In the beginning, people were slamming us—everyone said, “Hey, that’s not a Joe and Mario place. We love Babbo, we love Lupa—what the fuck is this?” Not only did we have to create an Italian restaurant that played the game at such a high level, not only did we have to convince the dining market that it was even possible, we had to convince our fans who were calling it bullshit, and that’s bad. There was no category for Del Posto, at least not here at home. That’s why Del Posto, initially, was much more an easy sell for Brazilians, Mexicans, Europeans, people who really dine around the world. Del Posto is much more similar to dining in Paris, London, or Rome than it is to dining on the Upper East Side. And of course people who eat uptown don’t always come downtown, and young people do not eat at the traditional four-star places, period.
So we set out to make Del Posto a transgenerational restaurant. Lidia was a full-on partner because she was there for the original concept, but beyond that we thought that she, Mario, and I would be the three best people from three different perspectives to come together to create a four-star dining experience. Lidia brought some history and gravitas to Del Posto. And Mario brought more of the edgy-chef thing. I brought a lot of ideas and concepts. Sometimes I think creating a restaurant is almost like putting on a play: You build the set, you decorate the set, you put in the players and then it goes. And a big role of mine at Del Posto was being the set designer.
When I was conceptualizing that restaurant, I was watching a lot of Fellini movies. If you look at 8½ or I Vitelloni, you can feel that marble-meets-wood, Old World, masculine vibe, but really it’s where the Old World meets sixties and seventies design. There are a lot of restaurant scenes in And the Ship Sails On. It definitely made an impression on me. It’s a little bit mod yet classic at the same time.
More than anything we have done, Del Posto took time to evolve—over five years—which culminated with a four-star review. The initial menu was not only impenetrable for the customer, it was unexecutable. It was quite literally delusional—we couldn’t even serve what was on it. We did “friends and family,” but where we usually do it for two, three days, at Del Posto we did it for two fucking months.
The menu was ambitious to the point of being counterproductive, and it almost ruined us. We were cooking whole animals and bringing them out and finishing them tableside. So the cooks weren’t really cooking, and you had captains and waiters carving the shit up—it was like the Three Stooges. We were doing whole loins of veal and selling entrée items that cost three hundred dollars. It was so far out of the paradigm of any New York dining experience, just pure insanity. Once in a while when a critic came in, we could fake it and make it seem as if it worked, but it didn’t—there’d be an entire fucking lamb on the floor, juice spilling out of the kitchen like a murder scene, something was always burning, and we’d have these ladies from the Upper East Side, dressed in white Chanel suits, who would sit down and get splashed with lamb blood. It was fucking biblical. They’d get black paint all over them because we’d painted that day and forgotten to put up a sign. We didn’t tell them. We just kept bringing them more wine so they’d get drunk and wouldn’t care.
I remember we were flambéing some crepes, and we set the tableside cart on fire. There was tons of bad shit happening—a lot of food went on the floor. Unfortunately, when you’re in front of customers, the ten-second rule doesn’t apply, unless it’s a whole roasted suckling pig, in which case we just pick it up, dust it off, and keep on hacking at it in front of the customer. If Michael Bay remade I Love Lucy starring Mario Batali, featuring Joe and Lidia Bastianich, this would have been it.
Our intentions were good, but it was ludicrous. And people knew it. The first reviews were mixed. We snuck out a three-star review from Frank Bruni, but we totally played it. We knew he was there. We created the best experience we could within the context, but it didn’t even matter, because this was also around the time the blogosphere was starting to cook, and word was out that Del Posto was some kind of elaborate joke.
For a while we tried to create a more casual menu and worked on the bar business, but that was sending mixed signals about the restaurant. We were losing our focus. Then, at a certain point two years ago, we realized that it would just take a while for a restaurant with that level of ambition to gain its stride. In our case it took us four years, but that’s not completely unjustified. I think that we were extra fucked up in the beginning, but we’ve become extra good and superrefined in the end. Maybe you could start a little closer and not have to go as far. A three-star review in the Times was great—amazing, really—but honestly, it wasn’t what we wanted. Babbo was three stars. We were batting .300. Lots of guys do that. We wanted to bat .400.
Early on, we also became pretty well known for being the de facto hosts of what I like to call “Cops ’n’ Robbers Night.” At one end of the bar are the robbers, and at the other end of the bar are the cops. They’re all drinking the same drinks, they’re all trying to pick up the same cocktail waitresses, or pretty much any random broad within eyeshot. Sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s who. Good guys? Bad guys? Whatever. I think if you go far enough to the left and far enough to the right, you come around to the same place again. It’s not just Del Posto—think Rao’s. There’s always been these places where opposites attract.
When I first met the wiseguys in the early days, I said to one of the bosses, “You guys ready to eat?” He looked at me and said, “Eat? We don’t eat. We dine.” And his sidekick goes, “Yeah, yeah. We don’t eat. We dine.” And they were very fucking serious about it. They make a big deal of being gourmands, and quite frankly they know more about food than most people do, even though they have particular dining habits. They’re not into too much democracy. At Del Posto we can facilitate their need for tyranny.
There’s one group that’ll come in with the roll of hundies—a hundred to the coat-check girl, a hundred to every hostess, a hundred for the maître d’, a hundred to the bartender, a hundred to the bar back, a hundred to the piano player, and suddenly our piano player, Fat Tony Monte, turns on a dime and puts the brakes on the Sondheim mid-fucking-measure and starts twirling tarantellas like he was working Don Corleone’s wedding reception. They’re ordering double vodkas on the rocks in wineglasses. Whatever the capo drinks, everyone else drinks—and it’s usually double vodkas in big wineglasses. Now, I am of the opinion that double vodkas should be served in rocks glasses, and I feel pretty strongly about that, but they feel very strongly about the opposite. And then their big thing is, they won’t sit down at the table and wait for the food—the food has to be on the table. They don’t want to waste time at the table waiting for food. The food is on the table, then they make the move from the bar. What the fuck do I know? I mean, you can drink at the table, too. I’m a wop from Queens, and I do it all the time, but this is some kind of bizarre subculture that goes way beyond Bus Head and Astoria.
It kind of feels like a movie from the 1940s—they’re all looking for one another, but they’re all right fucking there, hiding in plain sight. The wiseguys are at one end of the bar, and the cops drink down at the other. Not beat cops. I’m talking about NYPD detectives, FBI agents, DEA. Those guys like to “dine,” too. As much as they’re on opposite ends of the law with their counterparts, they have a similar aesthetic and sensibility. They like Del Posto; they think it’s their kind of place.
My dad was never in love with the Idlewild crew. I remember when I was a kid, those guys used to come into Buonavia. Goodfellas is pretty accurate, actually—they were doing the airport runs, driving Monte Carlos and Cutlass Supremes, had insane taste in clothes. There’s that one scene with the helicopter chase—that’s all in Bayside, where I grew up—and it was a pretty fair representation of what life was like down there. Gotti was a customer of Buonavia in the early days, but my father always told me, “If you treat them like everyone else, they’ll never come back,” because once you bought them a free round, you became their place, and then you were in t
he fold. You became beholden to them, and that was a scary place to live. My father successfully avoided that—Restaurant Man came from the Old World, and he had seen it all. Those guys spent money, but it wasn’t money he wanted, which tells you a lot.
These days you can have a healthier customer relationship with the double-vodka gang. And a lot of them are incredible restaurant customers, because they’re very respectful and enjoy and appreciate what you do, and they totally participate in the restaurant experience. They pay attention and react. Whether you’re talking about a food-and-wine pairing or a particular bottle of wine, or a dish, they’re always chiming in with their recipes, their experience, how good it is. They’re very much participants in the process of dining, which makes them fabulous customers, aside from the fact that they’re pamphleting the place with hundred-dollar bills on the way in, so it’s a party for everyone. They spend, they tip, they have a good time, they always befriend the staff. I don’t know what they do in their professional lives, but they’re awesome restaurant customers. Their sensibility and their aesthetic run very deep, the way they look, the way they carry themselves, what they know about food and wine and the details of style—their nails are always perfect, their shoes are like fucking mirrors, they have the best suits you have ever seen. You can call these guys whatever you want, but don’t tell them they dress bad or don’t know a fucking good plate of linguini. That would be a mistake.
After the economy collapsed and the market went to shit—I always mark it as the day Lehman imploded in September of ’08—the world changed and all our corporate business vanished. Ever walk into an empty dining room, where it’s just staff looking at you like hurt puppies wondering what’s coming next? It makes you want to shit your heart out. And in the middle of it all, Fat Tony was still playing the piano, boring the shit out of us with some somnambulistic version of Gershwin or watered-down Andrew Lloyd Webber. I can’t explain why exactly, but we could never get rid of him. Even when we were shuffling to pay the electric bill, we somehow came up with Fat Tony’s three hundred bucks, but don’t ask me how. We were very committed to the piano thing. Later, when we started making some dough, I got rid of the rental piano and bought an antique Steinway. He was mildly impressed.
And then we did some soul-searching—we spent a half million dollars, renovated the bar, got rid of the bar trade, and focused in on one level of service. We still had that extra star in our eyes. We eliminated tables, gussied up the place, and brought in staff to execute the final vision of what we thought an unambiguous, kick-you-in-the-ass, four-star restaurant should be. Which was the experience that Sam Sifton, the food critic at the New York Times after Frank Bruni—and a good guy—had.
But there were some real lows. Dark meetings in the private party rooms in the Del Posto basement, with mounting legal bills and no reservations coming in, a bad review from Adam Platt in New York magazine calling us “Vegas on the Hudson,” and another from jack-of-all-tirades Steve Cuozzo at the New York Post, their puffed-up real-estate columnist who moonlights as a restaurant critic. He wrote a two-page review of Del Posto and Morimoto’s Chelsea restaurant, and the headline was “Dumb and Dumber.” That was his review of the two restaurants. After I read that, I sent him an e-mail: “Are we dumb? Or dumber? That’s all I need to know.” Seven years later, with combined sales between Morimoto and Del Posto of something like $40 million, I just want to ask Steve, “Are you a real-estate reporter, a restaurant critic, or just plain fucking stupid?”
Bruni came in a couple of times while we were in this transitional mode, and we missed him, which is inexcusable. I still can’t believe we let that happen. He flew in under the radar, and he dogged us on the experience. He said a few things about us in the Times that really hurt, not that we were such a terrible restaurant but more like, “What the fuck are they doing there? What are they even thinking about?” It was gut wrenching.
When you’re as visible in that world as we are, and you tell the most important critic in town that you think you have a four-star restaurant, he’s going to respond. When Bruni left and Sam Sifton came in, that was our cue; we knew we had a chance. It was a clean slate. We knew that Sifton was already a fan of the restaurant, or at least he wanted to like it. He had come to Del Posto a few times and celebrated some anniversaries there with his wife. So we figured, this was it, we’d better jump on it and bring him over to our side.
This was no joke, what we did for a fourth star. It was like a manned mission to Mars. We really went all out. We did less business for a year—we just stopped doing the volume, cut down the tables, and fine-tuned the experience. Every day we found some new edge to polish, every day we talked about how to make the food better. We were brutal in our self-critique. And then we put it out there and waited. It’s like fishing. We said, “All right, Mr. Sifton, this is New York’s first four-star Italian restaurant….” We waited and waited, and one year went by…and then a year and a half. Seriously, we could have been to Mars and back in that time. He came in once, came in twice, came in three times—and then the whole thing just fucking exploded. We had it nailed. And we got that fourth star. We were crushing it, but it took that much time, that much work and extreme focus to make the grade. There’s a reason they don’t just give those stars away.
On the level of complexity where Del Posto operates, there is no faking it. And when Sifton came in again, what he got is exactly what the experience is for everyone. The menu kicked ass from top to bottom. Even the dessert program was like something from another planet—we found this kid, Brooks Headley, a punk-rock drummer who was a genius savant pastry chef. And it all clicked.
Ironically, the fourth star means less profit, even as it gains you serious national and international recognition, because that fourth star is a responsibility. You want it like nothing else in your life, but it’s a burden. You carry it like a weight. Every day when you make decisions, when you think about expanding, all you can think about is that fucking star. We lost a Michelin star through the years, and that was a big loss. When the Michelin guy came to New York our opening year, he gave us two stars. It was the first two-star Italian restaurant in the country—we had three two-star years, and then we lost a star. We’re still working to get it back.
It sounds crazy just talking about it. Fucking stars. It’s all an illusion, I suppose, but it brings a lot of international clientele, not to mention bragging rights, which none of us are beyond, except maybe my mom. We work in a field with some very competitive motherfuckers, some of whom like to rib us about our fourth star—because we generally root for other restaurants to do well. We like it when our friends succeed. We think it’s good for everyone when New York restaurants shine and reach new levels. We’re competitive, sure, but it’s good for everyone’s business when it happens. And then there are the others who don’t see it that way, they see us as the enemy, and then we’d just as soon take that star and beat them over the fucking head with it.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Don’t Shoot the Piano Player
Either you believe that the pope is the Vicar of Christ or you don’t, but I will say that meeting him and being around him turned out to be one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had. Being blessed by him, talking to him, singing “Happy Birthday” to him, spilling wine on him—there is an otherworldliness to him that I cannot even begin to describe.
When Pope Benedict came to New York in 2008, they needed someone to cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner for him for two days—“they” being the Vatican apostolate of New York—and they asked my mom, who agreed to curate all his dining for the whole weekend that he was here, to source the food, make the menus, bring the wine, hire cooks and a service staff, everything. She put me in charge of the wine. I didn’t ask for that job. My mother told me what I was going to do, and I listened. Sometimes that’s just the way it is.
Lidia had been grand marshal of the Columbus Day parade in 2007, which is a very big deal in New York City. Through this she b
ecame friendly with Monsignor Celestino Migliore and the archdiocese, who were naturally very involved in the Columbus Foundation, and the apostolate, who were in charge of planning the pope’s visit, and of course one thing leads to the next, and that’s how she got the gig cooking for the pope.
The apostolate’s residence is on Seventy-second Street between Fifth and Madison, an old embassy building, and, as you might imagine, it is beautiful and very rich in detail. The dining room is this extremely ornate affair with one giant oval table set up so the pope can have dinner with the Vatican secretary of state, who travels with him, and all the cardinals in the United States—there are about thirteen of them. The details are incredible, from what he wears—that crazy pope hat and those funky red Prada shoes—to the smell of the house. There is a lot of whispering. The church is so mysterious and cryptic, and there are all these freaky nuns running around, and it is all supercultish and weird. At first I was kind of like, hey, this is bullshit, a lot of pomp and circumstance, a real waste of time. It was my usual smart-ass way of rejecting dogma and conformity—it just seemed like a masquerade party. But when I got there and got into it, I changed my mind. The experience was just overwhelming.
When the pope comes to town, they block off the entire Upper East Side of Manhattan. Security was presidential times three—you had to walk everywhere for those few days; Midtown was pretty much closed to traffic. You could not drive anywhere in the remote vicinity of the pope.
Benedict had some particular issues about what he likes and doesn’t like to eat—he was definitely not going downtown to have the calamari at Babbo. His mother had been a cook, too. She came from southern Germany, from the Munich area, and of course there is a very similar sensibility in food styles between that area and northeastern Italy, so my mom designed menus that could have played on either border, to be true to her patria but also to invoke memories of his mother’s cooking. So she made insalata di fave, asparagi e fagiolini con pecorino fresco, ravioli di cacio e pere, risotto con verdure di primavera e schegge di Grana Padano, but also tenerone di manzo brasato, which is a beef goulash served with smoked potatoes, sauerkraut, and sour cream, and for dessert a classic apple strudel with honey-swirled gelato. And he totally got what she was doing and loved it. I remember there was a long discussion about his mother’s cooking—Lidia’s food reminded him of what his mom made. It was all very sweet.
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