“Give me a minute,” I said.
I stepped away and out the back of the room, into a little corridor that connected the Fireplace Room and the Patio. Along one wall was our bread table, where the waiters and busboys came to fill baskets.
I stopped a busboy as he breezed past and instructed him to remove all the bread to the kitchen and set this table up with a tablecloth, silverware, and wine glasses.
He looked at me like I was crazy, but I just told him to do as I asked.
It was a short, dark, corridor, with no action except the passing of restaurant staff. If they were lucky, maybe they’d see Chevy Chase on his way to take a piss.
I took the guy in and I could see the disappointment in his face, but the deal was done.
I divided the money up among the three dishwashers in the back; those guys worked their asses off and if anybody deserved some extra appreciation, it was them.
“This is from Mr. Schmuck,” I said, a private joke for my own amusement because they had no idea what schmuck meant. In the months and years to come, whenever I sold the bread table to a pushy customer, I repeated the routine until I decided it was poor form for a restaurateur to treat any guest that way, and began turning them away. One day, a dishwasher, I guess missing the occasional bonus, asked me, “What happened to Mr. Schmuck?”
“I’m sorry, he doesn’t come in anymore,” I said.
In any event, the moral of the story is there are some things money can’t buy. And in my restaurants, the hidden table is definitely among them.
THIRTEEN
The Restaurant Junkie
FREE OF THE Pressmans, the first order of business was to begin bringing Tuscan Square to life, but just as I was getting rolling on the massive construction phase, Bill Nimmo came to me with a proposition: the Sfuzzi chain—a nationwide group of Italian eateries, sort of an upscale Olive Garden with a Pompeii motif and Americanized food—had recently filed for bankruptcy and was on the auction block. Prudential Equity wanted to purchase Sfuzzi—fourteen restaurants including two each in New York City and the Dallas area, plus other units in Baltimore, Scottsdale, Philly, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Cleveland, Atlanta, Austin, San Diego, and Costa Mesa, California—and have me work my magic on them, converting each one into a Coco Pazzo with a less casual setting and more sophisticated food.
Their logic was sound, at least when explained in broad strokes: though the company was in dire financial straits, many of the individual restaurants did a respectable gross business—several million dollars a year in some cases—but their food costs were too high, so at the end of the day, they lost money. Food costs are one of the great barometers of a chef’s or restaurateur’s grasp of bottom-line reality and one of the things that seasoned industry professionals pride themselves on being able to control—not unlike the way chauvinists boast of controlling their wives. This was more true than ever in the mid- to late 1990s, when the growing legions of celebrity chefs managed to convince restaurant owners that the toques’ work in the kitchen was an important artistic endeavor and that the owners should consider themselves patrons of the arts, with a near-moral obligation to spend whatever it cost, not only for the best, most expensive ingredients, but also for the number of people it took to execute the very elaborate plating of them, with no regard to what they could reasonably expect to charge for the final product. The ultimate example of this is one of contemporary chefs’ favorite indulgences, foie gras (duck or goose liver), which you can charge a lot for, but which is expensive to begin with and doesn’t keep for an especially long time. (Fortunately, I’m Italian and we cook with one of the least expensive alternatives, chicken liver.) Other luxury ingredients such as caviar, truffles, sturgeon, shad roe, and soft-shell crabs create a similar quandary: they’re highly perishable and unless you charge an exorbitant price for them, opening yourself up to charges of larceny and the possibility of customer resistance, you risk making little or no money on them.
This was never an issue in my restaurants. From all the way back when I worked for my uncle, I understood how to manage a restaurant’s budget, and the food I served was straightforward enough that it would simply be unthinkable for food costs to become a problem. The key is using at least 90 percent of what you buy, and for me that was second nature because my mother never wasted anything in her kitchen; it all got used, even leftovers, which were repurposed into something new the next day, like cooking the remains of a pasta with scrambled eggs in a frittata. I’ve adapted and expanded this approach in my kitchens, milling stracotto into a sauce and offering it as rigatoni allo stracotto, for example, and almost never purchasing cuts of meat or poultry. Instead, I buy a saddle or a leg, butcher it myself, and use all the pieces. From one leg you can harvest several pounds of ground meat and stew meat, three osso bucos, two small loins, fifteen to twenty paillards, and enough top loin for a few servings of vitello tonnato. As if that weren’t economical enough, you can also use the bones to make stock.
Thanks to this philosophy, and to my secret weapon, Chester, among my peers I was known as one of the most ruthlessly efficient food-cost wranglers, bringing mine in as low as 22 or 23 percent of food revenue versus anywhere from 30 to 38 percent for most mid- to high-end places.
The other problem with Sfuzzi, it seemed, was that there was enormous corporate overhead. The infrastructure in place to run the company was overstaffed and inefficient, with no centralized purchasing or other economies of scale to balance the expense of having a corporation in the first place. This seemed simple enough to fix: just employ the kind of systems I had in New York, like my own private linen company, which had by then moved to a larger facility in Long Island City, just across the Fifty-ninth-Street Bridge.
Nevertheless, from the moment the Sfuzzi idea was first presented to me, I knew it was a bad one. In my opinion, food costs and overhead alone couldn’t explain the situation. It seemed to me that the parent company simply wasn’t earning enough to service the debt they had incurred to get the business off the ground. Plus, even if these didn’t seem like difficult problems to solve, just thinking about them turned me off. I was a restaurateur and a chef, and I had no interest in becoming a corporate leader. I liked to handle areas such as human resources myself, or turn them over to my most trusted lieutenants, such as Marta in the kitchens or Jack Weiss and a new guy, Joe Essa, who had come on board in the final days of Mad. 61 and stayed on to help me run my New York places. Beyond that, there was a reason that I had never opened restaurants in most of the cities where we’d be taking over Sfuzzis: the understanding of true Italian food took years to flow westward from New York and eastward from California. In many ways, outside of the major metropolises of America, Italian food is still misunderstood today, and there’s almost no awareness whatsoever of the different regions. People know that there are lots of sunflowers in Tuscany and that you get around Venice in a gondola, and that’s about it. In this way, Sfuzzi, with its Pompeii murals on the wall, was more user-friendly to many markets than a Coco Pazzo might ever be.
But more than that, Sfuzzi represented everything that was anathema to me: it was an artificial representation of Italy, right down to its silly name. Accordingly, many of the Sfuzzis did a huge bar business and were lapsing into something closer to lounges than restaurants. I had made my bones by committing to being 100 percent sincere in every detail of my places. Even though I owned a number of restaurants, I took great pains to keep tabs on all of them, and I was proud that I still signed off on everything, right down to the selection of silverware and napkins.
As if all those weren’t enough reasons to say no, the proposed means of financing the acquisition of Sfuzzi was to borrow six million dollars from the Tuscan Square funding, putting the project of my dreams in jeopardy. I was told that the money would be replaced by an anticipated influx of cash, but it felt like an awfully huge stack of chips to be moving around the table.
And yet, I have to be honest: despite all of these almost life-threatening misg
ivings, I was strangely attracted to the idea.
Why?
That is a question that I still wrestle with today, because at that moment, my life was just about perfect. I was being bankrolled by a company that put total trust and faith in me. I was the impresario behind two of the hottest restaurants in New York City, plus Sapore di Mare in East Hampton, and other places in New York and Chicago that were performing well. I was making a good living, and Jessie and I had three kids now, having welcomed our second son, Lorenzo, in 1995.
If you had told me when I arrived here in 1980, with little more to my name than a pocketful of confidence and a few pairs of creased blue jeans in my suitcase, nursing a broken heart and wanting nothing more than to get on the next plane back to Rome, if you had told me then that I would have attained this level of success in America, I . . . well, I won’t say that I would have told you that you were crazy, but I would have said that it would be a great deal. I would have signed up for that right then and there.
But I wasn’t happy, or perhaps I should say that I wasn’t content. I had moments of exhilaration, many of them. I had a driver in those days and at night I’d get into the back of my 500 Mercedes and make cell phone calls while he shuttled me from Il Toscanaccio down to Le Madri and then uptown to Coco Pazzo. I felt like a mogul sitting in the shadows of my chauffer-driven ride, and every time I made my entrance at one of the restaurants, I had that old Rick Blaine rush, the natural high of a restaurateur.
But the truth of the matter was that there was an even bigger rush for me, and that was the irreplaceable intensity of opening a new and preferably bigger restaurant. Nothing made me feel more alive—and by alive, I mean like I was on the high wire—than shepherding a new restaurant into reality.
Slowly but surely, I had become a junkie, but it was a socially acceptable, even socially celebrated type of junkie. In addition to the money, I was addicted to business deals, to expansion, and perhaps even to code-pendent relationships and drama. I’m not alone: the restaurant world is rife with ill-fated partnerships. But you’d think that after Silvano and the Pressmans and even Ian Schrager—with whom things were ongoing but less than perfect—I’d have known enough to be happy with what I had, to be content to have even just Le Madri, Coco Pazzo, and Sapore di Mare. Most restaurateurs would kill for those three restaurants. Hell, most would kill for one of them.
But not me: slowly but surely, I had developed an almost vampiric thirst for the Next Big Thing. And that thing had to be more outsized and outlandish than any that had gone before it. Tuscan Square was far from complete, and once open, it would be difficult to imagine anything bigger, so the Sfuzzi chain and its promise of adding fourteen new restaurants and scattering the Coco Pazzo name all over the nation in one fell swoop was attractive.
Nevertheless, I said no to Bill. He asked a second time, and again I said, no, and I did the same on his third pass.
The fourth time, he offered me an economic incentive that I couldn’t refuse . . . and I didn’t. I finally relented, and against all of my instincts, I said yes.
There’s a moment at the end of The Graduate: Benjamin (played by Dustin Hoffman) has just run off with Elaine Robinson. They escape from her angry family and jilted fiancé by getting on a yellow city bus and deposit themselves on a seat in the back. Her wedding dress is tattered and his face is smeared with grease. They smile at each other, but in the coming seconds, their faces go blank, empty. They don’t really know what they’ve gotten themselves into. Or maybe they do, but don’t want to admit it.
That’s the image that comes up for me when I remember agreeing to take on Sfuzzi. Because I knew way down deep that I was making a mistake. The truth was that I’d almost been too successful. I’d come to believe in my own great good luck, and if that failed, in the ability to talk or hustle my way out of anything. I had an intoxicating sense of business immortality. And so, despite my grave misgivings, I thought, “Hey, I’ll deal with the problems when they come; that always seems to work.”
There’s nothing more dangerous than a bullshitter believing his own bullshit. Despite what came out of my mouth, and what I allowed myself to believe, there was no doubt that Sfuzzi would be my undoing, that when I affixed my name to the paperwork in early 1997, I’d be signing something akin to my own death sentence.
NEXT THING I knew I was in Dallas, Texas, standing in the gallery of a courtroom with Bill and one of his associates. We weren’t there to watch a trial; we were there to bid in the auction of Sfuzzi. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied by my own growing sense of dread, I’d have found the scene funny: from the bench, the judge accepted one offer at a time. Before another group could raise the stakes, they’d huddle and confer in whispers, or ask for a recess to step outside and make cell phone calls to financial partners and attorneys.
The only thing that cheered me up was, of all people, our chief rival in the bidding: Al Copeland, also known as the Chicken King of New Orleans because he had founded the Popeyes chain. A middle-aged hillbilly playboy in shiny black boots and a huge Stetson-type hat, he exuded enough energy to power a small city, speaking his mind freely and loudly enough for everybody to hear. During a recess, I was milling around in the corridor outside the courtroom with Bill and his associate when Copeland came up to us.
“Hey, y’all,” he said. “I’m really only interested in four of these locations; why don’t we hook up and stop driving the price so high?”
I thought it sounded like a great idea, but my partners were doing the talking, and they brushed him off. It made me sad. It would have been great to get out of there and go celebrate over a few beers with the Chicken King of New Orleans.
At the end of the day, my team won, mostly because we came up with the most cash up front. But I took no pleasure in the victory, and back in New York, my apprehension was validated: once the ownership was transferred, I began receiving profit and loss reports. When you’ve been in my line of work long enough, you can read a spreadsheet the way a doctor reads a bedside chart, and as soon as those reports came rolling in through my fax machine, my eye went right to the danger signs. For example, the Vegas unit would show $300,000 gross sales for the month, but when I scanned the itemized breakdown, it became clear that about 20 percent of that was in redeemed coupons, which are not the same as cash, because the cash had been taken in months earlier, and by the corporation, not by the individual unit. The more I studied the charts, the more I gathered that Sfuzzi wasn’t a restaurant chain; it was a patient in the throes of a disease, and it was up to me to determine if the condition was fatal.
Follow-up tests were in order. I administered the first of them by visiting the two New York City locations, one in the World Financial Center, a huge downtown waterfront mall of shops and restaurants, home of the Winter Garden (a giant solarium) and, of course, neighbor to the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center; the other in the West Sixties, near Lincoln Center. My first excursion was to the one in the World Financial Center. The profits for that restaurant were actually very encouraging, so I thought it would be a way of easing myself into things.
By that time, we had moved out of the offices above Il Toscanaccio and were leasing the three floors above Le Madri to accommodate Toscorp’s growing needs: the second floor was to be Tuscan Square’s showroom, the third floor was for the accounting staff, and the top floor housed executive offices and a conference room. There was a subway station right downstairs, and I walked down and took the number 1 train to the World Financial Center, walked through the mall, and showed up anonymously for lunch at Sfuzzi.
When I set foot inside I was immediately reminded how tacky the concept was, with frescoes on the wall and chalky white pillars strewn about in a poor imitation of the architecture of Rome or Pompeii. Sfuzzi had originated in the Dallas–Fort Worth area of Texas and the food was like a bizarre cross between Wolfgang Puck and Yosemite Sam—anything-goes pizzas, salads topped with barbecue-seasoned chicken, and so on—the exact opposite of everything I h
ad been trying to teach people about Italian food for more than a decade. There was even one of my pet peeves, angel hair pasta with seafood sauce.
But the thing that bothered me the most was that no manager was present. The busboys and waiters were doing the best they could and I watched with something approaching pity, both for them and for what I was inheriting, as they tried to get through a service with no coordination between the front of the house and the back. The time between courses was interminable, and I noticed that at tables with more than one diner, very often one person would be served his lunch while the other was kept waiting for his, which is one of the cardinal sins you can commit in any dining room. But my growing temper wasn’t trained on the poor souls doing the work; it was focused on the absentee managers. It wasn’t the orchestra’s fault that they had no conductor.
Toward the end of my meal, a swift-walking young guy with soap-opera good looks, wearing a dark suit with pointy lapels, walked up to the podium, spun the reservation book around, and, while reviewing it, found about three reasons to lay his hands on the hostess, a frizzy-headed young thing who didn’t seem to mind in the least. He was the prototypical low-rent general manager: all strut, no stuff. The fact that he was clearly either sleeping with or on his way to sleeping with the hostess only solidified the cliché. And his obliviousness to the disarray on the service floor spoke volumes to me; a man like this would not be hired by anyone who knew how to run a restaurant. It’s not uncommon for restaurants to treat lunch as a there-for-the-taking enterprise, figuring expectations are lower than at dinner and many diners are simply looking to fuel up for an afternoon at their offices. This might sustain a business for years, but it doesn’t engender loyalty; customers who know you this way will abandon you the moment a better option presents itself. To me a paying customer was a paying customer and lunch should be treated with the same respect as dinner.
Dirty Dishes Page 23