Dirty Dishes

by Andrew Friedman

  We approached my partners and, after much haggling, came up with a proposal that worked for everybody. The only remaining relationship would be my (still unsigned) operating contract at Mad. 61.

  SADLY, FRED PRESSMAN died of pancreatic cancer that summer, but his passing made it easier, even appropriate, for me to sever my ties to the family. He was the only one with whom I ever really felt a kinship. I finally signed the papers that would put control of the restaurants in my hands that July.

  In mid-August, I was sitting in my office above Il Toscanaccio, smoking one my favorite cigars, Hoyo de Monterrey Number Two, when the phone rang. It was one of the maître d’s of Mad. 61, and he was hysterical.

  “Pino, they’re shutting down the restaurant!” he exclaimed.

  I sat forward in my chair. “Who?”

  “Barneys.”

  I snuffed out my cigar and hurried around the corner to Mad. 61. There were just a few customers polishing off their dinner, while Barneys’ chief operating officer, a real can-do hard-ass who had been brought in to help steer the corporate ship through bankruptcy—and who dressed like he was the forgotten Blues Brother—prowled the dining room accompanied by four or five Barneys’ security guards in their gray flannel slacks and blue blazers.

  The COO and I went right for each other, like a baseball manager and an umpire engaging in a dustup on the field. We met up in a corner near the bakery and began a chest-out confrontation.

  “What’s the problem?” I demanded.

  “We’re closing the restaurant,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “The family wants you out,” he said. I guess there was resentment that I, the little restaurateur who had needed their money eight years earlier, was now buying them out. “They’re in bankruptcy and it’s for the benefit of the estate. I’m just following orders.”

  “It’s not going to work that way. I have rights. I have a contract,” I bluffed. “You’re going to have to make me go.”

  “No problem,” he said, his face going purple with hostility. “We’re going to lock you out.”

  “You know what,” I said, as one of the security guards stuck his arms between us to keep us from coming to blows. “I have no idea what my remedy is, but I’m not going to sleep tonight. I’m going to spend the next twelve hours figuring out how to fuck you and the family.”

  I stormed out, then spent the weekend calling my employees, telling them not to show up for work until further notice. My concern was that because the company was in bankruptcy, we wouldn’t be able to pay them. And, sure enough, 110 payroll checks cut around this time bounced. I organized the staff and they began striking on Madison Avenue, picketing for their money.

  (It took three years, but eventually all the employees and vendors got paid. The only person who didn’t, as far as I know, was me, because the judge decided not to honor my unsigned management contract.) In September, Barneys announced plans to reopen Mad. 61, but I had a surprise for them: unbeknownst to anyone, I had—following my own advice—trademarked the name Mad. 61, just as I had trademarked everything since Le Madri. So when I read about their plans in the paper, I filed a trademark infringement suit in federal court and had my lawyer send them a cease-and-desist letter.

  By this time, the COO had been replaced with a more reasonable, collaborative executive, who called me up and asked me how much I wanted for the name.

  “Two million dollars,” I said.

  He told me to keep it and I said, “You bet I will.” That October, they ended up opening a makeshift restaurant called Fred’s in the space that had been the site of my biggest accomplishment as a restaurateur.

  I could never have expected that my real education in big business, begun in that conference room at Barneys in 1988, would end up coming full circle and applying to my final transaction with the Press-mans, but there you have it.

  And so, one of my partnerships ended, and a new one began. It was supposed to be the one that freed me, but it ended up being the beginning of the end, or something very close to the end.

  INTERLUDE

  WE STOP INTERVIEWING as a waiter puts a plate down before each of us: lamb stew, but not a particularly stewy one, no vegetables, just a pile of meat, looking not unlike pulled barbecued beef, with a mound of arugula stacked alongside it.

  “Taste that.”

  I spear a piece of lamb with my fork, put it in my mouth. The first thing that strikes me is pungent, hot black pepper. The second thing, as I chew it, is how meltingly tender it is.

  “How do you make this?”

  “I don’t sear the meat,” he says. I nod and think about this. I’ve never seen or cooked a stew recipe that doesn’t begin with searing the meat. Browning it leaves behind a fond in the pan, a coating of crusty bits imbued with flavor. His technique sacrifices that intensity in exchange for such soft lamb.

  “My mother taught me to cook it this way,” Pino says. “You put the lamb, the stock, the spices, the wine, in the pot at the same time and bring it up . . .” (He pauses here, hitting the brakes on his voice, lowering to a delicate whisper.) “. . . very, very slowly. Very gently.” He sounds not unlike a man instructing a younger man in the finer points of lovemaking.

  I’m struck, as I am most times we eat together, that Pino still feels food very intensely and treats it, talks about it, very sensually, even after all these years. I watch him plow through the lamb, eating with real gusto, a fork in one hand, in the other a hunk of bread with which he dabs at the sauce. I think of what food means to Pino, of how to this day it still seems to carry him away. For a moment, I feel as if I’m watching something private and personal, as though I’ve wandered in on somebody deep in prayer.

  Thinking about his story as he’s told it so far, a thought occurs to me. It’s probably too psychoanalytical for Pino’s taste, but I feel I have to voice it.

  “Pino?”

  Almost startled, as though he’d forgotten I was there, he looks up from his food and stops midchew. “Yeah?”

  “Did it ever occur to you how many times you’ve walked out on fathers in your life?”

  He puts down the fork and the bread and folds his hands on the table. I think that maybe I’ve offended or even angered him. His eyes reveal absolutely nothing, making it impossible to gauge what exactly I’ve embarked on.

  “Go on.”

  “You left your biological father in Italy, and then all of your professional fathers: you left Silvano and his father, you left Steve, and you left Fred Pressman.”

  He considers this for a moment, then averts his eyes and shakes his head from side to side, but it’s not a gesture of denial. Rather, it’s a kind of weary resolution.

  “You’re right,” he says. “Jesus. I never thought of it in this way.”

  “Why do you think it is?”

  He keeps shaking his head. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  “I don’t think you like anybody else to have authority over you. Not your father, not your employer, not your partners.”

  The side-to-side shaking becomes an up-and-down nod. “That’s true,” he says. “But they all had something in common; they all wanted to control me. I was a good son to my father. I was a great employee to Silvano. I made money for my partners. But at some point they all felt like they owned me. None of them wanted me to move on, to be myself.”

  “What does that mean, ‘to be myself’?”

  “I’m a leader, Andrew. I’m not a follower.”

  “So you were meant to be on your own all along?”

  “When it comes to business, probably so.”

  He picks up his fork and that bread and gets back eating. I do the same.

  We polish off the stew, then the salad, which is a perfect, cleansing chaser. Pino orders us two more glasses of wine and continues.

  TWELVE

  The Hidden Table: Running

  a Reservation Book

  IF YOU DINE regularly at popular restaurants in New York, or in any major
city, then you’ve probably experienced something like this: the restaurant opens its reservation book one month before a given date. With this in mind, you call exactly thirty days prior to your spouse’s birthday, or your anniversary, or just a date you’ve set aside to finally eat at this hard-to-crack bastion of fine dining, and are told that they only have tables available at six o’clock or nine thirty. You wonder how it’s possible that they’re already down to those two times. The phone was only busy on your first attempt; how many tables could they have given out in three minutes?

  Your confusion turns to anger on the night you show up for dinner. Standing at the bar, waiting for the lingerers at your table to vacate it, you see a handsome young couple walk up to the podium and get all lovey-dovey with the maître d’. He casts an eye over the dining room, then over his reservation book, discreetly summons one of his hostesses, and has her escort them to a table. From the look of the transaction, you’re 100 percent certain that they just walked in and scored a table with thirty seconds’ notice, compared to your thirty days of advance planning. And you’re still waiting at the bar!

  If you’re wondering how such a moment is possible, you’re not alone. There’s perhaps no aspect of the restaurant industry less understood by the dining public than the way tables are doled out, booked, and managed. There’s a science to running the book in a restaurant, and one of the reasons civilians don’t know much about it is that most restaurateurs do it their own way. It’s like the work of an artisan: different techniques are passed down through the generations, so how you do it is a blend of the ways of your mentors combined with your own inventiveness, ingenuity, and personal style. The notable exception to this is the relatively new development of Open Table, a Web-based business through which reservations can be booked for restaurants all over the world, and of other software and Web sites that turn the procurement of a table into a transaction no different than the purchase of a ticket to a Justin Timberlake concert.

  Call me old school, but when it comes to The Book, I could never, for a second, consider using a humanless system. The reservation book at my restaurant is a physical tome that would have been at home in a restaurant of the 1950s or ’60s: a fat registry, held closed by an elastic strap, with a list of tables available for each time slot. The first thing we do on each page is list the times and the tables by hand, then they get filled in as people call for reservations.

  Each day, the reservations are reviewed, a seating chart is created, and we determine who to seat where.

  But here’s another reason I could never use Open Table: when I wake up each morning, I know that a devoted customer or a friend is going to call looking to come in to dinner. These people feel they have the right to be able to call at five thirty or six P.M. and tell me they’re coming over.

  And I’ll tell you something. I agree with them. Being a regular, or a friend of the owner, should come with certain benefits.

  So that’s the situation: Open Table versus “I Want the Table.”

  And what’s the solution? Very simple. I hide the table.

  I learned my lesson early. Way back at Il Cantinori, I began teaching maître d’s to never promise anything out of the ordinary. The reason is that they always have the option of saying to a customer, “Let me check,” but when a customer reaches me, I don’t have the luxury of saying, “I don’t have the table.” Nobody believes that an owner doesn’t have a table in his pocket, even when it’s the truth.

  That’s when I began hiding tables: at Centolire, there are four tables that don’t appear in our reservation book or on the seating chart: one deuce, two four tops, and one six. Those are my secret tables, and they’ve given me peace of mind for years now, both here and at other restaurants, like the night Prince Rainier of Monaco showed up spontaneously at Coco Pazzo, completely unannounced. What was I going to do? Turn him out into the street?

  Their owners and managers may not admit it, but any hot restaurant has some version of this system. Many restaurateurs actually list “hold” tables in their reservation book or software, but I learned over the years that certain maître d’s with a taste for extortion couldn’t resist selling those tables themselves. To a person, they all do it the same way: make a promise to a customer, then come to me with their tail between their legs. “Oh, Pino,” they say. “I’m so sorry, but I overbooked at eight thirty.”

  “No problem,” I say, as I release one of my tables. “But if you ever do it again, you’re going to be overbooked on your ass and you’re not going to have a job.”

  They never argue. Because we both know the truth. And at some level I almost pity them, because the temptation is overwhelming, not just to make the tips, but to please—which ought to be part of the psychological makeup of any restaurant professional. Back in the heyday of Sapore and Coco Pazzo, as evening approached, I could feel the devil waiting at the door, an invisible presence ready to tempt my staff, to rob John, Tom, Ariel, and the great Carlos of their virginity, to turn them into front-door whores willing to keep a reservation-holder cooling his heels at the bar for an hour in exchange for a quick hundred from a walk-in. Sometimes, I’d hover over my hosts all night to help them resist the desire.

  As if all of this weren’t enough to contend with, at some of my restaurants it wasn’t enough to score a table; customers also wanted to be seated in the best location.

  The ultimate example was Sapore di Mare, which had two hundred twenty seats spread out among five rooms. The way I explained the seating philosophy of Sapore to my maître d’s was that Sapore was a show: live theater powered by spaghetti alla rustica. Our celebrity clientele were the stars of the show; the unfamous-but-glamorous guests were the nonspeaking supporting cast who got to share the stage with the stars. The rest of the customers were there to watch the show.

  The coveted seats were the forty-five in the Bar Room. This was where you might see Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Chevy Chase, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, and Steven Spielberg—not just having dinner but table hopping as if they were in a high school cafeteria.

  There was nowhere in the restaurant where I would have sat those people other than the Bar Room. It’s just the nature of the business. The French have a great expression, physique du rôle. And that was the prerequisite for a table in the Bar Room—to have the physique for the role. If that offends you, then I’m sorry.

  The other enormous ongoing challenge was Coco Pazzo, which only had 110 seats to play with, and only three marquee tables—19, 32, and 40, the only ones that I could keep an eye on while also manning the podium—with the supporting characters populating the seats right around them. The challenge was that on many nights we were attended almost exclusively by media and entertainment royalty, but we only had those three thrones to assign. So, we’d put the crème de la crème there and make the others happy with personal attention and little treats from the kitchen when I felt it was in order.

  There were nights when the challenge required a different solution, and I look back on these the way I imagine athletes look back on their most hard-won victories. On one evening, we were expecting Frank Sinatra and Julio Iglesias at one table and the Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart at another. My instincts were finely honed enough that I knew that these guests would be celebrities even to the other celebrities, so rather than seating them in the “face tables,” I sat one party in the back right corner and the other in the back left corner, affording them some privacy. It was a total reversal of the usual way of doing things. The only hiccup came when Sinatra got up to go to the men’s room. At his advanced age, he had a bit of a tough time making his way around tables, which often resulted in adjacent seatbacks forming roadblocks, turning the room into a maze. He was stranded there, having a senior moment, and I noticed as more and more customers took note of him and began staring.

  I quickly navigated the room. “Are you looking for the men’s room, Mr. Sinatra?” I asked.

  “Yeah, actually I am,” he
replied.

  I offered him my elbow and escorted him to the front of the restaurant where the restrooms were, then waited for him to emerge and escorted him back to his table.

  Now, New York City has some of the savviest diners in the world, so as people were leaving, they’d notice where Ron Perelman was seated, or the hot model du jour, and they’d whisper to me, asking for the table number. Like a young beauty subject to frequent, unwanted requests for her phone number, I quickly learned that the path of least resistance was best: I gave them the number, but I also did as those girls do and changed one of the digits.

  Some customers didn’t know when to say when, and this was one of the few times when my desire to please would give way to my desire to teach somebody a lesson.

  The ultimate example took place one Saturday night during the heyday of Sapore, when a guy showed up at the podium wearing baggy, pleated linen pants and a tropical shirt, flanked by two blondes as least ten inches taller than he was.

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  “Table for three,” he said.

  I looked over my shoulder. There wasn’t a square foot of unoccupied space anywhere in the restaurant, just a great sea of the prettiest, wealthiest people on the East Coast.

  “I’m sorry, we’re fully booked.”

  The guy took my hand in his and slipped me what I later realized was five hundred dollars. It was the least subtle payoff in the history of hospitality. It wasn’t a single bill, and it wasn’t neatly folded: it was a spool of cash roughly the diameter of a rolled-up magazine.

  OK, I thought, if you want a table so bad, I’ll give you a table.