The Pig was our first sort of side project—we were given equity because of our role in helping launch it. Ken knew lots of heavy hitters—the money came from the U2 boys and various other people in the business: Michael Stipe, Jay-Z, Eminem, Fatboy Slim. We helped them as much as we could. Because of Ken’s quirkiness and his gang of rock-star investors, it was mayhem right out of the gate, but the mayhem led to incredible success. It was like a free-form party that went on until six in the morning, every night. Ken hosted, the music people started showing up, then they were showing up every night, and the party would just go on and on. Eventually we took over the second floor, which wasn’t really part of the restaurant. It became more like the private club.
The Pig is an amazing study in New York restaurants, because what any normal person was sure wouldn’t work, or anything that was instinctively a bad idea to a restaurant professional, always seemed to fuel the fire of its success. Intuitively, to run a good restaurant, you create order and systems, and Ken was intentionally plunging everything into total entropy—from staffing to hierarchy to how the books were run to how the menu was written to how the pricing was done. I would tell him exactly what to do, and he would do the opposite, and it would work.
He wasn’t hiring people, he was casting them—he brought in tattooed lesbian punk rockers who had never tended bar before to be his bartenders, and then he had them write the wine list. The maître d’ was the pizza-delivery boy from down the block. You would think that this sort of Bizarro World cherry-picking would have led to complete chaos. And it did. But that’s exactly what drew people to it; it really had that feel of the West Village gone wild. In the third month open, I was there with Mario, and we look around, and it’s fucking Bono, Bill Clinton, Robin Williams, and Jay-Z having burgers together, talking about saving the world. That’s the kind of shit that went down there. It had that magic of putting people from different worlds, of high influence, together over beers and burgers at 2:00 A.M., and suddenly everyone is talking about the Pig and reading about it in tabloids from New York to London.
We never hired a publicist—that’s something I learned from Mario. His view of publicists and PR people was that they’re just useless cretins who live off the fumes of people who actually do shit. In the beginning I didn’t necessarily agree with that, coming from a more formalized, structured world where if you had a restaurant, you hired a publicist, but now I agree with the fact that if you’re doing the right thing and your message is clean and pure, you can just pick up the phone and call whoever the fuck you want and tell them what you’re doing yourself. If you’re a stand-up person and you’re not a douchebag, you don’t have to distance yourself from the media. In fact, they’d usually rather hear it from the person who’s creating the mayhem.
Anyway, we didn’t need the hype—every band that came to town had its afterparty at the Spotted Pig, along with the groupies, the celebrities, the strippers, and everything else that comes with the package. Ken hosted that party all these years. To his credit, he has gone on to leverage it to major success. A lesser man could have wound up dead. Or worse.
Nancy Silverton, our partner and the chef at the Mozza restaurants in Los Angeles, is a very powerful cook. I’m kind of in awe of her. Nancy is incredibly talented, a master chef, and a very passionate and inspired baker. She also makes the best grilled cheese you’ve ever had in your life. It’s amazing. She uses brioche and sour breads and butters them with a brush and grills them till they’re caramelized and crunchy.
She started Campanile in Los Angeles with her then-husband, Mark Peel, then opened La Brea Bakery, which she eventually sold to some multinational conglomerate. She got divorced and left Campanile.
We trusted her implicitly—we never even would have gone into Los Angeles without her. She was a hometown hero; they loved her, they knew her, they trusted her as we did. She was a known entity in the critical community and in the public community. She was amazing to have as a partner. Her palate is as good as it gets. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her eat, but she tastes continuously all day long, and her quest for purity and flavor is unrelenting. She’s obsessed. And it shows, because the food is great. Also, she was very inspired—opening a new restaurant with us was like a big fuck-you to the life she’d left behind.
It is a complete pain in the ass to open a restaurant in L.A., because there’s no center—it’s like a conglomeration of five cities, and there’s no one obvious hub. We looked in Culver City and Santa Monica, which I love, and Venice Beach, which was still too hippie, too left, too out there. We considered Beverly Hills for about a second, but that place makes me want to barf every time I go there. It’s the most antiseptic, sterile, faux-luxurious place—it’s just the worst of humanity, the worst of retail, and the worst of eating all wrapped up into one. Except for Spago. Wolfgang Puck is great. For an Austrian guy who speaks like Helmut Kohl to become the number-one chef to the stars in this country is amazing. He’s a very savvy guy—he created this aura, everyone knows who Wolfgang Puck is. He never really had a regular TV show, and he’s still a celebrity chef. It’s kind of amazing if you think about that.
We settled on West Hollywood, because we knew we had to be near the main business of L.A., which is the movie business. We wanted to be close to the studio lots; we thought those were the people who could drive the business. We found our location, a restaurant called Amelio’s on the corner of Melrose and North Highland. It turned out to be two restaurants that were attached. One was a more traditional restaurant, and the other had been run as a pizzeria. It was already laid out that way, so we went with that and opened Pizzeria Mozza on one side and Osteria Mozza on the other, which is kind of like Babbo minus 10 percent, or Lupa plus 30.
We got the concept of the mozzarella bar when we were in Rome with Nancy. We went to Obika, which is a famous mozzarella bar in Rome. We loved the idea of the interactive—pulling fresh mozzarella in the dining room in a classic osteria setting, with a pizzeria next door, where all the wines were under fifty bucks.
In a city where it’s said that people eat only between seven and eight-thirty, we were full at six and full at ten. We had lines of people at eleven-thirty in the morning waiting to have pizza for lunch. L.A. has never really been known as a great restaurant city—everyone drives everywhere, so people don’t really drink much when they go out to eat, and they’re more worried about who’s in the room than what’s on their plate. Those are the classic L.A. stereotypes. But we found there was a real groundswell of people who wanted to eat good food and cared enough to take a 6:00 P.M. or 10:00 P.M. reservation. It probably started with transplanted New Yorkers and Europeans, and then Jeffrey Katzenberg started coming in, and then Steven Spielberg, and all of a sudden we had this whole wave of L.A. luminaries.
Nancy’s vision is counterintuitive to any normal standard of Italian pizza—it’s some sort of pizza she invented. It’s basically a long bake. Whereas classic Neapolitan pizza is usually a ninety-second, two-minute bake tops, this is like a twelve-minute pickup. There’s a very particular recipe for the dough. It’s crunchy, light, it’s very ingredient-driven in the topping.
Classic Neapolitan pizza is about mozzarella, tomato, and bread. Period. The top-selling pizza at Mozza is a fennel/onion/sausage job. It’s really more of a pizza concept than an actual pizza, but it’s awesome. People say it’s the best pizza they’ve ever had.
So now I’ve got two restaurants that serve pizza, neither very traditional—basically we disrespected the old Italian traditional pizza paradigm and really went off road on both Otto and then Mozza. It’s not until we get to Tarry Lodge in 2009 that we have our first wood-fired oven to make our own Roman-style pizza.
Tarry Lodge was, again, a real-estate-driven deal. My wife was driving to Costco to buy me a case of red Gatorade. Port Chester, where Costco is, is the working-class town between Greenwich, Connecticut, and Rye, New York. It’s where the movie theater is and where all the best Mexican, Peruvian,
and Chilean restaurants are. And she saw this burned-out building, the old Tarry Lodge, with an auction sign on it, and she told me she loved the location and that I needed to buy it. I went to the auction and bid, and bid, and bid. Some guy finally outbid me by a hundred thousand dollars. On the way out, I gave him my number and said, “If you choose not to go with the sale, give me a call. I’d still be interested.”
Weeks pass, the guy closes on the building, but then he freaks out because he learns that some serious baggage comes with it—it was built on top of a foundry, which meant that there were potential preexisting environmental hazards, and you had to quantify them in order to develop the property. There was a lot of risk involved, and when he realized it, he had a meltdown, called me, and I wound up buying it from him for a hundred thousand dollars less than he paid for it.
For a century the Tarry Lodge was the watering hole for a foundry on the Byram River, which like most big foundries had its own bar where the guys would drink after work. Following World War II, some Italian family took it over, and it became a dark-paneled, pool-table-in-the-back-with-the-Budweiser-lampshade-over-it kind of place that had a shuffleboard bar and served pan pizza. A real townie bar, and very much loved. I started asking around, and people told me they’d been there on Pearl Harbor Day, and on their birthdays and anniversaries and after their weddings. There was a lot of nostalgia.
We had to knock it down because the place was a mess, gutted by fire. We razed the structure and rebuilt it to look as if the new place had been there for a hundred years. Our vision was to cater to the sentimentality of everyone who lived in Port Chester and the surrounding, swankier communities, everyone who had real or imagined memories of the place. It was a very romantic notion, and even if some of it was a bit fabulistic, we were very sincere, and it was quickly embraced. So now Tarry Lodge is a trattoria. It serves great brick-oven pizza, plus steaks, fish, and pasta—kind of like the greatest hits of Lupa and Otto.
And this is when our worlds collided and the Tarry Lodge became a crossroads for us—before that we were more dogmatically committed to single styles of restaurant, very true to one concept or style of Italian restaurateuring.
One of the great problems in the business of Italian restaurants is that making pizza creates a huge internal conflict. It’s all about labor and disparate check averages. Running a good pizzeria and a good trattoria in the same restaurant is almost like having a back of house for two restaurants, with only one revenue point. In other words, you have a pizzeria kitchen and a restaurant kitchen in the same place with only one set of tables, and to do it right you have to staff them both with qualified people. But you’re getting the revenue from just one set of tables, so classically that’s a big no-no. But at a certain point we realized with the Tarry Lodge that…you know what? People want pizza, pasta, and steak all in the same place. Fuck it. Let’s just give them what they want. It was like when we went out to Las Vegas a few years earlier and realized that there were some battles that were just not worth fighting. It took us a while to figure it out: Even though we are fundamentally right, and caving in to the requests for deviations from our menu and the experience we wanted to deliver stood firmly against every moral principle we have as Restaurant Men and hospitalitarians, it was still not worth fighting, at least not in Las Vegas. We just had to let it go.
There’s an underlying concept that we all struggle with; it’s at the very heart of what we do. We came out of Babbo and went to Vegas with the idea that you should listen to us because we know what the fuck we’re doing. The customer is not always right. Good customers, sophisticated customers, understand that. It might seem ironic, genuinely, but in New York City, the toughest place on earth, with audiences and customers who are relentlessly demanding, they understand that better than anywhere: The customer is not always right. There is an openness and an earnest desire to be surprised here that makes it the best place to practice any kind of art or culture.
Our instinct is to protect our art form, and when customers try to take us so far astray from the fundamental concept that they came to us for, then they must be stopped. We have to be able to say no. You can’t come into one of my restaurants and think that you are going to reimagine our menu with substitutions or your special needs. You want to bring your wine to my restaurant? I don’t think so. The million dollars of inventory I bought and selected for my restaurant is not sufficient? Why not bring your own food, too? The wine we choose is part of the dining experience, and that’s just the way it is. If you didn’t want it, you shouldn’t have come here. Can we turn the music down? No, we can’t. This is how we play the music. In fact, let’s crank it up.
And that’s all great if I’m saying it or Mario is saying it. But once we’ve given a paid employee two thousand miles away in Vegas that kind of power over an enormous and very populist transient customer base, we’re creating monsters. So we’ve had to bend on some of the classic Joe and Mario rules. And that was a big learning curve. It works in New York, where we have the leverage based on our reputation and the loyalty of our longtime customers, but in the world of Las Vegas where it’s once-a-year diners, if we want to play in that league we have to be willing to give the people what they ask for and learn to suck it up.
In Vegas the dream was to open something like Babbo, which became B&B. We also opened Otto there as well. We didn’t do a classic Vegas management deal, which generally involves licensing the name and giving up some control. We wound up being able to own the restaurants, which made it much more attractive to enter the market. We had a good relationship with Rob Goldstein, who was the head of casinos at the Las Vegas Sands, which also owns the Venetian and the Palazzo. Rob is a fit, fiftysomething Jewish guy from Philly with remarkably perfect hair, five-thousand-dollar French suits, and belts and shoes that were obviously skinned from the same very handsome crocodile. He was a classic Vegas casino guy, and he was a foodie and a fan of our restaurants. At first we were courted by Steve Wynn to do something—he wanted Babbo in the first Wynn casino resort. Keith McNally was going to do Balthazar there, and that was a big thing, but Wynn was impossible to deal with. He wanted us to work for him, but he had crazy demands on how much we had to be there. There was no way we could sign that deal. We met Rob Goldstein, however, and the Venetian was one of those hotels that were open-minded to our ideas—they were very proactive in creating incredible restaurants.
At first we proposed to do just one restaurant. And of course they wanted us to call it Babbo, but we thought there should only be one Babbo, and so we decided to call it B&B—Batali and Bastianich. And the fact that there is still just one Babbo is a good thing. I think the only other city that might warrant another Babbo might be London. One day.
In the beginning we had a great deal of resistance from the spaghetti-and-meatballs crowd. They came in and didn’t really understand what we were doing—the menu was very similar to Babbo’s and outside the realm of experience of most Vegas diners. But Vegas has really changed in the last five years; the market has become more sophisticated, a lot of hip New York restaurant brands have moved in, and B&B is doing better than ever. It is clearly the best authentic Italian dining experience in all of Vegas, and people search it out. There’s only so much bad spaghetti and meatballs you can eat, even in Vegas.
But B&B is only 92 seats, very small, very boutique by Vegas standards, so once it caught on, it wasn’t that hard to fill. It was an anomaly, though—we learned very quickly that people who come to Vegas mostly just want to eat steak and drink gigantic red wines. So four years later we opened up Carnevino Italian Steakhouse, which has 280 seats.
We hired Adam Perry Lang, who is a master butcher and a very talented meat sourcer. We spent a lot of time analyzing the supply chain of beef—our ambition was nothing short of being able to control the source of the meat from genetics through cow-calf, through feedlot, through slaughtering, through aging, and right to the plate. Because truly, the only thing that distinguishes one steak house fr
om the next is the quality of the beef. It does not take a master chef to deliver charred and rare; it’s all about the product. We built a twenty-thousand-square-foot dry-aging facility in a bunker in the middle of the desert, and we put a million dollars of beef in there, all of it handpicked by our team. We have porterhouse, rib eye, filet, and we also focus on carne crudo, raw beef Italian style.
Everyone in Vegas wants the best. At Carnevino the rib eye costs a hundred sixty dollars, but believe it or not, more than half of that is the actual food cost, which as you now know is not the kind of margin I would ever look for.
In the eyes of Restaurant Man, the yield on dry-aged steaks is just a complete fucking tragedy. It’s the King Lear of menu items. Look at the math—the shrinkage on dry aging is horrifying. You could lose 30, 35 percent of the weight in a month’s time. In other words, a thirty-two-ounce steak, by the time I serve it, might be twenty-two ounces. And then you’ve got to cook it, and you lose another 25, 30 percent of the weight. It’s constant shrinkage. From the moment you take in the prime cuts, you trim them, cull fat, and when you dry-age, you have to trim off all the oxidized parts, take off the mold, and you are shrinking it again. And then you shrink it on the grill. By the time it gets to the customer, it’s a miracle there’s anything left.
We’re talking about meat that might cost thirty dollars a pound—that is, it costs me thirty dollars a pound. So if you have a twenty-ounce steak, it costs me fifty bucks to put it on the plate. It’s massively expensive. It’s an extreme level of hedonism—sourcing these proteins and aging them. And then there’s the time value of money, holding a million dollars of meat inventory while it’s rotting in the middle of the desert. I should be paid interest for holding it, never mind the cost of the facility I built and the talent I hired to choose it and care for it. I think everything we serve is dry-aged at least thirty days—we don’t serve any fresh meat. Personally I like a thirty- to forty-day steak. I like some age on it, I like the richness. I like a little bit of funk on it. We have some kinky steaks that have been aged up to sixty, seventy days, which is really kind of out there. I don’t know if you’ve eaten a steak that old, but it’s very heavy, very rich, and stinky like gorgonzola. It’s a bit fetishy, definitely not for everyone. But many people will swear it is the best steak they’ve ever eaten.
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