Speaker 1: You were listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair.
Speaker 1: I have a menu from your restaurant, So that's something
Speaker 1: else that binds us in common. You see the chefs,
Speaker 1: they're planning the menu for your and you also you
Speaker 1: bring a lot of love to your customers. So I
Speaker 1: don't know anybody that comes to this restaurant it doesn't
Speaker 1: feel like they're in some way getting a familial element
Speaker 1: to the experience. So you have done an amazing job
Speaker 1: with that. And I give you a lot of credit
Speaker 1: for that. And I will say this to people that
Speaker 1: don't own restaurants because I have to own a restaurant
Speaker 1: in a very hard business. It's very hard to run.
Speaker 1: The operating margins are tight. The food has to be perfect,
Speaker 1: you know they say that. You know, they say in
Speaker 1: politics that terrorists us to be lucky once and we
Speaker 1: have to be right one hundred percent of the time.
Speaker 1: But in a restaurant, you could have one bad meal.
Speaker 1: It cannot get judged. To me, you can knock out
Speaker 1: fifty customers forever. They get on the phone and they
Speaker 1: give you a bad yell rating, or they tell twenty
Speaker 1: to friends, I had a bad meal. No one comes back.
Speaker 1: I forbid that your restaurant is the cis restaurant that
Speaker 1: I've ever been in my own a restaurant. What's the
Speaker 1: name of the restaurant. So the name of the restaurant,
Speaker 1: we named it after the John Gotti Social Club. So
Speaker 1: the old mafia Don and Queens had a social club
Speaker 1: called the Hunt and Fish Social Club, and so we
Speaker 1: named the restaurant the Hunt and Fish Club. And so
Speaker 1: it was a little knock on that effect. John Gotti Junior.
Speaker 1: When John Travolta was playing his father in the movie Gotti,
Speaker 1: they did their after party at our restaurant. And so
Speaker 1: restaurants on forty fourth Street, it's one right in the
Speaker 1: theater is a great place to go for the theater.
Speaker 1: We hire a lot of the Broadway musicians to come
Speaker 1: on a Wednesday night if there and saying, oh please,
Speaker 1: you gotta come. I don't know if you called the meatballs,
Speaker 1: but we have an underground menu. Want a restaurant because
Speaker 1: we're a couple of us are Italians, So we have
Speaker 1: my grandmother's meatball recipe you can ask for. We've had
Speaker 1: French onion soup. We have New England clam child. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the traditional stage crab cake and bacon. I'd like
Speaker 1: to have that. What's a but it has a cheddar
Speaker 1: beer sauce on the site on the side. On the
Speaker 1: we have cavatelli bolonnaise yocky with lobster gavia. That's very
Speaker 1: it's really delicious. Sounds good. So you have this restaurant.
Speaker 1: Do you eat there? Ten years ago? There? I eat there.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm in New York. I try to If
Speaker 1: I'm in New York for the week, I try to
Speaker 1: get there one at least one night. So yeah, I
Speaker 1: have a lot of meals there. My kids love it.
Speaker 1: We have chicken fingers for the kids, French fries. You know,
Speaker 1: there's some off the menu stuff that we'll give to people.
Speaker 1: Did you ever do another one? So we opened one
Speaker 1: at Laguardi Airport, So we have a Hunt and Fish
Speaker 1: Grill at Laguardi Airport. We're in partnership with the port authority.
Speaker 1: We're going to open one at Kennedy in Terminal one.
Speaker 1: Uh and so yeah, we're open to the idea of
Speaker 1: opening a few more of them. We got crushed during COVID, so,
Speaker 1: unlike some of the restaurants in New York, city, and
Speaker 1: for us, we had a cloak. We had no out
Speaker 1: because we were in the theater distri there was no
Speaker 1: place to put any alfresco dining. So we closed for
Speaker 1: fifteen months, and then we had to make a mission
Speaker 1: critical decision. We each had to put money in to
Speaker 1: keep the staff and to keep the thing going. And
Speaker 1: so we made that decision the four of us, which
Speaker 1: I think was a great decision. Everybody got to keep
Speaker 1: their jobs. We reopened. The business absolutely sucked. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to be sue. We were way down. Our traffic
Speaker 1: numbers were up here in twenty twenty, really high. They
Speaker 1: started out in the pits because in downtown New York,
Speaker 1: the corporations were letting people work at home. This was
Speaker 1: a corporate watering hole. It was a corporate hotspot. We
Speaker 1: did tons of corporate events and Christmas parties, but closing
Speaker 1: dinner parties for investment, banking transactions and all of that
Speaker 1: business went by the wayside as people were operating off
Speaker 1: of Zoom and more or less staying out of the city.
Speaker 1: So it's five years after COVID and we're now back
Speaker 1: to the March twenty twenty numbers. But I'll tell you
Speaker 1: we we took in a lot of water. You get
Speaker 1: involved with the menu, do you give them my opinions.
Speaker 1: I just have two things on the menu that I
Speaker 1: care about. So the two things I care about are
Speaker 1: the meatballs, which they're actually not on the menu. That's
Speaker 1: sort of if you know me, you can ask for
Speaker 1: the meatballs. Okay, So everyone asked for the media asked
Speaker 1: for the meatballs because we have a little bit of
Speaker 1: an underground menu because work we're Italians and I want
Speaker 1: to have meatballs at the table, and our chef makes
Speaker 1: an amazing meatball. And then the other thing that I
Speaker 1: love is we have a very expensive Italian ice cream machine,
Speaker 1: so we make our own ice cream, and so that
Speaker 1: was a big deal for me. The peasant food in
Speaker 1: southern Italy is simple. It's a couple of ingredients, and
Speaker 1: if you get the combo of the ingredients right, it's
Speaker 1: the best sort of food. It's also clean. I'll say
Speaker 1: something about your restaurant, which unfortunately is not so true
Speaker 1: in New York or America, because we poison our food
Speaker 1: in America. We're just being honest with everybody. But you've
Speaker 1: got like clean food here, well prepared without a lot
Speaker 1: of harsh ingredients or preservatives or I mean it's hard
Speaker 1: to believe, but chlorination and chicken and things like that.
Speaker 1: So the food here, I always lose weight when I'm
Speaker 1: in the UK, even though I'm eating and I'm eating bread.
Speaker 1: So I had the facacio coming in if I had
Speaker 1: I'm just letting you know, if I had American fagachio,
Speaker 1: I'd be up like three pounds after eating it. But
Speaker 1: here you can eat the fagato no problem, and you
Speaker 1: go home losing a little bit of weight. So come here.
Speaker 1: People here love what they're doing, and the restaurant years
Speaker 1: the people that are here consuming they love it as well.
Speaker 1: So I give you a lot of credit for that.
Speaker 1: And you're an expat. And also I think you figured
Speaker 1: it out as an expat, which is even more impressive.
Speaker 1: I've been here a long time. Thank you for listening
Speaker 1: to Ruthie's table for in partnership with Montclair