IN THE FALL of 1987, on one of our unfashionable, off-season weekends in the Hamptons, I was driving along Route 27, about to round the bend into Wainscott, when I passed what looked like a haunted house. I had never paid much attention to this particular building, which had been the site of Charlotte’s Hidden Pond restaurant and before that the home of a state senator. Set back from the main road and enshrouded by shrubbery, it was fast becoming invisible to the modern Hampton eye.
But a sign at the edge of the property caught my attention: the owners had gone into bankruptcy, it said, and the building was up for sale.
I swerved into the parking lot, got out of my car, and took a walk around. The place was an eyesore: a hulking, Tudor-style English house with a dark wooden frame and a sad gray tint to the stucco. It was in merciless disrepair, with huge nicks in the walls, cracks in the wood, and a stale stench that had no doubt been exacerbated by the damp sea air.
The place was more ready for a wrecking ball than for a prospective buyer, but none of that mattered, because I was having an out-of-body experience. Inspired by the proximity to the ocean, and by the fierce longing for summer that the Hamptons elicited in me, I began to envision a restaurant that would capture all the charm of Porto Santo Stefano: sun, salt, sand, tanned skin, and the simple food that would bring each seaside evening to a perfect close. In my mind, the edifice morphed into a spot-on replica of a Mediterranean villa, with tile floors, terra-cotta accents, and generous, wide-open spaces through which the summer breeze could blow, carrying that precious scent of the sea right through the dining room.
There was nobody around, so I started singing, out loud: “Sapore di sale. Sapore di mare . . . ” Taste of the salt. Taste of the sea.
I snapped my fingers: that was it! The perfect name for the restaurant: Sapore di Mare.
I knew that it would take a lot of work to turn the relic before me into the restaurant of my imagination, but after the conversion I had pulled off at Il Cantinori, I fancied myself the Bob Vila of the restaurant industry, able to turn “This Old Restaurant” into something shiny and new. I also loved the location: situated at the end of one of the splits of Georgica Pond, which flows alongside Route 27 where Wain-scott and East Hampton meet, it had the distinction of being at the epicenter of the weekend scene but also offering an oasis of calm.
Back in the city, I excitedly told Steve about the space and my idea and suggested that we take the project on together. We decided to move forward, but soon after he bought the property, it became apparent that we were both making radically different assumptions. I thought that I had earned the right to be a true partner, with equity in the venture; after all, it was my efforts out in the Hamptons that would deliver the restaurant’s success. He, on the other hand, wasn’t looking for a partner, certainly not after shelling out his own hard-earned money for the property, and had assumed that we’d reprise our Il Cantinori arrangement.
So, although it was my concept and enthusiasm that had inspired him to buy the property, I told him that I had no interest in just running another restaurant for him and that I’d pass, essentially leaving him holding the bag. I felt bad about it because it was an honest misunderstanding, but I felt that I needed to insist on what I thought I was worth.
In the end, it all worked out: after two months, he decided that the building was a very expensive albatross and flipped it over to me. In early February, I assumed ownership and the mortgage and obtained a construction loan to finance the build-out.
My only concern was breaking the news to Jessie. Il Cantinori was a serious distraction from our time together and I knew she’d be concerned about what another restaurant would mean for us. I took her to one of the hot new restaurants in town, Da Umberto on Seventeenth Street, and told her.
“It doesn’t mean I’ll completely disappear,” I said. “And besides, it’s more money for our family. For the two of us.”
“You mean for the three of us,” she said, her sly way of letting me know she was pregnant.
“Now we really have something to celebrate,” I said, and we clinked our wine glasses and toasted our ever-more-complicated and adventurous future together.
ONE OF THE things that appealed to me about the property I’d just bought was that it still felt like a house. There were five main rooms, and I had it in my head that I’d keep it that way, naming each one: the Bar, the Porch, the Veranda, the Fireplace, and the Terrace. I interviewed a contractor right after the closing and he suggested we convert it into one big room. A few years earlier, I might have listened to him, but I was fast developing belief in my instincts as a showman, and confidence for a restaurateur is the same as it is for an athlete: winning is a habit, and when you’re on a roll, you just go with the flow and ride out the hot streak for as long as you can.
I stuck to my vision, and I didn’t hire that guy. Instead, I decided to keep it a family affair. Jessie’s father, John, and brother, Richard, who were in the construction business, came up from New Orleans. I bought a small house in the spring, a wooded, secluded East Hampton enclave best known as the home of the cemetery where Jackson Pollock is buried, and put them up there, along with the key craftsmen. I spent weekdays in the city running Il Cantinori while my in-laws and their team set about turning that old English Tudor into a beautiful Mediterranean villa with white stucco walls, terra-cotta tile, and rustic chairs. We also restored all the windows to full functionality so we could have them open as much as possible and let that marvelous salty smell come blowing through the rooms. Every weekend, when I got back to East Hampton, I couldn’t believe how quickly the place was being transformed from something resembling a haunted house to a cheerful white ode to the Tuscan seashore.
I think there’s no surer sign that you’re in the right line of work than when long days invigorate you. I was working around the clock that winter and spring, overseeing lunch and dinner at Il Cantinori Monday through Thursday, then driving out to the Hamptons and making decisions about the build-out. But I loved every minute of it and had an endless reservoir of energy to draw on.
We also revamped the landscaping, uprooting everything except for two beautiful oak trees that grew up out of a central isle in the parking lot, some junipers, a Japanese maple, and a few others. To them we added rosemary and lavender, which perfumed the garden and provided some fresh herbs to draw from in the kitchen. By the time we were finished, the landscaped areas had the look and feel of a Mediterranean garden.
The only thing that caused me any displeasure was my weekly visit to the bank officer charged with administering my construction loan. The day I would head out to the Hamptons, either Thursday or Friday, I’d drop by his office. The arrangement was that he would release funds on an as-needed basis based on requisitions as they occurred; in order to get the money, I had to bring him progress reports and a copy of my ledger tracking payments I’d made each week. This was fine in the early stages, but as we came down the homestretch that spring things were moving quickly and I needed the remaining capital, about seventy-five thousand dollars, on hand, so I asked him to release it. He told me that he thought that was too much.
We squabbled a bit, and then I lost it.
“You know what,” I said. “I was approved for this loan. If you think you know better than me, you do it!”
I took the massive key ring I carried around in those days, with keys to everything from Cantinori to Sapore to my homes in Manhattan and East Hampton, and even my locker at the gym, slammed it down on his desk, then turned and stormed out of his office.
“Wait,” he said.
I spun around and let it fly: “No. I will not wait,” I said, spit spraying from my mouth. “I need the money. You can either give it to me and foreclose if I default, or you can build the fucking restaurant yourself.”
“I—”
“You make me feel like you’re my parole officer. What’d I do to deserve this?”
I don’t know if he was intimidated or sympathetic, or if he just thought I was crazy, but he relented and released the rest of my loan.
BY MAY, SAPORE di Mare was nearly fully realized. Even before we opened for business, turning the corner into the driveway for the first time each week was a thrill, seeing how the white gravel led right up to the steps of this perfectly rendered fantasy of the Tuscan seaside.
With the construction nearly complete, I could turn my attention to kitchen concerns: the menu, the chef, and the cooks.
Because my imagination and memory were fully engaged, the menu came together almost on its own: just as we did at Il Cantinori, we would display platters of room-temperature vegetables, this time on a wooden kitchen farm table right between the reception area and the Bar Room, casting our spell on customers as soon as they walked into the room. I wanted the food to be as light and summery as possible, beginning with this display: there’d be the pasticcio di Dante I had introduced at Da Silvano, eggplant parmigiana, roasted zucchini with caponata sauce, and preserved tuna in oil served with roasted zucchini. My goal was for the vegetables, their marinades, and their dressings to give off the aroma of a summer garden.
As for the printed menu, I wanted it to be as simple as possible, which is the way I think about food in the summer when, as a cook, you want to get in and out of the kitchen quickly and as a diner, you want very familiar, unchallenging food. In those summers working for my uncle, I had learned that the most popular restaurants, especially during this season near the water, were the ones where people felt like they could satisfy simple cravings. The menu almost wrote itself: whole fish, spaghetti alle vongole (spaghetti with clams), and other basic pastas such as spaghetti alla rustica with caramelized red onion, stewed tomato, and Parmigiano-Reggiano, calamari al forno (oven-baked breaded squid), cod in white wine, filleted fish that was grilled, roasted, or served with a livornese sauce (tomatoes, capers, onions, and anchovies), and of course a Florentine steak. To distinguish these very simple dishes, I focused on the quality and freshness of ingredients, especially the fish and shellfish, which—true to the name of the restaurant—still tasted of the sea. I also had a theory that if the right customers showed up, the food would taste better; what doesn’t seem better in the company of beautiful people?
My leading candidate for executive chef was an unlikely one: a short, portly Jewish-American kid from Queens with chubby fingers and a mile-a-minute patter named Mark Strausman. We had been introduced by a butcher we both knew and I had hired him to help at Il Cantinori. I liked Mark; he made me feel that my passion, communicated in those cooking demos and staff meetings, was contagious.
I decided to put the front of the house in the hands of a sharply dressed, smooth-tongued Latin American kid named Ariel Lacayo, who I had hired at Il Cantinori and had found to be a natural on the service floor. He was effortlessly charming and dashing, a gym rat with a flair for making preppy clothes seem stylish and a talent for never losing his cool.
“If you want to learn this business, I’ll teach you,” I told him when I first interviewed him, and he soaked up all the wisdom I had to offer.
From Il Cantinori, I also brought along a sprite of an Italian woman named Maria, who came to me by the strangest of routes: her son, a doctor, thought she needed to get out of the house. Because cooking was her true love, he had a friend who was in the wine business ask around after jobs in Italian kitchens. I took a chance on her and found her to be a talented home cook, more than capable of making my food. She wasn’t professionally trained for the timing requirements of a restaurant kitchen, but she could make all those vegetable dishes I liked to set out every day. She also became the first in what would become a long line of maternal figures in my kitchens. Maria shared my love of the seaside and so jumped at the chance to come out to the Hamptons. I was able to communicate with her in shorthand. Because she was from Rome, near the sea, she was familiar with the kind of trattorias that inspired Sapore, places where they stuck tables right in the sand at lunchtime. All I had to do was describe those dishes to her and she knew just what I had in mind. Since 80 percent of our appetizers would come from the farm table, I knew this would make life much easier for me.
I decided to put myself on the pasta station: at Il Cantinori, I had discovered the hard way that of all the things I had to show cooks, making a proper pasta was the toughest, because the correct way was so different from the way they had been taught to do it. They always overcooked it and their sauces had no consistency. It took me forever to develop the right instincts in them. Meanwhile, I could make a perfect pasta in my sleep. More than that, though, I loved making pasta and decided to indulge myself until we could recruit more cooks and get them properly re-educated.
That left the position of bartender. A friend of mine from Rome asked me to interview one named Giuseppe, a flamboyant dead ringer for the actor Marcello Mastroianni. I found him charming and talented behind the bar and hired him. He didn’t speak much English, but he knew enough to get by, and this only led to one small problem: Giuseppe was a proud and uncloseted homosexual, but he took great offense at the American word gay. If anybody referred to him as “gay,” he’d insist, with indignation “I’m not gay, I’m a pederast.” One day, I explained to him that the Italian word pederasta meant something else here in the States, referring to a molester of young boys.
“Well, Pino,” he said, without missing a beat, “young men are dying for me, you know.”
BECAUSE IL CANTINORI had been such a success, I decided to make its opening date of the twenty-third of the month, my lucky date, and that’s the day we opened Sapore di Mare, on May 23, 1988.
The restaurant exceeded my wildest expectations. Based on word of mouth, a few press mentions generated by my publicist, Susan Rike, and having a slew of Il Cantinori customers who spent a lot of time in the Hamptons, we had fifty people in the book that night. In order to maintain quality control while the waiters and kitchen fine-tuned their acts—a common practice for new restaurants—I ordered Ariel to contain the crowd at sixty people, max. But as the night wore on, we were besieged by customers who knew me from the city and to whom I simply couldn’t say no. I can’t say I was upset. There were little service hiccups, like too much time between courses, but it was as if I was throwing a wonderful party at my house and watching the guests arrive. Their beautiful, elegant summer attire flapping in the wind as they walked from the parking lot to our front door was reassuring. By the time the evening was over, we had served one hundred eighty dinners. And the reaction was a unanimous “wow.” I knew at the end of our first weekend that we had a hit on our hands.
FLASH-FORWARD TO a few weeks later: on a weekend night (take your pick, they were all the same, starting with Thursday), the bar was three feet deep with people and the dining area was like a who’s who of Hamptons royalty: it was almost absurdly star-studded, like a Hirschfeld cartoon or a New York magazine cover collage depicting all the people who weekended out there: Ralph Lauren at one table; Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley at another; the artist (and now film director) Julian Schnabel, a gentle grizzly bear of a man, with his wife and kids; Donna Karan; David Bowie and Iman; Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger; music industry attorney Alan Grubman; Revlon’s Ron Perelman; even Senator Alfonse D’Amato.
And me? I spent a lot of time in the kitchen. The pasta station was just inside the doors and because we were still only about half-staffed, I had plenty of room to work. I always had six pans warmed up on burners, ready to make or reheat a sauce, and behind them were huge pots where I kept salted water boiling for cooking the pasta. It was some of the hardest work I’d ever done, but also the most satisfying; I was young and strong and coordinated, and could have several dishes working at once, often putting out more than 150 pastas in a night.
I also emerged regularly to survey the service floor of my joint, checking in on the action and putting out fires when need be. It wasn’t long before I began to feel like Rick Blaine, the Humphrey Bogart character in Casablanca, overseeing the hottest place in town.
The celebs always ate in the Bar Room up front, but one of my biggest pleasures was introducing people to the other rooms, watching as they entered the Porch for the first time and felt the intimacy of the space and took in the peaceful view of the pond.
Once in a while, I’d slip out the back door for a breather in the parking lot, and there was no more sure sign of my burgeoning success than the display of automobiles there: the lanes closest to the restaurant were occupied by the cream of the crop: Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Rolls-Royce; the next tier by Porsche, Mercedes, and collectibles; the ones beyond that with “regular” cars. I’d look over the display of wealth and think about how far I’d come in just eight years.
ONE OF MY great pleasures over those first weeks was watching Ariel grow into his job. He could handle the most irate customer with unflappable charm and grace. One night, I saw a guy so angry that spit flew from his mouth as he laid into Ariel.
“Where is my table?” he spritzed.
“Two minutes, just two minutes,” Ariel said with a patient smile.
“What are you going to do for me?” the guy insisted.
“Don’t worry. You’re going to have the best seat in the house. I’m going to take care of you, don’t worry.”
Then, as soon as Ariel turned the corner out of the Bar Room, into one of the little corridors that connected the various areas to each other, he’d dab at his sweaty forehead and cheeks with a tissue and lament the interaction. “So rough, this guy,” he’d say. “So rude. So bad.”
It was this last bit that truly endeared Ariel to me. I saw how hard he worked on the service floor, but anybody can run around checking on tables. Maintaining your composure while being screamed at takes a special talent. It was one area in which he outshone me by a mile.
ON THURSDAY NIGHTS, I took a private car out to La Guardia Airport and boarded a prop plane to East Hampton Airport, taking to the clouds and feeling like a young tycoon as I glided out over the water and touched down on Long Island. I’d dive into Sapore’s world for three days, then sneak back into the city on Sunday evening and ease into my work week there.
It was a magical summer. Jessie was getting bigger and more beautiful by the hour, and the excitement of our first child’s imminent arrival only added to the sense of life beginning anew out there. The sense of family, which had been there from the start with Jessie’s father and brother, was also expanded as, more than in any restaurant I’d ever been a part of, the staff became like a family. Every time I showed up for the weekend, I was treated to a new surprise, like the time Maria responded to the homey setting of the restaurant itself, turning the area behind the building into an alleyway, like a Roman quarter, where she threw up clotheslines like you see all over Rome. She’d wash the restaurant’s chef jackets, shirts, aprons, and some personal clothing for Mark, hang them on ropes to dry, then iron them before service. She also set up a little coop where she kept chickens and roosters from which we’d harvest eggs, and eventually butcher and cook the birds as well.
In sharp contrast to the nightly hubbub of the restaurant was the daytime serenity. I came to think of our stretch of the pond as my own private saltwater lake. There were ducks, and sometimes I’d see a swan floating along. I rented a few canoes from a guy who had a roadside concession across the street so I and the staff could paddle around during breaks. It was everything a man could dream of.
LIKE ANY NEW restaurant, we had quirks to work out: one was that the clientele began taking the summertime theme to extremes. Many of our customers understood the spirit of Sapore and would arrive in casual but elegant attire, but others would show up looking as though they had just come from the beach, which I’m sure many of them had. Before too long, the customers wearing shorts, sandals, and bathing suits were becoming the majority.
So we made a new rule: No shorts. Just like at the Vatican.
One night, Ralph Lauren, driving home with his wife and a few friends, spontaneously decided to drop in for dinner. The friends met our dress code, but Ralph was wearing shorts.
I wasn’t there at the time, and I’d guess that Ralph looked every inch his stylish self, even in shorts. But without me there to make an executive decision, Ariel was loath to make an exception to our dress policy. We didn’t keep any pants in the cloakroom the way some restaurants keep jackets. So my quick-thinking maître d’ ran into the kitchen and emerged with a pair of black-and-white checkered chef pants, presenting them to Ralph Lauren.
Gentleman that he is, Ralph disappeared good-naturedly into the men’s room and emerged in his new outfit.
When I arrived and heard what had happened, I was mortified. But Ralph is a sport. He said it was no big deal and that he was happy to comply. And you know what? He looked good. He looked so good that I’m surprised that chef pants didn’t become the next big fashion craze out there. Even in the Hamptons, I guess, absurdity has its limits.
THAT’S THE WAY it was. We were awash in celebrity and I was becoming friendly with even more people I’d heard and read about when I was still living in Rome. One of my favorite times each week was Saturday afternoon, the eye of the storm between Friday night and Saturday night. It was also when many of our celebrity customers came in for lunch, to enjoy the restaurant’s patio away from the eyes of the masses.
One Saturday afternoon, we were hosting Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley, along with their little daughter Alexa Ray, and another couple that have since gone their separate ways, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger.
I was busy in the kitchen, getting ready for the evening service. The only management presence in the dining room was the current occupant of our revolving-door position of receptionist-hostess.
At about three o’clock, I began thinking about the dinner hour and went into the dining room to see if Ariel had shown up yet. There he was, the picture of Hamptons style, in a white linen suit with brown leather slip-on shoes.
With a list of that night’s reservations in hand, we walked the floor together, determining who we’d seat where, a very political exercise at a hot spot like Sapore. We also personally greeted Alec and Kim and Billy and Christie. It was another of those perfect, lazy afternoons at Sapore, with Alexa Ray asleep in her father’s lap, and him and Christie sipping wine as though they were hanging out on their own back porch at home.
As we made the rounds, I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, pedaling up to the entrance on a bicycle, a woman in her late fifties, or so I’d have guessed. It was tough to tell: she was wearing a straw hat and sunglasses, so it was hard to see her face.
But something about her seemed familiar.
We couldn’t hear the exchange that followed but from the gestures—the woman spoke, the reservationist shook her head from side to side, the woman shrugged happily, hopped on her bike and left—we could tell that she had been denied a reservation.
I had a nagging suspicion that something wasn’t right. I sent Ariel over to see what had happened. He returned and informed me that she was looking for a table for four for eight o’clock.
“And?” I asked.
“The girl told her that we were fully—”
I realized who it was.
“Jesus Christ, Ariel, that was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.”
He considered that for a moment.
“Oh my God, Pino! You’re right!”
I pointed to the highway: “Go after her!”
Ariel’s jaw dropped, but he didn’t move.
“We cannot allow this to happen. Go!”
“Pino, she’s gone down the highway.”
“So go chase her down the fucking highway! This cannot happen. Not here!”
With a shrug, Ariel began walking toward the road.
“You’re not going to get her if you walk. Run!”
Ariel began running in his immaculate white linen suit, slipping his jacket off as he started. Our driveway was covered with gravel, so he couldn’t really pick up any speed until he got to the highway.
I went out to the edge of my property and looked down the sloping highway. I could see the former First Lady about five hundred yards away, stopped at an intersection, straddling her bike, and behind her, coming up fast, my own Latin Gatsby, running down the road after her to gallantly offer her a table.
She was about to start pedaling again, but he called out to her and she stopped and turned around. They spoke. She nodded and he waved good-bye.
Ariel returned to our parking lot, drenched in sweat. He reported his success. She had accepted the reservation, and his apology.
I was so happy. I had always admired Jackie O. Not just her style, but also her strength after her husband was assassinated, and all those stories about how she had raised her children, Caroline and John Jr., to be humble and polite. She clearly lived those values herself. I mean, here she was in the Hamptons, where everyone wants you to know who they are, and she didn’t even divulge her identity to get a table at a restaurant.
I had to compliment Ariel on his triumph: “I’m proud of you, Ariel. You did what the best maître d’ in the Hamptons should do, and you should feel good about it.”
Despite my good feelings toward him, the incident pointed out one of the few problems that hung over us like a cloud: because the Hamp-tons is basically a very fashionable, sophisticated area sequestered within a working-class region, the supply of capable front-of-the-house talent was severely limited in those days. We were the first restaurant of its size and stature out there, and so we were constantly hiring and firing hosts, hostesses, and other employees—we just couldn’t have reservationists who didn’t recognize Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis!—so I was presented with a challenge that would endure through the entire lifespan of Sapore di Mare: we had great difficulty finding quality support in the kitchen or the dining room. It quickly became apparent to me that no matter how many ads we ran in the paper, and no matter how many phone calls I made, we were going to have trouble filling all the positions.
As for the few employees that we did manage to find—locals who had worked in diners and greasy-spoon joints—they could barely handle the pressure. Most of them stopped showing up for work after a few days, never to be heard from again.
Determined to maintain my growing reputation, I told Ariel to keep the crowd to a manageable size, even turning away business if necessary. And to make sure that he didn’t cave into the pressure of clamoring customers, I asked Jessie, then six months pregnant, to work the door with him.
This was a sound enough plan, but the Hamptons in the summer are populated with everyone who had ever set food in Il Cantinori, or so it seemed. So, as the hour approached eight o’clock each evening, the phone would begin to ring off the hook. Jessie would dutifully tell all comers that we were fully booked. In most towns, that would have been the end of the discussion.
But not in the Hamptons.
In fact, there was no discussion. A typical exchange went like this:
Ring. Ring.
JESSIE: Sapore di Mare, good evening.
CUSTOMER: This is Ms. So-and-So. Do you have a table
available at nine P.M.?
JESSIE: No, I’m sorry, we’re fully booked.
CUSTOMER: Just tell Pino we’re coming over.
JESSIE: But . . .
Click. Dial tone. Sound of Jessie slamming the phone down.
“Tell Pino we’re coming over” was the most-uttered phrase in the Hamptons that summer, along with “I’m a friend of Pino’s,” favored by guests who didn’t even bother to call and instead just showed up—their version of “Open Sesame.”
About once a night, poor Jessie would come swinging through the door to the kitchen, which opened right onto the pasta station where I usually cooked. She would tell me of the latest inhuman treatment she had received, and then sulk back to the dining room.
It broke my heart to see her looking so sad and mad, but I didn’t know what else to do. I needed her out there.
One night, I was going about my business at the pasta station when I had that sixth-sense intuition, unique to restaurateurs, that I had better go check on the dining room. I did: everything looked fine. But my radar wasn’t totally busted. Sitting on the reservation desk was Jessie, staring off into space, shell-shocked.
It was clear that this couldn’t continue. All that lay ahead for me was trouble: a series of tense battles on the home front. Moments later, as I watched my dear wife withstand an earful of abuse from yet another unannounced group, I decided that I had no choice. I had to relieve her of her pain.
But I couldn’t bring myself to tell her.
At the end of the night, I pulled Ariel aside and told him, “Tomorrow morning, the moment you get up, find me a new hostess. Don’t go to the beach. Don’t come in here. Get on the phone and find me someone and have her here by three thirty”—an hour before Jessie’s scheduled arrival.
The next day, Ariel had a new hostess installed, as directed. When Jessie showed up, she jerked a thumb in the girl’s direction and asked Ariel what was going on.
“Pino had to replace you,” he said, trying to sound soothing on my behalf. “It was too much stress for you.”
“Oh really?”
Jessie came swinging into the kitchen and stared at me with a look so cold that the pasta water stopped boiling: “You know, I really don’t care about working here,” she screamed. “I was trying to help you out. But you . . . you . . . you coward. You couldn’t tell me yourself?”
“That’s right,” I said. “I couldn’t do it. But what’s important is I’d rather keep you as a wife than as an employee.”
One of the things I’ve always loved about Jessie is that she can call me on my bullshit. (In my humble opinion, this is something all real men love in the women they choose to spend their lives with.) She spun around in a rage and stomped out of the kitchen. But she was home that night when I got back from work, and though she didn’t admit it right away, she was happier.
The problems extended to the lower ranks as well. Late in the summer, when I was in the city running Il Cantinori during the week, I began to get frantic calls from Mark, increasingly concerned by our lack of help. Our employment problems continued unabated and we were only getting busier and busier. If I had known what an ongoing headache this would be, I probably never would have opened the restaurant.
I was desperate, so when two of my regular customers (too ridiculously affluent and influential to name) asked me to give their home-from-college kids—we’ll call them Mitch and Missy—summer jobs, I thought sure, why not? And I hired them as a busboy and busgirl.
My thinking was that these kids were so well traveled and sophisticated that they’d bring an ingrained sense of good service to their work. Little did I imagine that they might be completely uninterested in the quality of that work.
But I got a quick lesson when Missy showed up for her first day in her BMW convertible and parked it in the lot next to the highway. Our innkeeper, a very serious old Dominican, instructed her to park it out back; the front lot was for customers. “Oh, Chico,” she said to him without breaking stride, her blonde hair flowing behind her in the summer wind, “I am a customer.”
Instead of showing up at five minutes to four, like the employees who needed the job, she and Mitch showed up at four thirty, fresh from the beach, unkempt and smelling of the sea and sand.
“You, boy,” I said to the young man. “Do you have a watch?”
“Yes, Mr. Luongo.”
“What time are you supposed to be here?”
“Four o’clock.”
“And what time is it?”
He looked down at his Rolex. “Four thirty.”
“So?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Luongo. I fell asleep at the beach.”
I looked at his unshaven face, his salt-caked hair. “What are you going to do about a shower?”
“Oh, I don’t need a shower, Mr. Luongo. I’m just a busboy.”
“Just a busboy? Look at these other people who are ‘just busboys,’ ” I said, gesturing at the well-groomed crew in freshly cleaned black slacks and white shirts: my proud, hard-working team.
“How many times have you come to my restaurant? Do the busboys look like this?” I pointed at him, to make sure he understood what this meant.
“You’re right, Mr. Luongo. I’m sorry. It’ll never happen again.”
Once they got to work, things weren’t much better. Missy had an aversion to dirty dishes, an unfortunate trait in a busgirl. When she approached an abandoned table, with its half-eaten pastas, napkins dropped in sauce, and lipstick on the wine glasses, she would scrunch up her face and hold her breath. Then, to avoid breaking a nail, she would only pick up one or two dishes at a time, scurry to the kitchen with them, and come back for the next puny load.
On a scale of one to ten, I’d say she was a minus ten.
As if I didn’t have enough problems to deal with, every time I left the kitchen, I’d find these kids doing something unbelievable. Like the time I discovered them in the middle of Saturday night service, passing a cigarette back and forth in the parking lot out behind the kitchen. Or when they took a break that same night to sit at the bar and have a cocktail.
When I saw that, I pulled them aside.
“People, listen. In Italy, we have an expression that if you look the other way three times, you are stupid. And I’m starting to feel like an idiot.”
I presented them with a choice: “I’ll give you one more chance. Be here at four o’clock tomorrow. Or else.”
Mitch—he’s probably a lawyer today—jumped right in. “Yes, Mr. Luongo. That’s perfect. I feel like the past few days, we’ve just been breaking the ice.”
“Listen,” I said. “We’re not breaking the ice. You’re breaking my balls. Now get out of here.”
The next day, with a fool’s optimism, I pushed myself all morning and into the afternoon. I got my work done early so I could spend some time with Mitch and Missy when they arrived, show them how I expected them to work, turn them into the kind of proud workers I respected.
I had been a busboy in my life. I had done everything you could do in a restaurant, and that’s part of why I resented them so much. I didn’t care who their parents were; the fact that they thought they could disrespect my beautiful Sapore di Mare, the place I had built with my own sweat and hard work—that was the most offensive thing of all.
You already know what happened next. They didn’t show up at four o’clock. They didn’t even show up by four fifteen. When they finally did show up, at four thirty, I was sitting in the balcony overlooking the dining room. I watched them prance in through the front door, even though Chico—hard-working, proud Chico—told them not to every day. As always, they were fresh from the beach, with messy hair and that salty smell.
My already famous temper was engaged. It didn’t matter that these two were the spawn of rich and famous power brokers; they threatened to undo my success.
“You two,” I said as I stood up and charged down the stairs. They looked terrified, like they were about to be gored by a bull.
“You know what? That’s it. You better get out of here. In fact, you better get out of here right now. Actually, you know what, GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE. NOW!”
They didn’t move.
“NOW!”
“But, Mr. Luongo,” Mitch said. “What about our tips from last night?”
“Tips?” I actually laughed. “You want your tips? I’ll give you a tip: you go home and tell your fathers that you are fired. You incompetent, spoiled, rich brats.” They stood there for a second, in shock.
Mitch jerked his head in the direction of the bar, suggesting to Missy that they have a drink before leaving.
“Now!” I bellowed. “Get the fuck out of here, you little brats. Out, out, out,” and I chased them right out the door.
Both Mitch’s and Missy’s fathers called me, outraged, vowing that they’d never come back to Sapore di Mare again.
But they did. They had to. They were friends of Pino’s.