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“I’m nervous,” Joe said. “I find the pizzas inedible. My mother finds the pizzas inedible. They sit on my stomach like a rock.”

There were complaints. They were too spongy. They were undercooked. They weren’t crispy. You couldn’t cut them with a knife. Joe wasn’t sleeping: “Everyone is suddenly a fucking pizza expert.”

“I got it!” Mario said one afternoon. “We shouldn’t heat the plates they’re served on. They should be cold.” But the plates weren’t the solution.

“I got it!” Mario said the following week. “I’m making too much gluten. The secret is twenty percent more yeast and only three minutes of kneading.” But the result tasted of raw bread—Joe, eating one at the bar, made a face of unequivocal revulsion—and the complaints continued.

“I got it!” Mario said, two weeks later. “It’s cake flour. Good old-fashioned all-purpose cake flour. Why didn’t I think of that before?” But it wasn’t cake flour. In fact, a few days later, Mario abandoned cake flour and was using “00” instead, the refined pasta flour from Italy.

“At night, I’m studying my McGee,” he said, alluding to Harold McGee’s book on the science of cooking. Otto was in its second month. It seemed inconceivable that he could still be experimenting with the recipe. “I know everything there is to know about gluten. The solution is fifty pounds of flour—half all-purpose flour and half Italian 00—and only a tablespoon of olive oil, three tablespoons of sugar, and then you let it sit for three hours.” I was impressed by the detail Mario was sharing with me—that the crucial ingredient was a single tablespoon of olive oil in fifty pounds of flour, for instance—and his belief that I would understand what he was talking about. I didn’t, but it didn’t matter, because this recipe wasn’t the solution either.

“Finally, I really do have it,” he said, when I found him one morning sitting at the bar. “It’s flour plus sweat equals dough.” He was exhausted. “Yesterday I swallowed thirty pounds of flour. I had a steam shower this morning and coughed up a loaf of bread. I’ve got to step away from this. I’m making five hundred pizzas a day. Are they good? Are they bad? How can I tell? I’m listening to too many people. I’m overthinking this. I can’t start doubting myself now. I’ve got to go with my gut.”

But even though the pizza recipe wasn’t settled, the place was very popular. Tom Adamson, a Babbo bartender, got end-of-the-night reports from a colleague at the Otto bar, and he passed these on when he brought pitchers of beer to us in the kitchen at eleven: 800 covers one evening, 923 the next. “These are not restaurant numbers,” he said. “These could be for a sporting event.” Otto was getting almost four times the number of Babbo’s customers. In the kitchen, these accounts were unsettling. Was it that Babbo was no longer the star? For Andy they were also demoralizing.

“Otto,” Elisa observed, “is quietly driving Andy crazy.”

“W
HAT ARE WE
going to do about Andy?” Joe asked Mario when I joined them for lunch one day in early March. By now no one had any idea what went into the pizzas, but it didn’t matter. People were eating them, Otto was a success, and Mario and Joe could think about other things. Joe was at Babbo in the evenings; Mario hadn’t been; he’d been filming Food Network episodes about stromboli. Joe knew they had a problem.

“Have you talked to him about being more proprietary?” Mario asked. Andy was openly angry and foul-tempered and had just fired a runner on a whim.

“How can I talk to him about being more proprietary when he’s not a proprietor?” Joe was alluding to the elusive Spanish restaurant. The arrangement had always been that Joe, Mario, and Andy would be joint owners. But the reality was that no such arrangement existed because there was no restaurant. There was Otto.

“He’s become
very
difficult,” Joe continued.

“This surprises me. Frankie told me Andy was much better—that his moods were under control.”

“Well, Frankie’s wrong. Andy is not better. He’s worse.”

Andy was different from the others. He was well read and articulate. On his days off, he went to movies, gallery openings, plays. I thought of him as the only grown-up in the kitchen. He wasn’t a screamer and didn’t gossip. He had a quick mind. As an expediter, he had a picture in his head of every table, how long each one would take to finish its course, and the time the kitchen would need to prepare the next one so that it arrived the moment after the plates were cleared. He was responsible for tens of thousands of dollars of extra business, because he’d figured out how to squeeze it in. “I act like I’m an owner,” Andy confessed. “What’s wrong with me?”

But there was something you weren’t seeing. Andy spoke fast, sometimes very fast, and his speedo speech could seem like crazy speech, a glimpse of a psyche running down a hill at full tilt. He could be shrill. “Oh, how I hated that voice,” Elisa said, recalling when she worked service. “It was always on the verge of losing it, just like Andy.”

“Andy’s in a bad mood,” Frankie whispered, going from person to person, just as we were about to start the service on New Year’s Eve. How could Frankie tell? I looked at Andy. It was true. Something was wrong: a seethingness, a self-imploding stress. It then came out, but never directly and always on the job. For instance, you’d be very busy, and Andy would tell you to fire six more orders.

Hang on there, guy, you’d think. You can see I can’t do more.

But as you took in the instruction, scurried to pick up the stuff, season it, get it going, Andy would tell you to fire another four orders. This time, you would say something (even if nothing more than a heavily intoned
“What?”
), whereupon Andy would add two more orders and (“Why not?”) another two, and then (“What the hell?”) four tasting menus. Why? Because he could. Because he was in a silent rage: at his plight, at what he had to do every night—no letups, no easy evenings, every day for five years—at Mario and the fact that he didn’t have to be there because he had Andy. Then, as though obeying the dictates of some self-destructive impulse, he’d go home and stay up until three reading about Spanish cooking, devising menus for a restaurant that didn’t exist.

There would never be a Spanish restaurant. I was convinced. At the end of my lunch—Joe’s having agreed to have one more talk with Andy—Joe asked Mario if he wanted to go for a ride. There was a site, not far from the meatpacking district, that he wanted Mario to see.

Fifteen minutes later, we were standing outside it, a large, empty building, as Joe elaborated a highly detailed daydream. “What about a five-hundred-seater,” he said, “with sweeping stairs and valet parking and a
tabac
shop off to the side.”

“It’s Joe’s idea of elegance—valet parking,” Mario explained.

Joe ignored him. “Let’s go all out and show New York you can have a four-star Italian.” Improvising, more ideas coming to him as he talked, Joe said, “No, on reflection, it shouldn’t be Italian, but Italian American”—a return to his roots, a homage to the cooking of his mother, Lidia. I was witnessing a creative side of restaurant making—an exhilarating thing—and, within six months, Joe had got a lease, hired an architect, and begun constructing a version of the vision that had come to him in the street in front of me. The place would have an Italian name, Del Posto.
Posto
was Italian for “place.” What it wasn’t was Italian for “Andy’s Spanish restaurant.”

M
ARIO HAD
assumed he had a clear picture of the Babbo kitchen, even when he hadn’t been there, because he’d been counting on Frankie to be a reliable spy. Frankie was his Andy spy: that’s why Mario had been surprised when Joe said there’d been problems. (There were actually many spies. “Don’t tell Elisa,” Gina told me one day, “but Mario asked me to keep an eye on her.”) But Frankie would never say anything negative behind someone’s back. Face to face was different; face to face, you’ll never meet anyone blunter.

Frankie was the oldest young person I’ve known. He wasn’t yet thirty but could have been fifty. Or maybe he was every bit his age but from a different era: a younger version of someone’s grandfather. He was from Philadelphia—“South Philly” (also fifty years behind the rest of the world)—and was lithe and nimble, and a very fast cook, with speedy street-smart reflexes: very male in an old-fashioned way, except for those eyelashes and a pronounced birthmark on his cheek, which was like the beauty mark of a woman from a time when women had beauty marks. He was close to his family and often went home on his days off: his mother owned a building (the tenant was a hair salon); his father, now retired and in his seventies, used to drive a truck. I accompanied Frankie on one of his visits—Philly cheese steaks, stromboli, chicken cutlets, an Italian-American street market, all the buildings brick, most of them two-story, evocative of Edward Hopper paintings and the movie
Rocky.
We drove around, and I was shown the ’hood: the church where Frankie had had his first job, helping prepare supper for the parish priests; his mother’s building, which he hopes to take over one day and make into an eatery (“Nothing fancy, just good food—I’ll run it with my sister and her husband”); his street, where every September he’d wheel a tomato juicer from house to house. The juicer was a hand-cranked food mill, the kind that Italians still use to skin and seed tomatoes to make a sauce. In Frankie’s neighborhood, it was called “gravy.” In September, all the women bought tomatoes by the bushel.

Frankie pretended to go to a community college (“I dunno—accounting”), but he wasn’t a good student, and one day he came home and found brochures for cooking schools on the kitchen table. His mother had sent away for them. Four years later, he got his first big job: at Le Cirque, then a four-star restaurant, when the head chef was the Cambodian-born, Paris-trained Sottha Khunn. At first, typically, Frankie wasn’t allowed to cook. “For the first three months, I did starters, just like Alex is doing now. I did everything Sottha Khunn told me to do. It was always ‘Yes, Chef. Whatever you say, Chef. Right away, Chef.’ It was a French kitchen, so I was his bitch. Okay, if that’s the way it’s done, that’s what I’ll be. Three months later, Khunn told me to watch the guy on the grill. I wasn’t supposed to cook, just watch. Then one day, he put me on the line—not on the grill, though, but at the fish station. The fish guy hadn’t shown up. I wasn’t trained. ‘No time to train,’ Khunn told me.” It was a disaster. Frankie was nervous, and everything went wrong, and at the end of the night, disgraced, he was sent home: from now on, he’d be working mornings.

Sottha Khunn was a screamer. “If he asked for something, you gave it to him. If he wanted it in a different way, you did it. You never questioned, you never argued, because in the back of your head you knew that once he started screaming your evening was ruined. He didn’t stop until you were sent home or fired.” Khunn was also a perfectionist and, for Frankie, an inspiration. “I learned more in three months of Le Cirque than three years of the cooking school. I went to cooking school so I could get a job with someone like Khunn.” Trained by a screamer, did Frankie then grow up to be one? Because as Frankie assumed more and more responsibility at Babbo, that’s what he seemed to be becoming: the kitchen’s screamer.

Alex got most of the screaming, although he admits he sometimes deserved it. He was still working the pantry station, but it wasn’t any less busy than any other spot. There were thirteen appetizers, each with its own complex construction, and he wasn’t, he conceded, always ready when the service started: a terrifying admission. It means you’re doing your prep while orders are being called out, and the orders come fast.

If Alex wasn’t ready, he fell behind. (“I wasn’t used to being so busy—I made three or four hundred appetizers a night—and didn’t have the time to reach up and get a glass of water.”) A table might have ordered a pasta and a starter, and the pasta would be done, ready to go out, starting to cool, and Alex was messing around with his beans.

“Hey, Alex,” Frankie shouted. “Do you know what
mise en place
means?”

Alex, characteristically, didn’t get the point of the question—he was so caught up with what he was doing that he hadn’t realized people were waiting for it—and he responded literally. He thought Frankie was asking for help with a French expression. He stopped and pondered the phrase, conjugating the verb, and was about to provide a translation, when Frankie stopped him. “No, you dickhead. It means having your shit in the right place in time!” Alex looked stunned. “Sometimes,” he said to Frankie, “the way you give information is not entirely appropriate, and I think you could afford to be a little less coarse.” It got worse. Frankie started timing Alex’s dishes and counting off the seconds. He sent back others. The salads weren’t high enough.
“Replate!”
They didn’t have enough greens.
“Replate!”
He hadn’t wiped off the dish first.
“Replate!”
The rosemary wasn’t fine enough. The beans were overcooked. He’d forgotten the pancetta.

“He was busting my balls,” Alex told me. “I’d become his bitch. He’d singled me out to kick my ass.” In fact, Alex hadn’t been singled out.

“I’m a dick, I’m a dick, I’m a dick!” Frankie announced routinely. “I’ve got to be a dick so we don’t lose our three stars. I don’t want friends.” He turned on Mario Garland. Garland was the guy who’d replaced Mark Barrett at the pasta station. But his dishes were too wet. (“I made the mistake of being nice to him,” Frankie told me. “He thought of me as a buddy rather than management.”) He turned on Holly because she kept “talking back.” “She wasn’t getting enough color on her duck”—meaning her pan wasn’t hot enough and she wasn’t browning the bird sufficiently—“and I told her, ‘You need more color,’ but she wants to explain. We’re in the middle of service. I don’t want an explanation. I want to hear ‘Yes, Frank, right away, Frank, whatever you say, Frank.’” Every place Frankie looked, he saw something he didn’t like. “There are a hundred ways to cook an ingredient. I’m here to make sure that it’s done Mario’s way.” The trouble was that Mario wasn’t in the kitchen. “I’ve told him to show his face. I need people to see that what I say is coming from him. They’re not listening to me.”