A Cucina Antipasto:For Bob Giraldi, It’s all about the FoodBy George De StefanoGigino Trattoria, located on Greenwich Street in downtown Manhattan’s Tribecaneighborhood, offers an appealing southern Italian menu created by a chef from the resorttown of Positano, and a warm, casual ambience inspired by trattorias in Italy. Tribecans, as wellas Italian food lovers from other parts of New York City and beyond, come to Gigino’s to enjoythe inventive but unpretentious cuisine and the convivial atmosphere.But it was the worst disaster in New York City’s history that really showed just howmuch of a neighborhood institution Gigino Trattoria had become since it opened in 1994.On the morning of September 11, 2001, Gigino’s owner Bob Giraldi was working out at anearby health club. He rushed home to his wife and daughter - the Giraldis live a block awayfrom the restaurant - shut the windows, and watched in stunned disbelief as the twin towerscollapsed.Gigino’s, like many buildings in the vicinity of the World Trade Center, was covered insoot and debris. But just a week later, Giraldi re-?opened it to serve free food to police, firemen,and other rescue workers.Cucina Antipasto: Bob GiraldiPage | 2“We were right near the barricades,” Giraldi recalls. “You could go north of Duane Streetbut you couldn’t go below” Greenwich and Duane, where Gigino’s is located. “I would sitoutside and smell that smoke and hear the sirens all day long. Bodies were being removed. Andevery day cops and firemen would come in for lunch. So I would feed them, mostly pizza andpasta. Sometimes they’d applaud.”Giraldi recalls that when word got out that he was feeding 9/11 rescue workers, someuptown restaurateurs followed his lead, hoping to garner similar favorable publicity. One wasJean Georges Vongerichten, a star of New York’s upscale restaurant scene.“But the workers didn’t want uptown French sandwiches from Jean Georges,” Giraldilaughs. “They wanted our food.” The rescue workers were rough-?edged men, mostly from theso-?called outer boroughs of New York City and from New Jersey. Many were blue collar ItalianAmericans. “It was goombah time,” Giraldi says, using the slang term - derived from compare-?-?for a proletarian paisan who maybe lacks refinement but is a solid, salt of the earth kind of guy,a reliable friend and protector. These were the kind of men who were throwing themselves intothe arduous and dangerous rescue work at the World Trade Center, with little concern for theirown safety.Bob Giraldi sat outside Gigino’s with a close friend who once was one of those men, theTeamster turned actor Danny Aiello. “We were having coffee and talking, and workers werecoming up and greeting him, saying how great it was that he was there.”Tribeca has recovered from the trauma of 9/11, which wreaked havoc on the economyof lower Manhattan. It’s now a much more expensive area than in 2001. A construction boomCucina Antipasto: Bob GiraldiPage | 3has spawned luxury high-?rises, there’s a spate of trendy and high-?priced restaurants, andupscale markets like Whole Foods have moved in. But Gigino Trattoria remains a neighborhoodmainstay unchanged by all the new development. It continues to serve delicious andmoderately-?priced southern Italian fare to its loyal customers.The loyalty hardly is surprising given what Gigino’s has to offer. There’s spaghetti delpadrino, a harmonious marriage of sweet (beets), bitter (escarole), and salty (capers) concoctedby chef Luigi Celentano. Cavatelli broccoli rabe e salsiccia -?-? rolled, bullet-?shaped pasta dressedwith sautéed bitter greens, garlic, and homemade veal and pork sausage -?-? evokes the heartyfare of Italian American Sunday family dinners. Zuppa di lenticchie e scarola (lentil and escarolesoup) is southern Italian comfort food, dense and rich with rustic flavor. Celentano’s excellentpizzas, ranging from a basic margherita to the lavish tartufata, with chicken, radicchio, endive,mushrooms, and asiago cheese, are as good as anything one can find in Italy.Gigino Trattoria is one of eleven restaurants that Giraldi owns or has a stake in. Onlytwo others, however, are Italian - Gigino at Wagner Park, a tonier and more expensive cousinto the trattoria, in Battery Park City, and Bread, an informal Tuscan eatery specializing in panini(Italian grilled sandwiches), on the edge of Tribeca and Chinatown. He also owns Mexican,seafood, and burger restaurants.But it is the Italian places that Giraldi loves best.“The only thing I always wanted to dowas open an Italian restaurant,” he says.That’s a surprising admission coming from someone who didn’t begin his professionallife as a restaurateur. A graduate of Pratt Institute, the prestigious Brooklyn art college, GiraldiCucina Antipasto: Bob GiraldiPage | 4has enjoyed a successful career in advertising with two of New York’s most prominent agencies,first as an art director at Young & Rubicam and then as creative director at Della Femina andPartners. In 1973, he formed his own company, Giraldi Productions, which has made hundredsof television commercials, as well as short films and music videos. Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” ishis best-?known production; the video won an American Music Award, the Billboard VideoAward, a People’s Choice Award, and is included in Rolling Stone’s top ten examples of videoart installation at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In 2000, he made his debut as a featurefilm director with “Dinner Rush,” starring his friend Danny Aiello.But Italian food is his first and most enduring passion.Born in 1939 to an immigrant family in Paterson, New Jersey, Bob Giraldi grew up in ahome where “it was always about the food.” As with so many Italian American households,the Giraldi family culture centered around cooking and eating.“On Sundays we would travel from Paterson to Port Chester [New York] to visitrelatives. Their house was like a museum upstairs, you couldn’t sit anywhere in the living anddining room, but downstairs, the basement -?-?that was where the heart and soul was. There wasa long table with chairs and we just spent all day Sunday around food. We didn’t discuss topicslike sports or politics or sex. It was all about what we were eating that day and what we werelooking forward to eating next. Then when your body was totally sated from eating, it was timeto go home. That’s how it was every Sunday for as long as I can remember when I was a kid.And I would imagine that was a defining experience in most Italian Americans’ lives.”Cucina Antipasto: Bob GiraldiPage | 5To non-?Italians, this might sound like gluttony. But since so many Italian Americanscame from impoverished peasant or urban laborer backgrounds, the family feasts were anoccasion for celebrating the abundance they had found in America. The fabled Sunday dinnersalso brought together several generations, from immigrant grandparents to their American-?born children to their grandchildren, establishing continuity between the old and new worlds.“Just about everybody in my neighborhood in Paterson, was a southern Italianimmigrant or descended from them,” he recalls. “Mostly from Naples and other parts ofsouthern Italy. There weren’t too many Milanesi or other northern Italians!” His late motherMinnie De Lucia Giraldi was from Naples, his father from Calabria. “My grandfather on mymother’s side was a butcher, so the quality of the food was important. And my mother turnedout to be quite an accomplished chef. All Italian Americans say their mothers are great cooks,but my mother really was gifted. One of my regrets in life was that I never had a chance to opena restaurant with her.”“Christmas Eve was my favorite,” Giraldi says. On that occasion his family enjoyed theseafood-?based feast known as sette pesci (seven fishes), a tradition of abundant eatingestablished by southern Italians “under the flimsy excuse that God wanted it that way.”Though the sette pesci always included fried smelts, sardines, and baccala (codfish), he favoredhis mother’s linguine alle vongole - linguine with fresh clams. Giraldi says that even GiginoTrattoria’s chef Luigi Celentano always praised her version of the classic dish as the best he’dever tasted.Cucina Antipasto: Bob GiraldiPage | 6In the Giraldi home, the love of cucina italiana infused the very atmosphere of domesticlife.“I used to bring friends home from high school, and they were impressed by theatmosphere - the food aromas and the warmth of our home. My non-?Italian friends’ homeswere cold by comparison. I remember a Polish friend’s house as being so gray and uninviting.But the Italian home was warm, the colors were like a palette, and there were the wonderfulsmells.”I know what Giraldi’s talking about. His recollections trigger my own chauvinisticnostalgia. I was born in a blue collar, predominantly Italian American neighborhood inBridgeport, Connecticut. But we later moved to a mixed “white ethnic” area and my best friendwas a Jewish boy who lived next door. Visiting me one afternoon Henry remarked, “Your housesmells different.” Thinking he meant that I lived in an odoriferous home, I was a bit offended.“No,” Henry hastened to assure me, “It’s great, it smells like Italian food.”“My house,” he said, “doesn’t smell like anything.”The day Giraldi left home to attend college, his mother and sister stood in the drivewaycrying. “I remember saying, ‘don’t cry, I’m only going to Brooklyn. I’ll be back in a few months.’But I came home the very next weekend. ‘I can’t eat there,’ I told my mother. There wasnothing to eat at college.”Minnie Giraldi didn’t only feed her son’s appetite; she nurtured his career aspirations.“My mother pushed me to go to Pratt,” he says. “She would insist that I should go to an artCucina Antipasto: Bob GiraldiPage | 7school. I managed to get an athletic scholarship to Pratt, the best art school in the area. I’d goto all my art classes carrying my duffle bag with my jock and sneakers in it.”When he graduated in 1960, he chose commercial art, not fine art or industrial design. “Icame out of Pratt and became an ad guy, an art director in the advertising business.”It wasn’t until the 1980s that he would become an Italian restaurateur, his first venturebeing Positano, a midtown Manhattan establishment specializing in the food of the AmalfiCoast, one of Italy’s most spectacularly beautiful locales.In 1981, Giraldi and his then-?wife Marian, and Giraldi’s business partner Phil Suarez andhis wife Lucy, went on vacation in Italy and ended up in Positano. For Giraldi, it was love at firstsight, both for the picturesque town, built on a mountainside overlooking the sea, and for thelocal cuisine, especially the seafood and the pasta. When they returned to New York, Giraldistarted thinking about a restaurant that would evoke the atmosphere and recreate the cuisineof the Amalfi Coast.“At the time, New York Italian restaurants were mostly Northern Italian or Little Italy redsauce places,” Giraldi says. “There were no restaurants specializing in Amalfitan seafood,Amalfitan cuisine.”He, Suarez and their wives returned to Positano in 1984 with the express purpose offinding a chef. After making inquiries among local hotels, they found Luigi Celentano, theyoung executive chef at Hotel Le Sirenuse. Celentano, a Positano native who began working inCucina Antipasto: Bob GiraldiPage | 8resort hotel kitchens in 1962, was looking for a new challenge, and was receptive to the idea ofrelocating to New York.But first there was the audition. Celentano’s lasted for hours, during which he prepareddishes such as pasta fagioli, spaghetti with shrimp, and a cheese-?based dessert that wouldbecome ubiquitous in New York Italian restaurants - tirami su.When it was over, “We knewwe had our superstar,” says Giraldi.Celentano came to New York and became the chef of the new Giraldi-?Suarez venture,creating the menu and running the kitchen. Positano opened in 1984 and was an immediate hit.The owners were well aware that sophisticated New Yorkers like their restaurants to have somedazzle, to offer a bit of a show as well as good food. They hired architect Randy Croxton tocreate a multilevel interior that evoked Positano’s hillside setting. They brought in carpentersand other craftsmen who had worked on Giraldi’s “Beat It” video to build the restaurant.Designer Milton Glaser came up with a pink, cream and green décor and designed plates with amermaid logo.Giraldi acknowledges that his high profile in the then-?burgeoning music video industryhelped bring in customers. But Celentano’s cooking was the real draw.“He’s just a marvelous chef,” Giraldi enthuses. “When we met him, he didn’t speakEnglish, and we only spoke basic Italian. But we found a way to communicate and becamepartners. He and I became like brothers, and today we’re still partners.”Cucina Antipasto: Bob GiraldiPage | 9Positano closed after a successful ten year run. Then, in August 1994, the team ofGiraldi, Suarez, and Celentano opened Gigino Trattoria in Tribeca. (“Gigino,” the diminutive of“Luigi,” is Celentano’s nickname.) The idea was to offer a menu similar to Positano’s, but in acasual, trattoria setting and at lower prices. But between idea and execution, the relationshipbetween Giraldi and Suarez began to fray. These days the two no longer are partners, and onecan assume things did not end amicably from Giraldi’s referring to Suarez as “my ex-?partnerwho shall go nameless.”Suarez felt the new venture should cater to an adult clientele, without children.“I said, excuse me, but this is an Italian trattoria,” Giraldi recalls. “I’d eaten in trattoriasin Italy and loved them, the whole casual nature of them. You can’t have a trattoria withoutfamilies and kids. What are we gonna have, just business people?”“Besides,” Giraldi continues, “Tribeca is a neighborhood, where families live. It’s a veryexpensive one now, but it’s still a neighborhood. So I went out and got a half-?dozen high chairs.And our place became one of the most popular family restaurants in the area. What other kindof restaurant can boast that it feeds adults and kids with same integrity as an Italian restaurant?The food appeals to adults’ and children’s palates.”Five years after opening the trattoria, Giraldi and Celentano started Gigino at WagnerPark, in lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City. It’s a sleeker and higher-?priced sibling of the rusticTribeca eatery, with an eye-?catching modern design in blue, cream, and pale pink hues. But itsmain selling point, ambiance-?wise, is its superb panoramic view extending from the Statue ofLiberty to the New Jersey skyline. There’s also a vast patio dining area that is predictably packedCucina Antipasto: Bob GiraldiPage | 10during warm weather. The menu shares some of the same dishes as the trattoria, but it seemsto have been designed to appeal to tourists as well as cucina cognoscenti, with such standardItalian American offerings as fried calamari and chicken parmigiana along with Celentano’ssignature dishes.In 2000, Bob Giraldi embarked on a new venture that combined the visual artistry he’dhoned as an art and video director with his life-?long love of Italian food. With “Dinner Rush,”Giraldi made his debut as a feature film maker. The film, which actually was shot in GiginoTrattoria, centers on the conflict between Italian American restaurateur Louis Cropa (DannyAiello) and his chef, who happens to be his son, Udo (Eduardo Ballerini). Louis, says Giraldi, “isa traditional guy, and he’s based on me.” The son Udo is a talented and creative chef, but he’salso egocentric, selfish, obsessed with the bottom line, and contemptuous of what he sees ashis father’s antiquated attitudes. If his father would rather eat sausage and peppers and hangout with his old friends, Udo favors nuova cucina creations like rabbit Piemontese with winereduction and chocolate and chatting up models and art critics.The generational war between father and son isn’t the only conflict in “Dinner Rush.”Two gangsters named “Black” and “Blue” are trying to shake down Louis. They want a piece ofthe restaurant, as well as earnings from the bookmaking business that Louis and his longtimepartner Enrico have run as a sideline. Louis resists the thugs’ demands, but when they killEnrico, he retaliates by putting out a contract on them. The identity of the hit man turns out tobe the film’s biggest surprise.Cucina Antipasto: Bob GiraldiPage | 11But before the surprising and satisfying denouement, there are a number ofentertaining and well-?observed vignettes of the restaurant business, downtown Manhattannightlife, and the characters that populate both worlds. Giraldi has a great ear for how certaintypes of New Yorkers talk and a satirical eye for their foibles and insecurities. The film skewersegomaniacal chefs, insufferable art critics, demanding restaurant reviewers and “foodies” whoare perpetually searching for the next hot restaurant.“Dinner Rush” immerses the viewer in the business of cooking and serving food. In onelong take the camera moves from the controlled chaos of the basement kitchen, where thetemperamental Udo rages and berates his harried staff while the kitchen workers whip up thefood and slap it onto plates and the waiters rush it up the stairs to the hungry customers. Themovie as a whole is fast and lively, deftly mixing comedy and drama.In the original script, which Giraldi’s agent brought to him, the setting was Chicago, andthe story was what Giraldi calls “a sophomoric look at the restaurant business.”“It was a social commentary on young people who work in restaurants: the type thathas sex in the kitchen or smokes dope in the hallway.” Giraldi bought the script but re-?wrote it,setting the story “in New York, where I know the business, and where I have a restaurant I’d liketo tell people about. It turned out to be a film that mirrors my life, my culture and mybusiness.”“That movie is pretty autobiographical, with the exception of the whacking at the end,”Giraldi says. “It’s based on things that I’ve experienced in my life.”Cucina Antipasto: Bob GiraldiPage | 12Gangsters have been involved in the restaurant business - as owners, investors, andsuppliers - for as long as there has been organized crime in America. Though no one was everwhacked in Gigino Trattoria, a mobster did lean on Giraldi before the restaurant opened. “Thisthug-?looking guy used to pull up in his Cadillac. He’d just stare at what was going on for a whileand then drive on,” Giraldi says. “This went on for a week and then he finally came in and toldLuigi [Celentano] that he wished us luck. He was opening his own place about ten blocks northin Tribeca and he was going to be the first in the neighborhood to have a wood-?burning brickoven.”These ovens, now more common in New York than they were in 1994, produce a betterpizza than the industrial-?type gas or electric ones, and they add a touch of Italian tradition to arestaurant’s ambiance.The problem was that Giraldi was already installing such an oven at Gigino’s.“He told Luigi that he would be happy for us to be the second place with a brick oven,and that we had no choice because he was, as he said, ‘from the street.’ He was definitelytrying to strong-?arm us.“I agreed to talk with him. He looked like Al Pacino in ‘Donnie Brasco’ [the 1997 mafiamovie starring Pacino and Johnny Depp] in his grey track suit.” Giraldi says that while the twowalked around the neighborhood talking, the thug repeated his threat. “I said, look, we’re farenough away that we’re not going to take each other’s business. And there’s certainly enoughCucina Antipasto: Bob GiraldiPage | 13of a market for Italian food and pizza for both of us.” But the thug insisted that his restaurantwould be the first in the area to offer brick oven pizza.“I said that I’d think about it and get back to him. Growing up in New Jersey around hiskind I knew how to talk to him, how to posture a bit.”Giraldi and Suarez called their attorney, who, Giraldi says, was a “mob lawyer” who haddefended such Cosa Nostra figures as Gambino family boss Paul Castellano. Two days later, thelawyer called Giraldi to say “Don’t worry. He’ll never bother you again.” Giraldi says theattorney contacted “some people” who were higher up in the local mob hierarchy and they toldthe “street” guy to back off. “We saw him watching us from his car a few times but he neverbothered us any more,” Giraldi says.“Dinner Rush” was well received by critics, ending up on a number of Top Ten film listsfor 2001. It also was selected for the prestigious New Directors/New Films Series presented bythe Film Society of Lincoln Center. The New Yorker praised its “Maileresque texture of appetiteand hustle.” Giraldi’s movie, with its volatile chef and eruptive kitchen dramas, clearlyinfluenced reality television series like “The Restaurant” and “Hell’s Kitchen.”But “Dinner Rush” died at the box office, a victim of bad timing. Shot in 2000, it wasreleased just a month after the destruction of the World Trade Center. Giraldi calls his film a“prewar movie,” made when “the mood and the attitude was entirely different.” Right after9/11, Giraldi discussed with his distributors the advisability of releasing it so soon. He felt itCucina Antipasto: Bob GiraldiPage | 14wouldn’t be “strategically smart,” given that the film was shot “in the heart of the war zone,with three shots of the World Trade Center.”The distributors and Giraldi ended up going with their original release date. “’DinnerRush’ was one of the few films to come out right after 9/11, which was a reason for its earlydemise,” Giraldi says. “It was successful in Europe, Asia and elsewhere but not here. It hung onfor a few weeks but no movie that came out at that time stayed on. We miscalculated, wethought America was ready to smile a bit, but they were not, we were off by months.”The fate of “Dinner Rush” hasn’t put Giraldi off filmmaking. In late 2008, he wasdeveloping his second feature, “Isola delle Femmine.” The film’s title is the name of the tinyisland off the northern coast of Sicily where Joe Di Maggio’s family originated. The script isbased on a true story, the Yankee Clipper’s ill-?fated trip to the place where generations of DiMaggios had been fishermen.It’s a very Italian story, and one can expect, given the island setting and the director’spredilections, that food - glorious, fresh Sicilian seafood -?-? will figure in the narrative. Thepeople of Isola delle Femmine would hardly welcome the island’s most famous son withoutpreparing a feast in his honor.Filmmaking, advertising, and music videos consume much of Bob Giraldi’s time andconsiderable energy. (He’s tall and still trim of physique, as in his long-?ago student athletedays.) But he’s most passionate about Italian food, and his Italian restaurants. His pride in thequality of their cuisine comes through loud and clear when I ask about the “authenticity” ofCucina Antipasto: Bob GiraldiPage | 15American Italian restaurants. In the 90s, I interviewed the Florentine cooking teacher andcookbook author Giuliano Bugialli, who told me that New York Italian restaurants fared poorlywhen compared to establishments in Italy. He criticized everything from the un-?Italian practiceof serving butter with bread to excessive saucing and cheese on pasta. One could find goodindividual dishes in New York restaurants, but he insisted that an authentic Italian meal washard to come by.Giraldi smiles when I recount Bugialli’s comments, but there’s an edge in his voice. “Iknew him,” he says. “My mother studied with him for a while. But he was being a little preciouswhen he told you that. In my restaurants there’s nothing we do that is not what I would see orget in Italy. Nothing!” The baby clams chef Celentano uses for pasta sauce -?-? vongole veraci inItalian -?-? are flown in from Italy. Pasta is either handmade or imported from Italy. Olive oil andother condiments and ingredients also come straight from la madrepatria.“The one thing we do different from Italians in Italy,” he says, “is we use moreingredients. For example, in an Italian sandwich the bread is the thing. You get one or two slicesof Parma prosciutto, but here you get more. Americans expect more meat, Italians expectflavor.”“But,” he insists, “We are as authentic as restaurants in Italy.”He does offer, however, an item not readily found in restaurants in Italy. “Mygrandfather would turn over in his grave, but I have whole wheat pasta at my places,” he says.He also serves whole wheat pizza at Bread. At that restaurant, Wednesday is “il giorno delCucina Antipasto: Bob GiraldiPage | 16salute” - healthy day - with lighter, vegetable-?based cuisine. Giraldi says that fare goes downwell with Bread’s “more looks-? and health-?conscious crowd.”Those customers includeemployees of RAI, the Italian broadcasting company, whose New York offices are in the samebuilding as Bread. “We’re popular with the people from RAI,” Giraldi says. “They feel at homethere.”Bob Giraldi, nearly 70 at the time he and I met, says that his life has come full circlesince his early years in New Jersey, when he liked nothing better than to eat his mother’scooking and enjoy the abundance and sociability of la tavola, the Italian table. “I started out ina home full of love and food,” he fondly recalls. “And now here in Tribeca, with my family andmy restaurants, it’s the same.”Cucina Antipasto: Bob GiraldiPage | 17