“Here I am,” I said to myself in English. “I am home.”
I clapped my hands together, then crossed the street and walked into Il Cantinori and got down to work for the day.
IN MID-OCTOBER, MY jubilation was briefly interrupted when two hoods—middle-aged guys in blue jeans and leather jackets—showed up at the restaurant in the middle of the morning.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“Yeah,” one of them said. “We’re here to install a cigarette machine.”
“I didn’t order one.”
“I know,” said the other.
“I don’t want it.”
Ignoring me, they went back out to their truck and returned, hauling the machine by its base. They deposited the rogue dispenser in the corner, and one of them looked at me and said, “It’d be in your best interest to keep this.” Then they left.
I might have come from Italy, but I was too naïve to know that these guys were likely low-level wise guys and made a practice of installing cigarette machines in every new restaurant in the area. So, as soon as they left, I dragged it outside and put it in the middle of Tenth Street to be battered by passing cars. It was probably a stupid thing to do, but I had worked too hard to be pushed around in my own place. It’s always been a belief of mine that once you start taking your pants down for people, you never stop.
It was also, let’s be honest, the Vito Corleone moment I’d always craved. Lucky for me, they never came back.
WE OPENED IL Cantinori on October 23, 1983.
It was one of the biggest nights of my life. I took one last walk-through, stepping out to the sidewalk, then back in through the mahogany doors. All of those elements I’d visualized were right there: the stucco walls to the right, the country hutch, two massive mahogany columns in the center of the dining room, lending it a modern touch, and the triangular brass sconces on the walls. The walls were also hung with photographs of iconic Tuscan images, mostly sepia-toned portraits of turn-of-the-century farmers. Above them a long rake, a spade, a scythe, and other agricultural tools were affixed artfully to the wall. At a corner of the bar, in a huge terra-cotta planter, Nicola had designed a mammoth flower arrangement that reached all the way up to the ceiling. All of this was set to music pouring out of the overhead speakers: I played nothing but Puccini and Verdi and Bellini in our first days.
I might have been standing in Florence, or in the countryside south of the city, and for a moment I actually felt as if I could turn around and instead of looking out on East Tenth Street, I’d suddenly find the cobblestone of an ancient Italian via stretched out before me.
Nostalgia gave way to melancholy, but there was no time for either because there was too much work to be done: there was just me, Steve, Nicola, and two waiters on the service floor. Behind the bar was Jack Weiss, and in the kitchen was a guy named Antonio Cinardi, who I had hired away from Silvano’s. (He was the only guy I took from Sil-vano, although somehow a rumor spread that I stole the entire kitchen crew, which I always thought was funny because that would have only been two more people.) He was a grousing, grumpy, antisocial character, but he had the most important trait in a cook: consistency. Once you showed him how to make a dish, he could produce clones, over and over, ad infinitum, which allowed me to be in the dining room as much as I wanted, or needed, to be at any given time.
There’s a great divide between the opening night of a restaurant for the owner and for the people of New York City. As big as the occasion was for me, it was just one more story playing out in the universe of Manhattan, and the masses were unaware of our arrival, and so our first hours were very slow. Steve spent his time pacing in the dining room, or talking to Jack, while Nicola tended to the phones and other business. Whenever people walked by, and especially when they looked in, we all paused expectantly, hoping that they’d venture inside.
Although we had two waiters, when the first guests—a young couple from across the street—finally showed up, Steve, Nicola, and I all greeted them personally, and I served them myself. I was so eager to welcome visitors into the restaurant, into this world I had created, and to share the food with them. After my three years in New York, Il Can-tinori was finally my chance to express myself, and the room and the menu were my media. I told them about the dishes, took their order, went into the kitchen and got their food ready myself, then delivered it to the table.
I lavished the same level of attention on the other guests who came in that night. We only served twelve people and took in about six hundred dollars, but I didn’t care: I was in heaven.
Over the next week, there was an ebb and flow as our business was subjected to all kinds of factors over which we had no control. Sure, word of mouth delivered people to our door, and some became regulars, but much of our success from night to night was based on good, old-fashioned foot traffic, on how many people happened to walk by while hungry and take a chance on the new place in the neighborhood. And so one night we would do thirty dinners, and the next we’d do fifteen, and so on.
Even our worst night was a validation of the concept to me, but Steve—a more seasoned businessman with another restaurant in his portfolio—was focused on the bottom line. The two of us couldn’t have been more different: I had about fifty dollars to my name, so any income was good news. He had sunk a few hundred thousand dollars into this place and wanted to recoup his investment, pronto. Once in a while, I would perceive that he was feeling tense, and I knew he’d be more stressed at the end of the night, when he saw the numbers. I’d see him at the corner of the bar, smoking a cigarette and talking to Nicola, and I’d decide to seduce him. I’d go in the kitchen and make three or four dishes I knew he’d like—maybe an artichoke salad, rigatoni alla buttera, and a piece of fish—and bring it out, pop a bottle of wine, and say, “Let’s have dinner!” We’d sit there together and have a laugh and kill the bottle and bury the anguish of the present with a dream of future success.
TO RAMP UP revenues, we decided to open for lunch, but we did less business the first day than we had for our first dinner, as just eight people showed up. For some reason lunch didn’t produce the same volume or number of regulars as dinner, although there was one customer who came in quite often: an older bald man with a taste for classic, almost preppy, attire and bow ties, and a bearing and disposition that reminded me of Alfred Hitchcock. He sometimes dined alone, and he took a great interest in everything we did: he listened with perfect attention as I described the specials, and his focus on the food itself was almost religious, as if he were communing with it. I had no idea who he was, but it was reassuring to have such a devoted and appreciative customer.
Our fits and starts never got me down. I just knew we were doing something that was going to catch on. And even on our worst days, I took great pleasure in visiting the local markets—like Balducci’s on Sixth Avenue, which was at the peak of its powers then—and improvising some dishes for the menu. I got to know Andy Balducci, who had been a customer at Da Silvano, and would ask him to help me find hard-to-come-by ingredients such as trevigiano, the bitter red chicory. He almost always come through, and he became a major asset to me.
As more and more people came to the restaurant, there was a growing buzz in the dining room. Many customers became regulars, returning with friends who in turn became regulars as well. We were beginning to live up to our name, becoming a little canteen for the neighborhood. After a month or so, we were taking in between twenty and thirty thousand dollars per week, which wasn’t a lot, but at least it was a step in the right direction.
Even so, the fits and starts were becoming frustrating even to me. It had been more than a year since I had left Silvano, and though I heard on the grapevine that he believed I was siphoning off his clientele, I was too naïve in those days to have even been able to do such a thing. I had left Silvano’s so quickly that it hadn’t even occurred to me to copy down all the customers’ phone numbers. And besides, I wanted to make it on my own. I can’t honestly say that I wou
ld be so charitable today, but back then, I was still very idealistic.
Ironically, it was our least well-attended meal that saved us. I had developed a causal rapport with that mystery man, the one who reminded me of Alfred Hitchcock, even though we didn’t talk about much more than the food itself. After he had visited several times I decided that it was time we met, so I extended my hand and introduced myself.
“I’m James Beard,” he said.
Of course! James Beard, as you might know, was one of the most influential figures in food culture in the United States. His home, on West Twelfth Street, has become the headquarters of a foundation that bears his name.
He sized me up for a moment, then smiled broadly.
“We have got to help you,” he said. “You have got to be known.”
I didn’t quite understand what he meant by that until one day, not long after, when he showed up for lunch with a woman I placed in her late thirties with dark hair and a friendly, if professional, demeanor. She loved the originality of the food, and she returned several times. He never introduced her by name, but I could tell that she was going to be the way in which I was helped. And when the New York Times called to arrange a photo, I realized that she was Marian Burros, the restaurant critic for the Times, and that there was a review in the offing.
A restaurant review in the Times in those days was a make-or-break moment in the life of a new establishment. New York magazine was a close second, but there was nothing like the power of the city’s major daily paper to confer success or quicken doomsday for budding restaurateurs. There was no Internet, so newspapers were still in all their traditional glory. I guess it’s a good thing that the Times has a stand-alone dining section now, but when it came along it ended one of the great traditions of New York City dining: that Friday restaurant review. It used to really stand out, on the last page of the Living section, a weekly event for people who cared about food and dining.
Christmas fell on a Sunday that year, and the Friday prior, December 23, was the day that our review was scheduled to run. So late Thursday night, Steve, Nicola, and I went to Zinno, the place where we had first begun talking about Il Cantinori, and had some drinks at the long bar; then we got into Steve’s car and drove down to a little international newsstand at the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue, where I hopped out and bought the early edition of Friday’s paper. Back in the car, we cracked open the Times and there, on the last inside page of the Living section, was our review. The first thing anybody looks at is the stars, and we had two of them, which was a big deal back then because very few restaurants had three stars, and even fewer had four.
It was a great review, a real acknowledgment of everything I was trying to do. When Marian described a “hearty soup of beautifully cooked beans with delicious chunks of crusty Tuscan bread seasoned with garlic and olive oil” as “outstanding,” I thought fondly of my mother and how proud she would be of this place we had created.
The funny thing was that because of the holiday, we were going to be closed for the next three days, so we had to enjoy our euphoria in private and wait until after the weekend for the nonstop ringing of the telephone that typically followed a positive Times review.
THE REVIEW CHANGED everything: within weeks, all those great people I had met at Da Silvano found their way to our door and it was like the best of my old times and the best of the new. Next thing I knew, the restaurant was being frequented by all those art-world icons like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Leo Castelli, who lived right down the block. Andy Warhol also become a regular. People make fun of his mannerisms now, the way he dressed and the soft way he spoke, but I just found him real. And he found me interesting, too: “I love your accent,” he’d whisper to me in that wonder-filled, little-boy voice of his. “Tell me the specials.” And then I’d start talking and he’d close his eyes and sway his head as if he were listening to a piece of music for the first time.
Even lunch picked up, drawing the likes of Keith Richards and his wife, the model Patti Hansen. I loved Keith; he had a great sense of humor, and for such a wiry guy he loved his pasta. At night, Richard Gere became a regular, as did Tom Cruise and his then-wife Mimi Rogers. Even the mayor, Ed Koch, dropped in from time to time.
Just as at Da Silvano, many of these luminaries gave me moments to treasure forever, like the night Keith Haring arranged a Vespa as a birthday present for Vogue fashion editor Elizabeth Saltzman, driving it right into the restaurant to present it to her.
One of my favorite regular couples was Lauren Hutton and her boyfriend Bob Williamson. She was the great, famous beauty, the face of Revlon in those days, but Bob was the guy I fell in love with, a true intellectual who could discuss anything and everything. There were periods when he came in to the restaurant seven nights a week and dined alone, with me keeping him company as much as I could while tending to other guests. He’d linger until after hours and leave with me when I locked up for the night. Their relationship had a tragic end when Lauren discovered that Bob had embezzled millions of her dollars, and then to cap it all off he died of cancer. Despite his shortcomings, I still remember him as fondly as I do any of my customers.
We also became known to many of the big-money characters of the day: Fred Pressman, the patriarch of the family who owned and operated Barneys, a notoriously expensive, cutting-edge, and attitudinal department store on Seventeenth Street, ate at Il Cantinori at least twice a week with his wife, Phyllis, and occasionally one or both of their two sons, Bob and Gene. Financier Glenn Dubin (who’d go on to marry, then divorce, Elizabeth Saltzman) came in often and introduced me to the investor Paul Tudor Jones II, who was so brilliant and focused that he was one of the few people that I mostly listened to; I’d just sit at their table in rapt fascination at his next set of goals and how he was going to attain them.
Before he went to jail, Ivan Boesky would come in quite often. I never got to know him well, but there was one enduring moment that I’ll never forget: Once, while he was being investigated for insider trading, he was having lunch in the outside cafe area, and was smoking a cigar. A pregnant woman was sitting there and I watched as she endured cloud after cloud of smoke from his stogie. I couldn’t hear them speak from inside, but she said something to him, clearly asking him to move, and I was able to read the one word he spat back at her: “No.”
She asked her waiter for the check, and paid it. As I stepped outside, she stood up to leave and got right in his face, her protruding belly so close that her unborn baby could have kicked him, and yelled, “I hope you go to fucking jail!”
On another morning, my regular customer, the attorney Steve Kauf-man, called me and said that a very famous client was being charged down at the courthouse and that he was going to bring her in for lunch afterward. He wanted me to arrange a table for ten in the back room where they could be inconspicuous.
He didn’t tell me who it was and I didn’t ask. Around noon, I was standing outside and I saw Steve leading a pack of about seven gray-suited lawyers, briefcases swinging in the wind. They were acting as a cocoon for their clients, husband-and-wife hoteliers Harry and Leona Helmsley, who were up on tax evasion charges. Leona, known to New York City as the Queen of Mean, was dressed from head to toe in red: a bright red dress and ruby red shoes. Steve might have wanted to be discreet, but clearly his client had other ideas. A blind man would have seen her coming from a mile away.
I led them into the back room and waited on them personally. Over the next hour, Leona proved herself to be worthy of her nickname, beginning with the moment she opened her menu and, seeing all the dishes listed in Italian, squinted at me and said, “What is this crap?”
I was offended, but Steve was my pal and I wanted to help him out.
“I’m sure I can find you something you’ll enjoy,” I said to her.
“No, no,” she said, waving me off. “Just make me a cappuccino, with skim milk, and lots of foam.”
I should have seen
disaster coming because you can’t make a lot of foam with skim milk. Nevertheless, I took the rest of the orders and gave the cappuccino order to the barista. When I was in the front dining room a few minutes later, I turned to see that two of my busboys were engaged in a heated debate with Mrs. Helmsley, whose face was nearly as red as her dress. I rushed into the back.
“Where is the foam?” she was demanding. “I asked for a lot of foam.”
“Mrs. Helmsley,” I said, trying to soothe her. “You can’t make more foam with skim milk. It’s the fat that makes the foam.”
Her eyebrows shot sky high at my effrontery. “I have cappuccinos made for me all the time with skim milk and lots of foam.”
I went behind the bar and did the right thing: opened a carton of whole milk and made her the most velvety, luscious, foamy cappuccino she’d ever seen in her life. I walked it out to her and she clapped her hands together. “See! How hard was that?”
On the way out, Steve thanked me profusely. I shook his hand, then went to the bar and made myself a drink.
When Leona Helmsley died in 2007, she left $12 million to her dog. I’m sure that bitch deserved every penny.
DOES THIS ALL sound addictive? Well, it was. I fell back into all my old Silvano ways—living for the work, even more so because now it was my place and I didn’t have to deal with the ire of a jealous owner.
I was also feeling more and more confident. While it was Steve and Nicola’s money that funded Il Cantinori, I believed that my vision was the crucial ingredient in its success. Maybe it was the actor in me, but I began to feel that I was entitled to some public recognition. I thought back to how we had promoted plays when I had worked with traveling troupes back in Italy. When the production rolled into a new town, we’d hire a public relations guy to create some buzz, getting the show into the papers and bringing the right people to see it. There obviously was no shortage of public relations agencies in New York, but none of them specialized in restaurants. A friend, Susan Rike, was an independent public relations agent who represented rock bands. I hired her to get the word out about Il Cantinori, but what she was really promoting was me, Pino Luongo, and my American success story.
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