Can I Get You Something Else?
Can I Get You Something Else?
Deliciousness, Fairness, and a Profitable Restaurant
Just after the 5 p.m. opening on a Thursday in January, three of us — two of us for the first time — walked into the white, very high-ceilinged, industrial-looking space and loud jazz of Pizzeria Ida in the Old North End of Burlington, Vermont. The room, encompassing both the tables and the kitchen, smelled fresh, clean, good, gently tomato-y. High storage shelves held containers of nonperishable Italian goods. A three-deck oven stood against the back wall. Two cooks were at work, and a personable young guy was taking an order at the small front counter. We knew the basic plain pizza cost $35. And we’d been warned that it’s the kind of place where the chef has no patience for unappreciative customers and it helps to know the ropes in advance. Right away the counter guy asked, “Have you been here before?” His descriptions were informed, enthusiastic. Later we saw that, when he had a moment, he also washed dishes. The place began to fill up. Pizzas were being phoned in for takeout and picked up. The long-haired, long-bearded pizzaiolo focused on the oven; the other cook, a young woman with long dreads, prepared salads, desserts, and other things. At the front counter, a short paper menu listed two round pizzas and three thicker “squares.” There was a calzone. The menu said, “All of our dough is naturally leavened, never refrigerated.” There were a few optional add-ons for the squares; otherwise, for anything: “No modifications.” There was a salad, meatballs by the piece, one or two other items. Sometimes, we’d heard, there were sandwiches or other specials. A dozen wine options stood in a group, “natural” and mostly Italian bottles at $50 to $100. All except the $100 bottle (the counter guy checked) were low in alcohol, good for pizza. We went for a COS Nero d’Avola from Sicily. No beer, but you could get imported Italian juices or a Mexican Coke.By Edward Behr
The frisée salad was very fresh, slightly small, with a good sweetish dressing. The meatball in tomato sauce was moist, well-seasoned, made of local beef. The flavor was beefier and the texture coarser than you’d find in Italy — nothing wrong with an American accent. The pizzas, just out of the oven, received gratings of Parmigiano-Reggiano from the uncommon, superior Vacca Rossa breed. (Mere “Vacca Rossa” appeared without explanation among the ingredients in tiny type on the menu.) The pizzaiolo set down our round pizza, saying something conventional like “Enjoy”; he wasn’t cheery but he was correct (and he thanked us when we left). The outer circle of crust was crackling crisp; the pie was excellent, though the imported San Marzano tomato flavor wasn’t killer. (That’s probably not fair; the only thing I put up is quarts of ultraripe tomatoes from my own garden.) It was more than enough food for two, maybe enough for three. The crust of the “Escarole and Piennolo Square,” which served as many or more people than the round pie, was springier inside, more bready. Both crusts were sourdough and not especially sour (because lively sourdough isn’t sour). The square’s flavors were perfect, thanks partly to the imported piennolo tomatoes. Two of us said, of everything as a whole, “It tastes like Italy.” The sole dessert, tiramisù, held house-made ladyfingers. The beans for the well-made espresso (no other coffee available) came from the Kagere Mill in Kenya (I read on the receipt) via the roaster Tim Wendelboe in Oslo (the young guy said). All the flavors were good, clean, fresh.
LEFT: Classico pie at Pizzeria Ida. RIGHT: Escarole and piennolo square pie at Pizzeria Ida. Kimberly Behr
Thirty-five dollars is a lot for pizza. Upscale pizza, or at least Wolfgang Puck’s smoked salmon pizza, dates from 1982, but pizza hasn’t come that far from its origins as a food of the poor in Naples. The inexpensive kind dominates. Counter service and filling pies link Pizzeria Ida to a normal pizzeria, which may confuse some people. But the ingredients and care are completely abnormal; no corners are cut. What it’s about isn’t exactly pizza. The wine and coffee are confirmation. The pies are really good, a lot of food: completely fair value. Pizzeria Ida is in the top tier of pizzerias anywhere. We felt a powerful sense of well-being.
The two cooks are Dan Pizzutillo and Erika Strand, partners in the business and in life. I called to ask a few questions. “I don’t have time, man,” Pizzutillo said, which sounded like no time ever. He relented, “Call me on a Monday.” I said I would. “Okay, take care.” I called on Monday, and he was high-energy, proud, wary but almost open. I accepted his invitation to come in the next day.
Pizzutillo and Strand come from New Jersey and spent years living and working around Philadelphia. Pizzeria Ida, which opened in the fall of 2018, is named for Pizzutillo’s grandmother from Campania. The inspiration was Anthony Mangieri’s Una Pizzeria Napoletana, which was originally in New Jersey and uses Italian products from the highly selective importer Gustiamo. We’d heard that, except for fresh items, all Pizzeria Ida’s ingredients also come from Gustiamo. “One hundred percent Gustiamo,” Pizzutillo and Strand confirmed (saying they’re friends with the owner), but not the flour, because Gustiamo has only small amounts of particular Sicilian kinds. The choice of flour at Ida evolves, and sacks of three or four different ones were piled up; the primary current flour, between white and whole, comes from Maine Grains. From Gustiamo, there were olives, peppers, nuts, nut spreads, the Vacca Rossa cheese, tomatoes, rice, beans, pasta, fruit preserves, torrone.
Pizzutillo became warm. Erika Strand was sweet, quieter. They said they were “against the culture of restaurants,” calling kitchen culture “toxic.” Pizzutillo gave Strand credit for greater experience, more technique, even for mixing the dough. He seemed to say he was just the guy who made and baked the pizzas. The counter worker, who seats and handles customers and is the face of the business, is paid $25 an hour, which with tips brings him to $35 or more. In essence, they’re taking part of their owner’s cut and giving it to him, which you can do with one person but not with a team. They can’t find anyone to bus and do dishes for $20 an hour. “We understand,” Pizzutillo said. “No one wants to do that job.” So all three break down and clean at the end of the night.
Pizzutillo offered slices of the Vacca Rossa Parmigiano with drops of 30-year-old Cà del Nôn balsamic vinegar, the real thing, which they sometimes use on skewers of grilled meat they serve to customers. The cheese, whose name means “Red Cow” (officially, the breed is Reggiana), has a slightly softer, more elastic consistency than usual Parmigiano; the flavor was rich, complete, on the mark. The balsamico was superlative. Pizzutillo offered tastes of two fine olive oils, one, from Gaudenzi in Umbria, as thick in texture as any oil I remember, the other, from a farm in Molise, more elegant. The pizzeria’s everyday oil is a lesser but still very good extra virgin from the Molise farm. The vinegar is sometimes an excellent classic red-wine version from Allegrini and sometimes a standout organic six-year-old balsamico from Cà del Nôn (I tasted both), which had given sweetness to that salad. (Apart from costly long-aged balsamico in its special 100-milliliter bottle, almost all of it, even from Italy, is pointlessly sweet and has off-flavors — you’re better off with mass-market cider vinegar.) Referring to the expensive imported ingredients, Pizzutillo said, “You don’t have to do this to make good pizza.” They like more everyday pizza, too, when it’s good.
They’d been open a little more than a year when COVID hit. “For 16, 17 months, it was straight takeout. Even though it was busy, it was awful,” Pizzutillo said. He clarified, “We’re certainly not ungrateful.” The negatives were that pizza steaming in boxes is not the way pizza should be, that they didn’t know when they would be allowed to reopen, and that there were no customers to interact with, just three people (there was a previous third hand) together for 12 hours. “We became more profitable than ever. We didn’t take any PPP money; we didn’t think we needed it.” (Payroll Protection Program money from the federal government flooded US restaurants.) Now under normal conditions Pizzeria Ida is still comfortably profitable.
When it first opened, a light blue, tiled, wood-fired Neapolitan oven occupied one section of the kitchen, but during COVID Pizzutillo and Strand couldn’t bake enough round pizzas fast enough. They’d always baked the squares in a small separate oven. And now they needed more capacity for everything. “You both agreed?” I asked. “No, he had to convince me,” Strand said. They sold the beautiful oven: “We wish we could just have put it somewhere.”
Until a year ago, the pizzeria was BYOB, and some customers brought good wine, which was fine, except they lingered, occupying the table, and the restaurant didn’t benefit. And Pizzutillo and Strand realized that some people without wine wished they had it. So they switched.
They mentioned a possible future bakery, and soon they’d like to explore lamination, layered doughs, so they can produce croissants or sfogliatelle. But mainly, they said, they haven’t accomplished everything they want with Pizzeria Ida. “We’re pretty hard on ourselves,” Pizzutillo said. The dough isn’t always “spectacular,” and slowly it gets better. “Two years ago the pizza was the best; a year ago the pizza was the best,” he said. “The dough right now is the best we’ve ever made. I know we can keep pushing the boundaries to get a little better.”
Less than a week after that pizza meal, Noma in Copenhagen — with its 20-course meal at approximately $500 per person plus drinks — announced it would close at the end of 2024, which resulted in articles about how high-end restaurants are economically unsustainable, even with their sometimes-brutal amounts of unpaid or poorly paid kitchen labor. The New York Times quoted Noma’s chef, René Redzepi, as saying, “Financially and emotionally, as an employer and as a human being, it just doesn’t work.”
That may be true for Noma and a lot of other places, but it’s hard to believe that high-end dining is going away. It may shrink and some restaurants may change shape, but there will always be a demand for a special experience and, for some people, an exclusive one.
(It’s tangential, but I never used to think much about who was eating in a restaurant, including the three-star Michelin places where I sometimes went, but the spread in incomes, not only in the US, is now so great that I’m uncomfortable sitting in a roomful of the very wealthy. I want to be in a mixed crowd, people who are there to be happy and enjoy each other and what’s being cooked. Not that I won’t go to a destination place, but I’d rather be part of local life.)
The problems with restaurants go back well before the pandemic, including at places that charge a quarter or a fifth of what Noma does. In a US restaurant of any size, it’s impossible to find the money to pay all employees fairly, including health coverage and other benefits. Tips instead of wages are relied on to pay servers, which can put them way ahead even of line cooks, who rarely receive what they deserve. (Tipping, unsurprisingly, is affected by race, and both men and women tend to tip women more, probably for different reasons, just for a start.) Raw materials are most of what makes food delicious, and if the materials are delicious, they’re probably organic, maybe regenerative, we hope humane, and therefore not cheap. The fat margin on alcohol helps to compensate for the tiny one on food. Some chefs, going back years, have used their famous but unprofitable main restaurant as a billboard for less fancy, lucrative spin-offs. A line of frozen foods has been known to provide income.
As an owner, you want your restaurant to be affordable (full), fair, sustainable, skilled, delicious. Prices are already high, so you can’t raise them (and margins are small, so you certainly can’t cut them to become more affordable). You have to offer less — of what?
A Noma-prompted article by the chef Vivian Howard in The New York Times was pretty dark, not that her skepticism was misplaced. Her restaurant in rural Tennessee, Chef and the Farmer, was producing highly skilled, labor-intensive, contemporary food, as she described it, though not Noma’s “extremist fine dining.” After 16 years, she couldn’t make the numbers work. She closed the restaurant last year with plans to reopen later this year: “The chefs will serve, cafeteria style, at our retrofitted kitchen bar. The energy we put into elevated service and its trappings will flow directly into the only ‘program’ we have chosen to keep — our food. Most important, we will open to diners just four days a week, from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., because that’s the kind of schedule that nurtures staff retention.” It’s a smart response, one of the few that makes sense. Open kitchens give warmth and liveliness to a room, if the cooks are happy and having a good time. Further income to support the reconceived restaurant, and make greater use of the kitchen, will come from prepared dishes, sold to be heated or completed at home, although that seems to say that a restaurant by itself still can’t work.
A restaurant, to give it some clear definition, is a place that serves food cooked on the premises, and it’s a sit-down place — with its own seats, not part of a food court. It aims at a long run; a pop-up doesn’t count. The basic categories reflect price and service: fast food (no service — also the highest margins), fast-casual (counter service and maybe they bring you the food), casual or family (table service), or “fine dining” (table service and more of it; the food and the ambience, whatever they may be, are more important). I don’t know where cafeteria fits in. Beyond those categories, of course, are all the myriad kinds of food and the reasons people go. Because we’re hungry. For the hospitality, for the taste, to have someone else do the work, for the performance and the energy of the room.
For months, I’ve been thinking about restaurants in light of Jerzy Grotowski, who in the 1960s and 70s in Poland created a “poor theater” to get at the essentials of acting. (I took a college class with Franz Marijnin, who had been in charge of actor training.) Grotowski asked and then answered: “Can the theatre exist without costumes and sets? Yes, it can.”
“Can it exist without music to accompany the plot? Yes.”
“Can it exist without lighting effects? Of course.”
Without microphones — it didn’t need to be said. His theater was “stripped of all that is not essential” to get at the wealth that comes from performance.
“Poor” is no way to sell a restaurant, but stripped-down seems to be where things are headed. Low-cost décor, not much in the way of service, maybe tables pushed together in rows, everyday plates and silverware, skilled but probably low-labor dishes, few choices. A restaurant does need a warm welcome, strong sensory pleasures (delicious ingredients), a pace that suits conversation, and maybe some form of generosity. I knew a baker-chef who, in his restaurant in Australia, placed a whole baguette on each table. (Could something go with it, a bowl of tzatziki, eggplant caviar?) Essential, too, are the guests in the room. We don’t have to leave home to read up-to-the-moment news, see a just-released movie, work, speak face-to-face, yet we like being part of a nonvirtual group sharing an experience.
In the 1970s, a friend brought me to the No Name in Boston. It was no secret even then, but as I recall you walked through a truck-width gate in a chain-link fence to get onto a working pier, and I wondered, are we really supposed to be here? We were told where to sit, in a way that reflected the rapid pace and wasn’t rude but wasn’t quite welcoming either. Long tables were shared church-supper style; there were paper placemats, paper everything. In those days of plentiful seafood, I ate a pile of fried sea scallops that was big enough to satisfy me as a 20-year-old doing construction work, and the price was possibly eight dollars. The No Name was owned by the Contos family from the time it opened in 1917 until 2019, when it closed and filed for bankruptcy. By then, its Seaport neighborhood was one of the most expensive in the city, although that may not have been a problem. There was no public explanation for the failure.
In 2002, at lunch at Shaun Hill’s Merchant House in Ludlow, England, then one of Britain’s best-known restaurants, there was a relaxed, almost sloppy confidence to the plating. Hill cooked alone in a small kitchen on a stove with room for just three active pans at once. When I called to reserve, he answered the phone. His wife, Anja, was responsible for desserts, and she served with one helper. There was no showing off in the food, just deliciousness — no mistakes. I ate hare, but I have no notes to remind me of the rest of the meal. I wrote at the time: “The best meal I ate in England, nearly perfect.”
Hill, at 76, is still cooking, though no longer alone, at his Walnut Tree Inn in Wales, which makes a small profit, he told me by email, not, however, in times of COVID and Brexit. About the Merchant House, he explained:
I had a six burner stove with one burner heating a steamer and two filled with reducing stocks. There was one oven, which served to heat bread, plates and bake anything that needed baking. As long as you accept the limitations — soufflés are not a good idea in an oven constantly flapping open — it’s all okay. I shopped in the morning while Anja baked bread, then we made the puds together. Interestingly, it was the only time I made any money, despite the Inland Revenue regularly searching for extra tables or meals served. Our food costs would have merited dismissal almost anywhere at nearly 50 percent, but of course there were almost no other overheads. The dining room was on the ground floor of my house, and we employed one waiter/waitress to help with serving. We spent nothing on marketing and precious little on decor. Breaking even was easy and moving on to a modest profit not too hard. The main joy was not having shareholders or, worse, the bank, dictating how things should be from their manuals of what is to be expected.
(As life becomes more and more digital, there’s something wonderfully appealing, to me, about being able to telephone and have someone answer directly and take my reservation. For people in their 20s, it may seem unnecessary compared with clicking online. For the restaurant, there are trade-offs, but the phone saves the significant cost of creating or subscribing to a reservation app, which may even take a percentage.)
Noma’s plates were a revelation — landscapes, fun, sometimes the forest floor, mossy, a terrarium without a cover. The scenes underlined the link with nature. How could you not find them wonderful, even if you saw them only in photos? But they weren’t so much about hunger as what went before.
LEFT: Chocolate salad with berries at Noma from 2022. RIGHT: Brain custard with pollen at Noma from 2022. Ditte Isager
The easiest thing to eliminate must be elaborate presentations. The Michelin three-star cooking of 30 or 50 years ago was visually casual compared with luxury food today. The cooking was always precise (assuming nothing went amiss); the statement was in the taste. The new simplicity of the plating was inspired by Japan. The sauce went down first and the main item was placed on it, inverting previous practice. The 16 color photos in the Troisgros brothers’ 1977 cookbook, Cuisiniers à Roanne, show arrangements not so far from what you might or could do yourself — mainly neatness, often symmetry — yet the very ease suggests impeccable control. The eight color photos in Roger Vergé’s Cuisine of the South of France from 1980 (published earlier in France) are similar and look as conservative as possible now, but at the time they and the whole book were fresh, inspirational, something you had to take in. The combinations are so simple — fish in cream with vegetables, baked slices of zucchini and tomato; they left the separate flavors intact. That was part of the lesson. In Michel Guérard’s Cuisine Minceur, the photos follow the same pattern. There are plenty more photos in books and magazines from those heady days of Nouvelle Cuisine.
Kassie Viaud at Ansanm in Milford, New Hampshire. Kimberly Behr
The counter-service Haitian restaurant Ansanm opened last fall in Milford, New Hampshire, a spread-out town of nearly 20,000 located an hour from Boston. Ansanm is the second restaurant of the chef Chris Viaud, who uses French techniques to prepare “contemporary American” food at his upscale Greenleaf a few blocks away. (Viaud was a 2021 competitor on Top Chef.) The light blue walls of Ansanm are hung with varied Haitian framed items and decorations. A few stools are in front, and four tables are to one side toward the back; the kitchen is largely invisible past a doorway. A high mounted screen holds the menu. Of the four of us, none were familiar Haitian food (I’ve quickly learned more), and a young woman with a beautifully welcoming smile answered our questions and took our order. Ansanm is a project of Viaud’s whole family, parents and siblings. In Haitian Creole, ansanm means “together.”
The food arrived on colorful trays, first warm flaky pâtés (hand pies) of three kinds — beef, chicken, and mushroom; each was a favorite of at least one of us. Soupe joumou, the thick winter-squash soup that’s an emblem of Haitian freedom and independence, tasted of vegetable goodness. (Joumou comes from giraumon, the French name for the squash, which in turn comes from the indigenous pre-Columbian jirumum.) The main courses, served in simple cardboard containers, were accompanied by well-seasoned rice mixed with peas, the outer crispness of just-fried plantains, a little cup of Creole sauce (peppers, onions, and tomato paste cooked together) and another of pikliz (PEEK-leez), which is cabbage slaw sharpened with vinegar and made very hot with chile pepper. A side of beet-and-potato salad tasted almost familiar, except lightened with the beets and having a slightly different flavor, including a touch of garlic. (It’s a descendant of French salade russe and called that in Haiti.) All the food tasted freshly cooked. The only real heat came from the pikliz, a name that likely conflates French piquer, “to sting,” and English pickle.
Kimberly Behr
Haiti’s famous dish griot — cubes of pork marinated in epis and fried — looked as if it might be dry, and yet the meat was flavorful and nearly succulent. Epis (from the French épices, “spices”), like the sofrito of Latin American cuisines that probably influenced it, is a flavorful base for many Haitian dishes. The mixture varies from cook to cook but generally contains bell peppers, hot peppers, thyme, and garlic. Poul nan sòs, chicken in Creole sauce, was full of flavor though the meat was overcooked. Chickpea curry was also flavorful, containing butternut squash, sweet potato, tomato, onions, and peppers cooked in coconut milk and flavored with allspice, adobo, curry powder, and epis. The légume sandwich on a bun was a fried patty of vegetables and chickpeas with scallion-cashew “pesto” (an idea of the chef) plus plenty of heat from pikliz. The two desserts were a moist pineapple upside-down cake (from an aunt’s recipe) and cashew praline (brittle) with brown sugar and cinnamon (cashews, kajou, are native to Haiti).
The cost was just over $25 per person, a little of that because curiosity led us to order too much. None of us lived nearby, but we all agreed that if we did, Ansanm would become a regular part of our local eating.
Afterward, by phone, I spoke with Kassie Viaud, the chef’s sister, who was the one behind the counter. The main cooks are their parents, Myrlene and Yves; the Haitian recipes are hers. Chris is responsible for the sandwiches. The ingredients come from conventional purveyors rather than the farms sought out for Greenleaf. The parents came to the United States as teenagers and are retired from earlier careers. “The space became available,” Kassie Viaud said, “and they were excited to get in the kitchen.” The motivation was to spread an appreciation for Haitian cuisine in the area.
Having retired parents cook the food of their youth isn’t a formula that will work for a lot of restaurants, but I tried to get a sense of whether, compared with the fine dining of Greenleaf, it’s easier to succeed as a business with Ansanm. Kassie said, “It’s definitely succeeding, because of the community interest, so I wouldn’t compare it too much to the Greenleaf crowd.” People go to Ansanm for food that’s different.
Alice Waters’ vision of slow food and slow life is cited so often that I hesitate to invoke it, but in her most recent book, We Are What We Eat, I like her acknowledgement that we’re all drawn to convenience. Rather than shop frequently at a separate bread baker, fishmonger, butcher, greengrocer, cheesemonger, pastry shop, it’s easier to go once or twice a week to a supermarket. We save time, but she asks: “What are we making room for?” Waters doesn’t quite say so, but a chain supermarket has a lot in common with a chain restaurant. After 50 years, her Chez Panisse remains a stand-alone. She says, “I think scaling up leads to a loss of individuality and a loss of a sense of community.” The small one-off has none of the economies of scale of a chain, but it knows the local resources, which may be too scarce to supply more than one or two places. It offers the comfort of a human scale. It’s more woven into its community, and more of the income stays there. A one-off usually has a sense of place: you look around and know you’re in that one restaurant.
Independent restaurants share some qualities with independent bookstores, which survive because they are independent. They reflect the owner, the staff, and the neighborhood; they have character and a point of view. Their numbers plummeted after Amazon undercut their prices, but during the 2010s new ones opened up and their numbers rose again. Barnes & Noble, too, is rebounding and modeling itself on them. A one-off restaurant is not only more distinct but more likely to experiment. It’s the individual, informed, ambitious, innovative places that create the excitement for all restaurants.
It became clear as I was writing that the biggest problem for restaurants is the cooking itself. In the industrialized world, hardly any business is left that’s centered on a craft product. Restaurants are the big exception. Of course, it’s a struggle to buy delicious raw materials, prepare them with skill, pay fair wages, and charge accessible prices. But sometimes you realize you’re in a restaurant that’s trying hard to do it all, and the food is great. You feel a sense of well-being that you don’t get anywhere else.●
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