Restaurant Man

by Joe Bastianich

  All this übermeat is superfucking expensive, and that’s why there’s never anything else on the plate. We need you to cough up some more cash for some overpriced broccoli—and where else would you pay ten bucks for creamed spinach? And that’s why the markup on wine is also a little bit more. Your net, your profit as a percentage of gross, might be lower, but your cost is higher, so in absolute dollars coming through the door you make more money. In other words, you’re getting a smaller piece, but it’s a bigger pie. Your check average is higher, because people are inclined to spend more in a steak house—it’s the one place where you can count on the customer’s knowing the game going in. Steak houses exist for one reason only: for you to spend money.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Game Changer

  Eataly is the game changer, a fifty-thousand-square-foot emporium, which could be intimidating in scale, but really it is just born from a very simple idea: to put restaurants and grocery stores in the same building and to make the food accessible and attractive. Shopping while you eat and eating while you shop is a very powerful experience. Everything about Eataly makes you hungry.

  Eataly has already changed behavior in New York. Where else are you going to find hipsters from Brooklyn, bluehairs from the Upper East Side, New York Times liberals from the Upper West Side, and everyone in between, interacting, buying, and consuming food in a communal space? It’s that kind of diversity and egalitarian mentality that drives Eataly. In its very own Italian way, I think Eataly became New York’s first piazza for food and wine, and if we’re successful, we’ll change behavior all over the country.

  Everyone is there for the same reason—the passion for Italy doesn’t know any economic, political, religious, or demographic boundaries. Who doesn’t love Italian food and wine? I think that’s why the Eataly thing was so viral—every walk of New York life was ignited by that passion, and Eataly was able to create this magical world where all of New York came together. I don’t think there are many other examples of that kind of environment in the city.

  The Eataly project came along through my connections in the wine world. I had met a guy named Oscar Farinetti, who was a successful Italian businessman—he was like the Crazy Eddie of Italy, selling consumer electronics, stereos, washers and dryers, air conditioners, and whatnot, and he became very successful creating a big-box retail model in Italy that never really existed before.

  You have to remember that when it came to any sort of modern conveniences, Italy was always a little behind. People were buying their first washing machines in the seventies. It wasn’t that long ago that Italians were still gathering to watch television in bars, because not everyone had a good set at home. Oscar came along and helped change that, and when his business was peaking, he sold out to some huge conglomerate and began investing in his true passion—he comes from Piemonte and loves wine and food. He began buying wineries, cheese producers, mineral-water companies—everything he loved about Italy—and then he opened the first Eataly, in Torino in an old Fiat factory.

  Eataly is not about trudging to the supermarket, it’s about becoming part of this great experience, maybe have an aperitivo or a glass of Prosecco in the piazza, and if you decide that you’re hungry, you can think about pizza, pasta, or fish, then sit down and enjoy whatever you like. Or shop for the best ingredients and re-create the experience at home.

  Eataly is a revolution in how food is sold. It’s a giant grocery store where every department has its own single-themed restaurant. The vegetable department has a vegetarian restaurant. There is pizza, pasta, espresso, gelato—all have their own dedicated areas. For instance, there is no pasta in the fish restaurant; it’s all fish. If you’d like something sweet, there is a dessert bar, or great gelato. There are two espresso bars. By the meat area, we have a steak house called Manzo, which is the only restaurant with tablecloths and a complete menu and the only one that takes reservations. Everywhere else it is first come, first served, so you can move around, check out various offerings, flirt with what you want, and just have a blast eating and shopping. It’s a great way to spend an afternoon.

  Eataly was an immediate success in the city of Torino. It created something of an uproar, because no own had ever done this before. Oscar expanded to Japan, but of course he wanted to bring it to New York. Every Italian’s ambition is to be a success in New York, and he was smart enough to know he needed a local partner. He found our group—me, mom, and Mario. Who better? We went over to Torino to meet him, and we were all very impressed.

  When we got back to New York, after two years of searching, we finally found the perfect location at 200 Fifth Avenue, the old Toy Building. We signed the lease in the middle of the banking crisis of 2008, so we had a great deal on the real estate. It was a courageous move to do it; honestly, it took some balls given the environment. And there were a million challenges—we were retrofitting the lobby of a hundred-year-old building, a landmark space, and leases of this nature are generally very complex. This one was no different. It was hundreds of pages of tech stuff and building codes, insanely detailed regulations. And it was a union building, so all the construction was union—and trust me, the Italians didn’t really understand what union labor means in New York. Managing the whole process was like building a city from scratch, and yet somehow Eataly opened up in 2010, a year and a half after we began.

  It was like the perfect storm. The Italians brought this aggressive, intelligent approach to retail, to which we added our practical and effective way of running restaurants. It was that “your choco-late is in my peanut butter, your peanut butter is on my chocolate” kind of moment. Dave Pasternack came down from Esca to run the fish restaurant. And we brought Liz Benno, who was a cook at Babbo and a sous-chef at Casa Mono, to run the vegetarian restaurant. We brought some great talent in from Vegas—Zach the narcoleptic gave us a hand—and we brought some cooks from Del Posto for pasta. Michael Toscano, who was the sous-chef at Babbo, became the chef at Manzo. This was a big deal for us, and there was no room for error. The whole world was watching. And Oscar knew how to crank up the publicity machine. The opening was incredible—Mayor Bloomberg was there eating pizza margherita and prosciutto. We cut a pasta ribbon. It was high Italian camp. For the first couple of months, we had lines of people waiting to get in. Twenty-thousand-a-day head counts.

  As New Yorkers we are kind of defined by where we eat. If you tell me which restaurants you like to frequent, I’ll have a pretty good idea of where you come from and how much money you make. I can profile anyone based on dining habits alone. But Eataly is a wild card. I can’t categorize it. As at an Italian piazza, not only does the richest man in town go there, so does the poorest. Eataly can be a two-dollar espresso or Eataly can be a hundred-and-fifty-dollar meal at Manzo with steak and Barolo.

  There are a lot of people who are not happy with Eataly. Some of the old guard went public, whining that the ambition of Eataly wasn’t authentic or it somehow wasn’t done right, but meanwhile they were still hustling overpriced veal Milanese and tired frutti di mare pasta specials to blissfully unsophisticated Park Avenue rubes.

  The truth is, Eataly threatens many people in the Italian food and wine world, because once they saw how incredibly powerful and dominating it was, they realized we were going to be taking away a big chunk of their business. They said we’d be eating them, from Little Italy to Agata & Valentina, and all the Dean & DeLucas in between, but as it turns out, that cannot be further from the truth. Eataly has become the showroom for Italian culture and keeps customers returning to the Italian table.

  Eataly celebrates the producer of each product and acts as a link between the customer and the maker. There are no private-label brands in Eataly. It’s counter to the fundamental essence of the concept, which is communication about the product and about who makes the product and where it comes from. It is all very authentic and very transparent. If Eataly is successful, it creates a conduit. The objective is to know the people who grow your food. Know the
people who make your chocolate. Know the guy who roasts your coffee. I think Eataly is a fundamentally better experience than other retailers who private-label everything and stamp it “organic,” which it very well may be, but we’re not about putting a screen between the producer and the customer by wrapping everything in our name. Eataly is all about communication—why wouldn’t you want to know who makes that granola you’re going to buy? Or that milk or that yogurt? Not telling is like lying to the customer. Eataly is a brand, but that brand represents a culmination of artisanal food producers. They create everything that is inside Eataly. Eataly represents the culture of the Italian table.

  I’m sure that Trader Joe’s is not delighted with our moving into the neighborhood, either. They are a very impressive operation from a retail perspective, but as a wine purist I find their wine mission statement to be just kind of sad, because it takes away what I believe to be the purity of wine, the art form of making wine. Everything we’ve discussed in this book about what wine should be, Trader Joe’s wine doesn’t do. They buy huge vats of leftover wine and put their label on it, and even though those bottles cost only between seven and fifteen dollars retail, they are probably 95 percent of the wine market—actually, maybe Trader Joe’s doesn’t give a shit about Eataly—but to me what they’re doing is just reinforcing the industrial wine complex, which is bad for everyone.

  There are five hundred restaurant seats in Eataly. It did $40 million in food and beverage and $40 million in groceries in its first year. These are huge numbers, and to a certain extent it is going to hurt someone, although I never believed that the market is a zero-sum game—I don’t believe that if a customer goes to eat somewhere else, that’s one less customer coming to me. I honestly think that every time customers go out and have a good experience, that’s going to reinforce their habit of going out, and they’ll do it again and tell a friend, and then more people are going to be eating out. I truly believe that influencing behavior as we do has a positive impact on our industry as a whole. But I also know that when you get to something with the dimension and scale of Eataly, something that’s sucking so much out of the economy, you’ve got to be pissing people off. If I walked into Eataly and had not created it myself, I’d have to walk right back out, vomit on the sidewalk, and shoot myself in the head.

  We’ve been incredibly fortunate, but there have been a few hiccups here and there. Frico Bar is a good example of a mistake, but was it really a failure? I think Frico was just a decade ahead of its time—basically, Otto is the evolved version of Frico Bar, and it does about $12 million a year, so our vision was eventually accepted in the marketplace. Sometimes you just have to wait for the public to catch up to you.

  But a few years later, we did a project on Forty-second Street called Bistro du Vent, which was our foray into French bistro dining, and for our effort we got thoroughly spanked, financially and editorially. It was a complete fucking failure, with a capital F.

  Dave Pasternack had the idea to open his own bistro. He had come from this culture of bistro cooking, at Steak Frites for Andrew Silverman and later for Terrance Brennan at Picholine, and at the time there really were no good French bistros in Midtown. Dave was kind of smitten with his success at Esca, but this turned out to be a fucking nightmare. I’m not saying whose fault it was, but it sucked. Hard.

  Again, it was one of those deals that was more real-estate-driven. There was a space that came up in the Manhattan Plaza, where Esca is. This is right before we began Del Posto, and we had the time and energy for a new project. Dave would be just around the corner; he would oversee both restaurants. But it was categorically a disaster, from conception to layout to design. The first mistake was listening to Dave and placating his ambition. Doing a French restaurant was a stupid idea, and, unfortunately, I didn’t have the discipline or vision to say no.

  Actually, the food was great, but no one wanted French food from us. No one. It got a good review—I think Bruni gave it two stars—but it didn’t resonate with our customers, who wanted to know what the fuck we thought we were doing making French food. That’s a good example of where a solid two-star review didn’t even matter. The place was destined to go over like the Hindenburg. There was no saving it. I don’t think Dave really knew how to create a spirited bistro menu, and that showed. The wine list was kind of silly. The service sucked. Simon, who was the manager, was sprinting between the bistro and Esca trying to run the front of the house in both places, and it was a joke.

  We’ve done Spanish restaurants—Casa Mono and Bar Jamón—and they worked, but Mario has lived in Spain, and he really feels it. Trying to be French, though, was a huge mistake. The attempt was totally contrived; we simply weren’t capable of doing it. The customers sniffed it out and stayed away.

  It was a very frustrating situation. We wound up asking Dave to give up his kitchen in the new place. It was not a nice meeting, but we thought at the end that pulling Dave out might give us some chance of saving our investment and getting him back to being 100 percent Esca, where he was a complete stud. We hired the biggest gun we could find, a fancy-pants French chef, Laurent Gras. He was a rock star; in fact, he just received three Michelin stars for a restaurant in Chicago. Supertalented chef but a complete nutcase—he was like the insane, screaming French chef from some old comedy, or an X-rated version of the Muppets, clanging saucepans, cussing like a Gallic sailor on a meth jag, and scaring the shit out of anyone who came near him. The only good thing about the experience was when we finally admitted to ourselves that we were going to shut it down and we had to go there every night and try to drink out the entire wine inventory. That was fun, because we knew once we drank it all, we could walk away. But seriously, I felt terrible. It cost a year of my life and a million dollars.

  What worries me now is that everything I’ve talked about in this book, every message, every lesson, is going to be completely foreign to my kids. They have it too good, and I don’t know what to do about that. I bring them back to Italy and force them to spend time with the people who run our vineyards, and Grandma Lidia, of course, but they live in a world of prep schools and PlayStations. Their reality is Greenwich and Manhattan. Where is their piss jug and chicken water? Where is their Restaurant Man to kick their pasty white asses?

  I know I can’t replicate my experience for them—they don’t even believe me when I tell them I’m a cheap fuck, because I spoil them too much.

  My kids will never have to deal with buying papers from a fingerless fuck like Turtle, and I hope they’ll never be delusional enough to think they’re going to make money selling toilet paper in the Balkans, or feel that they have to. They’re never going to get stoned and bake bagels, thankfully. And they will never get to enjoy the miracle of seeing a contraband copy of The Analist on clunky home video—the irony here is that they can’t even sneak watching porn on their computers at home, because my wife is pretty savvy about that stuff and keeps the filters on, but when they’re at Grandma’s house, there’s no firewall and they can watch whatever they want.

  I hope that I can inspire them through my hard work and that they will excel in school and work just as hard as I did to get whatever it is they want. They are privileged, there is no question about it, but I can’t and I won’t hand them the kinds of victories that are bought purely with a family name, inheritance, and connections. I try to share every part of my experience with them, and even if they don’t always get it, they will never be part of the culture of skimmers.

  My biggest fear is that they won’t be risk takers. We live in a nation of pussies, but for me, playing it safe was never an option. It’s a funny way to live, but I’m still a slave to the turn of the card, taking the kinds of risks that fuel growth, and that’s become the difference between running three restaurants in New York and more than twenty-five all over the world. You double down knowing that there are no guarantees. Failure and victory really aren’t so far apart.

  Even though they are two generations away, they need to fe
el the influence of my mom. Lidia has been the greatest influence for me. She supported me with her fame and infrastructure but was never afraid to let me succeed or fail in my own glory. She shared everything, she was incredibly generous, but she knew when to back off, and thanks to her I have this limitless ambition, meaning I truly believe that I can do anything I want to do in the world, and that confidence has never failed me. The flip side is, I’m not as risk-averse as I sometimes should be; while some other people are conservative and will do anything to protect their business, I feel I can draw outside the lines and take chances. Mario deserves credit for that, too, but mom is number one. It was she who instilled in me, on a very practical level, the passion for authenticity and honesty, for being true to our heritage and translating it without taking shortcuts when bringing it to the plate. She knew that sometimes you have to give up a few bucks to make money next week. She was never about the fast buck or instant gratification, which takes real brains, discipline, and vision. And that’s what I try to instill in my kids—looking at the long term. You might not make it this week, but the long game is where it’s at. One of the best things Lidia taught me is this: “Never make decisions on your best day, and never make your decisions on your worst day. Make all your decisions on medium days.”