CHAPTER FIVE
Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.
In the summer of 1989, I had just graduated from Boston College and applied for a job at Merrill Lynch, listing “wine buyer for Felidia” on my résumé as my current job, which was, of course, complete bullshit.
I probably could have tanked my career on Wall Street right there—I was definitely overextending. Rightly or wrongly, I had gotten into the habit of playing the Felidia card to gain access to all sorts of things, beginning with trendy restaurants in Boston in order to impress girls. Then I got into an internship—a very big deal, actually—at Lehman Brothers during my junior year. The guy who ran the program was an old Felidia customer, and that was enough to get me through the door—or at least my foot in. I had to have something else going on besides parents with a three-star New York restaurant to get my ass through. You could say Felidia got me the interview and I got the job myself, but I was learning an important lesson: I could use everything I knew about wine to gain access to people who were impressed by my very specific expertise. I could leverage boutique knowledge and trade on my microspecialty to create opportunities.
The guy at Merrill Lynch who read my application and called me was a corporate bond trader who went out for client dinners every night. He was a big wine guy, and he knew I was basically full of it. “Listen, kid,” he told me, “don’t pull my dick. I don’t give a fuck if your parents run the joint. You can’t be in fucking college and be the fucking wine buyer at fucking Felidia.” Everyone spoke like that back then; it was expected. It was one of the few endearing features of the entire era.
He tried to call my bluff and asked me about some specific vintages—I remember it was an Aldo Conterno Barolo. Would I recommend the ’82 or the ’85, the ’78 or the ’82? It happened to be a wine that I actually knew—and I nailed it. I knew more about them than he did. I wasn’t even twenty-one years old. And that’s when it turned into a laugh. He invited me down for lunch at Sparks Steak House, and that began the whole process of getting into Merrill Lynch in this crazy investment-banking program.
There were about sixty full-fledged M.B.A.’s in there with me, thirty-year-old men who had already worked as interns on Wall Street for two years, then gone back to get their master’s at Harvard, Wharton, you name it, the cream of the crop. Into that group had been randomly stuck eight undergraduate kids, to shake things up, I guess, of which I was one. They just sneak you in with all these people who are ten, fifteen years older than you and expect you to do the whole training program—it takes a year and a half to complete. You get licensed to trade stocks and commodities, get to go on all the corporate retreats, the complete shebang. It is very intense—basically it’s an indoctrination to ice-cold capitalism and a ticket to print money. At that point there was a tendency not to hire business majors exclusively, the idea being that successful liberal-arts students might bring a new perspective to the stock market’s particular brand of paganism, as if reading Milton would give you an insight into banking and finance. Well, maybe. It’s a tough call—it doesn’t always work out, but when it does, it does big, or at least that’s been my experience in the restaurant world. Sometimes you hire people for their ideas and not their on-the-job experience and you hit a home run; sometimes they melt down, because no matter how many times you’ve read Democracy in America, it will never prepare you for being reamed by a Wall Street douchebag for real. But a few of the guys who went through that program with me are the top cats on the Street right now, so there has to be something to it.
All of a sudden, I’m no longer living in a dorm room surrounded by filthy hippies—I have a two-bedroom apartment on the thirty-eighth floor of a building in Battery Park City, overlooking the Statue of Liberty. After having eaten lentils in a parking lot at a Dead concert, I felt delusional—whether this was all an illusion or a delusion, I’m not sure—but something was definitely not right. The money was big, people were out every night, there were a lot of drugs, a lot of partying. A lot of rich guys living in nice apartments, buying great cars, and wearing custom-made English banker suits.
There was definitely a ton of competition when it came to dressing. It was like American Psycho without the chain saws. I started rocking the braces, Hermès ties were making an early entry onto the scene, and I was totally overpaying for suits. I guess I was just playing the role—from hoodies to tie-dye to questionable pink preppy shirts to Brioni, I was still trying to get out of the ginzo ghetto. And I slept with my first Jewish chick.
I brought her to Tribeca Grill, which was then the hottest restaurant in the city. It was Drew Nieporent’s place, which he opened with Robert De Niro. I knew Drew through my mother and through the restaurant business, and we became great friends. Later, of course, he became famous for rolling the dice on David Bouley and for opening Nobu and turning it into a brand, but he is as old-school as they come, a real Restaurant Man, a fucking Restaurant Mensch, who came up doing every shit catering and kitchen gig you can think of. He didn’t have it in his blood, so he earned it, and he is as hard as they come.
Drew was always great to me. I was a young kid, but he made me feel like a real big shot. So I brought this girl there, and De Niro came in, and it was totally awesome. He showed us his dad’s drawings that were hanging on the wall over our table, and she just couldn’t believe it. It was like we were movie stars. She was blown away. I couldn’t believe I was going to get lucky with her—she was the totally hot secretary, I had no idea what she was even doing with me.
It happened because Drew treated me like a restaurant big shot even though I was a Wall Street nobody. This is where I finally bridged the reality of the new Wall Street playground with my upbringing in the restaurant biz and whatever advantage I was able to leverage because of my Felidia connection and my secret knowledge of wine. It was when I was banging this otherwise nice Jewish girl that I truly had my epiphany, with angels singing, the whole nine yards (although I was pretty shitfaced, and it might have been a combination of vodka, Billy Joel, and the orgasmic wailing of a Wall Street secretary), and I realized, what the fuck, in the whole world of finance I’m really nothing, but the New York restaurant and wine world was something the Masters of the Universe wanted to be part of but really didn’t understand, beyond trying to palm the maître d’ a Franklin to get a table. I was an insider, with a commodity.
One of the head traders—and this is about as big a dude as you were ever going to find on Wall Street, a guy whose bonus could fund wars (he’s in rehab as I write this, by the way)—his big thing at the end of the trading day was to shout, “Spark me!” Which meant he wanted to go to Sparks Steak House, and when they couldn’t get him a table, I would call Walter at the door and set it up, which made me the belle of the ball.
The other lesson I learned from the Jewish girl is how to go to work with a blistering hangover. I remember the next day after our night at Tribeca Grill I was hurting. Real pain. But I had to be at the desk at 7:00 A.M., seriously fucking wounded. That was the worst—it almost killed the good memory of the night before, but not quite. Anyway, misery loves company. And pizza.
On Fridays they would pay the kid at Lombardi’s Pizza a grand to go in at 3:00 A.M. and fire up the pizza ovens. They’d have fifty pizzas delivered at six in the morning to the trading desk, because Thursday was the night everyone went out, and they would come in the next morning completely wasted, like I was. You’ve seen it in The Bonfire of the Vanities, all these guys standing around thinking that they really ran the world, with medical oxygen tanks under their desks to clear their heads. They used to have their boys come in and give them shoeshines, like two shoeshines a day. They’d send out for back rubs. If you’ve ever read Liar’s Poker, you’ll get what I mean. I watched that happen. These guys were playing liar’s poker for hundreds of thousands of dollars a hand. That was a long way to come from where I started.
But it’s funny—life is such a cycle. Wall Street was really more Queens than it was intellectua
l Boston—it was back to the Machiavellian politics of the street. Real survival technique, what I learned in schoolyards in Astoria. It was more relevant than the philosophers at Boston College even though that—and my Felidia pedigree—had gotten me the job in the first place. The competition among the traders wasn’t even intellectual, it was almost physical. The rage and violence and competitive nature of these guys exposed them as being no more evolved than the worst street kids growing up in Queens. The pecking order was that raw and rudimentary. They were thugs. The investment bankers were a little bit more hoity-toity, maybe a little bit more intellectual, but the traders, they were the real deal.
Wall Street brought me back to those primal instincts, the core values I grew up with, which prevailed in that environment. Survival of the fittest. Eat or be eaten. Fuck or be fucked.
I was young enough to think, Okay, this is what I need to do to be successful. Let’s see how far it goes. But I obviously wasn’t committed to the lifestyle, because very soon there would be a point where I’d wash my hands of Babylon, put my dirty jeans back on, get a one-way ticket to Italy, and spend the next year and a half of my life living in my car.
For the entire year and a half I was on Wall Street, I felt like I was in a movie, just barreling along into the third act—I was on a full-flight trajectory to become a titan. My next move was the NYU Stern School of Business Executive M.B.A. Program. I was accepted, and I was going to be a made man.
But what was I really learning? I was learning the culture of skimmers. People who didn’t really make or do anything. I found it disheartening and soulless. It was just so fucking empty—creating nothing of value, living on a small percentage of other people’s transactions. And the office politics were idiotic. I was never good at being a kiss-ass—no one from Queens ever is, and I realized that having someone else decide how successful I would be and how much money I would make was not a way I could live my life. I needed to take that into my own hands. My entrepreneurial instinct started flaring up.
I was returning to my roots. I would come home from work and hang out at the bar at Felidia and talk to Sam the bartender and eat some reheated bar pizza that my dad used to make. It was his big marketing idea to go behind the kitchen line and get between the chefs and make bar food—he thought it would draw more people in. He used to make little chicken nuggets and pizzas with pita bread and give them out to people at the bar. He made them spicy so they’d make people thirsty enough to buy another drink. Even though my mom wasn’t a star yet—she had written her first book, but she wasn’t on TV—Felidia was famous as one of the best restaurants in town and was always filled with a very moneyed crowd. But Restaurant Man never stops hustling. He can’t keep himself from trying.
The turning point was fairly simple—I just looked at my boss one day and said to myself, You know what? This guy’s a fucking asshole. He was the kind of tool who would walk around the trading floor all day with his golf club pretending to practice his swing. Total douchebag—I would have been happy to shove a three-wood up his ass. He was married to this Barbie-doll blonde with zero personality—she probably didn’t have any genitals either, just like a real Barbie doll—and they both had fake tans that made them look like the orangutans in the original Planet of the Apes, all Dr. Zaius orange, like a combination of Tang and beer puke. They made me sick, they were clearly full of shit, and I needed to get the fuck out of there.
And then, on my twenty-first birthday, there was a party at Odeon. All my so-called pals were drinking whatever the trendy vodka was at the time and snorting their paychecks, completely oblivious to the fact that they’d come stumbling out of the bathroom with white powder on their noses, looking like complete morons.
I was never into doing coke, but I knew that it was everywhere. The thing was, if you weren’t into it, no one said to you, “Hey, c’mon, we’re gonna snort some rails in the men’s room.” The cokeheads always pretended it didn’t exist—as if everyone else didn’t know exactly what the fuck was going on when they were motormouthing a hundred miles an hour.
I realized that I had nothing to talk to these guys about. It was always about money and deals and what car you bought. I was happy in the beginning, with the novelty of it. But when it wore off, there was the stark realization that the paradigm of success that made you a big swinging dick on Wall Street was definitely not what I aspired to. I didn’t want to be that guy, and I didn’t want to fuck clueless women. I’d go home with a girl and everything in her house would be brand new, no style, just straight out of some catalog, and there were no books and no music. Their refrigerators were always empty—most of these women didn’t cook, they hardly even ate. But they were easily impressed by expensive restaurants. It was all complete bullshit.
A lot of guys would buy an apartment right away with their first couple-hundred-grand bonus, and suddenly they were stuck in a vicious circle. Always having to make more to buy more to make more to buy more, and they didn’t have the balls to get the fuck off the treadmill.
Looking back, I can see that it’s almost as if I were triangulating all my past experiences—Queens, Fordham, and Boston—to come to this point, but it was more visceral than intellectual. It was real life. Sure, part of it was those few years of studying philosophy and shrooming rearing their ugly head—the road to excess, I was learning, probably does not lead to the palace of wisdom—that for me brought down the Wall Street myth, hard. It felt very physical. Everything about it. Very real.
When it was time to collect my end-of-year bonus, I just figured enough already. I tried to make it work, but fuck it, it was a big world, and I was going to get my ass the hell out of there. I remember I was just pacing around, and every half hour I’d go down to the ATM to see if my six-digit bonus had cleared—it was an obscene amount of money they were giving me, especially for someone who was about to leave their church. And as soon as it showed up in my bank account, I hit the ground running. See ya. No shit, I went right to a travel agent and bought a one-way ticket to Italy. Then I felt like I could breathe again.
I’d been thinking about Italy for months by then. I wanted to do something with food and wine—it was becoming clear that it was my destiny. Who was I to fight it? I had plenty of dough—Wall Street was at least good for that. I’d go over to Italy. I’m just thinking explore. See what the options were. It wasn’t a directed trip, like I was going to go out and find a business. It was my escape route back into myself.
Truthfully, I missed going to Italy. And this was me, once again realizing how fucking stupid I was not to appreciate what I’d had in the first place. I wanted to get back to that juncture in my life where I knew people, where it felt safe. Italy was alluring. It was the antidote to the poison. I wanted to clear my head and get back to the garden, if you know what I mean.
My mom was very encouraging, of course—she didn’t bat an eye before she said, “Great, go”—and picked up the phone and started calling people and making some connections for me. Felice was not so enthusiastic—he didn’t like my quitting Wall Street. He felt he had worked his entire life to earn me the opportunity to do this, and now I was leaving it to rediscover the life he’d left behind, which had sucked.
I started out with our friend Bruno in Trieste. He was a successful young restaurateur in his own right, and hanging out with him I got a taste for the lifestyle. He helped me buy a car—a gray VW Rabbit hatchback with an Alpine cassette player. By that time I had already been there for over a month and was very much immersed in the culture, and I set out from Trieste to begin my journey. I did a couple of days in Friuli with Livio Felluga, a local wine producer. And then I went down to Tuscany and stayed with a family called the Cinelli Colombini in Montalcino, who made a Brunello called Fattoria dei Barbi. I lived in their forest house and got my first adult taste of Tuscany. There are very few wines that can make you taste a place the way Brunello di Montalcino can.
Montalcino is a great fortified hilltop town. I used to go to town every
night and just hang out at the bar in the piazza. During the day I worked in the Cinelli vineyards, I worked in the cellar, whatever they needed. It was a medium-size winery. The Cinelli Colombini family is Sienese, with a very old lineage. They took me to Siena. I was just kind of sucking it in—they brought me everywhere and embraced me as part of the family. My Italian started getting better—I was learning how to speak Italian for real, and that’s where the adventure really began. Doors were flying open.
I remember it as being very spiritually uplifting. It was a stark contrast to the emptiness I’d left in New York. The people I was with now truly believed in what they did, which was so life-affirming. It felt very rich and positive. You get immersed in some very serious stuff with these families that have made wine for twenty generations. Some of them were part of the Renaissance nobility and I was loving being part of it. I was feeling it—I was kind of fantasizing myself as being one of the landed gentry, not Bus Head from Queens.
Which was bullshit, of course. I am what I am—but the important thing I was learning is that even though these people were landed gentry, at the beginning and the end of every day they were merchants. They had to sell their wine, and they were really being nice to me because it’s good business to make an investment in young people as potential ambassadors for their wine, people who will sell it and talk about it around the world.
Restaurant Man Page 7