Restaurant Man

by Joe Bastianich

  There are a lot of people trying to be Babbo, but there is only one. We’ve been ripped off consistently—there are entire restaurant groups that have been born out of former Babbo sous-chefs, wine directors, or whatever. Jay McInerney said in the Wall Street Journal that we kind of gave birth to a whole category of restaurants. Ultimately, that’s the best compliment. That’s the proliferation of our species.

  Babbo let me move away from Becco. Becco was mainstream—we were servicing tourists and Europeans and lots of people who loved the food but didn’t know who was behind it or, really, didn’t care. Well, sure it mattered to some people, and that was great, but at Babbo it was all about who we were. That was very powerful and very addictive, the fact that we were expected to be there and that people actually cared we were there, curating their experience. And the fact that we were there brought people who were important in the world. It was about getting to smoke Marlboro Reds with Keith Richards at the bar or hanging out with Jimmy Page and Chris Robinson, you name it. It was one great night after another. Babbo was definitely where people came for a late night—musicians, celebrities, authors, people we really admired—and somehow, from an artistic perspective, from their perspective, we were their equal. That was very potent and enthralling. This was the vanguard—when restaurant people became more empowered and the restaurateur became as important as the customer. We were no longer the servants. We were the artists.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Heroes and Villains

  Elaine Kaufman died today. She was the essence of the front-of-the-house person. The classic restaurant owner. But what was she, really? Was she a restaurateur? Was she just a host? Was she Restaurant Woman? What was Elaine Kaufman?

  People loved her, and it got me to thinking. Where could you go to a restaurant and find a front-of-the-house guy who still owns the place? The classic guys were Sirio Maccioni at Le Cirque and Ken Aretsky at Patroon, Laurence Kretchmer and Bobby Flay, who of course is also a superstar chef. And Drew, of course.

  But all these people, me included, are culinary obsessives, and Elaine wasn’t. She was really kind of a dinosaur, in the sense that she ran a restaurant that not only wasn’t chef-driven, it was hardly food-driven. You wouldn’t go there to eat; the food was notoriously bad. It was like Jurassic Park over there—it was all about a time when dinosaurs roamed New York.

  She’s famous for telling people who asked, “Where’s the bathroom?” to “Make a left at Woody Allen,” but it wasn’t really a celebrity hangout, at least not as we remember it today. It was where New York’s literary elite met middle-of-the-road avant-garde filmmakers—George Plimpton and Mike Nichols having dinner in the same room at different tables, that was the classic scene at Elaine’s. But that era is dead. No young person ever went there in the last twenty years.

  She was a genius at running the front of the house, though. She was the star of the show, and she had to have a big enough personality so that you would actually go to a restaurant where the food didn’t matter. All these people liked to eat well, and a lot of them started coming down to Babbo. So why would they still go there if the food was bad? There must have been some kind of powerful charisma for her to be able to draw that kind of room, to have those people in her place. She was an odd breed of Restaurant Superstar who had nothing to do with the kitchen, and I was kind of in awe of that.

  You admire a lot of people for different things. Some people you admire for improving the quality of the business, the Danny Meyers of the world. He basically crafted and inserted enlightened hospitality into our industry.

  In the seventies and eighties, in a plastic world of ass-licking “Oui, madame”s and patronizing double air kissers, he had the idea that instead of placating customers and treating them like morons, they should actually be treated like intellectual, thinking, sophisticated consumers who were on an equal playing field with the restaurateur. For a long time in New York fine dining, even though the customers had the money, they were considered to be stupid and not to know what the fuck they were talking about.

  Danny has also been a great leader of evolved restaurateuring. His Union Square Café was an important restaurant for New York, really the first of its kind—market-driven, local, and sustainable in its concept. He pioneered a very progressive American wine program and was extremely customer-friendly. There is little doubt why it was the most popular restaurant in New York for years running.

  He is also directly responsible for the death of the six-day workweek in restaurants. It’s a disaster that he’ll take to his grave.

  Until Danny came along, everyone in the restaurant business worked six days a week. It had always been a six-day week. One day off, and that was it, and everyone was happy. He single-handedly spread this cancer of a five-day workweek through our industry

  I think he did it because he truly believes in the quality of life of restaurant workers and employees—as do I. We always try to make sure that our employees are happy, for many reasons, but not least of all because it is in our own self-interest. But ensuring their happiness doesn’t always mean giving them a birthday card and telling them how great they are and what a great team we are. It means seeing to it that they make enough money, that they’re treated respectfully, and that what they bring to the workplace is acknowledged. A professional environment where quid pro quo rules is the kind of environment restaurant workers are looking for. I think it’s very much give-and-take. You work this many hours, this is how much money you make. I treat you like the talented server you are, you bring that talent and intellect into dealing with my customers. I don’t make you work when I don’t need you. I don’t spread the pool too thin by putting too many servers on. I respect your economic value. It’s a very, very give-and-take relationship.

  But just because you work six days instead of five, that doesn’t mean you don’t have a great quality of life. Classically, you worked five doubles, Saturday dinner, and got Sunday off. Think about that. Come to work, lunch, you get a break, between lunch and dinner you go out to OTB, read the sports page, have a quick game of dice in the locker room, eat a family meal, pull three chairs together, take a half-hour nap, back to work. Work the night shift. Everyone worked a double and a Saturday night—waiters, cooks, everyone. Normal weekends were not the legacy of our business. Our business was a six-day-a-week business. That’s what people worked. Danny, along with various pieces of legislation, basically sealed the coffin on that.

  There are a few other people I think are worth mentioning as restaurateurs in the classic sense, real Restaurant Men, but much different from Danny or Drew or myself. Steve Hanson is King of the One-Star Restaurants. Basically, he’s about knocking off ideas—Ruby Foo’s, Dos Caminos, Prime House, Atlantic Grill. They’re big, shiny, solid restaurants, created and inspired solely to make money. He’s a total numbers guy—a classic cheap fuck like the best of us. He’s been a great guy in our business for creating a model of how restaurants can operate in the city and make some real dough, but I think the net result is that the restaurants are a little bit void and soulless.

  Andrew Silverman was my predecessor as one of the original Restaurant Men in New York City, a real old-school operator, down at the fish market every day buying junk fish. He’s just a hard-driving motherfucker of a restaurateur. His restaurants are City Crab and City Lobster, and he used to have Steak Frites. Everyone in the business knows him, because he’s such a take-no-prisoners, fuck-you kind of guy. He’s another one-star wonder—his restaurants are like food factories without culinary aspirations. A little bit designy, a little bit trendy, priced right for that Gen X crowd and for tourists, for young professionals, people who don’t have a huge budget but want to get a fancy dinner and feel like they’re having a big night out.

  Truthfully, the one-star restaurant is a good concept, but it’s just not what I do. Silverman and Hanson are great Restaurant Men in that they’re about making money and controlling costs and delivering margin, without fail. There’s nothing wro
ng with their places. I just can’t imagine the experience ever being personal.

  And then you have a withering douchebag like Pino Luongo.

  For five minutes about a thousand years ago, he was able to convince New York that he was some kind of Tuscan cook, but frankly, I think he was always full of shit.

  He came up in the 1990s with Coco Pazzo in Manhattan, and then later he opened up in the Hamptons. He was partners with probably the biggest asshole chef I’ve ever met in my whole life, a little, short-dicked Napoleonic fuck. He might be dead by now—I have no idea.

  I remember going up to Pino’s office in the 1990s, hoping to get some guidance because I wanted to open my second and third restaurants, and he just looked down the end of a big cigar and spit at me, “Kid, you don’t know what you’re doing.” He dismissed me as some kind of meaningless wannabe hack.

  Pino’s downfall was the typical mega-asshole mistake of believing that because some important people in New York ate at his restaurant, he was as smart and powerful as they were. He committed the ultimate sin of buying into his own press, which everyone in the business knows—and Pino proved it—is a one-way ticket to irrelevance. Now he’s just a sad and bitter clown. If he weren’t such a prick, it might be tragic.

  The best thing I can say about him is that he’s a good lesson in exactly what not to do in this business. Over the years so many people ride their egos right to the top and then ride them right to the bottom again. Once your ego is making decisions, it’s over. You have to step gingerly on the heads you use to climb to the top, because you’re going to step on the same heads when you stumble down.

  There are other storied Restaurant Men who are also facing oblivion. Tony May no longer has San Domenico, which was for many years one of the premier Italian restaurants in the country. Now he has a trying-to-be-trendy room called SD26 with his lovely and talented daughter, Marisa. Even if the food is good, it’s no place for a seventy-four-year-old man smoking a cigar, seating people. Tony—you’re a great Restaurant Man, but enough is enough. Take your wife to Positano. Get in some golf. Do some fucking thing. Please.

  These are the people who have had a hard time making the leap across generations, guys like Sirio at Le Cirque. In 1987 he was on top of the world. They called him the “Ringmaster.” I really don’t dislike the guy—although he always treated me like a piece of shit, I still have a world of respect for him. But how are you ever going to transform something like Le Cirque? How can you even think about bringing that business into the future? When I think of who ate there, it’s Barbara Walters, Walter Cronkite, Nixon, and Kissinger—his customers are all dead or dying. Le Cirque never appealed to a younger audience, it never evolved to accommodate the next generation of restaurant-goers. It was always dominated by Sirio, and he never let his kids perform in the center ring.

  My experience was different, because my mother was willing to let go. When I first opened Becco, she was there to catch me when I fell, but certainly when I soared a little bit, she didn’t try to clip my wings. I’ll always respect her for that ability to really prop someone up. She wasn’t in some cheap competition with the world to prove how powerful she is. I’m certainly looking down the pike at my own reality, and I hope that includes passing these restaurants on to my kids, who will, I also hope, have their own vision as well. I think a lot of the old guard are afraid of losing their power, that after being the Ringmaster there is only nothingness. But that is a sad truth that manifests itself over and over again in our business. For Restaurant Man there is sometimes no exit strategy.

  Drew always told me, “When you have the demand of New York, you become the gatekeeper. Then you decide how you decorate the room.” There are very few restaurants that achieve that stature, but when yours does, that’s a very powerful thing. You’re deciding when the captains of finance sit next to the titans of media and who are dashed and dotted by the creative elite. That’s a pretty influential position to be in. We’re in the New York business—what we do is totally ingrained in the socioeconomic fabric that is New York. Elaine understood that.

  We achieved that at Babbo, and perhaps later at Del Posto, but Babbo really is the place, because it’s got only eighty seats and it’s not superexpensive—it’s sort of elitist and populist at the same time. Elitist because it’s tough to get in without a reservation months in advance unless you know somebody and populist because it’s not prohibitively pricey. Fifteen years after we opened, Babbo—along with Nobu—is the toughest table in town.

  When it comes to dressing the room, we are very hands-on. We block out the prime-time tables. Mario and I decide who gets what at what time, and that’s how the mix is built. There’s no master plan—the rules are that we reward people who are good to the restaurant. People who appreciate the experience add to the room and add to the environment. There are a lot of famous, cool people who are total assholes and are not restaurant-centric. They don’t get in.

  Some people might find that haughty or snobby or whatever, but it really isn’t. It’s about adding to your own good fortune. Successful people want to be surrounded by other successful people in other industries. It adds to their experience and stature in society. So when we decorate a room that way, we’re increasing their pleasure and therefore increasing our success. We are definitely facilitators—we weave a certain part of the fabric that is finance, art, creativity, power—everything that New York is.

  But at Babbo, once you are seated, in no way are we preferential to celebrities or VIPs. Everyone gets the same experience in terms of hospitality and food. We’re egalitarian, and that’s a big part of it, because we know that no matter who you are, when you come to Babbo you want to have an eclectic mix of cool people around you. We’re creating a better experience for every customer by creating the right vibe. We want people who appreciate the art of the restaurant, the food and experience, who give something back to you—and I don’t mean that they just spend a lot and tip large and that’s it. We give them something personal, and they give something personal back. Everything is about a give-and-take, even if it’s based on a business transaction. So what I’m doing is asking the paying customers to open themselves up to the experience and become a part of the environment. To interact with the maître d’. To engage the waiter, to give feedback, to talk about the food and wine. To talk about their expectations of the menu. It’s true—I am asking you to do something. If you’re going to enjoy the experience fully, you have to be willing to contribute, to become involved in the experience on an intimate level. That’s what creates the magic. If not, you’re a voyeur and you can go somewhere else. You see a picture on the menu, you point at it, they bring it to you, you eat, and then you leave.

  The old school are the people who think that restaurants are there to serve them, so everyone who works in the restaurant is beneath them. Those people are assholes, and we keep them the fuck away.

  Generally, the bigger your ego, the worse your chances of being a good customer. Famous people who are ultimately insecure feel threatened by what we’re asking, and they are never going to get the best of what we do. Fashionistas suck. A lot of people I’ve met in the fashion business don’t really give a shit about what we do. Besides, they never eat anyway. With the fashion people, it’s never about what we do; it’s all about them and who they’re with, and our restaurants are not that kind of restaurant. If you’re not going to engage with the food, the experience, the hospitality, and the wine, if you’re just going to sit there being “fabulous,” then maybe you’re better off someplace else.

  When you go to a restaurant that’s powerful, compelling, and moving but you’re an ego-tripping rock star and you feel that your table is going to compete with the restaurant—like, who’s going to be more important, me or the restaurant?—that’s when it goes bad. You should have the generosity and freedom of spirit to lend your celebrity and yourself to the experience, because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The people who are so insecure about t
heir own celebrity or importance and try to compete with the power of the restaurant or the room, those are the losers.

  Some people come in thinking that they’re going to crack some code; they think we’re trying to trip them up. They feel as if the restaurant is trying to get something over on them—trying to get them to spend more on a special or on some bottle of wine the boss is trying to offload—as if we were in an adverse relationship of some kind. If you feel that way, then you are going to the wrong restaurant. We didn’t make our reputation by ripping people off; we made it by delivering something truly exceptional. You already know coming through the door what it’s going to cost, so why would you fight that? The good customers are trusting. They embrace the concept, embrace the staff, interact in a personal way, allow the people in charge to really create the best experience for them. If you’re not letting them do that, then you’re just a monkey wrench in the works.

  The essence of hospitality, at Babbo or Del Posto, would be like the experience you’d have if you were eating at my house. I’m going to give you tableside service. I work hard at being the consummate host, and in a very real way we always try to re-create that experience. What we do is marry what the customer wants with what the restaurant can give. When those two things match up, there’s magic. When they don’t…well, that’s a problem.

  The rule at Babbo is, we’ll let you take anything off a dish but we won’t let you add things in, because it’s not your job to write the menu. It’s ours. At Del Posto we have much more liberty to facilitate those kinds of requests, because it’s more expensive and is a different kind of experience—but again, the good customers, they let go. A guy like Bono is one of the biggest stars on the planet, and he doesn’t feel challenged by the room or the restaurant. I have heard him gush to a waiter, “I love that wine you chose for me. Thank you.” He comes up to the chef to say thank you for creating the food and how much he loved it. He is in awe of the restaurant. He’s not about being served, he’s about being interactive, and he has no problem appreciating someone else’s expertise or some effort that’s so small compared to whatever his mega-importance in the world may or may not be. I’ve heard Bill Clinton hold court at his table with waiters and line cooks to discuss the lamb chops. Those moments of communication are brilliant.