But you can only make work your entire life for so long before it begins to take its strange toll. My marriage was more of a joke than ever. I was back to drinking way too much and something inside me told me that I had to find some balance. I’d take a day off here and there, but being alone at home was still terrifying. I had no thoughts outside of the restaurant. No friends outside of the restaurant. Il Can-tinori had become my world, my reality, and nothing outside its walls held any joy for me.
And then, one Saturday afternoon in early May, I was standing outside the restaurant watering the plants when I looked up and saw Jessie, that dark beauty from Da Silvano who had haunted my lonely days. She was walking right at me across Tenth Street.
I had to fight to keep my composure. We began talking and I told a white lie, informing her that I was separated, when the truth was that I still lived at home. I asked her out and we had dinner at the River Café; the Hemingwayesque Charlie Palmer, who would go on to fame at Aureole, was still the chef there. I put it all on the line. I told her I was soon to be divorced, and my meaning could not have been more clear: I was ready for her to come into my life. Nevertheless, she left again, returning to her hometown of New Orleans.
I couldn’t get her out of my mind. It was true love at first sight. And it was also the beginning of the real end for me and Patty. Though I never confessed it to her, she knew that my mind and heart were elsewhere, and she grew resentful and angry.
It all came to a head every weekend. On Friday night, her personal time was just beginning but I was in the thick of my work week, and I didn’t want to be home anyway. So, she’d be left to socialize with her American friends, while I did my thing. This led to fight after predictable fight and early one Sunday morning, while we were screaming back and forth, I made the latest in a growing series of impulsive decisions: “That’s it,” I said. “I’m out of here.”
It was the same old story with me: sticking around was killing me, so I took off. I crammed whatever I could into two suitcases and left. I gave her everything I had in the world, all the money I’d saved up until then. It was like when I left Italy: my philosophy was that when you own nothing, there’s nothing they can take from you. But, I have to say, of all the people I’d walked out on in my life, this was the one I felt the worst about. She deserved better.
I CALLED JESSIE down in New Orleans and told her I was getting a divorce. She was slow to really believe me because I’d kept my marriage a secret when we first met. But I called her every day, sometimes more than once a day, for two weeks, trying everything from charm to outright begging to get her to come back to New York, back to me. Finally, she arranged a trip, ostensibly to visit her sister here, and we began seeing each other. Before long, she had moved back to New York and we entered into a long romance. It was life-altering to be in love, to have somebody other than myself to focus on. I was still working like a dog, but it was a different dog.
From the beginning it was a very intense relationship; for example, as soon as we got together she wanted to study Italian. We didn’t want anybody else around. We were just happy to be with each other.
We dated for a couple of years, eventually living together in an apartment on Park Avenue South and Twentieth Street. It was a one-bedroom on the eighteenth floor. I wasn’t kidding back in those Sil-vano days: I really did want for her to be all mine. I was very protective of my relationship with her. She had friends that she would see when I was at work but when I had free time it was just the two of us.
It was a wonderful time in my life, made all the more so by my first visit back to Tuscany. With my legal troubles put to bed, there was no reason not to return, but thanks to opening and running the restaurant and sorting out my personal life, it took a while to find the time for a proper trip. I was also a bit apprehensive: having left a fugitive, it was tough to truly believe there would be no consequences to visiting, but it was a smooth and uncontroversial trip. Seeing my hometown again put me back in touch with so much that defined me and my new career in New York, and reconnecting with my mother in person was like being given a new lease on life. Unsurprisingly, things with my father remained, if not quite cold, cordial at best.
Back in New York, as the restaurant did better and better, I had enough money to be able to partake in a great New York tradition: renting a weekend house. To find the right place, we began spending trial weekends in various towns upstate, passing the time antiquing and collecting little treasures that we planned to put in our house one day.
Before long, we gravitated to Long Island because I had come to miss the ocean. I found myself longing for Porto Santo Stefano, where I had spent those summers working for my uncle. We stayed at the creaky old American Hotel in Sag Harbor in the winter, drinking wine with the famous host, Ted Conklin. We loved the place in the off season because the quietude added to the feeling that we were hoarding each other’s company. We’d stroll the empty streets of East Hampton, catch a movie and a late dinner, and then return to the hotel.
So in the fall of 1986, we decided to spend some time by the beach, in the fabled Hamptons, a weekend playground for the rich and famous about two hours east of the city (or four hours on a summer Friday when the Long Island Expressway is clogged beyond belief ). The Hamptons are where everyone from Martha Stewart to Steven Spielberg goes to relax, be seen, and luxuriate in their palatial homes. The Hamptons always reminded me of The Great Gatsby, even though the novel really takes place in fictional towns based on Great Neck and Manhasset.
I never cared one way or another about the scene out there. What I loved was being near the ocean. It just made me feel good, so good that I didn’t even care if it was summer or not; the first time we rented in the Hamptons was in the off season, from Labor Day through Memorial Day, instead of the other way around. We rented a house that wasn’t winterized. It was chilly and drafty and the toilet water froze, but it was near the Napeague Bay, not far from Montauk, so I was happy to be there.
I remember driving around the Hamptons in those dark winter days and thinking to myself how few restaurants there were in the towns along Route 27, the Montauk Highway, which connects the dots on the Hamptons map from Southampton to Bridgehampton to East Hampton and on out to Montauk. With the crowds this place drew in the summer, it seemed like a huge missed opportunity for somebody (me) to really cash in on.
But it was more than the promise of business that appealed to me: the Hamptons made me almost painfully nostalgic, not only for Italy but for my youth. I remember walking with Jessie on the beach that winter, dressed in heavy coats and huddling together in the cold sunlight, and telling her about my teenage summers, painting for her a picture of those nights in the watermelon fields, those late-night drives, the sulfuric showers and falling asleep in the grass. Sometimes I would sing a few bars of “Sapore di Sale,” the song about that girl by the seaside and the taste of salt on her skin.
Jessie and I got married in August 1987, on a plantation in New Orleans. We rented an apartment on Horatio Street in the West Village and before long, she wanted to start a family. Things were moving very quickly, but much to my own surprise, I found myself ready for this drastic change. I was thirty-five years old. It was the right time, and the right woman, and we began trying to have a child.
But a funny thing was going on in the back of my mind: the restaurateur in me wanted to grow his family, too. And so, even as my responsibilities at home were increasing, I began thinking about opening my second restaurant.
SIX
Dirty Dishes, and Other
Things That Bring
Out the Beast
Armed with emphatic opinions, a talent for shaping trends,
and a volatile temper, Pino Luongo has been cutting a swath
of style and controversy through New York’s restaurant scene.
—New York Times, November 10, 1993
IT WOULD BE less than honest of me at this point not to address one of the things that made me famous early in my care
er, and which many people associate with me to this day: my temper.
When I was in my prime, my temper developed a celebrity all its own. As much ink was spilled describing my outbursts and obscenities as was devoted to my Midas touch and discerning palate. These things tend to get exaggerated, but I have to admit that much of what was said about me was true, particularly in the 1980s and especially when it came to my often tortured relationship with my employees.
The amazing thing is that until I opened my first restaurant, I didn’t think of myself as having much of a temper. Apart from isolated incidents with my father and with the Menichettis of the world, I was basically a happy person, rarely finding occasion to get into a fight or even to raise my voice.
That all changed when I opened Il Cantinori. I poured everything I had into realizing that restaurant, every ounce of time and energy. I gave up sleep and my personal life. I let my first marriage disintegrate. But I thought it was worth it. I knew enough about the downtown dining scene that I was confident that if I could make the place run harmoniously and keep the food consistently delicious, I would have a successful enterprise.
If only it were that easy.
You have to remember that this was 1983, when cooking and restau-rateuring were occupations that people ended up in rather than aspired to. So, it was difficult to find talented professionals to manage the podium, wait on customers, or even to bus tables. The best waiters and captains were the penguins who worked at the old-fashioned French and Italian places uptown, and I wasn’t interested in that kind of service. You hire one guy like that and you have to staff your whole place with the same type of professional—they don’t get along well with the younger, more causal style of American waiter—and before you know it you have a stuffy place that nobody below Fifty-seventh Street would want to set foot in. The dilemma was that it was next to impossible to find Americans who took pride in the art of service. And so was born one of the great and ongoing tensions of my life: the fact that my minute-to-minute success largely rested on the shoulders of people who had no personal stake in that success.
I was optimistic, though, at least at the beginning. My enthusiasm was so great that I believed that once I demonstrated how I wanted things done, and the people who worked for me saw my passion for hospitality, they would find it contagious and follow my lead.
Optimistic, it turns out, can be an unintended euphemism for naïve.
Let’s take busboys, for example. Bussing tables is not a difficult job, and I have always trained busboys myself to ensure they know what I expect. First they are supposed to remove the women’s dishes. The first dish goes on the open palm of one hand, the next dish rests on the wrist. Then you take the silverware from the plate on your wrist and move it to the one on your hand. Then you pick up the other plates and line them along your arm, or stack them. A smart busboy will pick up the plates with less food on them first so they can stack because—and this is a cardinal rule with me—there’s no scooping of food from one plate to another, ever. All restaurateurs have their own pet peeves and this is one of mine. My uncle taught me never to scoop food because it’s inelegant and sloppy, and it’s now part of my worldview. When I train busboys I make this as idiot-proof as possible: I actually scoop some food and I say, as though talking to a baby, “This is a no-no. A no-no.” To drive the point home, I shake my head from side to side and make very disapproving and severe faces. Sometimes I go so far that a trainee will laugh, and I’ll say, “You think this is a fucking joke?” at which point they stop laughing and look like they might wet their pants.
I also advise all new busboys that for large parties, they must be willing to take a load of dishes into the kitchen and come back for a second one. The reason is that if they pile too many pieces of silverware on one plate, they’ll do something that for me is worse than fingernails on a chalkboard: dropping silverware in the dining room. “Don’t do that,” I tell them. “I’d rather you stab me in the fucking leg.” As with all instructions offered to the often language-challenged busboys, I act this out, too, grabbing a knife and pretending to stab myself in the leg over and over.
For all of my efforts, I’ve learned that there are some busboys who just can’t help it. They will, no matter how many times the lesson is reinforced, no matter how many ways it’s demonstrated, no matter how many times you tell them “no-no” or pantomime doing a Norman Bates on your leg, scoop food from one plate to another, drop the silverware, and screw up the table in any number of ways. I’ll correct them, and they’ll nod and then turn around and do the same thing again at the very next table. At that point, I assume that the issue isn’t language or pride but an IQ deficiency. It’s what I call the “involuntary fuck you in the face.” They don’t mean anything by it, but it’s an insult just the same.
To preserve my sanity, I developed a plan B for hopeless busboys: after two corrections, I’d follow them into the kitchen and tell them, “Give me your apron, get your stuff, and get out of here.” It didn’t matter if it was in the middle of the busiest Saturday night of the year. I’d rather do their job myself than chase somebody around all the time. After all, I knew plenty about being a busboy; I’d been one myself just a few years earlier.
The truth of the matter is that this never-ending dissatisfaction is an inherent part of being a restaurateur, by which I mean a real working restaurateur, not just a dentist or celebrity who has invested some money. Each restaurant defines its own reality, and part of my job—my mission in life—is to maintain that reality at all costs. My blessing and my curse is that when I survey the dining room of one of my restaurants, waiters and customers swirling about, my senses are as attuned to the flow of food and service as they are to my own breathing, or to the beating of my heart. My eye will naturally train on the unhappy face, the uncleared table, the unfilled glass. These things offend me, because a restaurant is an illusion, a fantasy, and customers give themselves over to your vision the way audiences participate in theater or film, through the willful suspension of disbelief. A misstep on the service floor is no different from an actor forgetting his line, or celluloid catching in the projector. It takes the diner out of the experience and ruins the illusion. If you’ve ever heard a glass break in a restaurant, and experienced the way everything stops for a few seconds—then you know what I’m saying is true. As an actor, I tended to hold a grudge when a costar forgot a line, and as a restaurateur it’s no different: busboys who cannot perform at a peak level are a threat to my personal and financial security, and so they are eighty-sixed. It’s nothing personal. As they say in The Godfather, it’s strictly business.
But for all the busboys I canned—and yes, the bodies did pile up pretty quickly—I was never haphazard. In fact, there were employees who I responded to in the opposite way, showering them with compliments and money, like the answer to my prayers at Il Cantinori, a young, alarmingly skinny Chinese kid named Fuzzi with alert, scanning eyes and a Ghengis Khan mustache whom I hired a few weeks after the restaurant opened. Even during his first shift, I could tell that he was going to be my hero because he exhibited all the telltale signs of a master busboy. When Fuzzi cleared a table, it was like watching a show: plates moved silently from the table to his loving arms, the silverware never clanked, and his footfalls were as undetectable as those of a cat burglar. He exhibited all the signs of a true professional, like the fact that he never emerged from a kitchen empty-handed; he would go in with dirty dishes and come out with a pitcher of ice water, then go in with another load of dirty dishes and return trailing a waiter, helping him deliver hot food to a table. He was on it. At the end of his first shift, he came over and stood next to me by the bar, making a big show of surveying the dining rooms. He turned to me and said, “Me alone this room. No busboy. Me bring one more. Two of us. Whole restaurant.”
“OK!” I said, shaking his hand and feeling for the first time in my life that I might have just met the man of my dreams.
The next day, Fuzzi showed up with hi
s pal, another skinny kid, who went by the name of Mr. Chow and was every inch Fuzzi’s equal. I’d say that they reminded me of myself as a young man, but Fuzzi was one of the few guys whose talents exceeded my own: where I could carry a maximum of eight wine glasses in one hand (the stems go between your fingers, four glasses up and four facing down), he could manage ten, cradling two glasses between the stems of the others.
Before long, Fuzzi and Mr. Chow were permanent fixtures at the restaurant. They worked lunch and dinner seven days a week. They made good money, we cracked each other up, and they became my protégés. People knew not to fuck with them. In time, much as I had done at Da Silvano, Fuzzi became like my lieutenant, even though he was technically outranked by the waiters.
My busboy problems resolved, I was free to focus on my issues with the waiters. I could write an entire book on why I hate waiters; not the actual human beings who clock in and out, but the profession itself, which is one of the most half-assed ways in the world to make a living. Sure, there are career waiters who love what they do, but they are the exception. The majority are mercenary hourly laborers who are simply there because the flexibility allows them to pursue their acting careers, or some other artistic endeavor, at which most of them will fail. (Sorry, guys, but if you were going to make it, you’d have done it by now.) You’d think I’d relate to these thespians, but over the years I’ve come to resent them as liabilities. And many of them resent the jobs that restaurateurs like me provide: over the last decade or so, one of the most chic things a waiter can do is file a lawsuit with the labor department over some injustice that’s been done to him or her, such as verbal abuse, unlawful termination, or unpaid wages, but in most cases, I’d bet you that the person filing the complaint is a troublemaker, always disappearing from the service floor to make cell phone calls or smoke a cigarette and taking impressionable co-workers along for the ride. He probably got fired because he’s late or his uniform is never ironed or he gets catty with difficult customers, or all of the above.
Dirty Dishes Page 12