Burying the Hatchet Job, Part II


On taking good food to the masses…

ENGLISH: Here’s my thing: I would watch jerkoffs that didn’t know anything about the restaurant business make a pizza that sucked, and put it all over the country and fly around on their G4s to gather all their money up in all these restaurants. And that pissed me off more than anything. I’d think, Why should these motherf*rs be making all the money in our industry that we sweat for.

And that’s the thing that bothered me the most. Here you have chefs, all the chefs that I know, who dedicated their lives to being in the kitchen studying the cuisine, making sue it’s organic, and going to the markets, and sweating it out, and suffering. And everybody did. Everybody’s gone through it. And you’ve got corporate Joe who names a pizza after a game and makes how much money? Billions. Fucking billions for selling cardboard to America. That pisses me off more than anything. And truly, you look at—and I’m not knocking chains, but I’m just saying, that’s what America became.

ENGLISH: …I remember in the early ’90s T.G.I. Friday’s coming to me and saying, “What can you do to help us?’ Papa Gino’s and Red Lobster, all these people coming to the chefs, and saying, “How can we make our food better for people?” And I never wanted to get involved with them. I said, “I don’t know how to make it better on your level because you don’t have the right mentality and you’ll never be able to pull it off.”

RICHMAN: Isn’t that interesting that I’m complaining that his 20 restaurants aren’t as good as the restaurant when he was in there cooking, and he’s proud of what he’s done because he’s saying how much better it would’ve been than if he had left it to the corporate people to do it? It’s interesting.

TRAVERSO: Is there anyone who is a cautionary tale for the perils of expansionism?

RICHMAN: Certainly Wolfgang [Puck] took it too far by having breakfast pizza in the airport, but he knew exactly what he was doing. Wolfgang does not make any mistakes.

ENGLISH: No, he was a smart guy.

RICHMAN: Now, I don’t think it was a smart move, but it wasn’t a mistake for him, I’m sure. I thought it was a mistake, but he didn’t.

ENGLISH: He’s a smart guy. He went to Vegas. He definitely took chance and risks but he saw this long before a lot of people did. And got burned a little bit. Look, I’m in airports now, so…

RICHMAN: Do you have breakfast pizzas?

ENGLISH: We have breakfast pizza here [at Olives New York].

[Richman laughs.]

ENGLISH: But, you know what? It’s awesome, because the Italians do put eggs on pizza.

RICHMAN: They do put eggs on pizza.

ENGLISH: And that’s how we do it. But it comes with hollandaise, and Canadian bacon, and…it’s good.

TRAVERSO: It’s interesting because you’re not referencing the same thing that the foodies are. You’re looking at America and they’re looking at their peers.

ENGLISH: I’m looking at the airport. How much better do I have to be than what’s at the airport? Not a whole hell of a lot better. So I’m not trying to be, Okay, this is Todd English at the airport. But this is a whole lot better choice than what you’ve got there. That’s Wolfgang’s thinking, I’m sure. And what people are thinking. And thank God now, thanks to food writers like yourselves, the world is changing. And I do mean that 100 percent. The more you write about food, the more you’ve changed the way Americans think. It has changed. It has changed in 30 years. I’m not saying we’re perfect yet, but we are definitely on a road to recovery. I believe that. In Europe you don’t have to say it’s organic because it already is. Here we have to say it’s organic. At some point we won’t have to say it’s organic because, guess what? It is. It naturally is. Or whatever. It doesn’t have to be organic, but it’s grown properly. Because organic isn’t always better.

The hard part of expansion is, it’s hard to do on a big level because it now becomes more corporate. That’s hard. The thing you really [need to] do is the cookie-cutter thing, so my whole ambition is to do something like Figs in a bigger way. One concept. That’s it.