Dirty Dishes

by Andrew Friedman

  Everybody followed my lead and next thing I knew we had secured the space and I was once again developing a new restaurant. To earn the Coco Pazzo name, I decided that we would fly in the face of convention: we’d do very simple, casual food in a part of Manhattan where the prevailing wisdom was that you couldn’t do casual dining. There was a small private nook on the north side of the restaurant and we stuck a communal table in there, so single diners and walk-ins would sit side by side—another radical idea. And we decided to borrow a page from the Italian tradition and serve family-style dinner on Sunday night, something that had never been seen in this neighborhood of the city, though in time it would become the hallmark of restaurants like Carmine’s in the Theater District.

  To serve the high and mighty, I installed a trio of shamelessly sycophantic and highly competitive dining room personalities. The maître d’ was John Fanning, a bespectacled preppy blond. The floor captains were Tom Piscitello, a stocky, fast talker from Philly with a firm grasp of food and wine, and Carlos Carmona, a lovable South American with a smooth, soft manner and great style, evidenced by his collection of reading glasses that allowed him to match them to his pocket square or tie. These guys spent their days and nights trying to outdo each other—see who could dress the most dashingly in the well-to-do style of the Upper East Side, lavish the most attention on the customers, use the most extravagant language to describe the food and wine. The casting at Coco Pazzo was inspired, if I do say so myself, even if the bottom line was that they were trying to get the most tips. You know the Pirandello play, Six Characters in Search of an Author? This was Six People in Search of Tips. In fact, Mark and I had a private joke: to imitate the maître d’s escorting guests to a table, we’d say “follow me” and whip one arm over our head so that our hand landed, palm-up, behind us, coaxing a gratuity.

  Because the space had been a functioning restaurant when we took it over, the redesign was quick and easy. I once again adhered to my lucky number when we opened a few months later, on November 23, 1990.

  On day one, we were flooded with all those bold-face names from downtown, plus senators and superstars like Mick Jagger and Rod Stewart. David Geffen came in every day, and Revlon chairman Ron Perelman loved the restaurant so much that he asked me to hold the same table for him every night. I told him I’d have to charge him whether he came in or not and he said that was no problem.

  As if things couldn’t get any better, the New York Times wrote a love letter of a review, laying three stars on Coco Pazzo and calling us “the best restaurant to open in New York since last fall.” Suddenly, we weren’t just a place for the neighborhood; we were a destination restaurant for everybody in New York, the must-try hot spot of the moment.

  There was a downside to all of this, although it was a good problem to have: the restaurant almost became too inside, too clubby. Everybody in attendance wanted, and deserved, a face table. I had never intended to do it, but we had out–Le Cirqued Le Cirque because we had the fabulously wealthy uptown crowd but also the downtown cache of rock and rollers and artists.

  I began a new nightly ritual: making the rounds, beginning at Le Madri then hopping into a car around eight o’clock and climbing uptown to Coco Pazzo. There was an in joke at the company in those days, if a customer asked “Where’s Pino?” The answer was “Everywhere.” It wasn’t far from the truth. My challenge was different at each restaurant: at Le Madri, where we did most of our business early, I wanted to be sure that we were ready for the night ahead, drawing on all the mistakes I’d seen made at the places I’d worked and doing what I could to head them off. It sounds like a small concern, but one of the most important things I’d learned to check on over the years was the supply of folded napkins and tablecloths. I can’t tell you how many times I’d seen restaurants grind to a halt because they ran out mid-service and couldn’t get tables set for the next round of customers, and so I’d check on that personally and if we were low, I’d get busboys in the kitchen folding napkins.

  At Coco Pazzo, the focus was on keeping all waiting customers happy. When I arrived, I’d walk into the bar and if it was packed with people, I knew that some of them had to be getting impatient. I’d spot a customer with a cocktail in hand and say, “How are you doing?”

  “How do you think I’m doing?” was the reply I most dreaded, usually followed by, “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting? Where is my table?” I’d do what I could to make them happy, send them an appetizer, or pick up their drinks, and 99 percent of the time they left happy, not just because of my efforts but also because of something they’d never admit: they liked waiting because it meant that they were part of the action at one of New York’s of-the-moment hot spots. They might have been annoyed that Ron Perelman’s table was sitting there empty while they waited for theirs to open up, but they were excited to be dining among the Masters of the Universe.

  I have to be honest: as intoxicating as it was—and there were times when I had to make a conscious effort not to let it go to my head—there were moments when hosting so many celebrities was less than glamorous. Like when Sylvester Stallone came in to dinner with Ron Perelman and Ron treated him to a bottle of Gaja reserve wine, one of the most revered wines in the world. A few days later, Stallone returned to the restaurant with his family and told the maître d’ he wanted the same wine Ron had been drinking when they had been in together. The waiter promptly took him a bottle of Gaja. By the time Stallone was finished with dinner, he’d had two bottles. I wasn’t at the restaurant at the time, but one of the managers informed me that when he was presented with the bill, Stallone was shocked to see that he had an eight-hundred-dollar wine tab. Nobody had thought to mention the price to him, and I agreed with my team; he hadn’t asked to see the wine list, and besides, if Rocky couldn’t afford Gaja, then surely Rambo could.

  A few days later, I was out in East Hampton, golfing in a charity event, when my cell phone rang. It was Maggie, my assistant, telling me that she had Sylvester Stallone’s assistant on the other line. I instructed her to patch him in. It turned out that he was calling to complain about the wine incident.

  “Listen,” I said. “He asked for the same wine that Mr. Perelman had had. What were we supposed to do?”

  The assistant covered the phone and I heard him relaying what I said to a third party, presumably Stallone.

  “Well,” he said a few moments later, “Mr. Stallone thinks that somebody should have told him how much the wine cost.”

  “Listen,” I said, my anger almost impossible to hide. “If he can’t afford, or doesn’t want to spend, a lot of money on wine, then he shouldn’t order things without asking how much they cost.”

  We quibbled a little more and then both testily hung up.

  And that was that. But it wasn’t the last time I’d hear, indirectly, from Mr. Stallone. Just as in Rocky II, there would be a rematch.

  PART OF THE reason I responded so intensely to the Stallone incident was that, even if they can afford it, it’s always been a pet peeve of mine when people buy something without asking what it costs. This is especially true when the person works for me and is spending my money. The worst offenders are chefs, who will tell their food vendors, “Give me the best, no matter what the expense,” which is no way to turn a profit. Everything has a price and that price has to be weighed against other factors, such as the value of the good or service to your business.

  Once I had Le Madri and Coco Pazzo, I began to take advantage of owning more than one restaurant. For example, to help keep tabs on everything, I promoted Jack Weiss, my old Il Cantinori bartender, to director of operations. I also hired a friend of Alan Tardi, a bulldog named Chester Howell, who had trained as a chef but had more passion for numbers than for food. A lanky kid with light blond hair, Chester delighted in extracting the best possible deal from each vendor. He was the nastiest, most stingy negotiator I ever met in my life. And I mean that as a compliment.

  Chester’s first job with me was to set up a ce
ntralized purchasing department for the company. We were making about $7 million in food revenue each year and were spending between $1.6 and $1.8 million on the raw product, about 24 or 25 percent. At that level, it was worth creating a salaried position to get the number down even just a few percentage points. I told him that if he could get our food costs down to 22 or 23 percent, I’d give him a bonus. He did, and I rewarded him accordingly.

  Chester also helped me set up my own private laundry service. We were spending so much money on linen companies—which provide rented napkins and tablecloths, as well as a cleaning service, to restaurants—that I had a theory we could have the very best linen if we set up our own laundry and delivery system. Chester leased a van, rented space on Sullivan Street, put in washing machines and dryers, and hired three guys and a driver to do all the work. Because of the way the math worked out, this saved us enough to buy the very best linens, which to my mind was Frette, adding another layer of elegance to our dining rooms.

  That might not sound like an earth-shattering development, but to me, it signaled the next stage in my maturation as a restaurateur, able to improvise new ways of doing things that saved me money and improved the customer’s experience.

  My uncle would have been proud.

  BY 1991, I was starting to get that itch again, the need to try something new, to push myself. My exposure to corporate America was beginning to rub off on me and I decided that the logical next step in my evolution would be to open in another market, to see if I could expand. Most people faced with that impulse would begin thinking about Los Angeles or, today, Las Vegas, but I never had the interest in opening there. Instead, I had a long and abiding attraction to Chicago that dated back to a drive through the Midwest that Patty and I had taken in 1981, when we had visited her family in Sheboygan Falls. The theatricality of the city had stayed with me, especially the architecture which, for my money, is the most American of any of its big cities.

  After a bit of networking, I found a space in the heart of Chicago; there was a chocolate factory nearby so you could step outside and smell cocoa in the air, like in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. After a few years of dealing with New York City landlords, working things out with the one in Chicago seemed as easy as renting a one-bedroom apartment back in Manhattan. Before I knew it, I was off and running on Coco Pazzo Chicago. I wanted somebody I knew and who I could trust long-distance to manage it for me, so I offered Jack Weiss the opportunity to become the general manager of Coco Pazzo Chicago and he jumped at it.

  As much as I enjoyed developing new concepts, there was something very satisfying and comforting in re-creating an existing one in a new locale. There wasn’t the same high that came with starting from scratch, but there was something almost as good: the sense that we were putting together a restaurant the way you assembled a children’s toy from a box: insert part A into part B, screw on part C, snap into part D, open the door, and start making money!

  I’m not saying it was easy—that’s a word I would never apply to the opening of a restaurant—but there was a natural flow to the work from the moment we began. Unlike most projects, when you continue to hone the concept with each decision almost until you seat your first customers, with Coco Pazzo Chicago, we had a working template, the original place in New York, to guide us along the way. It took almost all the stress out of the process and whetted my appetite for more potentially expandable concepts.

  I already had one. For a while, I had been thinking that I’d like to combine everything that I loved about food and wine in one place: a restaurant, take-away shop, wine bar, pastry counter, wood-burning oven, and espresso bar all in one. I wanted to have customers sitting in the middle, like you might find in a public square in Venice or Rome. While visiting Chicago, it occurred to me that perhaps such a place might dispense Tuscan kitchenware and housewares as well. The more I thought about it the more drawn I was to the concept: I saw it as the ultimate expression of my nostalgia and romanticism, a way to actually create a little patch of Tuscany right here in the United States.

  At the end of 1991, Fred and Gene Pressman approached me and asked if I’d like to open a restaurant in the new Barneys they were planning on Madison Avenue in Midtown. I pitched them my still-sketchy notion of a food piazza and retail hybrid. They loved the idea of a piazza, but they weren’t interested in the retail component for fear that it would cannibalize sales from Barneys. It was still well worth doing, and so I gave it some thought and came back with a name. Given the location—the restaurant would have an entrance at Madison Avenue and Sixty-first Street—I threw out something that echoed the “crazy” element of Coco Pazzo that so many had responded to: Mad. 61.

  They loved it and we decided to move forward, only this arrangement would be a little different because I wasn’t going to be a partner with them; instead, I’d be contracted as the operator of their restaurant within their department store. This was fine with me; in fact, it would simplify my life because they’d be dealing with such day-to-day concerns as payroll and paying vendors, leaving me to focus on the stuff I loved most about being a restaurateur.

  But there were headaches to come. The store wasn’t scheduled to open until the fall of 1993, but because the Pressmans kept having second thoughts about design elements, the overall construction of the new Barneys was on an insanely tight schedule. When they took stock of the situation in early July 1993, they realized that in order to meet the desired opening date of Labor Day, they’d have to have the construction crews begin working 24-7 in shifts, and that’s just what happened: for the rest of the summer it was the Babel of construction—you could enter the building at any time, day or night, and find lights on and the buzz of power tools filling the air. (The workers were obviously delighted with all their overtime pay: one day I took the elevator to the construction manager’s office on the ninth floor and saw a sign for LMB, the initials of the construction company Lehrer McGovern Bovis, tacked to a plywood wall. Under the initials, one of the guys had given a new meaning to the initials by scrawling “Let’s Milk Barneys.”)

  It wasn’t until about this time, just two months before Labor Day, that the contractors finally began dealing with the restaurant build-out, which was important to me but was a minor concern to everybody else relative to the overall project. They took a down-and-dirty approach, triaging the situation in order to turn something functional over to me by opening day. I had no power over them because they weren’t my hires, so there was nothing I could do to push them

  Every time it seemed things were finished, we’d bump up against another obstacle. Mad. 61 was in the basement level, and the ground floor was cut away to offer shoppers an aerial view of the restaurant. So that they wouldn’t just be looking down at the tops of diners’ heads, the designers had the idea to put a shallow pool in the center of the dining room with tile work that would produce a reflecting effect. But when they filled the pool with water for the first time, just a few days before we were scheduled to open, it leaked into the floor below, which housed, among other things, the telephone control station. This was obviously unacceptable, so a decision was made to scrap the pool. I asked the construction guys to level it off into a raised platform and called on a designer friend to devise something we could install there to fill up the space.

  “I want something crazy,” I told him. “Maybe a sculpture.”

  He mulled it over and said, “What about using potatoes?”

  I thought it was a little out there, but I trusted his instincts and he brought in countless bags of Idaho potatoes and fashioned a massive and compelling pyramid, which we decorated with orchids.

  When we finally opened, Mad. 61 was only about 75 percent completed: the Madison Avenue entrance wasn’t yet functional (making the name a bit of a misnomer, at least temporarily), the flooring needed grouting, the paint job was a few layers short in places, and the kitchen equipment was only about three-quarters installed. To add to the drama, our gas wasn’t turned on by the city
until the day before we opened. Despite all of this, we made our debut on time, and it was like Coco Pazzo all over again. There were hordes of people clamoring to experience Mad. 61; the effect of a happening was heightened by the fact that there were different lines for each division: one for the restaurant, one for the cheese counter, one for the wine bar, and so on.

  Of all the restaurants I ever opened, I still think Mad. 61 was the best, most complete expression of my love for food, and of food as theater. The team I assembled was like my own group of all-stars, some company veterans, and some new talent: Paula Oland, who would go on to run the bakery at Balthazar, did a brilliant job running our bakery, as did my cheese buyer Steve Jenkins, whom I adored, despite his sarcasm-first, work-second disposition. Marta, working with chef de cuisine John Schenk, an intense and twitchy guy with a frantic Quentin Tarantino speech pattern; the delightfully opinionated pastry chef Patti Jackson; and Ciro, my pizza maker from Le Madri, kept the kitchen running full-bore. On top of all that, we had a long espresso bar with all the requisite Italian pastries and baked goods, and a wine bar offering twenty-five wines by the glass. It just went on and on. The sheer ambitiousness of the place would be noteworthy even today; there were a handful of concepts under one umbrella, each with its own unique demands, and they all functioned with the efficiency of a Swiss watch.

  I WAS STILL readying Mad. 61 for its long-anticipated opening when I got an inside track on a prime space on East Fifty-ninth Street, with corporate offices available right upstairs. Again partnering with the Pressmans, I grabbed up both spaces. I didn’t have a big concept at the time, but I had been thinking of the Emilia-Romagna region, mostly because Marta was from Modena, and we’d had a long and ongoing dialogue about how underrepresented the food of that region was in the United States. This was, we felt, a shame because many Italians believe it’s the best cuisine in all of Italy; it’s certainly the most complex with dishes like bollito misto with salsa verde (assorted boiled meats with green sauce), piadina (a flatbread blanketed with melted cheese), and tortellini in brodo (filled pasta in stock). The idea gained extra steam because one of the chefs at Mad. 61, Giancarlo, was from that region and was itching to make the concept a reality. I thought of myself as a director making a more minor, intimate film, and so took the name of a movie that I associated with my own childhood, Fellini’s Amarcord, which means, “I Remember.”