Back of the House

by Scott Haas

  “When I decided to begin my career in restaurants, my father didn’t speak to me for maybe three years,” Humm said. “He felt like cooks don’t have a family life. He thought they all drink.” He paused. “Too much. That they live above the restaurant in this little closet. Ja, that’s how it was. There was a part of me that wanted to prove him wrong, for sure. I have a lot of respect for my father. He always held me to very high standards. He had high standards for himself. But I could not help it!”

  “Help what?” I asked.

  Humm looked at his big hands.

  “I didn’t like being in an office,” he said. “I liked being in a kitchen. And my father just couldn’t understand it. It was a long time, I’m talking maybe three years ago, and I’ve been cooking twenty-two years, to convince him that there was more to what I do than what he thought. It’s a real job.”

  Neither of us spoke for a while. I heard the motors of the refrigerators.

  It was a heartbreaking story to have heard up close, and an even sadder one to live through, I knew. I also felt that I understood that the expression of love implicit between father and son could be experienced firsthand in Humm’s food.

  FROM A SON TO A FATHER, IT WAS TIME TO MEET ONE OF THE MOST PATERNALISTIC men in the industry. Drew Nieporent chose to work with two of the world’s best, but most difficult chefs in the business: first David Bouley, and now Paul Liebrandt. What was he thinking?

  “How you doing, buddy?” Drew said.

  We were in the private Skylight Room of Tribeca Grill, which is one of Drew’s other restaurants. More humble than his other properties, it is where he conducts business, sees friends, and hangs out.

  His cell phone was ringing, a GM came back to speak to him, e-mails pinged. Drew chewed gum. He threw his coat onto a bare table and motioned for me to do the same. He is a big, bearded man, always in motion, and his excitement reminded me of guys I saw shooting craps in Vegas.

  “Lunch?” he said.

  Drew has a mellifluous voice, seductive in tone, and I suppose that it is both natural and related to his having had a mother who performed on the radio.

  “My mother was a radio actress,” Drew said, after we sat down. We were the only ones in the room. The restaurant itself was packed. “She was very charismatic.”

  “And your father?”

  “My father worked for the New York State Liquor Authority,” said Drew. He placed a napkin in his lap. “He was the one who got me interested in restaurants. I grew up in Peter Cooper Village in lower Manhattan, and my dad would take us out to dinner to these great places where he knew all the owners. It was brilliant theater. It was the sixties, so that the chefs were literally just off the boat. We had every possible ethnicity.”

  A waiter handed us menus. Drew thanked him by name, drawing out every syllable.

  “So I was faced with a choice,” Drew continued. “I went to Cornell; I thought I was gonna be a chef. I loved cooking, but I also loved the front of the house.”

  “What helped you decide?”

  “Look,” he said, “my mother, when she stopped acting? She became a casting director. That’s pretty much what I do. I have my parents’ genes, my mom’s talent. I cast people to cook in and manage my restaurants. My biggest contribution to the industry is the number of people I gave opportunities to. For example, I cast David Bouley for Montrachet. I wanted Daniel Boulud, but he was heavily involved in Le Cirque, and he referred me to David.”

  Drew glanced at the menu and then continued talking.

  “The thing is though that guys like me, restaurateurs?” he said. “We’re dinosaurs. The chefs have become restaurateurs the same way that actors became directors.”

  The waiter came by to take our orders. Drew asked to start with bratwurst to be followed by garganelli. I got the tuna sashimi and the pappardelle. We drank tap water.

  “Chefs are more marketable,” said Drew.

  I wondered if being a dinosaur bothered him, but then I could see that it didn’t. He meant that he was the last of a species, and that no one in the future could top a T. rex. When giants roamed the earth.

  “We have a huge family tree,” Drew said, “of all the people who came out of my restaurants. I want you to see it. Hold on.”

  He called an assistant and asked her to bring me the diagram.

  “All of us in the business have family trees,” Drew said.

  “What is unique about your families?”

  “One, fairness,” said Drew. “Two, I wanted to create my own Shangri-La. Three, I wanted my restaurants to be genuine and accessible.”

  The first courses arrived. We ate quickly. The tuna came with two little spools of noodles.

  “Nobu, which I opened with Robert De Niro?” said Drew. “We had to make it accessible.”

  He began to describe the food at Nobu, and as he talked, the flavors came to mind from meals I had enjoyed there. He was rhapsodizing about Japan when a manager came over to our table with a customer in tow. The manager explained that the customer was considering renting the Skylight Room for her daughter’s twenty-fifth birthday party.

  Drew began to pitch.

  “Dina will craft a deal for you, Amy,” Drew said. “This is a great place for a party. I have had my kids’ birthdays here. And this is the room where De Niro and the Weinsteins cut all their deals.”

  Some dinosaur, I thought. Like most of the other chefs and restaurateurs I knew, Drew was always hungry.

  After the manager and customer left, Drew returned to our conversation.

  “I understand your point of view,” I said, “but how do you work with chefs who don’t share it?”

  Drew laughed.

  “Paul,” he said, referring to Chef Liebrandt, “he doesn’t listen to me. But here’s the thing: I don’t worry about money.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “No, really,” he said. “There are no budget reviews. Paul and the other chefs have to self-discipline. How not to waste food. How not to overproduce. People say I’m hard to get along with. I’m not. I’ve had two chefs here at Tribeca Grill in twenty-two years. I must be doing something right.”

  “How would you describe your style?”

  “I modeled myself on Joe Baum,” said Drew.

  Joe Baum had been one of New York’s greatest restaurateurs. He opened Windows on the World and The Four Seasons, among others.

  “You have to actuate your ideas,” said Drew. “You have to hire talented people.”

  “You also opened restaurants in Tribeca back before it was a neighborhood associated with luxury,” I said. “I remember when there was nothing here but warehouses.”

  “It’s true,” he said. “I helped change the landscape of New York dining. I improved it. Back when we opened Montrachet, it was the middle of no place. And now, twenty-six fucking years later, we’re still here with Corton, Tribeca Grill, and Nobu.”

  Our entrées arrived. They looked to be the same. Drew smiled.

  “This is why I have to be here all the time,” he said.

  We had both been served the pappardelle.

  Drew told the waiter that he was fine with it but asked him to check to see that he had not gotten someone else’s order by mistake.

  “Ah, restaurants,” I said, digging in.

  “It’s a challenge,” he said, “but I love it.”

  “This is no big deal, getting an order wrong. It happens. But what breaks down in the restaurant among staff? What emotional conflicts arise?”

  “There are drugs,” said Drew. “Bipolar disorder. No frame of reference for problems. Problems.”

  “How do you handle these problems?”

  “I can work with anyone,” said Drew. “A-ny-one. I’m Angelo Dundee. Bill Parcells. I’m a coach. A director.”

  “What happens when you try to coach Paul Liebrandt?”

  “He never listens,” said Drew again. He laughed in wonder. “He never listens to direction. After three years at Corton, I still think:
This guy is intense!”

  We were offered desserts, and Drew insisted I take one.

  “Carmellini is intense, too,” said Drew. “You know, he opened up Locanda Verde in this neighborhood. I’ve been here over twenty years. He’s partners with De Niro. I’m partners with De Niro. Does he say hello? No. So I send a guy over to him with a cake. Welcome to the neighborhood. Let’s be friends. I say to the guy: ‘Make sure you give it directly to Andrew. Don’t give it to anyone else.’ The guy comes back, he’s given Andrew the cake. I don’t hear anything. Then I hear from someone that Andrew is mad at me. Mad at me? I invite him here for coffee. You know, maybe he’ll apologize, say he’s been busy opening the restaurant. He comes in, sits down, looks at me, and says, “Well?”

  “He says, ‘well?’ ” I said.

  “I can see I’m not getting an apology,” Drew continued. “So then he tells me that he’s from a different generation than mine. He doesn’t have to say hello, he doesn’t owe me that, he doesn’t owe me anything. We made up, we’re friends, but that’s how it is.”

  “I love Andrew,” I said, “but he doesn’t always respond to social cues.”

  “Yeah,” said Drew, “you don’t have to tell me. My son has Asperger’s. But no one tells Andrew? No one tells Andrew the right thing to do?”

  “Why do you think chefs act that way? With anger or resentment, I mean.”

  “It’s almost as if they’re being rewarded for bad behavior,” said Drew. “Take Paul. I know he says he doesn’t get angry any more, but I’ve seen it. It’s like you got married to someone and found out after the ceremony that the person is a wife beater.”

  “There are a lot of angry chefs.”

  “Daniel Boulud used to be like that,” Drew said. “I worked with him a long time ago. He had been unbelievably mean to a waiter, and I told that waiter, ‘Don’t take that from him.’ Daniel came over to me and said, ‘Fuck you!’ I said, ‘No, fuck you!’ Then Daniel said, ‘No, fuck you!’ It was crazy. Finally, Daniel apologized and defused the situation.”

  “You’re all older now.”

  Our lunch was ending, but not before Drew’s assistant showed up to hand me his family trees.

  It was an eight-page invitation, in folds, for Drew’s fiftieth-birthday celebration. On each page was an egg-shaped drawing with the name of one of his restaurants. Emanating from each shape were lines connected to the names of the people who had worked or were still working for Drew.

  There were 197 names. After leaving Drew’s families, people had gone on to work at Veritas, Jean-Georges, Bond Street, Capital Grille, Aureole, Felidia, The Modern, Aquavit, Masa, Redd, Picholine, Lupa, Gramercy Tavern, Spago, Slanted Door, 11 Madison, and Jardinière. Among those who had worked for him were Kerry Heffernan, Rocco DiSpirito, Don Pintabona, Traci Des Jardins, Richard Reddington, and Masaharu Morimoto.

  “I try to treat people the way I want to be treated,” said Drew. “We used to call it a bunker mentality. If we dig in, we can get through this together. I want to create work situations where the staff isn’t killing themselves to get it right.”

  ON THE TRAIN RIDE BACK TO BOSTON, WITH THE GORGEOUS CONNECTICUT shoreline shrouded in darkness, I devoured the massese pizza I had bought at Eataly: mozzarella, tomato sauce, salami, fresh basil, and olive oil. It was shaped and produced according to the strict rules of the Verace Pizza Napoletana Association. The rules meant, among other things, that each pizza had to be baked in a wood-fired oven at nine hundred degrees, that the dough had to be kneaded by hand, that the tomatoes had to be San Marzano (preferably from Naples or Campania), that each pizza be no larger than eleven inches, and that the baking time be ninety seconds, maximum.

  As I ate, I thought of what the people in New York had said to me about their work. I had heard about men and their fathers, men who compared cooking to sports and battle, men who spoke of brigades and bunkers.

  The pizza really was spectacularly delicious.

  To create that pizza, rules were needed. Rules were needed to make all sorts of food. That was what cooking was about. The rules came from tradition, experience, and the chef. Every kitchen was different. Some were more about rules than others. The best kitchens were the ones where chefs could use rules to make certain that their creativity was expressed consistently in their food.

  It is the same as a relationship. You want the people you depend on to be consistent. A chef has a relationship to food, and the cooks who cook it and the servers who serve it, that must be consistent as well. To be consistent in food, as in any relationship, you need rules.

  People often come to therapy looking for rules that will make their marriage work, solve problems more reliably, be productive, and get along with others.

  To establish rules for consistency in the kitchen, a chef needed a game plan, strategies, an ability to improvise when in the weeds, passion for the work, and a willingness to be a responsible leader.

  The authority implicit in being in charge stemmed from the chef’s relationship to authority in the home that he or she grew up in. If the chef had an unreliable authority, the matter of trust becomes more complicated. As does the delegation of authority to others.

  What struck me about Tony when I first started working with him a year and a half ago, and what was true now, I thought, was his confidence and startling ability to make things new. He was still making up his own rules, and when he had ones he could depend on, night after night, there would be no stopping him.

  I knew more than ever why I had chosen to try to understand him, his devotion, and his restaurant family: He was a contender. It was like watching a guy at a gym train for a shot at the title. Few people knew him at the top, but that was where Tony was headed.

  IV.

  CUT

  TWENTY

  The Year-End Party

  IN THE MIDDLE OF JANUARY, WHEN BUSINESS IS SLOW IN THE RESTAURANT industry, Tony holds an annual party to celebrate the year’s achievements and look ahead. I was among a handful of people outside Craigie on Main employees to have been invited.

  “The cooks trust you,” he said, “and that’s no small thing. They’re not a trusting group of people.”

  This year the party was being held at Brick and Mortar, which was a new bar in Central Square, opened only a month ago, just down the street from Tony’s restaurant. There was no sign to indicate the bar. Tony had introduced it to me a few weeks before, and I loved it immediately. The exposed bricks, darkness, and old soul music gave the place a retro, hipster feel. It felt as if we were on the set of Hawaii Five-O.

  Each person attending the party received two tickets that could be redeemed for drinks. Servers walked around with trays of snacks.

  The room was packed with the Craigie family, but the strange thing was that when people came by to say hello, I did not recognize them. I had to look twice. Without their uniforms, the women with their hair down and wearing more makeup, everyone with more expressive, happy faces, it was as if I was meeting them all for the first time.

  Jill looked like a teenager out on a date. Mary’s skin tone made her face appear to be made of white porcelain. Ted’s posture was a slouch. Chuck kept grinning.

  “So, Jill,” I said, “tell me, please. Why is this the craziest kitchen you’ve ever worked in?”

  She clutched her drink.

  “I can’t say,” she said. She kept grinning. “I can’t!”

  “Tell you what,” I said, “touch your left ear if the answer is yes, and touch your right eyebrow if the answer is no. Is the kitchen crazy because there are so few rules such that everything has to go through the chef?”

  Jill touched her left ear.

  “Is it crazy because the rule you followed on Tuesday for a dish might not be the same rule for the same dish on Thursday?”

  Jill touched her left ear again.

  “Is it because the rules are unique? You are not being asked to follow a tradition,” I said. “You’re not making a Bolognese or a Mornay sauce.”r />
  “It’s all of that,” Jill said, “but more, much more.”

  She would not elaborate.

  People mingled and laughed and talked volubly for over an hour until Tony, wearing a white shirt and tie, went behind the oval-shaped bar, stood on a crate because of his stature, and shushed the crowd to make his year-end speech.

  “Craigie had its best year yet,” Tony said. “We made four million in sales. But we’re not done yet.”

  People whooped and applauded.

  “There have been a lot of achievements,” Tony continued. “Over half of the people in the kitchen have been with us for six months!”

  People cheered.

  “Twenty-five people are now on the schedule to be in the kitchen,” Tony said. “Check averages are now ten dollars higher per person compared to the year before.” He paused, put his chin down dramatically, and then looked up again. “There have been some pretty cool things that happened this past year. The Wall Street Journal mentioned us. U.S. Airways In-Flight magazine named us one of the top fourteen restaurants in the country. We donated eight thousand dollars to Share Our Strength!”

  Tony went on to list the year’s highlights, and the staff positively glowed. There was a deep, true sense of belonging evident in their faces.

  “We won James Beard, Best Chef Northeast,” Tony said. After the shouting died down, he added, “We could coast, but we ain’t coasting!”

  Karolyn and I shared a shot of champagne.

  “Craigie on Main,” said Tony, “is family, and I really mean that. It is a family. So give it up!”

  People shouted, whooped, and applauded more wildly than ever.

  “Thanks to Matty O’Foley, Danny Scampoli, and the entire management team,” said Tony. “And now some special awards. The wine award for excellence in sales, and for his eloquence and poetic writing…Chuck Sullivan!”

  People were giddy and proud. There were awards for “most improved in front of the house” and “most improved for back of the house.” Jill was named “Family Meal Hero” for the delicious food she cooked for staff.