And, besides, Silvano is just too damn hard to understand.
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AT SILVANO’S, I had been treated to a preview of what life could become, had become for a time; but with no stage on which to play it out, it was fast becoming just a memory.
I was also alone with my thoughts again all day, thrust right back into that feeling of exile I’d had when I had first arrived here. The problem, of course, was that I was still a fugitive. Returning to Italy was not an option, at least not until my spat with the army was resolved, and so I had no choice but to call on the only trade I had learned since arriving in New York. I milked my network of downtown restaurant friends and found a job at Zinno, an Italian place on Thirteenth Street. The restaurant, entered by walking down three steps from street level, had a long bar, typical of the 1980s, that was almost like a diving board into the main dining room beyond.
Zinno was just up the street from Da Silvano, but I might as well have been on another planet. Just a few weeks earlier, as Silvano’s de facto partner, I had been on the verge of a certain type of celebrity. Now I was just another waiter in a uniform—worse, it was a tuxedo. Is this it for me? I thought. Am I just going to be another immigrant working in another Italian restaurant, doomed to live in the shadows, emerging just long enough to shower snowy parmesan on people’s pasta or present them with their check? Am I going to become another one of the Body Snatchers like Oreste and Claudio?
Zinno did a brisk and steady business, but it seemed too big and impersonal; to me, it couldn’t make up its mind about what it wanted to be. Was it a restaurant, a lounge, or a jazz club? It was an instructive counterpoint to Da Silvano, which had such a well-defined personality. Watching hundreds of people come and go through the doors each night, an obvious conclusion occurred to me: If this place can succeed, I thought, then I’m sure I could open a successful place myself.
With that spark of inspiration, I began imagining the kind of restaurant I’d open if given the chance, and a vision began to come together in my mind. I wanted to do a very modern trattoria, which did not exist in New York City at the time, a response to that place I’d been to in Little Italy and all those other joints with red-and-white checkered tablecloths and straw-covered wine bottles that couldn’t be farther from my Italy. I wanted it to be like the authentic Italian cousin who comes to visit his American relatives and shows them what a real Italian is, with his easy style—laid-back, cool, and sexy.
I also thought about the food. Most of the Italian restaurants in New York were divided into Northern Italian and Southern Italian, but nobody seemed to have heard of the regions and their foods—the succulent roasted lamb of Lazio, the light-as-air pesto of Liguria, the risotto with balsamic vinegar of Emilia-Romagna. Being a creature of Tuscany I wanted to celebrate Tuscan food, but in a very personal way, translating the cuisine I had grown up on and had adapted through my own experiences in Rome and New York.
I might have only built and operated this unnamed place in my mind, but one night Steve and Nicola, my old restaurateur pals from Da Silvano, showed up at Zinno looking for me. We got to talking and after a few minutes, Steve leaned in close and whispered in my ear: “So, listen, there is this guy who has a restaurant on Tenth Street. I don’t know if you want to get into it, but I think that the three of us should go look at it. I think it would be a wonderful idea for us to do an Italian restaurant together.”
This was a very big moment, but it also seemed somehow expected. When Steve and Nicola walked in the door that night, there was something in the air, an immediate understanding that they had come to find me. I always knew that they, like many others, thought that I was a big part of Da Silvano’s success. Ironically, while it was the food that I was most interested in, I’d never cooked for Steve and Nicola; they saw me as a front-of-the-house commodity they believed could draw and maintain a following.
We made a date to meet at 32 East Tenth Street. The restaurant that currently occupied the space was some kind of nightmare of a Greek-Sicilian winter garden, an elongated space so packed with fountains and plants that it might have been mistaken for a nursery. And right in the middle of the dining room was a staircase that ran right into the ceiling. A stairway to nowhere. Talk about a metaphor.
Something most restaurateurs I know pride themselves on is that, when presented with a potential space, they can swiftly process all the necessary information: Are the shape and dimensions appealing? How’s the natural light? About how many tables and chairs can be installed? How much renovation will be required? Does the bar need to be moved, or walls put up or demolished?
Sure enough, as we walked around the space, I went into an almost clairvoyant trance. I became unaware of Steve and Nicola, and the details of the restaurant faded away. I was walking in a raw space, like a black-box theater. The elements of my restaurant began to materialize, one after the other: There would be a mahogany bar where the stairway had been. I saw terra-cotta tiles underfoot and dark wooden beams running along the ceiling. The last thing I saw was the restaurant in the hours before dinner service. I visualized myself opening floor-to-ceiling mahogany doors out onto the sidewalk, where there would be cafe tables, and the whole front dining room would feel as if it were outside. For a moment I saw the cafe from across the street: I pictured a beautiful green awning stretched over the tables, the quintessential, welcoming color that you see outside so many trattorias in Tuscany.
It looked like a canteen, and a name popped into my head. Il Canti-naro, meaning the guy who runs the canteen. But I didn’t like the sound of it—it had no poetry—and right away it became Il Cantinori, which isn’t really a word, but which made a crazy kind of sense to me—the same way my mother’s naming of dishes like uova alla francesina made sense—the sound of it, an idyllic term to describe a Tuscan in New York who would operate a canteen and offer you food.
By the time I eased out of the trance, Il Cantinori was so well defined for me that I could’ve begun building it out right then and there. I turned to Steve and said, “I got it in my head. This is going to be a great restaurant.” He and Nicola smiled and we discussed how to make it happen. As the one experienced in real estate, and blessed with the checkbook, Steve would take charge of securing the space. I told him that, despite my lack of experience, I was sure I could supervise the design and construction and bring it in for a relatively low budget. We all shook hands and decided to move forward.
That handshake was our contract. Steve was a man of his word and I stood behind mine, and though we didn’t hammer out an official deal until after the restaurant opened, we never had any problems. We both assumed our roles and flourished in them: he put up $300,000 (and ended up doing more than leasing the space; he went ahead and bought the building), and I instantly became a general contractor. I had never GC’d anything, much less a restaurant, but my self-confidence was enough for my partners to trust me to get the job done. This was also a much different time in the restaurant business: people didn’t invest millions of dollars in the kinds of gargantuan, high-concept monstrosities they build today. With the exception of Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck on the West Coast, and a few people like Jonathan Waxman of Jams and Chanterelle’s David Waltuck, and a few legendary French masters such as André Soltner at Lutèce, here in New York, there wasn’t such a thing as a star chef. It was the quiet before the big bang that was about to take place in the restaurant business, and for a relatively low sum of money and some real passion for the work, you could break into the still-unglamorous profession, no questions asked.
NEXT THING I knew I was in the restaurant business. Or perhaps I should say that I was in the construction business; I had tiles in my hands and dust on my clothing and bolted out into the streets of New York every morning excited about getting downtown and realizing the dream of Il Cantinori. The first order of business was to find a way to incorporate what I had come to think of as the holy trinity of Italian style: terra-cotta, s
tucco, and dark wooden beams, all of which have since become common in Italian restaurants here, but at the time were unique. As I reminisced about home, these three things seemed to be everywhere: in the houses my family lived in, in local schools and restaurants, and even in the churches. The only thing that seemed more iconic to me was the omnipresent cypress trees that dot the hills and highways of Tuscany, but even if I could have afforded it, there was no way I could have gotten one of those into the tiny space.
I came to think of my new role as the director of Il Cantinori, shaping and bringing to life a vision for my customers. It was a great feeling, a feeling of working and producing, of making something from almost nothing, of taking an idea, an abstract idea in many ways, and giving it life.
The easiest effect to achieve was the terra-cotta tiles, which you could simply purchase, but the others required more creative thinking. An important ally was woodworker Bob Biondi, a real-life Geppetto in his puffy white shirts and overalls, who was a godsend to us. Bob had a gravelly voice and an unfiltered cigarette perpetually dangling from the corner of his mouth, but he was also warm and dedicated to any project he signed on to. I explained to him the wood beams I wanted to see hovering over the dining room: rough around the edges, like railroad ties; dark, almost black, like chestnuts; and with a farmhouse imperfection. Bob and I found a guy who knew how to fuse plywood together and then chop the edges to make them deliberately imperfect, and then ash and stain them.
Now I was dreaming of rough stucco walls, also with the same coarse finish you might find in a Tuscan farmhouse. But craftsmen with expertise in the application of stucco proved impossible to find in Manhattan; it wasn’t just a matter of going to the local taverna and finding the guy with dried stucco on his pants. Eventually, somebody told me about the technology used for jails, where they shoot the material out of a pressurized pump; it comes out in blobs like fire extinguisher foam, but when it dries it has a rough surface. I found and enlisted a company that specialized in prison construction, and they said they could give me just what I was looking for. They also told me that because it was primarily an acoustic material it would cushion the vibrations that bounced around the room. I replied the way any sane restaurateur would: “Good!”
Having pulled off my stylistic trifecta, I decided I had to acknowledge in some fashion that Il Cantinori was a New York restaurant. I hired a talented lighting consultant named Bill Schwinghammer, who found us beautiful geometric sconces and hanging lights. They gave the room a modern smartness that said this is a New York restaurant, proud to be here—just like I was.
Working on the build-out was also a validating experience of New York, of America: I got to meet an Italian-American mason, an Italian cabinetmaker, a Greek plumber, and an Irish electrician. I loved all the different guys I’d come into contact with from all these different places. I enjoyed speaking Italian with the Italians, but my English was good enough by then that I could talk to anybody from anywhere: If I had to tell the construction guys something, I’d throw out my chest and say “fuck” a lot. If I had to say something to the Mexican workers, I’d always begin with “mira” (look). Instead of saying “Good morning” when I walked in at the start of each day, I began saying, in perfect New York-ese, “How ya doin’?” I probably seemed a little silly sometimes, but I was just making my best effort to fit in.
Despite the fun I was having, I was also living a bit of a double life. I had amassed a small savings, but I didn’t want to deplete it. So, I was overseeing construction at Il Cantinori by day, then cleaning up, putting on a tux, and walking over to Zinno by night.
Eventually, I decided I had to say something to the guys at Zinno.
“I’m going to be opening a restaurant,” I told the manager. “It’s months away, and I promise you I am not going to take anyone away from here.”
The manager thanked me for telling him and then, of course, a few days later called to tell me that the owners found the situation too close for comfort, and fired me.
It was the first of many lessons I’d learn in the coming years. I had tried to be straight with the guy, to operate in good faith, but I saw that this was what people meant by separating business relationships from personal relationships.
So much for honesty, I thought.
BY OCTOBER, THE gestation of Il Cantinori was nearly complete. I spent every waking moment there, conferring with craftsmen and making final design decisions.
Once the kitchen was completed, I also began planning my first menus, focusing as we did back home on seasonality and combining the food I had grown up on with influences I’d amassed in my various homes since then. For about a week I locked myself in the kitchen and cooked day and night, trying to imagine which of the dishes I’d known for years would be most welcome by New York palates tasting them for perhaps the first time. I had such a hard time whittling the list down that I decided that the offerings would change daily, so instead of a fixed menu, my goal was to define a repertoire that could be supplemented by specials. Of course, there would taken-for-granted dishes like chicken liver crostini, ribollita, and pappa al pomodoro. But there would also be Florentine-style veal tripe and calamari in zimino (a stewed dish intended to show people an alternative to the ubiquitous fried version). For pasta, I’d have rigatoni alla buttera with hot and sweet sausage, peas, and a touch of tomato and cream; penne with veal ragù; and ravioli della fattoressa, a Florentine derivation of a Piedmontese pasta featuring a single, large raviolo built around a nest of spinach and egg yolk. When the weather got cold, I planned to offer stracotto (Tuscan pot roast) and game such as venison, wild boar, hare, squab, and partridge.
To make a statement as soon as customers entered, I procured a long hutch, positioned it near the door, and devised a roster of prepared vegetable dishes that would be arranged there and served at room temperature, such as stuffed yellow and red peppers; baked tomatoes stuffed with rice and mozzarella; fried artichokes; eggplant marinated in mint, garlic, and red wine vinaigrette; and funghetto-style mushrooms slowly braised in tomato sauce and oregano. The idea was that the instant you entered Il Cantinori, you would leave New York behind: you’d smell the garlic and rosemary from the vegetable display and hear opera on the sound system. By the time you sat down and were handed a menu written in Italian and your waiter came over and said “buona sera,” you would be transported to another place.
I wasn’t the only person taken with the world that was materializing in the dining room. One day, a young Jewish New Yorker named Jack Weiss, with a broad forehead, pushed-back hair, and deep love of his motorcycle, wandered in, enticed by the Italian setting. I hired him to be our bartender and we became fast friends; he’d often come in during the final weeks of preparation to lend a hand, even though we weren’t paying him yet.
Though he was one of our first employees, I considered him our first customer: if others responded with his level of enthusiasm, we had a hit on our hands.
I WAS COMPLETELY immersed in Il Cantinori, and so it was a bit jarring when I came home one night to find a note from Patty on the kitchen table: Call Your Lawyer, it said, meaning my attorney in Italy, the one who had been trying for years to resolve my conscription beef with the army. It was a poignant reminder of what my marriage had become; Patty was just the person asleep in the bed when I came home at night, and the ghost who had already departed when I woke up the next morning.
In addition to our incompatible work schedules, there was another reason I had drifted away from her: it wasn’t her fault, but Patty was a remnant of what I was coming to think of as my old life. You’d think I’d have wanted to be put in mind of Italy, but she only reminded me of those last tormented days in Rome, the flight to the United States, and my first days here. As a result, I tried to zone her out just as I tried to shut out my homesickness. She deserved better than my resentment, but that’s all I had for her.
The next day, I called the lawyer.
“Pino, we won the case!” he told me. “You
can come home.”
“OK.” I said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“When are you coming back?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
I hung up and stood there listening to the sounds of traffic through the open living room window. This was the news I had been waiting three years for. But as I heard it, I realized that it came from a world that I didn’t belong in anymore. I had no idea what to do, so I did what any good New Yorker, even a relatively new one, might do at such a time: I took a walk.
I walked down Third Avenue all the way to Tenth Street. As I did, I really started to look intensely at what was going on around me. I appreciated more than ever the familiar scene you see every day in Manhattan if you live here. The dynamic, the people. It had become so close to me. I felt the past trying to pull me back, but the present, New York, was even more powerful. Details I had never really noticed seemed profound right then, like the smells of New York City in the late summer, even the hot tar of the streets and the exhaust from the cars; it all felt somehow more familiar than Italy, even though I’d only been here about three years.
I arrived at Tenth Street and started walking west along the north side. Like most streets in the city, Tenth changes character every few blocks. Right about when you arrive on the block where Il Cantinori is, it’s as pretty as Greenwich Village gets: a tree-lined relic of old New York, with little boutiques and brownstones. And on a September morning like that one, there’s often a gentle breeze that feels more like it’s coming in off the ocean rather than from the Hudson River.
I got there and one of the guys was putting up that green awning that I had always had in my mind, stretching it tight across the storefront. The last piece was in place; Il Cantinori had come to life.
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