Dirty Dishes

by Andrew Friedman

I wiped my mouth, calmly and methodically folded my napkin, and walked across the dining room as the manager and the hostess stood giggling away. As I got closer and closer, I felt like the shark in Jaws, about to devour two unsuspecting and frolicking young lovers.

  “Excuse me. You’re the general manager, right?” I asked.

  He turned around. They suppressed their giggles and he addressed me, “Yes, sir. How can I help you?”

  “I’m Pino Luongo, the new owner of this restaurant.”

  The laughter stopped. He shushed the hostess.

  “Oh, Mr. Luongo, of course. Great to meet you.” Then, as the realization dawned on him, he squinted: “Were you . . . were you in for lunch?”

  “Yeah, I was,” I said. “Let me ask you something: you always show up to work at two thirty in the afternoon?”

  “No,” he said. “I had an emergency to take care of.”

  Cupping her hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh, the hostess walked away quickly. He shot her a cross look, as though he’d have been putting one over on me if she hadn’t blown his cover. It was then that I realized that I actually needed a human resources department after all, if only as a buffer, because my instinct was to wrap my hands around this guy’s neck and strangle him. And I don’t mean that in a figurative way: I actually wanted to kill him.

  The guy gave me a quick tour of the dining room and then excused himself to go to his office. I had the distinct impression that he had hurried off to circulate an internal e-mail, warning his fellow employees: “Caesar has arrived in Pompeii!”

  I spent the next several hours sitting at the bar and watching the afternoon unfold. It was some of the most shameless thievery I had ever witnessed in my life. The workers from the lunch shift stuck around while those from the evening shift showed up at three o’clock, a good hour or two earlier than was common, and clocked in, then all these people stood around talking and working at a snail’s pace, milking the company for thousands of dollars during the restaurant’s dead time between meals. By the time I left, my blood was boiling. I’d usually have taken the subway back to my office at that hour, but I needed to get above ground for some fresh air.

  My experience at the Sfuzzi near Lincoln Center was almost identical, from the décor to the service to the food and the late-arriving GM.

  All I really wanted to do was focus on Tuscan Square, but these two units alone forced me to devote a lot of attention to starting the Sfuzzi conversions. Because the World Financial Center location was making money despite the manager’s best efforts to the contrary, I made the Lincoln Center spot a priority. I actually loved the location and saw a huge potential for pre- and post-theater and opera dining. I decided that it would be renamed Coco Pazzo Opera. I was so bullish on its promise that I thought perhaps we’d spend some money and really rebuild the design from scratch. Before doing that, though, I wanted to be sure we could remain there for a good, long while to recoup the investment, so I approached the landlord to see if we could extend the lease. He came back and revealed that it actually included a demolition clause, meaning that he could kick us out with six months’ notice if he wanted to demolish the building for any reason. In a shocking move by New York City standards, he actually gave me a piece of friendly advice—“Don’t do it”—the implication being that he was planning to bring in the wrecking ball at some point.

  I was trying to muster some enthusiasm, but at every turn I was met by an impediment. Finally, I came up with a very simple plan for recasting these places as scaled-down, moderately priced Coco Pazzos, something between the original one on the Upper East Side and the Coco Pazzo Cafe in Chicago. Working with my team, I devised a basic design philosophy that could be transmitted across all the units, along with a mandate of seasonal cuisine that could be adapted by the chefs at the individual locations, some of whom we’d keep and some of whom we’d have to replace. We also made a calculated business decision to not overhaul all the restaurants. In hopes of ditching a few of them, I phoned up Al Copeland, the Chicken King of New Orleans, the one who had brought a smile to my face back in Dallas, and asked if he wanted to buy the units he had originally wanted.

  He cut me off quickly: “Don’t even tell me the price. I know what you paid for them and you’re not going to sell them to me for less.” Then, after a pause, he shamelessly and charmingly added, “Are you?”

  I wasn’t prepared to do that, but as none of the promised replacement funds had materialized for Tuscan Square, we would end up selling off the restaurant in Atlanta, even though we’d spent the money to turn it into a Coco Pazzo, for a quick and necessary infusion of cash.

  That’s the problem with being a restaurant junkie: you end up like any other kind of junkie, doing whatever you have to in order to survive from one day to the next.

  I TRIED NOT to let these gathering clouds overshadow my excitement and enthusiasm for Tuscan Square. As I had come to see it, this new project would be the ultimate expression of my nostalgia for home, a nostalgia that had sifted out the ordinary and unpleasant: every summer’s day in Tuscany was sunny, but not too hot; every autumn afternoon was cold enough to let you see your breath, but not enough to produce a shiver; every meal was an occasion, something to be remembered fondly.

  By the same token, I often explained my vision for the retail component of Tuscan Square using imagined people to help bring it to life: the clothing line was summed up by a Tuscan gentleman I envisioned, a dashing man in his forties who lived in the old city of Florence. Because the countryside was just a stone’s throw away, his look was both cosmopolitan, expressed in the quality of the fabrics he wore, and country, demonstrated by a certain degree of informality. This guy might wear a filo di cotone cotton shirt, a chocolate brown vest, a corduroy jacket inspired by the boar-hunting season, with 1920s-style side pockets for his cartridges, and heavy slacks cut wide at the bottom to make way for his boots. I would never compare myself to Ralph Lauren, but in many ways he was my inspiration: I wanted to create a Tuscan wardrobe not unlike his idealized vision of American style.

  My goals for the kitchenware and tableware were inspired by the same notion of city and country, antique and modern, with everything from classic pewter tabletop items to stylized, contemporary flourishes like you might see in a modern restaurant. In addition to the clothes and the housewares, there would be a wide range of merchandise that reflected the artisan traditions of Tuscany, from hand-blown glassware to leather-bound agendas and diaries that showed off the exquisite paper-work of the region.

  Was all of this a bit over the top? Of course it was. But in the time in which I was operating, it seemed right at home. There was so much cash around in the 1990s, surely there’d be no limit to the number of customers willing to spend heaps of money on food and furnishings. And the taste for all things Tuscan was exploding as well, not just because of my restaurants, but also because of the others that had sprung up in the almost fifteen years since Il Cantinori had debuted, and because of books like Under the Tuscan Sun. In keeping with the times, it wasn’t just one store I envisioned, but many. I saw Tuscan Squares in other big cities like Boston and Los Angeles, and maybe even in certain affluent suburbs.

  As the construction proceeded and I watched the place come to life, it was almost enough to make me forget my Sfuzzi woes. There was just one nagging concern: whenever I left the premises and stepped outside, I’d look to my right and see thousands of people coursing down Fifth Avenue, but almost none of them turned onto Fifty-first Street. I’d never really thought about it before, but Rockefeller Center is like its own little enclave in the heart of Midtown and you just didn’t venture within without a purpose. I began to wonder if foot traffic, the lifeblood of most retail operations, would be a challenge for us.

  In addition to the enormous construction job, I had to generate an entire retail line from scratch. I assembled a team of friends and consultants to help me put out feelers all over Italy, mostly in Tuscany, and find all those artisanal products we’d n
eed. My man on the ground overseas was Marta’s husband at the time, Gianni Salvaterra, an Italy-based restaurant and lifestyle consultant who I hired to canvass Tuscany, make first contact with vendors whose wares he thought I might respond to, and set an itinerary for me when I would go over on buying trips. He produced a dizzying schedule for the first one, in April 1997, arranging face-to-face meetings with about forty-five companies in two weeks. I asked a good friend of mine, Gary Wolkowitz—the president of Hot Sox, who had impeccable taste and a house in Chianti—to travel with me and serve as my American alter-ego, offering feedback on what he thought people would best respond to here.

  It was rare to spend two weeks back home. I made some time to visit my parents and my siblings, but for the most part all we did was travel up and down the corridor from Florence to Siena to Pisa to Lucca, meeting with artisans to see what distinguished each one’s products from the others and to select and contract for Tuscan Square exclusives, negotiating terms and telling them how, if at all, we wanted things altered.

  The range of products we discovered was breathtaking: blankets, throws, and runners made from exquisite baroque fabrics; antique-looking pewter tabletop items; soaps, candles, and fragrances made with basil, lavender, and sage; a dozen different lines of glassware; terra-cotta plates, bowls, and mugs; and Casentino wool apparel, made from a cooked, singularly curly wool and named for the area to the south of Florence where it’s produced.

  Tuscany was becoming one huge cottage industry for us as business owners referred us to others they knew. Sometimes I would just stumble upon something and find out how to get it, like the day I dropped into a collectible arts store in Florence and saw resin chargers (underplates) that suspended herbs and leaves within a plastic casing. I thought they were the ultimate expression of seasonality at the table, and I became obsessed with having them for myself. I asked around town like a private eye. Finally, the clerk in a neighboring store told me that the family who produced these plates lived fifty kilometers west of the city. He didn’t know the name or address, but in the countryside, you often don’t need those details: “You go past the train tracks and there’s a little industrial development. They live there,” he told me.

  The next day I drove myself out to the town and after some more asking around, found the father. When I told him I was from New York, he looked at me with extreme skepticism, but I began telling him my story and he eventually invited me into his shop and demonstrated his technique: he heated the resin and poured it into the bottom plate of a mold of an oversized dish. When it dried and hardened, he created a collage of wheat on its surface. He then poured molten resin over it, and let it cool so that the wheat was suspended within the charger. It was fascinating.

  We sat down and began talking business. I told him I wanted hundreds of chargers of fall leaves, representing autumn, and green spring wheat, and golden wheat, which stood for summer. I also wanted marine-themed chargers, a nod to my love of the beach. He was hesitant about this, telling me that he’d have to forage for the shells, starfish, and pebbles himself, but he agreed to do it. Meeting him, and countless others like him, was a look into a creative aspect of Tuscan life that I had always admired but had never experienced at the source. As we got a close-up look into the lives of the often very humble artisans who made all of these products, and saw their painstaking craft, I felt enormous pride in where I came from, and couldn’t wait to share it all with the city of New York.

  I’D COME BACK from these exhilarating trips, and by the following morning, Tuscany would seem like as much of a long-lost dream as it had when I had first arrived in the United States. As my own little Tuscany was coming together in Rockefeller Center, I’d be constantly pulled away to focus on sprucing up Sfuzzi. I gave it my best shot under the circumstances, but there was simply no joy in it, so I turned to two of my most trusted employees, Jack Weiss and Joe Essa, assigning Joe to everything east of the Mississippi and Jack to everything west, and sent them on their way to kick some ass and whip the restaurants into shape. I tried to confine myself to isolated spot visits to sign off on places before they re-launched with my quickly diluting Coco Pazzo name on the door, and I brought the chefs to New York, one by one, to work with me and Marta in a kind of culinary boot camp, giving them a ten- to fourteen-day crash course in how to cook real Italian food—not that they, or their customers, were really all that interested.

  Adding to the stress of the situation was the fact that the $6.1 million we’d borrowed from the Tuscan Square funding to finance the purchase of Sfuzzi still hadn’t been replaced by the promised influx of cash. As a result, in order to keep Tuscan Square on track, we’d had to secure three new loans, with the attendant interest, over the first half of 1997.

  By May, addressing the most urgent units in order, we had converted five of the restaurants: the two in New York and the ones in Dallas and Addison, Texas; and the sold-off one in Atlanta. Fewer than half. (Under a separate deal with the landlord who had taken it over, we had also converted a former Sfuzzi in Union Station in Washington, D.C.) The work seemed without end, and the more Sfuzzis I visited, the more uphill the struggle became. No matter where I went, I realized that the various units were each operating independently, a chef doing his own thing with a malfunctioning support structure. I began to feel like the Martin Sheen character in Apocalypse Now, winding his way along that Vietnamese river and encountering ever-stranger sub-communities and soldiers gone renegade. It never occurred to me that I might be identifying with the wrong guy from Apocalypse; maybe by the time it was all over, I’d be more like the demented Marlon Brando character, Colonel Kurtz, sitting in that dark room, muttering nonsense and waiting for somebody to put him out of his misery.

  MEANWHILE AT TUSCAN Square, Marta and I collaborated on the menu. All the memories unlocked by the buying trips put me in mind of home cooking, and we made our theme the rediscovery of the less well-known home-cooked dishes of Tuscany, such as ricotta and chicken meatballs (polpette), pappardelle al pepolino (a long, broad pasta with summer tomato sauce, pecorino cheese, and oregano), calamari in zimino (squid in spinach and tomato stew), strozzapreti (“strangled priest” pasta, so named because if you eat them too fast you might choke on them) with butter and sage, and fritto misto di coniglio e carciofi, a Tuscan fried rabbit and artichoke classic. Because the lower level was right on the underground concourse of Rockefeller Center, where office workers breezed past on their way from the subway to the elevator in the mornings, we’d be serving breakfast at the espresso bar, and so for the first time in ages, I found myself thinking of one of the quintessential Tuscan breakfast indulgences, bomboloni, or Tuscan doughnuts, lightly fried and sugared and filled with either pastry cream (bomboloni con la crema) or chocolate (bomboloni con cioccolato). As a boy, I had eaten them on the beach in the summertime, and I decided that we’d make bomboloni at Tuscan Square as well.

  By the late summer, all of those products were rolling in from overseas and we were having a ball dressing the retail department, which had swelled from an initial goal of about one hundred fifty different items to more than five hundred, with each collection evocatively displayed: runners and throws were draped over chairs and settees; fragrances and soaps made from herbs and olive oil were artfully arranged on a sixteen-foot eighteenth-century Tuscan credenza; several lines of pewter, dinnerware, and glassware were presented on tables or shelves; the apparel, evoking weekends in Tuscany, with suede pants, cashmere sweaters, and coats, dressed an old-fashioned mannequin; a small library featured travel books and journals. There were even chairs, couches, credenzas, and armoires for sale, all that one could ever want to bring a little Tuscany into his or her life.

  There was just one thing missing, and I had to have it: I located a company in California that knew how to install something I’d wanted in one of my restaurants since Il Cantinori: a cypress tree. They created a concrete trunk that began at the foot of the staircase on the concourse level and shot up along the stairs and up
to the ceiling of the main-floor dining room, and adorned it with real cypress branches. The cost for this touch was twenty-six thousand dollars, and I thought it was worth every penny.

  Tuscan Square had a soft opening on September 16, 1997. My publicist, David Kratz, whose larger firm had replaced my friend Susan, pulled off a minor miracle by getting the city to allow us to shut down part of Fifty-first Street so we could really go to town with our Florentine marketplace theme. We laid sod over the sidewalk and the street, brought in trees and rocks, and erected a platform stage for live music. As much as a city street could, it felt like the Tuscan countryside.

  There were more than four hundred fifty guests, and they were positively blown away by the merchandise and the food. The purpose of the party was to generate press, and it succeeded magnificently with articles in the New York Times, New York magazine, and elsewhere. In the subsequent days, we hosted some friends-and-family dinners to get the kinks out, then we opened on—you guessed it—September 23. Though I still had opening-night jitters before every restaurant launch, Tuscan Square began with the same big crowds as my last few places had, and my team held up to the stresses magnificently.

  It was one of the high points of my career up to that point, so much so that it was nearly impossible to imagine what might top it. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but that also meant that the only direction for me to go was down.

  MY JUBILATION WAS interrupted when I opened the New York Times on October 10 and read the “Diner’s Journal” column penned by restaurant critic Ruth Reichl. In it, she said that Tuscan Square seemed “not very Tuscan,” referred to the “sheer stupidity” of the silk aprons we sold, and concluded by considering whether she’d prefer to eat in a restaurant or a theme park. I was royally offended by the idea that somebody who had spent years celebrating a restaurant machine like Wolfgang Puck on the West Coast before she came to New York could refer to what I did as a theme park. (Furthering my sense of a double standard was the fact that she’d given Churrascaria Plataforma, an all-you-can-eat Brazilian rodizio complete with rolling capirinha carts, two stars earlier that year, and would go on to give Ruby Foo’s, a highly stylized, vaguely “Asian” restaurant that combined Chinese and Japanese food in a dining room that was pure theme, two stars as well.)