It was my first look at a strange subculture of my industry. These people reminded me of the guys who magically appear on street corners during rainstorms selling umbrellas. I had no idea where they came from or where their places of business were. I didn’t really want to know. I thought they were vultures.
The auction began uneventfully as the auctioneer led the crowd from lot to lot. He carried a little collapsible stepladder and set it up at each lot so that he could be seen by one and all. And though there were only a few bidders, he actually went through the stereotypical auctioneer routine: “How much do I hear for this roasting pan? Can I get one dollar. I got one dollar. Can I get three? I got three dollars. Can I get five? Five? I have three. I have three. Going once. Going twice. SOLD!” And that’s how it went as they moved around the store bidding on stainless-steel sauté pans, point-of-sale systems, the sound system, and so on. But when the auctioneer got to the stacks of seasonal chargers, the same ones I had personally commissioned, and the best bid he could elicit was three dollars per item, I was outraged. He was about to accept the offer when I ran up to him and whispered in his ear.
“These are no longer for sale,” I said.
“Mr. Luongo . . .”
“These people are criminals,” I said. “If you saw what went into making one of these, you wouldn’t sell it for three dollars, either.”
I walked away and the man made his apologies to the bidders and they moved on.
Next up was the pewter tabletop items, little trays and salt-and-pepper shakers, and water pitchers. Again, the bidding was insufficient and before accepting the measly offer on the table, he looked at me. I shook my head from side to side. No way.
The auctioneer came over to me and was surprisingly calm. I think he must have encountered similar reactions before.
“Listen,” he said. “I know you’re upset, but we either need to shut this down or you need to let me do my job.”
I sighed hard and nodded. In addition to the chargers and the pewter, I told him to not sell any of the artwork. I walked over to the movers and hired them to pack up that stuff and deliver it to a storage facility I keep in New Jersey. I didn’t have anywhere else to take it, but I’d be damned it I’d let these strangers make out like bandits.
Then I shook the auctioneer’s hand, took a final look around, and left the building. I walked east to Fifth Avenue, where all the people had always been, and left Tuscan Square behind for good.
THEY SAY THAT bad news comes in threes, and the third recent closing was Coco Pazzo, again due to landlord issues. Unable to negotiate a new lease that made sense for me, in July 2008 I decided to move on.
It was the last remnant of another chapter of my life. We served our final dinner on July 30, then I spent the next day, the final day of our lease, getting the place cleared out. At the end of the afternoon, after all the employees and moving guys had pushed off, I sat there in the dining room that had once seemed so beautiful to me. Now it just seemed dingy and old. All the life had gone out of it with the tables and chairs and menus and barware.
It’s funny. I guess I should have been upset, or moved, but I just felt empty. Some restaurateurs believe that when one of their places closes, they leave a piece of themselves behind, but my feeling has always been that you take yourself along wherever you go. Whatever you did there and learned there carries over to your next place. In a strange way, it made sense that the only restaurant I’d be left with was Cen-tolire, because it was the one that most reflected who I was at the moment, my current feelings about Italy and America and food and hospitality.
I thought of that sensation I had when I first came to New York City, that Manhattan could be whatever you wanted it to be, and that the world changed every few blocks. That’s as true for me today as it was back then. I left the space that used to be Coco Pazzo and walked over to Madison, then eleven blocks up to Centolire, where the night was about to get started and we had more than one hundred fifty reservations on the book for dinner. Life, as always, went on.
INTERLUDE
THERE WILL BE follow-up questions, lots of them, and then pages to review and to edit, but Pino and I leave it there for the night. We don’t really have a choice: the restaurant has cleared out, the kitchen has fallen into silence, and the lighting has been dimmed. The only person left is Gi-anfanco, who’s closing out the credit card receipts for the evening at a little computer next to the bar.
“OK, buddy,” Pino says as he stands up out of his chair. I click off my tape recorder and rise, stretching. It’s been a long night.
Pino walks over to the computer and rests a hand on Gianfranco’s shoulder. He looks over the numbers, then punches something into the keypad. I’ve known Pino for ten years, but I’m not sure exactly what he’s doing over there. I never ask about his business. I think it’s why we’ve stayed friends for so long.
“I’ll say good-bye to you outside,” he says.
I head downstairs and out to the street. He goes to close up his office—just a little room situated under the kitchen, midway between the two dining floors, almost within the walls, a cramped space and a far cry from the three floors of offices it used to take to house his empire above Le Madri. He says he likes it this way, but sometimes I wonder.
I wait for him out front. It’s dead silent on Madison Avenue, and my Subaru is one of just about six cars parked on the block. Finally he emerges, a leather work bag slung over his shoulder.
“I’m glad you’re working on the book with me,” he says as he locks the door behind him.
“Well, you had your options,” I reply. It’s a running joke between us because although we’d written two books before, and had talked about this project for years, Pino had interviewed another writer at one point. It didn’t make me feel great, but I long ago made peace with Pino’s separation of personal affairs and business transactions. He’s not the only one who’s seen The Godfather.
He laughs. “OK. You’re entitled to say that. But the truth is that you know me better than almost anybody in New York.”
I’m surprised by the comment. How could I, a writer fifteen years younger than Pino, who came to Manhattan five years after him, who grew up in Miami, Florida, travels in different circles, and only met him ten years ago, possibly know him that much better than all the people he’s been seeing regularly for so long?
“Get out of here,” I say.
“It’s true.”
I just shrug. We shake hands and say good night and he walks off down Eighty-fifth Street toward the garage where he parks his car. I get in mine and drive through Central Park to the west side, then turn left and head down to Chelsea.
I think about his statement again. On reflection, it makes sense. For all of the people who have come and gone in his restaurants, the vast majority of the conversations he’s had there have probably lasted two minutes or less, and most of them were probably about the customer, not about him. He’d never say this, of course, but no restaurateur really knows who among his customers are the true friends; most relationships formed in a professional dining room are like those acted out in a play, and have no meaning outside the confines of the stage.
But Pino does make one mistake, I think. He might not socialize with many of them. They might not have been to his house, nor he to theirs. He might not know the names of their children or where they grew up. But if food is for him, as it was for his mother, the ultimate means of self-expression, then there are plenty of people who know him just fine.
EPILOGUE
Cooking at Last
FOR THE FIRST time since 1988, I’ve got just one restaurant.
I’m not in the papers on Wednesdays the way I used to be, and I don’t run around town every night, dropping in on each of my empire’s principalities. It’s been ages since I took a prop plane out to Long Island or even thought about opening a restaurant in another city or state.
I’m more anonymous than I’ve been since the days when I was a busboy. Many young chefs and resta
urateurs haven’t heard of me, or if they have, it’s because they read about me in Kitchen Confidential.
I’m not a mogul anymore. I’m “just” a successful restaurateur. My restaurant Centolire does a great business, mostly from the Upper East Siders around us. I might have had my differences with the critics of the world, but I’ve always put my customers first, and in return they are loyal. Long-timers still have their regular tables and once in a while a new luminary takes a liking to us. I won’t lie: it’s still thrilling to meet the people in the arts who I’ve admired from afar all my life.
It’s been twenty-five years since I opened Il Cantinori, but my life these days has come full circle. I spend my days at Centolire, supervising the prep work, and at night I divide my time between the kitchen and the service floor, still feeling a bit like a modern-day Rick Blaine. The customers are known to me from all times in my adult life: there’s my Tuscan Square consigliere Gary Wolkowitz and his wife, Sarah; Christie Brinkley and (separately) Billy Joel; and Glenn Dubin. Former mayor Ed Koch sometimes shows up in the winter. Some have been with me since Il Cantinori, or before: once in a while a customer will tell me that he or she remembers when I was a busboy at Da Silvano. More often than not, I don’t recognize these people; that was a long time ago, and at some point all of the faces, so distinct once upon a time, begin to blend together.
But I remember most of the others: on almost any night, I can gaze around the room and see faces familiar to me from over the years. Often, I feel like Joe Gideon, the Roy Scheider character in All That Jazz, in that scene at the end when all the people from his life come to his final, farewell performance. There’s also food from all the times of my life at Centolire: we’ll make your Caesar salad tableside, the way we made salads in my uncle’s restaurant at Porto Santo Ste-fano; we’ll also make carbonara, the one I perfected in my theater days, that way. There’s rigatoni alla buttera from Il Cantinori and spaghetti alla rustica from Sapore di Mare, and on and on, as well as new specials, some of which make it onto the menu and some of which fade into my past along with other honorable mentions.
What do I call this stage of my life? It might sound a bit anticlimactic, but the truth of the matter is that I’m happy. In many ways, I’m happier than I ever have been, and the reason is that, at long last, after all the pain and distractions of my youth, I’ve come to realize what it is that makes me happy.
Cooking.
I exhale every time I say that to myself.
Cooking.
Sometimes, I want to cry. Cooking has always been there for me. From the earliest moments of my life, when my mother fed me that pappa al pomodoro, or barley coffee, or taught me how to shop for fruits and vegetables at the market, or let me stand beside her in the kitchen as she showed me how to panfry those ravioli.
Let me say it again, for my own benefit: Cooking makes me happy.
Why has it taken me so long to realize this? Is it an oversimplification to say that this is what life is all about? Just like the editing of a novel or the refinement of a play, or the honing of a restaurant concept, those of us who are lucky learn to strip away what doesn’t belong and are left with the essence of ourselves, the thing that makes us who we are.
Even though it’s taken me a half century to figure it out, I consider myself a very lucky man to finally comprehend that it’s not the business deals or the money that defines me, it’s cooking. The pleasure of draining a perfectly al dente pot of pasta, slicing a tender stracotto, or even the simple pleasure of tearing basil leaves, unlocking their summery fragrance.
How simple my life would have been if only I could have known that twenty-five years ago. Maybe I’d still be down there on Tenth Street, running Il Cantinori with Steve and Nicola. The restaurant is, after all, still there—a quarter century after it opened, it’s still there—that’s how solid the concept was, and the food. I was the one who moved on to build an empire, have it crash down around me, and end up living the same professional life twenty-five years and seventy-some blocks away.
Now, more than ever, the kitchen is my sanctuary. With the cooking of any dish, I can take myself to any time and place in my life, and I can take my customers there, too. I’ve been mining my memories of home for a quarter-century, but I still unearth a new one once in a while. Just last year, I remembered how my mother used to make pasta with smoked herring roe. I worked my network of purveyors until I found one who promised that his smoked herring roe tasted like the one I described. I waited for the sample to arrive with rapt anticipation. When it showed up, I dropped everything and headed into the kitchen. I sautéed the roe with olive oil, butter, and garlic, then tossed it with linguine and finished it with a pinch of pepper flakes. I walked it with great ceremony over to a corner of the dining room and sat with my back to the staff. I wafted in the smoky, briny aroma, then twirled some pasta and roe around my fork and, closing my eyes, took my first bite. It carried me right back to that kitchen table in Grosseto. For a moment, I was a boy again.
For about a week I ate that pasta at least once a day, and sometimes twice.
I don’t chew out my staff the way I used to. People think I’ve mellowed with age, but that’s not really the case. I’ve mellowed because I have shed my addiction to opera and am in love with the size and scale, with the sheer manageability, of my life: my restaurant and my wife and three kids, and coaching my youngest son’s soccer team and playing squash a few times a week between lunch and dinner service, and driving into Manhattan each morning, then back home at night and going to sleep in our big pillowy bed with the darkness of suburbia enveloping us.
I don’t have the same highs I used to have, but I don’t have the lows, either. It’s a good deal.
But I have to be honest. Having shared my life with you, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I just took a look at a new restaurant space the other day. The first time I went to see it, all the old juices started flowing again. I saw it transformed into a restaurant in my mind, and I began to envision myself walking in every morning, a paper cup of coffee from the local deli warming my hand, the smell of sawdust catching in my nostrils.
Is this a healthy sensation, or the early warning signs of a junkie about to relapse?
Cooking makes me happy.
I don’t know. But after all these years, I would love to prove that I’ve still got it. I would love to know that I can create a restaurant that would lure all the younger diners, the ones who maybe have never heard of Pino Luongo.
Cooking makes me happy.
For the first time in years I’m in the grasp of an irresistible idea, a lighting bolt of inspiration that I need to bring to fruition.
Cooking makes me happy.
I’m just about ready to sign the papers, and I can’t wait to get started on the build-out.
Cooking makes me happy.
Doesn’t it?
One of these days I’ll figure it out.
APPENDIX
Recipes, My Way
Here are recipes for some of the dishes that have most informed my palate, and my life. I’m sharing them in the same way I presented recipes in my first book, A Tuscan in the Kitchen, without quantities, and with only a few cooking times for guidance. I know that you have the common sense to buy the right amount of ingredients to serve the number of people you’ll have at your table, and that if you’re a little off, you’ll find something to do with an extra carrot, or a few slices of leftover pot roast. Moreover, I have always believed that cooking should be an instinctual act and that food should express the taste, experience, and even the mood of the cook.
I urge you to try a few of these recipes. Trust your sense of sight, smell, and taste. The beauty of them is that, thanks to their fundamental simplicity, even if they are not made perfectly the first time, they will still be tasty. And as you tinker with and adjust them the second and third times you cook them, you will sharpen your ability to cook intuitively, which for me is the only way to do it.
PASTICCIO DI D
ANTE (DANTE’S SWEET MESS)
One of the first dishes I introduced to New York diners, this can also be served as a starter or as a side dish to fish, especially white-fleshed fish like cod or halibut. For the most appealing look, use red, yellow, and green sweet (bell) peppers.
Olive oil
Red, yellow, and green sweet peppers (any combination, or just one), seeded and cut lengthwise into slivers
Black pepper from a mill
Capers, drained
Canned anchovy fillets in oil, drained
Fresh Italian bread
Preheat the oven to medium heat.
Heat some oil in a heavy, ovenproof pan over medium heat. Add the sweet peppers and cook over high heat until they begin to sweat and wilt. Drain the excess liquid from the pan, season with black pepper, and scatter the capers and anchovies over the peppers. Cook, stirring gently, over medium heat until the anchovies “melt” into the mixture.
Transfer the pan to the oven and cook, uncovered, until the peppers look and smell roasted and have shriveled a bit, turning them a few times to ensure even cooking and avoid scorching. Serve warm, or at room temperature, with bread for soaking up the sauce.
PAPPA AL POMODORO (TOMATO-AND-BREAD SOUP)
Of all the dishes my mother made for me, this is one of my favorites. It’s also quintessentially Tuscan, because of its simplicity and because it uses ingredients that might have outlived their usefulness in other cultures: stale bread, which is important in attaining the thick consistency, and very ripe tomatoes. (If you don’t have stale bread, you can break up fresh bread, lay it on a baking sheet, and lightly toast it.) It’s also a very flexible recipe; the ratio of solid to liquid can be adjusted to personal taste, but a good rule of thumb is that the finished soup should resemble a bright red bread pudding.
Stale country bread with the crust removed
Dirty Dishes Page 28