Tom Whitehurst

Real life imitates a movie

Restaurateur Marco Mattolini has seen the movie "The Big Night," loved it and, to an extent, lived it.
   In case you haven't seen it or heard of it, it's about two Italian immigrant brothers struggling to keep their Italian restaurant afloat. The struggle goes deeper. One brother is the smooth, somewhat-business-savvy front man and the other is the uncompromising perfectionist chef. His problem is that he's too good for the average customer.
   No, not too good as in too aloof. Too good as in too good at his job, and too committed to dumb down his dishes for the sake of a dollar. In one memorable scene, a customer feels cheated because she ordered risotto and spaghetti didn't come with it. (If you need this explained, chances are you were not a regular at Marco's.)
   Art imitates life
   The restaurant fails, but not before it has one last, big night in which the brothers demonstrate to a handful of lucky customers how food can be a celebration of life, rather than a mere commodity to be sold.
   Great for art, bad for business. And the mediocre competing Italian restaurant down the street continued to thrive, just like it's no point to compare the gross of "The Big Night" to "Beverly Hills Cop."
   Last night was the last night for Marco's at Lamar. That's not to suggest that Mattolini's experience matches "The Big Night," though his food did receive consistently strong reviews over the years. Marco's at Lamar was somewhat of a failure, after about seven years of trying, but Mattolini as a restaurateur is far from one. He owns other thriving restaurant operations, including one in Italy.
   Learning spaghetti
   Mattolini came to the United States in 1984, hired by a Philadelphia-based chain to improve its quality.
   "I was told we'll have spaghetti and meatballs and chicken cacciatore. And I said, What is that? I had to learn it so I could teach it.
   "It was my first introduction to spaghetti and meatballs and chicken cacciatore. And garlic bread."
   Unlike the movie, Mattolini has had to be both brothers wrapped into one. He sees national chains thriving, and says frankly that they are smart operations.
   "You speculate on the ignorance of people," he says without disdain. That's because he knows that being a chef doesn't make him immune to that ignorance. The first time he ate Mexican food, he was in Delaware. He had never eaten Mexican food, so he had no way of knowing whether it was good or bad, or whether Mexican food in Delaware in the mid-1980s would have been comparable to Mexican food in South Texas or Mexico.
   But he had rice and beans, and he likes rice and beans, so he thought the rice and beans were delicious.
   "I was an epicure. I had no clue what I was eating. I was ignorant, an easy conquest."
   Mattolini thinks part of the problem with his Lamar Park restaurant was that it was perceived as expensive. He didn't think it was expensive, relative to the cost of ingredients such as veal, but he thought its image was one of high expense.
   "Even if I think we are not the most expensive restaurant in town," he concedes, "we are not the most cheap."
   His Marco's Bistro on the Southside is a response, a more casual approach, with plastic table covers and lower menu prices.
   "The most expensive item on the menu is the steak. It's nine dollars. You can't get a hot dog in New York for nine dollars. Of course, this is not New York."
   Marco's at Lamar had its big night. The bistro has tomorrow.
  

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