Restaurant Man

by Joe Bastianich

  Given his background and our worldview, we thought it only natural to do an Italian seafood restaurant. I had the property, so the real-estate side was done. We had already opened a restaurant at Forty-third and Ninth, where Esca is now, called Frico Bar, which didn’t really work out. I closed it down after three years. It was a wine bar, and we had wine on tap and a lot of affettati and antipasti. It was doing all right, but very obviously, to me at least, underperforming. We were just ahead of our time—wine on tap is becoming popular now, and a lot of what we were doing there became very successful later, when we opened Otto. But no one was hip to it back then, the preexisting wine culture wouldn’t tolerate it, and it’s one of the only places that we ever closed. As restaurants go, it rates up there with my Capezios in the “I don’t like to talk about it much” department.

  The first thing we did with Dave was take off on another research trip. That’s always the best part of opening a new place—you’re funded and powered to go out to have a wild time and find crazy shit. You’re with your partners and friends, and it’s a license to have fun. You’re doing your job, but it’s the crème of our business, the greatest perk of all, whether it’s sourcing salmon in Nova Scotia, seeking out an unknown breed of oysters in Iceland, or chasing coastal food around Italy and meeting the people. It usually involved swimming at night and major hangovers. In this case we thought we would eat our way through the whole Italian coastline—Amalfi, Sicily, Naples, Bari, Ancona, Venice, Trieste—and find out what really inspired us about the local seafood culture.

  Dave grew up with a lot of fishermen—he was a guy who could relate to that world. We went to local fish markets, usually after being up all night, and saw what was coming in and what the fishermen’s culture was at that time, what they were cooking. We would go eat wherever they ate. To our surprise we found that the fishermen at the source were eating everything raw, which was counterintuitive at that point, because no one thought raw fish had anything to do with Italy. The concept of crudo, of raw fish, at least in America, was born on that trip.

  They would take the best local fish, combine it with the best regional Italian olive oil. If you were in Venice, you would have an olive oil from the Veneto. If you were in Ancona, you would have one from Le Marche. If you were in Palermo, you would have a Sicilian oil and the perfect sea salt—or maybe black volcanic salt, pre–Ice Age pink Himalayan, or some flaky French—and it was brilliant. So we came back to New York and got with it, doing exactly what we’d seen.

  When we opened Esca, Gael Greene thought it was a put-on. She thought we were making it up. Italian sushi? What, are you guys inventing this stuff? Ruth Reichl was a big champion of Esca—she got it from the beginning—but a lot of the food mafia were rolling their eyes and calling it bullshit. We didn’t even bother trying to convince them otherwise. We very much had a fuck-you attitude, because we knew that it was no joke. We fucking lived it. We were over there, and it was an epiphany—holy shit, everyone is eating everything raw here! We thought we were going to come back with the latest risotto du jour and some concocted scallop-with-cauliflower appetizer. But meanwhile it was just fresh fish cut into manageable pieces with a little local olive oil on it, and that was it. Simple food served simply. What else did you need to know?

  We had a few other early champions. Bill Grimes gave us a three-star review in the New York Times, and we subsequently got many three-star reviews, but his was the first major one. We didn’t really know where we would land, two or three stars, and with Esca, unlike Babbo, we didn’t really think about it. We knew that it was special, but it kind of flipped out the market—we’d created a new category that you now see everywhere. Maybe there’d been a tuna carpaccio popping up here or there, but now Italian restaurants open with entire crudo sections on the menu. When you change behavior, that’s when you know you’re doing something important, and doing it effectively.

  Babbo changed things by dint of sheer imagination and audacity. Lupa changed behavior because it created a category of microspecific restaurants. Twenty years later everything is superregional and superfocused. Now you have restaurants that serve just meatballs—one-dish restaurants. Lupa and Esca are both testimonies to our ability to commit to something and bring it to economic fruition. I think where a lot of restaurateurs go wrong—and our success has a lot to do with Mario, because he is a stubborn fuck and when he is committed to an idea, you can’t push him off with a monster truck—is that the first minute they hit a bump or a slow night, they have the instinct to add things to the menu and go off concept. You have to have the balls to put something out there and to stick with it and to be pure and not to feel that the minute you have two empty tables, you have to offer something for everybody, because that’s how you dilute the product and it becomes a shitty experience.

  To have the real vision, to take the bumps, to take the criticism, to take the people who walk out because you don’t have veal parmesan, and stay focused, true to your concept, and pure over decades requires a certain kind of restaurateur. Drew always told me, “You know you’re really a restaurateur when you’re opening up restaurants with different themes. You’re not opening up the same restaurant over and over again.” And that’s what we did, almost to a fault. I think we might be more successful, certainly richer, had we figured out how to do thirty Babbos and sold them at an IPO for $200 million eight years ago when the market was hot. Instead we’re figli d’arte, as they say in Italian, “sons of art.” We pursued restaurants born of our trips and passions and experiences in Italy, and that has remained our MO—to interpret the authentic Italian experience and make it economically viable in the American restaurant market.

  But it would never work anywhere else. Babbo is so much about the building and the neighborhood—the West Village, Waverly Place, and the former Coach House building—it’s a crossroads of uptown and downtown, it’s where aristocrats meet bohemians, and it’s crafted for a pretty sophisticated customer. Because it is such a small restaurant, maybe it could find its place in San Francisco. But does it work in Houston? No, because you’d have to have veal parmesan and fucking spaghetti with meatballs, and we don’t do spaghetti with fucking meatballs. I’m painting in broad strokes, but to be true to its form, I think a place like Babbo needs the depth of the New York City restaurant customer base to thrive as well as it does. If your goal was to open up two hundred restaurants and sell them, you would have to have something with a broader market appeal.

  Esca can’t be duplicated because you just can’t source the product. We have a hard time even in New York, which aside from Tokyo is probably the greatest fish market in the world. It would be impossible to drive that menu without having the local market there for you—we probably have over 150 different types of fresh fish coming through the door. In fact, in New York we are really in the wholesale-fish business. We have four buyers and two trucks in the market every day. We source fish from all over the world for our restaurants and sell to other restaurants, so we’re very immersed in the fish business. But given the complexity and the range of what we serve at Esca, we would have a hard time sourcing that kind of product anywhere else. Just managing that inventory is nearly impossible, and if you didn’t have the traffic we do in Manhattan, you’d really have to simplify it.

  The best dinner at Esca always starts with the crudo. Usually it’s an appetizer—you could eat a whole dinner of raw fish, but you know, when you eat sashimi for dinner, it comes with a carbohydrate. You’d have to eat a lot of rice or something else with it, and that’s not the point. So a good start is a flight of crudo—the best fish with the best olive oil with the best salt. Three pieces of fish, usually lighter to heavier, left to right on the tasting plate. Maybe Nantucket scallops with Maldon salt and a Liguorian olive oil. Next you might have tuna belly with Gaeta tapenade and some Tuscan olive oil, which is a little more peppery. The last flight might be Spanish mackerel with Sicilian black volcanic salt, sea beans, and olive oil from Trapani, ramping up the fl
avor. And then maybe a few things for the table, like a little fritto misto and marinati, maybe some anchovies and mackerel poached in olive oil. Then I would go with black tagliatelle with zippy tomato sauce and teeny cuttlefish for a pasta, followed by a tasting of whole fish, I think the branzino in sale, which has become an Esca classic, where we bury the whole branzino in salt and then bake it until it’s like a fucking cinder block. And then spiny porgy on the grill, and a dorade patiently baked in seaweed. So three whole fish, filleted tableside and served with corresponding olive oil and salt. It’s fabulous. And it makes you want to fuck—it’s the Viagra of the Italian table, with no known side effects.

  At Esca we always try to serve the best regional, simple wines. Simple wine for simple food. It’s not somewhere you would have a hulking super Tuscan or anything like an “important” wine from Italy. We always had the concept of coastal food with coastal wines. So we served wines like Vermentino from Sardinia, and Fiano di Avellino from Campania. It got to the spirit of what they would do in Italy. Italian fishermen aren’t drinking expensive wine—you eat the fish that comes from the dock and the grapes that are grown across the street, and you eat the olive oil that is made from the olive trees behind the grapes. In Italy it’s ultraregionalism at its most natural, and we wanted to bring that spirit to our interpretation of fish at Esca. Thirty to fifty dollars will get you anything you want to drink. That’s a pretty low average in this day and age. You get some mooks who want to order a fucking Amarone with their branzino—they just can’t help themselves—but it’s not meant for that type of wine consumption. At Esca we have the worst wine sales of any of our restaurants, because simple white wine is a nice idea and it’s very poetic, but it doesn’t add up to dollars on a check.

  The real challenge at Esca was this creeping food-cost number, which is what you get when it is all about serving proteins—35, 37, 38 percent, which is eight points above what is acceptable in the normal line. And the wine sales, where we normally would make it up, were not going to be a hundred and twenty bucks of Barolo or Barbaresco. It was going to be thirty-dollar Vermentino, and that really put us under the gun to figure out how to make the margins work and get to the magical 20 percent bottom line.

  We had an old lease, so we had low rent going for us, but what did it is even simpler than that—we figured out how to keep the place crowded, how to jam the place every day. Basically, people loved it. They loved the crudo, and they loved Dave, who brought some real flavor to the place. Name one other chef who would go fishing in the morning and then bring his catch to his restaurant to cook it for you for dinner. He was the real deal and completely unpretentious about who he was and what he loved.

  A big advantage Esca had was being in Times Square, near Condé Nast and the New York Times, and it was the only decent, serious restaurant in a twenty-block radius, so we had everyone from Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. and S. I. Newhouse on down coming by for lunch, although depending on lunch is always a risky business, because the lunch crowd is very fickle—expense accounts follow the leading indicators of the economy. From one day to the next, you could pretty much predict the lunch covers in an expensive restaurant in midtown based on the headlines in the business section of the Times coupled with the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

  It helped that at some point we were in the wholesale food business and had effectively cut out the middleman. In other words we were buying in bulk, huge quantities—we began to cut out the distributor and source everything ourselves. We established a purchasing department and were buying enormous quantities of commodity items like olive oil, made for us, directly from the producer in Italy. We bring over containers of canned tomatoes and salt. We’ve got literally tons of cheese coming over. It’s classic Restaurant Man, just brought to a higher level of sophistication and a grand economy of scale.

  Restaurant Man has always been about going direct and creating more margin. But as much as you can make great margin by buying olive oil in bulk and cutting out the middleman, you’d still never want to be in the linen business, even as much as I hate paying for it. Linen is always the lowest-lying fruit, but it’s full of worms. It’s the nastiest, most disgusting, chemically driven, waste-spewing business you could ever imagine. If you spend a lot of money on linen, you can set up a small operation and save some dough, but no one has persevered, because it takes a certain kind of animal to run linens. It’s an ugly, ugly business.

  Regardless of all our successes, the Restaurant Man mind-set of being a cheap fuck always prevails. This is still a nickel-and-dime business, and you still have to strike the perfect balance of watching the margins like a motherfucker while being generous to your customers’ quality of experience, and you can’t cheat at it—customers can tell when someone is trying to throw something flashy at them, and it’s really nothing. Customers are not stupid, especially in New York; they can smell a con job from a mile away. So you have to make sure your cheapness is invisible. You must always appear generous to the point of being opulent—like I always say, you give from the front, you pull from the back.

  One thing you never want to do is compete on price point on menu items. You’ll lose that fight every time, because someone will always be willing to do it for less. But on the other hand, price puts bodies in seats, and it’s a marketing tool. It gives you the platform to create the art, to create the experience, the food, and the hospitality. But it has to be used judiciously.

  We’ve modified prices strategically during major downturns in the economy, but we’ve never discounted. Discounting is kind of like degrading the quality of your service. It’s undermining the professionalism of the restaurateur. Would you want your doctor to give you a discount? Would you go to a different doctor because he offered 25 percent off your next colonoscopy? I didn’t think so.

  And it weighs very heavily on me. Sometimes I can’t sleep because I’m thinking about prices and about the check at the end of dinner and if my customers are going to look at it and say, “It was absolutely worthwhile. Let’s do this again soon.” We’re in the business of taking people’s money, but we are not in the business of ripping people off. We’re in the business of exceeding expectations.

  Ultimately at Esca we were able to drive a pretty substantial check average even though the food cost was high—fish is not cheap.

  In Europe there’s a culture of quality fish. Fish in American restaurants is ubiquitous, but a lot of it is farm-raised crap. The problem with a lot of farm-raised salmon, for instance, is that they feed them dead salmon parts. They’re turning them into cannibals. It’s disgusting. They don’t give them fresh water to swim in, and their flesh becomes murky and tastes like shit. Branzino, which has become in the last ten years the standard menu item in an Italian restaurant, is farm-raised, usually in Greece or Turkey. They have large ocean farms, and they’re good. But most of what you get in the cheap Greek and Italian restaurants in Queens and on the Upper East Side, it’s not real branzino, and it tastes like mud. Of course, using cheap product is nothing new—how much veal parm being served do you think is really pork that’s seen the business end of a mallet? How much fish in the fish and chips in your local pub that’s being sold as Atlantic cod is really generic whitefish, or worse?

  Sourcing fish is another hot topic. Delicacy fishes, which are really integral to Mediterranean seafood culture, to Spaniards and Italians and Greeks, these are all becoming endangered from overharvesting. Ultimately, if we’re going to preserve them for the future, we have to stop eating them. It’s a sad but true fact. The future of feeding the world is almost certainly going to be some sort of farmed fish that are not cannibals, that are vegetarians. That eat moss—algae, basically. Tilapia is big now, and most people had never even heard of it five years ago. It eats everything, not including other fish. The yield is incredible. The meat tastes pretty good. It’s kind of an innocuous whitefish, but it’s cheap and good for frying. I think there are a lot of people who think tilapia can save the world. There are guy
s in Bushwick who are farming tilapia in bathtubs on their fucking terraces.

  Coming from the Northeast, we have an incredible resource of fish in our waters. Occasionally we import fish for our restaurants, but we certainly don’t serve anything that is in danger.

  I am not going to rattle a political saber over every menu item, though. I make these decisions on a personal level. Mario has some strong politics and principles, too, and between what we believe in and what we offer on our menus, we’re not so wound up. We can feel good about what we do. Mario is also very big into the Food Bank for New York City, which is a great cause—they serve hundreds of thousands of meals to the homeless and the hungry—and also “Meatless Mondays,” promoting vegetarian consumption. Everyone agrees that if you eat more vegetables, it’s good. And eating a lot of vegetables for us, quite frankly, is a very Italian way to eat anyway. There’s no conflict there.

  Fish is a big issue because as the world’s demand for it and for more refined proteins increases, we’re pinching the resources of the ocean. Sustainable fish consumption is a very hot political topic these days. In five years fish will triple in price from what we know now. In ten years fish might be five to ten times more expensive.

  The golden age of cheap, abundant food, quality food in this country, is ending. Fresh foods that used to be staples are now becoming commodity items. We’re really looking at a world where energy prices are driving up the cost of commodities. Flour doubled in price this year, and all dairy products—butter, milk, eggs—are greatly affected by transportation costs, so fuel, refrigeration, expiration dates all have a big bearing on price. And the kind of farming we do is so wasteful and unsustainable—industrial farming is a fucking nightmare. How many energy calories does it cost to make one potato compared with the yield? And once it goes through the commercial cycle, by the time it gets to the restaurant and served back to the customer, the cost is insane. There really are no economics to drive the farming model in this country—it’s really about subsidies and the American petroleum agenda.