Bonus: The underground menu at Anthony Scaramucci's restaurant, Hunt & Fish Club

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1:31And I will say this to people that don't own restaurants, because I happen to own a restaurant, it's a very hard business. It's very hard to run. The operating margins are tight. The food has to be perfect. You know, they say in politics that the terrorists have to be lucky once, and we have to be right 100 % of the time. But in a restaurant, you could have one bad meal. Yeah, you're judged immediately. It could knock out 50 customers forever. They get on the phone and they give you a bad Yelp rating or they tell 20 of their friends I had a bad meal. No one comes back, God forbid. Your restaurant is the cleanest restaurant that I've ever been in.

2:06I own a restaurant. What's the name of the restaurant? So the name of the restaurant, we named it after the John Gotti Social Club. So the old Mafia Don in Queens had a social club called the Hunt and Fish Social Club. And so we named the restaurant the Hunt and Fish Club. And so it was a little knock on that. Matter of fact, John Gotti Jr., when John Travolta was playing his father in the movie Gotti, they did their after party at our restaurant. Where is it? The restaurant's on 44th Street. It's 125. Right in the theater district, right? Right in the theater district. It's a great place to go for the theater.

2:37We hire a lot of the Broadway musicians to come on a Wednesday night. If they're off, they'll come down there and sing. Oh, please, you've got to come. I will not come. I don't know if you caught the meatballs, but we have an underground menu on our restaurant. A couple of us are Italians, so we have my grandmother's meatball recipe. Good. You can ask for it. We have French onion soup. We have New England clam chowder. Yeah, that's the traditional steak stuff. Jumbo lump crab cake and grilled bacon. I'd like to have that. What's a beer? Oh, but it has a cheddar beer sauce. On the side. On the side.

3:10On the side. Pappadelli. We have cavatelli, bolognese, gnocchi with lobster, gavio. That's very fancy. It's really delicious. Sounds good. So you have this restaurant. Do you eat there a lot? Ten years. Do you go there? I eat there. You know, I'm in New York. If I'm in New York for the week, I try to get there at least one night. So, yeah, I have a lot of meals there. My kids love it. We have chicken fingers for the kids, french fries. You know, there's some off-the-menu stuff that we'll give to people. Would you ever do another one? So we open one at LaGuardia Airport. So we have a hunt and fish grill at LaGuardia Airport.

3:42We're in partnership with the Port Authority. We're going to open one at Kennedy in Terminal 1. And so, yeah, we're open to the idea of opening a few more of them. We got crushed during COVID. Oh, we all did. So unlike some of the restaurants in New York City and for us, we had no out because we were in the theater district. There was no place to put any alfresco dining. So we closed for 15 months and then we had to make a mission critical decision. We each had to put money in to keep the staff and to keep the thing going. And so we made that decision, the four of us, which I think was a great decision.

4:19Everybody got to keep their jobs. We reopened. The business absolutely sucked. I'm not going to BS you. We were way down. Our traffic numbers were up here in 2020, really high. They started out in the pits because in downtown New York, the corporations were letting people work at home. This was a corporate watering hole. It was a corporate hotspot. hotspot. We did tons of corporate events and Christmas parties, but closing dinner parties for investment banking transactions. And all of that business went by the wayside as people were operating off of Zoom and more or less staying out of the city.

4:57So it's five years after COVID, and we're now back to the March 2020 numbers. But I'll tell you, we took in a lot of water. Do you get involved with the menu? Do you give them your opinions? I just have two things on the menu that I care about. So the two things I care about are the meatballs, which they're actually not on the menu. That's sort of, if you know me, you can ask for the meatballs. Note to everyone, ask for the meatballs. Yeah, you had to ask for the meatballs because we have a little bit of an underground menu because we're Italians and I want to have meatballs at the table. And our chef makes an amazing meatball.

5:36And then the other thing that I love is we have a very expensive Italian ice cream machine. So we make our own ice cream. And so that was a big deal for me. The peasant food in southern Italy is simple. It's a couple of ingredients. And if you get the combo of the ingredients right, it's the best sort of food. It's also clean. and I'll say something about your restaurant, which unfortunately is not so true in New York or America because we poison our food in America if we're just being honest with everybody. But you've got like clean food here, well-prepared without a lot of harsh ingredients or preservatives or, I mean, it's hard to believe, but chlorination and chicken and things like that.

6:24So the food here, I always lose weight when I'm in the UK, even though I'm eating and I'm eating bread. I'm having some bread now. So I had the focaccio coming in. Am I allowed to eat it? If I had, just letting you know, if I had American focaccio, I'd be up like three pounds after eating it. But here you can eat the focaccio no problem, and you go home losing a little bit of weight. So come here. The people here love what they're doing, and the restaurant here, the people that are here consuming, they love it as well. So I give you a lot of credit for that. And you're an expat. You're an expat.

6:57So you figured it out as an expat, which is even more impressive. I've been here a long time.

7:05Thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table 4 in partnership with Montclair.

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