It was an intense couple of days. The access was extremely intimate. Lidia was toasting homemade Easter bread for him for breakfast and bringing him coffee and milk, and he’s there in his robe, reading the paper. He wakes up, he has coffee, and he looks at the headlines just like every other man on the planet, and then he gets going with the pope thing. He may be infallible, but there is a real humanity to him. At this point he hadn’t been the pope for that long, and he had kind of a PR problem, especially following such a popular pope as John Paul II, but he turned out to be an okay guy.
The first night was His Holiness entertaining a group of American cardinals. There is a very specific dining room setup, and there is a protocol for everything. The pope always gets served first. He gets the food first, then the wine, and everyone waits for the pope. Pope, secretary of state, the cardinal of New York, and then the rank and file. Everyone else had normal service, but he had his own dedicated waiter and wine guy, and that was me.
The pope liked to work the room; he was a real schmoozer, talking to everyone at the table, and of course everyone kisses his ring, just like in the movies. He has kind of a sweet tooth, and my mom brought him this special dessert wine we made for her sixtieth birthday. She never shares it, but she brought some for the pope, and he really loved it. He’s not a huge drinker, although he indulged a bit and was having a good time.
It was Cardinal Bertone who asked me about how this wine was made, and then the pope jumped in, and it turned into a thirty-minute conversation, a very technical discussion, with everyone speaking in Italian. I’m explaining to them about picking the grapes in Friuli and the style of winemaking there, and the pope stayed right with me, asking questions and offering opinions. The pontiff knew a few things about grapes.
The second night my grandmother put on her best Lidia hand-me-down dress from the eighties and came to dinner with the pope. He had an audience with all the cooks and all the help. It was his birthday, and my mom made a cake—a giant replica of the papal mitre, aka that crazy pope hat. It reminded me of Monty Python, something between The Holy Grail and Life of Brian. And then after dinner, we went to some room that was either a study or the parlor, and he sat down at the piano and banged out some concert-level Mozart. The pope played a mean piano. Who knew? At one point I spilled some wine on him. Just a drop of red wine, but thankfully he didn’t notice, and I didn’t tell him. It was when I was filling his glass and pulling the carafe back, and one drop of red wine hit his shoulder. I saw it in slow motion. Bing! And it stained his vestment. Until now that moment has remained between God and me.
Every night the pope went out on the street to greet the public. There were tens of thousands of people, an ocean of people, waiting for him to come out onto the balcony. You could look down Fifth Avenue or Seventy-second Street in either direction, and all you saw was people. There were so many babies—babies with cancer, just horribly sick children—and they were passed through the crowd on the tips of people’s fingers, to the pope. And he would kiss them and send them back. Maybe they were healed, I don’t know. But crowd-surfing babies? It was the craziest shit I ever saw.
After the initial insanity of Del Posto had leveled out a bit, I realized that I wasn’t sleeping well and that it had nothing to do with the stress of having the sword of Damocles hanging over my career. I had severe sleep apnea. I figured it out because the only time that I would actually rest was sleeping on airplanes, sitting up. I would take a flight to California for six hours, or to Italy, and when I landed, I’d be as refreshed as I could ever remember being. I was basically doing the head-bob thing, which wasn’t ideal, but I was breathing more or less normally and getting into deep REM territory, so it was actually better sleep than I was getting horizontal in a bed.
I went to sleep clinics, I went to the doctor. A lot of my lifestyle was finally catching up with me, and I was told in no uncertain terms to lose some weight. I was as heavy as I had ever been, 260 pounds.
I was always a chubby kid. I’d struggled with weight my whole life. And I was always an eater. In my family, eating—this started for me with my father, but it also came from my mother and my grandmother—was a reward for behaving properly. It came from my father’s mentality where, when you’re facing starvation, what you eat validates who you are. Eating a lot meant you were doing well.
In addition to this food-as-reward scenario, there was also the unwritten commandment never to leave any food on the table, all of which came directly from my parents and grandparents, their having grown up in abject poverty. My grandmother wouldn’t eat until everybody else at the table ate, for fear that there wouldn’t be enough food for the rest of us. This went on even after my mom and I had become successful restaurateurs. This whole wartime mentality—that it represented your social standing and was a reward for a job well done—fostered this absurd, unhealthy relationship with food.
My mom’s approach to food is basically very healthy, as is the sensibility of the Italian table, but even now I think that there’s certainly an element of speaking out of both sides of our mouths when we preach it. We just eat too fucking much. Even if you’re eating things that are fresh and healthy, you don’t need to act like every meal is going to be the last one.
When I was young, a reward for a good grade in English might be a two-ton plate of hot antipasto. Later it was a suckling pig with Barolos among cousins in the house. When I was working on Wall Street, it was going out to a restaurant and having a helping of pasta and a thirty-six-ounce veal chop, followed by chocolate mousse for dessert, washed down with the best of the wine list. My whole life I have been buried in all the excesses of eating and what it meant on so many different levels, from big family dinners to holiday feasts, and the sheer quantity and hedonism of it were not only accepted, they were encouraged as a sign of wealth in the New World. I was very prone to unhealthy eating—when I was a kid, I would eat a fucking boxful of Count Chocula in a salad bowl with a quart of milk while watching cartoons on a Saturday morning, and let me tell you, if my wife caught my kids doing that, she’d probably have a coronary. In New York there are the warriors who go out to Balthazar to celebrate their conquests in the big city over a côte de boeuf at three in the morning. That’s food as a reward in another sensibility, and I was right there, along for the ride. It was all part of the living-large ethos of New York City, but I was turning into a complete disaster.
Del Posto was the apogee of elegance, and I was fucking slovenly. I’d given up the cigarettes, except now I was immersed in this trendy cigar lifestyle and was inhaling four Cubans a day. I had expensive humidors and boxes of contraband Commie cigars being delivered. I loved it; it was part of being the successful Restaurant Man.
I had a neighbor, a guy named Hank, who was a total aficionado of cigars and had these pre-Castro, aged masterpieces of the cigar maker’s art. And when someone gives you a cigar like that to smoke in his Greenwich mansion, in his perfectly humidified cigar room with some 150-year-old French cognac, after you have wet your palate with a sip of 30-year-old vintage Champagne while looking at his Monets and Cézannes hanging on the wall, that can turn your head around. It was all part of the same indulgence. And then we’d have another drink, another cigar, and head out to eat another cow.
The doctor told me if I didn’t stop I would have full-on type 2 diabetes in five to ten years and either die of a heart attack while I was sleeping or begin to go blind from glaucoma and start losing limbs. It was a nice picture he painted for me. He told me to take a look at my father—he had type 2 diabetes, which he did not control. He had glaucoma. He had poor circulation and neuropathy. I knew I had to change my life.
The real aha moment is when I stopped looking at food as an indicator of social status or as a reward and started looking at it as fuel for my body.
People can eat any way they like. I still think everyone should drink wine every day and eat pasta every day, and I’m lucky to have found a good balance for myself. I am an advocate of consump
tion—cocktails, wine, a Roman food orgy with steaks bigger than New Jersey and bowls of pasta that could sink a ship—but I can’t do it anymore. I love it when fat people come into one of my places and eat five courses. There’s a yin and a yang to it, of course, as with everything. I love gusto, but for me at least, that kind of eating had to end. Certainly I had done my fair share, more than twenty people will eat in a lifetime.
No more marathons of the Mario-and-me variety. Enough. And I had to sleep with this mask on that regulated oxygen, this Darth Vader contraption, and you can imagine what that was doing for my romantic life. But it stopped the apnea temporarily.
I started running. Well, first I started walking, but a walk became a jog, which quickly turned into a 5K run, which became a 10K, which became a half marathon, and then I was running in the New York City Marathon and eventually took it to the extreme and completed the world-championship Ironman triathlon in Kona, Hawaii, which was one of the most powerful experiences of my entire life.
In Italy over the summer, I met this guy Luca, a marathon runner, who helped me train and got me into some very good habits, and once I became a runner, then everything else took care of itself. It just improved every part of my life. I think there is a whole book to be written about how people look at me and treat me differently now versus when I was sixty pounds heavier. The world changed.
Now I am hooked—I’ve fallen in love with running. It has become a part of my life. Running for me is the most Zen thing you can do to begin your day. For me it’s a way to meditate, it keeps me aligned, keeps my weight off, keeps my eating regimen established. I had high cholesterol, I had high blood pressure, and all of that went away. Now I have to consciously remember to eat enough so that I don’t lose too much weight. Breakfast is a banana, maybe a piece of toast with a scrambled egg on it. The days of the thirty-six-ounce veal chops are gone. I’m not a big meal eater; these days I snack a lot more. I eat a lot of carbs and a lot of protein and try to stay away from processed food, although I eat a lot of chocolate and drink too much red Gatorade.
And then there is wine. I had to laugh recently when a blogger thought that he was being a smart-ass by writing that the secret to my success was drinking a bottle of wine a day, as if that were some sort of scarlet A for excessive alcohol consumption.
Which is complete bullshit.
The part about my drinking a bottle a day is true, but being snarky about it is uninformed, paranoid, puritanical, pedantic, and frankly just pathetic. Wine and food are definitely in the same category when it comes to their being used in reward scenarios, and of course many people have very unhealthy relationships with the bottle. But seriously, drinking a bottle of wine every day is completely moderate consumption, and if you have a sound philosophy about living life and enjoying your meals, about elevating the experience of eating every time you get with the knife and fork, you should be able to see that without my coshing you over the head with an empty quartino. If you have a glass of wine with lunch, and two with dinner, you could drink a bottle a day for the rest of your life and not only never be drunk but not even feel the effects of alcohol. A bottle of wine is nothing, hardly even a middle finger to the old ghosts of Prohibition. It’s actually good for you. Wine promotes balance and beauty in life.
I was thinking after I read that blog that maybe I should write a book called Joe’s Bottle-of-Wine-a-Day Method for Success. But now I’m thinking that one bottle isn’t nearly enough—especially if you’re drinking Bastianich wine.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
No, You Can’t Sit Down
Restaurants go bad when you stop paying attention to them. Of course, there are things that go out of style, but as I’ve said, we try not to be trendy. As long as you are committed to a restaurant and to keeping it fresh and vibrant, as long as you know what you’re doing and are watching those margins, you should be able to continue. Exceed expectations and people will always come back.
And if you do get hot, you have to be very careful not to get caught up in the whirlwind of your own success. It’s easy to let the swagger of the restaurant in its big moment affect you. It actually requires a lot of discipline to operate a hot restaurant. You have to step away just a bit. An immature or inexperienced operator might be high on the fifteen minutes of glory and forget the basic rules—when you’re hot, there are a lot of things that the market will forgive. What you have to do is keep the standard high and overdeliver on the market perception even when you’re the toughest reservation in town—especially when you’re turning people away—and then you’ll be able to survive once the spotlight fades. People coming into a trendy restaurant are usually so eager to like it that they’re willing to overlook a lot—shitty food, shitty service—because they know it’s hot and they think they are, too, for even being there. You need to announce that you’re in it for the long run, and you do that by leaning on value, quality, and the overall experience. People will get the message that you’re no flash in the pan. The graveyard is filled with the hottest restaurants in town.
Gramercy Tavern is a great example of a restaurant that has gone on for fifteen-plus years and has never been really trendy but is always fantastically consistent. Personally, I don’t like the hokeyness of it, I don’t like the Americana-purebred patina that the whole place is wrapped in, but it’s an incredibly well-run restaurant, and I do enjoy eating there. It’s a benchmark in New York City dining. It created a category, actually an entire genre—the American, quasi-farm-to-table, überhospitalitarian, make-the-customer-feel-great-at-any-expense experience. The food is honest and good and they make people feel very comfortable. Everything about it delivers.
In the long term, what keeps restaurants viable is just consistency. That’s what people want. This is a big Mario thing. People come back to your place and expect to have what they had last time. They don’t want to go to a new restaurant—people are creatures of habit. If they find something they like, they want to reexperience it. They want to bring their friends and show their friends how smart they are because they’ve found this great place. The minute you start changing too much, you spook them. Successful restaurants don’t close themselves; it takes a little push, like bad decisions, trend chasing, or willful indifference from the owner.
One Fifth Avenue was a historic restaurant with a fabulous location for years and years, but at some point it just drifted into obscurity. In the seventies it was a great hangout—John Belushi and the early Saturday Night Live crew spent every wrap party there, every week. There was a piano bar in front, and it was a classic Village joint for a long time, but it changed too often—it opened and reopened, and no one seemed to know what to do with it. One second it was a gay cabaret scene and then it was a seafood restaurant. I remember eating there when it was Clementine, a restaurant/discotheque. There was no consistency, but that address, that location, was fucking magic, if only someone knew the trick. And we did.
Mario actually lived next door, and at some point he got wind that Clementine was going to close. He knew the head of the co-op board of the building, and we were able to get the inside track on it before it went to market and grab it at a nice price. Once again it was a New York deal—we had the real estate before we had any solid idea of what we wanted to do with it. Frankly, we were making it up as we went along.
One of the ballsy things we did was to take the bar, which was in a very weird place in a corridor toward the back, and move it right up front. To move a bar in a historic restaurant is bad karma, but it worked. It all happened organically, and the space felt really good. We were physically very close to Lupa and Babbo, so it felt like home. This would become Otto.
We were fooling around with the idea of doing pizza—what we really wanted was a pizza-and-wine bar, which believe it or not was somewhat heretical. If you went to a pizzeria in Italy, you drank beer. No one drinks wine—eat pizza, drink beer, it’s like religion. Drinking wine with pizza really wasn’t very authentic, at least not for street-level Italians
.
We went to Naples, to Da Michele, which is the most famous pizza place in the heart of the ghetto. We were eating pizzas where there were literally crime scenes just outside. You see another side of Italian humanity there. It is not the enlightened rolling hills of Tuscany’s countryside, with guys in suede vests riding horseback and drinking Chianti Classico. This is gangs, violence, Mafia—the real deal. Everyone is on the take. It’s serious shit. People getting shot and knifed. If you want to see a ghetto, go to Naples. That is as urban as urban gets.
At Da Michele they make two pizzas, tomato and cheese, or just tomato. And that’s it. It’s a time-honored tradition. They use the same oven that’s been there for like two hundred years. It’s very minimal. And that’s the beauty of Neapolitan pizza: It is absolutely the poorest food in the city of Naples, it is peasant food, but it has to be done a specific way. The pizza has to have a big crust—they call it a frame—and it has to be blistered perfectly. And the inside needs to be soft. A cuore dolce, a soft heart. You go, you see these women, the way they eat pizza, they just fold them up and eat it like that, kind of like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, now that I think about it.
Restaurant Man Page 23