All or Nothing (26 page)

I never sat back and reveled in the moment. Instead, I blindly pushed forward, already thinking obsessively about my next restaurant. I had a vision for a completely different restaurant than Recette, a bigger and more approachable place that people could visit every day. I continued to cater outside events, but Recette didn't have a private dining room, so we had to turn down many requests for private parties. We had only six seats at the bar where people could wait until their table was ready. It was a learning process, and I already saw a second restaurant as a way of removing the restraints we operated under at Recette.

This was when my armor of serenity and connection started to wear away. I continued to say yes to every catering request I possibly could, worked long hours at the restaurant, and then went home to crunch numbers and work on a business plan for a second restaurant. When I wasn't at Recette, I was doing “market research,” my term for all-night eating binges on Beef Marrow with Oxtail Marmalade at Blue Ribbon or burgers at Daddy-O. Some nights I went to four restaurants in a row. There were no vacation days or time off. I stopped going to meetings and eventually lost touch with the other addicts I was connected to. In the back of my head was that mantra, “Your serenity is in direct proportion to your acceptance,” but as I obsessively tried to control the direction of my career my acceptance slipped away—and my serenity went right along with it.

Barding

Barding
: To cook meat by wrapping it in a layer of fat, such as pork fatback or bacon, before cooking it.

T
hree months after Recette opened, Frank Bruni, who had just retired as chief restaurant critic for the
New York Times,
came in with a friend. I noticed him right away. He sat down at table 17, right next to the kitchen, and ordered Salt Cod Fritters, Buffalo Sweetbreads, Sea Trout, and Berkshire Pork Belly with Rock Shrimp. I stayed in the kitchen and made sure to cook everything myself, my hands trembling as I poured the sherry into the caramel sauce for the pork belly. Then I stood at the edge of the kitchen and tried to eavesdrop. Bruni finished everything, which I took as a good sign, but he didn't comment on the food. As soon as he left I exhaled, a huge smile spreading across my face. Whether or not the
Times
reviewed Recette, the very fact that someone like Frank Bruni had gotten wind of it meant we were onto something.

A week later Sam Sifton, who at the time was the chief restaurant critic at the
New York Times,
came into the restaurant. He sat at a table next to the French window with his body facing outward and his face in full view of the security camera and ordered the Wild Arugula with Kumquats, Mint, Lemon, Hazelnuts, and Ricotta Salada and the Poussin with Grits. I tried to cook everything myself, running back and forth behind the line and to the pass to plate the food. Ed hated it when I reached over him and seasoned his fish. I was driving everyone nuts by being so controlling. “Refill his water glass,” I shouted to the servers. “Bring more bread to the table!” Once Sifton's food was served, I scrambled downstairs to my basement office and shut the door. For the next hour I kept my eyes glued to the security camera as Sifton ate, studying his facial expressions and trying to pick up on any clue as to whether or not he was enjoying his meal.

I didn't sleep at all that night. Neither did Lindsay, thanks to me. I kept waking her up to ask what she thought. “I don't know, Jesse,” she said. “It's late. Go back to sleep.” But there was no way I could do that. I was so on edge. So far all of our reviews had been lukewarm and business was starting to level out; we were nowhere near where I wanted or expected it to be. I knew that a review from the
Times
would either make or break us overnight. Even in a world with Menu Pages, Yelp, Zagat's, and a million other places for online reviews, people still pay attention to reviews by people who are paid to write and talk about food. We needed a good review from the
Times.
I wouldn't accept anything else.

A week after Sifton's visit I noticed a reservation under the name “Steve Bedot.” I don't know why, but the name jumped out at me. I ran downstairs to the office and asked Lindsay to look into it. A few minutes later Lindsay came running up the stairs so fast that she tripped and fell flat on her face. “The phone number matches the name Sam Sifton used last time,” she said. “Sifton's coming back.” That's when we knew for sure that a review was pending.

The whole staff was nervous that night when Sam Sifton walked in with three guests. With his head down, not making eye contact with anyone, he made his way to a table in the center of the restaurant. He and his guests ordered half the menu: Salt Cod Fritters with Lamb Sausage Ragu, Spot Prawn Crudo, Chorizo with White Beans, Buffalo Sweetbreads with Pickled Celery and Blue Cheese, Arctic Char with Ocean Broth, Blue Foot Mushrooms, and Pork Belly with Romesco and Rock Shrimp. I told all the servers to spy on him, and as I cooked I kept peeking out from the kitchen. He stayed until closing time, laughing and drinking right through. Clearly, he didn't hate the meal, but I needed more than that.

Two weeks later Lindsay was looking through the reservations when she found another name with a phone number that matched the one used by “Steve Bedot.” This had to be a good omen, I told myself. Sifton brought a new group of people and ordered everything on the menu. This time I could tell he was enjoying himself as he ate, drank, laughed, and joked around with his friends and even the waitstaff. He was the last person to leave, and as he was walking out he paused and we locked eyes. Sifton nodded, saying, “Thank you.”

A fact checker from the
New York Times
called the following day and fired off a million questions. “How do you make the romesco sauce?” he asked. “Can you list all the ingredients? What about the pork belly? How is it influenced?” I answered everything, and then he said, “We'll send a photographer,” before abruptly hanging up. The next day I carefully laid out cod fritters and pork belly as the photographer snapped away.

It was a slow Tuesday night, and the restaurant was half empty. We were an hour into service when my publicist called. “Are you sitting down?” she asked. I didn't like the mystery and told her to just come out with it. “The
New York Times
is giving you two stars,” she said. “And it's written like a three-star review.”

I hung up the phone and bolted down the stairs to my office to read the review, which had just been posted online. The entire kitchen staff, along with the majority of our diners, followed. I sat down at my computer with a dozen bodies hovering over me as I scoured the website, looking for the review. Finally the webpage loaded. It was everything Chris had said, but it felt a million times better to read it with my own eyes. Sam Sifton described Recette in exactly the way I'd first envisioned it: “The menu is remarkably free of stuff that's available everywhere else,” and, “It hits the flavor stations hard: salty and sweet, with an acidic bite at the end.” He understood what I was aiming for and articulated it perfectly, referring to the Foie Gras Terrine as “a meat painting, an organ sculpture,” calling the Salt Cod Fritters with Lamb Sausage Ragu “a head-scratchingly good combination,” and describing the Pork Belly and Rock Shrimp in Sherry Caramel as “Spain on a plate, as seen from Manhattan.”

I looked around the crowded office for Lindsay, and when I found her standing in the corner we hugged, knowing we had done it. Sam Sifton changed my life. From that moment on, Recette was booked every night.

I thought I was busy before, but once I was reviewed in the
New York Times,
everyone wanted a piece of me. Requests for private parties and events poured in, and I continued to say yes to everything from small dinner parties at people's homes to huge catering events at the Cartier mansion. When charities asked for help, I always made a point to say yes and be of service, and I enjoyed cooking for 800 people at City Harvest and Autism Speaks events. Every month I was on a new morning show, each one taking hours of preparation. And then I was back at Recette, trying to get the servers and hostess excited about great hospitality, maximizing the grid so every table was full and turning over efficiently, and scrutinizing the monthly P&Ls. In between, I stuffed myself full of hoagies, French fries, and cheesesteaks, only half aware that my weight was steadily creeping upward. I felt an insane amount of pressure to keep myself out there and relevant. My brain was constantly going, and I began to wake up every morning in a panic, thinking,
What else can I do to move forward?

Lindsay and I had only been together for about a year and a half, but it already felt like we'd shared a million lifetimes. I knew how lucky I was to have found someone who was so completely supportive of me and my dreams. She had already quit her day job to work at Recette full-time as our operations manager. It certainly felt like Recette was as much hers as it was mine, and I wanted to share the rest of my life with her too. Lindsay and I had never really talked about getting married, but I figured that if she'd already put up with me for this long, she must have been in it for the long haul.

I bought her a ring and planned to surprise her with it over dinner at Scarpetta, a modern Italian restaurant just a stone's throw from Recette. But that night Recette was slammed, and I didn't want to leave. Lindsay was in the office going over the books as I supervised the kitchen. It took everything I had to tear myself away from the restaurant, but I finally did, and over a delicious meal of Polenta with Morels and Truffles, Chilled Pea Soup with Crabmeat and Currants, Mozzarella in Carozza, and Black Cod with Slow-Roasted Tomatoes and Caramelized Fennel, I handed Lindsay the ring, and immediately fumbled. “Look, we don't have to do this now,” I said, “but do you accept?” Lindsay still teases me for my unromantic proposal, and I absolutely deserve it.

“Of course I'll marry you,” she said, and as we hugged and kissed the other diners all started clapping. True to form, we went right back to work after dinner.

The excitement we felt after getting engaged didn't last long. Only a couple of weeks later my mother felt a lump in her breast and went to get it checked. It turned out that she had an aggressive form of breast cancer, at stage two. I was devastated and worried, but this wasn't my mom's first health scare. Back when I was on the streets, she'd started seeing dots in her vision and got a CAT scan that showed a benign tumor on her brain, right underneath her skull. The doctors watched it for years and had finally decided it had to come out. That was just a few months before Recette had opened. My mom is a warrior, and she approached the brain surgery and now the breast cancer with complete strength and bravery. She never complained through many uncomfortable surgeries, chemo, and radiation. Every time I asked how she was doing she insisted that she was fine.

Lindsay and I toyed around with the idea of a traditional wedding with family and friends, but I knew we'd never take the time off from work to plan a proper wedding. A big circus wedding wasn't really our speed, anyway. Plus, I saw no reason to wait. I wanted a marriage, not a wedding. Lindsay and I got married at the City Clerk's Office on May 28, 2010, at noon and were back to work at four. That night Lindsay hosted at Recette wearing her wedding dress.

Only six days later Lindsay asked me to meet her out in back of Recette. The restaurant was packed, and I didn't want to leave for even a minute, but Lindsay insisted. When I got outside, she was standing there, smiling nervously. I knew what was coming. “Are you pregnant?” I asked her.

“How'd you know?” she asked as I bent down to kiss her. We were both excited, but Lindsay was nervous too. We were both working nonstop, and our lives already felt out of control. How would a baby fit into that? “Just don't worry,” I told her. “We'll make it work.”

That summer my dad, Art, and I had many meetings about opening another restaurant. Art liked to joke that I was his best investment, and would ask me when we were going to open up in Vegas. I described my vision for a restaurant that people could use daily. I wanted them to come in for a burger for lunch on Wednesday and then come back on Saturday night and have a full gastronomical experience with a steak and a bottle of Bordeaux. Art got on board right away. “Recette is your laboratory,” he told me. “But this has to be a business. It has to make money.”

As things got more serious and we started meeting with attorneys and looking at real estate, we realized that we needed a very significant amount of money for a big project like this. Art helped me look for investors and opened up a whole new world for me, sharpening my financial wits along the way. He asked questions I never would have thought of, like how the second restaurant would affect Recette. While I was focused on details like how many seats we could fill, Art taught me to think globally. He also introduced me to people who were instrumental in getting this project off the ground. Whenever we met at the Regency Hotel or for lunch at Sea Grill in Rockefeller Center, dozens of people would come up to Art to say hello. He knew everyone, and after he introduced me I'd go back to the office at Recette, Google them, and find out they ran hedge funds or publicly held companies.