A Writer's Life (57 page)

Food fortunes were being made throughout the 1980s and 1990s not only in New York but around the nation under the personalized leadership of several other “mogul chefs,” among them Wolfgang Puck of Los Angeles, Paul Prudhomme of New Orleans, and Charlie Trotter of Chicago. The average American citizen was now eating out about four
times a week, and such magnetic New York chefs as Charlie Palmer and Jean-Georges Vongerichten were individually attracting so many customers that each man was prompted to create four separate menus and advise the cooking in four different restaurants under their aegis—contributing to the numerical growth of full-service restaurants in New York from thirteen thousand in the 1980s to seventeen thousand in the 1990s, with a comparable increase nationwide. But as I continued to gather information about the restaurant industry, I kept wondering why, amid so much prosperity and growth and the public's ever-expanding embrace of restaurants as a nightly necessity, there was only continuing disappointment and instability in the restaurants that I was patronizing at 206 East 63rd Street.

What was wrong here? Was this site jinxed, as I had been told by Nicola Spagnolo? Was the ouster by Tucci's ownership of its chef, Cliff Pereira, merely the latest example of the flawed managerial judgment peculiar to this locale that might be called a restaurateurs' graveyard and the catacombs for short-term cooks? I was aware that most of the proprietors and managers of these ephemeral restaurants at 206 East 63rd Street had functioned successfully for long periods of time in other locations, and there was nothing in the outward appearance of this street that would suggest it was unwise to invest here. The building 206 was on the south side of East Sixty-third, just a few doors east of the heavy pedestrian traffic that flowed along Third Avenue, and down the street from Tucci, closer to Second Avenue, was the Bravo Gianni restaurant, which had so far prospered at 230 East 63rd for more than a dozen years, having opened in 1983. Moreover, these two restaurants were the only public dining establishments open for business on Sixty-third Street between Second and Third avenues, which was, in turn, a densely populated residential area lined with high-rises occupied by thousands of potential customers who, it seemed to me, could by themselves sustain the existence of at least half a dozen restaurants on this street alone.

But insofar as 206 East 63rd was concerned, the site was seemingly haunted. Yet I knew from my research that the particular location of a restaurant was irrelevant to the issue of its survival—witness the success of Elaine's. Even more inconvenient than Elaine's, as I mentioned earlier, is Rao's restaurant on 114th Street near the East River, but masses of people nevertheless spend large sums on taxis and limos in order to dine at this small Italian spot that has existed in East Harlem for more than one hundred years and eschews credit cards and even discourages its diners from choosing what they might prefer to order from the menu. The owner's aggressive son, who serves as the maître d', announces the
evening's specials in such a persuasive manner that people are reluctant to overrule him. I have seen Mafia bosses being bossed around at Rao's by the owner's son. The restaurant is filled with boisterous people, the jukebox music is too loud, the customers are forced to sit on uncomfortable wooden benches and chairs. And yet getting a reservation at Rao's is difficult even if one telephones weeks in advance. Long-tenured customers have laid claim to all of Rao's tables for every night of the week, no doubt in the spirit of those early-nineteenth-century San Carlo opera box holders in Naples who carried keys that enabled them to lock their seats in an uplifted position whenever they were not occupying them.

Trendiness also has nothing to do with a restaurant's long-term success. There is a staunchly reactionary place called Gino on Lexington Avenue south of Sixty-first Street that has been operating profitably for more than fifty years while dwelling in a time capsule created in the postwar 1940s. The daily menu at Gino features most of the same choices offered by its opening-night chef in 1945, and the restaurant clings to an unchanging policy of no reservations, no credit cards, and no waiters wearing earrings (Gino's waiters, incidentally, are probably the straightest middle-class family men in New York; whenever one of them dies or retires, he is replaced by a waiter who closely resembles him in manner and appearance). Unchanging as well is Gino's decor, its preference for artificial flowers, and its tomato red wallpaper pattern, which exhibits several rows of jumping zebras dodging hundreds of flying arrows. Half of the zebras on the wall are shown lacking a single stripe near the tail. Since the neighborhood artist who designed the original wallpaper in 1945 forgot to add a stripe across the rump of one of the two zebras that he drew leaping together in the same direction (a sketch that would serve as the prototype for every pair of zebras shown vaulting the length of the wallpaper),
half
of the zebras on the walls at Gino are short-striped due to the artist's negligence. Still, whenever Gino is compelled to change its wallpaper, it does so with an exact replica—one that flawlessly renders every other zebra with a missing stripe.

Shortly after the Tucci partnership had replaced Cliff Pereira with a very complaisant chef named Matthew Hereford—Pereira had meanwhile been hired to oversee Giorgio Armani's full-service café on the lower level of the designer's shop on Madison Avenue near Fifty-seventh Street—I feared that I had been wallowing for too long in the woes of the restaurants at 206 East 63rd Street. I felt that I was losing perspective as a writer because I had been spending too much time gathering information without pausing to evaluate it. What did I intend to do with all this material? What was my story?

Since writers often do not know what they are writing until
after
they have written it, I decided in the summer of 1996 to halt my research for a while and attempt to write a magazine article about the problem-prone restaurants of 206 East 63rd that had regrettably become part of
my
problem. Getting something into print might quickly boost my morale, I thought, and also help me to eventually determine what material was worthy of inclusion in a book,
if
any of it was. And so I sat at my desk for several days reviewing my notes and outlining what I anticipated would be an article of about three thousand words. After tossing into the waste-basket several pages filled with sentences and paragraphs that I wanted no one to read, I wrote:

Before I had finished the article, however, I received a phone call from a friend of Cliff Pereira's, telling me that Tucci—which had been in business for barely five months—would soon be sold. I found this difficult to believe, for the restaurant had appeared to be operating at full capacity
during the many evenings I had been there, and I now dreaded the idea of putting aside what I was writing and doing additional research. I telephoned Gerald Padian, a thirty-four-year-old attorney who was one of Tucci's five investors. He was unavailable when I called, but he soon got back to me and confirmed that a deal to dispose of the restaurant might be in the offing. He proposed that we get together later in the week, suggesting that he would have more to say at that time.

Among the quintet of Tucci's backers, Gerald Padian was the one I liked the most, and, not incidentally, he was the one who most eagerly cooperated with me in my work, and he also seemed to be genuinely interested in hearing my recounting of the unhappy histories of the restaurants that had preceded Tucci at 206 East 63rd Street. Ever since I had met him at the opening of Tucci, he had been friendly and forthcoming, and, since we were both avid sports fans, we subsequently spent lots of time talking together after dinner while watching Yankee baseball games and other events on the television he had installed above Tucci's bar.

Gerald Padian was born Catholic in the Bronx. He was a solidly built six-footer with jet black hair, green eyes, and a roundish pale-skinned face with a heavy jaw that had often been bruised in the boxing ring during his schoolboy years as a pugilist and in the bar fights he had occasionally gotten into while working as a concrete mixer and manual laborer in order to help pay his way through Fordham Law School. His paternal grandfather, Michael Padian, had briefly been a professional prizefighter in his native Ireland, and, after coming to America and settling down as a workingman with a family, Michael had given boxing instructions both to Gerald's father and later to Gerald himself. Gerald's maternal grandfather, of Spanish-French ancestry, had owned and operated a tavern on West 116th Street, which, Gerald liked to recall, had been filmed in scenes of
The Pawnbroker
, a movie starring Rod Steiger.

Gerald Padian's law office was on East Fifty-sixth Street, seven blocks south of Tucci. On evenings when it was his turn to oversee the dining operation, Padian usually arrived at the restaurant attired in lawyerly fashion—dark suits, white shirts, buffed shoes, and silk neckties that were never flashy but were sometimes loosely knotted. It seemed to me that Padian was at heart a blue-collar man who was resigned to wearing white shirts and neckties as part of his uniform as an officer of the court. And while he minimized the fact that he was fast with his fists, he impressed me as an individual who regularly foresaw unpleasant situations heading his way that he had to confront.

Before dawn one day during his third year at law school, while walking
near Lincoln Center toward the Fordham library, where he planned to study for an exam, he was followed on the sidewalk by a young black man who called to him, “Hey, can I have a moment of your time?” Padian did not respond, and kept walking. Then the man caught up with him and, face-to-face, repeated the question more urgently: “Can I have a moment of your time?” This guy's weird, Padian thought, and he's about to mug me, so Padian quickly grabbed him by the throat and shoulders and, with a vigorous shove, sent him staggering backward off the curb into the street.

Padian continued on toward West Sixtieth Street and Amsterdam Avenue at a quickened pace. Suddenly he was squinting into the glare of klieg lights and stepping on a cord of electrical wiring that lay across the sidewalk, and he saw in front of him a group of men busily engaged with their movie cameras and sound equipment. “Cut!” yelled one of the men angrily, and then Padian recognized the director Woody Allen, who was frowning at him and cursing loudly. Padian had interrupted a scene that Allen was shooting for
New York Stories
. The young black man, a production assistant who was supposed to prevent pedestrians from disturbing the filmmakers, now arrived at Padian's side and said sarcastically, “Thanks a lot! I was only asking for a moment of your time, trying to keep you from walking on the set when the cameras were rolling!” Padian was too embarrassed to say anything to the man or to Woody Allen, although the latter continued to curse him. Padian then slowly retreated from the set and continued on his way toward the library.

After graduating from Fordham Law School in 1988, he was hired as an associate in the litigation department of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, a large firm known primarily for its bankruptcy and corporate work. Among his young colleagues there was a fellow Fordham graduate of Armenian ancestry named Richard Tashjian. After working together for four years at Weil, the two of them left to establish their own firm, Tashjian & Padian, specializing in commercial litigation. One of their first clients was the owner of the Café Society nightclub on Twenty-first Street and Broadway, who was filing for bankruptcy in 1992. Padian and Tashjian tried to recruit outside investors who might open another nightclub there, but instead they met a wealthy individual who was willing to spend $1.5 million to convert the club site into a restaurant. Padian and Tashjian assisted him with the legal matters and also contributed funds of their own to participate in the partnership. The restaurant would be called Metronome, and the chef hired to run the kitchen was Cliff Pereira. Three years later, after Padian and Tashjian had severed their ties to Metronome and had negotiated with J. Z. Morris to take over the Napa
Valley Grill's vacated space at 206 East 63rd Street, Pereira was invited by Padian to work with the five-man partnership that would launch Tucci.

Even before its opening in February 1996, Padian revealed himself to be the most decisive of the Tucci partners, having a clear vision of how to operate the business profitably and avoid the practices of the Napa Valley Grill's owner, Michael Toporek, who had “fallen in love with his restaurant” and had ended up owing creditors about $500,000. Padian's place would be a trattoria, quite informal, and with a quick turnover. He would hire fewer waiters and kitchen workers than Toporek had for the Napa Valley Grill, decreasing the weekly payroll from twelve thousand dollars to below nine thousand. Padian's menu would reduce the food and beverage prices, making it possible for a Tucci customer to spend on average between twenty-five and thirty dollars per dinner with an appetizer and a glass of wine, which was roughly ten to fifteen dollars less than the average check at the Napa Valley Grill. Padian increased the seating capacity in the main dining room by moving in very small tables, each with a top measuring twenty-four inches square, and as a result seventy-five customers would be accommodated in a space that had formerly served a maximum of sixty. And since the tops were made of an attractive composite marble, Padian chose not to cover them with linen tablecloths. The laundry charged ninety-eight cents to wash a single tablecloth, and by avoiding this expenditure, he estimated a monthly saving of a few thousand dollars. He profitably disposed of Toporek's sleek and expensively designed cherry-wood bar, putting in its place a castoff antique bar purchased for less than two thousand dollars from a warehouse in Harlem, which had obtained it from a bankrupt resort hotel in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. Padian auctioned off Toporek's silk-cushioned chairs and replaced them with unpadded wooden chairs, which he believed would reduce the comfort level of Tucci's customers and encourage a faster rate of turnover.