In sharp contrast to the nightly hubbub of the restaurant was the daytime serenity. I came to think of our stretch of the pond as my own private saltwater lake. There were ducks, and sometimes I’d see a swan floating along. I rented a few canoes from a guy who had a roadside concession across the street so I and the staff could paddle around during breaks. It was everything a man could dream of.
LIKE ANY NEW restaurant, we had quirks to work out: one was that the clientele began taking the summertime theme to extremes. Many of our customers understood the spirit of Sapore and would arrive in casual but elegant attire, but others would show up looking as though they had just come from the beach, which I’m sure many of them had. Before too long, the customers wearing shorts, sandals, and bathing suits were becoming the majority.
So we made a new rule: No shorts. Just like at the Vatican.
One night, Ralph Lauren, driving home with his wife and a few friends, spontaneously decided to drop in for dinner. The friends met our dress code, but Ralph was wearing shorts.
I wasn’t there at the time, and I’d guess that Ralph looked every inch his stylish self, even in shorts. But without me there to make an executive decision, Ariel was loath to make an exception to our dress policy. We didn’t keep any pants in the cloakroom the way some restaurants keep jackets. So my quick-thinking maître d’ ran into the kitchen and emerged with a pair of black-and-white checkered chef pants, presenting them to Ralph Lauren.
Gentleman that he is, Ralph disappeared good-naturedly into the men’s room and emerged in his new outfit.
When I arrived and heard what had happened, I was mortified. But Ralph is a sport. He said it was no big deal and that he was happy to comply. And you know what? He looked good. He looked so good that I’m surprised that chef pants didn’t become the next big fashion craze out there. Even in the Hamptons, I guess, absurdity has its limits.
THAT’S THE WAY it was. We were awash in celebrity and I was becoming friendly with even more people I’d heard and read about when I was still living in Rome. One of my favorite times each week was Saturday afternoon, the eye of the storm between Friday night and Saturday night. It was also when many of our celebrity customers came in for lunch, to enjoy the restaurant’s patio away from the eyes of the masses.
One Saturday afternoon, we were hosting Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley, along with their little daughter Alexa Ray, and another couple that have since gone their separate ways, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger.
I was busy in the kitchen, getting ready for the evening service. The only management presence in the dining room was the current occupant of our revolving-door position of receptionist-hostess.
At about three o’clock, I began thinking about the dinner hour and went into the dining room to see if Ariel had shown up yet. There he was, the picture of Hamptons style, in a white linen suit with brown leather slip-on shoes.
With a list of that night’s reservations in hand, we walked the floor together, determining who we’d seat where, a very political exercise at a hot spot like Sapore. We also personally greeted Alec and Kim and Billy and Christie. It was another of those perfect, lazy afternoons at Sapore, with Alexa Ray asleep in her father’s lap, and him and Christie sipping wine as though they were hanging out on their own back porch at home.
As we made the rounds, I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, pedaling up to the entrance on a bicycle, a woman in her late fifties, or so I’d have guessed. It was tough to tell: she was wearing a straw hat and sunglasses, so it was hard to see her face.
But something about her seemed familiar.
We couldn’t hear the exchange that followed but from the gestures—the woman spoke, the reservationist shook her head from side to side, the woman shrugged happily, hopped on her bike and left—we could tell that she had been denied a reservation.
I had a nagging suspicion that something wasn’t right. I sent Ariel over to see what had happened. He returned and informed me that she was looking for a table for four for eight o’clock.
“And?” I asked.
“The girl told her that we were fully—”
I realized who it was.
“Jesus Christ, Ariel, that was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.”
He considered that for a moment.
“Oh my God, Pino! You’re right!”
I pointed to the highway: “Go after her!”
Ariel’s jaw dropped, but he didn’t move.
“We cannot allow this to happen. Go!”
“Pino, she’s gone down the highway.”
“So go chase her down the fucking highway! This cannot happen. Not here!”
With a shrug, Ariel began walking toward the road.
“You’re not going to get her if you walk. Run!”
Ariel began running in his immaculate white linen suit, slipping his jacket off as he started. Our driveway was covered with gravel, so he couldn’t really pick up any speed until he got to the highway.
I went out to the edge of my property and looked down the sloping highway. I could see the former First Lady about five hundred yards away, stopped at an intersection, straddling her bike, and behind her, coming up fast, my own Latin Gatsby, running down the road after her to gallantly offer her a table.
She was about to start pedaling again, but he called out to her and she stopped and turned around. They spoke. She nodded and he waved good-bye.
Ariel returned to our parking lot, drenched in sweat. He reported his success. She had accepted the reservation, and his apology.
I was so happy. I had always admired Jackie O. Not just her style, but also her strength after her husband was assassinated, and all those stories about how she had raised her children, Caroline and John Jr., to be humble and polite. She clearly lived those values herself. I mean, here she was in the Hamptons, where everyone wants you to know who they are, and she didn’t even divulge her identity to get a table at a restaurant.
I had to compliment Ariel on his triumph: “I’m proud of you, Ariel. You did what the best maître d’ in the Hamptons should do, and you should feel good about it.”
Despite my good feelings toward him, the incident pointed out one of the few problems that hung over us like a cloud: because the Hamp-tons is basically a very fashionable, sophisticated area sequestered within a working-class region, the supply of capable front-of-the-house talent was severely limited in those days. We were the first restaurant of its size and stature out there, and so we were constantly hiring and firing hosts, hostesses, and other employees—we just couldn’t have reservationists who didn’t recognize Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis!—so I was presented with a challenge that would endure through the entire lifespan of Sapore di Mare: we had great difficulty finding quality support in the kitchen or the dining room. It quickly became apparent to me that no matter how many ads we ran in the paper, and no matter how many phone calls I made, we were going to have trouble filling all the positions.
As for the few employees that we did manage to find—locals who had worked in diners and greasy-spoon joints—they could barely handle the pressure. Most of them stopped showing up for work after a few days, never to be heard from again.
Determined to maintain my growing reputation, I told Ariel to keep the crowd to a manageable size, even turning away business if necessary. And to make sure that he didn’t cave into the pressure of clamoring customers, I asked Jessie, then six months pregnant, to work the door with him.
This was a sound enough plan, but the Hamptons in the summer are populated with everyone who had ever set food in Il Cantinori, or so it seemed. So, as the hour approached eight o’clock each evening, the phone would begin to ring off the hook. Jessie would dutifully tell all comers that we were fully booked. In most towns, that would have been the end of the discussion.
But not in the Hamptons.
In fact, there was no discussion. A typical exchange went like this:
Ring. Ring.
JESSIE: Sapore di Mare, good evening.
/> CUSTOMER: This is Ms. So-and-So. Do you have a table
available at nine P.M.?
JESSIE: No, I’m sorry, we’re fully booked.
CUSTOMER: Just tell Pino we’re coming over.
JESSIE: But . . .
Click. Dial tone. Sound of Jessie slamming the phone down.
“Tell Pino we’re coming over” was the most-uttered phrase in the Hamptons that summer, along with “I’m a friend of Pino’s,” favored by guests who didn’t even bother to call and instead just showed up—their version of “Open Sesame.”
About once a night, poor Jessie would come swinging through the door to the kitchen, which opened right onto the pasta station where I usually cooked. She would tell me of the latest inhuman treatment she had received, and then sulk back to the dining room.
It broke my heart to see her looking so sad and mad, but I didn’t know what else to do. I needed her out there.
One night, I was going about my business at the pasta station when I had that sixth-sense intuition, unique to restaurateurs, that I had better go check on the dining room. I did: everything looked fine. But my radar wasn’t totally busted. Sitting on the reservation desk was Jessie, staring off into space, shell-shocked.
It was clear that this couldn’t continue. All that lay ahead for me was trouble: a series of tense battles on the home front. Moments later, as I watched my dear wife withstand an earful of abuse from yet another unannounced group, I decided that I had no choice. I had to relieve her of her pain.
But I couldn’t bring myself to tell her.
At the end of the night, I pulled Ariel aside and told him, “Tomorrow morning, the moment you get up, find me a new hostess. Don’t go to the beach. Don’t come in here. Get on the phone and find me someone and have her here by three thirty”—an hour before Jessie’s scheduled arrival.
The next day, Ariel had a new hostess installed, as directed. When Jessie showed up, she jerked a thumb in the girl’s direction and asked Ariel what was going on.
“Pino had to replace you,” he said, trying to sound soothing on my behalf. “It was too much stress for you.”
“Oh really?”
Jessie came swinging into the kitchen and stared at me with a look so cold that the pasta water stopped boiling: “You know, I really don’t care about working here,” she screamed. “I was trying to help you out. But you . . . you . . . you coward. You couldn’t tell me yourself?”
“That’s right,” I said. “I couldn’t do it. But what’s important is I’d rather keep you as a wife than as an employee.”
One of the things I’ve always loved about Jessie is that she can call me on my bullshit. (In my humble opinion, this is something all real men love in the women they choose to spend their lives with.) She spun around in a rage and stomped out of the kitchen. But she was home that night when I got back from work, and though she didn’t admit it right away, she was happier.
The problems extended to the lower ranks as well. Late in the summer, when I was in the city running Il Cantinori during the week, I began to get frantic calls from Mark, increasingly concerned by our lack of help. Our employment problems continued unabated and we were only getting busier and busier. If I had known what an ongoing headache this would be, I probably never would have opened the restaurant.
I was desperate, so when two of my regular customers (too ridiculously affluent and influential to name) asked me to give their home-from-college kids—we’ll call them Mitch and Missy—summer jobs, I thought sure, why not? And I hired them as a busboy and busgirl.
My thinking was that these kids were so well traveled and sophisticated that they’d bring an ingrained sense of good service to their work. Little did I imagine that they might be completely uninterested in the quality of that work.
But I got a quick lesson when Missy showed up for her first day in her BMW convertible and parked it in the lot next to the highway. Our innkeeper, a very serious old Dominican, instructed her to park it out back; the front lot was for customers. “Oh, Chico,” she said to him without breaking stride, her blonde hair flowing behind her in the summer wind, “I am a customer.”
Instead of showing up at five minutes to four, like the employees who needed the job, she and Mitch showed up at four thirty, fresh from the beach, unkempt and smelling of the sea and sand.
“You, boy,” I said to the young man. “Do you have a watch?”
“Yes, Mr. Luongo.”
“What time are you supposed to be here?”
“Four o’clock.”
“And what time is it?”
He looked down at his Rolex. “Four thirty.”
“So?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Luongo. I fell asleep at the beach.”
I looked at his unshaven face, his salt-caked hair. “What are you going to do about a shower?”
“Oh, I don’t need a shower, Mr. Luongo. I’m just a busboy.”
“Just a busboy? Look at these other people who are ‘just busboys,’ ” I said, gesturing at the well-groomed crew in freshly cleaned black slacks and white shirts: my proud, hard-working team.
“How many times have you come to my restaurant? Do the busboys look like this?” I pointed at him, to make sure he understood what this meant.
“You’re right, Mr. Luongo. I’m sorry. It’ll never happen again.”
Once they got to work, things weren’t much better. Missy had an aversion to dirty dishes, an unfortunate trait in a busgirl. When she approached an abandoned table, with its half-eaten pastas, napkins dropped in sauce, and lipstick on the wine glasses, she would scrunch up her face and hold her breath. Then, to avoid breaking a nail, she would only pick up one or two dishes at a time, scurry to the kitchen with them, and come back for the next puny load.
On a scale of one to ten, I’d say she was a minus ten.
As if I didn’t have enough problems to deal with, every time I left the kitchen, I’d find these kids doing something unbelievable. Like the time I discovered them in the middle of Saturday night service, passing a cigarette back and forth in the parking lot out behind the kitchen. Or when they took a break that same night to sit at the bar and have a cocktail.
When I saw that, I pulled them aside.
“People, listen. In Italy, we have an expression that if you look the other way three times, you are stupid. And I’m starting to feel like an idiot.”
I presented them with a choice: “I’ll give you one more chance. Be here at four o’clock tomorrow. Or else.”
Mitch—he’s probably a lawyer today—jumped right in. “Yes, Mr. Luongo. That’s perfect. I feel like the past few days, we’ve just been breaking the ice.”
“Listen,” I said. “We’re not breaking the ice. You’re breaking my balls. Now get out of here.”
The next day, with a fool’s optimism, I pushed myself all morning and into the afternoon. I got my work done early so I could spend some time with Mitch and Missy when they arrived, show them how I expected them to work, turn them into the kind of proud workers I respected.
I had been a busboy in my life. I had done everything you could do in a restaurant, and that’s part of why I resented them so much. I didn’t care who their parents were; the fact that they thought they could disrespect my beautiful Sapore di Mare, the place I had built with my own sweat and hard work—that was the most offensive thing of all.
You already know what happened next. They didn’t show up at four o’clock. They didn’t even show up by four fifteen. When they finally did show up, at four thirty, I was sitting in the balcony overlooking the dining room. I watched them prance in through the front door, even though Chico—hard-working, proud Chico—told them not to every day. As always, they were fresh from the beach, with messy hair and that salty smell.
My already famous temper was engaged. It didn’t matter that these two were the spawn of rich and famous power brokers; they threatened to undo my success.
“You two,” I said as I stood up and charged down the stair
s. They looked terrified, like they were about to be gored by a bull.
“You know what? That’s it. You better get out of here. In fact, you better get out of here right now. Actually, you know what, GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE. NOW!”
They didn’t move.
“NOW!”
“But, Mr. Luongo,” Mitch said. “What about our tips from last night?”
“Tips?” I actually laughed. “You want your tips? I’ll give you a tip: you go home and tell your fathers that you are fired. You incompetent, spoiled, rich brats.” They stood there for a second, in shock.
Mitch jerked his head in the direction of the bar, suggesting to Missy that they have a drink before leaving.
“Now!” I bellowed. “Get the fuck out of here, you little brats. Out, out, out,” and I chased them right out the door.
Both Mitch’s and Missy’s fathers called me, outraged, vowing that they’d never come back to Sapore di Mare again.
But they did. They had to. They were friends of Pino’s.
EIGHT
Why Pasta Matters
IF THERE’S ONE accomplishment I’d like to be remembered for, it’s popularizing Tuscan food in America. If there’s a second, it would be improving the quality of the pasta served in American restaurants.
I love pasta. For me, it summarizes and epitomizes much of what I’ve always responded to about Tuscan food, specifically its intersection of history, economy, and flavor. As with most deeply felt food connections, though, my affection for pasta exists somewhere beyond my ability to fully explain it. I can’t put words to why I fell in love with Jessie when I first saw her, and I can’t exactly put words to why I have had a love affair with pasta that’s gone on for more than half a century.
But I’ll try. With all of Italy’s regions and all of their differences, pasta is the thing that they all have in common, which is what led Giuseppe Garibaldi to say, in 1860, “It will be maccheroni, I swear to you, that will unite Italy.” Pasta is, in my opinion, the most complete food ever invented by mankind. Just as Americans have endless varieties of sandwiches (the original, burgers, wraps, and so on) that put meat, vegetables, and starch in a neat, pick-up-able package, we Italians have pasta, which often combines the same elements into something moist, substantial, and delicious.
Dirty Dishes Page 15