After four episodes spent nuzzling cute customers while his fledgling Italian eatery cratered around him, chef Rocco DiSpirito of NBC's The Restaurant is back in the kitchen and taking charge.
It's about time, Tampa Bay area restaurateurs say.
Local chefs and owners have watched the Sunday night reality show with a mixture of empathy, skepticism and horror since its July 20 debut. Rocco's on 22nd is a flashy, 240-seat Manhattan restaurant whose train wreck of an opening has been captured, and some would say embellished, on videotape.
"Even though I know it's this ridiculous reality show and I'm being manipulated, they capture the essence of the relationships pretty well," said Jeannie Pierola, executive chef at Bern's Steak House and chef/partner at SideBern's, in Tampa. "When you're a chef-driven restaurant, you have to be the driving force, the keeper of the karma."
Ostensibly, this is one of the most real of the reality shows: an actual chef and his real-life restaurant, not a matchmaking experiment or a trip to a deserted island. It's also the first major reality show about business, if you don't count $1-million offers to marry (or jilt) a virtual stranger.
In the early going at Rocco's the waits were long, the food cold and inconsistent, the clientele surly. One customer told the celebrity chef the food was better at Olive Garden. On the restaurant's second day, the staff sent a New York Post reporter's food to the wrong table. Twice.
Toward the end of Sunday's fourth episode, however, Rocco, a New York chef of legitimate renown, finally returned to the "back of the house," hand-rolling meatballs and giving sage cooking advice to his awed employees in the kitchen.
"In a real situation, Rocco would inspect 90 percent of the plates that go out, then go and ask the customers if they're happy," said Brad Sullivan, co-owner and chef at Zante Cafeneo in Tarpon Springs.
"My advice to him would be to continue to stay in the kitchen," said Brandee Cate, co-owner of Olivia's in Dunedin.
Bob Spoto, owner of Spoto's Steak Joint restaurants in St. Petersburg and Dunedin, doesn't buy Rocco's as reality. "No, how could you operate like that?" he asked. "I think it was put together to be a comedy, a comedy of errors."
Pierola of Bern's thinks the makers of The Restaurant toyed with the plot, making it seem Rocco's was drowning, only so its namesake could come to the rescue. It's no coincidence, she says, that executive producer Mark Burnett also developed the Survivor reality series.
Product plugs are all too obvious. References to sponsors Coors, Mitsubishi and American Express show up repeatedly. In one scene, DiSpirito realizes in a flash of brilliance that the way to buy time for his "hemorrhaging" restaurant is to open a line of credit at American Express. He also happened to star in several Amex commercials during Sunday's broadcast.
Pierola doubts that DiSpirito and his $4-million backer truly needed the extra cash. "I don't believe for a minute that they're undercapitalized."
Cate of Olivia's simply laughed. "I couldn't get a line of credit right now if I sold my daughter," she said. Cate and her husband, Bill, tripled their restaurant's size several months ago - without the help of a limousine-chauffered investor like DiSpirito's.
Nevertheless, elements of the show hit home for local restaurateurs, including the rude customers.
Cate said she honored a customer's expired gift certificate Sunday, only to have the customer complain later that he didn't use it all and wanted the difference back in cash. "It's appalling to me, the gall that some people have."
Zante Cafeneo's Sullivan said one customer interrupted him Saturday night as he described the day's specials. "She just cut me right in the middle and said, "I need water with lemon and separate checks,"' he said.
Not that the wait staff at Rocco's have been paragons of good service. Steakhouse owner Spoto said he would have sent some of the employees home for being sloppily dressed.
Michelle Miklus, floor manager at La Taberna in Brandon, said the maitre d' booked too many reservations, leaving many of the wait staff overwhelmed. The situation grew dire when Rocco's computer went down, leaving customer bills and orders in chaos.
As for the ultimate success or failure of Rocco's on 22nd, local restaurant owners are divided. Cate is pessimistic. "It's too much fluff," she said, "the restaurant of the moment." Pierola said she believes DiSpirito knows exactly what he's doing, despite the machinations of the show's producers, and will succeed. Spoto said the restaurant is handsome to look at, well-located, and has a winning menu.
La Taberna's Miklus was optimistic for Rocco's, if only because she's in no mood to dwell on the odds of a new restaurant failing.
"We're having a hard time getting business in the door," she said of the seven-month-old restaurant she helps run. "I'd like to see us succeed a year, so I don't want to say he can't do it."
