvious that they were very powerful. They made wine.

  My parents came from two separate towns in Istria. Mom is from Pula, which is a city and has lots of tourism, and my father’s family came from a very poor part, very rural. It was a town called Albona, on the coast, anchored by a giant cement factory where everyone worked—a Soviet-era behemoth that spewed dust 24/7—and everything there was covered by a white film. They carved out the whole mountain and mixed the limestone with chemicals to make cement. Ships would come in and transport the cement all over the world.

  Truthfully, none of them were exactly killing themselves at the factory. Everyone kind of got taken care of by the government. This was Yugoslavia in the seventies—these guys would hit the bar at eight in the morning and start drinking nickel beers. There was a lot of alcohol abuse in the culture of Communism.

  We used to stay with my father’s grandfather. In 1976 he was a hundred years old, but more than that he was just fucking old in a way you could only be in Communist Yugoslavia. He smelled funny—there’s nothing in America that can remotely compare. At night we’d sleep on the roof of the outhouse, which was actually pretty awesome. You couldn’t see stars like that in Queens.

  My mother’s grandmother was still alive, too. Her name was Rosa, and she lived in a house that was the size of the bathroom at Babbo, on the outskirts of Pula in a town called Busoler. The fireplace and the bed were in the same room, and the mattress was made out of fucking corn husks. No plumbing, no running water. There was a metal piss jug—I don’t know what they called it, but she would get up in the middle of the night and piss in that, and I don’t know which was worse, the sound or the smell. In the morning I had to empty it out.

  My great-grandfather’s next-door neighbor lived with his sister. He had like three teeth, and he was hammered morning, noon, and night. He used to beat her, and I’m pretty sure there was some fucked-up incestuous shit going on. Just by looking at this guy, I realized at a very early age how much excessive alcohol consumption and nonstop cigarette smoking could ravage a human being. I was only a kid, but I had seen better-looking—and more charming—turnips. Nevertheless, I also started smoking cigarettes on one of those trips—all the kids started smoking when they were nine years old there. These German girls gave me my first cigarette. I remember the brand—HB, in a red and yellow pack. I was a real delinquent in Yugoslavia. Everyone was. It was a long way from Italy and the land of truffles and winemakers who drove sports cars and lived in villas with their fancy wives.

  My father’s brother, Guerino, was a crazy musician. He used to play the accordion professionally and was pretty well known around town. During the day he was a mailman, and sometimes he made me come with him—I rode on the back of his farty little moped, and we would drive around and deliver the mail to all the women who were home alone while their husbands were getting drunk or working in the cement factory. He was screwing half of them—we’d stop so he could have “coffee,” and they’d give me a Coke and tell me to get the fuck out, go play in the yard. Meanwhile, down the road, his wife used to walk around in her bra and apron, snorting tobacco. And when I was playing, she would want to clean my face with her apron, into which she had blown her nose. She’d spit on the apron and then fight me to clean my face with it. That was some nasty shit. I’ll remember the smell of that wet-snot tobacco on her apron until the day I die—it is one of the defining olfactory experiences of my life, and in a perverse way it probably opened up my head so that I was able to smell and taste wine.

  The best part of those summers was always the beach; that saved it no matter what. The beaches on the Adriatic were gorgeous. We’d go to the sea every day and play with the other kids and do stupid kid stuff. The big thing was to see who could jump off the highest rock into the shallowest water.

  There were still water mines and land mines left over from the war everywhere. All these people, even the little kids, were out of their minds, and a lot of crazy shit happened. It could be a little scary—the factory was right behind the beach, spitting out noise and dust like some kind of monster—but at the same time it was so great because everything was supercheap. Communist-era beachside resorts cost practically nothing for an American with a few dollars.

  When I was about twelve, I got into hustling electric guitars to the Commies. Before we left home, I’d go to Manny’s, a guitar shop on Forty-eighth Street, and buy a new Stratocaster—I’d say it was mine to get through customs and then tote it around the beach until someone noticed and eventually sell it to some musician who would pay me a shitload of money for it. Hey dude, I’m from America. Check it out, I got a Stratocaster for you.

  My grandfather was in on the deal. He counted the money—he and my dad—so it wasn’t like I was running around with a wad of dough, but I used to make two or three hundred bucks every summer doing that. When you had a real Strat in 1979 in Yugoslavia, you were fucking badass. You were like the king of rock ’n’ roll. I bought a lot of ice cream, and later lots of beer.

  But outside of everything else, pretty much the whole time we were there, we were eating. I was tasting flavors that would last a lifetime, flavors I would bring with me into everything that worked later. Like what real grilled calamari tastes like—you have to burn it just right until there are freckles of black, blistered char. It was sweet, caramelized, and tender, then doused in this angry, bitter olive oil laced with unbelievably stinky garlic, then hit with chopped parsley, then shot into outer space with this lemon that was so sweet and tart it made you screw up your face.

  I remember risotto with crabs. The risotto was just a vehicle for the sweetness of the shellfish—it was somewhere between fish candy and ocean butter—but you could taste every individual kernel of rice. All the fish was grilled over wood. For the most prized fish, you had to drive twenty miles to this one dude in Albona, which is now part of Croatia. Again, it was like a drug deal—I guess when the fish is that good, it always is—and you got a little plastic bag that looked like it had a dozen eggs in it, but it was a bag of red mullet, three or four inches each, that this cat had caught with a primitive handheld line made of twine and a bent wire. It was like something out of a comic book, or a fucked-up Italian version of Huckleberry Finn.

  Back in Queens we were eating ghetto fish. We went to Marino’s Fish in Astoria, a gangster joint—the boss was one of those guys who had a gun under his apron—and bought porgies for like ten cents a pound, real gutter fish. Now we sell them at Esca for thirty bucks a plate. Back in the day, no one would touch them, too many bones. No one wanted mackerel or calamari either, but my father knew what to do with all of it. He loved the mullets especially, though. He put them on the grill when it was at its hottest and the leftover-food residue was starting to hiss and smoke and fume, and he’d hit ’em with a little salt and olive oil. The fish would blister and curl up and turn from red to orange. I still do it the same way, but when you’re on the coast and it’s the summer…that’s the flavor that I have in my head. I remember my uncle building fires with vine clippings and grilling these calamari that they’d just bought from the fisherman and covering them in the olive oil that they made right there, with garlic that someone had brought over from his farm or garden, with tomato and cucumber salads. I can remember what the bread tasted like. There was this one style of bread that they baked only there—they had a knack for burning everything perfectly. The impressions of the flavors of my childhood are indelible. The Communist-era ice-cream cones I used to buy at the bar and the kind of soda we drank—now I drink a chinotto and it brings me right back to that. It is so ingrained in me, it is actually k
ind of heavy. It may sound like a cliché, but so what? It makes me really happy.

  The big tourism draw in Istria was camping. There was a campground near my father’s old house that held dances at night. Germans, Dutch people, Italians—the Germans were hard-core, they were nudists with a propensity for having group sex in their tents. Everyone would go to the beach with their flippers and rafts. After a whole day of that, all night there would be a band show and a grill where you could buy c´evapcˇic´i, which are little nuggets of meat made out of a combination of beef, pork, and veal. You grilled them and ate them with ajvar, which is like roasted-red-pepper puree.

  All of that was great. And talking about it now it seems like a dream, a really good one, but honestly, at the time it didn’t seem like such a great privilege to go on a European vacation, if you even wanted to call it a vacation. It was like another world that I lived in for three weeks of the year. There were magic moments, of course, but seriously, the conditions were pure squalor—you had to sleep in a house with no plumbing and go out and shit in the grape fields in the middle of the night. There was nothing really charming or fun about that element of the experience. And meanwhile all my Jewish friends in Queens were going to camp and making out with girls. My Italian friends in New York, none of them worked. They just fucked around all summer until they eventually got lifeguard jobs. It was always strange coming back to your friends after being away—it was culture shock in a very real way.

  I was embarrassed by my family. My grandmother lived with us, walking around in her bra watering the plants, yelling at me in Italian. I was trying to figure out how not to be all that. How to eliminate the ethnicity. How not to be Italian, or blue-collar. How not to be Restaurant Man.