Dirty Dishes

by Andrew Friedman

  c. My sous chef covers it; he does all the real work anyway.

  7. What’s your philosophy of management?

  a. It’s all about hiring the right people.

  b. I try to be supportive, but firm.

  c. They take 10 percent right?

  8. What about purchasing?

  a. I phone my vendors personally about an hour before we close the kitchen each night.

  b. Food cost is my priority.

  c. You talking to me?

  9. If most of the dishes on your menu weren’t selling, what would you do?

  a. Change the dishes themselves.

  b. Lose some of the more esoteric stuff, keep the popular items, try some new things.

  c. Write a letter to be included in the menu, explaining my philosophy to our customers in order to educate them.

  10.Who’s your role model?

  a. Not Rocco DiSpirito.

  b. Not Rocco DiSpirito.

  c. Rocco DiSpirito.

  Grading the quiz:

  No C answers: When can you start?

  1 to 3 C answers: You seem like a nice enough young man/ woman. Try back after you’ve worked in real restaurants for a few years.

  4 to 7 C answers: We’ll call you (not really), don’t call us.

  7 to 10 C answers: How much would you take to stay out of my industry?

  FIFTEEN

  The New Normalcy

  ABOUT TEN DAYS after that fateful board meeting, I flew to Spokane, Washington, with Jessie, Marco, and Jacobella for a family trip, leaving our youngest son, Lorenzo, back home with our nanny. It was good to be away in the Pacific Northwest, where we got lucky and caught a break from the notorious perpetual gray drizzle of the region and instead were awash in sunshine and cool breezes. New York City, and all of my problems back there, seemed like a distant memory. Unfortunately, the days blew past quickly, and when the end of the trip came, we all packed our bags and went to bed early so we could wake up at the crack of dawn, return our rental car, and board the plane back to my own circle of New York restaurateurs’ hell.

  It was September 10.

  Before I even opened my eyes the next morning, I could feel that I was coming down with something: there was a tickle at the back of my throat and I was more tired than I usually am when I wake up. I hoisted myself out of bed and turned on the television set. The first thing I saw was the image of the north tower of the World Trade Center, with a crater in its side and dark gray smoke billowing out into the blue sky over New York City. The newscasters were explaining that an airplane had crashed into the tower, discussing it as though it were an accident. But I remembered well that the World Trade Center had been attacked by car bomb in 1993, and I had always been concerned that the buildings might be attacked again. And, of course, my worst fears were confirmed moments later when a second plane sliced through the south tower, sending up a huge fireball and more clouds of smoke.

  As horrific as the scene was, I have to be honest: my first thoughts weren’t of the people in those buildings; they were of the people who worked for me at Coco Marina, in the World Financial Center just to the west. I unplugged my cell phone from its charger on the nightstand and speed-dialed the restaurant but was met by a persistent and unusual busy signal, so I called Pearl, the comptroller of my company, in the offices above Le Madri, about two miles uptown. She told me that she was getting nothing but busy signals as well. I could hear panic in her voice, and I told her to stay cool and just take it one step at a time, and that I’d be in touch.

  I hung up and just sat there on the edge of my bed, watching the towers bleed smoke on the television screen. Jessie came over and sat down beside me and we didn’t say a word. We didn’t have to. We were both thinking the same thing, both watching along with the rest of the country between Spokane and New York. I must have been in a state of shock, because I was definitely not thinking straight and now that I had a moment to consider what was actually transpiring, the enormity of it began to sink in. I told the kids to get showered and dressed so we could leave for the airport, but then it occurred to me to call the airline and of course all the flights had been grounded.

  I forced myself to focus, to think, but it only made things worse. I began to envision the repercussions of what was playing out, a historic event on par with Pearl Harbor. It also occurred to me that I probably knew people who had perished, customers and the parents of my kids’ schoolmates who worked in finance, and surely former employees who worked at Windows on the World restaurant on the top floor. I also flashed forward in my mind, wondering about the ripple effect in world politics, picturing how security would probably change. And then, of course, the profound business impact. I guess it’s selfish, but it occurred to me that I had just filed for Chapter 11, with an eye toward reorganizing my business around the life-support system of my restaurants in Chicago and New York. I felt gut-punched.

  The only thing I knew for sure was that I had to get back. I loaded up the car, ushered the kids into the back, and we drove to the rental-car office at the airport to tell them that I was going to be returning the car in New York. I definitely wasn’t thinking straight because normally I’d have just done it, just driven back east and sorted it out when I got there. Sure enough, my hesitation cost me: the agent at the desk said that we had to bring the car back to the Spokane location. I insisted, explaining that my business was in Manhattan, and she rented me another car and we got on the road.

  It was already afternoon by the time we hit Interstate 90, which would be our means of passage to the east. The roads were sparsely populated and the contrast between what I’d seen on television and the tree-lined asphalt around us was stark. Compounding the sense of disorientation was the fact that I was clearly coming down with something worse than a cold; my dry cough was turning wet and my head felt like a fishbowl with liquid sloshing around its confines. To make matters worse, my kids were bickering in the backseat and I was getting aggravated, not just by them, but by the fact that for long stretches of time, I couldn’t find a news station on the radio because we were in the middle of nowhere. When I could find a station, we got intermittent reports about the extent of the damage and the early piecing together of what had happened and the profiles of the terrorists who had carried out the plot.

  We went in and out of cell phone range as well, but whenever we had service, I got Pearl on the line and had her conference in the managers of the various restaurants. I kept Centolire and the original Coco Pazzo open but closed all the others. I would later hear that Mayor Giuliani was instructing people to go out to dinner and forge on with their normal lives, but I had to do what I could to protect my already-fragile interests. I knew that the places in Midtown and downtown would be empty that night.

  Apart from those calls, we drove in a silence that was punctuated by the kids’ occasional flare-ups. With nothing in sight but the frontier, all the thoughts I’d been keeping at bay during our holiday came seeping into my head and I was reminded of my original voyage to the United States. In many ways, I felt just as lost now as I had then, just as adrift and unsure of what lay before me. At the same time, the attacks activated a sense of American patriotism in me, made me feel as though I myself had been violated, and that all the souls who had perished when those towers fell to the ground were members of my own extended family.

  We stopped for the night in Bozeman, Montana. The only thing that could have made this town seem smaller was if tumbleweed had come rolling at us down the desolate main street. We checked into one of the budget hotels interspersed along the road, and I was struck that the entire place was run by one person who did multiple duty as check-in clerk, night manager, and “concierge,” describing our local dining options, which in this case consisted of the vending machines on each hallway and the restaurant across the street. We chose option B and walked across the dusty, deserted road to have dinner in the local bar and grill. We were the only people there to eat, but there were a bunch of dudes in blue jean
s and flannel shirts clustered at the bar drinking beer and watching some local baseball game on two wall-mounted televisions. I excused myself from my family and asked them to switch the channel and the bartender stared at me coldly and said, “Why?”

  I told him that I wanted to see some news about the attacks. The man groused and changed the station to CNN. I stood there watching that endless looping of the planes crashing into the towers and listening to the updates, which were mostly speculative at that point. After a few minutes, they went back to the ball game and I returned to the table for our dinner: cheeseburgers for me and Jessie; grilled-cheese sandwiches for the kids.

  September 12 was Jessie’s birthday. We continued our beeline across the United States. Again, I worked the phone whenever I could, checking in on the restaurants and trying to reach a few of the workers from Coco Marina who were unaccounted for, especially a young steward who had worked for me for a long time. I finally caught up with him on his cell phone.

  “Mr. Pino,” he said to me. “I run and I run and I get on the train and I go to Philadelphia!” He wasn’t kidding: he had fled to Penn Station and gone straight to the City of Brotherly Love. He would never come back to New York.

  Talking on the phone aggravated my increasingly sore throat and left me hoarse and depleted, but I kept it up for as long as I could, gathering as much information as possible and making decisions about which restaurants to open and which to leave closed. I was also dying for details about the physical condition of Coco Marina, but they were impossible to come by as the entire neighborhood of the World Financial Center was cordoned off to everybody except emergency personnel.

  We made a marathon push that day, driving more than twelve hours. I was no fun to be with but Jessie understood what I was going through and, in her distinctly Southern way, let me have the space and time I needed to process my thoughts. Even when I was short with her or the kids, she was very sweet and calm, keeping the family together and never pressing me to adjust my attitude.

  By late that night, we made it to a small town—I can’t for the life of me remember the name—near Sioux City, Iowa, checked into a Comfort Inn, and walked around the corner to a local restaurant. It was just like the day before—a drive through barren highways that ended up in a small town, a largely unmanned hotel, and a perfunctory meal in a restaurant permanently perfumed with nicotine.

  We ordered Caesar salads, lousy burgers, and a wine I’d never heard of. I asked the waitress what they had for dessert, and Jessie, reading my mind and imagining a slice of day-old chocolate layer cake with a candle sticking out of it, turned to me and said, “Don’t even think about it.”

  When we woke up the next day, I was determined that we were going to make it to Chicago. My cough had become a dreadful, hacking thing, and I was trying to reach my doctor, but he hadn’t resumed normal business hours since the attacks and was nowhere to be found. I did reach Jack Weiss, however, and I asked him to arrange a hotel room for us, and when we got to Chicago on Thursday night, we checked in and went straight to Coco Pazzo. My business was in a desperate state, my adopted home was facing a historic crisis, and there was nothing I could do. All I could hope for was that a familiar meal in familiar surroundings would make my family feel more secure than I did.

  When we got to the restaurant it was almost completely empty. The staff were there in their starched black and white uniforms, and the antipasti table was all set up, but there were just a few diners scattered about, some of them no doubt stranded away from home themselves. We sat at a round table in the corner of the massive dining room and had a full view of the sad spectacle. Coco Pazzo Chicago was framed with blue curtains that usually imbued the scene with extra energy, but it felt as though the life had been sucked out of the space and it reminded me, more than anything, of an empty stage, a theater glimpsed on a dark night. It was the most depressing evening I’d ever spent in one of my own places. I’d made it back to civilization, only to learn that civilization had changed.

  In the car on Friday, I finally got through to my doctor. He offered to phone a prescription into a pharmacy so I pulled off the highway in a rundown postindustrial Indiana town with angry-looking teens prowling streets that looked more like Beirut than America.

  “Do you have a gun?” Jessie asked, and we laughed nervously.

  I found a drugstore, parked outside, and told Jessie to lock the doors.

  It was like the drugstore that time forgot, with picked-over shelves and a little makeshift pharmacy in the back set off by walls of unfinished plywood and a little hinged door through which I guess the pharmacist could come and go. A fiftyish black man with a colonial British accent (how he ended up in this town was anyone’s guess) appeared in the window.

  “What do you want?” he asked, and for a moment I actually wondered if he lived in that little room and perhaps I was trespassing. After three days driving cross country, anything seemed possible.

  “Are you the pharmacist?” I asked

  “Yes.”

  “My doctor wants to phone in a prescription,” I said and began to hand him my cell phone.

  He pushed my arm away and said, “You have to use our phone here.”

  Through the window he passed me an oversized plastic telephone like something out of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. It was the perfect, surreal flourish to the visit. I had my doctor call him and, miraculously, I procured my meds, got on the road again, and after many more hours of driving, we hit the outskirts of New York City. Passing it from the northwest, we could all smell the smoke in the air. I looked across New Jersey at the skyline. The first thing my eyes always went to were the twin towers, one of the beacons of my life here since the 1980s, the visual cues that told me if I was walking north or south. But they were gone, replaced by smoldering remains and the glow of searchlights; and sure enough I felt lost, and unsure of which way was up.

  WITH THE EXCEPTION of Coco Marina, which would remain closed forever, we reopened all of our restaurants by week’s end, but New Yorkers were not in a fine-dining mood. Many people who lived in and around the city were too busy burying the dead and grieving all that we’d lost to think of anything else. I myself found it hard to function and make even the most basic business decisions amid all the funerals we were attending for departed friends in the city and Westchester.

  But life went on, and over the following few weeks, I had to come to terms with the fact that gross revenue across the company’s restaurants was down by 50 percent. With a lending company to satisfy every month, and units outside the state that were underperforming as well, I began thinking about letting people go, but then I had an epiphany: what if everybody on salary were to take a 20 percent pay cut, starting with me because, after all, I was an employee as well. I figured things had to turn around sooner or later. This was New York, after all; people would have to start coming again at some point, wouldn’t they? And when they did, we’d all still be together, with a stronger bond formed by our shared sacrifice.

  When I came up with this plan, I began to embrace a phrase that had previously been something of a private joke to me: self-help, which I’d always associated with the American pop-psychology industry. There’s no Italian phrase for self-help because in Italy it’s a given that you take care of yourself. But I came to think of what had to be done to save my restaurants as self-help, pursuing avenues I wouldn’t normally take in order to simply be alive the next morning. Self-help meant doing whatever it took, and doing it on my own, to survive. I had to help myself, because no one else could. It would become a mantra.

  I called all my managers, chefs, and executives to a morning meeting downstairs at Tuscan Square and made my pitch, explaining how the hourly employees were already suffering because they were working fewer shifts every week, losing both their baseline income and tips, and that now it was time for us to take a hit. We all needed the money, and there were no other jobs to run to. We were on a sinking ship, and this was the only maneuver that might keep it afloat
.

  “Don’t give me your answer right now,” I said. “But I will need to know by tomorrow.”

  By the next day, everybody had agreed, some more grudgingly than others. One manager had the temerity to suggest that we dismiss all the waiters and let the GMs wait the tables, keeping their current executive salaries and making tips, to boot. My unspoken response was that maybe I didn’t need any managers. The most amusing part of this and similar dialogues was that the ones who pushed back were the same ones who, whenever I asked them to roll up their sleeves and put in some extra time, would look at the clock and say, “My day is done. I gotta go.”

  When all was said and done, we took my suggested pay cut, and it was the right thing to do, and much as I love America, I must say that it was the Italian thing to do; the textbook American corporate tactic would have been to trim off the expendable employees like fat from a side of beef. That would have been the clean way to handle the crisis, the ruthlessly efficient decision that would have best preserved the health of Toscorp. In the long run, my creative solution turned out to be a poor choice, because the business would continue to lose money, plunging deeper and deeper into the red.

  But I’m still glad I did it.

  LESS THAN A month later, Centolire was reviewed by the two major publications of the day: both the New York Times and New York magazine described my latest restaurant as a return to form.

  It hardly mattered. Business was in the toilet for me, same as it was for everybody else in town. At eight P.M., you could look out the window of Centolire and Madison Avenue was as desolate as it usually was at three in the morning.

  That October, I attended a meeting organized by NYC and Company, an organization created by the mayor’s office to promote tourism and business in Manhattan, in a Midtown conference room. All of the usual New York City restaurant characters were there: Danny Meyer, Drew Nieporent, Steve Hanson, Tim Zagat, Tony May, Giuseppe Cipriani, Keith McNally, about thirty in all. The purpose of the meeting was to see what we could do to help each other as the holiday season approached. It was noble in its intent, but for me the gathering had the opposite of the desired effect: it became clear that there was nothing to be done but to ride out the storm. It was a powerful reminder that for all of our combined influence in the restaurant world, for all of our friends in high places, at the end of the day we were what we had always been, since our days as busboys and waiters: people who served food. And if nobody wanted that food, there wasn’t a damn thing anybody could do about it. There it was again: self-help. If I wanted to survive, I’d have to find a way on my own.