Dirty Dishes

by Andrew Friedman

  As if all of this weren’t enough to bear, later that month, Carlos, the beloved maître d’ of Coco Pazzo, died. At the funeral I sat next to his young son, just ten or eleven years old at the time, and watched helplessly as he stared at the urn containing Carlos’s ashes and at the photographs of the man surrounding it. Shortly thereafter, his widow decided to take the kids and move back to South America to be with her family, a sad ending to what had been a happy immigrant success story.

  As winter approached, the days grew darker earlier, and I was plunged into a deep, deep depression, far worse than any I’d ever experienced. I’d say that I went crazy, but to me, becoming depressed seemed like the most sane reaction possible.

  One Saturday in November, I was sitting on the steps of my front porch. The advent of autumn is always a special time for me, but I was preoccupied with the swirling anxieties in my head, not the leaves blowing around our yard.

  My son Marco, thirteen years old at the time, came up to me.

  “Papá. Can we go paintballing this weekend?” he asked.

  “You know what, Marco,” I said. “Leave me alone.”

  He was beyond confused, his eyes utterly blank. When he snapped out of it, he asked: “Are you OK?”

  I felt so terrible that I began to cry. It was as if he were the adult and I was the child. I was ashamed, and rightfully so. It’s never all right for a father to speak to his son that way, and to break down and cry before him was almost worse. I pulled him close and gave him a hug, told him I was sorry.

  Despite that awful display, it was actually my family that kept me going: in the mornings when they were all getting ready for school, playing in the kitchen and running up and down the stairs of our house, I’d look at them and think, “I have to get through this. For them.”

  After that blowup with Marco, I resolved to put on the best possible face for my family, but I felt that there was nobody I could turn to, nobody who would understand or could help. I began looking for new ways to compartmentalize what was happening. Sleep became precious to me, the only time that I could put everything out of my mind. I don’t know why it wasn’t interrupted by nightmares—maybe because nothing I could dream up could be worse than the reality of my life—but it wasn’t. I also took refuge in the culture of the Italy of my youth: I’d sit in my study, playing the music of my adolescence on the sound system and reading the plays I had acted in.

  I was so lost, so eager for answers, for signposts, that when a friend put me onto a woman who did astrological charts out in California, I didn’t hesitate. I phoned her up and gave her all the essential information, such as my date of birth.

  She crunched the numbers and called me a few days later: “You’re going through hell,” she said.

  “Yeah?” I said. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” she told me soothingly. “You didn’t make any bad decisions. This scenario occurs once in a lifetime and you’ve been caught up in it for three years and will continue to be caught up in it for another year or two.”

  I swear on my children that I accepted everything this woman told me. Although she was wrong about my not having made any bad decisions—had I simply said no to the Sfuzzi proposition one last time, I wouldn’t have been in this predicament—I latched on to her advice. There was no point in nitpicking and analyzing what had gone before. No sense in agonizing over the lost money and time and the damage to the Coco Pazzo brand. I tried to put it all in perspective: just as I had come to believe it was my destiny to become a restaurateur, this was my time for bad luck. It was the flip side of my swift ascent to the top of the restaurant ladder. It was, belatedly, time to pay my dues.

  The next installment came due in December. We had long planned a life-altering holiday season for Tuscan Square, preordering several new lines of exquisite and very expensive merchandise months earlier. The store was stocked with a beautiful collection of glassware, china, and housewares, all cast in the elegant glow of a new lighting scheme. It was the very picture of my original vision for the store. I would stop by at night, putting things in the perfect place, picking up a beautiful plate or blanket just to feel the reassuring weight of good craftsmanship in my hand. But most times, there was nobody in the store but me. The country was in shock, and no one wanted luxury, no matter how simple and honest. The big holiday push ended up costing us more money than we took in and putting us even deeper into the red.

  OF ALL THE businesses under the Toscorp umbrella, the one that would never get back on its feet was Tuscan Square. After doing almost $1 million in retail sales the winter of 2000, the winter of 2001 showed just $350,000. By June 2002 we had no choice but to shut down the retail program, and we held a huge liquidation sale. It was cold comfort that so many of the people who turned up for the first time seemed to truly love the merchandise, because it was too late to make new fans. We turned the entire space into one huge restaurant and cafe.

  Other steps were taken to conserve money and reduce losses: I closed my laundry facility, which had been a tremendous source of pride for so long, and started using a rental company. We closed the Coco Pazzos in Austin and Philly that year, and sold the lease in Vegas back to the landlord.

  And that fall, as the New York restaurants started piling up debts and I began sensing anxiety among our primary lender, I shopped around for investors who would buy the note at a steep discount and step in as a new lender, buying us more time to get back on our feet.

  The final streamlining, or at least what I thought would be the final streamlining, took place two years later, in 2004, when I invited Jack Weiss to create a new investment group to take over the ownership of the Chicago restaurants and license the Coco Pazzo name from me. I was glad to see him benefit from his years of hard work, though it was, I must admit, a very painful decision. But I was in perpetual triage mode; if any given decision simplified my life and provided the money for another day’s survival, then I did it and moved on.

  WITH JUST FOUR restaurants left in New York City—Le Madri, the original Coco Pazzo on East Seventy-fourth Street, Tuscan Square, and Centolire—I was finally able to focus on running them the right way, on rebuilding my name and reputation, and also trying to rediscover the joy I once had felt at being a restaurateur. For the most part, this went fairly smoothly, but in 2004, I began to receive calls from Gianfranco at Centolire, all of them beginning the same way.

  “Pino,” he’d say, with a mixture of bemusement and concern, “you have to come see the specials tonight.”

  Marta had left Centolire a year earlier, and with my attention focused on the business of my restaurants, the new chef had begun taking extreme liberties. I’d ask Gianfranco to tell me what the problem was and words and phrases like “verbena” and “sushi” and “fish in a tomato coulis” and other culinary terms that have nothing to do with Italian or Italian-American food would come pouring out of his mouth.

  I saw an opportunity to get back in touch with my long-lost joy and installed myself as the chef of Centolire. I began creating a new menu and working with the guys in the kitchen. The moment I first put on a chef coat and an apron, I knew I was doing the right thing. It was energizing to get back in a kitchen; I’d been surrounded by kitchens for the past few years, but I’d been so preoccupied with other concerns that I had never had time to spend in them. Now, as I filled myself up with new experiences, I found myself able to let go of the past, to stop beating myself up for all the pain and loss I’d caused, for all the drama that had come about by taking my eye off what was important to me: food and cooking, the two things that had always given me the most pleasure in life. It put me back in touch with the Italian at my core, that guy who—as we liked to say back home—lived to eat (rather than who ate to live), who would be eating lunch and already thinking about what to make for dinner.

  A FEW MONTHS later, on April 1, 2005, one of my sisters called to let me know that my father had died of complications resulting from a str
oke. Jessie and I made plans to fly to Italy the next day, but our flight was canceled due to a brutal storm in the New York area. We would have been reassigned to another flight the next day, but that happened to be the day that Pope John Paul II passed away and the flights all filled up and we couldn’t get to Italy until April 3. On the flight, I thought back to my trip to America back in 1980, of how angry and afraid I’d been. It all came rushing back, no doubt because I associated those feelings with my father. I genuinely wanted to be there for the funeral, but missing it was the perfect bookend to our ill-fated relationship: he wasn’t there to welcome me into the world and I wasn’t there to see him out of it.

  When we finally arrived at my parents’ home, it was a day and a half after the funeral. All of the visitors had gone, leaving just a few family members: my sisters Anna and Rita were there, and my brother Ricardo. My mother was sitting in an armchair in the corner, holding my father’s light blue cardigan in her arms. I apologized to her for being so late and she just shrugged. I didn’t know if she was angry or not; I’m not sure she did herself.

  I sat down and my siblings recounted the funeral to me, describing how many long-lost friends and military buddies had shown up and what nice things everyone had to say about my father. I listened, but couldn’t take my eyes off Má, caressing that cardigan, holding it close to her face and rubbing at its fabric, and then it hit me: his smell was still on it. She was embracing him in the only way she could anymore, holding on to his physical presence for as long as possible.

  It was one of the few times I can recall when she didn’t cook for the family. My sisters made a simple lunch and we all sat down to eat. My mother sat at the table with us, but still didn’t speak, just picked at her food and stared off into the distance.

  She was so despondent that I felt obligated to say something: “Má,” I whispered to her. “Papá is gone, but you still have so much family around you. Your children, your grandchildren. We all care about you so much.”

  “Pino,” she said, speaking to me as though I were a child. “Right now, I don’t care about any of that. I am missing my companion. I am missing my lover.”

  I felt like an idiot. It should have been obvious to me. Before she was a mother, she was a woman. I had never thought of my father as an object of anybody’s affection, but she had adored him from the moment they met, from long before they had children. And now, she was alone. I was trying to make things better, but I had only succeeded in making them worse.

  Curiously, since my father died, I call my mother less frequently than I used to. Even though I never admitted it to myself, I think a part of me was always secretly hoping that one day, while calling to check in on them, Papá and I would have a true reconciliation. No matter what transpires between them, every boy wants a good relationship with his father, even after the boy has become a man, even after the father is gone.

  SIXTEEN

  Closing Time

  IN RESTAURANTS, AS in life, death is inevitable; in its own way, every establishment is as perishable as the ingredients that go into its food. As a result, every once in a while, a restaurateur’s world is dismantled—the employees dismissed, the paperwork packed up into boxes, the windows smeared with soap.

  The locations become other restaurants, or they turn into something completely different: spaces where I once welcomed diners have been converted into everything from pharmacies to office buildings, with no evidence of what we accomplished there, no lasting echo of the nightly party we hosted.

  It’s a natural part of the process. Places that people once clamored to get into become taken for granted. Ideas that were once new grow tired. Diners have never been faithful to one destination, but ultimately they are worse than polygamous: they are heartless. Those you entertained on a nightly or seminightly basis will desert you and watch as you die a very public death, and they won’t give it a second thought.

  There are restaurateurs who take this personally, but not me. I always understood my place with my customers. It’s not their job to keep me in business; it’s my job to make them want to come back. If I failed at that, then it was time to shut down and move on to the next project.

  This was easy for me to say, because for the longest time, the only closings I was involved with either had an upside to them, or were simply unavoidable: dropping all those faux Cocos was like breaking out of prison, and Mad. 61 was simply out of my control. It occurs to me that there were closings I haven’t even mentioned, like when Ian Schrager bought out my leases in New York and Los Angeles in order to sell his hotel company, or when I myself sold Sapore di Mare in 2000. I was so busy in those days, always moving forward to the next new thing, that I didn’t linger on these losses. Those restaurants had outlived their relevance, or their usefulness, and it was time to say good-bye. As simple as that.

  But I’ve had some more painful closings to contend with over the past few years. In 2005, my landlord at Le Madri decided that he wanted to demolish the building in order to erect condominiums on the site. He bought me out, which was a good business deal, but he also dropped the curtain on the longest-running restaurant I had left in my portfolio, one of the few remaining connections to my first years in New York and my first successes here. That building, where Fred Pressman and I had that fateful midday meeting in 1988, where I spent those hours with “the mothers” and later passed my time running Toscorp upstairs, is no longer a part of our physical world. It is, literally, just a memory now.

  In 2008, unable to reach a renewal or extension arrangement with my landlord, I was forced to shutter Tuscan Square. All long-term leases, at least in New York City, allow for options and extensions subject to so-called fair market value. Landlords tend to overreach and if you’re not careful, you end up signing on to more than you can cover and still make money. At the time of this writing, I’ve heard of restaurateurs in Manhattan agreeing to pay one hundred dollars per square foot, which is insane.

  Though it had been years since we sold merchandise at Tuscan Square, the restaurant was still close to my heart, like a beloved relative who’s in a coma but on whom you can’t bear to pull the plug. Often in moments like those, people say it’s a blessing when the patient finally goes, but I didn’t feel that way in this case. If it had made any kind of financial sense, I probably would have held onto Tuscan Square for at least a few more years.

  Like most death-related ceremonies, the closing of restaurants has a public and a private side. The public side is the press release, the “thank you for your patronage” sign in the window. The private side is messy. Closing a restaurant entails the management of the remains and the transference of property and possessions: the first order of business is, or should be, the employees. If you’re lucky enough to have other restaurants, you make an effort to retain whomever you can; the others are left to fend for themselves. The next decision is how much you can take with you; if you have any use, personal or professional, for the liquor, cooking equipment, and sundry other items, then you make arrangements to have them delivered to the appropriate locations.

  That leaves the items you can’t use, usually the furniture and large kitchen equipment. If you can’t take these things with you and use them elsewhere, there are three remaining primary options: just leave on the last day of the month and let the landlord deal with the mess; sell all or some of them to the restaurateur taking your place; or hold an auction.

  When I closed Tuscan Square, with only Coco Pazzo and Centolire left, for the first time in my career I held an auction to get rid of the surplus merchandise. In addition to the usual things one amasses in ten years of doing business, I had held onto some of the unsold Tuscan Square merchandise for use in the restaurant that had survived the retail store: chargers and pewter tabletop items and oil paintings of Tuscan landscapes. I didn’t know any auctioneers, so I opened up the New York Times and hired one. He scheduled and advertised the auction, which was set for a day in January 2008. On the day before the auction, he showed up, a
short man who, though well dressed, had the air of a huckster about him. He and his team organized all my equipment and merchandise, everything from the pots and pans to the furniture and electronic equipment, into lots arranged by category, affixing numbered tags—I thought of them like toe tags on a corpse—to everything.

  On the day of the auction I was introduced to an aspect of doing business in the restaurant industry that in a quarter of a century I had never encountered before: the first people to show up were movers and truck drivers, eight guys in jeans and T-shirts who sat around, clearly very practiced at the art of waiting. It struck me that by the end of the day, they were probably going to make the most money of anybody because once something was purchased, it had to be carted away almost immediately.

  As the time of the auction approached, the bidders began to arrive: restaurateurs who were there out of curiosity, people who were planning to open restaurants and were looking for equipment and decoration, and opportunists looking to buy cheap and resell.