THE FIRST YEAR WE RAN HARRY CIPRIANI’S was punctuated by letters, communiqués, and little episodes that constantly showed the degree of irritation our success provoked in the wooden heads of the Trusthouse administration in the United States.
Meanwhile, the Forte family’s hopes of taking over the management of the hotel above the restaurant became increasingly remote, because their representatives treated the landlords with crude arrogance that soon lost the Forte family’s credibility and appeal. Every time the restaurant was mentioned in the papers, the Trusthouse Forte complained that their name was never mentioned.
After receiving an altogether idiotic letter from the vice president of the Trusthouse Forte, I wrote in response:
Dear Tom,
Dear Tom,
Dear Tom,
I am speechless.
Arrigo
I had no doubt, however, that his total lack of a sense of humor would prevent him from understanding my message.
In the meantime, not a day went by, during my stays in New York, that someone did not offer us a chance to open a new place. Among the many offers, one seemed worthy of attention. It was a site on the ground floor of an old hotel that was being restored, the Taft—now the Michelangelo—on Seventh Avenue in the heart of the theater district.
I telephoned Rocco to ask if the prospect might interest him. He responded affirmatively.
So I went ahead with negotiations until a few days before the agreement was to be signed. Rocco suddenly had changed his mind. He had thought things over and decided not to go ahead. This was early 1987. I signed the agreement on my own and soon found another partner willing to finance the enterprise.
At the end of May 1987 the Bellini was inaugurated—not without incident, as you will see in the next chapter—a handsome restaurant this time decorated like the second floor of Harry’s Bar in Venice. Now, with the opening of the Bellini, I had both floors of the original Harry’s Bar replicated in New York, which made me feel even more at home in my adopted city.
By July it was clear that my second New York restaurant had created a clientele of its own without interfering with the Harry Cipriani. But the rumor began to circulate among the Forte brains — as I learned only later — that the Harry Cipriani on Fifth Avenue could very well do without the Ciprianis. A secret plot was hatched to look for someone else to run the restaurant.
On August 31, 1987, the president of Trusthouse Forte America, a Mr. Combemale, an almost perfect imitation of a British dandy whose only claim to fame was having married a very rich and well-connected woman, summoned my son Giuseppe to the company’s main office at three in the afternoon to inform him that at six o’clock that evening, a new manager would be replacing him.
Giuseppe, like his grandfather before him, has a capacity for seeing the funny side of things even in difficult moments. When he realized that it was no joke, he said “You’ll have to drive us out at rifle point,“ and off he went.
He then telephoned me in Italy. At the very moment we were having our astounding conversation, about five in the afternoon New York time, a truck pulled up outside the Fifth Avenue door of the restaurant. Several men got out, wearing hats and double-breasted pin-striped suits. They went into the restaurant and, applying guerrilla — or was it gorilla? — strategy, took up their strategic positions. They blocked the telephones, the elevators, the kitchen, and the doors. Two of them flanked the director and followed his every move. The sign outside was taken down, and another one was put in its place. Harry Cipriani had a new name.
When my son Giuseppe arrived back to work at six o’clock he was prevented from entering the premises. Clearly the ineffable Mr. Combemale had taken Giuseppe’s remark seriously.
After a shoving match, Giuseppe left.
This interesting episode seemed to me more like a story from Chicago in the thirties.
The next day, the front page of the New York Times carried the story of our departure: AT LUNCH: IT’S HARRY CIPRIANI. AT DINNER: IT’S TINO FONTANA, with a picture of me on the left and one of Tino Fontana on the right. This caught Trusthouse Forte off guard — they had planned a “painless“ rebirth. What most struck Italian journalists in the days that followed was the lightning-quick succession of events. Press accounts often contained more fiction than fact. A couple of days later I took out a half-page ad in the Times:
DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON
Harry Cipriani announces the sudden demise of Harry Cipriani Restaurant. Its loving spirit and soul will remain forever at its brother restaurant, Bellini by Cipriani. Trusthouse Forte, Inc., the holder of the lease to the Fifth Avenue location, decided without any notice to change the name of the restaurant and to grant the management of the restaurant to others.
Most of the sixty employees followed us to the Bellini on Seventh Avenue.
The Fortes installed a new manager in the Fifth Avenue restaurant named Tino Fontana, a totally unknown ice-cream vendor from Bergamo, the inventor, as Forte’s PR people subsequently reported, of the “new modern Italian cuisine,“ a sort of incestuous liaison between the French nouvelle cuisine and the culinary idiocies of the post-1968 Italian extremists. It fell to him to orchestrate the long agony that ended in 1990, when the restaurant had to close for lack of customers.
A few months later, the landlords of the Sherry Netherland Hotel called and invited us to return. And the Harry Cipriani reopened in 1991. It was once again a triumph. The day we opened, it was as if all our old customers had been waiting the whole time in Central Park for our return. The reopening of Cipriani was one of the most touching and unforgettable moments of my life. I felt surrounded by the vivid, tangible, and warm affection of my friends in New York, a city where everything is possible, including great love. And I am forever grateful. Everything went well, and I shared my time between Venice and New York with my son Giuseppe and daughter Giovanna, who would spell me.
Then there was the taxi incident. It was said to be an omen, but it was not.
Jean Paul Spence, a Hawaiian taxi driver in New York, had just got his license back after a three-month suspension. About seven in the morning one Sunday in February 1992, after working all night, he was happily challenging the world free-flight taxi record by racing east along Fifty-ninth Street in the direction of Fifth Avenue at eighty miles an hour.
He thought he could beat the traffic light before it turned red, but he was wrong. So to avoid a car that was just crossing Fifty-ninth, he veered slightly to the left without slowing down, and smashed — in the following order — a municipal clock, a mailbox, and a plant in a large terra-cotta pot. Then he shot through the right window of the restaurant like a high-caliber bullet, reared up and struck the ceiling, came down heavily among the empty chairs and tables, grazed a reinforced concrete pillar, tore through three plasterboard walls, touched ground next to the coffee machine, and finally came to a stop, miraculously unharmed, against a very heavy steel refrigerator chock-full of bottles. As in a cartoon, he had in his taxi entered Cipriani and traversed about seventy-five feet of restaurant and done hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage within thirty seconds.
We reopened the restaurant five weeks later. I hung the hubcap and the taxi’s license plate on the new back wall with the following inscription:
The February ’92 renovation was sponsored by Jean Paul Spence, a New York taxi driver, who left his license plate at the Harry Cipriani Restaurant early in the morning of Sunday February 2nd 1992.