Restaurant Man

by Joe Bastianich

  If you ask the sommelier for a recommendation, he might start with one of my wines, but it depends on the individual’s personality. It varies. Sommeliers are as guilty of ego and bravado as anyone else—sometimes the wines they recommend have to be wines they have found and they take ownership of. They may perceive my wines as being the wines of the Restaurant Man, their corporate master, so they rebel. There are all sorts of different scenarios. But most intelligent wine people will understand that promoting the wines is part of the job, and why not? If you thought my wines sucked, you shouldn’t have taken the job as a wine director. It’s kind of cut-and-dried that way. The sommelier carries the flag, so it’s kind of a representation of me personally and my reputation in the market. The wine world is a small world. It’s old school—you have to teach these young people who just got into the game to respect their elders, not act like punks, shut the fuck up if they don’t know what they’re talking about, behave intelligently, act on behalf of the restaurant and the economics of the restaurant, check their ego at the door, and not be a schmuck.

  Selling wine is all about sizing people up, and it takes a certain amount of chutzpah. The tableside bottle sell is a very funny thing—you take a look at the guy’s blazer, what kind of shoes he’s wearing, what kind of broad he’s with. Is he trying to be a hero? Is he a cheap fuck? Who does he want to impress? Maybe he wants it to seem like he’s spending a lot but he’s actually cheap, or maybe he actually wants to spend a lot of money but doesn’t give a shit what he’s drinking. Does he need to impress the table? Is he a boss, is he a date, is he fucking around on his wife? There’s all sorts of variables you have to size up, because these people have come here to part with their money and your job is to take it and turn it into a great experience for them.

  So now you’re the customer. You’re fortyish with a pretty girl your age, sharing the first two plates and having separate entrées—that’s pretty good. I’m guessing based on the way you dressed—you bothered to put on a jacket, but obviously you don’t do that every night; you’re trying to impress your date—I’m going to get you for a couple glasses of sparkling wine or a cocktail in the beginning and maybe two white quartinos. Split them between you with the app. Maybe a heavier white wine going into your first plate of pasta, and then I have you marked for something solid but not too insanely expensive, maybe a Barbera in the eighty-, eighty-five-dollar range, but if I’m feeling it, I’ll upsell you to a Barbaresco for a hundred twenty-five. But I will never rip you off—that would be suicide. You need to leave singing, “Holy shit, I never knew that a two-hundred-fifty-dollar bottle of Barolo could bring me that much sheer fucking joy!” And then you’ll come back and do it again.

  The general manager is kind of like the step into darkness when you reach the top of the league. As GM, you’re responsible for everything, including the maître d’s and the sommeliers—all these people who have their own agendas. But you probably make less than the maître d’ and have a lot more work and a lot more headaches.

  It’s a career job. You go to restaurant school and the school of hard knocks, but you do the job because you know it’s going to bring you other stuff in the future—career, security. It’s for people who are tipping off the end of the industry and trying to make it to someplace else. The GM winds up opening his own place or being a manager for big companies opening their own restaurants.

  The paradigm of pay versus work, headache, and responsibility kind of goes off the charts with general managers, because often they don’t balance. Being general manager is like being the de facto owner. It’s like wearing the crown of Restaurant Man without being Restaurant Man. You’re trying to run the business, but you’re running the ranch without riding the big horse. You’re in that weird position where you have the responsibility—and the liability for all the performance—but you don’t own it. It’s a tricky job, and usually thankless. If you’re going to be a general manager, you try to take a step up into the next world or the next reality, but it’s tough.

  In a funny way, the maître d’ is the most important and the least important position in the restaurant. Maître d’s are at the financial spigot of the restaurant, meaning they control who gets in and who doesn’t, but aside from that they don’t do anything. And yet they get paid as much as the highest-paid people in the place.

  Maître d’s make the big salaries, because unless you yourself as the owner are going to be at the door, your maître d’ is the face of the restaurant, and choosing one is a big decision. But he is definitely not Restaurant Man. In fact, there is always a lot of tension between Restaurant Man and the maître d’, because the maître d’ has his own agenda. Usually he’s kind of a semifabulous person who thinks he’s hot shit and has his own thing going on, and eventually his psychosis will expand until he believes that people come to the restaurant to see him. But that’s not true. The people come to the restaurant to see Restaurant Man.

  The skills of a maître d’ are the same skills a hooker has—to please the clients. Make them come. Make them feel like they’re the only one. Extract as much money as you can.

  Maître d’s are all on the take. They get paid a salary, but then there’s the palm variable. A fifty-dollar bill might get you noticed. Depending on the restaurant, they might even take a twenty. For an Upper East Side rip-off joint or a busy midtown steakhouse a hundie should get you in the game, but it’s just as likely that if they don’t know you, they’re going to think you’re a douchebag. It’s not about the cash flash, it’s all about the implicit value of your relationship. People send thank-you notes to the maître d’—not even thank-you notes but cash-value surrender trade. Before and after. It’s an ongoing relationship.

  John at Babbo has been there pretty much since day one. He’s the guy in New York that everyone loves to hate, but if we didn’t love him, he wouldn’t have been there all these years. He could have this gig for fucking ever—in the world of New York restaurants, twenty-year employees are a rarity. He’s a classic New York story. Love him, hate him, buy your way into his heart, or tickle his Prince Henry—however you can figure out a way to get into his good graces, do it—because unless I’m there or Mario is there and we’re feeling generous, at the end of the day he’s the one who decides whether you sit or not.

  I micromanage him. I stay on him and keep him pure. He’s selling real estate, and I know he’s on the take, it’s part of the job description—if he weren’t, something would be wrong. Say my sister-in-law wants to come in with a four-top at eight, and it’s full, and he thinks he’s going to sell that table for a hundred bucks. You know what? Fuck you, not if it’s full. When there are no more tables, there are no more tables, for anyone in the world. That’s my struggle with the maître d’.

  The other side of it is that there is always a table for Bill Clinton. Some people might wait a little bit, but it’ll all be good. There’s a lot of fungibility in our world. Once in a while, you bump somebody or walk them to the next restaurant. Or you make them wait—the first thing you do is placate them with a glass of cheap bubbles. An extreme example is when you end up buying them dinner, and you know how Restaurant Man feels about that.

  The maître d’ and the coat-check girl are the closest to each other in terms of being in control of their own gigs—they don’t work for you, they have inventory that they sell. The agenda is, you get a base salary to keep the restaurant full and run the book, but they feel it’s their right to sell and trade. So they make money on your back, all the time. The skill set is definitely knowing who matters in New York, how to prioritize the people who come to the door, and how to kiss the boss’s ass properly. He’s got the hot seat between the customer and the boss; this is his own little world, that seesaw right there, which is his balancing act, the place where he makes out extra big. And that’s the maître d’—they’re the biggest prostitutes in the business. About half the time, our interests are aligned, when the customer is truly fabulous, one of those people you want in that r
oom, but more often than not you have to allow the maître d’ a bit of latitude. He’s the guy you’re paying to do the job you would do if you were lucky enough to be in your own restaurant all the time. You want to hate him, but you couldn’t do it without him.

  I think it speaks well of Mario and me that we have a very low turnover in a business famous for going through more bodies than Charles Bronson and George Romero combined. We try to be good employers, we’ve always offered health insurance, we always try to be fair. We have our moments—we’re passionate Italian men—but I think if you look around, you’re going to find very few people in this industry who’ve had the kind of growth that we have. We’ve made partners out of employees. We’ve very rarely had those situations backfire—although today we almost had a “Waverly.”

  A Waverly is when we whack someone. If Mario or I ask you to have a cup of coffee at the Waverly Restaurant, a diner near Babbo, don’t go, because you won’t come back. Today it was a guy who had been with one of our restaurants for about ten years and was now in a management position, hiring people. He would find ten great people—sommeliers, managers—interview them, and they would accept the job, and then they wouldn’t come to work. Or they would come to work for one day and never come back. And we were like, what the fuck’s the problem? I think what was lacking was charisma; he just couldn’t convey it to the people he wanted to hire. A job is not always only about the salary position. You have to be inspired by the aura and energy of the person you’ll be working for, and if that person doesn’t impart those qualities right at the beginning, then people might just find another job or go in another direction. This is a very good guy, intelligent and smart, customer-focused—just not inspiring. Not evolutionary. I don’t think we’re going to fire him, maybe just move him along to a different job. But we had an interview with someone who worked under him, and this person extolled so many of his virtues that now we are rethinking it. We value good people and all we really want is for it to work.

  But if I had to, if it came to that, I would fire him and I wouldn’t lose any sleep. It doesn’t make me happy. I used to get very upset to have to fire people, but I learned a long time ago—and this is something my mother told me—that when you’re firing someone, you have to look at it not as if you’re eliminating someone’s job, you’re securing and enforcing the position of everyone else in that restaurant. Your average restaurant has 80 employees, and 3 people live off the salary of each employee—that’s 240 people who exist because of the economic reality generated at one restaurant. And once an employee gets in the way of maintaining the vibrancy of that reality, then that single person is jeopardizing every one of those people’s worlds. Think about it that way, then it’s easy. Sit down at the table and say, “Your performance is jeopardizing the well-being of the restaurant and everyone who makes a living off it. You have to find something else to do.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Babbo: Primi

  I had been hearing about this guy, Mario Batali. Ours was kind of a small world, and I knew that he’d been living in Italy around the same time I was, in a little town south of Bologna, and then gone on to be something of a hotshot chef on the West Coast before going back to Italy, kind of like I had, to get himself sorted.

  He opened Po in 1993, which is what put him front and center. He borrowed twenty-five grand from a few friends, including his wife, who was still his girlfriend then, and he and this guy named Steve Crane opened up on Cornelia Street. He was the chef, and Steve was the front-of-the-house guy. It had thirty-four seats, and it was always busy—he was cranking his take on Italian food and earning a very loyal following.

  Mario was a pioneer of cooking with an unapologetically Italian sensibility, even if the food was something out of his own fucked-up brain. He was fierce in not diluting the real spirit of Italy. His strength is being this interpreter of the authentic. Not an imitator but a very inspired, strong interpreter of the experience and making it stand out in the New York restaurant scene.

  Po was a three-man operation, and it was always packed. The waiters there made like six hundred dollars a night. It was quite a machine. I was at Becco—I had the midtown Theater District restaurant that was kind of square, and he had the hipper, downtown West Village restaurant that cool people went to. I was a little bit jealous of that.

  I didn’t go to Po until after I’d met him, which was another shidduch (as my Jewish friends would say) made by my matchmaking Italian yenta of a mother. She was coordinating the James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards dinner, with the theme of Italian cuisine. She called Mario to curate the culinary side and to bring in the new chefs, the young guns, the up-and-comers who were challenging the old guard, and she asked me to work on the wine side and bring in some young wine punks to make the mix. So we met at this awards dinner and became fast friends, fucking around, getting stoned, acting like hooligans. Neither of us was married yet, and we still owned the night. We’d go out to eat all the time—after I finished up at Becco, I’d go down to Cornelia Street, and we’d hang out in front of Po and polish off a couple bottles of white wine outside on a bench, shoot the breeze with the neighbors, give the drug dealers a hard time, and head out for dinner.

  We were always checking out what the new restaurant was. We’d philosophize a lot. We’d go out, critique other restaurants, study the menus like a couple of forensic scientists. Most of those places from the early nineties are probably long gone, but I remember that Jean Claude was big. Odeon. There was a restaurant called Boom. It was very early on in the new restaurant scene, and things weren’t really even that chef-driven yet. We leaned on the classic steak joints—we went to the Old Homestead, Sparks, Frank’s. But more often than not, we’d head to Blue Ribbon at, like, two or three in the morning. We met Bobby Flay there, and Tom Colicchio when he still had hair—there aren’t that many of the gang who were around then that are still doing it. We used to sit around eating until five. An assortment of strippers would roll in after work, and we’d hang out and drink with them, maybe end up in an after-hours club. This was Restaurant Man spreading his wings.

  I felt like part of the club. I had a successful restaurant that paid the bills. I had enough money to do whatever I wanted—travel a little bit, take my girlfriend to Paris. I was living in Fat City, and Deanna was definitely on board. She had to be. There was no choice, even after we got married. That’s who I was. The funny thing is, she’s not a big eater—but she humored me. I was still smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, something she put an end to the very instant our first kid was born, but back in the day we’d drink three bottles of wine. Well, she’d have half a glass and I’d mop up the rest.

  Mario was totally irreverent in his style, kind of a hippie like me, but a lot farther out than I was willing to go. He was from Seattle but had gone to school at Rutgers in New Jersey. He used to deal weed in college, wearing a robe and genie shoes, and he worked at a place called Stuff Yer Face Pizza. He was a skinny version of what he is now. He wasn’t wearing the clogs yet, but always the shorts. That was his signature—cargo shorts and sneakers. By then I had eased into some kind of post-bachelor urban-contemporary bon vivant. Mostly I looked as if I owned a successful restaurant. Mario looked like he was on his way to a Phish concert. We made a good pair.

  One night we were coming from dinner somewhere and were walking down Waverly Place in Greenwich Village, by Washington Square Park, and we saw the old Coach House restaurant all boarded up with a big For Rent sign.

  We were just having fun, not really planning on opening a restaurant, but somehow we got the inspiration to start what we thought would be the perfect restaurant, where we would have no economic ambitions and just kind of fulfill the pure aspiration of creating the ideal environment for eating and drinking and expressing our passion for Italy and all things Italian. You can bet that Restaurant Man has a few in him when he starts thinking like this. And that was the birth of Babbo Ristorante e Enoteca.

  We didn’t ne
ed to make money, we were flush—both of our restaurants, Becco and Po, were doing better than we could have dreamed—and so suddenly there was a purity of spirit and ideas, a freedom, almost an irreverence toward what was standard or expected. Sometimes the greatest commerce comes from a lack of commerce, we declared, contrary to every truism that Restaurant Man has ever preached or lived by. We didn’t exactly have our feet planted too firmly when we got to blue-skying this fantasy—we were just thinking about this great new idea for an Italian restaurant, wine and food in the perfect setting, and the Coach House was calling our names. We were convinced that if we were thinking about money while we were jamming ideas, then we would have been doomed. When you’re trying so hard to get rich, we reasoned, you forget that humanity and imagination are the key ingredients, and then you’re pretty sure to fail. True or not, this was a pure manifestation of ourselves, an ideal expression of who we were. We were putting our life experience into a living, breathing restaurant.

  We called the number on the For Rent sign and met with this guy Hassan, who was like the sultan of Albanian-Muslim restaurant slumlords in New York—he wore tracksuits and had a fucking scimitar hanging on his wall, and this is where we learned another important lesson in the New York restaurant business: Every restaurant opens based on a real-estate deal. Eventually we’d open places just because we could get the location, before we even had a concept. When it comes to you, you don’t say no. Like George Costanza and parking spaces. You see it, you take it, because it’s not apt to happen again. Not only did we get the lease, but we were able to sneak in this option-to-buy-the-building clause, because Hassan thought we were just a couple of mooks, doomed to fail, who were never going to have the money to close the deal, so he put it in there at a fixed price. A few years later, we bought it. He should have taken us more seriously—by putting in that option, he had left a few million dollars on the table.