Speaking of Queens, home-style pizza for me was two slices and a small root beer for ninety-five cents at Jack’s in Bay Terrace, next to the Bagel Den. Even though the tomato sauce is industrial and the crust and cheese are kind of chemical and sourced from a landfill or an oil spill, there’s a certain pleasure in a great, dried, crusty, overcheesed slab of gooey junk food. And I like garlic powder, which is still a complete mystery to me. I have no idea what’s in it.
In Rome the pizza would be crisper and cooked through. You could take a slice with a superthin crust, and it might even hold up. And there’s also the whole concept of focaccia from Rome, which are basically what we call the Sicilian pizza, the square one baked in the pan. That’s really just a focaccia with cheese and sauce on top.
We wanted to do a pizzeria at One Fifth, but here’s the thing: We couldn’t put in a pizza oven, because it was this old, historic building and there were serious venting issues. It seems counterintuitive to make pizza at a place where you can’t have an oven, but we were stuck on the idea. We thought that sliced meats, cheeses, pizza, and wine together were the magic combination for a two-hundred-seat restaurant near NYU in Greenwich Village. So we came up with the idea of cooking pizza on a griddle or a flattop. You cook the bread, put the toppings on it, and then finish it in something like a convection oven. In Providence, Rhode Island, we had seen great pizzas made on the grill, so we figured why the fuck not?
The pizza was a compromised product from the very beginning. We were so tortured, we ate so many pizzas trying to get it right—hundreds of pies coming out of the oven. We’d be there all night trying all sorts of timing and combinations and cooking techniques until we thought we had it right. But we were fucking lambasted when we opened. Reviewers were calling it “matzo pizza.” They said it was like Swedish flatbread. It was brutal. Ed Levine, the pizza king of New York, said our pizza sucked. Even our friends were slapping us over our pie. But Bill Grimes came in, gave us a nice New York Times two-star—I don’t know how the fuck he figured that was a two-star restaurant, but God bless his soul.
Truly, Otto isn’t really about the pizza—the success of Otto was a combination of this very winecentric, accessibly priced experience, a quality Italian-food experience that pizza happened to be a part of. The place was flooded with tables of twenty-year-old girls. Third-year NYU students. Droves of them. The success of Otto lies in the fact that it is a lot of people’s first real experience with these products, done right—good prosciutto, a good piece of cheese, a good glass of wine—and consuming everything together in the culturally right setting. People are blown away by it.
And if it isn’t a new experience for them, then they’re thinking about that summer they spent in Tuscany when they were sophomores or the trip they made to Italy with their parents. But there’s something about the impact of those flavors on young palates that really opens up their minds. Otto is entry-level authentic Italian flavors. We have ten pastas for nine bucks a bowl. People got hooked.
A lot of what makes Otto so great isn’t even good cooking, it’s good food handling. Easy stuff—make sure your cheeses are not oxidized and never too cold. We make sure the prosciutto is the right thickness. We use antique slicers. Everything counts, everything communicates. Even the condiments—extra-sticky truffled honey; tangy, crunchy amarena cherries; and a hot and sweet apricot mostarda—are little Otto-isms, snippets of Italian wine-bar culture and Italian food culture, all adding up to a great experience.
The gelato is another thing that really helped Otto. It’s made by a crusty, West Village hippie lesbian. She’s probably sixty years old. I don’t like her very much; she hasn’t been nice to me. She’s crotchety. But her ice cream is unbelievable—she’s obsessively consumed. She’s a genius, a true artisan in the classical Italian spirit. She uses only seasonal fresh fruit, and everything is worked by hand. The Otto ice-cream experience is truly amazing. It’s a work of art. There’s nothing quite like it. No one in the United States of America is even fucking close.
At first the high tables in the front room at Otto were a disaster. The restaurant is divided into two spaces, the front room with a bar and some tall tables, and then a larger dining room behind that. People would come in and not know what to make of these tables, which were chest-high and completely alien to American diners. They would complain, “What is this? We can’t eat here! There are no chairs!” Otto was the first quality New York restaurant that forced people to consume food at a table without chairs. You couldn’t even get one if you asked.
We got the idea from the Autogrill, a chain of restaurants out on the highways in Italy, where people would stand up and eat at tall counters. We actually measured how high the counters were, and that’s how high we built our tables. The design came from the card tables in a trattoria back in Trieste, where the old men played scopa, drinking and slamming cards down on the tables. The tables had a little cubby underneath where you put your ashtray and cigarettes, your car keys, and your money. So you come into Otto, you can put your cell phone and shit inside the little drawer, and then eat on top. At first there was a lot of resistance—because it was different. But that was our business plan, to create a venue for people to eat up front while waiting to have tables in the back. Have some antipasto and vino standing up, then sit down in the back and order pizza or pasta. That was the idea: spend some money, then sit down and spend more money.
Eventually everyone got used to it, and now it’s considered part of the Otto experience. And the train board is part of the trip, too; it really adds some fun and maybe a bit of romance. When you come to Otto, you get a train ticket to one of the fifty-two largest cities in Italy, and then while you’re standing and eating and drinking, you have to watch the board. When your city comes up, you go to the front with your ticket and they seat you. That was my idea.
Opening day of Otto was New Year’s Eve 2002, and the place was still a mess. Typical Joe and Mario chaos. Oh, and I wound up in jail.
I had to go return a floor sander to this shop up on Lafayette Street. I double-parked, dropped the thing off, and then I was waiting outside, standing by my truck so I could move it if I had to, smoking a cigar. A Partagás No. 4 Robusto—I will never forget that cigar.
I was just waiting for the guy to bring out the receipt, and a cop came up behind me, gets out of his car, and comes over to me. “License and registration.”
I said, “I can move, no problem.”
“License and registration.”
“I’m just double-parked, I can—”
But he wasn’t having it. “License and registration.”
I’m standing there puffing on my cigar, a little bit annoyed. It’s New Year’s Eve, and I have to get back and open my new restaurant, and I’m thinking, Why is this guy breaking my balls? I’m just double-parked.
I stood on the sidewalk steaming my stogie for a full five minutes. I figured I was going to get a ticket for double-parking, but he turned me around. “Sir, please stand up against the wall.” He frisked me, cuffed me, put me in the back of his cruiser, and called a tow truck.
“Sir, you’ve been driving with a suspended license.”
“You gotta be fucking kidding me. I’m opening a restaurant tonight!”
“Nothing I can do, sir. Mandatory arrest in the state of New York.”
I mentioned that I was a restaurateur. Babbo, Becco, Lupa, partners with Mario…but he clearly was not a fan. The next thing I knew, I was heading for the Lower East Side—Elizabeth Street, I think. They put me in a holding cell, took my belt and my shoelaces, and locked me up with this young transvestite prostitute, a junkie in sore need of a fix and some fresh mascara who was completely strung out and puking in the New Year.
I got my one phone call—I called our CFO, Mark Coscia, and told him that whatever he was doing, stop and come get me the fuck out of jail. He gets my assistant on the phone, and for whatever it’s worth (zero), they figure out that my license was suspended because I’d gotten
a seat-belt ticket that my former assistant had paid with a credit card, or tried to—she put the credit-card number down wrong, and the ticket was never paid. And then I moved into a new house, and they kept sending the no-payment notices to the old address, and I never saw any of them and never knew that my license was suspended.
After I’d spent three hours in the precinct, the police van comes to bring us to Central Booking. They chain me to the junkie, who is now totally cold and shaking. They put us in the paddy wagon and take us down to Centre Street, where I’m booked, fingerprinted, have mug shots taken, and undergo the medical interview. Do you have AIDS? Are you an addict? I didn’t get the finger search, but that was probably just because they were starting to get busy. It’s New Year’s Eve, so they’re bringing in bloody drunks, guys who’ve been in fights, and a guy in a full-body, red-fur Elmo suit, crusted in shit from rolling around in the gutter. A real mess of humanity.
Then we were moved into a big holding pen, a real shithole, just like on television, with the stainless-steel toilet bowl in the middle of the room. There is piss and vomit everywhere, and every few minutes another drunk or drug dealer gets tossed in with us. I end up standing for the first four hours, because not only am I scared shitless, I’m wearing a thousand-dollar suit, and fuck me if I’m going to sit in a puddle of piss. Hours later some matron comes by with completely disgusting cheese sandwiches wrapped in plastic and little containers of warm skim milk. The first six hours go by, then the next six hours, and nothing. There’s this bizarre contraband-cigarette business going on that I can’t figure out, but it’s obviously sanctioned by the cops who run the place, and all I can think about is what the margin is, what’s the cost of the cigarette versus the markup. Fucking Restaurant Man can never shut it off.
I was there for over forty-eight hours in the same cell. By that time I’d made friends with a couple of gangbangers. And everyone asked me what I was in for, which was a really interesting question, because you’re in here with these guys who are drunk and covered in blood and there’s no law down there, and I’m obviously some sort of yuppie. I can’t tell these guys I’m in for a fucking seat-belt violation—that would be the end, I could feel it. But I heard one guy say he was in for multiple warrants, so I figured that was vague enough. When somebody asked me, I told the guy, “I’m in for multiple warrants,” and tried to scowl. It seemed to work.
Later that night Ray Kelly, the police commissioner, was at Babbo, and word got back to my mom, who called and had the maître d’ bring the portable house phone to his table—while he’s eating dinner. With a journalist. She told him, “My son is in Central Booking. Can you get him out?” He didn’t like that very much.
Mario called a detective friend of his, and he came down with some brass, all the way down to my cell—there were like four cops and two detectives, and they called me over. I looked up from the swamp of squalor and stench and was thinking, Thank God, but they really couldn’t do anything. Once you’re in the system, you’re in the system, and they have the legal right to hold you for seventy-two hours before you even see a judge. But they promise to get me in front of a judge as soon as they can. If I’d had a hundred thousand dollars in my bank account and someone had asked me to sign a check for a hundred thousand dollars, I would have signed it on the spot. I was that fucking horrified and sick from the experience.
There was this one young black kid who kind of became my buddy in there. I think he was arrested for dealing crack. He’d been down there for a day or two before I even got there, and when he saw the cops come to talk to me, he said, “Yo, this guy’s like a John Gotti motherfucker. He’s all mobbed up an’ shit, and he’s gonna get us all outta here!” And now everybody in the cell thought I was connected, what with a whole slew of cops coming down and talking to me, at which point I became the celebrity of the cell, because maybe I had some pull and I was going to help them get out of there. Which is a double-edged sword, because either they’re scared to fuck with you and want to be nice to you or they want to kill you because they think you’re getting some sort of special treatment.
Night turns to day and then night again, and finally they put me in chains and drag me up to see the judge. One of the friendly cops managed to get me bumped up in the line, which probably saved me another thirty hours down there. I pled guilty to driving with a suspended license and was sentenced to time served and a thirty-five-dollar fine.
I missed the opening of the restaurant. I missed New Year’s Day with my kids. It was the worst experience of my life. It was like living in the fifth circle of hell. It was really that bad. Just the smell—it made me miss my grandmother’s piss jug in Yugoslavia. It made me want to be doused in rancid chicken water just to freshen up.
One thing I found out was that after being in jail, you don’t just walk into your house. You have to stop at the doorstep and take all your clothes off and walk in naked so you don’t bring in any bad luck.
It was January and fucking freezing in Connecticut, and there I was standing buck naked in front of my big, fancy house. My wife went from complete disbelief to panic to just making fun of me. Pretty normal for us, actually.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
That’s Right, the Women Are Smarter
Women are better cooks than men. April Bloomfield is a great example of why—she cooks to nourish your soul and your spirit, not to impress you with how clever and smart she is. It’s very evident; it translates directly into her food, which is both very comforting and unfancy and yet exquisitely executed. Her cooking is unapologetically a reflection of her personality—that of an ambitious, young, extremely focused woman who cares very much about her art and craft. Men construct and create. I think women just extend who they are into their food.
Cooking is a male-dominated profession, very chauvinistic, and it can be very antiwoman just because it’s a difficult job being in the extreme heat in the kitchen, and what’s demanded of you physically is like being in a rugby scrum. You have to be a tough bastard in there just to deal with these other macho men who are breathing down your neck, happy to see you burn or fail.
The women who rise to the top in this profession have fucking brass balls. Start with my first partner, my mother. In the early Felidia years, she was hard-core—she was back there cooking up a fucking storm and taking shit from no one. She was never the chef-whites, oui-oui French kind of chef. She was always cooking more the way a mom cooks in the kitchen, and she never really lost her presence. She would cook the food and bring it into the dining room. That was the great transition she was able to make—cooking for you not as a chef but as a mother would cook for you, then bringing the food to your table. That’s how people still relate to her.
April is British, a policeman’s daughter who was raised in some soot-filled industrial town, and she came up by working her ass off—I think she actually was going to be a cop but somehow got a gig in a kitchen and cooked her way into the royalty of London restaurants. She is truly a cook’s cook. Her style and approach remind me of my mother’s, and that really struck a chord with me. April and my mother are the perfect examples of why women are simply inherently better at creating and sharing food. Everything she does is with flavor and taste and not with hype. She doesn’t return critics’ calls; she never pandered to the media, so they started chasing her. The way she promoted her food was with exactly the same integrity as what she put on the plate. She is the real fucking deal. She is famous for refusing to take the Roquefort off her signature burger; I don’t necessarily agree with that. I don’t like it that way, but I respect her willingness to deal with the flak she gets for it and for her belief in her own vision. It takes a lot to be so committed, and that speaks volumes. If she won’t take the cheese off the burger, imagine how she feels about the rest of the menu.
Gabrielle Hamilton is another hard-core chef who has been fantastic in translating her sensibility to the table. Barbara Lynch in Boston is amazing; she cooks like a ninety-year-old grandmother. Ther
e are a lot of women chefs in San Francisco—Traci Des Jardins and Alice Waters, of course. I like Waters and her overall message, but I think there’s an inherent contradiction in her attempt to be so egalitarian and populist; ultimately, she lives in a haze of idealism.
Mario found April when we were working on opening the Spotted Pig. She was working at the River Café in London, a very famous Italian restaurant, and he recruited her to come over to New York and join the team.
The Spotted Pig, April’s entrée into the maelstrom of New York, was born of Ken Friedman, who had enjoyed a pretty good career in the music business. He started with Bill Graham and worked with U2 back in the late seventies—the urban legend is that he worked his ass off, literally stapling flyers to telephone poles in San Francisco. That kind of grassroots DIY promotion was central to their success, and they didn’t forget that. They brought him along for the ride, but I guess at a certain point in the music business, once you reach a certain age, you’re kind of too old to be swimming in that pool and you need to find something else to do. Paul McGuinness, U2’s manager, was good friends with Ken and one day said to him, “Well, you like food and you’re a good host. You should be in the restaurant business.” And Ken said, “Okay, I’d like to be in the restaurant business.” These, of course, are all the wrong reasons to start a restaurant. Paul told Ken that he should recruit some people who could help him and give him a bit of legitimacy, and so he called Mario, and Mario started by hiring April. Ken really knew nothing about the restaurant business, nothing about construction, so I was coaching him and Mario was coaching April on the food and the menu, and I worked on the wine program and getting the restaurant built. Ken is a very smart guy and paid very close attention to everything happening around him—and pretty soon he was flexing Restaurant Man muscle.
In 2003 we were looking around for a location. We wanted it to be pubby, with a casual vibe, but also with food that was exceptional and not run-of-the-mill bar grub. Ken had spent a lot of time in London, had seen the birth of the gastropub and certainly the Spotted Pig was the first gastropub in New York. He found the old Le Zoo space in the West Village. It was a famous restaurant that had been there forever on the corner of West Twelfth and Greenwich.
Restaurant Man Page 24