Dirty Dishes

by Andrew Friedman

They all nodded. None of us had the words to express what we were talking about—but the food itself spoke volumes, and after we had discussed our favorite dishes at length, the women took to the kitchen. The first order of business was to acquaint them with the ingredients available here, almost all of which were different than what they were used to back in Piedmont. This was well before the upgrade in regional American farming took place, so vegetables didn’t have the same big flavor they had at home. The women also had to learn to adjust to different cuts of meat, substituting, say, brisket for an eye round in stracotto because an eye round wasn’t as fatty here, and that fat was essential to a successful pot roast. Even the water and flour were different, as I discovered when they complained about the lack of elasticity of the pasta dough the first time they made it.

  Once this orientation was complete, we slowly began to start planning the menu. Cut loose to do their own thing, these country mice became as ferocious as tigers, turning the place into a flurry of flour and wine, knives and rolling pins. With those women in the kitchen, filling that enormous space with the scents of authentic Italian cooking, Le Madri became, more than my first two restaurants, a portal to my own past. When I left our apartment downtown, I felt like I was going to another home, populated by not one but four mothers. I think it was the same for them. They had only been in New York for a few weeks, but they were feeling homesick as well. Their food had a heightened intensity and I knew why: they poured all of their nostagia into their cooking.

  As the women acclimated to life in New York, I had constant reminders of my own evolution as when, like me years before, Margherita ended up doing an imitation of the construction workers she spent her days with, peppering her conversation gratuitously with “fuck.” She also took a liking to American slang and loved spitting out phrases like “Don’t piss me off.”

  It was also great fun to watch the women interact with the construction workers, most of whom were originally from Southern Italy. One night, as the smell of food wafted out into the dining room, one of the guys, I guess feeling teased by the delicious aroma of home cooking, called down from the scaffolding, “I guess we are not Michelangelo.” It was a funny reference to the legend that Michelangelo, when he was painting the Sistine Chapel, had had meals served to him while he was lying on his back. This became a running joke in the restaurant, and eventually the women took the bait and began taking lunch and dinner out to the men, letting them taste the dishes we were testing.

  To me as a fellow transplanted Italian, it was a joyous scene, but as a businessman I had a concern: the application of the stucco was slowing down. I pulled the general contractor aside and told him, “Look, I don’t care if your guys eat here. We’re cooks, and we like to share. But our price isn’t going to change, no matter how long it takes.”

  Things didn’t speed up, and so I brought the hammer down, telling the women to stop feeding the men. They were upset: Bruna was just plain pissed off, and Maria scolded me, telling me that it wasn’t as though she were making any extra food to serve the men; she was just sharing what had to be cooked to test it.

  One day, I realized that although I saw the women cooking and there was a glorious and garlicky aroma in the air, I hadn’t seen a plate of food in more than twenty-four hours. I went looking through the kitchen, the office, and even out on the back patio. There wasn’t a trace of food to be found.

  On my way to check the refrigerator, I passed by the scaffolding, and on a hunch, I climbed up to the top. Sure enough, piled there were a few small stacks of dirty dishes. I should have been upset at this minor mutiny, but I wasn’t. All these Italians were having a ball, and maybe I was being a little bit too hard on them; I didn’t want to stifle the spirit that would lead to our success.

  Besides, spending time at the restaurant site, and with these women, was heaven for me, but when I wasn’t there I had to keep some anxiety at bay: with nowhere to go in the evenings, I was suddenly coming home to an apartment populated by my family. Sometimes at night, I’d watch as Jessie held Marco in her arms, nursing him, and think about how much I’d put at stake to pursue Le Madri. Though Jessie never showed anything but support and belief, there was no money coming in, and I was accountable for a good chunk of the million-plus dollars the Pressmans had poured into our joint enterprise.

  But it wasn’t really the money that worried me. The Il Cantinori buyout had left me flush for the time being, and I knew that at the end of the day I’d be able to bring the project in on time. No, what really weighed on me was the fact that Le Madri was a more ambitious restaurant than my first two. I had acquired a reputation as a talented restaurateur. My name meant something in New York, and I wanted it to go on meaning something for a good, long while.

  AGAIN MY PUBLICIST, Susan Rike, stepped up to the plate, interesting New York magazine’s Richard Story enough that he came to the restaurant to see it and taste some food before we opened. The result was a five-page spread in the magazine, an unprecedented promotional score. It made me feel like the king of the city, but I also heard rumblings about resentment from other restaurateurs; I could feel anger rolling down Seventh Avenue like hot lava. Nobody had ever had a spread like that and here I was dancing on their stage. It pissed a lot of them off, but I didn’t care.

  The article was a revelation to me: at the time, there was no shortage of concept restaurants in New York City. Some succeeded and some failed, but I realized that what made my restaurants work was that they were all founded on a true and deeply personal inspiration: it could be a song, as it was for Sapore di Mare, or a longing for country dining as it was at Il Cantinori, or the memory of home cooking as it was at Le Madri. They were my attempt to stay connected to my own past, to re-create a little of it right here in New York City, and what people responded to was their authenticity and their sincerity.

  As I watched restaurants come and go around me, I realized that this was one of the things that set me apart: my places sprang from my own deep well of nostalgia and there wasn’t an insincere detail anywhere in any of them, from the wooden beams and stucco walls to the displays of vegetable dishes at the door to the historically accurate recipes. The reason I was succeeding was the same reason I sometimes went off on waiters or cooks and the reason I had told Bob Pressman, “I’m in charge, I’m in charge, I’m in charge”: I simply refused to compromise.

  I ALSO REFUSED to compromise in my first cookbook, which was published in October 1988.

  Just as I had a knack for naming restaurants, I thought I had one for naming books. My title for my first book was A Tuscan in the Kitchen. My idea was to try to capture between two covers what it was that people responded to about me in my restaurants: the food and the stories behind the food, both my personal anecdotes and the legends of such places as Maremma and Siena.

  I also wanted to teach people how to cook the way Italians cook, which isn’t by following exact recipes to the letter. It was the same reason I brought those women in to be a guiding force at Le Madri: in Tuscany, virtually any recipe you can think of is interpreted and personalized by the individual cook, so there are as many versions of, say, pappa al pomodoro as there are homes.

  To capture this spirit and with hopes of inspiring the readers, part of my vision for the book was that recipes would be presented with no quantities or cooking times. So, I’d begin, say, a recipe for risotto, fisherman’s style, by writing “Make sure you have enough liquid for making the risotto. Otherwise use white wine.” Or I’d end a recipe for pasta-and-bean soup by advising, “when everything smells right, serve the soup with a little olive oil on top.”

  It would be impossible to sell a book with that kind of instructions today, but my agent had no problem setting it up with one of the top cookbook publishers, Clarkson Potter. Working with coauthors Barbara Raives and Angela Hederman, I spent hours describing the most famous dishes in Tuscany, along with the legends behind them and personal associations I made with them. In a way, it was an autobiography, though it had
the structure of a cookbook.

  By the end of the process, we had put together a handsome and modestly proportioned book that I was very proud of. It had a charming photograph of a view through a window of the old town of Mon-talcino on the cover and both color and black-and-white photographs throughout.

  The book debuted and, to my dismay, we were savaged by critics who were shocked that I had left out the quantities and cooking times. The consensus was that the average American home cook was not able to relate to, let alone use, A Tuscan in the Kitchen. Never mind that many of the great cookbooks of all time, like those by Auguste Escoffier and, in Italy, Pellegrino Artusi, didn’t specify quantities or cooking times.

  In the midst of such explosive times for me, the cool reception the book received was a major disappointment, a reminder that although things were changing in America, I was still, in many ways, standing in that supermarket in Ozone Park, holding that anemic, cellophane-wrapped tomato in my hand.

  The only silver lining was that the book developed an enormous cult following over the years; I still hear from people who tell me it’s their favorite cookbook. And I was able to go on to do several others. But it remains a heartbreak for me.

  I HAD REALIZED by this time that you put together a restaurant the way you assemble lasagna: layer by layer. The top layer was the front-of-the-house team, and I pulled together an improbably complementary band of Italians: Gianfranco, a Florentine with aristocratic features set off by a shaggy mane of black hair with a taste for tweedy sport coats and short, thin ties; Ariel, whose pretty-boy charm and flashiness translated effortlessly from East Hampton to Chelsea; and Ce-sare, a Roman who had been a bartender at the ancient Gino’s restaurant on Lexington and then at Cipriani before tiring of uptown customers and spending his working hours in a tux. Cesare understood what pushovers many American women were for a foreign accent, and so made an art of shameless flirting. His trademark was the drawing out of the word “darling” until it seethed with the promise of sex: “Dahling, have a martini.” “Daahhling, what’s on your mind tonight?” “Daaa-hhhling, you look lovely.”

  These men could not have been more different, but they each reminded me of a very specific personality type from back home. My understanding of what I wanted to do in my restaurants was being sharpened with each new venture: I was no longer looking to simply serve Italian food and wine; I was building grander and grander sets and populating them with real Italians. Part of the reason for this was selfish: the more complete the experience was in my restaurants, the more I had the feeling of being back home. But I also believed that the range of characters would help ensure an element of spontaneity when a customer walked into Le Madri because the trip from podium to table would vary depending on the host with whom it was made.

  Of course, I picked May 23 for the opening. How could I not, after all the luck that date had brought me? To be sure that Le Madri lived up to the expectations created by all of our preliminary press, I did five days of “friends and family” tastings—practice sessions at which friends of the owners eat for free in exchange for patiently enduring any lapses in service or misfires from the kitchen. (Some restaurateurs even go so far as to distribute comment cards or questionnaires at the end of these experiments, but that was never my style.) Between the food and the payroll, we spent about twenty thousand dollars on these dress rehearsals, but it was worthwhile because we worked out a lot of kinks. One night, as the grill was maxed out with Cornish game hens and steaks, all of them throwing copious amounts of smoke up into the air, the exhaust system shut down. I kept hitting the reset button, but it wouldn’t come back on. I starting barking to the cooks to get everything off the grill as soon as possible because I knew what was coming next: a blast of cool fire-extinguishing foam from the hose that dangled over the cooking surfaces. We got the food out of the way just in time, but no sooner did the foam spurt out than the smoke began drifting out into the dining room. With images of the sprinkler system’s sensors trigging the nozzles and showering our diners, I grabbed a construction ladder, ran out of the kitchen, set it up, and climbed up into an access panel hidden in the vaulted ceiling.

  Though I succeeded in shutting off the sprinklers before they triggered, I was too late to prevent a team of firemen dressed as if they were headed for Three Mile Island from showing up and marching into the dining room.

  “Hey, Pino,” somebody yelled out. “Are they friends or family?”

  Everybody had a good laugh, but I was pissed off. Still, I’d much rather it happened during our dry run than when we had paying customers in the house.

  THE FOOD AT Le Madri was the best I’d opened with so far. Usually a restaurant’s menu has to be tweaked to synch it up with the demands of the customers, but all the dishes we began with, firmly rooted in home cooking, sold well. Many of the dishes that debuted at Le Madri are still with me today, such as a beef and artichoke stew; blind baby eel cakes (fritters); and a fritto misto (mixed fried seafood) primarily comprising white bait. And, of course, there was that marvelous wood-burning oven where I collaborated on a number of original creations with a sweet young Italian-American pizza maker named Ciro. We introduced a pizza that’s become something of a legend: the focaccia ro-biola, a thin wheel of rosemary bread, split in half horizontally, spread with creamy robiola cheese, baked, drizzled with white truffle oil, and cut into small triangles. It was an almost obscenely fragrant, melt-in-your-mouth signature dish that had people moaning with pleasure, and it fast became something that customers ordered along with their cocktails the moment they sat down.

  The only bittersweet aspect for me was accepting that part of the price of operating more than one restaurant was the need to turn the orchestration of the kitchen over to other chefs, but the truth was that having an experienced restaurant toque like Alan Tardi was invaluable. Under his guidance, the women of Le Madri were transformed from individual home cooks into a well-organized kitchen brigade, though some things didn’t change: Maria still prepared the antipasti offerings, an even bigger assortment than we served at Il Cantinori or Sapore—fifteen or more dishes set out every night along the ledge that fronted the pizza oven.

  As was the case with Sapore di Mare before it, and Il Cantinori before that, Le Madri became a magnet for celebrities and the bold-face names from publishing and finance. Loyal customers followed me wherever I went, from Tenth Street out to East Hampton and back to the city and Chelsea. Because of our location, convenient to many boutique literary agencies, we became a popular lunch destination for agents, publishers, and editors, as well as their high-profile writer clients. We drew some of the biggest names in fashion such as Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Giorgio Armani, Donna Karan, Nicole Miller, Vera Wang, and Betsey Johnson; business tycoons like Steve Forbes; art-world figures like photographer Patrick Demarchelier and my by-then regular customer Julian Schnabel, who always turned heads in the summertime when he showed up in his preferred ensemble of elegant pajama pants, ornate pajama top, and slippers. And, of course, a great many seats were occupied by the high-rolling customers of Bar-neys, who made a full day of shopping and lunch, or shopping and dinner, taking full advantage of the parking lot we shared with the department store, which was a real coup in Manhattan.

  Everybody who succeeds in New York has a few times in his life when he feels like the king of Manhattan, as though he’s been embraced by the city, and this was such a time for me. When I traveled from my apartment to Chelsea each morning, I felt like everybody, from deli countermen to cab drivers, had a smile and a kind word for me.

  Our success was so immediate and well reported that it wasn’t long before I received phone calls from friends tipping me off to imitators—unaffiliated restaurateurs who had announced plans to open restaurants called Le Madri—as close as New Jersey and as far away as Colorado. I guess a part of me was still pretty innocent because this shocked me. Over the previous summer, in the trade magazine Nation’s Restaurant News, I had noticed that restaurants featuring th
e word Sapore (which was unusual enough as a restaurant name that only a native of Italy would think to use it) had begun turning up in the South and Midwest, but nobody had had the gumption to actually lift the full name Sapore di Mare, so I let it go. But now, the fact that people thought they could appropriate the name, and—who knew?—maybe even the concept, that I had come up with offended me. I know that many believe that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but to me plagiarism is plagiarism and my response to it was “fuck you,” delivered across state lines in the form of a cease-and-desist letter from my attorney. As usual, my learning curve was steep but swift; to protect myself against any future would-be thieves, I trademarked the name Le Madri and resolved to do the same with any other names I devised in the future.

  I NEVER KNEW where my presence would be most required, where the next fire would need to be put out. One summer day, I was working in the city when Mark called me from Sapore in a state of panic. A group of INS agents had marched into the dining room unannounced and had begun interrogating everybody on the staff. They hadn’t checked for proof of citizenship or asked to see green cards; instead, they had simply corralled and carted off anyone who didn’t speak English, leaving Mark with a fraction of his staff heading into the final prep and evening dinner service.

  “Thank God I can still manage a Queens accent or they might have taken me,” he said, forcing a chuckle.

  I hung up the phone and looked into the kitchen. The cooks were finishing their prep for that night’s dinner at Le Madri. The mise en place containers—the little stainless-steel vessels in which prepared ingredients are held along the line—were full and, having been there since the early morning, the prep crew was winding down and thinking about going home for the day.

  “Guys, listen up.” I told them what had happened at Sapore, and that I needed them to go out to my car. I was going to drive them to the Hamptons, they would work a shift out there, and I’d have them back by morning.