It`s a scene reminiscent of countless show business movies: The theater is empty, workers scurry about putting scenery in place, off to the side actors are going over lines and in the center of the stage-astride a chair with a paper cup beside him that has changed its role from coffee container to ash tray-is the director.
We`re not in a theater, though. We`re in a restaurant, Coco Pazzo, two weeks before its Jan. 22 opening in a loft space at 300 W. Hubbard St. A combination of Italian style and New York chic, Coco Pazzo promises to become the hot spot for the local trend and fashion worshipers. (Bice arrived with the same promise, but failed to hold the spotlight much longer than it takes to cook an order of pasta.)
The cast and crew
Here the workers are installing paintings. The actors are cooks breaking in grills, rotisseries and a wood-fired oven. And the director, Pino Luongo, is talking about restaurants as theater.
Luongo provides the star-quality that was missing at Bice. The title
”director” fails to encompass his role. Call him impresario, auteur. More important, call him successful. Within the past five years he has opened eight restaurants in six American locations and the island of St. Barts in the Caribbean. The Manhattan Coco Pazzo (crazy cook), which opened in late 1990, has become ”the hippest Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side,”
according to New York Magazine.
New York ran a full-page photo of Luongo in a recent issue dedicated to the food of New York.
Prologue: the director speaks
The odds against the survival of a multicity restaurant empire built so quickly are huge. But Luongo is charging ahead and, so far, none of his ventures has foundered. He does, however, acknowledge the need for him to be visible in his Chicago restaurant, only the second to bear the Coco Pazzo name.
”I consider it very important,” he says. ”I plan to spend 10 to 12 days a month in Chicago.”
Act I, Scene I: the beginning
At 38, Luongo`s face is youthful, his features mobile. He has dark hair, long in the back, but eschews anything as trendy as a ponytail. His look is casual: a blue shirt with a floral maroon tie, slacks, suede shoes and a watch with a strap of various shades of brown. A plaid sport jacket hangs on the back of his chair.
He gives casual commands, suggestions almost. He delegates decisions, but clearly he is in charge. It seems effortless until you notice the depth of the dark circles under his eyes.
Between the inevitable interruptions he talks easily, and his conversation frequently is punctuated with humor. He was born in Tuscany and grew up in Florence with a Neapolitan father, a handful of siblings and a Tuscan mother who was ”a great chef who cooked the foods of her region and of her fantasy with great skill and consistency. As a teen, I learned cooking not by doing, but with my eyes watching her.”
The second level of his culinary education came as a stage actor, seeking out regional treasures at tiny, inexpensive eating places as he toured Italy`s provincial cities and towns.
Scene II: a `reinvention`
He came to the United States in 1981 in a prudent retreat from a losing fight with the Italian bureaucracy over his military status. At the time, he spoke no English.
”It forced me to reinvent myself. The idea that came to me was to blend what I knew and use my artistic feeling to design a restaurant,” says Luongo, who studied architecture before acting, ”create the foods I was attached to and then stage manage it.”
He had no formal restaurant training, so he gave himself a crash course.
”I work every stage,” he says, ”dishwasher, cook, purchasing, manager. I was forced to learn by doing. Now, my employees know I can-and will-roll up my sleeves and go to work beside them. It builds respect.”
By 1983, Luongo had become a partner in his first restaurant, a Greenwich Village Tuscan spot called Il Cantinori. It was an instant hit and when Luongo left a couple of years later he was able to turn entrepreneur and open a restaurant in the Hamptons with the financial underwriting of the Pressman family, owners of Barneys. Barneys is the Manhattan clothing store that is expected to open a store here this fall.
Act II, Scene I: Chicago drama
Others talk glibly of ”restaurant as theater,” but Luongo believes it. He feels the key to his success is transposing the dynamics of the theater experience to a restaurant setting.
His touchstone is Pirandello`s Henry IV, in which he once appeared as an actor. The play is a study of fantasy and reality, and to Luongo it offers the paradox that ”if you are happy, it doesn`t matter which world you dwell in, the real or unreal.”
When he first saw the Chicago location 10 months ago, he felt he`d found a theater setting in which to work magic. ”I saw the brick wall, very raw, very exciting. … I became very attached to this space. There`s a lot of emotion in the design.”
Because he embraces the juxtaposition of reality and fantasy, Luongo made no attempt to cover up floor-to-ceiling windows that reveal the stolid elevated train tracks above Franklin Street and a distinctly unromantic parking lot vista on the south side of Hubbard Street.
As counterpoint to the two brick walls, two interior walls are a soft, off-white stucco.
Cut to the visuals
Intense blue is the crucial non-earth tone. It pops up in chair cushions, theater-style drapes, tiles that surround the oven and, most dramatically, in Morandi still-life paintings that hang on the walls.
The centerpiece of the restaurant, an altar in the middle of the open kitchen, is the blue Spanish tile-fronted, wood-burning oven. On either side is a rotisserie cooker and a grill. There`s a separate pasta station. Chef Pat Trama, who came to Chicago last fall from Manhattan`s Coco Pazzo to learn the territory, is in charge. Other key personnel were imported from Luongo`s New York restaurants, too, and he vows they will be here for six months to a year. The large bar, with seats for dining as well as drinking, acts as a divider between the customer and the kitchen much as like the orchestra pit separates the actors and the audience in a theater.
Also, like actors, the staff needs costumes. At Coco Pazzo, servers will wear beige Calvin Klein slacks, white Hugo Boss button-down shirts, bow ties designed for Luongo by Nicole Miller.
These are the visuals. By themselves, they don`t explain how his restaurants work.
Scene II: a soliloquy
”I have a great management staff that I`ve built up over nine years,”
he says. ”My biggest job now is to set standards of excellence and motivate them, to make sure the work doesn`t become routine. Expansion has enabled me to keep people and offer them new challenges.”
He pauses, then returns to a theater comparison:
”Putting a meal on a table is like a performance. As an actor, the only way to keep fresh is to start over every day. You cannot think of yesterday or tomorrow. You must concentrate your energy on establishing a human exchange that makes the audience feel an excitement, an energy and convinces them this is where they should be. That`s the magic I seek to establish and maintain.” He also has created another paradox, an ambiance he calls ”Coco Pazzo style” in which affluent New Yorkers vie for large portions of humble fare, if not humility.
”I don`t like things to be too formal and orderly,” he explains. ”I want the experience of sharing and of family, of community. That`s how I grew up. We will cook a whole pig or goat and serve it to a group, but we won`t cook a pig and offer a la carte single servings through the evening.”
Other home-style dishes customers are likely to encounter include grilled mushrooms and seasonal vegetables, sage-flavored chicken livers on a bed of fresh fennel, lasagna with eggplant, tomato and Parmesan cheese, braised beef and dessert tarts.
Scene III: talking Tuscan
In ”A Tuscan in the Kitchen,” his 1988 cookbook, Luongo writes,
”Tuscan cuisine … encourages you to adapt and improve on the original, because Tuscan food has never become an institution. It has always been open to the personal efforts and imagination that makes better-tasting dishes.”
To underline this conviction, the recipes list ingredients but give only hints on proportions.
Is this then, at long last, the real Italian food foodies describe but never seem to find on this side of the Atlantic?
”Everyone talks about what is `real Italian food,` ” Luongo responds.
”I don`t say what I serve is `real.` The customers will determine that. What I serve is the kind of food I do, simple things with one common denominator: The ingredients are so well-defined that they are never confused on the plate or on the palate. My food should be neat, straightforward and cooked in the lightest way possible.
”When I taste something with 10 or 12 ingredients and I only taste one or two of them, that`s bad Italian food.
”At Le Madre (his other New York City restaurant, where all the cooks are Italian women), the tastes are close to those of Italy. But at Coco Pazzo, my palate rules and I have made some changes because of the influences of 10 years in this country. Interpretation, adaptation-that`s what this country is all about.”
Epilogue: how to make friends
”There are a large number of Italian restaurants here. I don`t intend to `beat` them. I have no secrets, no hidden wisdom. I only intend to offer an alternative, a different interpretation of Italian style.”
And what is Italian style?
”At its most profound,” he replies, ”it is class with simplicity.
”Also, it is anything that defines quality of life.
”For an Italian, that doesn`t mean only quality you can purchase. It also means small examples of quality in everyday life: going to a special espresso bar, taking a walk with a special view, using time for family and friends, sharing food and conversation with a group of friends. This is the simplest form of socializing and may be the oldest. You can`t make a good friend sharing tea at 5 p.m., but share a bowl of pasta in the warmth of good conversation with the wine flowing, then you make friends.”
You don`t have to be Italian to believe Pino Luongo intends to make a good many friends in Chicago.
