October 12, 2008 --
RESTAURATEUR Pino Luongo, who helped popularize Tuscan cooking in New York, wields a butcher knife instead of a pen in his upcoming memoir about the Manhattan dining scene - carving up Hollywood customers, trashing critics and thumbing his nose at the Mob.
In "Dirty Dishes," out in January, Luongo - who owns Centolire and once owned Il Cantinori and Sapore di Mare, among others - recalls how Sylvester Stallone dined at Coco Pazzo with Ronald Perelman, who treated the "Rambo" star to Gaja reserve wine, after which the actor ordered two bottles when he returned days later. "Stallone was shocked to see that he had an $800 wine tab," writes Luongo, who then got a complaint call from Stallone's assistant.
"If he can't afford or doesn't want to spend a lot of money on wine, then he shouldn't order things without asking how much they cost," Luongo angrily shot back.
The Italian-born chef says Leona Helmsley insulted him by opening her Il Cantinori menu and "seeing all the dishes listed in Italian, looked at me and said, 'What is this crap?' " The Queen of Mean then sent back her skimmed-milk cappuccino, arguing there wasn't enough foam in it. "She left $12 million to her dog. I'm sure that bitch deserved every penny," Luongo writes.
He also recalls how two Mob goons walked into Il Cantinori, plunked down a cigarette machine and warned him to keep it: "As soon as they left, I dragged it outside and put it in the middle of 10th Street to be battered by passing cars. It was . . . the Vito Corleone moment I'd always craved. Lucky for me, they never came back."
Luongo isn't fond of reviewers. "Critics, even those who like you early on, can treat you like their first [bleep]," he explains. "When you're young and hot, they want you, but when you settle into middle age, they leave you for somebody else."
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