Dirty Dishes

by Andrew Friedman

  I hated to do it to them, but I had no choice. We had to be ready for dinner at the beach. So we piled into the car and drove out to the Hamptons, and I assigned each of them to a station. They were real troupers, prepping and then cooking all night, only to pile back into my car at eleven forty-five for the return trip to Manhattan.

  It was an exhausting day. But here’s the sick thing, and the reason I believe I was born to be a restaurateur: I loved moments like those. Loved the rush of adrenaline. Loved opening the doors at five thirty and welcoming customers into a dining experience that bore no sign of the crisis that had preceded it. What was that old line from “New York, New York”? “If you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere.” Damn straight.

  Though I enjoyed the constant pressure, sometimes it did get the better of me, and my temper periodically erupted, even occasionally at a customer.

  One night at Le Madri, a couple had barged past the maître d’ podium into the dining room and were standing there yelling at Gian-franco.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked.

  Gianfanco explained that they wanted a table and we didn’t have one for them.

  “Well, if Gianfranco says we don’t have one, we don’t have one,” I replied.

  The man protested, uttering my least favorite phrase in the world: “You don’t know who I am.”

  My temper went from zero to sixty in no time. I climbed up on a chair, told all the customers in the surrounding area to be quiet, then turned to the guy and said: “OK, go ahead, tell us all who you are. Please, tell us who the fuck you are.”

  He thought about it for a second, looked around at the people staring at him, then gave me the finger and stormed out.

  I never learned who he was, and I never saw him again.

  THAT FALL, THE New York Times finally got around to reviewing us and gave us two stars, thanks to the open-mindedness of critic Bryan Miller. New York magazine’s Gael Greene, francophile that she is, never warmed to me, but it didn’t matter. We were hot, and we were buoyed again the following spring when Andy Birsh reviewed us in Gourmet magazine. In the 1980s, a review in the pages of Gourmet would drive people to your restaurant for months; they’d actually show up with the magazine in hand and scan the review to decide what to order.

  Because things were going so swimmingly, when Alan decided to leave Le Madri the following year I was determined to replace him with a bona fide Italian mother, making the restaurant as true to its name as possible. A friend of mine from back home told me about a wildly talented woman named Marta Pulini, who had worked at Bice in Paris before returning to her hometown of Modena. We spoke by phone and clicked via long distance; she talked about food exactly the way I did: with a reverence for seasonality, immediacy, and simplicity. She flew to New York to meet with me and I found that we had something else in common: we had both led full lives before getting into the restaurant business. She had been a semiprofessional tennis player, raised a family, and then decided to take up cooking as a career, attending Le Cordon Bleu to supplement her innate palate and talent with professional kitchen training. She preferred lighter food than I did, but we were still very compatible and we decided that she would come work for me as executive chef of Le Madri, becoming the latest in a long line of women culinary figures in my life.

  With that hire, things felt very stable. I had Marta in the city and Mark in Long Island, and everything was firing on all cylinders.

  And so, it was a bit jarring when I came home one day to find Jessie waiting for me, on the verge of tears.

  “Pino, I can’t take it anymore.”

  I was oblivious. What was the problem?

  “I can’t go anywhere with Marco. Everywhere I go it’s dirty. Even the parks. There are syringes everywhere. I want out of here.” It was hard to argue her point: by that point in time, the crime in New York was truly out of control; there were horrific violent acts described in the tabloids and local news broadcasts every morning, and friends of ours had actually taken to walking in the middle of the street late at night for fear of being pulled into doorways and robbed, or worse.

  I played the strongman for my wife. “Sure, baby, whatever you want.”

  She was right: for Marco and for her, the thing to do was to get out of the city. Personally, I had no desire to leave. I had left my home twice in my life: left the country for Rome and left Rome for New York. Somehow, I had ended up in the right place, and I didn’t want to let go. But I wasn’t really letting go; I was about to enter that Jekyll-and-Hyde existence called “commuting,” in which I would act the role of the suburban dad on weekends but maintain my life in the city from Monday to Friday.

  Another challenge to be met, more energy to be expended. It was all right.

  And so, shortly after our daughter, Jacobella, was born in 1990, we found a very beautiful, though also very old, Tudor-style home in Rye, in leafy Westchester County, New York. It was well maintained but would need a little T.L.C. to bring it up to modern standards. Despite my busy schedule, I was excited to take it on, and I had a vision for how to make it perfect. Just like a restaurateur to choose a place that needed fixing: I guess I have to make my mark everywhere I go.

  TEN

  Critical Condition: The

  Problem with Restaurant

  Reviewers, Blogs, and Surveys

  WHEN I GOT into the restaurant business, it was a last resort—an unglamorous business of good craftsmen who weren’t stars, even in their hometown. Now, the cooking industry has become a media darling. There’s more interest than ever in restaurants, and more people than ever are offering their assessments in print and online. In addition to the food critics who have always been a fact of my life, and the annual Zagat Survey, we now have a community of bloggers tasting food and snapping digital photos for their mostly self-financed, self-produced Web sites.

  There’s just one small problem with all of this. For the most part, restaurant criticism is a sham.

  Before I explain why, I want to be clear that I don’t have anything against the critics. Some of them have been very kind to me over the years, some have barely acknowledged me, and others have gone after me with a vengeance. I don’t begrudge them their opinions and I don’t blame them for any of my problems.

  But there are some things that must be said, and since I have a reputation for speaking my mind, it might as well be me who says them. First of all, most newspaper and magazine restaurant critics’ credibility begins with the assumption that the critic a) dines anonymously, and b) is a stand-in for the person reading the review. Both of these premises are often false, beginning with the notion that restaurant critics travel incognito. This is one of the great myths of the profession, at least in New York City, and especially when it comes to the critic for the New York Times. In many cases the reviewer attempts to be anonymous, but members of the industry, even sworn enemies, unite to be sure that he or she is almost always recognized. If there’s ever been a photograph of the Times critic published, you may rest assured that the photo is tacked to the wall like a wanted poster in some employees-only area of the restaurant, so that they can all have their eyes perpetually peeled and on the lookout. (In many cases, the critic is also known to the chef, restaurateur, and managers from his or her previous stint as a reporter.) Restaurants share lists of aliases that major critics use to make reservations, the names that appear on their credit cards, and the phone numbers they give out for confirming reservations.

  As a result, despite their best efforts to travel under the radar, these men and women are routinely granted one of the best seats in the house. They are tended to by the best waiter or waitress, and the chef personally fusses over their dish to ensure perfection—or as close to it as he or she is capable of. Restaurant staff are on especially high alert during the opening weeks of a new restaurant, when the chefs never leave and the entire staff functions like a team of air marshals, scanning the faces in the crowd for anybody on the watch list. The experience critics hav
e during these important, make-or-break weeks can be doubly inapplicable to the average diner, because not only is the critic getting the best possible treatment and food, but there are many famous chefs around town who work every night until the Times review breaks, then bolt the scene and return to their usual golf schedule.

  I empathize with the critics themselves, who have a near-impossible job to do, dining out on a daily basis, often returning to places they detest and putting food they don’t care for into their bodies in order to complete their research. I can’t help but think that it doesn’t take long before critics lose the ability to relate to what it’s like to be a normal diner. And I know that many critics get bored with their work, because I’ve watched more than one of them go from being an enthusiastic chronicler of cuisine to an anthropologist more concerned with incidental details like what the people at the next table are wearing or doing, or the décor of the bathrooms. When you start seeing comments about that kind of thing, it’s time to find a new critic to read.

  Where I don’t pity the critics is in their feeling of superiority. There’s no question that critics have the right to pen a review of a restaurant, but over the years, whenever I’ve written them letters or phoned them up to complain that they didn’t understand Italian food, or that they had been too harsh in taking away a star, which former New York Times critic Bryan Miller did to Il Cantinori and which I wrote him about, or whatever, they have taken offense at the mere fact of my daring to confront them—not writing me back, but subsequently taking potshots in articles and reviews. But where is it written that freedom of the press is a one-way street? What’s wrong with criticizing the critics? If they have the right to assess—in public—how I do my job, why can’t I offer an opinion on how they do theirs? These people have had their asses kissed for so long by restaurateurs, chefs, and publicists that when somebody has the balls to disagree with them to their face, they take it as an affront. But I don’t kiss asses. You do it long enough and it destroys your palate.

  Now, blogging is a relatively new profession, but the problems have already revealed themselves. First of all, blogs are for the most part an unregulated industry, a Wild West of pseudo-journalism where anybody with a few hundred dollars and an opinion can have a stage equal to that of major publications that have been around for generations. Unlike most critics, many bloggers make no effort at anonymity whatsoever. It’s not at all uncommon to see food bloggers hanging out at a restaurant’s bar, gabbing with the chef, or his publicist, or at industry parties, chowing down on free food. Then they slouch back to their homes and, sitting there in their underwear, bang out posts that have more and more power over consumers’ restaurant-going decisions. I don’t want to sound like Jerry Seinfeld, but “who are these people?”

  And then there’s one of the most powerful publications in the world of New York City restaurants: the Zagat Survey. I happen to like this publication; it’s light, compact, and updated every year. It saves you a call to directory assistance or a visit to the Internet.

  But as a survey . . . well, there are a number of problems. In principle, I have nothing against the concept of a survey. In fact, I love the spirit of it. The idea that a random sampling of diners would be given a vehicle to share their opinions with fellow food enthusiasts is very democratic. But in reality, the Zagat Survey is anything but random.

  I wonder, for example, how many of the people who purchase the survey understand that many chefs and restaurateurs, as the annual deadline for survey forms approaches, send out e-mails to their customers, encouraging them to fill out the survey, electronically stuffing the ballot box. Another obvious question I have to ask is how many restaurateurs pay people to fill out surveys. I know that Tim Zagat is a lawyer, so I want to be very clear about this: I don’t know of anybody who actually does this, but I also know that I could pay some young kid a few bucks an hour to fill out a number of surveys on my behalf, and nobody would be the wiser. Am I the only person who’s ever had this idea?

  Then, of course, there’s the logic-defying curiosity that has been an industry joke for more than a decade: the dominance of Union Square Cafe as the most popular restaurant in New York for more than five years, until it was unseated by Gramercy Tavern in 2003. Since then, the two have reigned as the number-one and number-two most popular restaurants in town in the survey, and there’s barely a chef or restaurateur in town who hasn’t shared a good and hearty laugh over this fact. We don’t laugh out of disrespect to restaurateur Danny Meyer, who owns them both, or to the restaurants themselves, but rather because it strikes us as curious that a random survey would result in these restaurants’ seemingly infinite dominance. More than that, what value exactly is “most popular” supposed to have for people looking for a place to eat? The most popular restaurant in the United States is probably McDonald’s. A more accurate title for that page at the front of the survey might be “Best Marketed Restaurants” or “Best Restaurants at Getting Their Customers to Fill Out the Zagat Survey.”

  There are other things I could point out, such as how tired the style of the survey is. I mean, how “clever” is it to “encapsulate” the most “obvious” of comments by putting “every” other “word” in “quotation marks”? After “a while,” it begins to get “annoying.”

  So what’s a restaurant-goer to do? Where are you supposed to turn for advice and direction?

  It’s easy to imagine the perfect critic: somebody knowledgeable in the cuisines of various countries, with a finely honed palate that can distinguish not just good from bad, but also excellent from exceptional—distinctions that aren’t always obvious, especially in today’s anything-goes dining scene. Someone possessed of a grasp of the classics, with a mind open to new things but not susceptible to being seduced by originality for originality’s sake. A person as happy to enjoy a good meal in a greasy-spoon neighborhood hangout as in a four-star restaurant. And somebody who doesn’t play favorites and whose reviews aren’t affected by the goings-on in his or her own life.

  Easy to imagine, but such a person does not exist.

  Would it be hopelessly old-fashioned of me to suggest you ask your friends? To me, there’s no better recommendation than one from somebody you know personally, who loves the same kind of food and experience that you do (or knows your likes and dislikes). As a restaurateur, most of my business ultimately comes from the word of mouth of my customers either bringing people in or sending them with their blessing. There’s something pure about people finding restaurants this way, and unlike some of the patrons who come (or worse, stay away) because of the critics, they always seem to get just what they expect.

  ELEVEN

  Strange Bedfellows

  HISTORY HAS A funny way of repeating itself. I had a customer named George Kaufman who came to see me every Monday night at Le Madri, and one Monday he pulled me aside and told me that he had a space on the Upper East Side that he wanted to show me. He described it in less-than-flattering terms: with the exception of the south-side entrance, it was an almost windowless room located on East Seventy-fourth Street that had been operating as a restaurant called Metro where Patrick Clark (now deceased) was the chef. The place had failed and was recently shuttered.

  “You come take a look, and if you like it I’ll make it work for us.”

  There was a lot that didn’t make sense about that location for me: it was uptown, where I had once lived but where I’d never worked. Yet something about the notion intrigued me and it wasn’t hard to figure out what it was: once again, it was the proximity to money and influence, climbing to the top of that ladder. This was the land of Cipriani and Le Cirque, where if you opened the right kind of restaurant, you’d be hosting business leaders, movie stars, and politicians every night of the week.

  I went to have a look at the space and found myself immediately drawn to it. For the neighborhood, it actually seemed right that it be a bit sequestered, so all those power brokers could have their privacy. I thought about fashioning the spa
ce after the style of a 1940s villa in Tuscany or Umbria, with wood paneling and murals inspired by the still-life paintings of one of my favorite artists, Giorgio Morandi. My interest was based in part on the fact that Mark, stranded out on Long Island, had expressed a desire to return to Manhattan, and I thought this restaurant would be a way to keep him in the family.

  The only thing missing was a concept. I told George that I’d get back to him and gave myself a few days to let the idea develop, setting it aside to simmer. A few thoughts began to come together in my mind. One of my favorite pastimes back then was opening the windows at Le Madri and letting the breeze blow through the dining room, causing the tablecloths and draperies to flap in the wind. One night I was sitting there having dinner with my friend Bob Krasnow, chairman of Elektra Records. He was thinking about moving to the Upper East Side and I told him that I might be opening a restaurant up there.

  “What are you going to call it?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “But I’ve been thinking about the food, and I think what I want to do is break the rules. Just put Mark in the kitchen and let him go crazy. It’s like coco pazzo,” which is an Italian expression meaning “crazy chef.”

  He laughed: “I don’t know what you just said, Pino, but that is a great name.”

  Encouraged, I trademarked the name, because I knew that even if the restaurant didn’t work out, I was going to use it for something.

  But things did work out. I took the concept to the Pressmans, with whom I had a two-way first-refusal arrangement: neither of us could commit to a new restaurant without first inviting the other to be a part of it. “It’s a no-brainer,” I told them. “The landlord is a gentleman who just wants to see the place rented, and I’ve got the perfect concept.”

  After our success with Le Madri, they jumped right in and I convinced Irv to not rock the boat in the lease negotiation. The deal we were being offered was a great one; there was no need to get cute and potentially blow it.