Restaurant Man

by Joe Bastianich

  When we first walked into the building it was still the old Coach House—creepy cool in that spooky Dickensian kind of way, where nothing has been touched for years, and it looked as if the Ghosts of Christmas Past were having a party. The tables were still set with glasses and silverware when we walked in—there was everything except the food. The cast-iron pans that they’d used to make their famous corn sticks were hanging on the wall ready for another big night. There were brass chandeliers, red banquettes, an old-school cash-register stand with toothpicks and mints, and a clunky six-line telephone. The number was SPring 7-0303. Still is. Classic New York.

  This was like stepping back in time with Leon Lianides, the legendary owner of the Coach House and a charter member of the Restaurant Man Hall of Fame. He was like a mythical figure in New York restaurants—he had opened in the 1940s, and James Beard himself was one of his biggest fans. He had fallen ill and retired, and when the business started coming apart, he got rid of the restaurant. But there was still money in the register, and in the locker room there were all these white jackets hung up ready for the next shift—they employed only black waiters, and they all wore white with black bow ties. It was like that.

  We didn’t have a huge budget, but we decided to gut the joint, put in a new kitchen, and give it our take on a very hallowed space. Once upon a time, this had been the Wanamaker carriage house, before it was a restaurant. When we tore up the floorboards, there was hay and horse shit under there.

  We did what we considered a respectful and modest but elegant restoration, cleaning it up to what we thought it could be without losing what it had been. We built a grand bar, which the Coach House never had. We wanted it to be an eating bar, which was going to be a big part of Babbo. In retrospect Babbo pretty much launched the trend of eating bars in good restaurants—you see that everywhere now.

  As we got into it, the conflict of Restaurant Man—putting art before commerce—became a little bit scary, never mind the concept itself, this crazy idea to reimagine Italian food.

  It’s not that I didn’t believe in Mario, but I was kind of caught in the middle. I was brought up to do traditional Italian food, and my mother was always telling me to be careful, don’t let this guy go too crazy. Stick to what you know. Make sure the dishes are authentic. And Mario was cooking all this shit that he was just kind of coming up with out of nowhere.

  I knew he was a good cook and a real personality, but we’d never worked together. We had very different ways and styles of looking at things. He was coming up with these Beef Cheek Ravioli and the Calamari Sicilian Lifeguard Style. There was no fucking Sicilian lifeguard—he was just like, “Hey, how do you suppose a Sicilian lifeguard would make calamari?” And then he did it. I didn’t quite know what to make of it all. I was panicked, because right in that moment of pressure and being out in the public eye, I was kind of reverting to what I knew, which was really classic, traditional food. Mario was spinning that food and that tradition into something new. He was right, of course, and it launched our complete evolution of ideas. We never accepted anything just because that’s the way it was done. Everything from serving wine in quartinos to our dining-room presentation—French service, crumbing tables with spoons, and Led Zeppelin roaring on the stereo.

  The quartino is one of those things that I took with me from Italy. My grandfather was a famous drinker—they would call him “Quarticci” because he would go down to the osteria and order quartos of wine all day long. But the philosophy here is to combine the circumstance and service of wine by the bottle with the attractive price and consumption of wine by the glass—and it was revolutionary.

  With the glass of wine, the problem is always how much wine do you put in? Is there too much wine? Too little wine? Should I have another glass…? A quartino is a third of the bottle. It’s a fixed amount of wine, and it comes in a separate vessel—a mini-decanter—so you can manipulate how much wine you want in your glass at any time, and it gives you the opportunity to try a couple different things, maybe move from white to red, without a big commitment. It’s the pomp and circumstance of wine-by-the-bottle service in wine-by-the-glass consumption. It’s the best of both worlds. Now you see it everywhere. We do it in all our restaurants except Del Posto.

  At Babbo each dish grew out of a conversation, trying to put something forth that was new and different. It was a combination of culinary adventurism and the dining-room experience with respect for the classic but with an eye toward innovation.

  And it was about eating locally, whether produce or fish or meat. An Italian chef in Venice would never cook with shrimp from the Gulf of Naples. It was taking that sensibility and applying it to New York, the United States, the Hudson Valley region. Using the great techniques and condiments of Italy but with the bounty of local agriculture and the focus on locality. We were the first to do it in a very Italian way. Waste not, want not. Living a sustainable lifestyle seems to be such an of-the-moment idea, but it’s really not—it’s a tradition of people who have had to struggle in life for food or for sustenance. That’s the way people lived. Just talk to my grandmother. She’s been living sustainably since 1921.

  The menu is the document that drives the business, that brings home the spirit of the restaurant. It is the most important document in our lives.

  Caesar salad, salmon, and tiramisù are like the paradigm of menu planning—they’re in the DNA of most people who are going to go into a fine-dining experience. Not very imaginative, but Americans are just hardwired that way, and every time you deviate from that, you are moving them out of their comfort zone. You are asking them to indulge your whim. And in the bigger picture, that’s what every menu is about. It creates a structure for the meal, on your terms. It’s like the operator’s manual for a good time, so even if you are one of the jabronis who just wants to have the same old thing, you can read it and be inspired to taste and experience foods outside your world, which is the only way we succeed.

  The menu is the Rosetta stone of the restaurant. It is Restaurant Man’s Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Magna Fucking Carta. It says so much. It tells you the personality of the people who created it and will give you the first clue that the restaurant you’re about to eat in sucks—if there are misspellings on the menu, how much do you think the people who created it really care? It’s an important document and should be created with respect. If the menu looks bad and has mistakes on it, get the fuck out. The menu should be part of the entertainment, part of the dining experience. It’s kind of like reading the Playbill when you go to the theater. It should be an alluring and engaging document. Does it have burn marks on it from the candle? If you ever get a greasy menu with food stains on it, it’s time to run like hell.

  The menu also clearly states your financial commitment—as a customer, you look at a menu that has twelve- to twenty-five-dollar apps and twenty-two- to thirty-two-dollar entrées, and depending on what you drink, you basically know you’re in for a meal that will run from fifty to seventy-five dollars, and you need to be comfortable with that.

  I think a lot of people overlook the importance of the menu as a marketing tool and a way of communicating to the customer what the ambition of their restaurant is. Not only the typeface and the design, but what is it printed on? Is it cheap-looking? Is it the right kind of paper for that restaurant? Is it in a nice leather binder…or fucking pleather?

  The greatest menu of all time was the Sparks Steak House menu, which we have interpreted and knocked off pretty successfully at Carnevino in Las Vegas. It was basically all the food—entrées, apps, steaks, salads—listed on the front page of a giant piece of cardboard about two feet tall and a foot and a half wide, a four-fold, and then three pages of wine. It was very straightforward, but it led you to believe that you needed to spend money. The Sparks menu was epic. I have one framed—I wish I had a signed one. It spoke of the power of the experience and was completely appropriate for the place. It reflected the personality of the boss, Pat Cetta, in
a real way. He had a thousand wines on there. It was the greatest wine list in New York in its time, with incredible values and vintages. Pat taught me how to use wine to drive the business and that investing in the wine list and being thoughtful about it would bring a huge return—he was a mentor to me. He used to call me “lover” while he groped my date. “Hey, lover, let’s have a bottle of something sweet,” which was code for “let’s slam a split of d’Yquem.”

  We made a miniature version of the Sparks menu when we opened Otto. We wanted to put the wine list in everyone’s hands, because some people don’t look at the wine list. It started at Becco when we invented the fifteen-dollar wine list—a hundred wines, all of them on the menu. Babbo has a separate wine list, which is part of the experience there, but at Otto and Carnevino the wine list is part of the menu document. When you’re dedicating 25 percent of the printable real estate on your menu to food and 75 percent to wine, I think that sends a big statement to your customer.

  At Babbo we started with a plastic insert menu when we first opened, the classic one with the green border and the little metal tabs at the end. We chose a piece of art on the front, and we printed new ones every day. But soon after we opened, we went all the way—Mario’s father-in-law had founded Coach Leather and later sold it, but we still had the contact there, and they did a four-page, leather-bound Coach-branded menu for Babbo. People steal them all the time. If we catch you we’ll put it on your check at full retail—that’s a three-hundred-dollar souvenir, lover.

  We have antipasti, primi, secondi, and then we have pasta tasting and the traditional tasting menu. The wine list is separate, and the dessert menu is separate as well.

  Babbo’s menu is only four pages, but it’s overwhelming—there are twenty different pastas in there, a lot of stuff. There is nothing I hate more than a useless, lazy menu with only three appetizers and four entrées. That’s not even a menu, that’s bullshit. You’re a fucking restaurant, cook something. I think part of being a dynamic and versatile restaurant is offering people options. That’s what it’s all about. Dining options. Otherwise don’t even bother going to the restaurant to have dinner—just show up between service for family meal and take what you get.

  When it comes to writing menus, Mario is like Kurt Vonnegut meets Einstein—he knows how to create the document that does it all. He knows how to write the words to sell the dish. He knows where creative meets informative meets slightly snarky but intelligent. He can put a menu together better than anybody else.

  There hadn’t been a menu quite like Babbo’s before—it is very creative but also very easy to understand, and it opens the doors to infinite possibilities of putting together a three-course meal, from ethereal and conceptual combinations of white anchovies and a caprese salad that I promise you are the freshest things you’ve ever tasted in your time on earth to a powerful one-two punch of pasta and steak, cooked to a level of perfection that you probably didn’t even know was possible. But again, Mario’s genius is that he doesn’t overcomplicate things. He is extremely black and white. And that’s a very back-of-the-house state of mind—either it’s cooked right or it’s not. Good or bad. Smart or stupid. At the back of the house, when you’re producing dishes and running labor, you live in that world, whereas in the front of the house you live in the world of the perception of the consumer, which is the abyss of gray between the black and white of the kitchen. It’s two parallel universes that have to overlap seamlessly to create the perfect restaurant experience.

  Mario is also delusionally optimistic. And I’m the opposite. I’m the Doubting Thomas of the relationship. He’s always thinking about what will go right, and I’m always thinking about what could go wrong. Mario was sometimes more confident and brash, and I was slightly more conservative. That seesaw balance to the partnership continues to make it prosper.

  It might seem that he’s the artist and I’m the businessman, but actually in some ways I’m much more of the creative artist and he’s much more of the nuts-and-bolts guy when it comes down to actually running the business. He’s a creative chef, and very whimsical, but he’s probably more dogmatically tied to the concept of margin and making money than even I am. Sometimes I’m willing to forgo a buck to try an idea.

  What really distinguishes Mario is that as much as he’s about the art and doing it for the love of it and doing it right, he won’t do anything unless it makes money. There are a lot of chefs who are willing to forget about margins to create art, but Mario will not even sell food or craft concepts that elevate his own brand and his own artistry at the cost of the business. He has always been incredibly grounded by this focus on keeping good margins and generating profitability. He said to me when we first started, “I like you because you’re a cheap fuck from way back.” That was his mantra, too, a real Restaurant Man. You can bet he got along great with my old man.

  So, sure, when we started, we said let’s fuck it all and do what we want, we’ll just follow our artistic inspiration. But as soon as we got into it and spent six hundred thousand dollars of our own money building it, that whole footloose-and-fancy-free thing went right out the fucking window. It had to. But fortunately, we understood early on that we were onto something so special, and even though you can bet your pants that we were looking at the margins—you know the math—we were also living in some pretty rarefied air when it came to creating the experience.

  After all that conceptualizing, finding a name for the place was actually one of the most challenging tasks. We were very troubled—we were getting ready to open, and we still didn’t have a name. When we started the place, we’d both just had our first kids, and Babbo is Tuscan slang for “Daddy.” Somehow that’s what came up, and it stuck. We figured it didn’t mean a lot, but it sounded friendly and fun, and if you knew the Italian, better yet.

  One night we were out on the stoop having our customary bottle of stoop wine and discussing the vast merits of our genius. If you live in New York and you don’t have chairs outside, you sit on the stoop. It is the New York mini-amphitheater. Ten people can sit around talking to one another, and then there’ll be someone on the sidewalk addressing the group—performing, really. There is a whole stoop dynamic. It’s the urban conduit for socializing and communication. Where I grew up, it was all stoops—we played stoopball and had stoop barbecues, we had our meetings on stoops. We are a product of stoop culture, for sure. After Babbo opened, we still drank outside—we’d call in to the maître d’ to bring us something white and fast, fast and cold, and we’d sit out on the stoop and drink. People would stop by and have a glass. Sometimes we’d have twenty people out on the stoop.

  Some of the biggest decisions were made in the theater of the stoop. We did interviews, hired people, conceived of new restaurants, all out on the stoop. The one rule was, only positive things on the stoop. If we had to fire someone, we’d bring him over to the diner.

  One night we’re hanging out on the stoop and these two guys came walking down the street, headed toward some frat-boy bar on MacDougal Street. They were in their full Brooklyn guido regalia—pompadours, sweat suits and chains, Adidas high-tops untied. They looked up at the name on the awning, and one guy goes to the other, “Look, it’s Babboo’s!” And the other guy says to us, “Hey, Babboo!” They thought we were opening up some sort of Pakistani or vindaloo joint, some kind of hookah place. Now, that was a real moment of panic.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Babbo: Secondi

  We have a stupid, insane tradition in the restaurant business that’s known as “friends and family”—which means trying out the new place with tons of trial dinners and getting feedback from your so-called friends and family, to see how the people you supposedly know and trust respond. But it might as well be referred to as “enemies and detractors,” because no matter how much you like these people or think you value their sagacity when it comes to your food, the second they start eating for free and offering opinions, you realize how much you’d rather just line them up in th
e street and shoot them in the fucking head.

  They order inappropriately and they behave like animals because they’re not paying. They make asses out of themselves because it is completely counterintuitive to everything that trying out a normal restaurant would be. Then they think they’re going to tell you what’s wrong with your restaurant after they’re drunk and they’ve eaten all your food for free? And then you get the sotto voce—you know, they’ll leave that night and tell you everything was great, and the next day you hear the gossip of what they really thought, because they didn’t have the nerve to tell you to your face, even on the off chance that they were right.

  I’m all about rehearsing on paying customers these days. Because the paying customer is the real customer. That’s who’s invested in the experience. When people don’t pay, they don’t act like customers. There is no fucking point—you might as well have them over for a dinner party at your house. Ask any musician: People on the guest list, and that includes critics (especially critics), never enjoy the show as much as someone who ponies up for a ticket. It’s a fucking rule. After years of so many painful “friends and families,” I want to slit my wrists and fucking bleed to death in the middle of their table. We’ve eliminated it. Now we try to open really quietly so not too many people know right away, a nice soft opening for paying customers.

  In the beginning I think that some people were a little shocked by what we were trying to do at Babbo. We were always inspired by the response to our own restaurants—Becco and Po—but of course they were very different. Mine was in the Theater District and his was in the West Village, and combining those two aesthetics was part of our challenge. So Mario brought his people in, I brought in my crew and some others who worked with my mother and me, people I had learned from and trusted, and we had to reconcile these two styles of how we envisioned the food—The Traditional versus The Reinvented. They honestly weren’t as far apart as it might sound, but they were stylistically diverse, and it made people crazy until they opened up to it. The beauty of Babbo, in the end, is that we were able to unify all our different influences and ideas into creating one product that was the Babbo menu and the Babbo dining experience. It was no longer a mess of ideas. It was one solid thing. Babbo. Babbo was the perfect intersection of uptown and downtown. It was a place where Upper East Side bluehairs would be comfortable to come down and have a dinner at 6:30 P.M. and musicians or artists from the Lower East Side could come in at 10:30. It was like the crossroads of New York society. When you can get different strata of New York life to collide in one environment—and truly, the restaurants in New York are our public spaces, are our living rooms, where we live our lives—that creates the magic.