FREE OF THE Pressmans, the first order of business was to begin bringing Tuscan Square to life, but just as I was getting rolling on the massive construction phase, Bill Nimmo came to me with a proposition: the Sfuzzi chain—a nationwide group of Italian eateries, sort of an upscale Olive Garden with a Pompeii motif and Americanized food—had recently filed for bankruptcy and was on the auction block. Prudential Equity wanted to purchase Sfuzzi—fourteen restaurants including two each in New York City and the Dallas area, plus other units in Baltimore, Scottsdale, Philly, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Cleveland, Atlanta, Austin, San Diego, and Costa Mesa, California—and have me work my magic on them, converting each one into a Coco Pazzo with a less casual setting and more sophisticated food.
Their logic was sound, at least when explained in broad strokes: though the company was in dire financial straits, many of the individual restaurants did a respectable gross business—several million dollars a year in some cases—but their food costs were too high, so at the end of the day, they lost money. Food costs are one of the great barometers of a chef’s or restaurateur’s grasp of bottom-line reality and one of the things that seasoned industry professionals pride themselves on being able to control—not unlike the way chauvinists boast of controlling their wives. This was more true than ever in the mid- to late 1990s, when the growing legions of celebrity chefs managed to convince restaurant owners that the toques’ work in the kitchen was an important artistic endeavor and that the owners should consider themselves patrons of the arts, with a near-moral obligation to spend whatever it cost, not only for the best, most expensive ingredients, but also for the number of people it took to execute the very elaborate plating of them, with no regard to what they could reasonably expect to charge for the final product. The ultimate example of this is one of contemporary chefs’ favorite indulgences, foie gras (duck or goose liver), which you can charge a lot for, but which is expensive to begin with and doesn’t keep for an especially long time. (Fortunately, I’m Italian and we cook with one of the least expensive alternatives, chicken liver.) Other luxury ingredients such as caviar, truffles, sturgeon, shad roe, and soft-shell crabs create a similar quandary: they’re highly perishable and unless you charge an exorbitant price for them, opening yourself up to charges of larceny and the possibility of customer resistance, you risk making little or no money on them.
This was never an issue in my restaurants. From all the way back when I worked for my uncle, I understood how to manage a restaurant’s budget, and the food I served was straightforward enough that it would simply be unthinkable for food costs to become a problem. The key is using at least 90 percent of what you buy, and for me that was second nature because my mother never wasted anything in her kitchen; it all got used, even leftovers, which were repurposed into something new the next day, like cooking the remains of a pasta with scrambled eggs in a frittata. I’ve adapted and expanded this approach in my kitchens, milling stracotto into a sauce and offering it as rigatoni allo stracotto, for example, and almost never purchasing cuts of meat or poultry. Instead, I buy a saddle or a leg, butcher it myself, and use all the pieces. From one leg you can harvest several pounds of ground meat and stew meat, three osso bucos, two small loins, fifteen to twenty paillards, and enough top loin for a few servings of vitello tonnato. As if that weren’t economical enough, you can also use the bones to make stock.
Thanks to this philosophy, and to my secret weapon, Chester, among my peers I was known as one of the most ruthlessly efficient food-cost wranglers, bringing mine in as low as 22 or 23 percent of food revenue versus anywhere from 30 to 38 percent for most mid- to high-end places.
The other problem with Sfuzzi, it seemed, was that there was enormous corporate overhead. The infrastructure in place to run the company was overstaffed and inefficient, with no centralized purchasing or other economies of scale to balance the expense of having a corporation in the first place. This seemed simple enough to fix: just employ the kind of systems I had in New York, like my own private linen company, which had by then moved to a larger facility in Long Island City, just across the Fifty-ninth-Street Bridge.
Nevertheless, from the moment the Sfuzzi idea was first presented to me, I knew it was a bad one. In my opinion, food costs and overhead alone couldn’t explain the situation. It seemed to me that the parent company simply wasn’t earning enough to service the debt they had incurred to get the business off the ground. Plus, even if these didn’t seem like difficult problems to solve, just thinking about them turned me off. I was a restaurateur and a chef, and I had no interest in becoming a corporate leader. I liked to handle areas such as human resources myself, or turn them over to my most trusted lieutenants, such as Marta in the kitchens or Jack Weiss and a new guy, Joe Essa, who had come on board in the final days of Mad. 61 and stayed on to help me run my New York places. Beyond that, there was a reason that I had never opened restaurants in most of the cities where we’d be taking over Sfuzzis: the understanding of true Italian food took years to flow westward from New York and eastward from California. In many ways, outside of the major metropolises of America, Italian food is still misunderstood today, and there’s almost no awareness whatsoever of the different regions. People know that there are lots of sunflowers in Tuscany and that you get around Venice in a gondola, and that’s about it. In this way, Sfuzzi, with its Pompeii murals on the wall, was more user-friendly to many markets than a Coco Pazzo might ever be.
But more than that, Sfuzzi represented everything that was anathema to me: it was an artificial representation of Italy, right down to its silly name. Accordingly, many of the Sfuzzis did a huge bar business and were lapsing into something closer to lounges than restaurants. I had made my bones by committing to being 100 percent sincere in every detail of my places. Even though I owned a number of restaurants, I took great pains to keep tabs on all of them, and I was proud that I still signed off on everything, right down to the selection of silverware and napkins.
As if all those weren’t enough reasons to say no, the proposed means of financing the acquisition of Sfuzzi was to borrow six million dollars from the Tuscan Square funding, putting the project of my dreams in jeopardy. I was told that the money would be replaced by an anticipated influx of cash, but it felt like an awfully huge stack of chips to be moving around the table.
And yet, I have to be honest: despite all of these almost life-threatening misgivings, I was strangely attracted to the idea.
Why?
That is a question that I still wrestle with today, because at that moment, my life was just about perfect. I was being bankrolled by a company that put total trust and faith in me. I was the impresario behind two of the hottest restaurants in New York City, plus Sapore di Mare in East Hampton, and other places in New York and Chicago that were performing well. I was making a good living, and Jessie and I had three kids now, having welcomed our second son, Lorenzo, in 1995.
If you had told me when I arrived here in 1980, with little more to my name than a pocketful of confidence and a few pairs of creased blue jeans in my suitcase, nursing a broken heart and wanting nothing more than to get on the next plane back to Rome, if you had told me then that I would have attained this level of success in America, I . . . well, I won’t say that I would have told you that you were crazy, but I would have said that it would be a great deal. I would have signed up for that right then and there.
But I wasn’t happy, or perhaps I should say that I wasn’t content. I had moments of exhilaration, many of them. I had a driver in those days and at night I’d get into the back of my 500 Mercedes and make cell phone calls while he shuttled me from Il Toscanaccio down to Le Madri and then uptown to Coco Pazzo. I felt like a mogul sitting in the shadows of my chauffer-driven ride, and every time I made my entrance at one of the restaurants, I had that old Rick Blaine rush, the natural high of a restaurateur.
But the truth of the matter was that there was an even bigger rush for me, and that was the irreplaceable intensity of opening a new and preferably bigger restaurant. Nothing made me feel more alive—and by alive, I mean like I was on the high wire—than shepherding a new restaurant into reality.
Slowly but surely, I had become a junkie, but it was a socially acceptable, even socially celebrated type of junkie. In addition to the money, I was addicted to business deals, to expansion, and perhaps even to code-pendent relationships and drama. I’m not alone: the restaurant world is rife with ill-fated partnerships. But you’d think that after Silvano and the Pressmans and even Ian Schrager—with whom things were ongoing but less than perfect—I’d have known enough to be happy with what I had, to be content to have even just Le Madri, Coco Pazzo, and Sapore di Mare. Most restaurateurs would kill for those three restaurants. Hell, most would kill for one of them.
But not me: slowly but surely, I had developed an almost vampiric thirst for the Next Big Thing. And that thing had to be more outsized and outlandish than any that had gone before it. Tuscan Square was far from complete, and once open, it would be difficult to imagine anything bigger, so the Sfuzzi chain and its promise of adding fourteen new restaurants and scattering the Coco Pazzo name all over the nation in one fell swoop was attractive.
Nevertheless, I said no to Bill. He asked a second time, and again I said, no, and I did the same on his third pass.
The fourth time, he offered me an economic incentive that I couldn’t refuse . . . and I didn’t. I finally relented, and against all of my instincts, I said yes.
There’s a moment at the end of The Graduate: Benjamin (played by Dustin Hoffman) has just run off with Elaine Robinson. They escape from her angry family and jilted fiancé by getting on a yellow city bus and deposit themselves on a seat in the back. Her wedding dress is tattered and his face is smeared with grease. They smile at each other, but in the coming seconds, their faces go blank, empty. They don’t really know what they’ve gotten themselves into. Or maybe they do, but don’t want to admit it.
That’s the image that comes up for me when I remember agreeing to take on Sfuzzi. Because I knew way down deep that I was making a mistake. The truth was that I’d almost been too successful. I’d come to believe in my own great good luck, and if that failed, in the ability to talk or hustle my way out of anything. I had an intoxicating sense of business immortality. And so, despite my grave misgivings, I thought, “Hey, I’ll deal with the problems when they come; that always seems to work.”
There’s nothing more dangerous than a bullshitter believing his own bullshit. Despite what came out of my mouth, and what I allowed myself to believe, there was no doubt that Sfuzzi would be my undoing, that when I affixed my name to the paperwork in early 1997, I’d be signing something akin to my own death sentence.
NEXT THING I knew I was in Dallas, Texas, standing in the gallery of a courtroom with Bill and one of his associates. We weren’t there to watch a trial; we were there to bid in the auction of Sfuzzi. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied by my own growing sense of dread, I’d have found the scene funny: from the bench, the judge accepted one offer at a time. Before another group could raise the stakes, they’d huddle and confer in whispers, or ask for a recess to step outside and make cell phone calls to financial partners and attorneys.
The only thing that cheered me up was, of all people, our chief rival in the bidding: Al Copeland, also known as the Chicken King of New Orleans because he had founded the Popeyes chain. A middle-aged hillbilly playboy in shiny black boots and a huge Stetson-type hat, he exuded enough energy to power a small city, speaking his mind freely and loudly enough for everybody to hear. During a recess, I was milling around in the corridor outside the courtroom with Bill and his associate when Copeland came up to us.
“Hey, y’all,” he said. “I’m really only interested in four of these locations; why don’t we hook up and stop driving the price so high?”
I thought it sounded like a great idea, but my partners were doing the talking, and they brushed him off. It made me sad. It would have been great to get out of there and go celebrate over a few beers with the Chicken King of New Orleans.
At the end of the day, my team won, mostly because we came up with the most cash up front. But I took no pleasure in the victory, and back in New York, my apprehension was validated: once the ownership was transferred, I began receiving profit and loss reports. When you’ve been in my line of work long enough, you can read a spreadsheet the way a doctor reads a bedside chart, and as soon as those reports came rolling in through my fax machine, my eye went right to the danger signs. For example, the Vegas unit would show $300,000 gross sales for the month, but when I scanned the itemized breakdown, it became clear that about 20 percent of that was in redeemed coupons, which are not the same as cash, because the cash had been taken in months earlier, and by the corporation, not by the individual unit. The more I studied the charts, the more I gathered that Sfuzzi wasn’t a restaurant chain; it was a patient in the throes of a disease, and it was up to me to determine if the condition was fatal.
Follow-up tests were in order. I administered the first of them by visiting the two New York City locations, one in the World Financial Center, a huge downtown waterfront mall of shops and restaurants, home of the Winter Garden (a giant solarium) and, of course, neighbor to the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center; the other in the West Sixties, near Lincoln Center. My first excursion was to the one in the World Financial Center. The profits for that restaurant were actually very encouraging, so I thought it would be a way of easing myself into things.
By that time, we had moved out of the offices above Il Toscanaccio and were leasing the three floors above Le Madri to accommodate Toscorp’s growing needs: the second floor was to be Tuscan Square’s showroom, the third floor was for the accounting staff, and the top floor housed executive offices and a conference room. There was a subway station right downstairs, and I walked down and took the number 1 train to the World Financial Center, walked through the mall, and showed up anonymously for lunch at Sfuzzi.
When I set foot inside I was immediately reminded how tacky the concept was, with frescoes on the wall and chalky white pillars strewn about in a poor imitation of the architecture of Rome or Pompeii. Sfuzzi had originated in the Dallas–Fort Worth area of Texas and the food was like a bizarre cross between Wolfgang Puck and Yosemite Sam—anything-goes pizzas, salads topped with barbecue-seasoned chicken, and so on—the exact opposite of everything I had been trying to teach people about Italian food for more than a decade. There was even one of my pet peeves, angel hair pasta with seafood sauce.
But the thing that bothered me the most was that no manager was present. The busboys and waiters were doing the best they could and I watched with something approaching pity, both for them and for what I was inheriting, as they tried to get through a service with no coordination between the front of the house and the back. The time between courses was interminable, and I noticed that at tables with more than one diner, very often one person would be served his lunch while the other was kept waiting for his, which is one of the cardinal sins you can commit in any dining room. But my growing temper wasn’t trained on the poor souls doing the work; it was focused on the absentee managers. It wasn’t the orchestra’s fault that they had no conductor.
Toward the end of my meal, a swift-walking young guy with soap-opera good looks, wearing a dark suit with pointy lapels, walked up to the podium, spun the reservation book around, and, while reviewing it, found about three reasons to lay his hands on the hostess, a frizzy-headed young thing who didn’t seem to mind in the least. He was the prototypical low-rent general manager: all strut, no stuff. The fact that he was clearly either sleeping with or on his way to sleeping with the hostess only solidified the cliché. And his obliviousness to the disarray on the service floor spoke volumes to me; a man like this would not be hired by anyone who knew how to run a restaurant. It’s not uncommon for restaurants to treat lunch as a there-for-the-taking enterprise, figuring expectations are lower than at dinner and many diners are simply looking to fuel up for an afternoon at their offices. This might sustain a business for years, but it doesn’t engender loyalty; customers who know you this way will abandon you the moment a better option presents itself. To me a paying customer was a paying customer and lunch should be treated with the same respect as dinner.
I wiped my mouth, calmly and methodically folded my napkin, and walked across the dining room as the manager and the hostess stood giggling away. As I got closer and closer, I felt like the shark in Jaws, about to devour two unsuspecting and frolicking young lovers.
“Excuse me. You’re the general manager, right?” I asked.
He turned around. They suppressed their giggles and he addressed me, “Yes, sir. How can I help you?”
“I’m Pino Luongo, the new owner of this restaurant.”
The laughter stopped. He shushed the hostess.
“Oh, Mr. Luongo, of course. Great to meet you.” Then, as the realization dawned on him, he squinted: “Were you . . . were you in for lunch?”
“Yeah, I was,” I said. “Let me ask you something: you always show up to work at two thirty in the afternoon?”
“No,” he said. “I had an emergency to take care of.”
Cupping her hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh, the hostess walked away quickly. He shot her a cross look, as though he’d have been putting one over on me if she hadn’t blown his cover. It was then that I realized that I actually needed a human resources department after all, if only as a buffer, because my instinct was to wrap my hands around this guy’s neck and strangle him. And I don’t mean that in a figurative way: I actually wanted to kill him.
The guy gave me a quick tour of the dining room and then excused himself to go to his office. I had the distinct impression that he had hurried off to circulate an internal e-mail, warning his fellow employees: “Caesar has arrived in Pompeii!”
I spent the next several hours sitting at the bar and watching the afternoon unfold. It was some of the most shameless thievery I had ever witnessed in my life. The workers from the lunch shift stuck around while those from the evening shift showed up at three o’clock, a good hour or two earlier than was common, and clocked in, then all these people stood around talking and working at a snail’s pace, milking the company for thousands of dollars during the restaurant’s dead time between meals. By the time I left, my blood was boiling. I’d usually have taken the subway back to my office at that hour, but I needed to get above ground for some fresh air.
My experience at the Sfuzzi near Lincoln Center was almost identical, from the décor to the service to the food and the late-arriving GM.
All I really wanted to do was focus on Tuscan Square, but these two units alone forced me to devote a lot of attention to starting the Sfuzzi conversions. Because the World Financial Center location was making money despite the manager’s best efforts to the contrary, I made the Lincoln Center spot a priority. I actually loved the location and saw a huge potential for pre- and post-theater and opera dining. I decided that it would be renamed Coco Pazzo Opera. I was so bullish on its promise that I thought perhaps we’d spend some money and really rebuild the design from scratch. Before doing that, though, I wanted to be sure we could remain there for a good, long while to recoup the investment, so I approached the landlord to see if we could extend the lease. He came back and revealed that it actually included a demolition clause, meaning that he could kick us out with six months’ notice if he wanted to demolish the building for any reason. In a shocking move by New York City standards, he actually gave me a piece of friendly advice—“Don’t do it”—the implication being that he was planning to bring in the wrecking ball at some point.
I was trying to muster some enthusiasm, but at every turn I was met by an impediment. Finally, I came up with a very simple plan for recasting these places as scaled-down, moderately priced Coco Pazzos, something between the original one on the Upper East Side and the Coco Pazzo Cafe in Chicago. Working with my team, I devised a basic design philosophy that could be transmitted across all the units, along with a mandate of seasonal cuisine that could be adapted by the chefs at the individual locations, some of whom we’d keep and some of whom we’d have to replace. We also made a calculated business decision to not overhaul all the restaurants. In hopes of ditching a few of them, I phoned up Al Copeland, the Chicken King of New Orleans, the one who had brought a smile to my face back in Dallas, and asked if he wanted to buy the units he had originally wanted.
He cut me off quickly: “Don’t even tell me the price. I know what you paid for them and you’re not going to sell them to me for less.” Then, after a pause, he shamelessly and charmingly added, “Are you?”
I wasn’t prepared to do that, but as none of the promised replacement funds had materialized for Tuscan Square, we would end up selling off the restaurant in Atlanta, even though we’d spent the money to turn it into a Coco Pazzo, for a quick and necessary infusion of cash.
That’s the problem with being a restaurant junkie: you end up like any other kind of junkie, doing whatever you have to in order to survive from one day to the next.
I TRIED NOT to let these gathering clouds overshadow my excitement and enthusiasm for Tuscan Square. As I had come to see it, this new project would be the ultimate expression of my nostalgia for home, a nostalgia that had sifted out the ordinary and unpleasant: every summer’s day in Tuscany was sunny, but not too hot; every autumn afternoon was cold enough to let you see your breath, but not enough to produce a shiver; every meal was an occasion, something to be remembered fondly.
By the same token, I often explained my vision for the retail component of Tuscan Square using imagined people to help bring it to life: the clothing line was summed up by a Tuscan gentleman I envisioned, a dashing man in his forties who lived in the old city of Florence. Because the countryside was just a stone’s throw away, his look was both cosmopolitan, expressed in the quality of the fabrics he wore, and country, demonstrated by a certain degree of informality. This guy might wear a filo di cotone cotton shirt, a chocolate brown vest, a corduroy jacket inspired by the boar-hunting season, with 1920s-style side pockets for his cartridges, and heavy slacks cut wide at the bottom to make way for his boots. I would never compare myself to Ralph Lauren, but in many ways he was my inspiration: I wanted to create a Tuscan wardrobe not unlike his idealized vision of American style.
My goals for the kitchenware and tableware were inspired by the same notion of city and country, antique and modern, with everything from classic pewter tabletop items to stylized, contemporary flourishes like you might see in a modern restaurant. In addition to the clothes and the housewares, there would be a wide range of merchandise that reflected the artisan traditions of Tuscany, from hand-blown glassware to leather-bound agendas and diaries that showed off the exquisite paper-work of the region.
Was all of this a bit over the top? Of course it was. But in the time in which I was operating, it seemed right at home. There was so much cash around in the 1990s, surely there’d be no limit to the number of customers willing to spend heaps of money on food and furnishings. And the taste for all things Tuscan was exploding as well, not just because of my restaurants, but also because of the others that had sprung up in the almost fifteen years since Il Cantinori had debuted, and because of books like Under the Tuscan Sun. In keeping with the times, it wasn’t just one store I envisioned, but many. I saw Tuscan Squares in other big cities like Boston and Los Angeles, and maybe even in certain affluent suburbs.
As the construction proceeded and I watched the place come to life, it was almost enough to make me forget my Sfuzzi woes. There was just one nagging concern: whenever I left the premises and stepped outside, I’d look to my right and see thousands of people coursing down Fifth Avenue, but almost none of them turned onto Fifty-first Street. I’d never really thought about it before, but Rockefeller Center is like its own little enclave in the heart of Midtown and you just didn’t venture within without a purpose. I began to wonder if foot traffic, the lifeblood of most retail operations, would be a challenge for us.
In addition to the enormous construction job, I had to generate an entire retail line from scratch. I assembled a team of friends and consultants to help me put out feelers all over Italy, mostly in Tuscany, and find all those artisanal products we’d need. My man on the ground overseas was Marta’s husband at the time, Gianni Salvaterra, an Italy-based restaurant and lifestyle consultant who I hired to canvass Tuscany, make first contact with vendors whose wares he thought I might respond to, and set an itinerary for me when I would go over on buying trips. He produced a dizzying schedule for the first one, in April 1997, arranging face-to-face meetings with about forty-five companies in two weeks. I asked a good friend of mine, Gary Wolkowitz—the president of Hot Sox, who had impeccable taste and a house in Chianti—to travel with me and serve as my American alter-ego, offering feedback on what he thought people would best respond to here.
It was rare to spend two weeks back home. I made some time to visit my parents and my siblings, but for the most part all we did was travel up and down the corridor from Florence to Siena to Pisa to Lucca, meeting with artisans to see what distinguished each one’s products from the others and to select and contract for Tuscan Square exclusives, negotiating terms and telling them how, if at all, we wanted things altered.
The range of products we discovered was breathtaking: blankets, throws, and runners made from exquisite baroque fabrics; antique-looking pewter tabletop items; soaps, candles, and fragrances made with basil, lavender, and sage; a dozen different lines of glassware; terra-cotta plates, bowls, and mugs; and Casentino wool apparel, made from a cooked, singularly curly wool and named for the area to the south of Florence where it’s produced.
Tuscany was becoming one huge cottage industry for us as business owners referred us to others they knew. Sometimes I would just stumble upon something and find out how to get it, like the day I dropped into a collectible arts store in Florence and saw resin chargers (underplates) that suspended herbs and leaves within a plastic casing. I thought they were the ultimate expression of seasonality at the table, and I became obsessed with having them for myself. I asked around town like a private eye. Finally, the clerk in a neighboring store told me that the family who produced these plates lived fifty kilometers west of the city. He didn’t know the name or address, but in the countryside, you often don’t need those details: “You go past the train tracks and there’s a little industrial development. They live there,” he told me.
The next day I drove myself out to the town and after some more asking around, found the father. When I told him I was from New York, he looked at me with extreme skepticism, but I began telling him my story and he eventually invited me into his shop and demonstrated his technique: he heated the resin and poured it into the bottom plate of a mold of an oversized dish. When it dried and hardened, he created a collage of wheat on its surface. He then poured molten resin over it, and let it cool so that the wheat was suspended within the charger. It was fascinating.
We sat down and began talking business. I told him I wanted hundreds of chargers of fall leaves, representing autumn, and green spring wheat, and golden wheat, which stood for summer. I also wanted marine-themed chargers, a nod to my love of the beach. He was hesitant about this, telling me that he’d have to forage for the shells, starfish, and pebbles himself, but he agreed to do it. Meeting him, and countless others like him, was a look into a creative aspect of Tuscan life that I had always admired but had never experienced at the source. As we got a close-up look into the lives of the often very humble artisans who made all of these products, and saw their painstaking craft, I felt enormous pride in where I came from, and couldn’t wait to share it all with the city of New York.
I’D COME BACK from these exhilarating trips, and by the following morning, Tuscany would seem like as much of a long-lost dream as it had when I had first arrived in the United States. As my own little Tuscany was coming together in Rockefeller Center, I’d be constantly pulled away to focus on sprucing up Sfuzzi. I gave it my best shot under the circumstances, but there was simply no joy in it, so I turned to two of my most trusted employees, Jack Weiss and Joe Essa, assigning Joe to everything east of the Mississippi and Jack to everything west, and sent them on their way to kick some ass and whip the restaurants into shape. I tried to confine myself to isolated spot visits to sign off on places before they re-launched with my quickly diluting Coco Pazzo name on the door, and I brought the chefs to New York, one by one, to work with me and Marta in a kind of culinary boot camp, giving them a ten- to fourteen-day crash course in how to cook real Italian food—not that they, or their customers, were really all that interested.
Adding to the stress of the situation was the fact that the $6.1 million we’d borrowed from the Tuscan Square funding to finance the purchase of Sfuzzi still hadn’t been replaced by the promised influx of cash. As a result, in order to keep Tuscan Square on track, we’d had to secure three new loans, with the attendant interest, over the first half of 1997.
By May, addressing the most urgent units in order, we had converted five of the restaurants: the two in New York and the ones in Dallas and Addison, Texas; and the sold-off one in Atlanta. Fewer than half. (Under a separate deal with the landlord who had taken it over, we had also converted a former Sfuzzi in Union Station in Washington, D.C.) The work seemed without end, and the more Sfuzzis I visited, the more uphill the struggle became. No matter where I went, I realized that the various units were each operating independently, a chef doing his own thing with a malfunctioning support structure. I began to feel like the Martin Sheen character in Apocalypse Now, winding his way along that Vietnamese river and encountering ever-stranger sub-communities and soldiers gone renegade. It never occurred to me that I might be identifying with the wrong guy from Apocalypse; maybe by the time it was all over, I’d be more like the demented Marlon Brando character, Colonel Kurtz, sitting in that dark room, muttering nonsense and waiting for somebody to put him out of his misery.
MEANWHILE AT TUSCAN Square, Marta and I collaborated on the menu. All the memories unlocked by the buying trips put me in mind of home cooking, and we made our theme the rediscovery of the less well-known home-cooked dishes of Tuscany, such as ricotta and chicken meatballs (polpette), pappardelle al pepolino (a long, broad pasta with summer tomato sauce, pecorino cheese, and oregano), calamari in zimino (squid in spinach and tomato stew), strozzapreti (“strangled priest” pasta, so named because if you eat them too fast you might choke on them) with butter and sage, and fritto misto di coniglio e carciofi, a Tuscan fried rabbit and artichoke classic. Because the lower level was right on the underground concourse of Rockefeller Center, where office workers breezed past on their way from the subway to the elevator in the mornings, we’d be serving breakfast at the espresso bar, and so for the first time in ages, I found myself thinking of one of the quintessential Tuscan breakfast indulgences, bomboloni, or Tuscan doughnuts, lightly fried and sugared and filled with either pastry cream (bomboloni con la crema) or chocolate (bomboloni con cioccolato). As a boy, I had eaten them on the beach in the summertime, and I decided that we’d make bomboloni at Tuscan Square as well.
By the late summer, all of those products were rolling in from overseas and we were having a ball dressing the retail department, which had swelled from an initial goal of about one hundred fifty different items to more than five hundred, with each collection evocatively displayed: runners and throws were draped over chairs and settees; fragrances and soaps made from herbs and olive oil were artfully arranged on a sixteen-foot eighteenth-century Tuscan credenza; several lines of pewter, dinnerware, and glassware were presented on tables or shelves; the apparel, evoking weekends in Tuscany, with suede pants, cashmere sweaters, and coats, dressed an old-fashioned mannequin; a small library featured travel books and journals. There were even chairs, couches, credenzas, and armoires for sale, all that one could ever want to bring a little Tuscany into his or her life.
There was just one thing missing, and I had to have it: I located a company in California that knew how to install something I’d wanted in one of my restaurants since Il Cantinori: a cypress tree. They created a concrete trunk that began at the foot of the staircase on the concourse level and shot up along the stairs and up to the ceiling of the main-floor dining room, and adorned it with real cypress branches. The cost for this touch was twenty-six thousand dollars, and I thought it was worth every penny.
Tuscan Square had a soft opening on September 16, 1997. My publicist, David Kratz, whose larger firm had replaced my friend Susan, pulled off a minor miracle by getting the city to allow us to shut down part of Fifty-first Street so we could really go to town with our Florentine marketplace theme. We laid sod over the sidewalk and the street, brought in trees and rocks, and erected a platform stage for live music. As much as a city street could, it felt like the Tuscan countryside.
There were more than four hundred fifty guests, and they were positively blown away by the merchandise and the food. The purpose of the party was to generate press, and it succeeded magnificently with articles in the New York Times, New York magazine, and elsewhere. In the subsequent days, we hosted some friends-and-family dinners to get the kinks out, then we opened on—you guessed it—September 23. Though I still had opening-night jitters before every restaurant launch, Tuscan Square began with the same big crowds as my last few places had, and my team held up to the stresses magnificently.
It was one of the high points of my career up to that point, so much so that it was nearly impossible to imagine what might top it. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but that also meant that the only direction for me to go was down.
MY JUBILATION WAS interrupted when I opened the New York Times on October 10 and read the “Diner’s Journal” column penned by restaurant critic Ruth Reichl. In it, she said that Tuscan Square seemed “not very Tuscan,” referred to the “sheer stupidity” of the silk aprons we sold, and concluded by considering whether she’d prefer to eat in a restaurant or a theme park. I was royally offended by the idea that somebody who had spent years celebrating a restaurant machine like Wolfgang Puck on the West Coast before she came to New York could refer to what I did as a theme park. (Furthering my sense of a double standard was the fact that she’d given Churrascaria Plataforma, an all-you-can-eat Brazilian rodizio complete with rolling capirinha carts, two stars earlier that year, and would go on to give Ruby Foo’s, a highly stylized, vaguely “Asian” restaurant that combined Chinese and Japanese food in a dining room that was pure theme, two stars as well.)
Other critics would follow suit, offering similar opinions. A number of critics responded to Tuscan Square as though it were the Disney World or Epcot Center of Tuscany. We were so well received by our customers that I was a bit shocked by the cool critical reception. I was getting that old, familiar feeling again, the sense that colleagues and industry observers were trying to keep me down, that my ambitions to expand beyond the cubbyhole of a restaurateur and become a retailer were somehow out of line. I’ll never forget the day that a well-known culinary travel writer was strolling the retail area when she caught sight of the soaps and candles and exclaimed, for all to hear, “Oh, my God! Who could have lunch with soaps?” Of course, she wasn’t going to be having lunch with soaps, the fragrances of which can confuse the palate; she was going to be escorted to the separate dining area and served lunch there, well out of range of the scents that so offended her. I guess she’d never been to some of the great department stores of London, such as Fortnum and Mason, where you can have tea or a meal almost within arm’s reach of a box of soap or perfume.
This was not an isolated opinion, though. For whatever reason, the consensus among journalists seemed to be that Tuscan Square was a gimmick, but for me a gimmick is something that’s shallow or lacks depth. I guess the reviewers wanted me to be a plagiarist. I have nothing against Keith McNally—in fact, I like the guy, and I think that Bal-thazar is a magnificent masterpiece of a restaurant. But at the end of the day, what is it, really, other than a near-copy of places that already exist? It would have been a breeze for me to find a little square in Portofino, or even take the Piazza della Repubblica itself, and just recreate little pieces of it in a big Manhattan space. It would have been the easiest thing in the world.
I’m sure I probably sound defensive, but I truly believe that while it was fine for me to be the Little Busboy Who Could, and open Il Can-tinori, even Le Madri, this level of audacity was too much for some people. How else to explain that while Reichl had no problem giving a lovely review to Mad. 61, in the middle of an actual department store, she suddenly found the proximity to retail offensive?
Despite all the resistance, Tuscan Square did pretty well, especially the restaurant, and we did about $6 to $6.5 million of business annually for our first few years, against a projection of about $8 million. I kept thinking that if we were just a few yards to the east, on the corner of Fifth Avenue, we’d have exceeded that by a mile.
Meanwhile, my new Coco Pazzos were not generating the amount per unit needed according to the projection to sustain the debt obligation to the lender. By June 1998, we had to sell Coco Addison, followed a few months later by Coco Dallas. There were nine of the former Sfuzzis left, plus eight of my own restaurants, but other closures would soon follow. The corporation was sick and we were amputating limbs, trying to prevent the infection from spreading.
The funny thing is that I probably could have made those restaurants profitable and earned a lot of money for me and my partners. It would have been very easy actually: take what I knew about consistency and service, add in my ruthlessly efficient approach to food costs, dress the servers in T.G.I. Friday’s–type uniforms, and serve Italian-American food. I could have just called the chain Pino’s, and we would all have been rolling in dough.
So why didn’t I just do that?
Because until just now, as I was recounting all of this, the idea never entered my mind.
BY THE FALL of 2000, I was despondent. Whatever pleasure I had taken in Tuscan Square and my original places in New York City and Chicago was overtaken by the day-to-day grind of administering the half-dozen or so remaining Cocos, which were slowly but surely driving me pazzo, not just because of the thankless task of overseeing them, but because they were dragging me down into a quicksand of mediocrity. It felt like every time I picked up a newspaper food section or a magazine somebody was taking a potshot at my restaurant chain, and the worst part about it was that they were right. People had said a lot of things about me over the years, some true and some false, but nobody had ever called me mediocre. I was mortified, and I was driven deeper and deeper into despair. For the first time since I had moved to New York, I found myself wandering the streets again. Even though I had a handful of restaurants and an enormous retail store, I felt like I had nowhere to go.
On one of these walks, I ran into a friend of mine on the Upper East Side. I tried to put on a good face, but he was perceptive and realized that I was in hell. We got to talking and he determined that I was depressed and offered me the phone number of a psychiatrist he knew. I was skeptical, but I made an appointment.
The shrink’s office was a shabby two-room affair on the ground floor of a prewar apartment building. The doctor was a shlubby, chubby, middle-aged guy who carried himself as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. He led me into his private room and I took a seat and started talking, recounting my saga of the past few years. At one point, as the enormity of my situation washed over me, I stopped for a moment and looked off into the distance. He picked up a box of Kleenex and held it out to me.
It was like having a bucket of cold water splashed in my face.
“What is that?” I asked him.
“It’s OK to cry here,” he said.
A grown man holding out a box of Kleenex to me was an insult, but a useful one, because it made me feel ashamed. I wondered what I was doing there. Was I not the same man who had managed to overcome the handicap of showing up in the United States with little money and even less English? Who had built a restaurant group out of thin air? Was I not the grandson of the great fisherman Ettore, who had known torture? I thought again of The Godfather and of Don Cor-leone shaking the crooner Johnny Fontaine by the shoulders, slapping him and saying, “You can act like a man!”
“You know what,” I said. “I’ll be very honest with you. I feel bad. But sitting here, it makes me feel worse. Send me a bill. I’m leaving.”
I stormed out and into the street. It was a perfect fall day, not unlike the one, almost exactly twenty years earlier to the day, when I had wandered around the Financial District marveling at the sights and sounds of New York. I breathed in the fresh air and looked around. I was only a few blocks from where I had started my long march down to Da Silvano all those years ago (and, a few years later, the walk to Il Cantinori) on which I had decided to stay in the United States.
I had come through so much, I told myself; surely I could survive this.
I hailed a taxi and went back down to my office and got to work solving my problems.
AFTER MUCH SOUL searching, I decided to do something counterintuitive: open yet another restaurant. I needed to flex my entrepreneurial muscle with something fresh and creative, to prove that the Chain Formerly Known as Sfuzzi was one giant abomination, and that the real me was still here, still able to create a great new restaurant. This wasn’t about recapturing that old, addictive rush; it was about pride. I had to show people that I still had it. Most of all, I had to show myself that all wasn’t lost, that the thing that had defined my life in the United States was still there and functioning.
The concept I had in mind was radically different from anything I’d done before. Having re-created, as much as I thought possible, a little corner of Tuscany in Rockefeller Center, I found myself thinking fondly of my own first days here in the United States, my affection for the immigrant experience of America. As with Sapore, I was reminded of a song, about a young boy asking his mother for centolire, one hundred lire, so he can go to America. I was sometimes critical of the Italian-American culture, especially when I first got to the United States. But after so long here, I realized that there was much about it I could identify with, especially the core truth of what America meant to me. I decided that my new place would be called Centolire, and would celebrate Italian-American culture.
I wanted to get back to the Upper East Side, and when the space that housed Celadon, a handsome but failing neighborhood restaurant on Madison Avenue, became available, I pounced. I loved the space, especially the glass elevator available to shuttle guests from the small first floor to the spacious, rectangular second floor. The deal was so sweet that I was able to move on my own, without my corporation attached to my hip, and make this truly my own venture. I signed the lease just before the New Year. As we left 2000 behind, I had the feeling that 2001 might be the year that I turned it all around.
I OPENED CENTOLIRE in March 2001, with illustrations on the menus of cruise ships bound for America, and food divided into New World dishes such as chicken scarpariello (chicken breast braised in an aromatic liquid of white wine and broth) and spaghetti and meatballs and Old World dishes such as spaghetti alla rustica and pollo martini (parmesan-crusted chicken breast with lemon sauce). The approach to naming the dishes was consistent with our Old Word versus New World inspiration: using “chicken” for the scarpariello because that’s how Italian-Americans refer to it (many Italian-American creations pair Italian and English words), and pollo for the martini because that’s what it’s called in the motherland.
For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, I was excited about a new restaurant opening. I had Marta in the kitchen and two of my most reliable front-of-the-house guys on the floor: Ariel and Gianfranco. We were all a bit older than we used to be, but it was just like old times, especially when a lot of my longtime customers from the original Coco Pazzo found their way over, welcoming me back, welcoming me home.
He wouldn’t get around to reviewing us for a while, but when he finally did, the New York Times critic William Grimes made my day, recounting my roller-coaster ride in America:
When Pino Luongo burst on the New York scene nearly 20 years ago with Il Cantinori, he looked like a culinary Pavarotti in the making. His restaurants, by combining high quality with flashy presentation, put sizzle back in the steak Florentine. Italian food seemed exciting again. Il Cantinori begat Le Madri, which begat assorted Coco Paz-zos, and before long, Mr. Luongo was running neck and neck with Mario Perillo for the title of Mr. Italy.
Success led to mediocrity. Lately, Mr. Luongo has seemed more interested in cashing in than doing the hard work of preparing
good food. This dubious track only adds to the appeal of Centolire, a surprise return to form by Mr. Luongo. The restaurant,
in the two-level space that once belonged to Celadon, is a large, good-looking tratto-ria with a warm, beating heart. The
food, doled out in substantial portions, is honest, well executed and deeply satisfying. Mr. Luongo is once again hitting
his high C’s.
It was an honest summation of my life in the restaurant trade to date, except for one thing: I hadn’t “cashed in”; I was out of cash, or at least my company was. The same month I opened Centolire, we closed Coco Opera. (The landlord had decided to exercise his demolition clause, and we had to vacate.) Soon thereafter, after trying to salvage it as a Coco Pazzo Cafe, we shuttered Il Toscanaccio. Tuscan Square was still underperforming and so were the various restaurants around the country. I was in a state of perpetual regret: how could I have made such a poor decision by taking all of this on? Adding irony to the state of affairs was the fact that all of my original restaurants, Le Madri, the original Coco Pazzo, and the Coco Pazzos in Chicago, were still doing great. But it was never enough. It wasn’t that we couldn’t pay our vendors, it was that we were in a kind of quicksand: no matter how well we did, we couldn’t make our payments to the lender. The debt seemed more and more insurmountable every day, and we wanted to negotiate new and more reasonable terms.
I consulted with some attorneys and accountants and concluded that the only way out was to have Toscorp file for bankruptcy, which would allow us to restructure the corporation and separate out my original restaurants. I was resistant at first. Back in Italy, filing for bankruptcy was something shameful that called your personal honor into question. It meant that you’d be stiffing people for their bills and throwing in the towel on your business. One of Toscorp’s attorneys showed me a little tough love when he pulled me aside and said, “Kid, you ain’t in Italy anymore. This is America. It’s just a business solution.”
And so, on August 23, 2001, we held a board meeting and decided to file for Chapter 11, to refinance the corporate funding, and to reconstruct the ownership, all with the goal of protecting its most vital aspects in New York City and Chicago, the barely beating heart of this huge and dying beast.
It wasn’t the end of my problems. We still had units in Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Austin, and Costa Mesa. We also still had Coco Marina in downtown New York, in the World Financial Center, which was perhaps the only one of the former Sfuzzis turning a respectable profit.
Of course, I couldn’t know it at the time, but that one would be gone in less than two weeks, as well.