Restaurant Man

by Joe Bastianich

  The balance between Mario and me is key to the formula. I was working the front of the house, Mario was in the kitchen. And it was bringing the very best of both worlds together, to really take care of each person thoughtfully and completely and blow them all away. It was a one-two punch. Tag-team champs. And then the critics came and everything else happened, and it grew from there.

  Mario, in terms of his public persona, is more flamboyant. He’s definitely a little more gregarious and likes to run with the crowd a bit more. I’ve been more laid-back, and when I had time, I returned to Europe and eventually started making my own wine, which ate up a lot of my time. When I wasn’t here, I was in Italy working on that, and that’s what I really loved.

  We heard a lot of noise when Babbo first opened about our chutzpah in putting out a menu that didn’t seem to have one single Italian staple on it, no warhorses, no greatest hits—not to mention our taste in loud rock ’n’ roll—but we stuck to what we believed in, and in fact about 70 percent of the menu has been solid since day one: We always have pig’s feet, tripe, and testa, as well as barbecued squab, a pork chop that takes longer to eat than a Dave Matthews concert runs, and fresh branzino cooked with ingredients and flavors that my father had never even heard of, plus the famous two-minute Calamari Sicilian Lifeguard Style, and a mess of completely imaginative and sexy pastas including the pappardelle bolognese, which sounds simple enough but blows everyone’s mind. You think you’ve had bolognese, and then you try Mario’s and you just want to weep at the tragedy your life has been. The Mint Love Letters—ravioli with lamb sausage and mint—have become a signature dish, and you can bet they didn’t even exist before Babbo. Plus, 30 percent of the menu gets changed continually, which is part of the organic nature of a great restaurant.

  When we began, the wine list was relatively humble—about a hundred wines, with the price point kind of low. It’s huge now, though. A multimillion-dollar inventory. But it started off as something quite simple. We had six hundred thousand bucks to do the whole restaurant start to finish and to open, which is a lot of money, but not considering that we opened what would be a three-star Italian restaurant.

  Babbo is a pure partnership, but the wine program is all me. In the beginning I opened every bottle of wine there. When we started becoming successful, I started buying wine like crazy, and Mario was always 100 percent with the program. I remember telling him, “I’m buying wine like this restaurant is going to be open for fifty years. You down with that?” And he always was, and we really invested very heavily. Now we have an incredible cellar of aged wines, beautiful wines. Crazy stuff. Where some people try to pull money out of their restaurants, we always tried to put it back in with more inventory. We built the cellar, we invested in the building. It was always about investment, because Babbo always paid back in spades.

  When we were ready, we had an opening party at Babbo with a lot of media attention. Alice Waters was there, a lot of the food critics came out—the Mimi Sheratons, the deans of the New York Times, the Village food intelligentsia. We had a lot of support right from the beginning.

  Which is not to say that we didn’t have our problems. We had our balls on the line from day one. We had invested all our money in this place and were sort of flying by the seat of our pants. I was fighting my instincts to count nickels and, at least for a moment, was putting art before commerce. And there were some moments spent doing what we call the Curly Shuffle, which is a glib way of saying we were trying to figure out whom to pay first, since we didn’t have enough dough to pay everyone. The Curly Shuffle.

  It’s like this: You’ve just opened your restaurant. You’re probably upside down a couple hundred thousand dollars to your contractor. You owe the last 20 percent to your kitchen supplier. He’s holding paper on all the kitchen equipment, which means that he can come in and repo it any second. You’re up and running. But if you don’t have the cash flow, if you don’t pay the liquor companies, they don’t deliver. (If you don’t pay your liquor bills in a thirty-day cycle, they have to report you to the State Liquor Authority, and then you can’t buy any more liquor wholesale, so you cannot even think about playing games with them. In that case you have to buy wine every day at the corner liquor store to sell to your customers, which is illegal and expensive. At least we didn’t have that problem, but I’ve seen it.)

  You’re taking in money every night, and you have these lists of people who need to get paid. Rule number one is, never bounce a payroll check. Because the minute you bounce one payroll check, the word is out. The rats smell a sinking ship, and they’re scurrying in every direction. And then there’s sales tax. You have to pay it, because you’re personally liable for sales tax—you don’t pay, you go to jail. But that’s the easiest one not to pay because it’s kind of like a self-control, good-guy honor system. Just pray you don’t get audited.

  And the bottom category is your food vendors. Fish guys are always first in line, probably because they run with the thinnest margins, so they’re the most hard-edged about getting paid. Once they smell that the ship is sinking, word gets out. So the fish guy tells the meat guy, who tells the dried-goods guys, who tell… Once word gets out that you’re a bad credit risk, people are going to demand COD. Which means you have to stand at the door with your fucking checkbook. Some people won’t even take checks, only cash. It’s all about juggling. If you’re out ninety or a hundred fifty days with your meat guy for fifty grand, he doesn’t want to sell you meat anymore. You try to find another meat guy, but chances are he’ll know you’re out fifty grand to the other guy. Because everyone is sharing this information on the back end. So with the daily cash flow, you’ve got to cover what it takes to keep the restaurant open. You have to pay your rent. Got to pay utilities, or else they’ll turn off the lights and gas on you. You can always negotiate with the landlord, but you can’t run a restaurant in the dark without fire. So you prioritize what needs to be paid to stay open, because when you’re open, you generate more cash flow every night to pay more bills for the next day. It’s a little bit of a pyramid scheme sometimes.

  The ideal thing is not to start at a two-hundred-thousand-dollar deficit with no money in your bank account. Ideally, you have operating capital and you can actually pay everyone. You want to be cash-flow-positive, or at least cash-flow-sustainable from day one. But you can run at a cash-flow loss. What you’re doing by not paying your vendors is using them as a bank. You’re buying that steak for ten dollars, selling it for thirty. But of that thirty you take in, ten of it has got to go to pay the cooks. Ten of it should go back to the guy who sold you the steak. But it’s not. You’re taking his ten dollars and you’re paying it to the power company, because they’re actually going to turn off your lights. The people who have the least leverage get paid last.

  This is how it went in the early days at Becco, and again in the early days at Babbo. Most restaurants, when they open, this is the action—it’s high finance gangster style. And it’s all counterintuitive, because you open up and you need the money, but you’re thinking, Oh, my God, am I really ready to serve? I really should do twenty covers tonight and nail them so that the customers love it and take off into the world singing our praises. But if I do forty covers, I could double the revenue. But what’s my risk-return on doing more covers than I should be doing and delivering a half-assed experience? And then they’re going to tell their friends this sucked. But I make more money immediately. Ugh. You built this palace, you spent all this money, and you want to build a quality experience. So do you go for the immediate buck, allowing you to write a check to your fish vendor tomorrow morning or hold the line and do less business in order to perfect it and slowly grow the business over time, which is expensive? You probably have enough staff to do the forty covers, but you choose to do twenty, because you’re investing in the experience of the restaurant. But someone has got to pay.

  It crashes when the sheriff comes and padlocks your door. The landlord will go to court and get a warrant a
nd seize the property, which means they’ll put a big yellow SEIZED sticker on the front door. That’s one way. The second way is, you’re treading along one night and the lights go out. They padlock your meter. They come with a wrench, turn the switch on the meter off, put a padlock on it, and you’re done. Out of business. Third is, you bounce payroll checks. You show up to your restaurant one day and no one comes to work. We’ve never gotten to that point, but I’ve seen it lots of times, and when it happens, you are fucked. There is no coming back from the dead. Once you see the SEIZED sticker on the door, or once the third busboy from the restaurant down the street comes looking for a job, you know the jig is up. The classic sign is CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS. “Closed for Renovations” equals out of business.

  No downtown restaurants with punks like us calling the shots ever got three stars.

  No stars actually means “satisfactory”—the idea is that it’s enough that you’re getting reviewed. One star means “good,” which is actually a lot better than good anyplace outside New York. Two stars are “very good,” which would be like a miracle anywhere else in the civilized world. Three stars are “excellent.” Three stars qualifies you as a destination. People can plan a vacation around a reservation at a three-star restaurant. Four stars is fuck you—you have to be so incredibly fucking good to get four stars that it’s practically an abstract concept. Ever read Stephen Hawking’s books? Four stars is like an imaginary number. It’s like a black hole, or an event horizon, or traveling sideways in time—it is impossible for any normal person to understand, although once you are confronted with it, it is a real holy-shit moment. You grab your balls, because you can’t even believe it exists. Four stars is an epiphany.

  Felidia was a three-star restaurant. San Domenico was a three-star restaurant. Those were the two old-school three-star restaurants. So to have a young, downtown, maverick three-star Italian restaurant was a game changer. I don’t think it was something that we ever really came out of the gate to pursue—Babbo was its own organic evolution that started with very moderate ambitions. We kind of responded and fed on the fuel of the city and the energy that came through the door, and that fed our passion and, to a certain extent, our egos. And then the sky was the limit. Reviews started rolling in. This was before the days of the blogs and the Internet, when it was all about the print media, and it was untouchable. We were bulletproof.

  Everyone loved Babbo. It became the new standard, certainly for Italian food—the interpretation of the experience, the service, the hipness, the music, the look. It became the standard for all Italian restaurants that came afterward, and the critics were the ones who put it on the map. Getting three stars from Ruth Reichl in the New York Times was the defining moment in our careers. That made Mario and me. Along with the four-star review that Del Posto got twelve years later, which really made me dizzy, it is the most important thing that ever happened to me professionally.

  One of the few issues Mario and I would disagree about is comps—who eats for free. Restaurant Man hates comps, but grew up in a world where it was considered a necessary evil. We were supposed to carry old-school, free-loading critics, and Mario just wouldn’t. He was adamant and obstinate about that. I was of the old school, the way my parents brought me up—the restaurateur was still kind of a second-class citizen, and the customers were the aristocracy, and the only thing above customers were critics. And critics didn’t pay for food, because they paid you back when they wrote about how wonderful your restaurant was. They were golden.

  Then along comes Mario with a little bit of “Fuck the critics. Like everyone else, they should pay.” That was an eye-opening experience for me. I came around to it, because what it comes down to—and I knew it all along, of course, from the “friends and family” fiascos we suffered through—is that if you give it away, you devalue it in the eye of the person who is supposed to be evaluating it. So by saying to you, Mr. Critic, that you don’t have to pay for this great experience—even though it’s the best one I can create for you in your entire career of food and wine—that somehow makes it worth less, even in the eyes of someone who’s supposed to know better. Now I’m with Mario. Everyone pays.

  When Ruth took the helm of the New York Times restaurant reviews, we figured that maybe we could get a good look—she was that California, slightly left-wing, liberal, open-minded, Italocentric gal who could open up to the concept of Babbo. And she loved it, hook, line, and sinker. She really believed, and she became a great advocate not only of the food and the experience but of what Babbo meant to the landscape of the time. And she always paid. The New York Times critics always pay, and tip, like real journalists, not some fucking schnorrers.

  And it was a good time for us, because as restaurants were changing, reviewers were changing with them. You were losing the old-school dinosaur reviewers. But this of course invites the question, do restaurants mold reviewers or do reviewers mold the restaurants?

  With wine the latter is definitely the case, when—and it’s been said many times before—there’s no single person in the world who has such a powerful and dominant effect over an entire industry as Robert Parker does in the wine industry. There’s no other example of anything like that—the world makes wine for Robert Parker.

  So do we open up restaurants for Sam Sifton, who was the New York Times food critic? Probably not. But when we see the type of person that Sam is, and certainly in the case of Del Posto—and with that restaurant we always had the ambition of scoring a four-star review—we definitely realized that he was the guy to give us that review, and we worked it. We laid it out there. Baited him, put the word out in the market to his friends. We played the game. That’s how it gets done. You can’t cheat. Either you’ve got it or you don’t. But if you want a four-star review, you’ve got to go out and tell those people that you’re a four-star restaurant. They may agree or disagree, but unless you have the ability to communicate your intentions to the marketplace and to the critics, you won’t even be considered.

  At Babbo we knew when Ruth was coming. We knew what she looked like—we had gotten the heads-up. She was trying to go incognito, but we knew some of her guests. Restaurant Man also trades in intelligence. So we planted a few of our friends next to her. That’s a big thing, we always do that—you put a plant next to important critics, and they order everything on the menu and ooh and aah, and you do all your fancy table stuff for them while the critic looks on, because critics eat not only their own dinner but everyone’s dinner around them. When Ruth was there, we controlled that room down to the bread crumb, from what song played when she walked into the room to Led Zeppelin with the linguini and Jimi Hendrix with the saffron panna cotta. It was curated to the micrometer, every detail of the experience.

  Someone once accused us of being cynical when we micromanage like that, but you know what? That’s our job, to dazzle people and to get reviewers on board. But you can’t fake it—either it’s there or it’s not. You can enhance things. And sometimes, if you overdo it, you can fuck yourselves up. We’ve been busted acknowledging critics’ presence. And at a certain point, when everyone knows you know who they are and they know who you are, it’s just about respecting people’s privacy and their anonymity, which can suddenly become the elephant in the room. You want to have fun and show off, but you have to pretend that it’s just another day in Dodge.

  If we did try to game the system, though, we always did it with a great amount of prudence—a restaurant can’t change its stripes for one table or one night. What you are and the quality of the experience will ultimately come through. The truth is that the margin between our riding the controls and just letting the machine do its thing isn’t much. Every table is different, but we are consistently good.

  The Babbo building, 110 Waverly Place, is magical. Does that sound too hippie? I can handle it. Because, no shit, there’s definitely a vibe, an energy there. People have been eating and drinking and having fun in this building for over a century—before it was the Coach House, i
t was a speakeasy.

  I never foresaw the tremendous success we would have; it was just one of those amazing things. With Babbo it was always great—everything we did just seemed to take off. There were never really any negative reviews, any negative comments. I always tell everyone, “You only get one Babbo in your life.” Yeah, if you’re lucky. Babbo always seemed to be greater than us. There seemed to be a positive energy that affected the customers, the neighbors—everyone.

  We don’t have any real competitors. I think we rolled into a lucky position where we stand alone, and we don’t feel threatened. In New York we’re fortunate, because there are enough customers who enjoy good restaurants, so we don’t have to recruit customers as much as we trade them. People who go to Nobu probably come to Babbo as well. And every great Italian restaurant in New York is just one more reason for people to get out and eat Italian every night. If they eat out more, chances are we’re getting a good piece of that business.