THE IRREPRESSIBLE RESTAURANTEUR

Silvio de Mori Is Mercurial, Charming and a Dash Mysterious. How Else to Survive 14 Restaurants in 35 Years?

Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Magazine
By Martin Booe
June 1, 2003

SCENE: De Mori Restaurant, Beverly Hills.

A cheery patio restaurant in the Rodeo Collection. Ivy curls around the trellis overhead and a fountain makes soothing sounds in the background. Owner Silvio de Mori, 55, with white-silver hair and eyes that crinkle up merrily, or wistfully, presides over the end of lunch with yours truly, MB, who is, for most intents and purposes, at this moment, an emotional wreck. The purpose is to interview Silvio about his long career in the restaurant business, the nature of restaurants, the beauty of food, but mostly the talk is about women.

MB squirms in his seat because he knows he's not doing his job. Silvio rises to say goodbye to a customer, which typically involves a strong one-armed hug, followed by a hand clasped around the back of the neck and a forceful kiss on one cheek. He now returns to the table and finishes a story about making love to a Finnish girl many years ago in a tent collapsing in the middle of an ice storm. Silvio speaks in a thick but nonspecific European accent, a product of his back-and-forth between France and Italy.

There are three kinds of restaurateurs. First, there are the ones who open restaurants to make money. This is dicey, because the failure rate for new restaurants is very high. Then there are those who open restaurants intentionally to lose money because they believe a restaurant would be a fun toy, a jolly tax write-off and make for interesting small talk at cocktail parties. The third type is another breed altogether. These are the people who own restaurants because it is in their blood.

The restaurant begins as a tabula rasa and winds up being a sort of Jungian projection of one's inner life, or a kind of gestalt. In this instance, the restaurant does not live or die by its food, or its service, or its ambience, though the three are inseparable. Here, some kind of alchemy takes place and the fusion of all three must happen, and the restaurateur's spirit must infuse every corner of the dining room like a friendly ghost.

This is a story of my dinners with Silvio de Mori, who has owned or run 14 restaurants since 1968, and of my dinners with him, and of my ultimate failure to practice journalistic objectivity when confronted by his gale force, mercurial personality that is as much a part of the menu as the Florentine-style double rib-eye steak and linguine with spicy marinara, garlic and Parmigiano. It is the story of the life of an inveterate restaurateur, and the ups and downs of the business.

Silvio's current venture is de Mori, which has been a work in progress since it opened last June. (His prior venue was the highly regarded Mimosa, now owned by his former partner, chef Jean-Pierre Bosc. The two also owned Café des Artistes in Hollywood, but more on that later.) Originally, the idea behind de Mori was to serve simple, rustic food prepared from his repertoire of family recipes.

Partly for this reason, and partly because he wanted her closer at hand, Silvio imported his mother, Maria, to supervise the preparation of such traditional family recipes as the Bolognese and the minestrone. Mama de Mori, however, proved to be rather more ambitious than anticipated, leading to a number of contretemps worthy of a Lina Wertmüller film.

SILVIO: If there's no Bolognese, then we get into a fight. If there's too much salt in the minestrone, we have a fight. She sent a photo crew away. "Get them out of here, I'm not prepared!" She's always yelling at the waiters in Italian. They don't understand, but they always say, "Yes, Mama!" I come into the kitchen, she chase me out. She don't want me to have the recipes, especially for the Bolognese.

She takes a bus to get in early so they can't see her cook. And she keeps the spices all in a locker so nobody can see what she put in the minestrone. We have fun until she thinks she's running the restaurant. The suppliers are terrified of her! Every time she grabs her handbag, everybody sighs with relief and says, "Are you leaving?" And she yells back, "No!"....

Why does one become a restaurateur and what makes it work? This is the question I ask Silvio at Hirozen, his favorite sushi restaurant. We have monkfish liver and other sushi to the point where we are drowning in omega oils. Here is the long answer:

When Silvio arrived in Los Angeles in 1984, all he had to his name was a suitcase, a melancholic basset hound named Philippe and one good Italian suit. "No matter how broke an Italian is, he always has one good suit." He was 36, and he was indeed broke. Presumably, the suit had no pockets left, judging by the amount of money that had burned through them in the preceding 15 years. Silvio had become a millionaire at the age of 26, and he had dutifully fulfilled the great expectation incumbent upon any 26-year-old millionaire, which is to say he ran amok.

Silvio was born in the northern Italian town of Vittorio Veneto in April of 1947. Work was scarce in those postwar years, and when Silvio was an infant, the family relocated to Paris, where his architect father found work. In school, young Silvio assiduously studied philosophy and literature, with aspirations to become a writer, but the 1968 student revolution there jangled his nerves enough to compel him to return to Italy. It was summer, and he bought a defunct espresso bar in Florence and renamed it Bar La Borsa. Silvio could pull a mean espresso (a skill he finds tragically underrated here), and the café began to flourish.

He designed glass cases, added ice cream to the bill of fare and began concocting "ice cream cocktails" long before the days of frappuccinos. He made lots of money. Then winter came and nobody wanted ice cream. Silvio had an idea. He arranged lettuce, tomatoes, prosciutto, salami and peppers in his prized glass cases, and thus, by his estimation, created the first self-serve salad bar. It was a hit and he made more money. Lots of it. He rented a beautiful apartment. He traveled around the world and bought a yacht and "expensive cars, great expensive cars." A Ferrari Daytona, a BMW 535i, a Harley Davidson motorcycle. He loved to race. He still loves to drive. Fast.

The next year Silvio created a venue called "The Hamburger Club." He describes it as a "replica of McDonald's," which at that time was years away from dispatching its occupation forces to Europe. In 1971, he hatched Coq d'Or. A French restaurant specializing in oysters and champagne, it was an anomaly in Tuscany, and an unwelcome one, predicted his father. Dad was wrong. It had no phone number, no sign, no listed address. (Again, Silvio was ahead of his time.) It was an enormous success, and Silvio found himself hobnobbing with the bigwigs of Italy. By now his nickname was "Goldfinger."

One year later, he sold the Hamburger Club concept for more than $1 million and happily retired to write—his first passion in life—and to race, his second. "I had a house in the hills, I had fancy cars, I had beautiful women, I stayed in the best hotels and ate in the best restaurants. Then one day the money was all gone. But I don't regret anything. I enjoyed myself."

With the change left over from his fortune, Silvio, by then married with two children, bought a 600-seat restaurant in the hills south of Florence, and again the money rolled in. Then Silvio blew it and blew it big, investing in what he refers to as the "gray market in cars." He is circumspect about the details, but he lost everything.

With his suit, but no green card, he came to the U.S. in 1984, lured by the success of friends who'd opened restaurants in New York; Silvio, however, opted for the West Coast. Although broke, he was guided by the sense of destiny peculiar to people who have grown up with money. He knew he would get it back.

His brother, Jean-Luis, already lived here and worked at a Beverly Hills restaurant called Caffé Roma. "What's the best restaurant in town?" Silvio asked. "Rex," his brother replied. Silvio got a job there as a waiter, and within a week he was named the restaurant's manager. Things were going well, but Silvio yearned to run his own show. He began keeping an eye out for opportunity.

In October 1984, Silvio agreed to rescue a closed restaurant on Beverly Boulevard housed on the second story above an antique store. The owner asked what he needed to get started. "Twenty thousand dollars and a Toyota Land Cruiser with a phone," Silvio blurted out randomly. "The guy looked at me like I was crazy, and then he said yes."

The restaurant was renamed Pane Caldo. It had 27 seats, no liquor license, no phone, and it took in $33 on the first day of business. Philippe, his basset hound, eyed him mournfully as if anticipating hunger pains, and Silvio would talk to him soothingly. But after a few months and two favorable reviews, Pane Caldo burgeoned to 140 seats and, according to Silvio, who earned 5% of the gross, the restaurant was taking in $8,000 a day. Money started to flow again.

Along the way, Silvio had befriended an elderly man he knew only as "Billy," whose last name happened to be Wilder, who loved Pane Caldo's food. But in 1986, Silvio got the boot—once the restaurant became profitable, the owners begrudged him his piece of the gross, he says. He launched Boboli (now Madeo) with an Italian menu executed by the French chef Philippe Mongereau.

Two years later came Silvio, his first eponymous restaurant, which was hugely successful, but succumbed after a year owing to the fact that, unknown to Silvio, his investors were involved in financial irregularities he refuses to disclose.

At this point, Silvio took to his bed for one month, until his friend Wilder invited him to lunch, handed him an envelope containing $20,000 and offered to bankroll a new restaurant. Tuttobene was a success, but they lost their lease in 1993. This was followed by a venture in Chicago called Mezzanote, which ran for two years.

By 1995, Silvio had been going at a dead run for five years, and the pace finally took its toll. Exhausted, he retreated to Italy for a sabbatical, only to be lured back to Los Angeles the next year by restaurateur Bob Morris of Paradise Cove. Morris offered him a $12,000 monthly salary to run a fat-free restaurant called Gratis. "It was a disaster. We did great business on Mondays, when people were hung over and repenting. Then, the rest of the week, nothing. And me, the king of olive oil, serving fat-free food! Ridiculous! But the money was good."

Silvio began to hanker for French-Tuscan food, hearty bistro fare. He went into partnership with Jean-Pierre Bosc, who had been working at Lunaria, and in 1997, they opened Mimosa in Los Angeles. Silvio and Jean-Pierre also opened Café des Artistes (now a busy Hollywood watering hole and scene, still managed by Silvio's son, Oliver). Mimosa thrived during its first two years. Bosc's hearty cooking and Silvio's ebullient, therapeutic presence charmed customers. But the partnership soon soured.

Silvio says Bosc wasn't as attentive to the restaurant as he should have been, a claim that draws a sigh but no comment from Bosc today. The disgreement worsened until one day, Silvio dropped a bombshell: He'd secured a location on Rodeo Drive and was opening another restaurant alone. He sold his shares of Mimosa and Café des Artistes to Bosc. The partnership and the friendship ended.

At my most recent dinner with Silvio, I arrive in a funk. Bad day, bad cold, too much coffee. It's after 2 and the restaurant is still pretty full. When I see Silvio, he looks weary and stressed. "You look like I feel," I tell him.

"Marr-tin, I can see it in your face." We repair to the patio to smoke and he calls for Pinot Grigio. "Have you eaten?" My pregnant pause quickly gives birth to a filet mignon in some sort of sauce, which apparently includes sodium pentothal as an ingredient. I'm talking about myself again when I'm here to talk about Silvio. I know better than this, I'm trained not to do this, but resistance is futile, earthling.

Earlier, I had talked to his son, Oliver, who said, in a tone that mixed exasperation and admiration: "My dad is an incredible problem child, and half the time I feel like I'm the father. But he has this incredible gift. He's moody as hell, but no matter what is happening with him, he leaves it at the door. He is never, ever short with a customer, no matter how unreasonable they're being. For him, it's all about making people feel at home. Helping people enjoy themselves is like an obsession for him."

The sense of mission has helped de Mori over some rough patches in its first six months. Silvio's organizational vision, or lack thereof, has led to some clashes in the kitchen. His original plan was to preside as de facto executive chef, with, of course, the input of Mama de Mori. She, however, has had it with Los Angeles and gone back to Europe indefinitely, though she calls to harangue him about the minestrone every day. (Alas, I never got to meet her.)

Reading between the lines, I gather that the kitchen has had trouble replicating his recipes. But now he's changing course and, after unceremoniously chasing one well-received chef from the kitchen, Silvio has tilted the menu toward more sophisticated Mediterranean fare by hiring chef Stéphane Chevet.

SILVIO: My sense of taste has always made me money. This has really been the hardest restaurant. We're on the second floor. But we're on Rodeo Drive, so that draws a lot of tourists. But I really want locals, repeat business.

MB: Have you ever thought about quitting?

SILVIO: Aw, I can retire if I want to. But I'm old. I have to be happy. If you take me away from this, you take away one of my eyes. It will keep me alive spiritually and kill me physically, but it's my life. I will do another one, I guarantee you.

MB: You got a couple of pretty uncharitable reviews early on. How do you deal with that?

But by now my corruption is complete, and I find myself taking his side. Before he can answer, I interject:

"Silvio! Food writers! We're all a bunch of egomaniacal, double-crossing sadists! All of us!"

"Martin, you know, you are all only human."

The Irrepressible Restaurateur
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/
la-tm-silvio22jun01,1,6620657.story?coll=la-headlines-magazine