Restaurant Man

by Joe Bastianich

  You know that smell of rancid grease? Ever clean the grease trap in a restaurant? The grease trap is the vilest, most disgusting thing you’ve ever smelled in your entire life. It’s where all the water and the grease drainage from the kitchen go. By law you can’t flush that grease into the sewer systems. So you have what’s basically a giant iron box that traps the grease and sends the water into the sewer system. It’s like a huge box of filth.

  We used to pay someone to come and take it away, but now I run my car on it—it’s biodiesel. We have a filling station at Del Posto, and we run two box trucks and my Ford Excursion off scrap oil. There’s a whole greening aspect to what we’ve been doing. Being sustainable and green is nothing new to us, but we like to push it. Restaurant Man likes to come on like a tough guy, but he’s still the same old hippie, running his truck the same way Willie Nelson runs his.

  Speaking of smells, here’s another reason Restaurant Man hates linen—dirt. Because linen is not just linen, right? It’s food, coffee stains, grease. You ever see those motherfuckers who blow their nose in restaurant napkins? These guys should be dragged out into the street and shot. That is the nastiest, most disgusting thing I have ever seen. You walk into the restaurant, take the napkin, and blow your snot-filled honker into it. And we, as restaurateurs, have to pick up that napkin and refold it. It fucking should be illegal. That is some seriously gross shit.

  The night’s dirty linen goes into plastic bags and needs to be tied tightly, because it smells—foul. Usually linen companies don’t pick up on Sundays, so you’ve got Saturday’s linen festering until Monday. Sunday smells.

  I also have a rule about changing toilet seats—I change the seats on every toilet once a month. Because I think having nice, clean, new toilet seats is a small investment that goes a long way. Toilet seats cost only twenty bucks apiece. Ever see a toilet seat in a restaurant with nicks on it? Again—revolting.

  You would be amazed about the stuff that happens in restaurant bathrooms. Some people think that shitting in a restaurant is part of the dining experience. They do. Some people think that fucking in the restaurant is part of the dining experience. We get a lot of that. Babbo is where it always happens. I’ve found condoms, syringes, women’s underwear, glassine envelopes—you name it, I’ve found everything in the bathroom. There is a woman blogger who fucks her date in the bathroom and reviews the sex and the food. I love her. Even my father was a fan.

  And then there are bar smells. Bars smell because bartenders never want to clean them. And that smell is something you can pick up. When you walk through even a nice restaurant, have a drink at the bar and you can get a whiff of that bar stink. It’s nasty shit.

  We do a strip-down of the bar once a week. Take everything out. Bleach out the back and clean it up good, because everything behind the bar is syrupy and sticky. The bar just wants to be dirty. You have to be invested in it to keep it clean.

  The thing about the bar that disgusts me most is the soda gun. Think about going into some shitty bar or restaurant in New York City—picture bags of syrup in some fucking roach-infested basement. That syrup comes through this tube that has twelve little plastic tubes in it that gets its water right from the tap, then goes through the carbonizer. And the gun is just oozing syrup from the cracks in it—the lemon-lime, the cola…. And the big thing in bars is fruit flies, because they breed in still water and feed on sugar. Some guns have cranberry juice, iced tea, fucking Gatorade…. You’ve got twelve different syrups coming through one gun, mixing with the same water. And you can fucking taste it. You can taste the sour mix when you order a Coke.

  The good thing about ordering a Coke in one of my restaurants? You get a nice little bottle of Coca-Cola. You’re paying five bucks for it, so why the fuck not? That’s one of the biggest rip-offs in restaurants. Because soda out of the gun costs you eighty-nine cents a glass, and you’re charging four or five bucks. Restaurant Man likes the margin, but you’re just killing yourself and the beverage program you pretend to be so proud of—that gun is a bastion of disgustingness. It sits in its little holster oozing syrup. It’s the same with beer systems in restaurants. People do not maintain their beer lines, and you get yeast-fermented nasty skunk beer. Beer systems need to be cleaned like once every two or three weeks, but that costs money, and some people just don’t get that it’s worth it as an investment in your business and shows respect for the product and the customer.

  Some soda guns are really Coca-Cola or Pepsi guns, and the syrup is actually a high-quality, controlled product. You buy their stuff and their guns are better, and they really do care. But a lot of restaurants are using these unbranded generic soda-system companies. They sell Jerry’s Cola, complete shit, and they pass it off as Coca-Cola. Then it only costs twenty cents a glass, but you’re still charging five bucks, so what the fuck? The carbonation is never right. It’s always too sweet. It’s flat. And it’s unsanitary. You know it the second you taste it. It tastes metallic. Chalky. It sucks because it’s not Coca-Cola, and you should fucking send it back.

  You can tell more about a restaurant by smelling it than by seeing it. From the entryway to the bathroom to the coat-check room to the bar to the table, it’s just like wine: You can close your eyes and tell how good it’s going to be, tell about the quality of the experience. A restaurant with delicious food that is run by people who really care has a good smell to it. It smells like deliciousness and love. The building might be five hundred years old, but it still smells right. That’s when I’m not jaded. It’s embracing. That’s when Restaurant Man turns into a puppy dog.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  If we had ever declared that we were going to open a four-star Italian joint, we would have been laughed out of town. Three stars at Babbo was already pushing it, especially since we’d been so libertine with regard to the old concepts of what an Italian restaurant could be. There were people who already suspected that we were nuts, and we were certainly supplying ample evidence to support that theory. There is smart and successful and creative, and then there is the overreaching hubris that kills a lot of people in this game, and that was the story behind what would become Del Posto. Eventually we earned the four stars, but it was a long journey, and in retrospect I would never do it again, no fucking way. Between creating this stratospheric experience and all the short-term failures, the tableside disasters, and then the years of fighting and battling with the most unlikable fucking New York douchebag landlords ever, it was like being dragged through a war. It was an endless, bloody campaign. But am I glad I did it? Well, if you’d asked me that before we got the fourth star, I really don’t know what I would have said, but having gotten it, I can say that it is no doubt the most significant thing that has happened to Mario, my mom, and me in our professional lives. There are only five or six four-star restaurants in New York currently, and if you look back over the last fifty years, maybe there have been a dozen. It’s the only four-star Italian restaurant in the country, and you can’t put a price on that. But that’s not the whole story.

  Del Posto started as yet another real-estate deal, just after September 11, 2001. The corridor of West Chelsea where we built it was part of the extended Meatpacking District, a kind of no-man’s-land out by the West Side Highway. There were actually tumbleweeds haunting the streets when we got there.

  We knew a guy named Irwin Cohen who had developed the Chelsea Market as a far–West Side concept five years before, and then he bought the Nabisco baking building at 85 Tenth Avenue, which is where we built Del Posto. He had a guy who worked for him, Jim Somoza, who was a customer at Babbo, and they were looking to do retail on the ground floor, and he came to us with a sweetheart deal. It had been a hard-core lesbian bar in the eighties, totally industrial, a very rough extension of the West Village. And that’s how it started—once again we had the real estate before we had the concept. It was just too good an idea to pass up; there was no way that this was not going to become a great location.

  So we carved out tw
enty-eight thousand square feet, which is a massive amount of space, on this corner, and then we got down to the business of how we were going to fill it with people.

  My original idea was to do a retro red-sauce joint and re-create Buonavia, my parents’ first restaurant in the 1970s in Queens. Given the horror show that we were about to enter, it might have been the right way to go.

  A massive red-sauce joint on the West Side probably would have been successful. I was going to bring back my dad’s combination plate—chicken scarpariello, shrimp parmigiana, and eggplant parmigiana—which is why my mother came on board. She loved the idea because she was Buonavia. This was the first business I was going to do with my mom since Becco, and she was great, totally along for the ride, even as the concept kept changing. When we did Babbo, she was a little suspicious of Mario’s creativity, but now it is like a fucking love fest between them—they are completely crazy about each other, and sometimes I’m the one outside looking in, but it’s all very good.

  Gradually the concept changed from checkered tablecloths to something more authentically Italian, and then somewhere the ambition emerged to do something very high-end. I think when the restaurant started coming together and we saw how beautiful and grand the space would be, that’s when we let our four-star ambition sneak in the side door—because the dream always was to do something at the top of the Italian pyramid. We always felt we were the guys to do it. We thought we could build the greatest, most opulent Italian restaurant in the world. We also had a chef in-house, Mark Ladner, who was then working with us in Lupa and Otto, and we knew he had the talent. When Mark came on board, things crystallized, and then everything snowballed: It was ambition fueled by money fueled by ambition fueled by opportunity.

  The rent was so far under market that we signed a really long lease—the market value now is about twenty times what we’re paying. Without the obligation of a heavy real-estate cost, you can be more creative and more flexible on the concept. And when we started poking around the basement, we discovered things we didn’t expect, a netherworld of New York architecture. The first thing we learned is that all those buildings on the far West Side are basically built on landfill and the Hudson River runs underneath them. So what you see if you go through the basement floor is that they’re built on pylons. And the river flows underneath the basement. Manhattan Island was widened to make the West Side Highway happen, and the bottom of the island, Battery Park, is landfill. As is often the case, our imagination started to get the best of us, and in what was just raw space we built a grand staircase that descends from a sprawling mezzanine when you come in, everything ultra-opulent and everything from scratch. Once again it was the Big Bang According to Mario and Joe—first nothing, then suddenly a brand-new galaxy. Pow.

  Del Posto was the first time we went to outside partners to help us finance a project—we talked to a prominent financial luminary who had a little vision and to a couple of Goldman Sachs guys who were customers at Babbo. We raised $5 or $6 million from investors.

  We pitched them on having the real estate sewn up—this was before all the condos, before the High Line, before everything, so it was really pioneering. We were pretty much the first restaurant out there. The only other one is the old Frank’s Steak House on the south side of the block, which had moved from Fourteenth Street. I had my bachelor party at the original, and that closed in 1994.

  We thought $6 million would do it, but it ended up taking double that. We had to get another bank loan, which we personally guaranteed for $5 million to finish the job and thought we’d do the Curly Shuffle on the back end to the tune of a million to float the thing. That’s a lot of Curly and a lot of shuffling, but for $12 million, you get a twenty-eight-thousand-square-foot restaurant that looks like it’s been there for a hundred years, that has more marble in it than a Medici palace, and is state-of-the-art, top to bottom. There’s nothing quite like Del Posto; it’s a restaurant that’s going to be there forever.

  We opened in 2005, and things got very bad very quickly. What happened was that our friend Irwin sold the building—he’d bought it for $40 million and sold it for $70 million to some hedge-fund jerk-offs who wanted to flip it again. Our deal with Irwin was a little soft, I admit, nothing earth-shattering, but there was some ambiguity about some building and technical details—the proper specs for vents and compressors, stuff like that—so the new landlords immediately launched a lawsuit. It was a full-on frontal attack with one purpose only: to chase us out of the building and close the restaurant.

  No matter who owned the building, our lease was going to hold up at Irwin’s super-friend-of-family rate, a big negative when you’re trying to sell a building. Let me put it into perspective: Say I’m paying $200,000 a year in rent with my sweet friend-of-Irwin lease, but the market rent is really $2 million a year, so that’s $1.8 million a year that the new guys are leaving on the table, times thirty-five years of our lease. See where I’m going with this? It was easily worth spending a few million to get us the fuck out. All they wanted to do was flip the building, and they did—they sold it a year later and made $100 million over what they’d bought it for—but maybe they would have made $130 million if they’d gotten us out, minus the few million they spent on the war with us.

  They hired Warren Estis, who is like the fucking antichrist of landlord-tenant lawyers. L&T litigation in New York is notoriously vicious and public, and these guys were just pure fucking evil. They hired multiple law firms and the Hermann Göring of publicists—suddenly there were stories on “Page Six” about the troubles Mario and I were having, personal shit you would not believe—because they didn’t really care about winning any lawsuit; that was never going to happen. They just wanted to close the restaurant, which was the only way to get us out, and that became their ambition—to ruin us. Personally. They went after Mario especially, because he is a celebrity. And the whole time we were open for business. Never mind that we were trying to keep our heads up and evolve a concept that really didn’t exist, that we had 150 employees with hundreds of people who depended on them. I get it, business is business, and this is New York, but these guys didn’t want to talk, they didn’t care about the neighborhood, they had zero good faith. They were just complete fucking hemorrhoids.

  It would have been the end of life as I knew it if I had to walk out. It was all built and paid for. Mario and Lidia and I all had personal guarantees on the loans—it was everything, our homes, our business, my wife’s engagement ring. Everything in our lives would have gone to paying that debt if they’d been successful. Have you ever been served with court papers? You’re served. Tag, you’re it. And every time I turned around, I would get served. It was crazy. We spent well over a million dollars fighting this shit.

  When does ambition get the better of you? Whether it’s egotistical or professional, you think you’re at the top of your game and you want to execute. But do you want to do it for yourself or do you do it to show the world what you can do? What is the cost if you don’t succeed? Would I have been justified in trying to do something so ambitious, having to pay $5 million back to the bank, losing $6 million in partner money, and probably being responsible for the Heaven’s Gate of restaurant failures? I can’t even imagine how it would have affected our other businesses. It would have changed my life. Losing wasn’t something we really knew. It was one of the worst times of my life—all I could do was think of what Winston Churchill supposedly said, and tell myself that when you are going through hell, keep on going.

  Our partnership always worked because we were always unified in our success and in our failure. I think that ultimately what brought the restaurant to its fruition was our ability to hunker down together, dig in deep, live through the bad times, bite the bullet and throw in some more money, and believe. With my mom and Mario, I have the best partners in the business.

  Meanwhile, we’ve got people coming in to eat, and they are supertweaked, because every day they’re reading in the paper that we’re breaking bu
ilding codes left and right, playing a game way out of our league, in cahoots with the devil, and on the verge of collapsing. It didn’t help that aesthetically Del Posto was breaking all sorts of rules.

  “Four-star Italian” is a category created by us. We were always uncompromisingly committed to making sure that we did not become another four-star French restaurant—everything we did had to be conceptualized in its Italianness. Luxury dining from the Italian perspective, from the culture of the Italian table. We were looking back into history and bringing all the greatest elements of Italian restaurants and dining and food into one contemporary restaurant. And that would be the ultimate Italian dining experience.

  We took everything, even the tableside service, all the clichés about the French dining experience, and reinterpreted them to fit into the Italian vernacular and the sensibility of Italians. Italian four-star dining is different from French in the sense that, yes, it’s opulent, luxurious, detail-oriented, but it’s also a little bit more familiar, warmer, more family-oriented, a little bit more interactive, not quite as distanced. Eliminate the snob value and appeal to people’s desire to eat pure food in a real way. But since there was no clear history of that, we were kind of making it up as we went along. There are the standard expectations of what a four-star restaurant is. You come into Daniel, you have amuse-bouches, which is the shit they send you for free when you sit down. But we couldn’t call it amuse-bouche, and there’s no Italian name for that. So we had to invent a name, which was primo assaggio, first taste, which doesn’t exist in Italy because in Italy they didn’t have to name it. But we did. Now every aspiring Italian restaurant passes it off as old-school—anywhere you go, primo assaggio, compliments of the chef. We invented that term and convinced everyone it was legit.