Because I had the ability to move a lot of wine in our restaurants, I was less concerned with what the market thought of the wines. I just made ones that I liked, according to the styles that I liked, which is a wide range but didn’t always jibe with whatever was trending or popular and can be somewhat heartbreaking if the people don’t catch up with you or come around. But you can’t chase trends in the wine market. You have to have a vision, you have to believe, and ultimately the market has to come around to you or you have to find your consumer. It’s not like running a restaurant, where you can play with the menu, think up new specials, invent shit on the fly because one night you’re stoned in the kitchen and come up with an idea for sea urchin, jalapeños, and black pasta served cold.
Say today we decide that Petite Sirah is the new wine trend, or will be, but we don’t have any Petite Sirah growing. We have to plant it. The first thing we have to do is tear up the old vineyard. We have to wait a year for the earth to settle. We have to plant a new vineyard. Three years to get 10 percent production. So we’re already at five years. In seven years we’re at 50 percent production. In ten years we have moderate production to produce a wine that may need to sit for another year or two until it gets to the market. That means our decision today will reap its first viably economic fruit twelve years from now. You can’t do it. You can’t anticipate where the wine world’s taste is going to be. Who could know that with the global economic meltdown that we would have a complete backlash against oaked wines? That no one would want to drink extracted wines, sweet wines, or all these buttery Chardonnays? Suddenly there was some odd mandate for moderation and austerity, projected onto the palate! They weren’t connected per se—the economy and the shift in taste—it just kind of all happened at the same time, but now you had a lot of crap on your hands that no one wanted, and no one had the dough to buy it even if they did. Suddenly everyone wanted wines that were real, that had a history, that came from a specific terroir, and for me that was great, because that’s what I’d been saying all along, that wine should be connected to a real place, that the best wines could transport you. Unfortunately, it required a total financial collapse for the world to catch up to me, but I’ll take it.
Obviously, the economy is a driving force in how people are personally changing their consumption—that sensibility of excess and just piling shit on top of shit to make something better is gone. And now everyone wants to eat and drink things that are sourced locally, or in a place that’s at least identifiable. Just the idea that what we are drinking actually has a real source is often enough—a place you could go and breathe and eat and be inspired, like a vineyard in Italy, not a fucking wine factory that looks and smells like a petroleum-processing plant in Elizabeth fucking New Jersey.
I like to drink my own wines; they make me happy. Because I made them. Because I own the land they come from. I realize that is somewhat narcissistic bordering on pure solipsism, but so what? The wine I make is a very personal extension of me. And I never get tired of drinking it. I’m always the champion of this bottle and the next bottle—you can pin an entire generation of hangovers on me. But it comes from a genuine desire to share. You can’t blame me for that.
I’m so drawn to wine because it’s about identity. It’s about who we are, who I am. It’s about where I come from. Wine is one of the only things in the world that transcends our own humanity. I’m propagating a war-torn family legacy. With my wine I’m bringing my kids back to postwar Europe from which their ancestors had to flee and become refugees because Europe was being destroyed. Drinking my wine is like bringing them back to 1921, to the land where they come from. Maybe when they are forty or fifty years old, the wineries will all have been paid for and they’ll look back while sitting on their porch in Tuscany, having a glass of my juice, watching their children running around the vineyard, and they’ll say, “Look at my dad. What a great, smart guy he was. He left me this winery and paid for it for me. Now I can do whatever the fuck I want with it.” That may be the point where I’ll either roll over in my grave or come rising up like Joe the Zombie and join them for a bottle.
Wine is a bigger topic than we are—one life in wine is not enough to truly live the life of wine. In a world of ultimate immediacy, where we control and dictate and captain our ships and direct every movement, wine is only something we participate in, because ultimately the process of wine is the natural cycle of life and Mother Nature and nature in general. You can’t control that; you can only take part in it for a finite amount of time. By the time you get to make wine, if you’re a serious winemaker or a wine entrepreneur, you’re already an adult. You really don’t get to do it before you’re twenty-five or thirty. Say you have a long career and you’re able to keep making wine until you’re seventy. That’s forty vintages. Let’s say ten of them are fucked up and unharvestable or for some reason cannot be used to make wine, which is very normal. That leaves thirty. So in a lifetime of wine, you have thirty opportunities to express yourself and your passion. Think about that. Thirty chances in a lifetime. And then you go away. You return to the earth, and maybe, if you’re lucky, your kids will carry on your legacy.
From a cultural perspective as someone who has this history in Italy, and from a personal perspective, being a father, it’s the only thing I can leave my kids that will speak of me and my story. It’s the only thing that will transcend my humanity and leave my legacy to them. That’s what’s really appealing to me about wine. It’s kind of at the core of who we are as a people, because it allows us to live in multiple generations and centuries. It allows us to participate in something that is bigger than our eighty or ninety years on this earth.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Romulus, Remus, and Me
Mario and I were flying high. We always were; it was our nature. More accurately, I think we had a knack for keeping our feet on the ground while our heads were in orbit, which is why Babbo worked. We found the right formula of Hard-Ass Restaurant Man versus Starry-Eyed Artist to achieve what had been initially some pretty far-out concepts. Mostly, though, ridiculously hard work paid for us to have ridiculously good times.
After Babbo was up and running, we had a little more time to enjoy the rewards of our success, so naturally we pointed the ship back to the motherland. We’d tell our wives that we needed to go to Italy, that it was very important for the sake of our future in the food and wine world—which wasn’t so far from the truth, actually—and then we’d go on these boondoggle R&D trips, eating and drinking everything in sight.
We took on Rome as though we wanted to live like fucking gladiators. Full-contact eating and drinking. One of my favorite dinners was at Checchino, a restaurant built into a grotto in the walls of Testaccio, which once upon a time was like the Hunts Point of Rome, where all the butchers were. We had rigatoni con la pajata, one of the legendary dishes of Rome—we went to Rome pretty much just to find it—intestines of suckling veal, cooked while they still have their mothers’ milk in them. They’re braised in tomato sauce with rigatoni, and the milk from the intestines curdles into a ricotta.
I get that there are people who are kind of skeeved by the idea of braised baby-cow intestines with milk curdling inside them. This is nothing new. This is the food of the gods, and my message to people who are grossed out is simple: Don’t go to Rome, and don’t eat it. I really am not into any dare eating or stunt eating—I think Anthony Bourdain is out of his mind with the insects and the still-beating heart of the cobra and all that, but if something is sensible, within the culture, I’ll eat it. Sometimes I get a little freaked out by it, but I’m no cheeky-smeeky eater. The one thing that really bugs me, though, about Mario is that he likes to suck on chicken knuckles, the fucking white, gelatinous part of chickens at the end of the bones. He likes to chomp on them as if they were a Twix bar. That is so fucking gross to me. He sucks on chicken bones like they’re candy and loves to eat chicken feet. Boiled chicken feet. That’s where I draw the line. But I have an issue with poultry. I
t goes back to being a kid and being practically waterboarded with bloody chicken juice in the back of my father’s truck.
Anyway, at Checchino I think we started off with some cow’s feet—all the parts of the hoof were boiled out and put into a gelatin mold and served with celery and wine vinegar—and then the rigatoni con la pajata. And then the abbacchio alla romana, which is a baby lamb smeared with smelly anchovies, roasted, deglazed with red wine vinegar, and served with fried artichokes. I think that night we drank an entire case of wine, which happened more often than you could imagine. The only problem was that the next day we had an early cooking class.
It was me, Mario, Mark Ladner, and Zach Allen, a great chef who also happened to be a narcoleptic. We were going to hire him to work at our new place, which would become Lupa. I remember interviewing him in New York before the trip. We were all sitting at a table, and Mark says to Mario, “This is Zach Allen. He worked for the Caballero. He’s a good guy. I can vouch for him.” Mario said, “All right. We’re going to pay him two hundred and twenty dollars a week,” basically what a dishwasher makes, and everyone looked around, waiting for a response, and Zach was fast asleep. Mario hired him on the spot—Mario’s only regret was that he probably could have gotten him for twenty bucks less. Now Zach oversees all our West Coast operations and our new businesses in Asia.
The next morning in Rome, we were completely hungover. After dinner we were doing shots of grappa, and now we were suffering for that as well, a complete fucking mess. We were finally sort of getting it together to hit the road when we realized we were missing someone: Zach had fallen asleep with his face on the night table next to his bed, and he was now stuck to it. We had to slowly moisten sponges with some leftover grappa and work on him like a bunch of drunk EMTs to melt whatever adhesive combination of saliva and sweat and random Roman gunk had glued his face to the nightstand, without ripping his skin off.
Afflicted by the most blistering hangovers since Julius Caesar’s coronation party, we had to drive out of Rome without directions, before GPS, to Castelli Romani in order to meet Paola di Mauro. They call her the emperor of Roman cuisine. She was seventy years old at the time. Her kitchen was her own coliseum of Italian cooking. She was going to cook with us and impart this great wisdom to us, and all we could do was pull over every ten minutes to puke.
I’m a good boy and, like my mama taught me, insisted that we had to buy flowers for Paola. So we’re driving around Rome trying to buy flowers. But it’s Sunday morning, and of course nothing is open. Finally I stole some flowers from a church cemetery.
Paola made zuppa romana with these crazy beans, cicerchia, that are very typically Roman, and Romanesco broccoli. It was quite a day. After paying her a compliment on the healing properties of her cooking, I excused myself, yacked it all up, and steeled myself for the next course.
Maybe there was a moment when I thought, Holy shit, am I becoming my parents, trucking across Italy on some quasi-educational eating binge? But that idea vanished pretty quickly. It was more like we were becoming Romans. Our meals were epic, the wine consumption historic. Mostly we’d been eating in Rome’s great trattorias. In Italy there are different levels of restaurants. The simplest one is a frasca, which could be a roadside kiosk that might sell fruit and vegetables as well as one or two dishes, where workmen might come and eat a lunch, maybe buy some pig bones and a slice of cheese and a case of peaches to take home. Then there’s the osteria, which is slightly above that. Those will have a table or two and a real menu. The trattoria is slightly more defined—a few more courses, more of the restaurant experience. In the osteria you might have some prosciutto, a bowl of soup, a plate of pasta, very casual service. In the trattoria you have antipasti, primi, secondi—it’s more proper, but nothing like the ristorante, with white tablecloths, antipasti, primi, secondi, dolce—more of the tropes of classical dining. And contrary to what the world might believe, there is no such thing as an Italian bistro. It’s a chafing concept, and yet there are a lot of places trying to be that in the West Village. Italian fucking bistros. Please. It upsets me.
The distinction really hit us on this trip: Babbo is a ristorante. What we needed to do is bring a real Roman trattoria to New York. It was one degree closer to street level—no deconstructed osso bucco, no getting inside the heads of stoned lifeguards to figure out how they would cook their squid. This meant pastas that you would actually eat in Rome before a couple of lunatics reimagined them.
Rome is where the great commerce of food came from—long before Chicago, Rome was the greatest butcher in the world. The nobility in the surrounding countryside ate the prime cuts of meat, the people who lived in the city ate the secondary and tertiary cuts, and by the time you got to the ghetto, you were eating the innards, but that poor meat—things like stomach, lungs, and spleen—was truly the people’s cuisine of Rome.
So while the nobility got the best cuts of steak, the rest would go on to the slaughterhouses to feed the populace, and the Tiber River would run red with the blood from the abattoirs. There was a bend in the river that was piled high with the carcasses of animals thrown into the water after they were harvested of all their meat.
The real charm of Roman food culture is just how basic and accessible it is to everyone. There’s a magic about not eating in a grand ristorante—eating in the simplest trattoria in a winding alley of Trastevere can be even more incredible. That street experience was what we decided to bring to Greenwich Village.
Jason Denton, who was one of the first waiters at Po, wanted to do a restaurant with us, and together we came up with the idea of Lupa—Lupa is the she-wolf who famously nursed Romulus and Remus in the Seven Hills of Rome. Mario and I like to take these concepts as far as we can, but Jason had a big part in the success of Lupa. He is a great Restaurant Man.
Thompson Street, where we built Lupa, might not be a winding alley, but it has a nice vibe. It wasn’t the ritzy part of the West Village, more like a no-man’s-land between SoHo and Greenwich Village, just north of Houston Street. The space was a little bit industrial, in a tenement building, a restaurant laid out like a railroad flat with an air shaft dividing the space, with a room in the back, and another in the front. It was a very inexpensive renovation. We used reclaimed wood, and we brought the Croatian sociopath Davor back to build it for us. We made these giant arches behind the bar and through the dining room out of rescued brick and again it was done on a very limited budget. By that point we were shipping stuff from Europe to our restaurants in giant containers, which gave us a great opportunity. We just threw anything we found on our trips onto the boat: antique tables, shoes, cowbells, you fucking name it. A lot of junk that became props for Lupa. I think people celebrated Lupa in its simplicity and its purity because it was cheap and really good. When we opened, pastas were nine to fourteen bucks and no lunch there was over twenty. It had a great vibe.
Babbo was a ristorante that interpreted this intellectual idea of Italian food—it was more of an artistic creation. We indulged in some highly conceptual menu planning. Lupa was a more literal translation of a kind of restaurant in a specific city in Italy. It was about chickpeas and tripe; bavette; cacio e pepe, the signature pasta dish of Rome; coda alla vaccinara, braised oxtail, butcher style. They’ve been cooking oxtail as long as they’ve been knocking off their heads in Testaccio, and there’s nothing intellectual or interpretive about that. It was very literal, and very deliberately and specifically about understanding the attention to detail in all these incredible, iconic Roman dishes. In New York now, there’s a wash of microregional, stylistically city-focused restaurants, but Lupa may have been the first, maybe the first restaurant that wasn’t northern or southern Italian.
Lupa wasn’t trying to be Rome in New York—we were still sourcing locally but thinking about bringing that true Roman feel to an urban, slightly gritty, nuts-and-bolts trattoria in mid-nineties Manhattan. That simplicity, that real translation of flavor, was really important at Lupa.
W
e didn’t know we would be successful before we opened—no one had tried this before. Mark Ladner spent a lot of time with us in Italy and became the opening chef and a partner at Lupa. That’s when we really started to see the brilliance of Mark, who to this day I think is one of the great cooks in New York, maybe in the world. Amazing that an American kid who grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, could capture and grow on the experience of food made by housewives in this urban environment of Rome and interpret that into a New York dining experience.
All the wines at Lupa are from central Italy, from the Mezzogiorno, a lot of Lazio, Campania, southern Tuscany, Abruzzo. The wine list was very much focused on everyday wines. No Barolos, no Barbarescos. Really easy, breezy simple wines. We knew the food. The dishes were researched. The ingredients were right. The lingo was right. We nailed the details and really delved into all the things we consider part of the authentic Roman experience.
For example, Roman restaurants are filled with these amari—which literally means “bitters.” Fernet-Branca is the classic. When we were terrorizing Rome, we started each day with a shot of Fernet—it helped settle the hangover.
No one really drank amaro here in the States, but in Rome, after lunch, you would always be offered one. Essentially they are digestivi, born in pharmacies. They’re very medicinal, with an alcohol base, and each town has its own style. Our thought for Lupa was that the whole back bar would be full of these amari we’d collected, bottle by bottle, all over Italy, that no one had ever seen before. Now amaro is in every restaurant in the whole world, but it was really Lupa that brought it to New York, and it grew from there.
Restaurant Man Page 17