In 1992 I could put a twenty-eight-ounce porterhouse steak on the plate, not prime but choice, for nineteen dollars. These days it’s hard to even find any affordable steak to put on the menu, quite honestly, considering what the product costs. That’s why steaks are all forty or fifty bucks—a fifty-dollar steak in a responsible restaurant costs twenty-five dollars to put on the plate, and you still have a 50 percent food cost, enough to make Restaurant Man want to go on a killing spree. Steak houses try to make it up on big wines—they’ve got a higher margin on big reds to cover the shitty margin on food cost, and at the end of the day it should even out. Also, in the steak house, a major part of the model is that you’re not fabricating as much product. You’re not creating food, or really making food—you’re buying meat and potatoes. You have less labor in the kitchen but higher food costs. In a pasta restaurant, making fresh pasta costs nothing, but you need the skill set to make the ravioli by hand, to fill them, to cook them. You need an educated, trained staff, on every level. A grill man is not even a fucking sauté cook. All he has to do is get a steak medium rare. It’s not easy, but once you know the trick, it’s pretty hard to fuck up.
It used to be that if you were really good, you could handpick beef. Sometimes the USDA inspectors miss, and you could pick out high-grade choice that kind of approaches prime. If you knew what you were doing, you could bring your meat hook up to Hunts Point and go one side of beef at a time, but those days are over.
The veal chop is the bane of every restaurateur’s existence, because there’s almost no margin; the food cost is just too fucking high. I lose money on it. If a four-top comes in and every one of them orders a veal chop, I might as well go to their table, give them twenty dollars each, and tell them to get the fuck out.
The primo end-cut veal chop, the one you dream about that’s two inches thick and white on both sides and on that big, long bone, and it looks like it was drawn by Dr. Seuss? That veal chop costs almost twenty-five dollars to put on the plate. So even if I charge thirty-five for it, I’m way over my pain threshold. I have certain friends who know that when they come and order the veal chop at Becco, they have to put five dollars in an envelope and leave it for me. That’s absolutely true. I’ve got them trained like monkeys. The classic veal-chop eater is a savvy New Yorker, a guy who knows his way around the dining scene, who is instinctively going to go for what is probably the highest-food-cost item. And veal is more delicate than steak, not quite as macho. It’s a gorgeous, delicious, beautiful thing. But when you order it, please keep in mind that you are driving me out of business.
Frugality is exactly the core value that you need to be successful in this business. It’s not even something you can learn—for me, being cheap is in my DNA. Well, honestly, I’m not cheap, but I am a frugal motherfucker. Come to my house, I’ll open up a four-hundred-dollar bottle of wine for us, and I won’t even think about it. But to see half a tube of toothpaste thrown out because you’re not willing to roll it up right or to see lights left on…that kills me. I go around the house turning off lights after my kids. And the way they waste toothpaste—or food, for that matter—it just eats at me. Sometimes I come home at night and what the fuck, there are eighty lightbulbs burning in the house, and I’m counting them while I’m switching them off. The kids get the memo in the morning. At breakfast time I sit them down and tell them, “Last night I turned off eighty lightbulbs when I got home at one A.M.”
I think that’s really the nature of the beast. You have to think that way. It has to be a part of who you are. When someone wants to talk these highfalutin ideas about sustainability, I tell them, “Why don’t we start by turning off the fucking lights?” You walk into a restaurant like Del Posto, you have eight hundred fucking lightbulbs that are running all day, from seven in the morning when no one is there, just because that’s how things are done—open the front door, turn on all the lights. What if we just turn off the fucking lights when we don’t need them? How about like in the old days, when the last customer left the restaurant you turned off the lights and everyone ate the family meal in the dark, because the people who work there don’t need the lights? Lights are for customers.
When you’re dealing in the world of forty-dollar entrées it’s easy to be all green and wear the whole responsible-sourcing thing like a badge of honor, because there’s so much money and margin on every level. And that’s the problem with all the Alice Waters–isms and even Slow Food to a degree—it’s expensive and fucking elitist. My criticism of it has always been, yeah, everyone should eat locally in a sustainable way and eat beautiful garden vegetables, but this shit is not cheap. And you have to live in certain communities to have access to it. Going to fancy restaurants like Blue Hill at Stone Barns and paying forty bucks for a local lamb that they slaughtered in the back served with carrots they’re growing in their Rockefeller garden is a beautiful thing, but really, it’s such a small percentage of the population who can afford to live in that ether that it’s not applicable in any wide, mainstream way.
We source locally as much as possible. Not because we want to be so didactic, but because it’s just better. If it’s going to make the food on the plate better, or the wine in the bottle better, or the experience for the customer better, then of course that is what we’re always aiming for. And using things that are geographically as close to the point of sale as possible, especially produce and dairy, generally equates to improved quality and better dining. So as far as that affects local consumption, less transport, less packaging, I’m all for it. But doing it for the sake of doing it and being held to some impossible, idealistic standard is crazy.
We’re running into that in our retail business, Eataly. Some wiseass is always going to say, “Hey, you guys preach all this shit, but look, you have strawberries from fucking Florida.” But if we were really going to have just local fruits and vegetables we might as well shut it down right now. We’d have four carrots and six beets—that’s all that’s strictly local right now.
And then there’s the new wave of foodies—including a lot of people I genuinely like—preaching urban farming out in Brooklyn. Their intentions are good, but seriously, what I want to know is, for all their proselytizing, who is getting those vegetables? Are the people in Bushwick really getting those carrots, or are they just being served to hipsters who live in lofts and don’t have jobs while the world around them shops at filthy, roach-infested superbodegas. It’s so far from being economically viable as to be farcical. Hippie Joe loves it, but Restaurant Man Joe thinks these are just spoiled kids playing in the sandbox and they ought to get real jobs.
“Farm to table” became superhot and trendy, but it’s not a new concept. Nothing is new. Everything is reinvented. Now they’ve stuck a whole bunch of fancy lingo on it, talking about carbon footprints and protein this and that—someone is always figuring out a different way of interpreting the cost of food—but it’s still the same old concept of waste not, want not, use what’s around you. And don’t do things to people you wouldn’t want them to do to you. Have a little humanity and morality. A little fucking respect. That’s truly what it’s all about, right? My grandmother has been living sustainably since forever, and she’s been feeding her family from her urban garden and reading her paper by a forty-watt bulb since she came to America in the 1950s. She’d rather strip down to her bra than turn on the air conditioner. Her mantra is “Don’t do nothing you don’t want nobody to do to you.” Consume what you need, act locally, don’t waste anything, and turn off the fucking lights.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Curse of Restaurant Man!
One of the great tragedies of being Restaurant Man is that I have a lot of trouble enjoying myself in a restaurant, any restaurant. I’m too wound up. I’m tweaked. I can’t give myself up to the experience. Imagine being a scientist and every time you fucked your wife, all you thought about was the biology of it. It would be tragic.
I eat in restaurants all the time. But for me it’s not si
mply another experience—it’s like living or breathing. It just is. Restaurants aren’t special to me anymore. When they’re fancy and ambitious, they become a burden. When they’re light, they become unsatisfactory. And when they’re exactly right, the kind of experience that most consumers would die for, then it’s like being alive to me, that’s it. Like breathing. I love every one of my restaurants, and I strive to make them the best they can be, and I know how good they are, but I’m fucking jaded. Honestly, it’s not a good way to be.
Actually, what I am mostly jaded about is that Eurocentric, New York, high-end thing. That’s why I enjoy Asian food—Chinese, dim sum, Japanese, Thai noodles—food where the experience is so out of left field for me in a professional context. Cooking comes naturally to me, but I don’t even like to eat what I cook. I like to sit around and steam dumplings that I pick up in Chinatown because I don’t know anything about them. Every plate of dim sum that comes is a surprise to me, and it’s delicious. Dim sum makes me feel like a kid at a birthday party. I love Japanese food, too, because I don’t know the business. I don’t know how to make a fucking spicy tuna roll, I don’t know what shumai costs; I’m completely lost at sea, and it’s a good feeling. Otherwise every time I’m looking at a plate of food, I’m doing the math. I don’t even have to glance at the menu. I know what food costs; I do the markup in my head, and I’m never wrong. Seriously, I can’t help myself. Fucking Restaurant Man—the irony is that I can hardly enjoy the thing I love the most, because I can’t stop thinking about it from the business side.
But then, going down to Drew’s restaurant for me is not really about eating, it’s about, “Wazzup, Drew?” When I go to any restaurant and there are three waiters there who used to be my busboys, that’s the biggest high I can get. Because the busboys are really the heart and soul of the New York restaurant world. If I take people out to dinner with friends and three former busboys come up and say, “Hey, Papi! What’s up? Good to see you, man,” then I know I’m really somebody in the New York restaurant scene. They all have nicknames for me, and that’s when you know you’ve made it.
But it’s sad, being so oversaturated with the experience. It’s like being a musician who can’t enjoy going to someone else’s gig, although he might still be into the records that got him into music originally. The first love never dies, right? I still like to go to Sparks and eat that shitty butter submerged in ice. I love the incredibly mediocre iceberg lettuce. It just brings me to that moment. It’s not like I stopped loving food or wine, or that any of the real magic that inspired me when I started ever died. The simple stuff amazes me more than ever—every bite of salty prosciutto with some snappy Lambrusco, whatever—the magic will always be there. I am always amazed at the power of food and wine to transport you. But the trappings of a working restaurant are such that I just can’t look past the man behind the screen, ever.
There is no detail that can escape the ever-vigilant gaze of Restaurant Man! I will often decide what restaurant I go to or don’t go to based on stemware. To me it is a primal part of the wine experience. There are BBQ places I like but won’t go to because I don’t drink out of fucking mason jars.
Another thing that bugs the shit out of me is polyester napkins. Nothing worse than a fucking polyester napkin that doesn’t absorb anything. A simple cotton napkin is one of the basic commandments of Restaurant Man. And I’d rather have a clean wooden table than a shitty, abrasive polyester tablecloth anytime. It’s all about the sensibility of the tabletop. At Del Posto it’s a padded, plush table where you press down on it and it’s almost like lying on a mattress. It’s like a Sealy Posturepedic table—it bounces back very slowly, and there’s a richness to that. It ain’t cheap, but it is very satisfying.
I’m not fanatical about silverware, as long as it’s functional. I like Sambonet, an Italian company that makes good, simple flatware. In most cases we use stainless steel, but at Del Posto we actually have silver silverware. We kind of went crazy—we have Ginori china, which is this handmade Italian china that costs a hundred fifty dollars per plate. The handmade wineglasses cost me about thirty bucks a stem—and I’m importing them directly from Slovenia. For a civilian they’d be sixty bucks a glass, easy. And then, of course, we break them.
I put a bucket for broken plates and glasses in each restaurant. You think that’s crazy? I mandated that because I want to see it all out—if they’re just breaking plates and throwing them in the garbage, there’s no control point. So we keep buckets in the kitchen where all the breakage goes, and you can look at it and see what your consumption rate is. You look in the bucket, you see ten Ginori plates, you’re looking at more than a thousand dollars’ worth of china. I want everyone else to see it, too, because I think it sends a message. It’s the same thing I do with the dishwashers. I tell them every time they pull a fork or knife out of the garbage can in the dish station, I give them ten bucks. The fork usually costs only two or three dollars, but it’s the point that you’re making such a big statement to your dishwasher. He is never going to forget it. And every time he goes by, he says, “Hey, Papi. Come here. Ten pesos.” It’s the international language, and you’re reminding them that silverware in the garbage is not a sock lost in the dryer and you just shrug it off. This is my fucking money. This is your salary.
And then of course we replace everything the second it gets tired—you see a lot of fatigued plates in restaurants, which is kind of gross. They get metal fatigue because all the surfaces in restaurants where food is plated and washed are stainless steel, and even though it’s a superhard metal, it remits a little bit of resin after the friction with the porcelain. The bottom rim of the plates collects the resin, and when you stack the plates, it stains the plate you’re stacking into. We bleach our plates once a month—throw them into giant garbage cans filled with bleach and hot water and soak them overnight. The problem is that after a few years of bleaching your plates, you basically eat away at the enamel. They become porous, and then you’ve got to throw them out, which is expensive.
Everything on the table sends a message. A big statement is not to put salt and pepper on the table. If you’re a chef-driven restaurant, why would you allow the customer to alter the flavor of the food? Obviously, if customers request salt, we will bring it to them. Salt and pepper on request—although we’ve been fresh-peppered to death in this country. And no cheese on fish. That’s for gavones.
We get a lot of people who come in and ask for olive oil, then balsamic vinegar. And then more bread. And then parmesan cheese. It’s like a fucking free appetizer they’re getting. Ever see those people who take the butter plate and put the balsamic vinegar in it? And the olive oil, red chili flakes, pepper, parmesan cheese. It’s a fucking disaster. It is the scourge of our industry, these fucking Italian places where you’re seated and they appear with the giant bottle of shit olive oil and fake balsamic vinegar, which is basically cheap vinegar colored with caramel and acid, and pour it on the plate for you. You know, for a dipping sauce for your bread.
It’s deplorable. Places like the fucking Olive Garden are responsible for teaching America all this bullshit, all these bad habits. And then people come to real restaurants and expect it. Olive oil is expensive, but restaurants should always buy great olive oil. I have my own brand of olive oil, but a liter still costs twenty bucks—my cost. Which means it would be thirty-five bucks at Whole Foods, for you. Which is an expensive bottle of olive oil.
We use different grades of olive oil—there’s table oils, finishing oils, cooking oils. Olive oil is a big thing in restaurants, especially Italian ones. But good olive oil in cooking is what makes the difference between good restaurants and great ones. It’s that level of detail. The type of olive oil you use, the type of salt you use—you’d better believe you can taste it. Why go to all the trouble of making and serving food and then screwing yourself with crappy salt? I know guys who have broken up with women because they served iodized salt at home. Some people don’t think it makes a dif
ference, but it does. Everything does. For men of taste, iodized salt is a deal breaker.
Just as important is the grated cheese. People expect you to give it away. And we do. But guess what? Real Parmigiano-Reggiano costs me more than ten dollars a pound. And then you’re only getting like 70 percent yield. So the net product is costing me thirteen dollars a pound.
A lot of restaurants either don’t use real parmesan and instead use cheese that costs 30 percent of the real thing, like an Argentinean knockoff, or they think they’re smart and they’ll blend it. Thirty percent real parmesan, and then they cut it with Stella. They step on it, like they’re cutting cocaine. Good parmesan cheese is like snowflakes that melt on warm concrete. When the Stella hits your pasta, it forms these little waxy balls that don’t really melt. That’s how they cut corners. It’s the equivalent of snorting baby laxative, and I won’t stand for it.
But the number-one thing about a restaurant is, when you walk in, what does it smell like? Because in Manhattan at least, most restaurants don’t have balanced air systems. They have hoods that suck out more air than is coming in, but they don’t have makeup air, which is the way it should be done.
Restaurant Man Page 20