IN AUGUST 1988, as Sapore di Mare was going full tilt in the Hamp-tons, back in the city Il Cantinori had settled into a very pleasant, half-speed respite. It was that laid-back time when the Village undergoes its annual transformation into a ghost town, so quiet that you can hear your own shoes clicking and clacking on the sidewalk as you stroll the breezy tree-lined streets on your way to work each morning.
I didn’t mind the calm at all: a lot of the restaurants back home would have been closed during August, so I looked at whatever business we did as gravy, especially since I had seen the way it picked up again every fall—the reanimation of the city that starts with Labor Day and ends with the Jewish High Holy days. It was also a welcome counterbalance to the action at Sapore, which was bursting at the seams on the weekends, beginning with Thursday night, when our customers migrated from the city to the country. I actually had come to love the end of summer because the break from our normal pace afforded me all sorts of indulgences, like spending more time chitchatting with customers, or checking out new restaurants. The dining scene in New York was mutating, expanding, evolving a little bit every six months. Within a few years of when I threw my hat in the ring with Il Canti-nori, a number of American chefs and restaurateurs had begun to change the face of the dining scene in New York. Down in Tribeca, Drew Nieporent had opened his first restaurant, Montrachet, with the chef David Bouley. Just a few blocks away, Danny Meyer had opened Union Square Cafe; and a few blocks the other way, Jerry Kretchmer and his partners had opened Gotham Bar and Grill, which after a dodgy first year had found new life with a young chef named Alfred Portale. It was true what they said about rising tides lifting all boats. New restaurants were popping up left and right and chefs were becoming celebrities, garnering more and more coverage in newspapers and magazines—and not just in the food pages. New Yorkers were becoming passionately interested in food, and I’m sure that it was one of the things that kept Il Cantinori going so strong for its first five years.
That August, one of my regular customers, Fred Pressman, the owner of Barneys department store, pulled me aside and told me he had a piece of possible business to discuss with me. I had always considered Fred something of a kindred spirit, a fellow merchant and man of good taste, so I was curious to know what it was that he had in mind.
“Would you be interested in opening a restaurant with us in Chelsea?” was the question.
Today, Chelsea is perhaps the hottest neighborhood in New York City, but in the late 1980s is was a semi-industrial wasteland, a spillover area just north of the West Village and one of the city’s curious no-man’s-lands, long past one heyday and awaiting the moment when the cyclical nature of New York life would make it fashionable once again. I had never expected that I might help bring that eventuality about, but that’s what was about to happen.
The Pressmans owned a four-story building a block north of Bar-neys where they had planned to open a restaurant in partnership with Roberto Ruggeri, owner of Bice restaurant in Milan. But something had gone down with Roberto. Fred declined to say what it was, but he gave the impression that a major catastrophe had been averted, and that he didn’t want to be associated with Roberto any longer and had pulled the plug on the deal.
I already had partners, and I didn’t really need another restaurant, but I couldn’t resist the attention, and I was intrigued. To me, the Pressmans had more money than God: with partners like them, who knew what kind of access—to people, to money, to prestige—I might end up with? For all of my success, there were still times, like those moments when I’d stand out behind Sapore and gaze over the collection of cars in the parking lot, when it didn’t seem real, when I still expected that it might all go down the tubes or be taken away from me. There were still times when I felt like that mute in the airport when I first arrived in 1980, with that sensation of being stared at like King Kong, like a curiosity, a side show. Part of my success was based on my “otherness,” but that same quality made me always feel like an outsider, a permanent foreigner. So the Pressmans didn’t just represent advancement to me; they represented the security and acceptance of people with access to the power brokers of New York.
In addition to all of that, there was that feeling of easy camaraderie with Fred, the sense of a soul mate, of somebody who “got” me.
The only thing was that I was just getting my financial legs under me: Jessie and I had a child on the way, and I had taken on a lot of debt when I assumed ownership of Sapore.
So I told Fred that the only way I’d want to pursue anything was if the Pressmans bankrolled the project; my contribution would be my know-how, my taste, and my time. He said they were fine with that and we made an appointment to look at the space together. I walked over from Il Cantinori one midweek afternoon and was struck that Chelsea was almost without character: it had neither the skyscrapers of Midtown nor the old New York charm of the Village. It was a sprawling neighborhood of housing projects and 1960s-era apartment buildings with a smattering of delis and diners. Eighteenth Street itself wasn’t any more promising: there was an electrical substation across the street from the restaurant space, and next to that was a plumbing supply store—not exactly the view New Yorkers liked to be presented with when they entered and exited a restaurant.
But when we stepped inside, I could see right away why the Press-mans thought a restaurant would be the thing to put there: the room was high-ceilinged, with western exposures, meaning that it would be light, but not blindingly so, at lunchtime. There were enormous arched windows and exposed brick walls. In the only-in-New York department, the space had once been a storage facility for floats and such from the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, but it had been cleared out and so was empty except for some industrial kitchen equipment that had been delivered when they were getting ready to open it with the Bice team. There was also an emergency exit that led to the enormous Barneys parking lot, and it occurred to me right away that we could build a patio there for outdoor seating, which in my opinion was a must, if only because I myself loved dining outside in the summer and had become addicted to it on the Porch at Sapore.
It was the perfect union of functionality and theatricality, and I began what was fast becoming a familiar exercise for me as I imagined the new restaurant we might build there: I saw an airy dining room with long white tablecloths, dark wood at the edges, and flowing drapes over the windows. I had been thinking that my next restaurant should have a pizza oven, and I imagined it along the western wall. I could smell the smoke and I began to smell the food: garlic and herbs and that winey, beefy aroma that made me think of my mother’s kitchen, which naturally led to one of the biggest ideas I’d ever had: home cooking was the root of all Italian cooking, so why not go to the source and bring together a team of Italian mothers and grandmothers to consult on a new restaurant? In a matter of seconds, I could see the public relations potential: food journalists hungry for the next big concept would eat up the idea that the restaurant’s recipes came from actual, bona fide Italian mothers whom I would import from Italy and parade in front of them. My only immediate concern was finding home cooks who also knew how to function in a professional kitchen, but I didn’t see why I couldn’t simply hire an American chef to pull it all together.
The name popped into my head: Le Madri. The mothers. There was no question about it: a home run.
FRED RESPONDED TO the idea and we decided to try to make it work.
There was just one problem: I might have had two successful restaurants, but when it came to doing business—real business, big business—I was an idiot, or at least an innocent. Steve, Nicola, and I had done everything ourselves, with just a handshake between us. We had even handled the acquisition and transfer of the Sapore space with a breathtaking lack of legal intervention; though we had our differences from time to time, there was an unspoken bond between us, three immigrants and small-business owners who understood that we’d each make our share of mistakes along the way and would never take advantage of each other.
But with the Pressmans it was different. They were natural-born Americans with an innate grasp of how to do business here. They understood contracts the way I understood pasta: it was in their blood. Besides all of that, they could buy and sell me and had high-powered attorneys at their beck and call. So as the time approached to meet with them and hammer out a working agreement, I grew increasingly fearful of making a bad business deal, of promising more than I could deliver or of being taken advantage of. Fortunately, I’ve always known what I don’t know, and so I went into the process with a great deal of humility and with my eyes wide open.
One sunny August afternoon, I showed up at Barneys’ corporate offices, across the street from the department store, for the Big Meeting. It was an unassuming building and the executive offices were on an upper floor, tastefully and humbly decorated. I hadn’t put on a suit and tie, because I didn’t know how to stand on ceremony back then. Instead I arrived in slacks and a sport coat, perfectly in keeping with my relationship with Fred. The only problem was that Fred had magically disappeared. In his stead, waiting for me in the rather cramped conference room, were Irv and Mark, respectively the company CFO and in-house legal counsel, slender men with pale complexions and power ties who, it was clear from their cool reception, were going to treat me as an adversary.
To make matters worse, we couldn’t get right down to business because we were waiting for Fred’s son Bob, to whom he had turned over the handling of our negotiations. It was tense in the room. I maintained my composure, but the fact that Fred had thrown me to the legal dogs only heightened my anxiety. My opinion of lawyers and accountants was that they are there to make better deals for their clients than their clients would be able, or willing, to make for themselves, and not only because their clients don’t know the intricacies of the law: the American attitude, it seemed to me, was that your lawyer could royally screw somebody on your behalf, but as long as you didn’t do it yourself, your hands and your conscience were clean.
I didn’t know how exactly to protect myself, but I had never forgotten the cost of being too direct, too honest, back when my forthrightness with the GM of Zinno had cost me my job there. This time, I’d keep my cards close to my vest.
The two suits and I sat around making painful small talk for about thirty minutes.
At one point, Fred appeared in the door way of the conference room, rapped on the open door, and said, “Don’t beat Pino up too much. He’s my partner,” then disappeared laughing down the hallway.
I remember thinking it was a power play disguised as a joke, and I steeled myself for the worst. As the minutes ticked by, it became increasingly apparent that these men considered me beneath their master’s reputation and family, a smooth-talking immigrant charmer who had somehow wooed the old man and convinced him to invest money in him. Did they ever say this to me directly? No. But when you know how to read people, instinctively, the way animals read each other, such sentiments are as apparent as the color of their eyes.
Finally, Fred’s son Bob, the co-CEO of Barneys, showed up. I disliked him from the moment I laid eyes on him: he looked like a pasty, corpulent member of the Lucky Sperm Club if ever there was one. He came bounding into the room and began talking right over us.
“Pino!” he said grandly, as though we were best of friends when in fact I don’t think we’d ever said more than two words to each other in all the times I’d visited his father’s table in my restaurant.
I shook his hand, tried not to laugh in his face.
“We love your restaurant. Been there many times. And now we’re going to do a restaurant together.”
He was a study in insincerity, which, as a former actor, I found doubly insulting.
“You know we were going to do a restaurant with Roberto, right? Had to pull out. We have a name to protect.”
“Sure,” I said.
He sat down, gathered himself up, and took a deep breath.
The room came to a hush as we got down to business.
“OK, Pino. What is the most important thing for you?”
He was so transparent that all my inhibitions went right out the window and I spoke my mind freely: “Three things,” I said. “I’m in charge, I’m in charge, I’m in charge.”
Bob looked at his people and grinned, then looked back at me.
“I guess you’re in charge.”
I let it go.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m in charge of the design, the menu, and how we manage the business. I don’t want anybody to talk to me about what the menu should or should not have on it, who can cook, or how I run things.”
He held up a hand.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “We have to be involved in the design.”
Of all the things on the table, this I could live with because I trusted the family’s taste, even Bob’s.
“OK, as long as you understand we’re doing an Italian restaurant. This isn’t going to be a French establishment,” I said.
I thought it was important to say this because despite the rise of all those young American restaurateurs and chefs, French food still ruled in New York City. When it came to cuisine, Americans had a serious inferiority complex: they saw, and continue to see, themselves as lesser talents. All you need to do is examine the list of four-star ratings, still owned by French and French-leaning restaurants, to know that this is true. And, despite the financial success of people like me and Silvano, noses still turned up at Italian food, so I wanted to be clear that Le Madri was going to be unmistakably Italian in every aspect, regardless of whether or not it cost us a star.
“We’re fine with that,” he said.
We all nodded.
“OK,” Bob said. “Now. How much money are you going to put down?”
That’s when I realized how dysfunctional this scenario was. Either Fred hadn’t fully briefed Bob, or Bob hadn’t paid attention to his old man—or maybe he was trying to see if I’d budge. If I had to guess, I’d go with the last one: Bob and his sidekicks were going to protect Fred from himself.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Your investment? What’s your investment going to be?”
“My investment?” I said, wiping imaginary perspiration from my forehand with my index finger. “Sudore,” meaning “sweat.” “That’s what I’m here for. If that’s not the deal, then we’re having the wrong meeting.”
Before he could respond, Bob’s secretary knocked and came in, leaning over to him and whispering in his ear.
“Listen, guys,” he said. “I have to go. Let’s move on. Let’s make this happen.”
And he left.
Irv and Mark took over the meeting and we began trying to hammer out a working budget for the construction phase of Le Madri. Their position was that because I was going to function as general contractor and wanted autonomy in calling the shots, I was going to be the one responsible for its accuracy, a guarantor. Financial words and terms began to fly around the room, some of which I was familiar with; others were new to me. My acting skills really came in handy because I just pretended to understand what they were referring to, nodding and taking notes in my yellow legal pad. I also settled on a strategy: no matter what they said, I just listened, made more notes, smiled, and said “I’ll get back to you.” I could tell that this began to frustrate them, but I simply refused to agree to anything, not even the date when I’d get back to them.
When I got off on my own, with the help of my attorney, I assembled a team of lawyers specializing in liquor licenses, permits, and construction. This opened up a new world of hourly rates to me and I found it shocking. Some of the guys charged two hundred or two hundred fifty dollars per hour, and this was in the eighties. Whenever I called one of these lawyers to go over my notes from my meetings with the Pressmans’ attorney, I would look at my watch right before dialing the phone and make a note of the time so I could track it. This became an obsession of mine and I started to convert my legal bills into restaurant food: for example, to pay for a thirty-minute call I had to sell four main courses. I’d see a tray loaded with pastas float by on a runner’s open palm and think, That only pays for about twenty minutes of counsel. In time I realized that this was self-defeating. Attorneys are just a part of doing business here. They are criminals without guns, but you can’t do anything about it, and the sooner you accept that, the better. You know who told me that? A lawyer, and he charged me for the ten seconds it took him to make the suggestion.
Part of me felt that I was making a huge mistake, but the rest of me knew that unless I wanted to scrape and claw for every advancement in my career, I would need partners with pockets as deep as the Pressmans’. If being in business with them meant a crash course in law and finance, then so be it. Once I came to terms with that fact of life, I embraced the challenge and took a new view of it: I knew how to open and operate a restaurant. I’d done it twice already and done it successfully. As I thought about it, my confidence grew, and I realized that I actually knew more about the nuts and bolts of the job than these guys Fred had caged me up with. All I had to do was figure out how to translate my experience into their lingo. A friend of mine gave me some important advice: “Don’t promise them the world because you will get nothing for it,” he said. “Don’t give them the optimistic scenario. They are already in bed with you, so be conservative.”
I was adjusting. Slowly but surely, I was learning how to be a businessman, but it was a difficult metamorphosis: with Steve and Nicola, and on my own in East Hampton, there was an understanding that we were engaged in a human enterprise, that there would be mistakes and that we would learn from them, but that everybody had his or her heart in the right place. This was different: I was putting myself on the line. And the number we ultimately came up with to finance the build-out and opening expenses was enormous: $1.25 million, which to a guy who had shown up in the United States with empty pockets eight years earlier was a terrifying sum. When I eventually got around to signing the contracts we’d drawn up, I was a coguarantor, not responsible for the same amount as the Pressmans, but still responsible for enough that any creditors would be well within their rights to come after me for some of their money. There’d be no room for learning experiences this time, no margin for error.
AS OUR NEGOTIATIONS progressed, Fred introduced the one and only contingency to our moving forward: he wanted me to sever my ties with Il Cantinori, which was only a few blocks away and, as he saw it, a conflict of interest. Fortunately for him, Steve was quickly developing the opinion that Sapore di Mare was taking me away from Il Cantinori too much of the time.
As I became increasingly scarce around Il Cantinori, the tension between me and Steve built. When I was there, and we sat down for our dinner at the end of the night, he’d turn his chair away and talk to me over his shoulder.
Finally, one evening, as we were sitting like that, Steve turned to me and said, “We got to talk.”
“I agree,” I said, and we slowly began having the conversation that had been so long coming. I knew that it was going to end with Steve buying me out, but he was such a shrewd businessman that I felt I had to at least bluff that I might purchase his and Nicola’s shares of Il Cantinori.
“You can buy me out,” I said. “Or maybe I buy you out.”
Steve smiled at my chutzpah. “Pino,” he said, as though schooling a little boy. “I own this building. You going to buy me out? I’m going to become your landlord? I think you’ll go.” It reminded me of Moe Greene in The Godfather telling Michael Corleone: “You buy me out? No, no! I buy you out.”
I agreed and after that awkward evening we swiftly put whatever tensions there had been behind us and hammered out a deal in record time. Before I knew it, I was out of Il Cantinori.
This plunged me into a period of bereavement. Il Cantinori was like my soul. It was my first restaurant, the spring from which all my confidence flowed. This was the early fall, the low season of Sapore, so I was in the city most of the time. There were some mornings when I’d get in my car and begin daydreaming and suddenly realize that I was parking on Tenth Street instead of in Chelsea, having driven myself to Il Cantinori on autopilot. And with no restaurant at which to spend my evenings, I’d sometimes walk over to Tenth Street around six thirty and sneak a peek into Il Cantinori. It looked the same, except that I wasn’t there; instead I was a ghost discovering to his horror that the world could function just fine without him in it.
The pain was eased by new arrivals in my life: Jessie gave birth to our first son, Marco, in September 1988, and I myself was birthing Le Madri. I poured all of my energy into the development of the restaurant.
It was the most extensive overhaul I’d yet been involved in. Somewhere along the way I decided that I wanted to have a vaulted ceiling, found the right craftsmen to do the work, and watched every day as they painstakingly constructed it, first fashioning a wire lathing, then applying the stucco. There was also green river hemlock wood flooring to be installed and a beautiful wood-burning pizza oven.
While all this was going on, I was also consumed with finding the mothers. The first would be Maria, my cook from the Hamptons, whom I was starting to think of as a sort of good-luck charm. For the others, I reached out to a network of friends, including a Piedmontese winemaker named Bruno Cerreto, to identify some talented female Italian chefs. (I also phoned my own mother and asked her to be a part of the restaurant. “That’s the respect you have for me,” she scolded me. “You want me to become an employee.”) Bruno meanwhile found me Bruna Alessandria, a classic Italian beauty in her early forties from the farmland of Piedmont with a taste for colorful hand-knit clothing, and two other Piedmontese cooks, Margherita Aloi, just eighteen at the time, and Silvana, just nineteen, neither of whom—to be honest—was an actual mother, but both of whom could cook as if they’d raised a dozen happy kids. The mothers all arrived together; it was as if we’d placed an order, only instead of two pounds of white truffles we’d ordered three women.
Neither Bruna nor Margherita had been to the United States before, or had spent much time in any big city, so they were a bit overwhelmed. I set them up in an apartment in the Flatiron District, at Twenty-second Street and Broadway. To serve as funnel for all their combined ideas, I enlisted a young American chef named Alan Tardi, a modest, professional, and soft-spoken guy who had worked at Chanterelle and Lafayette.
Alan or I would meet them downstairs and escort these women—dressed in their earth-toned country threads—all over town. My first priority wasn’t to get them into the kitchen; it was to treat them to a few weeks of the tourist life, to give them a sense of American culture and get them excited about being here. I wanted them to soak up New York City, so we took them to Central Park, the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center, and other landmark locations. At a time when I was becoming more and more Americanized, these women reminded me who I was and where I came from; maybe that’s why I came up with the concept when I did, to help myself preserve my essential identity. I loved taking them around Manhattan. I so related to what it was like to feel like a fish out of water here that I was highly protective of them. Whenever they were in my presence, I was their human force field, acting as bodyguard, interpreter, and sugar daddy. No matter where we went, they stuck out like a handful of sore thumbs thanks to their country attire and the fact that we all spoke Italian. It wasn’t long until, like me before them, they were drawn to the Village, which felt the most like home, and that’s where they’d often gravitate in their personal time.
We also wanted to introduce them to the Italian restaurants here and took them everywhere from Italian-American joints to hot restaurants, with the notable exceptions of Da Silvano and Il Cantinori. They were definitely not impressed by what they saw and tasted, usually pushing their plates away with a smirk after a few bites. Bruna was especially severe in her appraisal of the food, saying things like, “I don’t even feed the pigs with this.”
Our first “official” meeting was a few weeks later in the restaurant’s unfinished dining room. As construction workers hammered, drilled, and sawed all around us, we sat and talked about food.
“I want you to give me lists of your favorite dishes,” I told them, speaking in Italian, of course. Since they all hailed from Piedmont, the dishes they named were distinctly Piedmontese: those little ravioli called plin, tagliatelle with porcini mushroom ragù and white truffles, and a whole roster of risottos, including ones made with asparagus, chicken liver, and a red risotto made with Barolo wine. They also expressed a reverence for vitello tonnato, or sliced cooked veal served with a tuna mayonnaise. Clearly, Le Madri wasn’t going to specialize in Tuscan cuisine, which was fine with me because all I really cared about was that the food be authentic and have that unmistakable feeling of home cooking about it.
After we kicked around these and other dishes, I said, “Now, I want to take the essence of our cooking, the unwritten flavor of Italy, the way we all eat at home, and communicate it to New Yorkers.”
They all nodded. None of us had the words to express what we were talking about—but the food itself spoke volumes, and after we had discussed our favorite dishes at length, the women took to the kitchen. The first order of business was to acquaint them with the ingredients available here, almost all of which were different than what they were used to back in Piedmont. This was well before the upgrade in regional American farming took place, so vegetables didn’t have the same big flavor they had at home. The women also had to learn to adjust to different cuts of meat, substituting, say, brisket for an eye round in stracotto because an eye round wasn’t as fatty here, and that fat was essential to a successful pot roast. Even the water and flour were different, as I discovered when they complained about the lack of elasticity of the pasta dough the first time they made it.
Once this orientation was complete, we slowly began to start planning the menu. Cut loose to do their own thing, these country mice became as ferocious as tigers, turning the place into a flurry of flour and wine, knives and rolling pins. With those women in the kitchen, filling that enormous space with the scents of authentic Italian cooking, Le Madri became, more than my first two restaurants, a portal to my own past. When I left our apartment downtown, I felt like I was going to another home, populated by not one but four mothers. I think it was the same for them. They had only been in New York for a few weeks, but they were feeling homesick as well. Their food had a heightened intensity and I knew why: they poured all of their nostagia into their cooking.
As the women acclimated to life in New York, I had constant reminders of my own evolution as when, like me years before, Margherita ended up doing an imitation of the construction workers she spent her days with, peppering her conversation gratuitously with “fuck.” She also took a liking to American slang and loved spitting out phrases like “Don’t piss me off.”
It was also great fun to watch the women interact with the construction workers, most of whom were originally from Southern Italy. One night, as the smell of food wafted out into the dining room, one of the guys, I guess feeling teased by the delicious aroma of home cooking, called down from the scaffolding, “I guess we are not Michelangelo.” It was a funny reference to the legend that Michelangelo, when he was painting the Sistine Chapel, had had meals served to him while he was lying on his back. This became a running joke in the restaurant, and eventually the women took the bait and began taking lunch and dinner out to the men, letting them taste the dishes we were testing.
To me as a fellow transplanted Italian, it was a joyous scene, but as a businessman I had a concern: the application of the stucco was slowing down. I pulled the general contractor aside and told him, “Look, I don’t care if your guys eat here. We’re cooks, and we like to share. But our price isn’t going to change, no matter how long it takes.”
Things didn’t speed up, and so I brought the hammer down, telling the women to stop feeding the men. They were upset: Bruna was just plain pissed off, and Maria scolded me, telling me that it wasn’t as though she were making any extra food to serve the men; she was just sharing what had to be cooked to test it.
One day, I realized that although I saw the women cooking and there was a glorious and garlicky aroma in the air, I hadn’t seen a plate of food in more than twenty-four hours. I went looking through the kitchen, the office, and even out on the back patio. There wasn’t a trace of food to be found.
On my way to check the refrigerator, I passed by the scaffolding, and on a hunch, I climbed up to the top. Sure enough, piled there were a few small stacks of dirty dishes. I should have been upset at this minor mutiny, but I wasn’t. All these Italians were having a ball, and maybe I was being a little bit too hard on them; I didn’t want to stifle the spirit that would lead to our success.
Besides, spending time at the restaurant site, and with these women, was heaven for me, but when I wasn’t there I had to keep some anxiety at bay: with nowhere to go in the evenings, I was suddenly coming home to an apartment populated by my family. Sometimes at night, I’d watch as Jessie held Marco in her arms, nursing him, and think about how much I’d put at stake to pursue Le Madri. Though Jessie never showed anything but support and belief, there was no money coming in, and I was accountable for a good chunk of the million-plus dollars the Pressmans had poured into our joint enterprise.
But it wasn’t really the money that worried me. The Il Cantinori buyout had left me flush for the time being, and I knew that at the end of the day I’d be able to bring the project in on time. No, what really weighed on me was the fact that Le Madri was a more ambitious restaurant than my first two. I had acquired a reputation as a talented restaurateur. My name meant something in New York, and I wanted it to go on meaning something for a good, long while.
AGAIN MY PUBLICIST, Susan Rike, stepped up to the plate, interesting New York magazine’s Richard Story enough that he came to the restaurant to see it and taste some food before we opened. The result was a five-page spread in the magazine, an unprecedented promotional score. It made me feel like the king of the city, but I also heard rumblings about resentment from other restaurateurs; I could feel anger rolling down Seventh Avenue like hot lava. Nobody had ever had a spread like that and here I was dancing on their stage. It pissed a lot of them off, but I didn’t care.
The article was a revelation to me: at the time, there was no shortage of concept restaurants in New York City. Some succeeded and some failed, but I realized that what made my restaurants work was that they were all founded on a true and deeply personal inspiration: it could be a song, as it was for Sapore di Mare, or a longing for country dining as it was at Il Cantinori, or the memory of home cooking as it was at Le Madri. They were my attempt to stay connected to my own past, to re-create a little of it right here in New York City, and what people responded to was their authenticity and their sincerity.
As I watched restaurants come and go around me, I realized that this was one of the things that set me apart: my places sprang from my own deep well of nostalgia and there wasn’t an insincere detail anywhere in any of them, from the wooden beams and stucco walls to the displays of vegetable dishes at the door to the historically accurate recipes. The reason I was succeeding was the same reason I sometimes went off on waiters or cooks and the reason I had told Bob Pressman, “I’m in charge, I’m in charge, I’m in charge”: I simply refused to compromise.
I ALSO REFUSED to compromise in my first cookbook, which was published in October 1988.
Just as I had a knack for naming restaurants, I thought I had one for naming books. My title for my first book was A Tuscan in the Kitchen. My idea was to try to capture between two covers what it was that people responded to about me in my restaurants: the food and the stories behind the food, both my personal anecdotes and the legends of such places as Maremma and Siena.
I also wanted to teach people how to cook the way Italians cook, which isn’t by following exact recipes to the letter. It was the same reason I brought those women in to be a guiding force at Le Madri: in Tuscany, virtually any recipe you can think of is interpreted and personalized by the individual cook, so there are as many versions of, say, pappa al pomodoro as there are homes.
To capture this spirit and with hopes of inspiring the readers, part of my vision for the book was that recipes would be presented with no quantities or cooking times. So, I’d begin, say, a recipe for risotto, fisherman’s style, by writing “Make sure you have enough liquid for making the risotto. Otherwise use white wine.” Or I’d end a recipe for pasta-and-bean soup by advising, “when everything smells right, serve the soup with a little olive oil on top.”
It would be impossible to sell a book with that kind of instructions today, but my agent had no problem setting it up with one of the top cookbook publishers, Clarkson Potter. Working with coauthors Barbara Raives and Angela Hederman, I spent hours describing the most famous dishes in Tuscany, along with the legends behind them and personal associations I made with them. In a way, it was an autobiography, though it had the structure of a cookbook.
By the end of the process, we had put together a handsome and modestly proportioned book that I was very proud of. It had a charming photograph of a view through a window of the old town of Mon-talcino on the cover and both color and black-and-white photographs throughout.
The book debuted and, to my dismay, we were savaged by critics who were shocked that I had left out the quantities and cooking times. The consensus was that the average American home cook was not able to relate to, let alone use, A Tuscan in the Kitchen. Never mind that many of the great cookbooks of all time, like those by Auguste Escoffier and, in Italy, Pellegrino Artusi, didn’t specify quantities or cooking times.
In the midst of such explosive times for me, the cool reception the book received was a major disappointment, a reminder that although things were changing in America, I was still, in many ways, standing in that supermarket in Ozone Park, holding that anemic, cellophane-wrapped tomato in my hand.
The only silver lining was that the book developed an enormous cult following over the years; I still hear from people who tell me it’s their favorite cookbook. And I was able to go on to do several others. But it remains a heartbreak for me.
I HAD REALIZED by this time that you put together a restaurant the way you assemble lasagna: layer by layer. The top layer was the front-of-the-house team, and I pulled together an improbably complementary band of Italians: Gianfranco, a Florentine with aristocratic features set off by a shaggy mane of black hair with a taste for tweedy sport coats and short, thin ties; Ariel, whose pretty-boy charm and flashiness translated effortlessly from East Hampton to Chelsea; and Ce-sare, a Roman who had been a bartender at the ancient Gino’s restaurant on Lexington and then at Cipriani before tiring of uptown customers and spending his working hours in a tux. Cesare understood what pushovers many American women were for a foreign accent, and so made an art of shameless flirting. His trademark was the drawing out of the word “darling” until it seethed with the promise of sex: “Dahling, have a martini.” “Daahhling, what’s on your mind tonight?” “Daaa-hhhling, you look lovely.”
These men could not have been more different, but they each reminded me of a very specific personality type from back home. My understanding of what I wanted to do in my restaurants was being sharpened with each new venture: I was no longer looking to simply serve Italian food and wine; I was building grander and grander sets and populating them with real Italians. Part of the reason for this was selfish: the more complete the experience was in my restaurants, the more I had the feeling of being back home. But I also believed that the range of characters would help ensure an element of spontaneity when a customer walked into Le Madri because the trip from podium to table would vary depending on the host with whom it was made.
Of course, I picked May 23 for the opening. How could I not, after all the luck that date had brought me? To be sure that Le Madri lived up to the expectations created by all of our preliminary press, I did five days of “friends and family” tastings—practice sessions at which friends of the owners eat for free in exchange for patiently enduring any lapses in service or misfires from the kitchen. (Some restaurateurs even go so far as to distribute comment cards or questionnaires at the end of these experiments, but that was never my style.) Between the food and the payroll, we spent about twenty thousand dollars on these dress rehearsals, but it was worthwhile because we worked out a lot of kinks. One night, as the grill was maxed out with Cornish game hens and steaks, all of them throwing copious amounts of smoke up into the air, the exhaust system shut down. I kept hitting the reset button, but it wouldn’t come back on. I starting barking to the cooks to get everything off the grill as soon as possible because I knew what was coming next: a blast of cool fire-extinguishing foam from the hose that dangled over the cooking surfaces. We got the food out of the way just in time, but no sooner did the foam spurt out than the smoke began drifting out into the dining room. With images of the sprinkler system’s sensors trigging the nozzles and showering our diners, I grabbed a construction ladder, ran out of the kitchen, set it up, and climbed up into an access panel hidden in the vaulted ceiling.
Though I succeeded in shutting off the sprinklers before they triggered, I was too late to prevent a team of firemen dressed as if they were headed for Three Mile Island from showing up and marching into the dining room.
“Hey, Pino,” somebody yelled out. “Are they friends or family?”
Everybody had a good laugh, but I was pissed off. Still, I’d much rather it happened during our dry run than when we had paying customers in the house.
THE FOOD AT Le Madri was the best I’d opened with so far. Usually a restaurant’s menu has to be tweaked to synch it up with the demands of the customers, but all the dishes we began with, firmly rooted in home cooking, sold well. Many of the dishes that debuted at Le Madri are still with me today, such as a beef and artichoke stew; blind baby eel cakes (fritters); and a fritto misto (mixed fried seafood) primarily comprising white bait. And, of course, there was that marvelous wood-burning oven where I collaborated on a number of original creations with a sweet young Italian-American pizza maker named Ciro. We introduced a pizza that’s become something of a legend: the focaccia ro-biola, a thin wheel of rosemary bread, split in half horizontally, spread with creamy robiola cheese, baked, drizzled with white truffle oil, and cut into small triangles. It was an almost obscenely fragrant, melt-in-your-mouth signature dish that had people moaning with pleasure, and it fast became something that customers ordered along with their cocktails the moment they sat down.
The only bittersweet aspect for me was accepting that part of the price of operating more than one restaurant was the need to turn the orchestration of the kitchen over to other chefs, but the truth was that having an experienced restaurant toque like Alan Tardi was invaluable. Under his guidance, the women of Le Madri were transformed from individual home cooks into a well-organized kitchen brigade, though some things didn’t change: Maria still prepared the antipasti offerings, an even bigger assortment than we served at Il Cantinori or Sapore—fifteen or more dishes set out every night along the ledge that fronted the pizza oven.
As was the case with Sapore di Mare before it, and Il Cantinori before that, Le Madri became a magnet for celebrities and the bold-face names from publishing and finance. Loyal customers followed me wherever I went, from Tenth Street out to East Hampton and back to the city and Chelsea. Because of our location, convenient to many boutique literary agencies, we became a popular lunch destination for agents, publishers, and editors, as well as their high-profile writer clients. We drew some of the biggest names in fashion such as Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Giorgio Armani, Donna Karan, Nicole Miller, Vera Wang, and Betsey Johnson; business tycoons like Steve Forbes; art-world figures like photographer Patrick Demarchelier and my by-then regular customer Julian Schnabel, who always turned heads in the summertime when he showed up in his preferred ensemble of elegant pajama pants, ornate pajama top, and slippers. And, of course, a great many seats were occupied by the high-rolling customers of Bar-neys, who made a full day of shopping and lunch, or shopping and dinner, taking full advantage of the parking lot we shared with the department store, which was a real coup in Manhattan.
Everybody who succeeds in New York has a few times in his life when he feels like the king of Manhattan, as though he’s been embraced by the city, and this was such a time for me. When I traveled from my apartment to Chelsea each morning, I felt like everybody, from deli countermen to cab drivers, had a smile and a kind word for me.
Our success was so immediate and well reported that it wasn’t long before I received phone calls from friends tipping me off to imitators—unaffiliated restaurateurs who had announced plans to open restaurants called Le Madri—as close as New Jersey and as far away as Colorado. I guess a part of me was still pretty innocent because this shocked me. Over the previous summer, in the trade magazine Nation’s Restaurant News, I had noticed that restaurants featuring the word Sapore (which was unusual enough as a restaurant name that only a native of Italy would think to use it) had begun turning up in the South and Midwest, but nobody had had the gumption to actually lift the full name Sapore di Mare, so I let it go. But now, the fact that people thought they could appropriate the name, and—who knew?—maybe even the concept, that I had come up with offended me. I know that many believe that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but to me plagiarism is plagiarism and my response to it was “fuck you,” delivered across state lines in the form of a cease-and-desist letter from my attorney. As usual, my learning curve was steep but swift; to protect myself against any future would-be thieves, I trademarked the name Le Madri and resolved to do the same with any other names I devised in the future.
I NEVER KNEW where my presence would be most required, where the next fire would need to be put out. One summer day, I was working in the city when Mark called me from Sapore in a state of panic. A group of INS agents had marched into the dining room unannounced and had begun interrogating everybody on the staff. They hadn’t checked for proof of citizenship or asked to see green cards; instead, they had simply corralled and carted off anyone who didn’t speak English, leaving Mark with a fraction of his staff heading into the final prep and evening dinner service.
“Thank God I can still manage a Queens accent or they might have taken me,” he said, forcing a chuckle.
I hung up the phone and looked into the kitchen. The cooks were finishing their prep for that night’s dinner at Le Madri. The mise en place containers—the little stainless-steel vessels in which prepared ingredients are held along the line—were full and, having been there since the early morning, the prep crew was winding down and thinking about going home for the day.
“Guys, listen up.” I told them what had happened at Sapore, and that I needed them to go out to my car. I was going to drive them to the Hamptons, they would work a shift out there, and I’d have them back by morning.
I hated to do it to them, but I had no choice. We had to be ready for dinner at the beach. So we piled into the car and drove out to the Hamptons, and I assigned each of them to a station. They were real troupers, prepping and then cooking all night, only to pile back into my car at eleven forty-five for the return trip to Manhattan.
It was an exhausting day. But here’s the sick thing, and the reason I believe I was born to be a restaurateur: I loved moments like those. Loved the rush of adrenaline. Loved opening the doors at five thirty and welcoming customers into a dining experience that bore no sign of the crisis that had preceded it. What was that old line from “New York, New York”? “If you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere.” Damn straight.
Though I enjoyed the constant pressure, sometimes it did get the better of me, and my temper periodically erupted, even occasionally at a customer.
One night at Le Madri, a couple had barged past the maître d’ podium into the dining room and were standing there yelling at Gian-franco.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
Gianfanco explained that they wanted a table and we didn’t have one for them.
“Well, if Gianfranco says we don’t have one, we don’t have one,” I replied.
The man protested, uttering my least favorite phrase in the world: “You don’t know who I am.”
My temper went from zero to sixty in no time. I climbed up on a chair, told all the customers in the surrounding area to be quiet, then turned to the guy and said: “OK, go ahead, tell us all who you are. Please, tell us who the fuck you are.”
He thought about it for a second, looked around at the people staring at him, then gave me the finger and stormed out.
I never learned who he was, and I never saw him again.
THAT FALL, THE New York Times finally got around to reviewing us and gave us two stars, thanks to the open-mindedness of critic Bryan Miller. New York magazine’s Gael Greene, francophile that she is, never warmed to me, but it didn’t matter. We were hot, and we were buoyed again the following spring when Andy Birsh reviewed us in Gourmet magazine. In the 1980s, a review in the pages of Gourmet would drive people to your restaurant for months; they’d actually show up with the magazine in hand and scan the review to decide what to order.
Because things were going so swimmingly, when Alan decided to leave Le Madri the following year I was determined to replace him with a bona fide Italian mother, making the restaurant as true to its name as possible. A friend of mine from back home told me about a wildly talented woman named Marta Pulini, who had worked at Bice in Paris before returning to her hometown of Modena. We spoke by phone and clicked via long distance; she talked about food exactly the way I did: with a reverence for seasonality, immediacy, and simplicity. She flew to New York to meet with me and I found that we had something else in common: we had both led full lives before getting into the restaurant business. She had been a semiprofessional tennis player, raised a family, and then decided to take up cooking as a career, attending Le Cordon Bleu to supplement her innate palate and talent with professional kitchen training. She preferred lighter food than I did, but we were still very compatible and we decided that she would come work for me as executive chef of Le Madri, becoming the latest in a long line of women culinary figures in my life.
With that hire, things felt very stable. I had Marta in the city and Mark in Long Island, and everything was firing on all cylinders.
And so, it was a bit jarring when I came home one day to find Jessie waiting for me, on the verge of tears.
“Pino, I can’t take it anymore.”
I was oblivious. What was the problem?
“I can’t go anywhere with Marco. Everywhere I go it’s dirty. Even the parks. There are syringes everywhere. I want out of here.” It was hard to argue her point: by that point in time, the crime in New York was truly out of control; there were horrific violent acts described in the tabloids and local news broadcasts every morning, and friends of ours had actually taken to walking in the middle of the street late at night for fear of being pulled into doorways and robbed, or worse.
I played the strongman for my wife. “Sure, baby, whatever you want.”
She was right: for Marco and for her, the thing to do was to get out of the city. Personally, I had no desire to leave. I had left my home twice in my life: left the country for Rome and left Rome for New York. Somehow, I had ended up in the right place, and I didn’t want to let go. But I wasn’t really letting go; I was about to enter that Jekyll-and-Hyde existence called “commuting,” in which I would act the role of the suburban dad on weekends but maintain my life in the city from Monday to Friday.
Another challenge to be met, more energy to be expended. It was all right.
And so, shortly after our daughter, Jacobella, was born in 1990, we found a very beautiful, though also very old, Tudor-style home in Rye, in leafy Westchester County, New York. It was well maintained but would need a little T.L.C. to bring it up to modern standards. Despite my busy schedule, I was excited to take it on, and I had a vision for how to make it perfect. Just like a restaurateur to choose a place that needed fixing: I guess I have to make my mark everywhere I go.