Going to school at Fordham Prep was a big lesson in breaking away. I was being let loose with a student subway pass into the world of New York with zero supervision. It was living in the city for the first time in a real way. We’d go down to Eighth Street to buy clothes, then go to the head shops to look at bongs. We’d go to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show and watch the freaky girls throw toast at the screen. We went to Canal Jeans and ate at Wo Hop. We’d go to the Bowery, to CBGB’s for the punk-rock matinee shows and try to sneak in. I was playing guitar, and I had a little band with this Greek kid who lived up the block and wore a dog collar—he fancied himself a little bit like Sid Vicious, so we would do “God Save the Queen” over and over in my basement. I wasn’t really a punk, but I used to play with them because I knew all the songs on guitar.
We slept outside on line for tickets to see the Police at Shea Stadium. It was the Synchronicity tour—R.E.M. and Joan Jett were the opening acts. Michael Stipe wore a white wedding dress onstage. Incredibly, now we are good friends.
Fordham had a pretty serious academic curriculum. They were very tough on the classics—I took Latin and Greek every year—but there were a couple of cool, hippie professors there, too, both Jesuits. There was one guy, a deacon, who looked like Dom DeLuise, which was perfect—that’s what all Jesuits should look like. And then there was Mr. Beck. He was this quirky, crazy theology and philosophy teacher who turned me on to the concept of freethinking and intellectualism, thinking for the sake of thinking, away from pragmatism and that sort of monoexistence. Coming from the background I did, I had seen everything as very much cause and effect. You worked to make money so you wouldn’t starve to death, so you had a place to live. We didn’t do nuance.
I started thinking about politics for the first time, and the thought processes that created the situations we were in. The weed, school—it was all coming together. A package deal. Just meeting young guys who were professors who taught during the day and were jazz musicians at night—it was pretty amazing to realize that the people who were teaching you actually had other interests and were actually interesting. I think that’s the first time I realized that my teachers had something going on, that they weren’t just robots, that there was more than meets the eye to pretty much everything. That helped wake up my brain, too. I loved the people who helped me break down the walls I had built in my head and to think about things a little bit differently.
The summer between my freshman and sophomore years, 1982, we went on a trip with Father Sloan. He used to smoke More 120s, the green packs. Fucking strangest cigarette ever, those long black things. And like all good Jesuit priests, he was really fat. He drove about ten of us around France for five weeks. This was my first time going to Europe without parental supervision. I’d never really been to France, and I don’t speak French. But it was like the highest exchange rate for the dollar ever—it was ridiculously cheap so we’d go to bars and buy beers for everyone—and I loved every second of it. We went to Strasbourg, and I remember seeing Normandy for the first time. Eating crepes on Mont-Saint-Michel. We were in Paris when Italy won the World Cup.
It wasn’t a big foodie trip. It was low-budget. We were eating a lot of jambon on baguettes, a lot of cheese, and these premade frozen crepes stuffed with cheese and mushrooms that we would buy in the supermarché. One of the guys with us was a couple years older, a real Queens tough guy, the kind of guy who smoked Marlboro Reds and kept them in the rolled-up sleeve of his T-shirt. He scored some hash in the Paris subway, which we smoked with a couple of blond Dutch girls. We were camping in the outskirts of Paris, near the Seine, trying to smoke hash from under a cup—you know, you put a piece on a needle, like the pin from the Clash badge you were wearing on your denim jacket, then put the cup over it to trap the smoke. Except all we had was this shitty collapsible cup made for camping, and it kept falling down on the needle. I don’t think the girls were too impressed.
All of our family trips were paying off for my parents. My mom especially was soaking everything in, and not just on the level of revisiting the old country. My father, I think, went out of some sort of obligation, but my mother saw it as a chance to explore. It was like she was bringing rare jewels and silk back from the other side of the globe. She knew what she was doing.
When Felidia opened (“Felidia” = “Felice” + “Lidia”), it was like the birth of modern Italian restaurants. Suddenly we went from charging $8.95 for a spaghetti-and-meatballs dinner with salad and dessert at Buonavia and dealing with the old Jewish clientele—they would ask, “What comes with the veal parmesan?” You get some pasta. “What else do I get?” You get a salad. “What else do I get?” You get dessert. “What else do I get?” You get a Motorola fucking television. That was my father’s big joke—to selling risotto for twenty-five bucks a plate and hundred-dollar bottles of wine.
In America risotto was born in 1981. Before that no one had any fucking risotto here, no one knew what the hell it was. No one had puntarelle; there were still parts of a cow no one had even heard of. This was the birth of real Italian food in New York. A lot of these things were facilitated by overnight delivery. FedEx was born in that period, too, and it was the first time you could overnight buffalo mozzarella, which is one of those magical Italian ingredients that everyone now takes for granted.
Felidia came up just when, for the first time, the boys in the back mattered. It was happening everywhere, a new kind of kitchen culture. People were going to restaurants not because the food was good or because you liked the guy running the joint but because a certain chef was cooking there, and where these guys came from, their pedigree, and their art form became topics of discussion. This was the beginning of the culture of chef worship, and that was a game changer.
There were times, when Felidia was first getting ready to open and my parents were overextended, that I gave them money from my paper route. These were some down-and-out times. In the late seventies, interest rates were 18 percent and higher, and my folks couldn’t borrow money, and everyone pitched in. It was a wartime mentality. I remember eating frozen chicken wings for dinner for a while. You have to remember, my family was starving in Europe before they came here—going through something like that will change your whole value system. My father’s sense of affluence is directly connected with the food that you eat. Once you’ve been hungry, things are never the same again.
People always ask me, “What motivates you?” and I say, “An acute fear of poverty. That’s what motivates me.” Because the alternative to having money is not having money, and I know what that’s like. Not that I was ever truly starving to death, but there was always this sense that being in business—our restaurant—was the only thing that kept us from being destitute. It was very real. Maybe it’s amplified by recollection, but it certainly wasn’t amplified when I was living through it.
My dad was such a classic restaurant guy, even after Felidia became successful, that for the rest of his life he lived in a time warp, caught in 1976—he thought that two hundred bucks was a lot of money. But he taught me the one immutable fact of running a restaurant: To be successful in the business, the best instinct you can have is to be a really cheap fuck. My mother was more romantic—she went from being nothing to being a chef. She was never trained, she was just a cook. She learned from her mother and her grandmother, and then somehow in the early eighties she became a chef. She realized where it was all going—she was young, she was ambitious, she was smart.
The whole nouvelle cuisine thing began in France in the 1970s and migrated to New York like the fucking plague. Barry Wine’s Quilted Giraffe in the Sony Building was the place, the coliseum of soulless painted dishes. Anne Rosenzweig and Jonathan Waxman bowed to the trend in 1984 with Arcadia and Jams. And Italian was coming in, real Italian. You had the big French grande dame places firing on all cylinders, and the Italians kind of snuck in there in the late seventies. You had Da Silvano, New York’s first truly authentic trattoria, and it kind of dovetailed with the
art boom in SoHo in the early eighties. It was Wall Street and the Masters of the Universe at that point in time—misguided Reagan and cocaine optimism, bright lights, big city.
Where Felidia was, on Fifty-eighth Street, it became like Restaurant Row for Italians—there must have been fifteen Italian restaurants. La Fenice, Tino’s, Tre Scalini, Gian Marino, Nino’s… They were all doing high-end food—and charging for it. These guys were hard-core guineas—they would line up their Ferraris out on the street on Saturday nights, and after work they’d race down to Atlantic City to go whoring. During the week they hung out at Club A, underneath the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, where the topless joint Scores was later. It used to be a major gangster hangout—bring in some hookers and magnums of Cristal; the Italian restaurant boys loved to show their largesse.
For Felidia my mother recruited two brothers, Dante and Nino, who worked at Brussels—a very fancy restaurant at the time. They brought legitimacy to the whole deal—at home Dante made prosciutto, vinegar, and wine. He was bona fide. He made everything kosher.
The big thing at Felidia was that all the pastas were finished in the dining room, each pan made to order. We’d do three pasta plates—later I would amp that up at Becco, my first restaurant, and people always loved it.
The first course was the antipasto table, which was the centerpiece of the room. You didn’t serve yourself, but there it was to worship and choose from: shrimp in white bean salad, steamed mussels with roasted red peppers, dried cod with olive oil, and the grilled octopus and potato salad, which was famous. Seafood salad, clams, monkfish floured and fried in olive oil with wilted white onions and peppercorns, then classic mozzarella and peppers. We had cima alla genovese, which was veal pounded flat, then rolled up and tied with string around a big fluffy frittata. It was incredible. Felidia had good authentic antipasto when most places were still doing ginzo shit.
Dante was a classic character from the Old World. He had some kind of problem with his leg and moved kind of slowly, and he wore this butter-stained tuxedo that would get increasingly dirty over the course of the week because he was finishing pasta tableside in the dining room every night. But what he lacked in dry-cleaning receipts he made up for in spirit, bringing real Italian flavor to the table.
He was from a small town near Bologna. His family owned a hilltop trattoria there, and we actually used to visit him when I was a kid. He took me foraging—it was a real entrée into the culinary culture of high-altitude Italy. My people had come from near the sea, but the mountain food is a whole other thing, and I learned to love it.
Now he was a real live Italian country man living in Queens. He would go to Cunningham Park and find porcini mushrooms. He could compose a bitter salad out of weeds he pulled from the service median of the Cross Island Parkway. He had the ability to re-create the flavors of the hills around Bologna—he had a way with food, a magic touch, and even though he was a captain at Felidia, he had a lot of influence on the kitchen.
He worked there until he couldn’t walk—they literally carried him out, and then Felice built a ramp for him in our garage. Dante would wheel himself over and direct everyone how to make wine and vinegar—“put the grapes in there, squeeze that, okay, stop.” In a very real way, he gave everything he had to Felidia and was a big part of its success. He’d hand you the menus to look at for a second, then hobble back to the table and take the menus away from you and say, “Justa tonight I make-uh sumpthin-uh special for you.” That’s how he did it, every night. He really knew how to pour it on. He made a career out of that.
At the beginning everyone in my family worked at Felidia. My grandmother would put on a shirt and go in the morning to take care of the plants and answer the phones. But pretty soon my mother was starting to happen. Felidia was obviously becoming successful—there were some good reviews, and it was catching on—and little things started to change in my life. My mother took me shopping at Bloomingdale’s. Fucking Bloomingdale’s. She bought me real clothes. I used to get all my clothes at the army-navy before that, my basic uniform of thermals and hoodies. Now all of a sudden I had a two-tone Calvin Klein denim jacket and a pink-and-gray argyle wool sweater. It was getting a little gay, but I was going to the dances at Fordham Prep trying to figure out what would impress the ladies. At that moment it was like guido preppy. We wore Capezio dance shoes. I swear, of all the things I’m going to cop to in this book, that is probably the most shameful. White fucking Capezios. And I wore them with parachute pants. And a white turtleneck. Ugh. Think Morrissey 1982.
But on the weekends I was still fucking Bus Head, working as a grunt at the restaurant. Now, however, I was learning about wine.
Lidia and Felice started buying wine in quantity, really investing in wine. They had this massive cellar at home, and every day they came home with a carful of wine. And before school in the morning, after the paper routes, I had to unload it all and bring it into the house. The wine started in one corner of the cellar, and before you knew it the whole ground floor of the house was full of wine and getting fuller. Every day we’d put more cases in the house, pull out some for the restaurant, and bring more in. It was massive.
Once in a while, I’d steal a bottle of port to drink with my delinquent friends, but most of what I knew was Barolo and Barbaresco. I knew the names, the places I had visited, and I knew it was expensive.
Pretty soon I wasn’t just busing tables. I was only fourteen, but I might recommend a bottle of wine at a table and then run and get it. I still wasn’t thrilled with working in my parents’ restaurant when I could have been out getting fucked up and chasing girls with my friends, but pouring wine was definitely a step up. And, more important, I was really tasting wines—for the first time in a professional setting. I’d been drinking wine my whole life because it was part of the meal, but this was the next level. Maybe it wasn’t speaking to me just yet, but it was definitely whispering in my ear.
Nino was the sommelier at Felidia. He would take a bottle of 1947 Barolo and open it up behind the bar, I used to pour some off the top, and we’d taste it. And then he’d say, “Now we gotta freshen it up a little bit.” He’d pour some of the house wine back into the bottle, top it off to “give her a little more body,” he said. I’m still not sure if he was doing that so we could have half a glass of really good wine each, and then we could bring a full bottle of the wine to the table, or if it really benefited from a tiny dose of cheap swill just to give it some body.
He was always saying, “Hey, kid, check this out. This is a ’47, a ’51, a ’53….” Even then I was drinking thirty- or forty-year-old wine, fifty-year-old wine, and I could tell the difference. My mother always said I was a born taster. Nino was just trying to take care of the boss’s son, but I was getting an accidental education.
And then there was Sam the bartender. He had his picture in Playboy with a martini shaker and his big, bushy, flavor-saver mustache. He was an operator, too. He used to make the best martini in Manhattan—people would come in special for it. He would pour the martini, shake it, put the glass in front of you, and pour it so it bulged over the rim without spilling. And he said that if you could move the glass without spilling any, he’d buy it for you. That was his MO. I used to shoot the shit with him, asking him about brands of spirits, Cutty Sark, Galliano, what sells, what doesn’t, what’s in what cocktail, what’s hot this year. There was always one bottle of Rock & Rye or some disgusting old shit that no one wanted—I was always fascinated by that. He made a Pussycat Parfait, an eight-layer drink—all the liquors have different densities, and he would pour them over the back of the spoon. That was like the perfect drink for a teenager, like the rock concert of cocktails—I tried to make it several times without much luck. And then there were all the trendy drinks: grasshoppers, something called a Comfortable Screw Against the Wall (which was just a screwdriver with a shot of Galliano added), a lot of girlie garbage.
But I was learning the bar business, the markups, what goes into what drinks, what
the costs were. And I’m tasting all kinds of wine and learning everything I can about them. My father is making wine at home, and I’m tasting wine in Italy in the summers and tasting wine in the restaurant. Thankfully for me, there was always a clear distinction between guzzling jugs of Boone’s Farm and Riunite in the park, listening to Led Zeppelin and smoking weed, and tasting wine in a restaurant. I never really confused the two. It was always very clear that one was professional and real and the other one was just getting fucked up.
In 1984 I was a junior in high school and still going to Italy with my family every summer, but I was getting sick of it. I didn’t realize what I had. The whole driving-around, going-to-restaurants thing became a drag, because you couldn’t smoke in front of your parents, so I’d have to go out and sneak cigarettes all the time. When you’re an accomplished teenage smoker, you’re trying to smoke your pack a day because you feel that’s what you need to do, and when you’re with your parents the whole day long, it’s a pain in the ass. It all became about getting away from them to find where the booze and cigarettes were. Finding the Dutch and German girls who were a little bit slutty and just trying to get some action.
At some point I’m saying to myself, Fuck, my Jewish friends, they go to pool clubs, and I’m working as the Bus Head, and I have to go to Europe and live in a cowshed with my degenerate great-grandparents. I was whining—Why can’t we go to fucking Florida? Why can’t we belong to a pool club? Why can’t we eat hot dogs? My mother set me straight: This is who you are, and fucking deal with it. Get used to it, because it’s never going to change. You’re never going to be a Goldstein, and your father is never going to be a lawyer or a doctor, and you’re never going to belong to a pool club, and your grandparents don’t live in fucking Florida. You belong to a restaurant family. You gotta work. This is who your people are. Embrace it.
Restaurant Man Page 5