Dirty Dishes

by Andrew Friedman

  The name popped into my head: Le Madri. The mothers. There was no question about it: a home run.

  FRED RESPONDED TO the idea and we decided to try to make it work.

  There was just one problem: I might have had two successful restaurants, but when it came to doing business—real business, big business—I was an idiot, or at least an innocent. Steve, Nicola, and I had done everything ourselves, with just a handshake between us. We had even handled the acquisition and transfer of the Sapore space with a breathtaking lack of legal intervention; though we had our differences from time to time, there was an unspoken bond between us, three immigrants and small-business owners who understood that we’d each make our share of mistakes along the way and would never take advantage of each other.

  But with the Pressmans it was different. They were natural-born Americans with an innate grasp of how to do business here. They understood contracts the way I understood pasta: it was in their blood. Besides all of that, they could buy and sell me and had high-powered attorneys at their beck and call. So as the time approached to meet with them and hammer out a working agreement, I grew increasingly fearful of making a bad business deal, of promising more than I could deliver or of being taken advantage of. Fortunately, I’ve always known what I don’t know, and so I went into the process with a great deal of humility and with my eyes wide open.

  One sunny August afternoon, I showed up at Barneys’ corporate offices, across the street from the department store, for the Big Meeting. It was an unassuming building and the executive offices were on an upper floor, tastefully and humbly decorated. I hadn’t put on a suit and tie, because I didn’t know how to stand on ceremony back then. Instead I arrived in slacks and a sport coat, perfectly in keeping with my relationship with Fred. The only problem was that Fred had magically disappeared. In his stead, waiting for me in the rather cramped conference room, were Irv and Mark, respectively the company CFO and in-house legal counsel, slender men with pale complexions and power ties who, it was clear from their cool reception, were going to treat me as an adversary.

  To make matters worse, we couldn’t get right down to business because we were waiting for Fred’s son Bob, to whom he had turned over the handling of our negotiations. It was tense in the room. I maintained my composure, but the fact that Fred had thrown me to the legal dogs only heightened my anxiety. My opinion of lawyers and accountants was that they are there to make better deals for their clients than their clients would be able, or willing, to make for themselves, and not only because their clients don’t know the intricacies of the law: the American attitude, it seemed to me, was that your lawyer could royally screw somebody on your behalf, but as long as you didn’t do it yourself, your hands and your conscience were clean.

  I didn’t know how exactly to protect myself, but I had never forgotten the cost of being too direct, too honest, back when my forthrightness with the GM of Zinno had cost me my job there. This time, I’d keep my cards close to my vest.

  The two suits and I sat around making painful small talk for about thirty minutes.

  At one point, Fred appeared in the door way of the conference room, rapped on the open door, and said, “Don’t beat Pino up too much. He’s my partner,” then disappeared laughing down the hallway.

  I remember thinking it was a power play disguised as a joke, and I steeled myself for the worst. As the minutes ticked by, it became increasingly apparent that these men considered me beneath their master’s reputation and family, a smooth-talking immigrant charmer who had somehow wooed the old man and convinced him to invest money in him. Did they ever say this to me directly? No. But when you know how to read people, instinctively, the way animals read each other, such sentiments are as apparent as the color of their eyes.

  Finally, Fred’s son Bob, the co-CEO of Barneys, showed up. I disliked him from the moment I laid eyes on him: he looked like a pasty, corpulent member of the Lucky Sperm Club if ever there was one. He came bounding into the room and began talking right over us.

  “Pino!” he said grandly, as though we were best of friends when in fact I don’t think we’d ever said more than two words to each other in all the times I’d visited his father’s table in my restaurant.

  I shook his hand, tried not to laugh in his face.

  “We love your restaurant. Been there many times. And now we’re going to do a restaurant together.”

  He was a study in insincerity, which, as a former actor, I found doubly insulting.

  “You know we were going to do a restaurant with Roberto, right? Had to pull out. We have a name to protect.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He sat down, gathered himself up, and took a deep breath.

  The room came to a hush as we got down to business.

  “OK, Pino. What is the most important thing for you?”

  He was so transparent that all my inhibitions went right out the window and I spoke my mind freely: “Three things,” I said. “I’m in charge, I’m in charge, I’m in charge.”

  Bob looked at his people and grinned, then looked back at me.

  “I guess you’re in charge.”

  I let it go.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m in charge of the design, the menu, and how we manage the business. I don’t want anybody to talk to me about what the menu should or should not have on it, who can cook, or how I run things.”

  He held up a hand.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “We have to be involved in the design.”

  Of all the things on the table, this I could live with because I trusted the family’s taste, even Bob’s.

  “OK, as long as you understand we’re doing an Italian restaurant. This isn’t going to be a French establishment,” I said.

  I thought it was important to say this because despite the rise of all those young American restaurateurs and chefs, French food still ruled in New York City. When it came to cuisine, Americans had a serious inferiority complex: they saw, and continue to see, themselves as lesser talents. All you need to do is examine the list of four-star ratings, still owned by French and French-leaning restaurants, to know that this is true. And, despite the financial success of people like me and Silvano, noses still turned up at Italian food, so I wanted to be clear that Le Madri was going to be unmistakably Italian in every aspect, regardless of whether or not it cost us a star.

  “We’re fine with that,” he said.

  We all nodded.

  “OK,” Bob said. “Now. How much money are you going to put down?”

  That’s when I realized how dysfunctional this scenario was. Either Fred hadn’t fully briefed Bob, or Bob hadn’t paid attention to his old man—or maybe he was trying to see if I’d budge. If I had to guess, I’d go with the last one: Bob and his sidekicks were going to protect Fred from himself.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Your investment? What’s your investment going to be?”

  “My investment?” I said, wiping imaginary perspiration from my forehand with my index finger. “Sudore,” meaning “sweat.” “That’s what I’m here for. If that’s not the deal, then we’re having the wrong meeting.”

  Before he could respond, Bob’s secretary knocked and came in, leaning over to him and whispering in his ear.

  “Listen, guys,” he said. “I have to go. Let’s move on. Let’s make this happen.”

  And he left.

  Irv and Mark took over the meeting and we began trying to hammer out a working budget for the construction phase of Le Madri. Their position was that because I was going to function as general contractor and wanted autonomy in calling the shots, I was going to be the one responsible for its accuracy, a guarantor. Financial words and terms began to fly around the room, some of which I was familiar with; others were new to me. My acting skills really came in handy because I just pretended to understand what they were referring to, nodding and taking notes in my yellow legal pad. I also settled on a strategy: no matter what they said, I just listened, made more note
s, smiled, and said “I’ll get back to you.” I could tell that this began to frustrate them, but I simply refused to agree to anything, not even the date when I’d get back to them.

  When I got off on my own, with the help of my attorney, I assembled a team of lawyers specializing in liquor licenses, permits, and construction. This opened up a new world of hourly rates to me and I found it shocking. Some of the guys charged two hundred or two hundred fifty dollars per hour, and this was in the eighties. Whenever I called one of these lawyers to go over my notes from my meetings with the Pressmans’ attorney, I would look at my watch right before dialing the phone and make a note of the time so I could track it. This became an obsession of mine and I started to convert my legal bills into restaurant food: for example, to pay for a thirty-minute call I had to sell four main courses. I’d see a tray loaded with pastas float by on a runner’s open palm and think, That only pays for about twenty minutes of counsel. In time I realized that this was self-defeating. Attorneys are just a part of doing business here. They are criminals without guns, but you can’t do anything about it, and the sooner you accept that, the better. You know who told me that? A lawyer, and he charged me for the ten seconds it took him to make the suggestion.

  Part of me felt that I was making a huge mistake, but the rest of me knew that unless I wanted to scrape and claw for every advancement in my career, I would need partners with pockets as deep as the Pressmans’. If being in business with them meant a crash course in law and finance, then so be it. Once I came to terms with that fact of life, I embraced the challenge and took a new view of it: I knew how to open and operate a restaurant. I’d done it twice already and done it successfully. As I thought about it, my confidence grew, and I realized that I actually knew more about the nuts and bolts of the job than these guys Fred had caged me up with. All I had to do was figure out how to translate my experience into their lingo. A friend of mine gave me some important advice: “Don’t promise them the world because you will get nothing for it,” he said. “Don’t give them the optimistic scenario. They are already in bed with you, so be conservative.”

  I was adjusting. Slowly but surely, I was learning how to be a businessman, but it was a difficult metamorphosis: with Steve and Nicola, and on my own in East Hampton, there was an understanding that we were engaged in a human enterprise, that there would be mistakes and that we would learn from them, but that everybody had his or her heart in the right place. This was different: I was putting myself on the line. And the number we ultimately came up with to finance the build-out and opening expenses was enormous: $1.25 million, which to a guy who had shown up in the United States with empty pockets eight years earlier was a terrifying sum. When I eventually got around to signing the contracts we’d drawn up, I was a coguarantor, not responsible for the same amount as the Pressmans, but still responsible for enough that any creditors would be well within their rights to come after me for some of their money. There’d be no room for learning experiences this time, no margin for error.

  AS OUR NEGOTIATIONS progressed, Fred introduced the one and only contingency to our moving forward: he wanted me to sever my ties with Il Cantinori, which was only a few blocks away and, as he saw it, a conflict of interest. Fortunately for him, Steve was quickly developing the opinion that Sapore di Mare was taking me away from Il Cantinori too much of the time.

  As I became increasingly scarce around Il Cantinori, the tension between me and Steve built. When I was there, and we sat down for our dinner at the end of the night, he’d turn his chair away and talk to me over his shoulder.

  Finally, one evening, as we were sitting like that, Steve turned to me and said, “We got to talk.”

  “I agree,” I said, and we slowly began having the conversation that had been so long coming. I knew that it was going to end with Steve buying me out, but he was such a shrewd businessman that I felt I had to at least bluff that I might purchase his and Nicola’s shares of Il Cantinori.

  “You can buy me out,” I said. “Or maybe I buy you out.”

  Steve smiled at my chutzpah. “Pino,” he said, as though schooling a little boy. “I own this building. You going to buy me out? I’m going to become your landlord? I think you’ll go.” It reminded me of Moe Greene in The Godfather telling Michael Corleone: “You buy me out? No, no! I buy you out.”

  I agreed and after that awkward evening we swiftly put whatever tensions there had been behind us and hammered out a deal in record time. Before I knew it, I was out of Il Cantinori.

  This plunged me into a period of bereavement. Il Cantinori was like my soul. It was my first restaurant, the spring from which all my confidence flowed. This was the early fall, the low season of Sapore, so I was in the city most of the time. There were some mornings when I’d get in my car and begin daydreaming and suddenly realize that I was parking on Tenth Street instead of in Chelsea, having driven myself to Il Cantinori on autopilot. And with no restaurant at which to spend my evenings, I’d sometimes walk over to Tenth Street around six thirty and sneak a peek into Il Cantinori. It looked the same, except that I wasn’t there; instead I was a ghost discovering to his horror that the world could function just fine without him in it.

  The pain was eased by new arrivals in my life: Jessie gave birth to our first son, Marco, in September 1988, and I myself was birthing Le Madri. I poured all of my energy into the development of the restaurant.

  It was the most extensive overhaul I’d yet been involved in. Somewhere along the way I decided that I wanted to have a vaulted ceiling, found the right craftsmen to do the work, and watched every day as they painstakingly constructed it, first fashioning a wire lathing, then applying the stucco. There was also green river hemlock wood flooring to be installed and a beautiful wood-burning pizza oven.

  While all this was going on, I was also consumed with finding the mothers. The first would be Maria, my cook from the Hamptons, whom I was starting to think of as a sort of good-luck charm. For the others, I reached out to a network of friends, including a Piedmontese winemaker named Bruno Cerreto, to identify some talented female Italian chefs. (I also phoned my own mother and asked her to be a part of the restaurant. “That’s the respect you have for me,” she scolded me. “You want me to become an employee.”) Bruno meanwhile found me Bruna Alessandria, a classic Italian beauty in her early forties from the farmland of Piedmont with a taste for colorful hand-knit clothing, and two other Piedmontese cooks, Margherita Aloi, just eighteen at the time, and Silvana, just nineteen, neither of whom—to be honest—was an actual mother, but both of whom could cook as if they’d raised a dozen happy kids. The mothers all arrived together; it was as if we’d placed an order, only instead of two pounds of white truffles we’d ordered three women.

  Neither Bruna nor Margherita had been to the United States before, or had spent much time in any big city, so they were a bit overwhelmed. I set them up in an apartment in the Flatiron District, at Twenty-second Street and Broadway. To serve as funnel for all their combined ideas, I enlisted a young American chef named Alan Tardi, a modest, professional, and soft-spoken guy who had worked at Chanterelle and Lafayette.

  Alan or I would meet them downstairs and escort these women—dressed in their earth-toned country threads—all over town. My first priority wasn’t to get them into the kitchen; it was to treat them to a few weeks of the tourist life, to give them a sense of American culture and get them excited about being here. I wanted them to soak up New York City, so we took them to Central Park, the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center, and other landmark locations. At a time when I was becoming more and more Americanized, these women reminded me who I was and where I came from; maybe that’s why I came up with the concept when I did, to help myself preserve my essential identity. I loved taking them around Manhattan. I so related to what it was like to feel like a fish out of water here that I was highly protective of them. Whenever they were in my presence, I was their human force field, acting as bodyguard, interpreter, and sugar daddy. No matter wh
ere we went, they stuck out like a handful of sore thumbs thanks to their country attire and the fact that we all spoke Italian. It wasn’t long until, like me before them, they were drawn to the Village, which felt the most like home, and that’s where they’d often gravitate in their personal time.

  We also wanted to introduce them to the Italian restaurants here and took them everywhere from Italian-American joints to hot restaurants, with the notable exceptions of Da Silvano and Il Cantinori. They were definitely not impressed by what they saw and tasted, usually pushing their plates away with a smirk after a few bites. Bruna was especially severe in her appraisal of the food, saying things like, “I don’t even feed the pigs with this.”

  Our first “official” meeting was a few weeks later in the restaurant’s unfinished dining room. As construction workers hammered, drilled, and sawed all around us, we sat and talked about food.

  “I want you to give me lists of your favorite dishes,” I told them, speaking in Italian, of course. Since they all hailed from Piedmont, the dishes they named were distinctly Piedmontese: those little ravioli called plin, tagliatelle with porcini mushroom ragù and white truffles, and a whole roster of risottos, including ones made with asparagus, chicken liver, and a red risotto made with Barolo wine. They also expressed a reverence for vitello tonnato, or sliced cooked veal served with a tuna mayonnaise. Clearly, Le Madri wasn’t going to specialize in Tuscan cuisine, which was fine with me because all I really cared about was that the food be authentic and have that unmistakable feeling of home cooking about it.

  After we kicked around these and other dishes, I said, “Now, I want to take the essence of our cooking, the unwritten flavor of Italy, the way we all eat at home, and communicate it to New Yorkers.”