ONE DAY IN MAY 1985 LORD FORTE, the well-known British restaurant owner, called me from London. A few years before, my father had invited him and his wife home for lunch, when he was still only Mr. Charles Forte. I had seen him a couple of times subsequently at Harry’s Bar. He was an extremely cordial man with very bright, foxy eyes. And so they should be.
The subject of his telephone call was an invitation to London to talk about opening a restaurant in New York. We made a date. First we met in his office, and then I was invited to lunch at his beautiful house, where I spent two delightful and amusing hours with him. His wife was there, her brother, their son Rocco, and if I am not mistaken, Forte’s splendid daughter Olga, who had married the Italian Alessandro Polizzi di Sorrentino. Lord Forte talked a great deal during the meal, making a number of witty comments, not all of them appreciated by his guests.
“When I was young,” he said at one point, “if I had a slight headache, my wife called four doctors. Now no sooner do I have a headache than a solicitor is called to make certain all the papers are properly signed.” The smiles that greeted this remark were rather forced. He made a few remarks about his daughter, Mrs. Polizzi, too, but it was clear nevertheless that she was his favorite. She was the one whose mind was most like his.
He talked pleasantly about whatever came into his head, the way successful men do at a certain age, when they no longer have to worry about what other people think.
He and his son Rocco told me that the place they had in mind for the restaurant was a beautiful site on Fifth Avenue. Above the restaurant was an old hotel, the Sherry Netherland. Trusthouse Forte, as the Fortes’ family business was called, had set its eyes on it. They wanted to open an outstanding restaurant on the main floor in hopes of persuading the owners of the building to let them take over the management of the hotel.
I demurred because I did not have the time, but Rocco persuaded me that I should at least go to New York to have a look. I vividly remember the trip, because it was the first time I set foot on board the Concorde, that seagull of the air. I had been to New York only once before, and for one day only, stopping over on our way, my wife and I, to Birmingham, Alabama, where my daughter was to have heart surgery. When I think back to that first, fretful trip, I still remember how moved I was by the incredible sight of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, which were still under construction at the time. I ascribed my emotion on that first trip to my fragile state of mind, every thought centered on my daughter. But this time I was truly overwhelmed by New York.
As soon as I saw the location the Fortes had picked out, I knew it was perfect. That was the right place for Harry’s Bar of Venice to install its New York cousin. The two big windows opened onto the plaza at the end of Central Park, dividing Manhattan in two. It was Sunday, and a crowd of people was listening to amateur bands playing Mississippi blues at the foot of the golden statue. All around, the horse-drawn carriages patiently waited their turn. When I looked up, I reacted no doubt as a thousand tourists had before me; my head and stomach were violently struck by four or five elegant skyscrapers that seemed to have nothing to do with life below.
I wrote Rocco — he was the one who would be managing the venture with me — giving him my terms. I wanted to call the restaurant The Copy, but we finally settled on Harry Cipriani. I absolutely would not call it Harry’s Bar. I was anxious to show all the people around the world who had copied our name that names are not what counts. What you have to copy is what is inside.
Soon after my communications with Rocco, an architect appeared in Venice to photograph and take the measurements of Harry’s Bar. While I had not received an answer from Rocco, I concluded that silence meant consent. And construction work on the New York site began at once.
I went to New York again some time later, and my first impression was confirmed. There are ways to make a bar or a restaurant mirror its location. One way I learned from my father, namely, the total absence of constraints that might deprive the spirit of man of its free expression. And when those constraints are all removed, the place is no longer just a place to contain people but has emotions and feelings of its own. I knew that Harry Cipriani could be such a place.
My impressions about New York and about Americans in general, whom I had known in Venice for many years, were also confirmed.
About the skyscrapers of New York. Only a nation that earns a great deal of money can dare build structures that burst skyward. You might say that the height of the buildings is an index of a country’s wealth. It is common knowledge that I have never had a soft spot for architects, but I must admit that height is precluded in Italy, not only because of lack of money but because of the authorities who supervise monuments. If an architect is forbidden to use one of the four dimensions, all that he can do is try to ruin Palladio and his buildings. So I acknowledge that it is much easier to practice architecture in New York than in Italy, because once you have designed the second floor, all you have to do is multiply that by the number of millions of dollars available.
Briskly walking down the Avenue of the Americas, between the sensational walls of gigantic buildings, I realized that I never felt small. That’s what is remarkable about New York. In all its immensity, people do not lose their own dimension.
The construction of the restaurant went forward. A few days before we were to open — this was November 1985 — Rocco telephoned from London to say that my monetary demands were too high. They weren’t. We argued back and forth. Deeply convinced that my demands were in fact reasonable, I offered not to go ahead. There was no need to proceed as far as I was concerned. It was too late to turn back, Rocco answered. By the time Cipriani on Fifth Avenue opened, we still had no written agreement. When, in 1985, we opened Cipriani’s, we created a sensation.
From the very first days there was always a crowd of lively people, merrily sipping bellinis, chatting, and waiting at the bar for their tables. There were hundreds and hundreds of customers. And what was more, I knew every one of them. It was as if all the customers that came to Harry’s Bar in Venice in a year had arranged to be together in New York at one time. For a good decade now, Harry’s Bar’s American cousin has enjoyed a consistently full house.
I worked sixteen hours a day, but I never felt tired, embraced as I was by an incredible sense of human warmth. To me, New York is not a city, but a feeling. Just like Venice. New York and Venice: these are the only two places that to me are not cities but feelings. The replication of Venice’s Harry’s Bar was so perfect that during the first days of business on Fifth Avenue, the only way I could be sure I was actually in New York and not in Venice was to look out the two large windows on Fifth Avenue. The white lights moving outside were automobile headlights, I reassured myself, and not the lights of speedboats in Saint Mark’s harbor. Because inside, the voices, the lighting, the soft hubbub of the customers, and the feeling of well-being were all identical with my Harry’s Bar in Venice.
What made these two different and fantastic cities so much alike? I wondered. Could their asymmetry be one of the elements? Venice is asymmetrical by nature, but the asymmetry of New York is something created by people. While the layout of New York City is absolutely geometrical, there is an enormous asymmetry in the way the skyscrapers are situated in concentrated bundles. The towers of New York and the palaces of Venice express other kinds of asymmetry as well, the asymmetry of wealth and poverty, the asymmetry of the different races that have lived side by side, and continue to do so, and the asymmetry of so many contradictory sensations. The palaces on the Grand Canal represent the churches of powerful men, and in New York, I perceived the skyscrapers as stupendous obelisks reaching for the sky.
Every day I was struck by another similarity. The way you get around both cities is on foot. One city is, and the other one was, the trade capital of the known world. Wherever you live in either city, however, you realize you are in a neighborhood. In both places you find the little shop that sells buttons, the local grocer, the shoeshine parlor, and the shoe repair shop. If you walk the same streets at the same time every day, you cannot help but see the same faces, and after a while, however shyly, you start greeting them and being greeted in return.
Both cities are clearly defined by water.
The big difference to me is that New York moves at a faster pace than Venice does; it is more energetic and now richer.
While I concluded that New York in its own way shared a bit of Venice’s charm, I also discovered similar flaws — such as snobbism.
At 12:30 on the dot one Sunday some weeks after we opened, a woman, perfectly turned out in Coco Chanel from head to foot with a tall, rather dandyish looking gentleman right behind her, entered through the revolving door of our restaurant. They hurried right by me, neither of them acknowledging my greeting. Her voice sounded highly professional as she gave her name to the maître d’, who is second in command on Sundays and shares my views on the relative importance of tables and the people who sit at them.
We both had paid scant attention to the fact that the reservation for Mr. Pinkerton and his secretary had been made by a magazine that once was the height of fashion but was starting to slip. We offered them a table for two that was in a key position in terms of subtle sophistication. From that table you could see everything without being seen by anyone else.
We had been told that he wasn’t merely a famous photographer, but the most famous photographer in the world. He did not dress like a photographer, though I have to admit that of all the famous photographers who have dined in our restaurants, none of them ever looked like any other. It is totally impossible to classify photographers, because they defy any known morphological system, at least in terms of the things a restaurateur notices. They range from the suppressed tumult of a Roiter to the Emilian singsong of a Fontana and the odd bouncy step of a Snowdon. Each one is different from the other.
I wondered whether Mr. Pinkerton specialized in fox hunting, because he dressed like an English country gentleman. He wore a beige wool jacket, and on top of that a very Sundayish cashmere sweater was slung over his shoulders and tied in front by the sleeves. He did not utter one word.
After a while I went over to them with a pleasant smile, but neither of them noticed me. He had sipped up the broth from his minestrone without touching the vegetables, and her full attention was engaged in moving the ravioli around her plate with the end of her fork. The atmosphere in the dining room around them was friendly, casual, and unconstricted. The only thing that was our of place was the hostility at that table for two. I asked in vain if everything was all right and got no answer, so I paid no further attention to them. In the end they skipped dessert and hastily asked for the check.
When they were at the door, she came over to me and said: “You’ll regret having given Mr. Pinkerton that table!” Without waiting for an answer, she stepped into the revolving door behind him. But halfway through, she changed her mind and came back in. “You’ll see,” she said threateningly, “what we write about you in our magazine!” She went back to the revolving door and out into the sunlight of Fifth Avenue, leaving me speechless, and somewhat sad.
I thought a bit as I watched them leave and then returned to see how the other diners were doing. There was a young couple now at the table where the Pinkertons had been sitting, and they seemed to have a great desire to look into each other’s eyes. They gave me a happy, reassuring smile in response to my interest. And I immediately felt at peace with myself.
Two months after the New York Cipriani restaurant opened, when even the Trusthouse Forte bookkeepers were convinced that it was a great success, Lord Forte telephoned: “Dear Arrigo,” his voice was jolly, “my compliments, my warmest compliments.”
“Thank you,” I said, “but I am afraid my asking price was too low. My price has gone up.”
This cooled his enthusiasm markedly. “All right, but don’t overdo it!”
After I conveyed to him my firm position, he said: “I’ll call you back in five minutes,” and hung up.
Exactly five minutes later he called back. “All right, then. Keep up the good work.”
A few days later my son Giuseppe took over the restaurant, and I returned to Venice.
Despite recession, snow blizzards, and other calamities, Cipriani of New York is packed each lunch and each dinner.