All or Nothing (25 page)

When Art met me in the lobby, I didn't even show him the business plan. Instead, I shared my passion, telling him about the kind of atmosphere and food I wanted to create. “Come up to my room,” he said. “Let's keep talking.” In his lavish hotel room I opened up the business plan and went over it with him line by line. Instead of nodding in approval, he raked it over the coals, challenging me with a million questions about what the demographics had to do with the location, the liquor versus food revenue and percentages, the profit margins, and the labor costs. Thanks to my hours of obsessive study, I had an answer for every one of his questions.

When we were done, Art looked at me and asked, “Do you read the newspaper? Do you know what's going on in the world?” It was 2008. The global economy was tanking, and there I was asking for a capital investment.

“When you're depressed, what do you do?” I asked him. “You eat and drink. I have no doubt this is the right time and we will succeed.”

“I'll invest in your restaurant,” Art finally said. “Now that you have some capital, it should be easier to find the rest.” He reached out and shook my hand.

I left the hotel and skipped down Park Avenue, pausing only to call Lindsay so we could celebrate the moment together. Then I called my father, and when I heard his excitement, I knew there was no one else in this world who would share my passion and enthusiasm like him. I needed someone to be my business partner, to manage the business side of things while I focused on the creative aspects of the restaurant.

“I want you to be my business partner,” I told my dad. “It has to be you.” My father was getting ready to retire, not looking to get involved in another business, but he was too much like me to say no. He called me back the next day and said, “There's nothing I would rather do more than be in business with my son.” He said he would match Art's investment.

Instead of waiting until I had all the money, I kept “acting as if”—making plans for the restaurant as if it was already a reality. Over the next several months I worked on raising the remaining funds and looking for locations in between my regular work for Daniel, the salon, and Recette Private Dining. I found a place on Carmine Street that seemed like a good possibility, and my dad and I brought in a restaurant consultant who had helped open many places in South Florida. Telling us that many of the terms were outrageous, he basically killed the deal. Nothing came easy, but when I started to feel desperate, I made sure to go to a meeting or reach out to other addicts so that I remained in the center of the circle. This way at least I knew that someone would catch me if I fell.

I didn't always know where to turn, but I kept striving forward. I approached many of my wealthy clients and asked them if they wanted to become a partner in the restaurant, but they all passed. Then I asked several people I knew in Florida—some of them friends or business associates of my father's—but they all passed too. Late at night I wondered how many of those people had said no because they knew about my past, but I tried not to think about that since it was beyond my control.

Finally I had another success. My client Daniel had a good history with restaurant investments, but he didn't want to be a partner. Instead, he gave me, a twenty-seven-year-old kid with a record, an unsecured loan for $100,000. His faith in me was truly humbling. Shortly after, my aunt Stacey and uncle Mark joined with an investment. I was filled with gratitude. After clawing my way back from hell, I found myself in the enviable position of having something to come back to—not only a loving and forgiving family, but people of means who saw my drive and passion and were willing to help me. I knew how lucky I was. Many addicts never enjoy this level of emotional or financial support, and I set short-and long-term goals to give back in meaningful ways.

At that point we were almost all the way to our fundraising goal. The restaurant consultant introduced me to a new broker who showed me two spaces in the West Village, one on Bleecker and the other on West Twelfth Street. When I walked up to the second location and saw the quiet tree-lined corner and French windows, it reminded me of that bustling restaurant at the end of a quiet street in Florence what felt like a lifetime ago. I fell in love and knew in a moment that this was where Recette would live.

When we signed the lease for 328 West Twelfth Street in September 2009, it felt like a hard-won victory, but we didn't have much time to celebrate. I went down to the restaurant right after signing the lease and walked into the kitchen. The ceiling panels were covered in dry grease, the floor tiles were chipped, the sinks were clogged, and the kitchen equipment looked like it was from the turn of the nineteenth century. The kitchen exhaust system consisted of a single fan that would barely have been adequate for a small home kitchen. Otherwise, there was no ventilation. We had to tear it all down and start fresh with a complete kitchen renovation.

We quickly set our sights on a January opening, which gave us only four months to prepare. I hardly knew where to begin. Christina, Brian, and I dissolved Recette Private Dining so I could focus entirely on the new Recette. Every day I got up with the sun and was at the restaurant by 7:00 to meet with architects, liquor lawyers, contractors, electricians, and handymen. There were permits, community boards, and labor unions to worry about in addition to all the little details regarding the restaurant itself.

While I was accustomed to delegating in the kitchen, when it came to the restaurant, I wanted to be involved in every detail. I couldn't let go. My father was meant to handle the business end of things, but I made sure he ran everything by me, even the things I knew nothing about, like leases, insurance binders, attorneys, and landlords. Lindsay was now working at an email marketing company by day, but she came home every evening and jumped right in, typing out emails that I dictated while scrubbing and later measuring every inch of the kitchen on my hands and knees.

I didn't hire a designer. Instead, I told the contractors exactly what I wanted and asked my mother to help with the decor. Then I went down to Crate and Barrel and Pearl River Mart myself to pick out linens, glassware, china, and flatware. On my birthday in October I went to a restaurant supply store on the Bowery and picked out all of our kitchen tools—sheet pans, spatulas, pots, pans, skimmers, tongs, ladles, wooden spoons, basting spoons, and baking supplies. It was the best birthday present I could have imagined.

But I knew the most important thing was to get the kitchen in order. Christina had been an amazing partner in Recette Private Dining, and I wanted her to be my pastry chef. She said yes right away and even became an investor by contributing her own funds. Then I picked two of the guys I most respected from Gordon Ramsay who hadn't given me shit for leaving—Dean and Ed. They were both awesome cooks, fast and efficient and expertly trained by Ramsay to reach the level of execution that I wanted to achieve.

Christina, Ed, Dean, and I spent hundreds of hours in the kitchen creating new recipes for Recette's menu and then tweaking them until they were absolutely perfect. I didn't want to use any of the recipes from Recette Private Dining—everything had to be brand-new. I thought about the dishes I most loved at Hearth and Gramercy Tavern, which had all been perfectly seasoned, in-your-face food. That's what I wanted to serve. We started experimenting. Christina and I made a traditional caramel, but instead of butter, I added sherry vinegar and savory spices, creating a sweet, salty, and acidic sauce that we served with pork belly. I was inspired by Spanish and Portuguese cooking and the way they use meat and seafood together, and after experimenting with different ingredients, I found that rock shrimp paired nicely with the pork belly. This became one of Recette's signature dishes.

There were no rules or boundaries—Asian, Mediterranean, and traditional American ingredients were all fair game. I had the idea for a duck carpaccio that involved curing a duck breast for twenty-four hours and rendering the skin so that it was crispy on the outside but still rare and succulent on the inside. Slicing the duck breast paper-thin, I laid it out like a fan and topped it with chicken liver mousse. Then I rolled it up and served it with crispy duck tongue. It felt good to be creating something that was completely my own, and during those hours in the kitchen all of the stress and anxiety about opening the restaurant melted away.

Deciding which recipes made it onto the menu wasn't arbitrary. Any chef worth his salt can come up with creative dishes, but it's another thing to come up with ones that can be executed in three minutes by any cook in the kitchen. The final menu items had to be foolproof. At first our ravioli dish consisted of cheese ravioli in a seafood broth with cured pork jowl, cuttlefish, and roasted mushrooms. The broth for the ravioli was delicious—salty and briny and tasting like the ocean—but we noticed that the cheese inside the ravioli sometimes leaked out and curdled in the broth. The dish wasn't ready yet. After weeks of experimenting, we transformed the broth into a shellfish sauce and added cream to make it more viscous. Then we added roasted cauliflower to the ravioli filling so that it held together better. Soon this became one of my favorite dishes.

Instead of fried shrimp or calamari, I wanted to serve fried razor clams. We ordered 150 pounds of razor clams, cleaned them, and dredged them in seasoned flour, egg, and breadcrumbs. Then we fried them and served them with a spicy tomato sauce. I loved this dish, but it was too hard to clean the razor clams, because they were so full of sand, and there was too much room for error when frying them. They came out either overcooked or undercooked too often. To make it to the menu they had to come out perfect at least eight out of ten times.

In many ways my time on the streets and in jail prepared me well for the crazy process of opening a restaurant in New York City. I had developed a sixth sense about people, and when I needed someone to break down boxes and haul out trash, I had no qualms about walking up to a guy on the street and saying, “Hey, man, are you looking for work? Come with me.” When the hot water went out one day and everyone else was paralyzed with panic, I just went outside and circled the block until I found a guy getting into a contractor's van. “Hey, man, I need your help,” I said, and he came into the restaurant, cleaned out some insulation and other junk from underneath the pilot light, and relit it within five minutes.

Nothing really fazed me. I wasn't spending time praying or studying the Bible like I had in jail, but I still very much believed in God's will and that everything would happen as it should. The Big Book, which serves as the basis for AA, tells us that acceptance is the answer. Throughout this process I lived by the motto, “Your serenity is in direct proportion to your acceptance.” I read this and repeated it to myself every day like a mantra, knowing that being committed to one particular outcome for Recette would mean losing my grip on serenity.

Before our official opening, we did three nights of service for friends and family. This gave us a chance to work out the inevitable kinks in the menu and service, and sure enough, there were plenty of things that needed to be ironed out. The first thing we noticed was that the general manager we'd hired hadn't laid out the tables very well. There was no room between the tables for the servers to walk through and deliver dishes or clear plates. The servers also needed to up their game. Some guests got doubles of the same appetizer; another diner received his dessert before his main course.

The kitchen was under control from day one because I had such a tight team. But there were still some menu items that needed fine-tuning. Some of the charcuterie got cut, and we decided to offer cheese by the piece instead of a cheese plate so the guests could customize their meals. We had a chickpea dish with yogurt, tarragon, and pork belly that we cut from the menu before the official opening because it just wasn't refined enough. I tasted everything that came out of the kitchen; I didn't want the guests to get anything that wasn't absolutely perfect.

By the third night things were running pretty smoothly. I walked outside and looked into the restaurant through the French windows, watching everyone eating and drinking and laughing. The room was filled with joy.
Holy shit,
I thought.
I really created something.
Seven years earlier I'd been living in the mulch in a park, looking forward to nothing in life except my next high. But this new high of knowing I had created something was just as exciting—and just as addictive.

On opening night Recette did sixty covers, the next night
we did eighty, and the night after we did a hundred. Within a week we were packing people in. For the most part people seemed to love the food, but others thought the plates were too small and too expensive. I wanted the guests to be happy, so I listened to these criticisms, increasing the portion sizes for some items and lowering the prices on others.

I was surprised that it took just as much work to keep the restaurant going after the opening as it had to get it open. It was a living organism that needed to be nourished, and I took this on completely like a new mother who won't let anyone else hold her baby. I carried lemon and sea salt with me at all times and reseasoned everything that came out of the kitchen. I didn't trust anyone else to season it as perfectly as I could, and I held the employees to high, sometimes impossible standards. In that first month I definitely yelled more than I should have, but I had a vision that wouldn't be denied. I had to inspect every little plate of food and make sure the servers were on their toes and the hostess wasn't screwing up the reservations.

Some of the people around me thought I was crazy, but the intensity I brought to Recette was no different than the intensity I exhibited as an addict hustling, stealing, and manipulating to get money to buy drugs. For better or worse, I saw every element of the restaurant as a reflection of me. I had taken all the experiences I ever had in a kitchen—from cooking with Rosie and Nana Mae to working my way up the South Florida restaurant food chain, mashing potatoes in jail, working at Gordon Ramsay, and staging at Per Se and Jean Georges—and amalgamated them into my own unique style. I was proud of it, and I couldn't loosen the reins and risk losing everything I had accomplished.