Dirty Dishes

by Andrew Friedman

  The place was more ready for a wrecking ball than for a prospective buyer, but none of that mattered, because I was having an out-of-body experience. Inspired by the proximity to the ocean, and by the fierce longing for summer that the Hamptons elicited in me, I began to envision a restaurant that would capture all the charm of Porto Santo Stefano: sun, salt, sand, tanned skin, and the simple food that would bring each seaside evening to a perfect close. In my mind, the edifice morphed into a spot-on replica of a Mediterranean villa, with tile floors, terra-cotta accents, and generous, wide-open spaces through which the summer breeze could blow, carrying that precious scent of the sea right through the dining room.

  There was nobody around, so I started singing, out loud: “Sapore di sale. Sapore di mare . . . ” Taste of the salt. Taste of the sea.

  I snapped my fingers: that was it! The perfect name for the restaurant: Sapore di Mare.

  I knew that it would take a lot of work to turn the relic before me into the restaurant of my imagination, but after the conversion I had pulled off at Il Cantinori, I fancied myself the Bob Vila of the restaurant industry, able to turn “This Old Restaurant” into something shiny and new. I also loved the location: situated at the end of one of the splits of Georgica Pond, which flows alongside Route 27 where Wain-scott and East Hampton meet, it had the distinction of being at the epicenter of the weekend scene but also offering an oasis of calm.

  Back in the city, I excitedly told Steve about the space and my idea and suggested that we take the project on together. We decided to move forward, but soon after he bought the property, it became apparent that we were both making radically different assumptions. I thought that I had earned the right to be a true partner, with equity in the venture; after all, it was my efforts out in the Hamptons that would deliver the restaurant’s success. He, on the other hand, wasn’t looking for a partner, certainly not after shelling out his own hard-earned money for the property, and had assumed that we’d reprise our Il Cantinori arrangement.

  So, although it was my concept and enthusiasm that had inspired him to buy the property, I told him that I had no interest in just running another restaurant for him and that I’d pass, essentially leaving him holding the bag. I felt bad about it because it was an honest misunderstanding, but I felt that I needed to insist on what I thought I was worth.

  In the end, it all worked out: after two months, he decided that the building was a very expensive albatross and flipped it over to me. In early February, I assumed ownership and the mortgage and obtained a construction loan to finance the build-out.

  My only concern was breaking the news to Jessie. Il Cantinori was a serious distraction from our time together and I knew she’d be concerned about what another restaurant would mean for us. I took her to one of the hot new restaurants in town, Da Umberto on Seventeenth Street, and told her.

  “It doesn’t mean I’ll completely disappear,” I said. “And besides, it’s more money for our family. For the two of us.”

  “You mean for the three of us,” she said, her sly way of letting me know she was pregnant.

  “Now we really have something to celebrate,” I said, and we clinked our wine glasses and toasted our ever-more-complicated and adventurous future together.

  ONE OF THE things that appealed to me about the property I’d just bought was that it still felt like a house. There were five main rooms, and I had it in my head that I’d keep it that way, naming each one: the Bar, the Porch, the Veranda, the Fireplace, and the Terrace. I interviewed a contractor right after the closing and he suggested we convert it into one big room. A few years earlier, I might have listened to him, but I was fast developing belief in my instincts as a showman, and confidence for a restaurateur is the same as it is for an athlete: winning is a habit, and when you’re on a roll, you just go with the flow and ride out the hot streak for as long as you can.

  I stuck to my vision, and I didn’t hire that guy. Instead, I decided to keep it a family affair. Jessie’s father, John, and brother, Richard, who were in the construction business, came up from New Orleans. I bought a small house in the spring, a wooded, secluded East Hampton enclave best known as the home of the cemetery where Jackson Pollock is buried, and put them up there, along with the key craftsmen. I spent weekdays in the city running Il Cantinori while my in-laws and their team set about turning that old English Tudor into a beautiful Mediterranean villa with white stucco walls, terra-cotta tile, and rustic chairs. We also restored all the windows to full functionality so we could have them open as much as possible and let that marvelous salty smell come blowing through the rooms. Every weekend, when I got back to East Hampton, I couldn’t believe how quickly the place was being transformed from something resembling a haunted house to a cheerful white ode to the Tuscan seashore.

  I think there’s no surer sign that you’re in the right line of work than when long days invigorate you. I was working around the clock that winter and spring, overseeing lunch and dinner at Il Cantinori Monday through Thursday, then driving out to the Hamptons and making decisions about the build-out. But I loved every minute of it and had an endless reservoir of energy to draw on.

  We also revamped the landscaping, uprooting everything except for two beautiful oak trees that grew up out of a central isle in the parking lot, some junipers, a Japanese maple, and a few others. To them we added rosemary and lavender, which perfumed the garden and provided some fresh herbs to draw from in the kitchen. By the time we were finished, the landscaped areas had the look and feel of a Mediterranean garden.

  The only thing that caused me any displeasure was my weekly visit to the bank officer charged with administering my construction loan. The day I would head out to the Hamptons, either Thursday or Friday, I’d drop by his office. The arrangement was that he would release funds on an as-needed basis based on requisitions as they occurred; in order to get the money, I had to bring him progress reports and a copy of my ledger tracking payments I’d made each week. This was fine in the early stages, but as we came down the homestretch that spring things were moving quickly and I needed the remaining capital, about seventy-five thousand dollars, on hand, so I asked him to release it. He told me that he thought that was too much.

  We squabbled a bit, and then I lost it.

  “You know what,” I said. “I was approved for this loan. If you think you know better than me, you do it!”

  I took the massive key ring I carried around in those days, with keys to everything from Cantinori to Sapore to my homes in Manhattan and East Hampton, and even my locker at the gym, slammed it down on his desk, then turned and stormed out of his office.

  “Wait,” he said.

  I spun around and let it fly: “No. I will not wait,” I said, spit spraying from my mouth. “I need the money. You can either give it to me and foreclose if I default, or you can build the fucking restaurant yourself.”

  “I—”

  “You make me feel like you’re my parole officer. What’d I do to deserve this?”

  I don’t know if he was intimidated or sympathetic, or if he just thought I was crazy, but he relented and released the rest of my loan.

  BY MAY, SAPORE di Mare was nearly fully realized. Even before we opened for business, turning the corner into the driveway for the first time each week was a thrill, seeing how the white gravel led right up to the steps of this perfectly rendered fantasy of the Tuscan seaside.

  With the construction nearly complete, I could turn my attention to kitchen concerns: the menu, the chef, and the cooks.

  Because my imagination and memory were fully engaged, the menu came together almost on its own: just as we did at Il Cantinori, we would display platters of room-temperature vegetables, this time on a wooden kitchen farm table right between the reception area and the Bar Room, casting our spell on customers as soon as they walked into the room. I wanted the food to be as light and summery as possible, beginning with this display: there’d be the pasticcio di Dante I had introduced at Da Silvano, eggplant
parmigiana, roasted zucchini with caponata sauce, and preserved tuna in oil served with roasted zucchini. My goal was for the vegetables, their marinades, and their dressings to give off the aroma of a summer garden.

  As for the printed menu, I wanted it to be as simple as possible, which is the way I think about food in the summer when, as a cook, you want to get in and out of the kitchen quickly and as a diner, you want very familiar, unchallenging food. In those summers working for my uncle, I had learned that the most popular restaurants, especially during this season near the water, were the ones where people felt like they could satisfy simple cravings. The menu almost wrote itself: whole fish, spaghetti alle vongole (spaghetti with clams), and other basic pastas such as spaghetti alla rustica with caramelized red onion, stewed tomato, and Parmigiano-Reggiano, calamari al forno (oven-baked breaded squid), cod in white wine, filleted fish that was grilled, roasted, or served with a livornese sauce (tomatoes, capers, onions, and anchovies), and of course a Florentine steak. To distinguish these very simple dishes, I focused on the quality and freshness of ingredients, especially the fish and shellfish, which—true to the name of the restaurant—still tasted of the sea. I also had a theory that if the right customers showed up, the food would taste better; what doesn’t seem better in the company of beautiful people?

  My leading candidate for executive chef was an unlikely one: a short, portly Jewish-American kid from Queens with chubby fingers and a mile-a-minute patter named Mark Strausman. We had been introduced by a butcher we both knew and I had hired him to help at Il Cantinori. I liked Mark; he made me feel that my passion, communicated in those cooking demos and staff meetings, was contagious.

  I decided to put the front of the house in the hands of a sharply dressed, smooth-tongued Latin American kid named Ariel Lacayo, who I had hired at Il Cantinori and had found to be a natural on the service floor. He was effortlessly charming and dashing, a gym rat with a flair for making preppy clothes seem stylish and a talent for never losing his cool.

  “If you want to learn this business, I’ll teach you,” I told him when I first interviewed him, and he soaked up all the wisdom I had to offer.

  From Il Cantinori, I also brought along a sprite of an Italian woman named Maria, who came to me by the strangest of routes: her son, a doctor, thought she needed to get out of the house. Because cooking was her true love, he had a friend who was in the wine business ask around after jobs in Italian kitchens. I took a chance on her and found her to be a talented home cook, more than capable of making my food. She wasn’t professionally trained for the timing requirements of a restaurant kitchen, but she could make all those vegetable dishes I liked to set out every day. She also became the first in what would become a long line of maternal figures in my kitchens. Maria shared my love of the seaside and so jumped at the chance to come out to the Hamptons. I was able to communicate with her in shorthand. Because she was from Rome, near the sea, she was familiar with the kind of trattorias that inspired Sapore, places where they stuck tables right in the sand at lunchtime. All I had to do was describe those dishes to her and she knew just what I had in mind. Since 80 percent of our appetizers would come from the farm table, I knew this would make life much easier for me.

  I decided to put myself on the pasta station: at Il Cantinori, I had discovered the hard way that of all the things I had to show cooks, making a proper pasta was the toughest, because the correct way was so different from the way they had been taught to do it. They always overcooked it and their sauces had no consistency. It took me forever to develop the right instincts in them. Meanwhile, I could make a perfect pasta in my sleep. More than that, though, I loved making pasta and decided to indulge myself until we could recruit more cooks and get them properly re-educated.

  That left the position of bartender. A friend of mine from Rome asked me to interview one named Giuseppe, a flamboyant dead ringer for the actor Marcello Mastroianni. I found him charming and talented behind the bar and hired him. He didn’t speak much English, but he knew enough to get by, and this only led to one small problem: Giuseppe was a proud and uncloseted homosexual, but he took great offense at the American word gay. If anybody referred to him as “gay,” he’d insist, with indignation “I’m not gay, I’m a pederast.” One day, I explained to him that the Italian word pederasta meant something else here in the States, referring to a molester of young boys.

  “Well, Pino,” he said, without missing a beat, “young men are dying for me, you know.”

  BECAUSE IL CANTINORI had been such a success, I decided to make its opening date of the twenty-third of the month, my lucky date, and that’s the day we opened Sapore di Mare, on May 23, 1988.

  The restaurant exceeded my wildest expectations. Based on word of mouth, a few press mentions generated by my publicist, Susan Rike, and having a slew of Il Cantinori customers who spent a lot of time in the Hamptons, we had fifty people in the book that night. In order to maintain quality control while the waiters and kitchen fine-tuned their acts—a common practice for new restaurants—I ordered Ariel to contain the crowd at sixty people, max. But as the night wore on, we were besieged by customers who knew me from the city and to whom I simply couldn’t say no. I can’t say I was upset. There were little service hiccups, like too much time between courses, but it was as if I was throwing a wonderful party at my house and watching the guests arrive. Their beautiful, elegant summer attire flapping in the wind as they walked from the parking lot to our front door was reassuring. By the time the evening was over, we had served one hundred eighty dinners. And the reaction was a unanimous “wow.” I knew at the end of our first weekend that we had a hit on our hands.

  FLASH-FORWARD TO a few weeks later: on a weekend night (take your pick, they were all the same, starting with Thursday), the bar was three feet deep with people and the dining area was like a who’s who of Hamptons royalty: it was almost absurdly star-studded, like a Hirschfeld cartoon or a New York magazine cover collage depicting all the people who weekended out there: Ralph Lauren at one table; Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley at another; the artist (and now film director) Julian Schnabel, a gentle grizzly bear of a man, with his wife and kids; Donna Karan; David Bowie and Iman; Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger; music industry attorney Alan Grubman; Revlon’s Ron Perelman; even Senator Alfonse D’Amato.

  And me? I spent a lot of time in the kitchen. The pasta station was just inside the doors and because we were still only about half-staffed, I had plenty of room to work. I always had six pans warmed up on burners, ready to make or reheat a sauce, and behind them were huge pots where I kept salted water boiling for cooking the pasta. It was some of the hardest work I’d ever done, but also the most satisfying; I was young and strong and coordinated, and could have several dishes working at once, often putting out more than 150 pastas in a night.

  I also emerged regularly to survey the service floor of my joint, checking in on the action and putting out fires when need be. It wasn’t long before I began to feel like Rick Blaine, the Humphrey Bogart character in Casablanca, overseeing the hottest place in town.

  The celebs always ate in the Bar Room up front, but one of my biggest pleasures was introducing people to the other rooms, watching as they entered the Porch for the first time and felt the intimacy of the space and took in the peaceful view of the pond.

  Once in a while, I’d slip out the back door for a breather in the parking lot, and there was no more sure sign of my burgeoning success than the display of automobiles there: the lanes closest to the restaurant were occupied by the cream of the crop: Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Rolls-Royce; the next tier by Porsche, Mercedes, and collectibles; the ones beyond that with “regular” cars. I’d look over the display of wealth and think about how far I’d come in just eight years.

  ONE OF MY great pleasures over those first weeks was watching Ariel grow into his job. He could handle the most irate customer with unflappable charm and grace. One night, I saw a guy so angry that spit flew from his mouth as he laid into Ariel
.

  “Where is my table?” he spritzed.

  “Two minutes, just two minutes,” Ariel said with a patient smile.

  “What are you going to do for me?” the guy insisted.

  “Don’t worry. You’re going to have the best seat in the house. I’m going to take care of you, don’t worry.”

  Then, as soon as Ariel turned the corner out of the Bar Room, into one of the little corridors that connected the various areas to each other, he’d dab at his sweaty forehead and cheeks with a tissue and lament the interaction. “So rough, this guy,” he’d say. “So rude. So bad.”

  It was this last bit that truly endeared Ariel to me. I saw how hard he worked on the service floor, but anybody can run around checking on tables. Maintaining your composure while being screamed at takes a special talent. It was one area in which he outshone me by a mile.

  ON THURSDAY NIGHTS, I took a private car out to La Guardia Airport and boarded a prop plane to East Hampton Airport, taking to the clouds and feeling like a young tycoon as I glided out over the water and touched down on Long Island. I’d dive into Sapore’s world for three days, then sneak back into the city on Sunday evening and ease into my work week there.

  It was a magical summer. Jessie was getting bigger and more beautiful by the hour, and the excitement of our first child’s imminent arrival only added to the sense of life beginning anew out there. The sense of family, which had been there from the start with Jessie’s father and brother, was also expanded as, more than in any restaurant I’d ever been a part of, the staff became like a family. Every time I showed up for the weekend, I was treated to a new surprise, like the time Maria responded to the homey setting of the restaurant itself, turning the area behind the building into an alleyway, like a Roman quarter, where she threw up clotheslines like you see all over Rome. She’d wash the restaurant’s chef jackets, shirts, aprons, and some personal clothing for Mark, hang them on ropes to dry, then iron them before service. She also set up a little coop where she kept chickens and roosters from which we’d harvest eggs, and eventually butcher and cook the birds as well.