Restaurant Man

by Joe Bastianich

  I didn’t get that then, but they certainly knew what the fuck they were doing—it paid them back in spades, because I’ve become an ambassador of their brands for thirty years, and all it cost them was a couple of kind words and a few dinners. Maybe a little patience. I’ve always tried to use that same lesson, to invest in young people. Give them your time, share your knowledge, try to impart to them some of who you are. The Italians understood this very well—it’s a sensibility in their culture to treat young people that way. It’s just a practical means of getting what you do out there into the world. If you can bring one person to your cellar through a tasting and a dinner, really turn his or her lights on about your wines, that person will go out and preach it to everyone. And the message is always better coming from an enthusiastic third party.

  There were a lot of holy-shit moments on this trip—we did a vertical tasting of Brunello going back twenty years, which means tasting the same wine from the same vineyard, going back vintage by vintage.

  This was at the Barbi estate. They were crusty and noble, friends with my mom, and they took great care of me. The whole time I was there, there was this nervous sexual tension between me and this older woman, a journalist who was hanging out and tasting wine, working on a cookbook, I think. She was about forty, American, and she was pretty in the way your friends’ moms are pretty—but now, out in the Italian countryside, there were some real possibilities. Imagine the raging hormones of a twenty something kid, especially when he was getting no play from the twenty-year-old Italian girls, and the tawdry desires of an older but very vital woman, mingling without allegiance or responsibility in the soft air of Italian wine country. It was about all I could do to rub one out and play it cool.

  It was a beautiful spring morning when the winemaker took us down to the cellar for the tasting, with the cellar master and his gimpy assistant. It was very ceremonial, very ritualistic, as if I were about to be admitted into a secret society, a combination of Eyes Wide Shut and joining the evil fraternity in Animal House.

  The sunshine streamed through the cobwebs covering the windows, and I can still see the pattern of shadows it cast. There were twenty bottles set across a table, perfectly spaced, each with its own glasses. I remember that when the sunlight hit the bottles after they were opened and some of the wine had been poured, you could see their beautiful imperfections, of the green glass, of the labels beginning to crumble. That was nice.

  That morning we tasted young to old, although these days when I do tastings we do old to young. The first wine, the current vintage of the Brunello, still unreleased, screamed of flesh—bloody raw meat. And violets. It is very carnal and very pretty at the same time.

  The final Brunello was a ’71, a great vintage, and it was a spectacular example of what twenty years can do to fruit juice. The subtlety and finesse, when the tannins became like the spiderwebs, superfine and silky. Those wines for me are all about that carnality even now, and as they mature, what was flowers and flesh turns into juicy tobacco, like a plug of Red Man, and the smell of a wet forest, like a carpet of rotting pine needles.

  But the ’71 was no longer wet or damp, more like dry leaves in December, leaves that have been there for a few months, maybe a bit crunchy and crackling when you rake them up for the final time of the season, and the tobacco had become more like blackberry brandy and cassis.

  This woman and I were sleeping in adjoining rooms in the farmhouse. We shared the same bathroom, which meant she had to walk through my bedroom to wash up, or whatever it was that women did. I was in my early twenties, and when it came to real women, I really had no clue.

  The smell of mature sex was very much in the air. It reached the point where I was tasting it in the Brunello. She had really gotten into my head. I was horny as hell, but I think sometimes when your senses are tweaked like that, it is a good time to taste wine. It was transcendent, the wine, the cellar, the woman—it was the perfect tasting. The big stinky Brunello and her musk and vulnerable me. It all came together.

  On this trip I was learning in a very tangible way the subtleties of Italian regional varietals. I was getting very deep into the specific profile of the local terroir. The wines of Montalcino were incredible with Tuscan foods—it was all making a lot of sense. Not that it was so complex, but the first time you have Tuscan bread, which has no salt in it, it’s almost like eating food with a void in your mouth. Very strange. But it is an important part of the experience, and you come to sense how everything about these places goes together. Like the first time I had a true bistecca alla fiorentina—it’s just a piece of grilled steak, straightforward, but the way they cook it on the wood-fired grill outside brings out all the flavors. I still have very vivid taste memories of that moment in time, whether it’s the green, peppery vibrancy of Tuscan extra-virgin olive oil or those perfect Tuscan tomatoes picked off the vine and tossed on a plate with a little basil and a glass of Rosso di Montalcino. The impact on a young palate of these products in their very primal and pure state was indelible. There were no tricks. It’s all about ingredients—zucchini and eggplant picked from the garden by grandmothers, or my first Tuscan ribollita, which is like a vegetable soup that’s cooked down and reduced to an eye-opening essence.

  It was an intellectual journey, but also a very primal, sensory trip. Each place had a specific smell and flavor, each had its own products, which really fit in with the local wine—and that’s when I realized that Italy is about small places. In fact, the best meal you will ever have in Italy will not be in a restaurant, but in someone’s home. But tasting and smelling and seeing helped me become a better restaurateur and winemaker. What I do in my restaurants, when I’m cooking dinner, or when I make a bottle of wine in Friuli, is really about re-creating those simple flavors. The important thing is that the wine and the food exist together in space and time—there’s not a distinction. They’re one and the same, because wine is food and food is wine. More important, when they are consumed together, they speak directly of the place they come from. I don’t think there are any hard-and-fast rules on what you can and can’t do—no one is going to die from drinking Rioja with the risotto—but to be in Spain and to have a great white anchovy with a good vino fino, there’s nothing quite like that. It’s the same thing in Italy.

  Celebrating that localness is when you really get into the spirit of Italianness. For young cooks and people who want to do this, what Mario and I have always said is, “Look, you can work here, you can do this, but ultimately you have to go live in Italy, because there is no way you can have that profound experience here. And then you’ll know.”

  I went to Chianti for a while and hung out in and around Florence. In Chianti I stayed with the Stucchi Prinetti family, who are direct descendants of the Medici. I was flying in some rarefied air—my mom totally hooked me up. But here’s an example of “if I knew then what I know now”: If you’re a dude backpacking through Italy, you have to go for the low-hanging fruit—generally Dutch and Australian chicks are the easiest to get some action with when you’re on the road. Hippie backpackers, they like to share the wealth. They’re not afraid about putting it out there. But locals, no way. Italian girls are like the Virgin Mary. Don’t even waste your time. At least for the first go-round. The second time, then they’re giving it away—I mean the second time around, like after they’ve been married once already, then they throw it to the wind. They might as well be from Queens. But at least for their first time, it’s very sacred. I wish I’d known that then.

  My mom also set me up with some gay restaurateurs in Rome who tried to romance me, to put it politely. I guess that was about par for the course for Rome, but believe me when I tell you they didn’t have much luck. They were still supernice to me, though. The one fellow had a very famous restaurant in Rome—he was like the Italian Liberace, very flamboyant—and he had a younger boyfriend, and they used to take me out to dinner. They had a beautiful apartment near the Colosseum on via dei Serpenti, Road of the Serpents. I remem
ber I got to this house on a Friday, and the next day was the first of the Three Tenors concerts, which took place at the Baths of Caracalla. The whole city was silent while they sang. It was one of those summer nights, really hot, and the sunset was perfectly epic. With the window open, you could hear it all. I was just sitting there in my room listening, lamenting this girl I had left behind in another town, and it all got very heavy very quickly. This culture had so many thousands of years of history, and I was coming from New York where everything is so immediate and shallow—so five minutes ago—and it just hit me that I was in a building that was five hundred years old, in a city that was three thousand years old, near a coliseum that was two thousand years old, where multiple civilizations have lived and died and coexisted. It was very humbling. Where I came from, the here and now was all-important, and what I was experiencing, from the romance of the place and its physically imposing nature, from being in Rome by myself day after day, was the weight of everything that had come before. I was nothing. Cities got built over cities. Cultures build themselves on the bones of those that came before them.

  Later I found out that these guys, aside from running their completely flamboyant restaurant, were professional Etruscan-artifact thieves. They had this astonishing place out in the country—it was like half house, half tented palace, and all the men wore linen genie pants and Roman sandals, shirtless with ornate golden chains and sideburns. If you were to imagine gay porn being shot in Italy in the late seventies, this is what it was like.

  They were also eating the best mozzarella, and the best ricotta, and the best olive oil, and the best tomatoes. Those guys knew how to do it. No cheapness. It was all about indulgence, on every level. The hedonism began with the location—just the splendor of it. And then the food and wine. They had this way of going about fulfilling their wildest desires. I think because none of them had kids or were really responsible to anyone but themselves, they were able to create this insanely indulgent lifestyle.

  And the whole time they were out there, they were also excavating for Etruscan ruins. Stewardesses would come to these crazy parties with their Pan Am bags, and then they would exchange bundled-up packages of totally illegal artifacts. My two new friends were basically funneling them into the black market in New York to pay for their food and sex orgies in Italy.

  It seemed as if everyone in Italy had some sort of hustle. Later on in Rome, I fell in with these Yugoslavian gangsters. It was in the heat of the war in the Balkans, and they needed to import toilet paper there. I actually formed a company that was going to do that—I figured everybody poops, right? They said if we could get paper at this price, we could make a lot of money. So they were my partners. When I eventually got back to New York, I called up all the various people who make toilet paper and figured out how to buy it and get it shipped to a war zone, but after some quick analysis I realized I didn’t really trust my partners. They were more into smuggling cigarettes than they were into doing legitimate trade. The toilet paper was a front, and they were just going to use me to set up an import-export business—a pack of Marlboros in Egypt cost like twenty cents, and all you had to do was get it to New York in a container filled with worthless toilet paper, then hustle the cigarettes in the city for a buck-fifty. There was a lot of money to be made. They were preying on my dreams of being a legitimate merchant, ha-ha.

  Aside from these get-rich-quick schemes, all of which failed before they even got started, I was eating and drinking the entire time, of course, and traveling a lot, sleeping in the car the way we did when I was a kid. My mom set me up at a place in Umbria, a very fancy restaurant hotel. In my room there was a chef’s jacket over the chair, and I thought, Great, my mom told them I’d work, and I was actually ready to go do whatever they needed me to do in the kitchen. It was a nice change from the smugglers. So I come down, and everyone salutes me as I walk into the kitchen. They’re like, “Ça va, chef? Buongiorno, chef.” And I’m like, “Huh?” I’m looking at them. They’re looking at me. They want to know, “So what’s today’s special?” It was like an episode of Fawlty Towers—they thought I was the new chef. I had taken the wrong room, and the other guy hadn’t shown up yet, and I was wearing his jacket. It took a few minutes to defuse that situation. I guess for a second I was thinking about just taking the job.

  My mind was very open to everything, and I tried to absorb as much as I could. I knew what authentic Italian food was, I knew the difference between chanterelles and porcini (which weren’t so common then), pappardelle and risotto, and the then-almost-unheard-of magic of balsamic vinegar. I was just building on the foundation laid between Queens and Felidia and all those trips we’d taken when I was a kid.

  Wine culture was very different in Italy, though. Italians never looked at any wine list—that was for German and American tourists. Italians drank the “wine of the place.” They generally don’t fuss much over big important bottles of wine. But I realized that understanding the rare and expensive wines and the people who made them was how I would eventually make my living.

  So I focused on the top-end wines and the names that I heard, because I knew that’s where the money was to be made in New York, whether it be in a restaurant or retail. I learned those wines and met the people who made them and at the same time immersed myself in the world of hyperlocal consumption. Really, none of it was that fancy, just simple wines, simply served, with simple local food.

  Getting back to New York was major culture shock. While in Italy I had lost all that post–Boston College preppiness, the crunch, the Deadhead tie-dye, left behind Wall Street and the pinstripe suits and gotten a little Euro, hitting the disco scene in Sardinia and the beaches of Rimini, running around with crazy Albanian prostitutes. There’s a summertime Euro-disco vibe that happens in Italy and the rest of Europe. I was working it.

  I came back at the beginning of ’92, the year before Clinton came rushing into office with all that Fleetwood Mac–driven optimism. There was a bad real-estate recession at the time; I remember things were not great at Felidia, times were tough. And here I was coming back with the bright idea of opening my own restaurant. But starting a business in such a shitty market ended up being to my advantage. I was able to get a space at a great price, and I adapted these ideas that I had about food and wine from an intellectual and passionate level into something highly practical, to make sense in the business realm. If anything, I’m very much a marketer, and my strength is to take ideas of passion and purity and turn them into a sellable product. And that product at the time had to be something that could appeal to people in a major economic downturn yet still be a good deal when things turned around. Better, in fact.

  Here was the pragmatism that my dad had taught me. I’m back to ground zero. I’ve left all the different phases in my life behind me. I’m done fucking around. The academics are over, the Wall Street stint is over, I proved I could do it and took a lot of lessons with me, and now I’m going to make money in food and wine. I’m going to be here now. I went back to my primal instincts and bought a 1978 Suburban—a 100 percent Restaurant Man–approved vehicle. I thought, Where can I get the cheapest rent? Where do people have to eat? The Theater District. People have to eat in the Theater District. I found a location and built the restaurant myself.

  I was like Jeff Goldblum at the end of The Fly, when he is suddenly becoming more insect than human. He was turning into a monster. This is what was happening to me—I could no longer suppress it. This was my biological imperative.

  The DNA of Restaurant Man had finally taken over.

  Be afraid.

  Be very afraid.

  CHAPTER SIX

  From Blue Nun to Barolo

  When I first got back from Italy, I was crashing in a room upstairs from Felidia, in a storage closet, basically. This is what passed for my post-hippie, post–Wall Street bachelor pad—I’d pick up chicks and bring them back to the restaurant at 4:00 A.M. after the bars closed, open up the kitchen, make spaghetti puttanesca, put so
me prosciutto on the slicer, and try to get laid. And then the skies opened up, for real this time, and I met my future wife, Deanna. Maybe I should let her tell the story….

  “Joe was just back from his year in Italy. He was wearing black pants and a black turtleneck and chain-smoking, and mostly he was just happy to be back with his boys from Bayside. I was definitely not impressed. I got to know him slowly, and somewhat unintentionally. I kind of blew him off that New Year’s Eve—I was with a bunch of friends, and one of them got too drunk and got thrown out of the bar where Joe and I were supposed to meet. A few nights later, we finally made plans to go to a movie alone, but after he picked me up (in his dad’s car), he decided to change the plans and took me to his ‘uncle’s’ restaurant instead—Angelo Vivolo’s place—where of course we were treated like royalty. Now I was impressed.

  “Later that month I took him up to Westchester, where my family was celebrating my grandmother’s birthday. I introduced him to my grandparents, and he spoke Italian to them, and they were really impressed by his knowledge of food and wine and how he understood them perfectly. On the way home, he pulled off the road unexpectedly and kissed me. It was love, all right. Now I just had to convince my parents he had a future. They didn’t believe he was the wine buyer for Felidia, and they weren’t exactly convinced that he was going to make it selling toilet paper in war-torn Yugoslavia.”

  It kills me to think that I was still considering the toilet-paper business when I first met her. I had an office, maybe I had a computer. Spent a lot of time making phone calls. I looked at a lot of toilet-paper samples. And for the record, I was not testing the toilet paper. I was looking for a volume product to send to the Balkans. Anyway, as anyone who has ever had to take a shit in Bosnia can tell you, they have a different way of thinking about toilet paper. It’s not exactly Mr. Whipple’s Finest over there.