How do you get a table at a notoriously overcrowded New York restaurant? Bribe the maitre d’.
You might try it next time you’re clamoring to get into Mario Batali’s perennial Greenwich Village hot spot Babbo, where co-owner Joe Bastianich admits his longtime maitre d’, John, is on the take.
According to Bastianich, they all are. It’s part of the job description.
“They get paid a salary, but then there’s the palm variable. A 50-dollar bill might get you noticed. Depending on the restaurant, they might even take a 20. For an Upper East Side rip-off joint or a busy Midtown steakhouse a hundie should get you in the game, but it’s just as likely that if they don’t know you, they’re going to think you’re a d-----bag,” writes Bastianich in his juicy new memoir, “Restaurant Man,” out Tuesday.
“It’s not about the cash flash, it’s all about the implicit value of your relationship. People send thank-you notes to the maitre d’ — not even thank-you notes but cash-value surrender trade.”
The book reveals the secrets of the restaurant empire Bastianich started with chef-partner Batali — which also includes Lupa, Esca, Otto, Del Posto and the juggernaut that is Eataly. It’s a behind-the-scenes look at how it runs, who their friends are, who their enemies are — and what cheap bastards they are.
“Ultimately, Restaurant Man’s job is to stop the people who want to f--k him from f--king him,” he writes of an owner’s life. “It’s a nickel-and-dime business, and you make dollars by accumulating nickels.”
He and Batali “block out the prime-time tables.” They’re the ultimate gate keepers:
“There’s no master plan — the rules are that we reward people who are good to the restaurant . . . There are a lot of famous, cool people who are total a--holes and are not restaurant-centric. They don’t get in.”
Fashionistas, for one, “suck.”
On the other hand, the maitre d’ at Babbo always has a table for “great customer” Bill Clinton.
AP
Bastianich recalls one night during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, when the gregarious Clinton loudly tells an off-color joke involving lesbians and Jerry Brown within earshot of journalists, even though Bastianich tries to warn him. The story goes viral the next day.
The restaurateur observes: “The ex-president is always funny, but he appears to have a hard time with any sort of self-governance. Like it seems that he is always trying to watch his weight, but when it’s time to order, he goes nuts on the menu.”
Wiseguys are also good customers — though they prefer the duo’s more opulent Del Posto on Tenth Avenue. They’re interested in the food. And they make friends with the staff: “There’s one group that’ll come in with the roll of hundies — a hundred to the coat-check girl, a hundred to every hostess, a hundred for the maitre d’, a hundred to the bartender, a hundred to the barback, a hundred to the piano player, and suddenly our piano player, Fat Tony Monte, turns on a dime and puts the brakes on the Sondheim mid-f--king measure and starts twirling tarantellas like he was working Don Corleone’s wedding reception.”
Bastianich is a shrewd businessman who grew up in the industry. His mother, Lidia, and father, Felice, ran two restaurants in Queens, Buonavia and Villa Seconda, before opening Manhattan’s acclaimed Felidia in 1981.
Much to a young Bastianich’s mortification, his grandmother was known to water her garden in her bra, the cigarette machine in his parents’ Queens restaurant was filled with black-market smokes and the neighborhood kids called him “Bus Head” thanks to the polyester uniform he’s forced to wear busing tables at Villa Seconda.
Like most kids of immigrants, he wants to get far, far away from his Queens roots, trying on a series of personas — Deadhead, Guido, preppy, Wall Street player — until he ultimately settles on Restaurant Man. He can’t escape it. It’s in his DNA.
“Being Restaurant Man means being there in the morning. It’s a drag — you closed late the night before, you were probably drinking too much and trying to lay the coat-check girl — but you have to shake it off and start all over again. You sip your espresso at the bar, maybe have a little Fernet-Branca to kill the hangover, and take a look at what happened the previous night.”
He marks booze bottles to see what his staff was up to the night before. He routinely checks the bartender’s tip jar “because that’s where they leave evidence — blow, money, theft, phone numbers.” He methodically inspects the restrooms, replacing all toilet seats on a monthly basis: “My father drilled this into my head from the time I was 6 years old. He used to say, ‘We don’t run this place like a f--king Chinese restaurant.’ ”
Though his mother would gain culinary fame, it was his father who was the original Restaurant Man. And, like his dad, he’s obsessed with the cost of restaurant linens, relying on those square paper napkins you find on bars — or “bev naps,” in restaurant parlance — because they’re free: “When the staff is eating, I make them use the bev naps. I take them home and make my family use them at dinner. I clean the windshield of my truck with them.”
He opens his first restaurant, Becco, in 1993, where he has the great idea of selling $6 bottles of wine for $15 — even though he admits he could get $18, the usual three-times markup. He figures he’ll make the difference on volume. He’s right.
Like any good Restaurant Man, he’s nothing but pragmatic: “So what if people thought I had a schleppy Italian place in the cheesy Theater District? So what if . . . I was humping it out with Mary Schleneggen from Morristown and Bobby Lipshitz from Larchmont — they wanted to get to the theater and they didn’t want to have to spend a lot to get a great meal.”
But bigger things were in store for Bastianich. In 1995 mama Lidia — “my matchmaking Italian yenta of a mother” — introduces him to Batali, then chef of the white-hot Po. He admits to being a tad jealous at first:
“I had the Midtown Theater District restaurant that was kind of square, and he had the hipper, downtown West Village restaurant that cool people went to.”
Yet they become friends — hitting the town late-night with “Tom Colicchio when he still had hair,” hanging out with strippers and checking out after-hours clubs. Batali and Bastianich would go on to open Babbo in June 1998, on Waverly Place in the former Coach House restaurant.
Christopher Sadowski
It was a game-changer: There was no veal parm on the menu, just the deliciously far-out culinary inventions of Batali. And there was music — LOUD rock and roll. Ruth Reichl gave it three stars. (Though Bastianich admits that since “Restaurant Man also trades in intelligence . . . we planted a few of our friends next to her . . . [to] order everything on the menu and ooh and aah.”)
But for all of his bashing of the old Italian restaurant rules, Batali, like Bastianich, isn’t above making money: “What really distinguishes Mario is that as much as he’s about the art and doing it for the love of it and doing it right, he won’t do anything unless it makes money,” writes Bastianich.
“[Batali] is famous for policing the garbage — if you throw it out, you can’t sell it. We’re two cheap f--ks from way back. He’s a genius at being showy but not spendy. Show is free — baby carrots cost three times as much as big carrots, but if you carve big carrots down to look like baby carrots, it’s the same thing.”
Another cash saver is to forgo the tradition known as “Friends and Family,” the trial run a restaurant hosts prior to an official opening: “It might as well be referred to as ‘enemies and detractors,’ because no matter how much you like these people or think you value their sagacity when it comes to your food, the second they start eating for free and offering opinions, you realize how much you’d rather just line them up in the street and shoot them in the f--king head . . . I’m all about rehearsing on paying customers these days.”
Hey, it works. Bastianich’s partnership with Batali has produced a series of restaurants that have become NYC institutions. But there were bumps along the way.
He admits to the initial disaster that was Del Posto “where something was always burning.” The restaurant took five years to evolve into the city’s first four-star Italian restaurant thanks to a 2010 re-review from Times critic Sam Sifton: “We laid it out there. Baited him, put the word out in the market to his friends. We played the game. That’s how it gets done. You can’t cheat. Either you’ve got it or you don’t. But if you want a four-star review, you’ve got to go out and tell those people that you’re a four-restaurant.”
Bastianich also has some good old-fashioned vendettas to settle. He calls chef Pino Luongo “a withering d-----bag.” Le Cirque’s Sirio Maccioni is a Restaurant Man “facing oblivion.” San Domenico’s Tony May is “a great Restaurant Man, but enough is enough. Take your wife to Positano.” Hospitality maverick Danny Meyer, whom he respects, “single-handedly spread this cancer of a five-day workweek through our industry.” (There’s no mention of the tip-skimming class-action lawsuit against Bastianich and his partners, which was settled last month when his company agreed to a $5.25 million payout.)
Perhaps you may recall that Mario Batali came out in support of the OWS crowd. What a hypocrite. Think he might be a 1 percenter?
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