The restaurant opened at the end of 1993, but by 1995 it was failing. I realized that American customers just didn’t have the stomach for the unfamiliar dishes of the region. I revamped the concept to a more casual, less expensive Tuscan place called Il Toscanaccio, which means “The Naughty Tuscan.”
Despite the slight turbulence of Amarcord/Toscanaccio, it was a fantastic couple of years, during which I also opened a smaller, more casual Coco Pazzo Cafe in Chicago. My relationship with the Press-mans was smooth and I had even become closer with Gene, spending time with his family in Larchmont, just up the road from us in Rye.
But things were about to change, and they did so suddenly. On January 12, 1996, I was sitting at my kitchen table at home in Westch-ester, when I opened the New York Times and read that Barneys had just filed for bankruptcy. I turned on the television and there it was on the local news. I knew that there had been tension between the Press-mans and their Japanese investors, and that the project had to have gone over budget during the summer of overtime in 1993, but this was something of a shock, as was learning about it in the newspaper. I guess, despite all the history we had together, I was still an outsider to them after all.
I was also, of course, worried about what this meant for Mad. 61, but another concern quickly superseded it: though I’d been operating Mad. 61 for three years, my contract had never been signed. This isn’t terribly unusual in business relationships, especially between partners with multiple past projects together, but now that the company was in bankruptcy, I had no idea how to protect myself.
Though the restaurant continued to operate, I really wanted this detail nailed down, and I tried repeatedly to get in touch with Irv. His secretary kept putting me off, telling me, “Oh, Pino, this is a crazy time for them.”
Despite the instability, Mad. 61 was still packed at lunch; you’d never have known we were doing business on a sinking ship. One day, I was talking with some customers when an executive from the National Restaurant Association introduced himself to me.
“Did you hear that the Sfuzzi chain just filed for bankruptcy?” he asked.
“No,” I said. I had heard of Sfuzzi, but I didn’t really know anything about it.
“You should take a look at it, think about taking it over.”
“I’m not interested,” I said. “I have enough going on.”
It was a conversation I’d have cause to remember again before too long.
DESPITE AN INCREASINGLY strained relationship with the Press-mans, I was about to enter into another partnership with another unlikely collaborator: Ian Schrager, one half of the legendary duo responsible for the symbol of New York City in the 1970s, Studio 54. In the late 1980s, Ian created a second act for himself as a hotelier with the revolutionarily affordable and stylish Morgans Hotel in the Murray Hill neighborhood of New York and the Paramount Hotel in the Theater District, and yet another hotel, Mondrian, was about to follow in Los Angeles. Like the Paramount, it would be designed by Philippe Starck, who I thought was a genius for his minimalist modern style. Ian and his former partner, Steve Rubell, who had died in 1989, had been customers of mine for years. Both were regulars at Il Cantinori, and Ian and his wife, Rita, also frequented Sapore di Mare and Coco Pazzo. I liked Ian. Like me, he had come from modest roots and made it big on his own, and we had an easy rapport and an ability to communicate in industry shorthand.
One night, while visiting at his table at Coco Pazzo, I asked him about the restaurant at the Paramount. When the hotel opened, there had been a French bistro on the ground floor, but I had heard through the grapevine that it had closed. One thing led to another and next thing I knew I was once again having a conversation in one of my restaurants about opening another place.
I went to meet with Ian at his office in the Paramount. Though I had known him for years, I realized that I had no inkling of his business persona, which I soon discovered was as intense as any I’d ever seen. This was apparent from his office alone, which held several tables covered with overlapping piles of spreadsheets, architectural drawings, and other papers. He was constantly taking calls from his secretary, then turning to me and saying, “Give me a second,” so he could pick up the phone and dispense with a furniture-design issue or a crisis at one of his hotels. In our very short meeting, it became clear to me that he was a control freak of the highest order, making me look laid back by comparison. He was also superhumanly connected; there were three Ferris-wheel-size Rolodexes lined up on his desk, and in the course of our ninety-minute meeting, he referred to them three or four times. I realized there wasn’t a person in New York, Los Angeles, or London whom he didn’t know. Calvin Klein, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney—you name them, and they were there. He was on a first-name basis with all these people, and they seemed to be real friends of his, not just casual acquaintances from his club and hotels.
Watching all of this only deepened my respect and affection for Ian, but it also made me not want to be his partner in a new restaurant, nor even to be a hired gun. It seemed inevitable that if we set up a Siamese dynamic, eventually we’d drive each other crazy. I told him I’d do a place in the Paramount if he’d lease me the space and let me operate autonomously. He agreed, and I decided to further expand the Coco Pazzo brand and launch a restaurant inspired by the proximity to Broadway: Coco Pazzo Teatro.
I’d be operating on my own this time. The Pressmans were unable to come along due to their current financial constraints. It was an awkward relationship that was getting more uncomfortable by the day.
WHILE WE WERE preparing to open Coco Teatro (as I called it), I interviewed one of the cooks from Le Madri for the job of executive chef. He came to my office above Il Toscanaccio, and I was immediately struck that the guy was as skinny as a string bean, with a shaggy head of hair and a face anchored by droopy, expressive eyes and framed by a chiseled chin.
In our first interview, he ran down the places he’d worked previously. His experience in Italian food was thin, to say the least, and he seemed to perk up only when discussing French cuisine.
“Jesus,” I said, “How are you going to cook Italian?”
I lit up a cigarette, and he took it as license to smoke himself. Once he started, he didn’t stop for the rest of the meeting. We filled the room with smoke and once we got comfortable, we began talking about everything but business, which is a real weakness of mine with people whose company I enjoy. Waving the cigarette around like a prop, he told me all sorts of stories about the places he’d worked, painting effortless sketches of former employers and his line-cook colleagues, all of it soaked in a uniquely sour, cynical sense of humor. I found him quietly confident and effortlessly charismatic. I had the feeling that he didn’t take very much very seriously, least of all himself.
“You should be a writer,” I said to him.
“Actually, I’m working on a novel,” he said, matter-of-factly. “I don’t know if it’ll ever be published, but I’m working on it.”
The guy’s name was Tony Bourdain.
Tony devoted a chapter to me in the best-seller he wrote years later, Kitchen Confidential, so I think it’s only fair that I share my impressions of him from back in the day, long before he was a world-renowned author, or even a known cook. The job for which I was interviewing him would be his first position as executive chef.
After our interview, I invited Tony to cook an audition menu at Mad. 61 for me and Marta, who by then had been promoted to corporate chef, helping me oversee all my restaurant kitchens and menus. He came to Mad. 61 and put out a number of small plates for us. One was a raviolini of brandade, the Provençal staple of pureed salt cod, potatoes, and olive oil. It’s one of my favorite French dishes, and his was a knockout. He also served bluefish, which, he went on to say in Kitchen Confidential, he thought I took as a sign that he had a “pair of balls” on him, but in reality was about the safest thing you could serve somebody with my culinary upbringing, since it was one of the things my mother was raised on.
; I loved Tony’s food. In a time when every young chef seemed concerned with reinventing the wheel, he was happy to be a steward of the classics; it’s no wonder that he ended up as the executive chef of the bistro Les Halles, because he was born to cook that kind of stuff.
I hired him a day or two later. We had about two months to get Coco Teatro ready and we spent the time furthering his education in all things Italian. He spent his days and nights with Marta at Mad. 61 and with the gang down at Le Madri. He seemed particularly enthused about perfecting his pasta know-how; even though he himself wouldn’t be cooking the pasta, we wanted him to know what great pasta was, and before long, he got it. Watching him cook and eat it, I had the feeling he was discovering it for the first time, or really thinking about it the first time. I felt like a matchmaker, introducing somebody to his true love.
I broke a number of my rules for Tony. One was that by that point in my career, I really tried to avoid spending too much time with chefs. I have a lot of respect for anybody who can cook well and manage a kitchen, but so many chefs, especially young American ones, seemed more focused on advancing their own celebrity than on improving their own talent in the kitchen. As a consequence, I would usually take a minimalist approach to dealing with them, sticking my head in the door and asking, “Did you take care of this? Did you order that? Can I get an expense report and a sheet of numbers and hours?” and then leaving.
But Tony was so entertaining that not only didn’t I mind spending more time with him, I actually went to Coco Teatro just to hang out. Tony was real. Maybe he wasn’t the best chef in the world, the best expediter, but he had a frank honesty that I found refreshing. Spending as much time as I was in the company of financiers and would-be celebrity chefs, I felt that Tony was just Tony, and he was the funniest guy I ever knew in the kitchen. That voice you hear in his books, dripping with world-weariness and irony, is the way he actually talks; he did a nightly routine about how the grease traps overflowed that was worthy of George Carlin. But I have to spill the beans and say that Tony isn’t as much of a badass as he makes himself out to be. Oh, I’m sure he’s partied plenty hard, but the guy is, when you get right down to it, a sweetheart. How else to explain the only chef I ever met who had a distaste for firing people? Most chefs have been screwed over so many times by so many prep and line cooks that they have developed emotional calluses and are able to fire them with a gunslinger’s nonchalance. But Tony once told me flat out that he didn’t have the stomach for it.
We were something of an odd couple, but I think that Tony and I related because we both truly loved food, and didn’t really love business, and because we were bullshitters who spotted in each other a reluctance to bullshit in our own relationship. I don’t know why we had that special dynamic, but if I had to guess, I’d say it was the brandade. We also shared a sick passion for Marlboro Reds and an appreciation for great French cigarettes like Gauloises and Gitanes.
And so, because of Tony, I enjoyed visiting Teatro.
Once it opened, Coco Teatro, true to its name, did a huge prethe-ater business, which is one of the true circles of restaurant hell. To work in a kitchen that experiences such a rush is one of the most thankless jobs of all time. Every afternoon anxiety builds as five forty-five approaches. Between then and seven thirty, it’s the same drill every day: customers arrive, sometimes later than their reservation; they sit down, order a drink, and chat with each other as if they have all the time in the world; and then, when there’s about an hour and fifteen minutes to work with, they ask their waiters, and by extension the kitchen, to do the impossible: prepare them a three-course meal, often with special orders and substitutions, and get them out the door in time for their curtain, but without rushing them. And all of this takes place absent the usual staggering of tables that permits a restaurant kitchen to function when all of its seats are occupied at the same time.
Ironically, the fact that I enjoyed hanging out at Coco Teatro with some regularity hastened Tony’s departure because I often ended up eating dinner there and couldn’t help but notice the signs of stress in the dining room. My eyes, so well trained to discern discontent, perceived it everywhere: when you see three quarters of the tables without food on them at seven o’clock and waiters muttering to themselves every time they push out through the swinging kitchen doors, there’s a problem. There was never an issue with Tony’s food—in fact the New York Times bestowed a generous two stars on us; it was the timing.
After one particularly stressful service, I excused myself from the table and asked Tony to step outside for a cigarette with me. I thought of it as a last cigarette for a condemned man about to face the firing squad. My plan was to say, “My friend, you’re through.” Unlike him, I never had any problem firing people. But I was so fond of Tony personally, and so sympathetic to the absurd demands of pretheater chef-dom, that I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
And so, I took the coward’s way out and had the general manager do it for me. We offered Tony the chance to stay on as sous chef, but he declined and I don’t blame him. We didn’t see each other again until years later, after his flattering portrait of me in Kitchen Confidential. We’ve had dinner a few times since then and picked up right where we left off, as though no time had passed at all, the way true friends are able to do.
WHEN MONDRIAN WAS finally set to open in Los Angeles, I persuaded Ian to lease me the restaurant space so I could open a Coco Pazzo there as well.
We did well, and I was thrilled to have a restaurant designed by Philippe Starck, a relaxing motif of whites and beiges with an outdoor dining room separated from the Alice in Wonderland courtyard by playful, seven-foot-tall flower pots. While I always was drawn to the idea of spending time out west, after a few months of regular visits, I came to dislike the scene, especially all the effort made to sequester celebrities and ensure their easy passage in and out of hotels and restaurants. The extra security measures at Mondrian made it an adventure for people to get from the carport to our restaurant. Meanwhile, at Coco Pazzo, hostesses would lead diners to a table only to discover that Whiskey Bar patrons had stepped between the flower pots to take it. This became a nightly struggle as people in bathing suits would have pushed all the silverware and plates out of the way and were sitting there with their drinks sweating into the tablecloths. And they didn’t want to give up those tables. One night, while I was trying to evict a trespasser, a bronzed blonde in a denim skirt and bikini top, she said to me, “Why do you need a restaurant in LA? We don’t eat. We drink!”
After that, I began stationing busboys between the flower pots every afternoon until the first wave of diners were in their seats and the tables were firmly in our hands for the night.
The final straw between me and Los Angeles was the sequel to an earlier incident: I was on vacation with my family in Forte dei Marmi, on the seaside of Tuscany, to the west of Lucca, when my satellite phone rang. It was Ian Schrager.
“Pino, what the hell did you ever do to Sylvester Stallone?” he asked.
I told him the story of the wine and the golf course phone call, then asked, “Why?”
“He was going to have a private event with us. A lot of people. But when he found out you were the restaurateur here, he canceled it.”
I had to laugh. I guess I didn’t have the same talent for maintaining those celebrity relationships that Ian had. But our business arrangement would last for a few years, if only because I had the foresight to not become his partner. He might have been upset with me, but at the end of the day, it was me, not him, who was losing the private party. Was it worth missing out on a profitable function over the cost of a few bottles of wine and the right to stick to my guns and do what I thought was fair?
You bet.
AS 1996 PLODDED along, I decided that it was time to move on from the Pressmans. Not only couldn’t I get them on the phone, but I just couldn’t shake that concept I’d originally pitched them for Mad. 61, of a place that combined restaurant and retail under one roof.
Over time, the idea had grown into a full-fledged vision for a complete, self-contained Tuscan experience where we’d serve food and sell everything from tablewares and housewares to soaps and fragrances to clothing, draperies, and bedding, and anything else that represented the artisan tradition and style of Tuscany. I wanted to secure a gargantuan indoor space and re-create the experience of a Tuscan city square, along the lines of the Piazza della Repubblica in Florence, right in the middle of New York City—the Manhattan equivalent of a Florentine marketplace populated by merchants selling goods from their carts, with dining available nearby. I wanted there to be a fine-dining room, a bar, a takeout shop, and an event venue, with marble columns, a chestnut-wood bar, and a huge open kitchen. I even had a name for the project: Tuscan Square.
I finally got Irv on the phone and told him I wanted to move on to other projects, and he understood. With the help of a broker, that winter I met a gentleman named Bill Nimmo, a tall, mild-mannered investor from Prudential Equity Partners, a private investment group, and we explored the possibility of their investing in my company by funding my buyout of the Pressmans and possible future projects. It wasn’t long before the Prudential Equity team was on board and was even prepared to finance the leasing of three contiguous spaces in Rockefeller Center for me, and to raise the financing to make Tuscan Square a reality. Our venture, by the way, not just Tuscan Square, but the umbrella corporation that would own all the restaurants, needed a name as well, and I fused Toscana and corporation and came up with Toscorp. It sounds a little scary to me now, like a villainous corporation in a bad science-fiction movie; but at the time, it was a perfect reflection of what was going on: I had affixed my Tuscan dreams to a corporate machine.
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