I’M NOT TRYING TO BE DIFFICULT: Stories From the Restaurant Trenches, by Drew Nieporent with Jamie Feldmar
Hundreds of thousands of restaurants closed during Covid, and the ensuing rent and labor costs have left the industry still thrashing. That’s not to mention the issues of workplace abuse that the #MeToo movement had already brought into the open, and the staff treatment that still needs systematic reform.
You wouldn’t know any of this from Drew Nieporent’s new memoir, “I’m Not Trying to Be Difficult,” whose tone is crystallized by the triumphant opening of his first restaurant, Montrachet, in 1985. After it earned a three-star New York Times review, Nieporent writes, “I could have sold out Shea Stadium.”
There are plenty of ups and downs cataloged here — the tremendous successes of Tribeca Grill and Nobu, both in partnership with Robert De Niro, and the strikeouts when Nieporent spread himself too thin. But we hear mostly about the good times.
As when reading Michael M. Grynbaum’s recent history of the free-spending glory days of Condé Nast or Graydon Carter’s and Keith McNally’s wonderful memoirs, you wish for time travel, plus the kind of expense account that would let you live the high life they describe.
Ever-rising rents, spiking food prices and minimum-wage increases that more equitably compensate the staff but can doom a restaurant’s balance sheet — these realities play next to no part here, even if Nieporent consistently made an effort to give patrons good value.
Unlike Carter and McNally, Nieporent isn’t a gifted writer, or a writer at all. He’s a raconteur, and he and his co-author, Jamie Feldmar, punctuate the stories here with a well-waved cigar (Nieporent’s daytime office in the 1990s, we learn, was a table outside Tribeca Grill’s loading dock stocked with a phone and cigars).
The anecdotes take on real zest when they move from his New York City adolescence to the cruise-ship kitchens and dining rooms where he worked during college, and his stints at the circus-y, era-defining hot spots Maxwell’s Plum and Tavern on the Green, where he became a manager.
Nieporent revels in the world he details: There’s the headwaiter who “accidentally” drops palmed bills from reservation-less customers to deftly calculate how good a table he should give them, and the old-school chef who drinks too much and sends out platters of strip loin that’s “borderline mooing” to a corporate lunch.
Though the book isn’t structured as a how-to, it does impart a good number of lessons. Always seat your best tables first. “Why? Because you get them back.” Be gracious but “take the goddamn order” if you want to get in that second seating essential to breaking even. Don’t ask diners if everything is all right — that invites time-wasting complaints. A wood fire may be romantic, but a gas grill leaves the same marks and doesn’t antagonize the neighbors.
Aside from a knack for efficiency and an appetite for long hours, what really distinguished Nieporent was his eye and reverence for talent, married to the genuine pleasure he took in eating. (That passion had near-calamitous effects on his health.)
Montrachet was the result of his hustle — but also his instincts, acting on the memory of a meal in California cooked by a then-unknown David Bouley. When their volatile partnership exploded, Nieporent made other stars — and even if he never mentions racial equity or social movements, he did nurture women and chefs of color before it was fashionable.
His voice is at its surest when describing the skill of the team he built and stuck with. Nieporent calls the chef Debra Ponzek’s food “rustic, precise, eloquent”; now that’s someone I want to eat out with. He seems baffled by the shift from the restaurateurs he modeled himself on — pros like Joe Baum and Sirio Maccioni — to tantrum-throwing chefs with no management training. Still, the book’s appendix honors all the chefs he has hired, along with listing all the restaurants he’s opened.
The book doesn’t go in for much introspection. In a low moment, De Niro and the other partners freeze him out of the international Nobu empire. The calls coldly informing him of his reduced role came out of the blue, he says. Might he have been the tiniest bit hard to work with? His bluster and self-congratulation, at times stifling, don’t give us the sense that the author takes his memoir’s title very seriously.
By book’s end, though, we do get the strong sense of someone trying to figure out how to remain relevant in a post-critic, influencer-driven world that has changed beyond his recognition. One way might be to convey to aspiring restaurateurs a sheer love of well-made food — and how to both recognize and create a well-managed establishment.
Restaurants still give Nieporent joy. And at its best, “I’m Not Trying to Be Difficult” makes us rediscover and share that joy.
I’M NOT TRYING TO BE DIFFICULT: Stories From the Restaurant Trenches | By Drew Nieporent | with Jamie Feldmar | Grand Central | 288 pp. | $30
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