How did that red snapper get past the Young Restaurant Man? That son of a bitch Herbie Slavin must have had the best of me that morning. He probably pulled out one snapper, showed it to me on the hook, then swapped it for another fish. It was a bait and switch, literally and figuratively. That was typical frontline warfare at the old Fulton Fish Market. My idiot chef didn’t notice it. He just cooked the fucking fish and served it to the food critic, who proceeded to take me down.
He made me feel that I had disgraced my entire hardworking immigrant family by serving him an inadequate snapper, and that my entire lineage of forefathers were rolling in their graves at this egregious error that I had committed. It was brutal. Since then pretty much everyone who’s had to deal with him knows what a self-righteous, condescending prick he can be. When Mario and I opened Babbo, I was a little unsure how to handle Mariani—my dad told me, “John eats for free.” But Mario set me straight. This was the kitchen talking to the front of the house: Fuck him, he pays. Everyone pays.
After I started making a couple of bucks, I decided that Deanna was indeed the woman of my dreams. This was December 1993, and I basically emptied the coffers at Becco, trucked down Forty-sixth Street to see my friend Howard Weisberg the Jewish Diamond Guy, and I bought a beautiful engagement ring that cost more money than I ever dreamed I’d have.
I proposed to Deanna on a Friday night in December, right in the middle of pre-theater dinner service.
At the time we were living above Becco, and Deanna was working during the week as an assistant buyer at Bloomingdale’s and as a coat-check girl at Becco on the weekends. Coat-check girl is one of the best jobs you can have—you make a lot of dough for doing very little, and you’re in with the boss, which comes with its own perks, even if you aren’t fucking him. The coat-check girl knows everything. She’s the first to arrive, last to leave. She’s always near the bar, always near the boss. And you can tell what people are really about by their coats, don’t doubt it for a second. She’s not an on-the-books employee—you don’t pay the coat-check girl, she pays you for the concession. She makes her deal directly with the house. The old way of doing things is she takes the first fifty and then everything from fifty up is split with the house. It’s easy money. Or she guarantees you three or four hundred bucks a week and after that she keeps it all. Every deal is different. But you never have to buy information from her—she’s not an official employee, she’s clandestine, and she knows who’s fucking whom and what everyone is doing. She knows who’s coming in and who’s going out. She’s your girl.
The night I proposed to Deanna, we were fully booked. People were waiting to sit down. Packed. I had the ring in my pocket. I was going to take her on a trip to Cape Cod for the weekend, but I couldn’t wait. The ring was burning a hole in my pocket. I was really gaga in love. During the pre-theater rush, I ran upstairs to our apartment—she was just getting back from Bloomingdale’s—I dropped to one knee, proposed, gave her the ring, and then ran back downstairs to get everyone the fuck out by seven forty-five so they wouldn’t be late for their show. My whole family was there waiting to celebrate with us, and when she came down, everyone applauded. There were tears, there was lots of backslapping, the whole Italian works. That night we went out to Sparks to celebrate.
My mother turned our wedding into a sort of industry event. She invited food and wine journalists, winemakers and restaurateurs from Italy, guest dignitaries, kitchen superstars. Five hundred and fifty people. My wife probably knew eight people at the wedding, not counting her family. The food was major—we did all the traditional stuff like baccalà, sauerkraut and pork, caviar, stuffed cabbage, Italian wedding-pillow pasta, octopus and potato salad…. Most affairs have one hour of hors d’oeuvres; we kept it on for three. We had wine made special for the wedding—five-liter bottles of Brunello with custom labels printed to commemorate the day. And then we gave everyone who came a bottle of the same Brunello as a gift. It was a little bit more of an industry event than I might have liked, but it was very cool, a lot of fun. People still talk about it.
And naturally we moved back to Queens. Where else was I going to go? Down the block from my mother’s house, which was kind of a mistake. It’s another one of those things I can’t really explain; after years spent trying to bust loose I was right back where I’d started. Maybe I shouldn’t be ripping on the guys I knew in college who wound up becoming their parents? Whatever. I’m still not selling insurance. But it just seemed like the right thing to do.
We bought a nice house, but we’d go to my mother’s house to eat all the time. It was a little weird for Deanna, but seriously, if Lidia Bastianich wanted to cook for you, you’d go, right? And then my father would show up on a Saturday morning, in his underwear, playing the accordion. And he wasn’t shitfaced or anything like that, it was just that kind of neighborhood. My father would be walking around in his bathrobe singing these goopy Istrian love ballads, and meanwhile there would be six police cruisers parked outside my grandmother’s house. The first time I saw that, I freaked the fuck out—“Oh, my God, what happened?”—and ran inside, where she’s got all these cops sitting at her kitchen table, including some of the top brass in Queens, and she’s making them espresso and giving them tips on how to farm radicchio and tomatoes in their backyards. Yeah, I was back into it, all right. There was no escape.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Don’t You Know? Busboys Run the Show.
Running a restaurant isn’t just about making the food. You have an entire army of people working for you who have nothing to do with food prep or cooking, but they’re the people whom the customer is most likely to come into contact with, the people who at the end of the day are going to make the place sing or make it crash no matter how good the stuff coming out of the kitchen is. If Restaurant Man only cared about the fancy-pants chef, he would be out of business before he even got started.
The lowest man on the totem pole in any restaurant is the dishwasher. It’s mucho trabajo, poco dinero. And dishwashers take a lot of shit. Saca la caca. They start on pots and pans. That’s the bottom of the barrel, worse than dishes and plates—they have to scrub the pots and deal with the cooks who rush them—“We need the fucking pots back, Chachi”—who are all drunk lunatics, throwing hot pans at the dishwasher, under a lot of pressure. So pot washer is at the bottom—for a guy who’s just off the bus, it’s where he cuts his teeth. When he gets promoted to dishes and plates, at least he’s dealing with busboys, and he can call them names—Maricón! Te gusta la pinga? There’s a lot of fag joking going on in a kitchen.
That’s going to happen in any male-dominated locker-room-like situation. There’s a lot of that between the guys in the kitchen and the management, too, but you really have to strike the right balance, because these guys are generally very hardworking and you need to let them know how valuable they are to the team. Mexicans probably work the hardest, but the Ecuadoreans and Peruvians have more culinary aptitude—except, of course, for Mexicans from Puebla. Puebla is the one place you could always pull a good Mexican cook out of. The first thing you do when you interview your dishwasher is ask him where he’s from. The ones from Puebla can cook. All of them. I don’t know what the fuck goes on in Puebla, I’ve never been there, but everyone who comes from there can cook like a motherfucker. You can get them out of the sink and off the pots and put them right on the line.
Otherwise, from dishwasher a guy can move up to clean the restaurant and become a porter, which is really the head dishwasher, but it’s a nicer title. The chief porter is the key job—not only is he in charge of cleaning the whole restaurant overnight, he accepts your merch. If you don’t have the right guy, that’s the weak link in the chain—he’s the guy who’s got the scale in the front and checks everything in, and therefore you have to hire carefully. He has to be incorruptible. So pot scrubber, dishwasher, restaurant cleaner, porter. That’s kind of the hierarchy. And in our restaurants you can absolutely move up the chain. At the point when you’re c
leaning the restaurant, either you aspire to become a porter or you go to the front of the house and become a busboy.
Busboys are like the blood of a restaurant. With a good team of busboys, you can take over a small city. Busboys really run the place—they do most of the work in the front of the house. They clean the front of the house, they clean the tables, they deal with all the shit that waiters don’t want to do. The old axiom is that busboys work for you, waiters work for themselves. Busboys love Restaurant Man, because Restaurant Man allows them to enter the world of tips. That’s where life changes. Imagine if all of a sudden someone decides to double your salary—“Okay, kid, tomorrow you’re making twice as much money as you made yesterday.” That’s pretty good. Workaday, uninspired waiters hate Restaurant Man, because they see him as the oppressor and they see the job of being a waiter as something to pay the bills while they pursue whatever other things they think they’re going to be successful at. Sing, dance, be a chorus boy—they wait tables while they’re failing at their art. Professional waiters are generally overeducated, artistically deprived, bitter people who feel that every dollar they earn is blood money, and they resent being there.
But the better example of the waiter is the person who truly wants to work in one of our restaurants. My thing with waiters is that I want to keep them here in the restaurant working for the shortest time possible so they don’t burn out, I want them to make as much money as possible, and I want to educate them as much as I can. The waiter is my voice when he speaks to my customers. He communicates what our philosophy is, what our menu offerings are. He’s the interpreter for the back of the house, which is the production engine. He’s the orchestrator of the meal. He’s the conductor. And it’s the waiter’s job to take the experience and customize it for each consumer. What a waiter does is curate: A restaurant has the capacity to produce a fantastic experience, and the waiter’s job is to take that experience and custom-fit it for every person who comes in to spend money with us. Nothing is taken for granted.
The waiter is the intermediary in the battle that goes on every night between the front of the house and the kitchen. It’s classic—Mario and I live it each day. It is epic, and it will never change. His world is a world of black and white. Right and wrong. Good or bad. Rotten or fresh. The world of the front of the house, with customers, is entirely gray. There’s no clear right, there’s no wrong. The customer is right, the kitchen is wrong, the kitchen is right, the customer is wrong. Everything is subject to interpretation and perception. This is the classic battle of all restaurants—the mentality of Restaurant Man versus The Kitchen, and the waiter can easily get caught in no-man’s-land.
I think it says a lot that our waiters stick around—we create a positive work environment. It is a good job, with benefits, and you can learn a truckload if you’re tuned in. Many of the people who get hired as waitrons are very passionate about food and wine and probably very good cooks in their own right, or aficionados who can see it as an academic pursuit leading to the next level of food consciousness, and that is no shit. Work at Babbo or Lupa for six months and you will leave having seen things few others could even imagine.
What we’re really looking for, simply, is people who enjoy giving other people pleasure. Once you have that, that’s the skill set you need to be a great waiter. If you have a passion for learning about food and wine, even better. Everything else we can teach you. To get the gig, you have to have carried a plate before, but I’ll forgo experience any day for someone who is willing to learn, listen, and get satisfaction and joy out of creating a memorable experience for the customer. That’s the most fundamental quality a great waiter needs to have.
We’re also conscious of creating a situation where waiters can pursue their other aspirations, encouraging them to stay with us as long as they can, so if they fail at their singing career, they’ll still dig working for us, and they become part of our family. The restaurant in its purest sense is truly a family. We have waiters at Becco who’ve been there for twenty years, since the opening. Jason Denton—who is our partner and now owns eight restaurants—was a waiter at Po working for Mario. That’s how he started. We always take care of the people we like.
And then there is the bartender. He’s like the bunk sergeant of the waiters—when you come into a restaurant, you always assume that the bartender knows something more than the waiters do. He’s a stud. Usually it’s a job that makes more money. Depends on the restaurant, but in our restaurants the bartenders handle the cash. They handle the booze. They decide who is going to get drunk and who isn’t. They really need to be your ally, because there are so many things that they can control, including the spirit or philosophy of the restaurant, even when they’re just bullshitting with customers.
Babbo was where we launched the bar-dining craze, so the bartender position at Babbo was always the key thing, and then it went over to Lupa and onward. Bartenders became almost a hybrid management position. In many ways they are the figurehead of the restaurant. So you always want to pay special attention to your bartenders. You want hot-looking guys, good-looking girls with a nice set of tits, you know. It’s a tricky thing, because it’s not cool to talk about how attractive your staff is, but it’s a reality. There’s a lot of that in the restaurant business.
Hostesses are functionary. There’s no magic power. They’re usually college students. We’ve had a lot of hostesses who have gone on to greatness in our company, running wine divisions and becoming general managers, but generally the hostess is a pretty blah position. It’s an hourly gig for a pretty girl, but she can turn it into an opportunity if she knows how to hustle a little bit.
Service director is one of those catchall phrases—basically it’s the guy who makes sure that everyone plays nice. He’s like the playground cop. He’s on the floor, he kind of acts as a manager. He makes sure that the standards of the restaurant are kept up, hiring the right people and seeing to it that they’re trained properly, ensuring that the level of hospitality and technical service is everything it should be. He sees that the restaurant is set up correctly, that waiters know the menu and the wines, that everything happens in the way that it’s supposed to happen. A lot of service managers are promoted from their gigs as waiters.
Entry-level manager is someone just out of restaurant school. It’s a weird thing, because even though a waiter makes two or three times as much as the manager, the manager is his boss. But if a waiter’s acting career doesn’t pan out or if he doesn’t become a rock star and he figures out he’s got to make a living in the restaurant industry and doesn’t want to be the waiter whore for the rest of his life, he has to step into management, and that’s the great injustice. The managers work harder than the waiters, sometimes for half the pay—but if you’re a manager or a service director, you’re supposed to be a career guy. You’re supposed to work for the house, investing in a career, taking a salary. You’re not a tip employee. It’s a whole different trajectory.
Now we come to the wine director and the sommelier. A wine director would be in a restaurant where there is more than one wine person, so the sommeliers work for the wine director. The wine director is responsible for writing the wine lists, buying the wines, figuring out which wines are going to work by the glass, working with the bartenders on the liquor, and ensuring the wine quality and service in the restaurant. Wine director is more of a management position than the jobs of the sommeliers and wine waiters who work for them on the floor, opening bottles and making recommendations.
Usually people on the wine trajectory have a specific passion for wine. Some are ex-waiters, some are people who just happen to fall into the wine world. It’s a lot of work for low pay, but it is tailor-made for people who love wine. You get to live in the world of wine. There are plenty of perks—you go to a lot of tastings and meet a lot of rich people. Wine is that great social oscillator that can drag you down to the bottom level and maybe give you a quick rise to the top. I’ve seen many people through the years ta
ke the wine ride to the top very quickly.
To be the wine guy—or gal, I shouldn’t have to say it, but obviously there is no job in the joint, including Restaurant Man, that is somehow gender-specific—you need to be a good taster, and you can’t fake it. Do not give me any of this medium-body, fruit-forward bullshit if you expect to work for me. If you talk like that, I don’t even want you eating at one of my places. Seriously—if I invite someone to taste wines with me and ask about his or her perceptions, I can tell if that person is a good taster. If I’m going to hire a wine director or sommelier, I am definitely going to taste with any potential candidates and have them talk to me about the wines. It tells me a lot.
In my places, wine directors are especially important, because wine is so important to our brand, and each of our restaurants has a stylistic direction for its wine service. Lupa focuses on wines mostly between forty and fifty-five dollars a bottle. Not the grand terroirs, not Barolo, Barbaresco, or Brunello—more labels from Mezzogiorno, Lazio, Campania, Abruzzo, or Sardinia, wines that are appropriate for the kind of food served at a trattoria. Babbo is more about full coverage, every wine from every region, with deep vintages of grand cru wines, Barolo, Barbaresco, and at a much higher price point to categorically cover Italy. But within that list, Babbo is also about offering a lot of good deals. You can pick gems out of the list at Babbo. We haven’t always updated the pricing, and the price of wine has gone up astronomically in the last ten years. If you really know what you are doing, you can make a big score.
And of course I have my own wines on the list, and the members of our wine staff are the de facto representatives. Our wines get positioned front and center. We use the restaurants to position and promote them, and the wines are great. They’re totally appropriate for the experience we create in the restaurants, and they’re not very expensive. But I’ve never, for the sake of selling more of my wine, sacrificed the integrity, the intellectuality of a wine program, and you can see that in every restaurant you go to.
Restaurant Man Page 10