Restaurant Man

by Joe Bastianich

  Lupa was never seriously reviewed. We wanted it to be more populist. It was small. It was in a tenement. There was nothing fancy-pants about it. Eric Asimov wrote about it in the “$25 and Under” column in the New York Times, but that was it, and that was enough. Honestly, we weren’t soliciting reviews. What for? If we got one star, it would suck. Certainly it’s not a three-star restaurant. If it got two stars, that would be great, but it wouldn’t change anything. The place kind of defies categorization in its own way.

  And then, just as I was finishing writing this book and getting it ready to go to the publisher, Asimov, who was now sitting in as the New York Times food critic—in the wake of Sam Sifton, who had gone on to become the national editor, and while the restaurant world eagerly waited for the more enlightened musings of Pete Wells—came in to give Lupa another look, and he hit us with a flat one-star review.

  Frankly, I was disappointed and hurt when I saw his review. I thought that of all our restaurants, Lupa was the most bulletproof. The concept was pioneering, and it’s still relevant—the food remains true to its original vision: simply delicious. The entire message is crystal clear, and the prices are still extremely fair. Lupa has become a benchmark in our industry, so I was taken aback by his inability to translate its spirit and importance. It was a major disappointment for the entire Lupa staff, as well as to Mario and me.

  He centered the review on the ebbs and flows of a busy restaurant—he was jostled while waiting for a prime-time table that he didn’t have a reservation for. He also wrote, “At off-hours—a late night, a midafternoon—Lupa continues to be delightful, satisfying and attentive.” What I get out of this is that the unequivocal success of a restaurant is now a liability? He had some quibbles, but he also praised the pasta to the sky, along with the salumi, another house specialty. But overall I think he missed the point, the simplicity of what a Roman trattoria should be. You know my philosophy: I’d rather be warm for twelve years than be hot for six months, and Lupa’s long-term popularity is a testament to the meritocracy of the New York dining world, where people will continue to vote with their feet. But one star is just a complete letdown for Mario and me and all the people who work at Lupa eighty hours a week to create this experience. I feel bad for the Lupa crew, I am sorry they weren’t honored with a better New York Times review, but the restaurant has been as good as it’s ever been, and we are not going to change a thing.

  Stars matter for certain restaurants at certain price points. When you charge thirty, forty dollars for an entrée, you have an accountability to justify those prices and you’re fair game for journalists and their opinions, as well as the Michelin and Zagat guides and everyone else. But price still matters even if you have the stars—at Babbo, where we were trying to bridge the gap between being a hip restaurant and a fine-dining experience, all the entrées are under thirty dollars, except for the rib eye, which costs me almost that much to put on the plate.

  But when you’re a lower-priced restaurant, people will vote with their feet and their dining dollars. New York is a savvy town, and good food will always rise to the top in New York. I think there are very few examples of people serving great food at a great price and not succeeding in the city. They may not succeed wildly, but if you’re really that good, people will seek you out and support you. There’s no more of a meritocracy in the entire food universe than the New York dining scene.

  People always ask me how I felt when Mario was becoming a TV star and a famous media personality while I was still mostly behind the scenes. I tell them I never minded. I was very happy, over the fucking moon about making some money with our business that was born completely out of our passion for Italian food and wine, and more comfortable with myself than I would have ever imagined when I was growing up a self-loathing wop. Between Bus Head and the bagel shop, some sort of seed had been planted, and now not only was I loving being in the restaurant business, I was loving my ginzo roots. All was right with the world.

  This was also around the time of our first retail adventure. By now, any discomfort with my heritage that I’d wrestled with when I was growing up was long gone—in fact, I was wearing my pride on the sleeve of my Armani jacket. Our fortunes were tied to our passion for all things Italian, and it had occurred to us that, beyond our restaurants, a maniacal devotion to Italian wine could have some positive economic consequences on our lives. No one had really championed the category before; it was totally untrodden ground. We were kicking it hard—Babbo with the higher end, Lupa with more ready-to-go wines—but we had never been retailers.

  America is still full of blue laws, a result of Prohibition residue and regional anti-alcohol sentiment. The idea originally was to stop people from having a monopoly in liquor. Back when those of a certain moral fiber thought that liquor was an evil thing, the fear was that if breweries could brew beer, distribute it, and own the pubs where it was drunk, then the beer companies would become a satanic monopoly that would turn the populace into monsters. That was the Prohibitionist mentality. After Prohibition every step in the commerce of alcoholic spirits in the United States needed to be separated. It was part hangover from the Volstead days and also part of an antitrust sentiment that doesn’t really exist anymore: Back then there were also laws about movie studios owning distributors and theaters, and later about people owning television stations and newspapers in the same regions, but you’ve seen where that’s gone. We live in a time of complete conglomeration—but when it comes to booze, there are still plenty of cranky old morality-driven laws on the books. We are still living in the shadow of Prohibition. For instance, you can’t order a drink in New York City between 4:00 A.M. and noon on Sunday—between last call and lunch. That’s kind of an amazing concept. Think about it: You can’t order a Bloody Mary with your 11:00 A.M. brunch on Sunday even if you’re staying at the St. Regis and spending two thousand dollars a night for your room.

  We were successful at selling wine in restaurants, but we also knew that Italian wine had a long way to go. We believed that it was very undervalued. We saw all these wine collectors coming into restaurants—young wannabes who really didn’t know anything about wine and would drop thousands of dollars, all of it on Bordeaux.

  Italian wine, which we thought was the greatest wine in the world, had no play in this universe. It wouldn’t be abnormal to find a guy spending a quarter million in a year on wine, all of it French and Californian. We thought that was wrong. We were running into this kind of aristocracy of wine people, and none of them were buying or collecting Italian wine. We thought, how many hundreds of millions of dollars was the collectible-wine market in the United States? What if we could convert 15 percent of all expenditures on overpriced Bordeaux and Napa Valley crap to quality Italian wines? Certainly it was merited. That was our business plan. And that’s how Italian Wine Merchants was born. We had flourished in our restaurants with this laser focus on everything pure and Italian, so why wouldn’t it be a reasonable assumption that we could take on retail, or the collectors of the country, and put what we thought were the greatest wines in the world into the big leagues? All we wanted was a small slice of the big pie.

  Italian Wine Merchants was me and Mario, of course, and, unfortunately, a sawed-off Neapolitan prick named Sergio. He was a manager or a sommelier at San Domenico, and he used to hang around our restaurants.

  Even before Babbo I had the ambition to do a retail business, but I was running restaurants and had no experience on that level. Sergio’s dad was a retailer up in some bumfuck town near Albany, and he had worked there and knew the bottle-shop business. He talked the talk. And this was my downfall—he had the 3 percent I needed at that moment, the retail experience I was missing, even if back then it was only brown-bagging pints of Popov for the town drunks—to get me to 100 percent and get the business started. I should always be smarter than that—that 3 percent, I can buy it or learn it—but we made him a full partner. Big fucking mistake. Eventually we’d be sitting out on the stoop at Babbo t
alking about whacking the short-dicked little fuck.

  But meanwhile the Italian Wine Merchants was turning into another Joe and Mario fantasy camp. It wasn’t exactly Field of Dreams—we built a four-thousand-square-foot showroom on Sixteenth Street off Union Square. The problem was, it was right across from some social-services building, and around the corner was a high school, so it was all very weird and wired, even though fifty feet in the other direction was Union Square, pure gold. But this block was not a good scene. There was almost no foot traffic, it was kind of scary—you had to want to come to see us. But it was cheap, and it was big.

  The space was a showcase of Italian lifestyle, and we were very aggressive—you came in to talk about wine and we’d be in there curing a giant fucking prosciutto. We brought in pigs, five-hundred-pound pigs we would buy at farms, and we’d start carving and cooking the fuckers right there in the store. It was very avant-garde. We took it to the rawest element. We were giving cooking demonstrations and tastings—we were the first people to have a kitchen in a wine store. It was insane, conceptually out of the parameters of anything anyone had ever attempted when it came to wine retail. It was a store, but with big ambitions. It wasn’t a bottle shop, it was a dream. It was barely legal, but we didn’t care, we just did it. It’s not that we didn’t care about the laws—we did—but we were going to push it until someone called “Cut!” No one ever did.

  It was very nonconformist. But what it was really all about was building a relationship with the customers to educate them about Italian wine and having them buy into the concept that as a wine buyer you need to make Italian wine a part of what you collect or own. And this is where my Wall Street experience really paid off: We were like portfolio managers. We had account executives, cellar managers—we took the model from the world of finance and applied it to wine.

  Italian Wine Merchants led the way for everything else that has happened in the last ten years in very specific wine retailing and this insistent focus on niche, niche, niche. And it didn’t happen just in New York. We were everywhere. We hit every wine festival and every wine collector. We were in Nashville, Portland, Los Angeles, San Diego—you name it. If you had a wine festival, we would come to town like fucking Vikings. We were out there on the national scene in a big way, saying, “Look, guys. Wake up. Italian wines are the greatest in the world. Get hip, get on board, or get run over.” One great night we were in Nashville at the house of Tom Black, who is one of the great opinion makers and collectors of wine. We had every hotshot wine yahoo from Alabama to Florida to Arizona there, and we did a night with absolutely mind-fucking Barolos, like ten vintages, with agnolotti and white truffles right off the plane from Alba, and we blew these people away. One by one we conquered all these nouveau riche wine snobs who had no clue and had to be told what they should be drinking and buying. They knew our momentum. They knew Mario, they knew Babbo, they knew me, maybe they had an idea of what we were really about, but we would come in and we would kill these guys, millionaires who thought they were big wheels because they had a couple of cases of Bordeaux in their basement. We were rocking the whole American wine scene. Italian Wine Merchants went from zero to $12 million a year in five years. That’s a big number for only Italian wine.

  At the most basic level, we weren’t selling wine, we were selling legitimacy. We were selling a slice to everyone who wanted to feel a little bit Italian. All those people who had the money went to Amalfi, went to Florence, rented the villas, but they didn’t have access to the essence of Italianness. We were selling that passport.

  I never lost money buying a bottle of wine. I may not make any money making wine, but buying and selling it, hell yeah.

  I learned how to buy and sell it from my parents when they were loading up Felidia with great bottles. Then Pat Cetta at Sparks taught me to buy wine like Attila the Hun. Eventually that translated to my being able to do business with not only retailers but these insane wine collectors—there are about a hundred guys in this country who have multimillion-dollar cellars and who get together to drink obscene amounts of wine on any given weekend.

  On a flight from New York to L.A., these guys can mop up half a million dollars of wine, no sweat. Happens all the time. You couldn’t snort that much cocaine—Aerosmith and Mötley Crüe in midseason form couldn’t even come close. It’s complete lunacy. These are regular guys from New Jersey who are sitting on millions of dollars of wine. Think about having $20 million worth of wine in your basement. Can you imagine having that in your house? Start drinkin’, baby—you can try, but you’ll never drink it all in your whole life.

  Of course there are a lot of people in the wine world who are full of shit—poseurs and wannabes, people with no taste, who just want to impress one another with their rented wine savvy, but there are also the truly great collectors, who can truly taste and who understand wine and who treat it as if they were collecting art, because, really, that’s what it is. Except you can’t drink a Warhol. Wine, at its best, is consumable art, there when you want it.

  There’s a hierarchy in the wine world. Thanks to Robert Parker, the critics are at the top. Below them are the professional wine intelligentsia—educated restaurateurs and their sommeliers and the people who create wine programs, and winemakers. On the other side is a consumer wine intelligentsia that is very powerful. These guys are not wine professionals, but they are knowledgeable, passionate, and they have resources beyond those of mortal men.

  There are people who can raise simple wood whittling into high-minded sculpture by being sagely critical about it, or just publicly championing it, and it is the same thing with wine. A great wine collector takes the work of the winemaker and, through whatever gravitas or juice he has, can elevate its status, the same as in the art world. One guy can declare a bottle of Barbaresco a masterpiece and boost its reputation (and price) to that of a Botticelli.

  The moat around the fortress that separates the wine elite from the masses is winespeak. It is a subculture of snobs, invented out of necessity to explain the unexplainable, but also created to dichotomize the wine world and keep the smart clique in and the masses out. It is learnable—I suppose Esperanto is, too—but basically we allow ourselves to make shit up, and if you have enough authority and the balls to say it with 100 percent confidence, you can call any wine pretty much anything and people will listen to you—notes of mother’s milk and bananas Foster, rusty Moxie caps and damp 1969 National League baseball cards. Say it with enough gravitas and, for better or worse, people will accept it. And that’s what makes you a master of this universe. We have been given free rein in the use of an imperfect system, and within that there is a lot of abuse, but most of it is hidden under the cloak of pomp and stature, so even if you’re dead wrong, enough chutzpah and maybe a nice suit will let you get away with it.

  But we were very earnest, we were true believers, and with Italian Wine Merchants we created Italy as a category in every major wine cellar in the country—before that it wasn’t really taken all that seriously, which is odd, because Italian culture has had a bigger impact on America than that of most other wine-producing countries. Italy has always been popular with Americans, as opposed to France, which has always had a snooty, douchebag reputation. Spain has a great rep for being lots of fun, and the Spanish are maybe twenty years behind Italy in becoming real players in the global wine market. Of course, they don’t have Rome, Florence, or Leonardo da Vinci—not that there’s anything wrong with Madrid, Barcelona, and Goya, but it’s just not the same.

  We realized pretty soon after we opened Italian Wine Merchants that Sergio just wasn’t our guy. Mario and I have always made partners of people who brought something to the party. We’ve turned waiters into owners, but they all had vision. Sergio didn’t have shit. He was that 3 percent that we needed for the first forty-five days, and from that point on he was just in our way.

  After a few years, we were ready to string him up with one of the hams that were hanging in the back of the shop, but we
figured it would be better just to go our separate ways, which is what we did. We both had our hands full with our restaurants, and mine with actually making wine, and it was a good time to get out. If it was our goal to spread the gospel of Italian wine, we could declare success. We had opened many doors and created a lot of awareness that brought a great deal to every other part of our business.

  We sold out right before the crash in ’08—Sergio found some newly minted millionaires who were looking to buy some legitimacy in the wine world, and it turned out okay, because we made some good money on the deal, but not as much as it was worth. We gave away at least a couple of million dollars. But that’s how badly we wanted to get away from Sergio.

  Mario mistrusted him from the beginning. My mother told me not to do the deal—she told me never to go into business with a Neapolitan. Mario always defers to Lidia’s advice. They really like each other, and for Mario, Lidia is like a higher-intellect version of me—we are a lot alike, but she’s much smarter. They both warned me, but I didn’t listen, which was another mistake, because not only is she always right, but Mario loves to tell me when she is. When we took a $2 million haircut on this, he told me, “You should have listened to your mother, you douchebag. Don’t get into fucking business with a sawed-off Neapolitan fuck. Anyone with a small penis is no one you want to have business with. Only guys with big swinging dicks.” He meant that existentially, of course.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Pirate Love

  Dave Pasternack knew fishermen who had hooks for hands, real fucking hooks, metal hooks, like fucking pirates. These were guys who would come into a restaurant to sell you a bag of scallops that was hanging off the end of their arm. It was fucking awesome. When it came to authenticity, you couldn’t argue with that.

  Dave was the chef at Picholine. His wife, Donna, was a waitress at Po, which is how Mario knew him. Dave was a good guy, a tough guy who’d been around the block a few times. He was a real South Shore Long Island fisherman, a blue-collar Jewish guy who wasn’t afraid to knock back boilermakers with roughneck crews that hung out at the dock bars or throw a wrench at a Detroit diesel. He had worked as an ass kicker for Andrew Silverman at one of his joints. Mario thought he was a talented cook, and really one of us, and wanted to work with him. So we decided to open a restaurant together. We made the decision sitting on the stoop at Babbo, drinking wine out of our fancy Spiegelau wine stems—some things never change.