No one in Manhattan eats dinner before 6 p.m.
Please.
And yet, there they were at 5:20 p.m. on a Friday, about 50 diners impersonating a WPA-era breadline at the front door and parked at tables beneath the now famous sunflower yellow awning at Rocco’s on 22nd, a new Manhattan restaurant you may have heard about.
A few doors down, at the terrific upscale Indian cafe Tamarind and at another popular Italian spot, Beppe, there was not a customer in sight, just a few lonely waiters gazing out the window, setting tables.
Ah, what a difference a reality television show makes.
In case you’re not one of the almost 8 million viewers who watched “The Restaurant,” the NBC series in question, it’s a show that took viewers through seven tumultuous weeks in the life of the handsome and charming chef and Queens native Rocco DiSpirito as he started his latest restaurant, Rocco’s (he is also executive chef of a 5-year-old three-star restaurant called Union Pacific).
DiSpirito stressed in the very first episode that opening Rocco’s — rather than a grab at fame and fortune — was a humble longtime dream, a way to get back to the Italian roots that he had once been ashamed of, and a showcase for the Italian-American fare of his beloved 78-year-old mother Nicolina DiSpirito (she’s listed as the executive chef on the NBC Web site). Especially her meatballs.
Honor your past and be nice to your mother, and good things will follow: You could have your livelihood bankrolled by American Express, Mitsubishi and Coors (sponsors of the show, whose product placement made an otherwise breezy and entertaining show clumsy and groan-worthy) and find yourself starring in an American Express commercial that runs about 5 million times a day.
The final episode aired Aug. 24 but reruns of “The Restaurant” are playing on Bravo, and DiSpirito is reportedly in talks to film a second season. Still, it’s probably safe to say that Rocco’s is the busiest restaurant in the city right now.
For some reason, I assumed I wouldn’t need a reservation. Wrong. The place was booked for weeks. So my plan was to weasel a seat at the bar.
Just as the doors finally opened and people began pushing their way in, my elegant dining partner Vickie Freeman came slinking up, giving me the impression that she’d been hiding behind a tree.
“I hope no one sees me,” she said.
She’s the co-owner of the excellent non-reality restaurant Five Points and is married to its chef, Marc Meyer, so I could understand why she might not want to be spotted standing in this particular line. There’s been more than a bit of Rocco bashing going on the city’s restaurant community: “He has a big ego! . . . For the food industry, I think it is a boring show,” said Didier Virot of Aix. Zarela Martinez of Zarela said, “I want to leave a legacy, but not that kind of legacy.” Me-ow.
But Freeman is a lot kinder about DiSpirito than that. “He’s a serious chef, and he’s doing something fun,” she said, after we’d nabbed a couple of seats at the bar (where I saw no one drink a Coors the entire time I was there). “Half of the restaurant crowd might say he’s loud and pathetic, but if you talk to the honest ones, they’ll admit they’re jealous. Who wouldn’t want to own a restaurant that’s packed at 5:30?”
`That’s not Uzay’
In spite of rumored cast/staff attrition, some of the act/wait staff (from the show) were still around. Laurent, the expressionless French general manager with the Pepe LePew eyelids went sashaying by. A few minutes later the chilly blond wait captain Emily came nudging through the crowd with her chin up. “That’s not Uzay,” I heard a woman tell her husband, but I couldn’t tell if it was the goateed waiter (from the show) or not.
As we ordered a couple of glasses of Prosecco, a woman popped up behind us and asked the bartender, in a thick Texan accent, if she could take her picture.
“Yes,” she said, “But I wasn’t on the show.”
The woman snapped her photo anyway, then smiled at me and walked back to her seat.
“I wasn’t on the show,” she said to Freeman and me, before telling us that we should try Mamma’s meatballs.
Since Mamma DiSpirito was already circulating around the dining room (wearing her chef’s white jacket, just like she does on the show!) I thought it would be a little embarrassing if she stopped by and we weren’t eating the meatballs; I also worried that if I didn’t order some, the place might fall silent and someone would scream, “Cut! You’re supposed to order the meatballs!”
So we ordered those, and some good salumi ($9), and some nice fried, stuffed zucchini flowers ($10), and I had the unremarkable spaghetti carbonara ($15) and Freeman the unremarkable linguine puttanesca ($14). It was fine. Whatever. Of course, the menu is loaded up with exactly the kind of food you’d be eating — fried calamari, clams oreganata, sausage and peppers, caprese salad, penne alla vodka, linguini with clam sauce — if you were, say, a broadly drawn character on a broadly drawn television show about a family-run Italian restaurant.
The show, the show, the show. You couldn’t get away from it.
And yet most everyone seemed to be pretending that it had nothing to do with their reason for being here. A group of women in various states of publicly acceptable undress and full evening makeup had arrived around 6 and scanned the room, possibly wishing to appear bored; one of them surreptitiously adjusted her tube top.
A man who looked like some kind of crazy German architect, with the big round glasses and supershort hair, and his equally severe female companion, faced the crowd while sipping beers at the bar. A twentysomething couple busied themselves on their cell phones as they waited for a table, because everyone knows that using your cell phone makes you simultaneously invisible and cooler than everyone else in the room.
Critical, uh, acclaim
I had to assume that most everyone was probably aware that Rocco’s has not exactly gotten glowing reviews. In early August the New York Post gave it zero stars and called it “a loud, overpriced stinker”; William Grimes of The New York Times, in late July was kinder, claiming that the place “was adjusting to life as a real restaurant.” (He recently re-visited and gave it one star.)
Apparently Grimes missed the fact that the place is not a “real restaurant.” DiSpirito’s Union Pacific is a real restaurant, and a brilliant one.
Rocco’s is and always will be the set of a television restaurant, and if you arrive without having seen the show, that is exactly what you’ll feel like you’ve wandered onto, and you will likely feel very left out. (Freeman pointed out the very expensive-looking stove that was sitting unused, and a row of heat lamps that were dangling also unused over a row of topiary plants.)
Suddenly, it hit me.
“Everyone looks like they’re waiting for something to happen,” I said dumbly.
“Exactly,” Freeman said. Everyone was waiting for Rocco
“And the first time I was here, something did happen,” she replied, referring to an earlier visit she’d made to appease her pleading kids.
On that visit, she says, the bar was so crowded that you couldn’t turn around, and the tables were packed with groups of those slinkily dressed women in full mating garb (more of whom were starting to swim around the bar, on this night, sort of like sharks whose only known prey was Rocco himself).
But Rocco didn’t just say hello to her kids; he placed a hand on their shoulders, like the pope, which they loved! And they were no more thrilled than the rest of the crowd when he visited almost every table,
Tonight, however, there was no Rocco. But it was still early, so people seemed hopeful — some shamelessly hopeful, others hopeful with what appeared to be a touch of shamefulness.
Debbie Hilton, the attractive and energetic woman from Waco who had snapped the photo of the bartender, was frankly thrilled. “This is just wonderful,” she said, having enjoying meatballs ($8) and the veal parmigiana ($25). Her son Casey, who had sent her tapes of the show beforehand, was in town for her 52nd birthday; they were also going to see “Gypsy” on Broadway.
“We got to talk to Mamma and the good-looking waiter with the goatee,” she said. But Mamma had informed them that Rocco probably wouldn’t be arriving until around 11, if at all, and it was only 8:30. Still, “It’s just neat!,” Hilton added.
What’s important
Adam and Jennifer Kaiser, a well-dressed young couple in town from Florida for a friend’s wedding, were not quite as bubbly.
“I could think of 15 other places I’d rather eat,” said Jennifer Kaiser, who is from New York and whose grandparents still live down on Grand Street, “but my friends [in the wedding] wanted to come because of the show. My girlfriend called — it took six or seven weeks to get a reservation.”
“I’ll bet you’d usually see a lot of celebrities on the weekends,” she said, after informing me that while she’d normally wear jeans to a restaurant she got dressed up to come here.
“There’s Lonn, from the show,” she said suddenly.
“Who?” I asked.
“Lonn. L-O-N-N.” I’d never seen anyone get excited about spotting a waiter before.
When Freeman and I finally got an audience with the extremely popular Mamma (with two M’s, she told me), she had just toasted another couple at the bar with a large glass of cola (“salute!”) and had her picture snapped again.
“Bella,” she said, grabbing my hand and giving me a big hug. In a heavy Italian accent, she told me some of her story.
“I work in a school cafeteria for 20 years. I loved it. I love the kids. Now I am retired.”
But now you’re a celebrity, too, I pointed out, and you’re working again.
“My celebrity is to meet you,” she said, putting her head on my shoulder. “I get to spend more time with Rocco. When he tell me `you have to be the second chef,’ I felt born again. I was waiting to die.”
Now she comes in almost every day to make the meatballs and sauce, has a nap in her apartment upstairs, and works the room like a pro. The next night, she said, Rocco was taking her and her husband to Union Pacific for their 49th anniversary.
“I love my son, I love to cook, so we can be together.”
Speaking of Rocco, I said — probably somewhat rudely considering how nice she being so nice to me — where was he?
“I don’t know. He was here all day. He works too much. Once in a while he must take a day off. I’m worried about my son. I want him to have a good life. I don’t need time off. We are old, but we have more strength,” she said, making a fist.
“When is he going to get married?” I asked her, my second rude question, pointing out all the girls.
“Don’t talk about that with me,” she said. “I just want him to be happy. He’s special. That’s what everybody tells me.”
I had to agree there. But would we get to meet him?
“I love my son,” she said. “He might come in. Maybe at 11.”
