Other critics would follow suit, offering similar opinions. A number of critics responded to Tuscan Square as though it were the Disney World or Epcot Center of Tuscany. We were so well received by our customers that I was a bit shocked by the cool critical reception. I was getting that old, familiar feeling again, the sense that colleagues and industry observers were trying to keep me down, that my ambitions to expand beyond the cubbyhole of a restaurateur and become a retailer were somehow out of line. I’ll never forget the day that a well-known culinary travel writer was strolling the retail area when she caught sight of the soaps and candles and exclaimed, for all to hear, “Oh, my God! Who could have lunch with soaps?” Of course, she wasn’t going to be having lunch with soaps, the fragrances of which can confuse the palate; she was going to be escorted to the separate dining area and served lunch there, well out of range of the scents that so offended her. I guess she’d never been to some of the great department stores of London, such as Fortnum and Mason, where you can have tea or a meal almost within arm’s reach of a box of soap or perfume.
This was not an isolated opinion, though. For whatever reason, the consensus among journalists seemed to be that Tuscan Square was a gimmick, but for me a gimmick is something that’s shallow or lacks depth. I guess the reviewers wanted me to be a plagiarist. I have nothing against Keith McNally—in fact, I like the guy, and I think that Bal-thazar is a magnificent masterpiece of a restaurant. But at the end of the day, what is it, really, other than a near-copy of places that already exist? It would have been a breeze for me to find a little square in Portofino, or even take the Piazza della Repubblica itself, and just recreate little pieces of it in a big Manhattan space. It would have been the easiest thing in the world.
I’m sure I probably sound defensive, but I truly believe that while it was fine for me to be the Little Busboy Who Could, and open Il Can-tinori, even Le Madri, this level of audacity was too much for some people. How else to explain that while Reichl had no problem giving a lovely review to Mad. 61, in the middle of an actual department store, she suddenly found the proximity to retail offensive?
Despite all the resistance, Tuscan Square did pretty well, especially the restaurant, and we did about $6 to $6.5 million of business annually for our first few years, against a projection of about $8 million. I kept thinking that if we were just a few yards to the east, on the corner of Fifth Avenue, we’d have exceeded that by a mile.
Meanwhile, my new Coco Pazzos were not generating the amount per unit needed according to the projection to sustain the debt obligation to the lender. By June 1998, we had to sell Coco Addison, followed a few months later by Coco Dallas. There were nine of the former Sfuzzis left, plus eight of my own restaurants, but other closures would soon follow. The corporation was sick and we were amputating limbs, trying to prevent the infection from spreading.
The funny thing is that I probably could have made those restaurants profitable and earned a lot of money for me and my partners. It would have been very easy actually: take what I knew about consistency and service, add in my ruthlessly efficient approach to food costs, dress the servers in T.G.I. Friday’s–type uniforms, and serve Italian-American food. I could have just called the chain Pino’s, and we would all have been rolling in dough.
So why didn’t I just do that?
Because until just now, as I was recounting all of this, the idea never entered my mind.
BY THE FALL of 2000, I was despondent. Whatever pleasure I had taken in Tuscan Square and my original places in New York City and Chicago was overtaken by the day-to-day grind of administering the half-dozen or so remaining Cocos, which were slowly but surely driving me pazzo, not just because of the thankless task of overseeing them, but because they were dragging me down into a quicksand of mediocrity. It felt like every time I picked up a newspaper food section or a magazine somebody was taking a potshot at my restaurant chain, and the worst part about it was that they were right. People had said a lot of things about me over the years, some true and some false, but nobody had ever called me mediocre. I was mortified, and I was driven deeper and deeper into despair. For the first time since I had moved to New York, I found myself wandering the streets again. Even though I had a handful of restaurants and an enormous retail store, I felt like I had nowhere to go.
On one of these walks, I ran into a friend of mine on the Upper East Side. I tried to put on a good face, but he was perceptive and realized that I was in hell. We got to talking and he determined that I was depressed and offered me the phone number of a psychiatrist he knew. I was skeptical, but I made an appointment.
The shrink’s office was a shabby two-room affair on the ground floor of a prewar apartment building. The doctor was a shlubby, chubby, middle-aged guy who carried himself as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. He led me into his private room and I took a seat and started talking, recounting my saga of the past few years. At one point, as the enormity of my situation washed over me, I stopped for a moment and looked off into the distance. He picked up a box of Kleenex and held it out to me.
It was like having a bucket of cold water splashed in my face.
“What is that?” I asked him.
“It’s OK to cry here,” he said.
A grown man holding out a box of Kleenex to me was an insult, but a useful one, because it made me feel ashamed. I wondered what I was doing there. Was I not the same man who had managed to overcome the handicap of showing up in the United States with little money and even less English? Who had built a restaurant group out of thin air? Was I not the grandson of the great fisherman Ettore, who had known torture? I thought again of The Godfather and of Don Cor-leone shaking the crooner Johnny Fontaine by the shoulders, slapping him and saying, “You can act like a man!”
“You know what,” I said. “I’ll be very honest with you. I feel bad. But sitting here, it makes me feel worse. Send me a bill. I’m leaving.”
I stormed out and into the street. It was a perfect fall day, not unlike the one, almost exactly twenty years earlier to the day, when I had wandered around the Financial District marveling at the sights and sounds of New York. I breathed in the fresh air and looked around. I was only a few blocks from where I had started my long march down to Da Silvano all those years ago (and, a few years later, the walk to Il Cantinori) on which I had decided to stay in the United States.
I had come through so much, I told myself; surely I could survive this.
I hailed a taxi and went back down to my office and got to work solving my problems.
AFTER MUCH SOUL searching, I decided to do something counterintuitive: open yet another restaurant. I needed to flex my entrepreneurial muscle with something fresh and creative, to prove that the Chain Formerly Known as Sfuzzi was one giant abomination, and that the real me was still here, still able to create a great new restaurant. This wasn’t about recapturing that old, addictive rush; it was about pride. I had to show people that I still had it. Most of all, I had to show myself that all wasn’t lost, that the thing that had defined my life in the United States was still there and functioning.
The concept I had in mind was radically different from anything I’d done before. Having re-created, as much as I thought possible, a little corner of Tuscany in Rockefeller Center, I found myself thinking fondly of my own first days here in the United States, my affection for the immigrant experience of America. As with Sapore, I was reminded of a song, about a young boy asking his mother for centolire, one hundred lire, so he can go to America. I was sometimes critical of the Italian-American culture, especially when I first got to the United States. But after so long here, I realized that there was much about it I could identify with, especially the core truth of what America meant to me. I decided that my new place would be called Centolire, and would celebrate Italian-American culture.
I wanted to get back to the Upper East Side, and when the space that housed Celadon, a handsome but failing neighborhood restaurant on Madison Avenue, became available,
I pounced. I loved the space, especially the glass elevator available to shuttle guests from the small first floor to the spacious, rectangular second floor. The deal was so sweet that I was able to move on my own, without my corporation attached to my hip, and make this truly my own venture. I signed the lease just before the New Year. As we left 2000 behind, I had the feeling that 2001 might be the year that I turned it all around.
I OPENED CENTOLIRE in March 2001, with illustrations on the menus of cruise ships bound for America, and food divided into New World dishes such as chicken scarpariello (chicken breast braised in an aromatic liquid of white wine and broth) and spaghetti and meatballs and Old World dishes such as spaghetti alla rustica and pollo martini (parmesan-crusted chicken breast with lemon sauce). The approach to naming the dishes was consistent with our Old Word versus New World inspiration: using “chicken” for the scarpariello because that’s how Italian-Americans refer to it (many Italian-American creations pair Italian and English words), and pollo for the martini because that’s what it’s called in the motherland.
For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, I was excited about a new restaurant opening. I had Marta in the kitchen and two of my most reliable front-of-the-house guys on the floor: Ariel and Gianfranco. We were all a bit older than we used to be, but it was just like old times, especially when a lot of my longtime customers from the original Coco Pazzo found their way over, welcoming me back, welcoming me home.
He wouldn’t get around to reviewing us for a while, but when he finally did, the New York Times critic William Grimes made my day, recounting my roller-coaster ride in America:
When Pino Luongo burst on the New York scene nearly 20 years ago with Il Cantinori, he looked like a culinary Pavarotti in the making. His restaurants, by combining high quality with flashy presentation, put sizzle back in the steak Florentine. Italian food seemed exciting again. Il Cantinori begat Le Madri, which begat assorted Coco Paz-zos, and before long, Mr. Luongo was running neck and neck with Mario Perillo for the title of Mr. Italy.
Success led to mediocrity. Lately, Mr. Luongo has seemed more interested in cashing in than doing the hard work of preparing good food. This dubious track only adds to the appeal of Centolire, a surprise return to form by Mr. Luongo. The restaurant, in the two-level space that once belonged to Celadon, is a large, good-looking tratto-ria with a warm, beating heart. The food, doled out in substantial portions, is honest, well executed and deeply satisfying. Mr. Luongo is once again hitting his high C’s.
It was an honest summation of my life in the restaurant trade to date, except for one thing: I hadn’t “cashed in”; I was out of cash, or at least my company was. The same month I opened Centolire, we closed Coco Opera. (The landlord had decided to exercise his demolition clause, and we had to vacate.) Soon thereafter, after trying to salvage it as a Coco Pazzo Cafe, we shuttered Il Toscanaccio. Tuscan Square was still underperforming and so were the various restaurants around the country. I was in a state of perpetual regret: how could I have made such a poor decision by taking all of this on? Adding irony to the state of affairs was the fact that all of my original restaurants, Le Madri, the original Coco Pazzo, and the Coco Pazzos in Chicago, were still doing great. But it was never enough. It wasn’t that we couldn’t pay our vendors, it was that we were in a kind of quicksand: no matter how well we did, we couldn’t make our payments to the lender. The debt seemed more and more insurmountable every day, and we wanted to negotiate new and more reasonable terms.
I consulted with some attorneys and accountants and concluded that the only way out was to have Toscorp file for bankruptcy, which would allow us to restructure the corporation and separate out my original restaurants. I was resistant at first. Back in Italy, filing for bankruptcy was something shameful that called your personal honor into question. It meant that you’d be stiffing people for their bills and throwing in the towel on your business. One of Toscorp’s attorneys showed me a little tough love when he pulled me aside and said, “Kid, you ain’t in Italy anymore. This is America. It’s just a business solution.”
And so, on August 23, 2001, we held a board meeting and decided to file for Chapter 11, to refinance the corporate funding, and to reconstruct the ownership, all with the goal of protecting its most vital aspects in New York City and Chicago, the barely beating heart of this huge and dying beast.
It wasn’t the end of my problems. We still had units in Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Austin, and Costa Mesa. We also still had Coco Marina in downtown New York, in the World Financial Center, which was perhaps the only one of the former Sfuzzis turning a respectable profit.
Of course, I couldn’t know it at the time, but that one would be gone in less than two weeks, as well.
FOURTEEN
A Star Is Bored: Interview
Questions for Young
American Chefs
TRYING TO STAFF fourteen dysfunctional units of the Chain Formerly Known as Sfuzzi, not to mention my own original restaurants, put me in touch with a broad range of young chefs in the late 1990s. This was a transformational time in the American cooking trade because the first generation who had grown up watching celebrity chefs on television and in ad campaigns were coming into their own.
As a result, a lot of young men and women had entered a very old and noble profession for all the wrong reasons. Where their predecessors had fallen in love with food at a young age and tirelessly toiled in other people’s kitchens for years, often for no money, traveled all over the world just to spend time in the birthplace of certain cuisines and techniques, and patiently waited until they had amassed a wealth of knowledge before even imagining that they might call themselves a chef, the new crop thought they had the chops to be a chef right out of cooking school. Many of the young cooks I met had no interest in perfecting their craft: they were simply looking to learn enough to get into a kitchen and then, as soon as possible, get out of the kitchen and in front of a television camera.
It’s like I was saying about pasta before: you can’t be told how to make a perfect spaghetti alle vongole (spaghetti with clams). You need to learn how to recognize the best fresh clams, and how to clean them. You need to know how to cook pasta right. You even need to know the best way to chop the parsley. Then you need the palate and technique to put it all together and make it taste good and then the teaching and management abilities to be able to teach others to do the same and ensure they get it right time after time.
It takes patience and humility, not just ego, to become a great chef. And yet I met a steady parade of kids who thought they were hot stuff, who really believed that they were going to be the next Food Network star, or reality-show winner, or supermarket product cover boy or girl. There was the young Italian-American kid who showed up in an Armani T-shirt and designer jeans, his muscles betraying the fact that he clearly spent more time at the gym than he did thinking about food; or the mad scientist with cotton-candy hair and polka-dot tie who fashioned himself a molecular gastronomist, proud of all the foams and jellies he could create, with no appreciation of the fact that the two most important functions of food are, and always will be, to taste good and to satisfy.
Over the course of my career I’ve gotten pretty good at interviewing chefs. One of my many tricks was to meet them anywhere but a restaurant, to take them out of their natural habitat and see them a little more nakedly. My first question was always, “How did you learn to cook?” I was looking for some sign of passion, of a lifetime of cooking at their mother’s side, or their grandmother’s, or of how they’d fallen in love with cooking unexpectedly in their first job. I was almost shocked at how many chefs had made the decision at the end of high school and seemed to have little love of food or of cooking.
To save myself time and disappointment, I developed a number of questions designed to cut to the quick, and I’m pleased to share this helpful quiz for interviewing young American chefs:
1. Who were your last three employers?
a. A Michelin three-star rest
aurant in France, an unheralded but locally famous tavern in Greece, and David Bouley.
b. Alice Waters, Jeremiah Tower, and me (in my own forty-seat restaurant).
c. They were all before cooking school; do you still wanna hear ’em?
2. Top Chef is . . .
a. what I push myself to be every day.
b. an OK reality show.
c reviewing my audition tape . . . again.
3. What’s your favorite technique?
a. Grilling in the summer; braising in the winter.
b. The right one for the dish at hand.
c. I can’t decide between sous vide and freezing with nitrogen.
4. What’s the mood like in your kitchen?
a. It’s not my kitchen; it’s the owner’s kitchen.
b. Calm, cool, and collected, just like me.
c. Whatever my mood du jour is; the kitchen is just a big, stainless steel reflection of whatever I’m feeling. Deal with it.
5. Do you go to the gym?
a. I get enough of a workout on the line every night.
b. I don’t have time, working six or seven days a week.
c. Of course, gotta stay trim; the camera adds ten pounds.
6. What’s your ideal Saturday night?
a. Every table turns three times and we put out at least four hundred dishes.
b. They’re all different, but it’s my favorite night of the week, the one that lets me know that I have what it takes.
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