Restaurant Man

by Joe Bastianich

  But basically I was wasting time all day. Smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, wait for Deanna to come home from work. Go out to dinner, nurse my hangover on her couch, try to get Deanna to sleep with me, then mooch money off her. (See, I could have been a great musician.)

  But it was time to get back to my inescapable destiny. I was twenty-three years old.

  My grandmother was the first investor in Becco, my first restaurant. It was a pretty big leap of faith for her—there was no real business plan. We were at dinner at my mother’s house, and I pretty much sat her down and told her, as best I could, what I wanted to do. She loaned me eighty thousand dollars to get started. “Spend it wisely, kiddo, because that’s all you’re going to get.” She was doing all right, Grandma was. She’d been saving money her whole life, and when my uncle started working at IBM fifty years ago, he got her to buy stock in the company every year, and she became a big shot over at the International Business Machines Corporation. Who’da thunk it? Hard to think of her like that when she was walking around the yard in her bra watering her garden.

  Drew Nieporent was the kind of restaurateur I wanted to be, someone I looked up to and wanted to emulate. Of course! He had the hip, cool restaurant in Tribeca. He was partners with Robert De Niro. But I was going to go a different route. Becco was never going to be trendy—it was going to be consistent. So what if people thought I had a schleppy Italian place in the cheesy Theater District? So what if Drew was getting movie stars and I was humping it out with Mary Schleneggen from Morristown and Bobby Lipshitz from Larchmont—they wanted to get to the theater and they didn’t want to have to spend a lot to get a great meal and a great experience, and it worked. This is a lesson I learned early, and we stuck with it for all our restaurants—it’s better to be lukewarm for twenty years than hot for six months.

  Despite the economy, Broadway was still bustling—Miss Saigon had just opened and was pulling them in with that oversize hydraulic-helicopter gimmick—and there was no question those crazy theatergoers had to eat before all that excitement. A couple of years later when Becco was up and happening, The Who’s Tommy was the big thing, and we used to hang out with Pete Townshend after the show at O’Flaherty’s bar, shooting pool.

  We were right in the heart of the action, on Forty-sixth Street, Restaurant Row, and I had managed to score a triple-net lease for three thousand dollars a month. But there was no real business plan—my plan was basically my truck, an out-of-work Mexican construction worker, and a Croatian sociopath named Davor. This was my team. We had no contractors; we did the whole job ourselves. We were taking over a space that was previously a barbecue joint called Caroline’s that had been popular for about five minutes in the late eighties. It was a great room with a 1930s Deco bar imported from Paris for whatever restaurant had failed there before Caroline’s fleeting moment came and went.

  Davor was a character from my childhood—he used to hang out at the bar at Buonavia. He was a good-looking young guy, and he dated this Irish barfly who hung around there, a woman named Pat. She was a bit androgynous—they were a very strange couple; it was hard to see the chemistry. He helped me build the restaurant. Later, after I got married, he built an illegal porch on my house, which I almost got arrested for, building without the right permits. Even then I was trying to get away with doing things on the fly.

  Making Becco out of a BBQ joint was no little feat—there was an old BBQ pit that had to be cut into pieces in order to take it out of there. I decided I was going to do it myself, so I rented my first blowtorch and had at it. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing—I cut the thing up but managed to start a fire in the process. I could have burned down the whole building, and the last thing I wanted to do was call the fire department. Somehow I managed to put it out myself with a garden hose. Of course, then the place was flooded and I had that problem to solve. Another time I was down in the old walk-in refrigerator. They used to have these wooden walk-ins—they were okay for beverages back then but not for food. I couldn’t afford a new one, so I bought sheets of aluminum and was going to use those to line the insides of the wooden ones. I had all this industrial glue, and I was shut up in there, and at the time I was smoking three packs of Marlboros a day, drinking like twenty-two cups of espresso, and not really in the best shape to be working with highly toxic adhesive in a closed-off area. Anyway, the fumes overtook me. I passed out and started convulsing. Davor and the Mexican had to drag me out by my heels or I would have died.

  But somehow it got done.

  Becco was a wing-and-a-prayer project, and the whole concept had to be recession-proof. The idea was a fixed-price menu—antipasto and pasta, everyone eats the same thing. It was my interpretation of the communal table in Italy, but for the Theater District in Manhattan. So everyone had some grilled vegetables and a little shrimp and calamari, and then we had three pastas every day, maybe some butternut squash ravioli with toasted almond and pumpkin oil, and rigatoni in spicy tomato sauce with soft-braised cabbage and salcice picante, perhaps some risotto in sweet crab stock with moist lumps of lobster. We’d put them on platters, bring those to the table; they would all help themselves. We kept the food cost low and charged sixteen bucks for lunch, a bit more for dinner. It was the textbook example of another concept that we’d try to lean on for everything else we did—Keep It Simple, Stupid. (Although by the time we got to opening Del Posto, that idea had pretty much sailed right out the window. More on that later.)

  Here was the real kicker: Along with the value concept of our menu, we had a couple hundred wines, all at fifteen bucks a bottle, including Barolos and Barbarescos, wines that were traditionally very expensive.

  For years, growing up working at Felidia, I had always seen people reading the wine list from right to left—reading the price first, then figuring out what they would have based solely on the price point, which always struck me as contrary to the whole point of ordering wine. I thought, wouldn’t it be great if we could eliminate price as a factor in choosing a bottle and make it incredibly affordable so they could concentrate on enjoying wine with their food, rather than its being this status symbol? With the wine at fifteen dollars a bottle, how could I miss? We took price away and made the wine a central part of the experience. It was no longer a nightmare to choose a bottle of wine. It was now a pleasant part of the trip.

  The wines were all Italian, and they were selected regionally. They covered the whole map of Italy, they were interesting, they paired well with the food. I really sank my teeth into being the value-wine guy in the market. In a way the recession actually worked in our favor—in a bear market, people are desperate to sell. You can make deals, and we were very aggressive.

  Becco math was based on “seventy-two bucks a case”—that’s six dollars a bottle, and we sold each bottle for fifteen, a 40 percent cost, which isn’t so bad. Usually in restaurants the rule is to charge for a glass what you paid for the bottle, and the bottle usually gets marked up three times. Of course six times three is eighteen, so we weren’t making as much as we could, but the percentage still had integrity. And we thought we’d make it up in volume. You’d see this incredible list, how could you not buy a bottle? Or two? And it worked. People would order a bottle of white, then a bottle of red, and then they’d try another bottle of red. Consumption increased, and we got a lot of attention for this great, affordable list that was making good wine accessible to regular people without giving them sticker shock or stressing them out over the list. People loved it, and they kept coming back.

  Before Felidia, New York had been drowning in a completely unevolved Italian-food scene. Wine options in the United States in the 1970s had been fairly limited—there were some knowledgeable people, of course, and French wines were largely revered, but what most people knew was Fazi Battaglia, Riunite Lambrusco, and the Pescevino in the bottle shaped like a fish, and of course the Chianti in the straw-covered bottles, maybe a cheap Valpolicella, some thick Carlo Rossi “Burgundy” in a jug, and Boone’s Farm fo
r the Frisbee tossers. Leisure-suit-wearing swingers drank Mateus with an air of faux sophistication (I remember they used to advertise that shit in upscale hi-fi magazines), and Blue Nun seemed to be the favorite of the drunken clergymen I’d see hovering around Times Square. The Italian wines were mostly very industrial, driven by government subsidies. They made a lot of it and flooded the market with it. It was mass marketing and all about volume—the more you produced, the more money you made, and since most people couldn’t tell Montepulciano from motor oil, it didn’t make a difference.

  But by the time Felidia opened, there was a shift in the culture of Italian restaurants in America. And by the late eighties and early nineties, things were changing in Italy as well. People were getting away from industrial wines made by these huge companies and turning to the history of their own terroir and their own varietals, making wines that were more regionally significant, that had historic, real Old World value.

  My mom was my partner. She was there, helping me with menu development, she helped me hire the chef. We were business partners, but she had the sensitivity to be there when I needed the help and let it be mine, on my own, when I didn’t. It was that sensitivity that allowed me to create a project that was my own vision, one that I could feel good about and keep my independence. She definitely had her followers, and that didn’t hurt. She knows the business, she’s got names, contacts, she was on the verge of becoming a star, but she never tried to take over or dominate or pretend that we were one big happy family where she played at being a contrived Italian matriarch for marketing purposes. She is far too down-to-earth for that. It was practical—I was just a kid, and I had some idea of what I was doing, but mostly I was just busting my ass. Working there together, we realized that sometimes it was best if we weren’t in the same restaurant at the same time, another lesson that would be invaluable later.

  From a business and cultural point of view, the idea at Becco was to change the role of the restaurateur, to become an advocate for the customer as opposed to just being a tool of the food business. We were rejecting the corporate themes, and over time the trend we created became the standard.

  We had two hundred wines on our list, 70 percent of them red, and we invented the concept of wine service in a very affordable setting that anyone could enjoy. Call the guy or gal who brings you the list whatever you like—the wine director, the sommelier, the wine rat—but this was the birth of smart wine. We distilled all the marketing and corporate bullshit out of wine selling and wine branding and got to the essence of finding the right wine and putting it on the table. This was wine for the people. It was much more ambitious than what my father was doing back at Buonavia, but it was still completely true to Restaurant Man’s hard-core mentality. We were adding value without adding expense.

  Eventually the wholesalers and the distributors saw the volume we were doing and the impact that this was having and they got behind it. We were buying closeouts and doing direct imports—everyone wanted to be part of the Becco wine program. It was the first time anyone had really done anything out of the box with a wine list. The standard then was still this absurd, giant, bound behemoth wrapped in plastic or God forbid, pleather. It was supposed to be like the Holy Bible—very intimidating. It thumped like a drunken rhinoceros when the waiter dropped it on the table. And it was useless. Page after page of pictures of pretty bottles, and all these wines listed without vintage. This was the absolute apex of nonintellectual, distributor-driven, supremely dumbed-down wine marketing. Our list was one of the first steps to helping customers get smart about choosing a bottle of wine and for the restaurants to stop looking down on customers as if they were easy marks. We wanted them to enjoy it, we wanted them to enjoy the entire experience.

  We started buying wine for Becco before we opened in ’92, and we got lucky—1990 turned out to be a benchmark vintage for Italian wine. At Becco we caught lightning in a bottle.

  Now it is harder to find good wines to fit the price-point parameters, but we’ve become such a big player that we can still do it. It was fifteen dollars a bottle when we started, and twenty years later it’s only twenty-five. When you confront business decisions, you have to stay true to what you believe is right. Really, it’s just about being honest with what moves you. We knew that quality always paid dividends—whatever you’re doing, it will pay off, exponentially. Always. Your customers will take care of it. Guaranteed.

  Well, you can believe that if you want. That’s what I want to believe, that’s the way it should be, and we have been supremely fortunate, but I can remember some pretty sweaty moments at Becco when the cash flow wasn’t going right. There was at least one time when the power was about to be shut off during dinner service and I had to come up with a check, stealing from Peter to pay Paul, getting caught in that bad circle of owing yourself money just to stay open, but we made it. Restaurant Man is made of some pretty stern stuff. I was making business decisions based on instinct, but I was buying everything myself, and you know I was being a cheap fuck—I was the one writing the checks.

  Every day I’d get up, buy two packs of cigarettes and two cups of coffee—this was before Starbucks, so they were fifty cents each—and get into the Suburban and cruise the produce market for the loading-dock specials, which is produce that is one day bad, so they pretty much give it away. So we’d have pallets of asparagus and raspberries, and we’d have to pick through it to get to the good stuff, and it would be great, ripe and perfect, but it took a little bit of work. Then we’d see Fat Sal, who ran the broccoli rabe mafia; he was the only guy you could get it from, and you’d have to bring him coffee, light and sweet, and a cherry-cheese Danish every day for six months before he’d even talk to you. Then the fish market a few days a week. You have to pick out fish one by one. You have to know what a bad fish looks like—that’s where the battle of margin begins—and you have to love the nervous energy you feel in your stomach when you get a good deal on a three-hundred-pound swordfish and you’re taking it at four bucks a pound, and you have to know that even if you’re selling fifty portions a day, you’re going to just get through it before it goes bad, but you’re going to make so much money on it. It’s a risk-reward scenario, but it’s all about getting good product and cutting a good deal and making your customers happy.

  I saw Becco as this apocalyptic, I-gotta-make-it, end-of-days scenario, because I felt that if I failed, I’d roll off the cliff and into oblivion and poverty. This was my last chance at doing something with my life. It sounds extreme, but it was that black and white for me. It was also where the hard-core, blue-collar Restaurant Man had to grow up and become supermedia- and client-savvy, too. I’d spent so long with the construction boots and the buyer’s jacket on, with the fishhooks at Fulton Street, building the restaurant from surplus I found in lumberyards and going to restaurant auctions and ripping out used restaurant equipment, and suddenly I was a guy putting on a suit and rescuing my Hermès ties from the back of the closet. “Buona sera, signore. Can I get you a drink?” That’s what I did every night. Greeting every guest and seating every one of them personally. We were definitely a front-of-the-house-driven restaurant. My goal was to make every customer happy at all costs. Whatever it took. The Becco mantra expressed the enlightened version of Restaurant Man: Overdeliver, exceed expectations, every day.

  Tableside service, which became the successful hallmark at Becco, was actually a very successful accident. We had a packed house one night—including Gael Greene. We were overwhelmed and didn’t want to get into the weeds and screw everything up with such a heavyweight critic in the house. We couldn’t plate the pastas fast enough in the kitchen, so we sent waiters out with the pasta pans and let them plate it at the table, just keep it moving, and that’s how it got started. It was a total smash—everyone loved it. Where else could you get that kind of service at that price? Gael gave us a good review, although I think she was a little bit doubtful—maybe she thought that since I was my mother’s son, somehow all this had bee
n given to me. I was out of my mind working so hard, and I kind of resented that. These days she calls me for a table.

  And then Bryan Miller at the New York Times gave us two stars. My first two-star New York Times review! Two stars is very good, three stars is nearly impossible to get, four stars is like a blessing from God. For Becco a two-star review was as good as I could ever have hoped for. Honestly, when Bryan came in, we totally jacked up his meal. I remember recognizing him, and we did everything we could within our power, including cooking every dish twice to make sure it was beyond criticism, making the portion size bigger, really laying it on thick. I waited on the table myself and made sure the check was low. Whatever I had to do to guarantee he had a great time. A lot of the guys who actually printed the Times, the print-run managers, ordered lunch at Becco, and that morning they brought the paper by, literally hot off the press. Ever pick up a paper while it’s still warm and smells of ink? It’s another wonderfully Old World thing in itself. And they gave me the original plates from the print run on that review. It was huge. Probably in today’s terms Becco is a one-star restaurant, the rest of the world having caught up to us—but that review definitely set us on our way.

  And then there was John Mariani, a food critic who was still important at the time. He berated me. I served him a red snapper I’d bought from Herbie Slavin, and John said it was the most rancid, disgusting piece of fish he’d ever had. He told me, right there, sitting at the table, looking up at me with laser beams for eyes, that he’d broken the head open and it stank of rotten fish and almost made him vomit. I felt all the air leave my lungs. I thought I was going to pass out. I was standing there, emasculated, in front of an entire dining room full of people. He just sliced my balls off, right there at tableside, and let me bleed from my crotch as his guests smirked and laughed on. That was our first meeting.