Rita Sodi on Food as a Reflection of Home

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TRANSCRIPT

SPENCER BAILEY: Hi, Rita. Welcome to Time Sensitive.

RITA SODI: Hi, Spencer. Happy to be here.

SB: We could go in a lot of different directions—Tuscany, the West Village. I really want to start with New York City because—and we will get to Tuscany a little bit later in the conversation, but—in all the research I was doing to prepare for this, I realized I didn’t know when you first came to New York, when you first set foot in New York. And I was wondering if you could talk about your earliest memory of New York and coming from Italy, what that was like, what you remember of it.

RS: I came to New York—to stay in New York—in 2008. I’ve been coming to New York for a long time, and I’m coming from fashion, so I was not in the restaurant business and everything. I was coming to New York almost two times a month or something, for a few days. Big city, pretty different from Florence, and a lot going on, a lot of energy.

One of the first times I came to New York, I was like, “One day I will live here.” That’s what I was thinking. I didn’t know that it actually would happen, but that’s what I was thinking. [Laughter] I opened I Sodi in 2008.

SB: How would you describe your relationship with New York now, now that you live here, have been rooted here for the past almost two decades?

RS: I feel like I’m a New Yorker. I still have a big accent, but who doesn’t?

SB: [Laughs] Well, I feel like once you hit the ten-year mark, at least that’s what some people say. It’s like if you’re in New York for ten years, then you can take the New Yorker status.

RS: Okay. So I’m a New Yorker.

SB: [Laughs] Before opening I Sodi, in 2008, you worked in fashion, as you mentioned. You were notably, if I understand correctly, an executive in product development for Calvin Klein Jeans?

RS: Yeah, I was doing a little bit of everything around the product, production, fabric and everything.

SB: So that job brought you here. Was that the first time you came to the city, when you were working in fashion?

RS: The first time I came to the United States was San Francisco. Long, long time ago. For a month, I came to San Francisco to learn English. It didn’t happen. I didn’t learn English. I just enjoyed myself and going around all of California and everything. After I came to New York, like other two times before I started in fashion, more or less, so not a lot.

SB: Yeah. It was still sort of like an outsider thing until you were coming for work.

RS: Yeah.

SB: When did you become interested in the West Village in particular? How did you choose the West Village as the home of this restaurant, I Sodi, when you opened it, in 2008?

RS: Because it’s a village. 

SB: [Laughs]

RS: It’s a part of New York and it’s a village. It’s not Midtown. It doesn’t even look like New York, right? But you are in New York, actually, it’s the New York.

SB: It’s the closest thing to Tuscany in New York, maybe?

[Laughter]

RS: Maybe. You know everybody, you say hi to everybody. It’s a good feeling.

SB: Yeah. So it’s been sixteen years since you opened I Sodi, a decade since you and your life and work partner Jody Williams opened Via Carota together. Your restaurant group with Jody, Officina 1397, also operates Bar Pisellino, The Commerce Inn, and Buvette, practically an entire block’s worth of restaurants. Somehow it just seems like you couldn’t have built this little empire, if I could call it that, anywhere other than the West Village. In your own humble way, Jody and you are helping preserve a certain close-knit vibe that easily could have been taken over by venture-funded Blank Street Coffees.

So I guess this is a long-winded way of asking: In your mind, what role has the West Village played in your operations, from I Sodi to Via Carota to Bar Pisellino?

RS: I think it’s the focus of my life. I met Jody, so it’s everything I can want from the West Village. After a month, more or less, that I was open, I met Jody.

SB: Right. She just ran up on you, right? She sort of—

[Laughter]

RS: No. [Laughs] She had friends that would say, “Oh, you have to go to eat at this place. The food is very good, blah, blah, blah.” And other friends, they said, “Oh, you have to go to that place because you have to meet this woman and everything.” And finally she made it to I Sodi. And she introduced herself and after she was coming to visit me when I was doing pasta in the morning, bringing me strawberries from the market, asking stupid questions. At that time, I didn’t know she knew everything she was asking me already. 

[Laughter]

Anyway, that’s it. That’s the beginning.

SB: And she was in the process of getting Buvette going at that time, right?

RS: Yep. And it happened to be one block away.

SB: It’s wild.

RS: Yeah, it’s wild.

SB: What do you make of that moment? It seems so profound, this catalytic connection point between these two lives intersecting in the way that they did when they did. Because it’s like, you had just opened this experiment, a giant leap.

RS: Yeah. [Laughs] Something very, very big. And I didn’t know it was so big. It was a big surprise.

SB: [Laughs] I do want to ask a little bit about the “neighborhood restaurant” element of what you do, because I feel like in a world that is so often fleeting-feeling, or things just seeming to pass and go by, what Jody and you have created is this stronghold in a neighborhood. And I think particularly at this moment, this idea of the neighborhood restaurant really feels like a grounding place, somewhere to sort of— Not just a town square, but something to ground you. Could you elaborate on your take on that?

RS: I saw a child become an adult. It is true. They were coming with the mom and dad and everything, and then now they’re coming by himself and they are drinking wine. They’re an adult and they have their life. And I’m looking like, “Oh, okay. I feel grounded.” When you have this feeling, this sensation and you leave this, oh yeah. You’re part of something there.

SB: Yeah. How do you think about time more generally when it comes to the life of the restaurant? Because that must be pretty profound to see someone who’s say, I don’t know, 5 or 6 and now they’re 15, 16. Or someone who is 10 who’s now drinking age. [Laughs] That’s quite profound.

RS: Yeah, it’s been a long way to arrive there. It was not really easy to see people growing up. It’s been pretty hard and is a pretty tough experience. And I grow a lot. I didn’t know it was so hard, but I made it, and I met Jody, so [that’s] even better. I feel proud. Yeah, I do. I do, because I saw a lot. And one day I told Jody, I said, “Jody, [this was] my dream and now it’s my nightmare.” And she said, “No, no, that cannot be.” And after my dream became my dream. That’s where I’m living now. I’m living my dream.

SB: I want to go back to the beginning of I Sodi, because—for the listeners who might be slightly confused at this point—you left a fifteen-year career in fashion, just kind of picked it up and came to New York, never having run a restaurant before or been a professional chef—you’re a self-taught chef—find this place on Christopher Street—

RS: And open it.

SB: … and open it. How did you come to that decision? Tell me what went through your mind from being like, “Okay, I’m done with fashion. What’s next?”

[Laughter]

RS: I grew up with food. As an Italian family at that time and everything, I grew up in food. Fashion took me to travel a lot, and I have a lot of food experience with any kind of cuisine from Asia, Europe, everywhere. And the more that I was eating out and having different experiences, the more I was missing what I call “my food.” And so when I arrived at a certain point, I said, “Okay, let me make my food for other people.” And I said, “New York, I think it’s the right place where people can have my food and understand my food.” So that’s what I did. I opened I Sodi on Christopher Street, at that time it was quite wild.

SB: What was it like in the weeks or days in the lead-up to it? Could you talk about that process of literally building a restaurant?

RS: Oh, I was very excited. I was so excited, so naïve because I didn’t know what was waiting for me. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know where to buy stuff. I didn’t know where to do anything to run a restaurant. And so I learned from my mistakes. I learned everything from my mistakes, and every day I was stronger and stronger and stronger. And they’re calling me if there is a pasta cooker is not turning on, so I got somewhere, right?

SB: Exactly. Well, I read in just weeks after opening, your chef quit. That must’ve also been—

RS: Mmm, he didn’t— Yeah. Let’s put it that way.

SB: [Laughs] It wasn’t smooth sailing out the gate. And this was also 2008, the middle of the Great Recession, the year of the Lehman Brothers collapse. Not an easy time to open a business, let alone a restaurant.

RS: Yeah. That was a big, big year, very, very stressful year. Very, very stressful. My mother came to visit me, and for her it was the first time in New York or out of Europe actually. She stayed one week and we cooked together. She was coming in the morning around ten. We were cooking, making pasta, cooking. And I was like, “What do you think?” “Oh, you decide.” I feel like, “I am doing your food. What are you doing?” She was helping me take everything I was doing. For her, it was the first time to do and be supportive.

So I was like, “Mama, why do you stay here? Let’s go around.” And she said, “This city is too big for me. I prefer to stay here.” So she came here; she stayed for a week. She never left Christopher Street. 

SB: [Laughs]

RS: Yeah, that was a big moment. Having her for one week. And she was approving everything I was doing and tasting the food and loving it. It made me stronger, the fact that she approved of my food. If she approved of my food, it’s a good thing, right?

SB: I think we should say here that your mom wasn’t just the person cooking for you growing up. You were basically her sous-chef. You were learning her recipes. You were by her side in the kitchen.

RS: Yeah, I was. And when I decided to open I Sodi and all of this, I was like, when we have dinner together, I was sitting down with a glass of wine and talking about the food, talking about how she made stuff, talking about… taking notes. It was beautiful, a beautiful time to spend with my mother, because I ate her food. I was her sous-chef, but I never really talked about the food.

I had this moment that I was able to talk about food. And I was like, “How do you know— Why you’re doing this or why you’re doing that?” And she’s like, “Oh, I went to the shop the other day and there was this woman and she told me, ‘I’m doing this and this.’ And I said, ‘Oh, okay, how are you doing it?’ And I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to try.’” Once in a while, she had these new dishes, then they were coming from the neighborhood, then she was coming from another city or another region and everything and talking when they were buying food and she was making this new stuff, and this is amazing. I think this is great. It’s fantastic.

SB: Yeah. I mean, you leave Tuscany in a way, but it doesn’t leave you. It’s in your kitchen.

RS: Yeah, it is. The smell, everything.

SB: When you’re in the kitchen, particularly at I Sodi, could you talk a little bit about what your relationship to time is like? When you enter the kitchen, how does time pass for you? Is it meditative? Is it fast and focused? You’re cooking, which you’ve sort of described already—it’s very much rooted in your mother’s cooking. It’s this traditional Tuscan, very rigorous, I would say, methodical almost—“plainspoken and almost stern” is how Pete Wells has put it. And I think it’s also, I would say, unfussy. It’s focused. So what is the relationship to time? How do you think when you’re in the kitchen?

RS: I think to cook, to make food, to make great food, smell food. Look at— Be alive, become alive in my pan or in my pot, and the smell. And you can tell when it’s coming, right? Everybody’s like, “Oh, how long you keep your onion on the fire before…?” You smell it! You don’t need to have time. You smell, you see, and everything. The food is talking to you. It’s not just there—it’s talking to you. Everything is talking to you. Boiling, sizzling, smelling—it’s talking.

There is a lot of noise in the kitchen. You have to listen to this noise. You have to learn how to listen to this noise. It’s the secret. I would say, it is my secret. Let’s put it in this way. It’s my secret. Maybe for other people it doesn’t mean anything, but this is a lot.

I used to open the door of my mother and know what I was eating. I know it’s meat sauce—tonight I have a meat sauce or tonight I have this and that. The smell, the thing. I go in the kitchen in the morning in the restaurant to check what they’re doing, prepping, and everything. And the first thing, I go and check if the meat sauce is cooking covered because it has to cook for four hours covered. Pop, pop, pop, very, very slow, slowly, slowly. And there, that’s it. You cannot go fast, open, doing two hours instead of four. I can tell, I can taste it and say, “Hey, let’s put back in there. Let’s put back on the fire. Let’s put back in there.” I make sure that it’s still every day is the food that I know, that I want, and they love.

SB: I think you’re the first guest on this show to describe their nose as a clock, which is interesting. [Laughter] I’ve never thought about the relationship between smelling and time, but that’s pretty fascinating.

RS: Yeah.

SB: As I was preparing for this, I was enjoying reading the sort of paeans that have been written about your restaurant. And there are many online. One author writing in the Michelin Guide noted, “Going to dinner at a restaurant like this— it feels like an extension of my life. An escape for a few hours. From everyday stressors. To reconnect and recharge.” In his recent number thirty-four ranking of I Sodi in The New York Times—Pete Wells again—he wrote, “Going there is a little like seeing your favorite movie on the big screen for the first time.”

RS: Wow. I never read about us. So I don’t know anything what’s going on there.

SB: You heard it here first. [Laughter] And one last writer, another writer—this was several years ago in Bon Appétit—described I Sodi—and I love this—as a “carb-heavy therapy session.”

RS: [Laughs] That’s fine.

SB: I was wondering, what experience do you hope diners get at I Sodi? What is the sort of food service atmosphere that you strive for?

RS: Just having a good meal. “Come on, come here. I’m trying to not bother you. Let you have your dinner with your guests and be around you just in case you need me. But just enjoy your dinner.” Food and table and all, it’s so important part of your life. You have to eat. You need to eat. And dinner is the best time of the day to talk with somebody about anything—work, love, what happened today, busy day, crazy day, everything. It’s that moment where you sit, enjoy yourself, and talk.

SB: Yeah, to be in the company of others. And I always love that because…. I’m sure there’s some connection here, but the word company actually is “with bread,” com pane, which—I love that. I love this idea that food is this sort of central connector. And in this time of late-stage capitalism, we could even think about how interesting that our connective tissue that brings this whole crazy planet together really starts with bread.

RS: That’s true. And nobody wants to eat bread anymore now, so that’s sad.

SB: True. Gluten….

RS: [Laughter] That’s sad.

SB: I should add here that, when you came to New York, you were coming from Bagno a Ripoli, in Tuscany—

RS: Yes. Bagno a Ripoli.

SB: —where you lived in a restored seventeenth-century stone villa with gardens, olive groves, and a view of Florence, or at least the hills.

RS: I lived at the top of the cupola.

SB: That’s quite a time difference in more ways than one. Share a little bit more about Bagno a Ripoli. I want to hear kind of—

RS: I lived in this, how do you say, little villa, the top of this hill where five minutes from the Ponte Vecchio where you can see the cupola of the Duomo and a place where I cook a lot of the time and I spend a lot of time with my family, with friends. Jody came, we cooked a lot with Jody. She came. The bigger time when she came was when my mother died, and we did this big dinner together. And it’s just a good memory, a very good memory. It’s the time, going up at the hill you can find pheasant or rabbit around. It was like the last hours of the wheel, and the only one, actually. And the name of the street is Via Carota.

SB: Hence the name of the restaurant.

RS: Hence the name of the restaurant, because it’s us. It’s a part of our life where we live there and everything, we lived before Via Carota.

SB: Sort of the restaurant as tribute, as memorial almost.

RS: Yeah. Exactly.

SB: Interesting. You sold that place, right, or—?

RS: Yeah, because I thought I was able to spend some time there, but I found out that I was not able to do it and I didn’t want to rent it. Also, because I would leave everything, would be like everything mine. And I said, “No.” So I decided to sell it, and yeah. And I put all my furniture and everything. Actually, the ones I love more in storage in Florence. After I moved here to New York, they stayed in storage for another eight years, and now they’re in our house upstate.

SB: Wow.

RS: Yeah.

SB: And other items came over from Italy and are part of Via Carota?

RS: Yeah, the chair. The chair of Via Carota used to be in the kitchen of Via Carota. It’s weird. My mother’s cutting board with the big hole in the middle with the mezzaluna is hiding there in the dining room and is there—is looking at us. I step inside and I feel at home. I don’t feel a restaurant. I look at everybody. I look if they eat the food, how they eat it, if they do, why didn’t they eat it. Why everything? I’m making sure people enjoy it. If they don’t eat it, I want to know why they don’t eat it. Because maybe it’s our fault, maybe something is wrong. I want to know the first sip or the first time they tasted something. I love to look at the people and see their face. And so I say, “Okay, they love it, they like it,” or something like that. They make my day.

SB: I love that you described it as home because I was thinking about this sort of…. Again, I obsess over time on this show, and this isn’t to quote Pete Wells again, but he did write this, and it was so beautiful. In 2016, in his first Times review of I Sodi, he wrote, “I Sodi seems not to have fully assimilated into the United States. It exists in its own extraterritorial jurisdiction, like the headquarters of the United Nations. To eat there is to abide by the laws of eating that Rita Sodi, the chef and owner, brought with her from the farm north of Florence where she was raised.” And I feel like this “extraterritorial jurisdiction” has its own sense of time. It’s not quite New York, it’s not quite Tuscany, but maybe it’s home. It’s a sense of home.

RS: It’s home. Yeah, it’s a home. It has its own space in the West Village. And we treat our places like they’re our homes, different rooms, but they’re all the same. You smell, “What’s that smell? What’s going on today?” Open the window, close the window. “Oh, it’s too cold, it’s too hot.” We never stop. We never stop.

SB: Seasonality we haven’t talked about yet, but that is so central to your cooking at I Sodi, at Via Carota, wherever. You’re always looking at what are the freshest ingredients. Could you talk about that, how you think about the seasonality in the food and how rooted in time in the seasonal sense your cooking is?

RS: Yeah, this is a good time to talk about that because we always have a discussion, me and Jody, about, “When is the time to start to use tomatoes?”

SB: We’re in late June right now. [Laughs]

RS: Yeah. Actually, we started today to use tomato. I did not really agree about it, but the weather it’s calling from them so it’s okay. It’s a little bit too early. They are there, but are not perfect. But we arrive at the compromise and we say, “Okay, let’s start today.” Today is the first day we do tomato in the restaurant. And we eat tomato because we don’t need tomato. If they are not in the restaurant, it’s the same thing.

So seasonality, there is a reason why there are different vegetables, different everything seasonally based on the weather, cold, hot, short day, long day, and everything. And your body goes with that. And what you need is growing when you need it. Not when you don’t need it. Imagine tomato in the winter or November when it’s raining. How sad is that? Now you can find everything anytime of the year, right? And they can be also good. I’m not saying about quality, but you don’t need tomato in November. You need it now. You see a plate of tomato arrive in your…. Oh, it’s your joy. It’s your joy, you smile, right?

SB: And this connects so much to food systems. I think obviously the farmer’s market, that’s the best grocery store we have. But I’ve always wondered, why doesn’t a larger grocery store exist where what you get is what’s in season. And they’re rigorous about saying, “Sorry, that’s not in season. We don’t have that right now.” I know that goes against a lot of capitalist ideas, but I just think it would be a beautiful thing to have a grocery store where literally it’s like, “Okay, we decided tomatoes are in season. They’re available now until they’re not.” [Laughs]

RS: Until they’re not. It depends on how the summer goes, how much rain, how much it doesn’t rain and everything. For instance, you arrive at March, and by the beginning of May after several months of gray and no color, nothing, you have bright, bright fava beans and asparagus coming out and everything. It’s joy! And radish and ramps and all this stuff. After that, it’s something that you really enjoy. And next year you’re looking for them. You look for what the season gives to you, because you’re so excited to taste this stuff again.

SB: Well, and I think we forget almost, as a species, as human beings where we are in time when we’re not paying attention to where our food comes from, and when it’s fresh and when we’re just thinking about, “Oh, well it’s here. It’s in the grocery store, so I should eat it.” There’s a disconnection.

RS: Yeah. Fortunately, unfortunately, I don’t know, but….

SB: Yeah. Well, this episode will come out in early September, so what will be top of your mind for food then?

RS: Early September, there’s still a lot of tomato, a lot of summer, and it starts to be the grapes. It starts to be very, very good almost there and everything that…. Yeah, it’s the end of a bright season.

SB: We sort of touched on this, but I wanted to go back to your upbringing on your family’s fattoria, or farm. What was life like on the farm? What memories, looking back on it now, stand out to you most about food, about family, about life?

RS: It was a small farm, big family because we were two families together. My father, brother, we were living together and so we were twelve people every day.

SB: Big table.

RS: Big table and everything. And my mother and my aunt, they were living for us, for the family. The only things they cared about was taking care of the family. And taking care of the family, one of the most important things is feeding the family. So you have to have breakfast, you have to have lunch, you have to have dinner. You have to have what we call merenda, like around four o’clock, 3:30 before dinner, but not too near to dinner because you have to eat at dinner, so it can’t be too near to dinner. I had a lot of rules, a lot of rules. [Laughter]

I came to New York with a lot of rules: You cannot miss a table. You cannot arrive late. You cannot leave the table. Our holiday together where you spend all day at the table and laughing and making fun of each other, tell story. And I have my animal around. I had a little pony and it was just for me.

SB: My little pony.

RS: My little pony, it was black and white. And his name is Giorgio. It had a big satchel on the front. So I was riding him and there was a big, big memory. And we have Camilla with him then is the cow where my mother was taking milk every night. The milk, when it come from the night has a cream on top and is more. So first glass of milk and everything. And after the neighborhood was coming, because it was too much for us, just for the families, it was coming and we were selling, kind of. But they were coming with their bottles and we were putting the milk. And when we had more eggs than we needed, we offered to the people living around. And that’s what  happened with everything. In the garden when it’s in season, everything was okay. We can eat just what we can eat. But if we have too much, we are lucky this year we have a lot we will share with the neighborhood. 

My mother was coming there, “This is what the garden gives to you tonight.” She was putting the food in there. In the summertime, she was making big fried vegetables, like everything, everything, tomato and zucchini, and everything she was able to find to fry. It was great, and big city together because you have to eat at home. I think in my first restaurant—the first time I went to a restaurant I was like 17, something like that. You don’t really need to go to the restaurant if you have somebody, they cook for you, as my mother used to. I’d say, “Why do I have to go to eat something that is worse than what I eat at home?” That was the mentality at that time in Italy also because there was not any other restaurant. It was just Italian food. So you cannot go like, “Oh, I’m going for Chinese or I’m going for Japanese.” No—no way. [Laughs]

SB: Well, in that sense, you kind of grew up being used to serving the neighborhood.

RS: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true.

SB: But also having this sense of home and home cooking, which I think you continue to this day. And you’ve noted that you still compare the dishes you make to your mother’s, which is so special to be able to carry that forward and to have actually literally cooked in the very kitchen at the restaurant with her. Could you share a bit what it was like to learn cooking from her? What it was like to be in the kitchen with your mom?

RS: Let’s say, we would be cutting vegetables for the meat sauce or something like that. So, “No, not too much. No take out. No, no. Go, go. Has to be finer, finer. It’s okay? No, no. Finer, finer.” She was looking at every step, and I was trying to cut corners and do stuff. No. No way. She was on top of everything. I was not able to cheat in any way. The pasta, she was making handmade pasta every Sunday for lunch, and all the family was coming and sitting and it was like a religious thing to do, and by hand. So I was helping her and everything and I was like, “Mom, is it okay? It’s good enough?” She was like, “No, you cannot see through enough. And what about now? No, go, go.” She was— No way. She will not let me do anything.

SB: Yeah, she could smell it wasn’t quite—

RS: Yeah, she could smell everything I was doing that was not right.

SB: Are there particular food rituals that stand out to you, things that were part of your upbringing that you still continue to this day?

RS: Once in a while it happens. Like for instance, now you have peas and then you have to take out from the shell and everything. This is a moment when you do this. It is like, go and talk with your friend, right? Everybody sit around, take a little bit of them and chat and clean the food, right? Clean the beans and clean the peas. And we were doing the same thing for Easter. We were doing…. Oh no, sorry, for Christmas, we were doing Tortellini en Brodo, like the one you do with the meat inside and you doing your finger. So we would start ten days before and that’s what we put in the freezer because she has to give it to everybody, a bag of tortellini to everybody. So after dinner at night, we were making pasta and we were doing tortellini all around the table and make a tortellini for ten days before Christmas. [Laughs] Everything we were doing was making tortellini at night. The rule is the rule.

SB: I was reading that she had these special fried potatoes too, that she would soak in water for two hours. Cold water.

RS: Yeah. “Don’t touch it. And when they cook, don’t turn them too much, okay? Otherwise, leave it there. Leave it alone. You will know when you have to turn it.” So it’s all these rules. And now, I’m making everybody in the kitchen crazy about this stuff.

SB: Bringing this back to time a little bit or getting literal with it, in what ways do you think this upbringing, growing up on a family farm, shaped your relationship with time?

RS: I think I don’t really appreciate how much I got from all my childhood. I wish I could tell you and answer you in the right way, but I don’t know, but I know it’s a lot. Sometime I do stuff and everything, I’m like, “Oh, my God.” Of course I know! I used to do this! I used to see this and everything. So, a lot. But I don’t know exactly what, how, but it’s with me. It is with me. Sometimes I smell one thing, like now they’re cutting the grass and everything…. I’m like, “I know the smell,” and an image come back. I see, I see me as a child with my grandma and everything doing. My mother was always complaining with her because she was giving too much food to the chicken. They were too fat. They were too fatty. So she was like, “Give it less food. They don’t need all this food. Look how much fat they have.” So anyway, just—

SB: Smell sparking a memory. Yeah. Yeah.

RS: Yeah. Yeah.

SB: I wanted to bring up fashion here because, aside from the obvious fact that fashion is so omnipresent in Italy, it’s such a part of Italian culture in so many ways. When did fashion and textiles become something you were interested in? When did your fashion career period of your life begin?

RS: I started to work in this company, it was near to the village where I used to live, and they were making jeans, denim. So I started to work there as a…. I was in the product, but I’m not sure exactly what we were doing. At that time I was very lucky, because at that time you were making jeans, and you will deliver it. No wash, nothing. At that time it was just jeans, very stiff. And after we start to wash them, and after we start the stone wash.

North of Florence, Rimini on the seaside, there is a lot of laundry. They are very busy there in the summertime, but wintertime, they’re not busy. They started to try to work in washing garments and everything for factory. We started to do stone wash and they took the stones from the river and destroyed all the machines. And after they discovered there is a pumice and there is much more abrasion and it’s very light. I’ve been lucky because I learned all the mistakes, all the steps and everything. And I feel like I was a guru of denim washing. I knew everything. Come to me and I will tell you everything. I can tell you anything. And yeah, that’s how I started my career in fashion.

SB: Denim guru turned chef. 

RS: [Laughs]

SB: Do you see a link between fashion and food, or your work as a producer then and your work as a chef and restaurateur now?

RS: They’re both crazy jobs. Long hours everywhere and tough. Both tough but yeah.

SB: Fall down, get back up.

RS: Yeah, exactly. That is a very common thing.

SB: Did it cross your mind in your time working in fashion that you would one day potentially leave to work in the way you are today? Was being a professional chef or restaurateur ever…?

RS: No, absolutely. Absolutely, no, no. As I said before, one day I said, “One day I will live in New York.” But not in this situation or everything, no, no, absolutely no.

SB: Yeah. You’re working in Italy for Calvin Klein jeans. Calvin Klein is actually located in New York.

RS: In New York, yeah, exactly.

SB: But you come here and you’re like, “Nope, I’m going to be a chef.” So, what we haven’t talked about yet is The Commerce Inn, which is this other restaurant Jody and you created based on a mutual fascination, I would say, with Shaker furniture. And then it became a fascination with Shaker cuisine.

RS: Yeah. Not really Shaker cuisine, because anyway, Shaker cuisine is farm to table, right? It’s pretty simple. And with some influence from England. Yeah, the Shaker is its simplicity. And we didn’t know that until we start to talk about, then we say, “Oh, I love that too. Oh yeah, we love it too.” Anyway, Commerce is a special place. Everybody knows Grancho, right? Who didn’t have brunch at Grancho? I miss that place. When the lease came up, we say, “Oh no, they will never give it to us. But anyway, yeah, let’s try,” and we got it. And so we started to think about it, and we said, “This is American. It’s been for a long time, and everything is American, it cannot be Italian, cannot be French. It’s American. This is what it is.” So we decided to challenge ourselves and go for this American restaurant.

SB: And I don’t know that we’ve said yet, but Jody is a California native.

RS: Jody is Californian, but she spent six years in Italy.

SB: Yeah, right. And Emilia-Romagna in Rome.

RS: Yeah. And we have a lot of discussions about that because she thinks in a different way sometimes because Rome food and Emilia-Romagna food is different than the one in Florence. It’s like, “It’s Italy.” No. Every village, every region has its own thing. And I say, “No, we are doing this way.” “No, no, no, no. We are doing it this way. Maybe in Rome but not in….”

SB: How do you split your time together, especially at Via Carota…. Or I guess Commerce Inn as well? They’re both sort of the child of both of you, whereas she has Buvette, you have I Sodi. These other two restaurants are very much a collaboration.

RS: Collaboration, yeah.

SB: Where do you come in and where does she come in? How does that sort of appear?

RS: We feel like we can finish the dish for each other. TSo there is no moment I come or she come or I leave when she leaves. It’s pretty natural. And we have our strengths and our weaknesses. We know…. We know each other, and we are very, very different. I’m like, everything has to be the same day, same time, same as…. Jody’s like everything has to be completely different every day, every moment and everything. We really play very well together. Sometimes not, but that’s normal.

SB: Sure. But yeah, I think this sort of mix of energy, her Californian-ness and Roman-ness an—

RS: Yeah. And the energy then…. I’m very calm and very quiet. She’s loud—not loud, but she has a voice and everything. The energy in the kitchen for sure when she’s there is different than when I’m there.

SB: Before we finish, we have to talk about Negronis. [Laughs]

RS: Okay.

SB: The bar menu at I Sodi has, I think, is it eight Negroni variations?

RS: Yeah, more or less. Depends, depends. But yeah, more or less. We took out one or two, I think for the summertime. But yeah, more or less it’s that.

SB: And I would say, it’s safe to say you might also be considered a Negroni guru.

[Laughter]

RS: No, I think there are bartenders that know much better than me, but I can be a Negroni tasting guru if that kind of thing existed. Yeah, we have a Negroni since 2008. And at that time there were not too many Negronis around. And a lot of people, they come in and say, “What is this?” And some people try and love it. And some people say, “No, can I change it? Please, can I have a Manhattan please?” But it has become more popular and popular every year. And now they’re kind of—everybody more or less knows what a Negroni is.

SB: [Laughs] Yeah, it certainly… it certainly caught fire.

RS: Yeah. [Laughs]

SB: What do you think makes a Negroni so special? What, to you, is the defining factor of the Negroni?

RS: It’s the complexity of the drink. You don’t taste just one thing. You taste different things. It depends from the beginning to the end. It’s fresh, but it’s not overwhelming. There is alcohol, but it’s not too boozy. Bitter, but not too much sweet, but not too much…. It’s these elements together that make it special.

SB: And it really is best with Italian food.

RS: Okay. One other rule that I have is you don’t eat with cocktail, okay? 

SB: Ohh.

RS: You drink a Negroni—

SB: Before.

RS: … before dinner, but you have to enjoy your dinner with a glass of wine.

SB: I’ll remember this next time I’m at I Sodi. I might’ve broken that rule.

RS: Okay. If you want a Negroni…. Sorry! The best way to have a Negroni at I Sodi is with fried artichokes. That is the best because fried artichokes are not very good with wine because they have a pretty strong flavor and take out the worst of the wine. But with a Negroni, they’re perfect. So if you want to try, you will let me know what you think about it.

SB: This next question makes me cringe a little because I don’t like asking the what’s your favorite color question, but what’s your favorite Negroni?

RS: My favorite Negroni is the classic. But I’m very moody, so I’ll go by season and everything. Right now I’m in the white. But generally speaking, the classic Negroni.

SB: So finally, just to finish, and I wanted to end on a subject we touched on at the beginning or toward the beginning of the interview, which was endurance, or maybe put differently, it’s consistency. Of I Sodi, the great food writer Jeff Gordinier has noted that it has, “Never lost the muted elegance of a Miles Davis trumpet solo.” [Laughs] A beautiful sentiment in any case. So I wanted to finish by asking you, what do you make of the consistency, the clarity, the endurance?

RS: Everything is precise. Everything has a recipe that has grams, how much, or a spoon. For instance, if you cut the butter, you cut in little cubes. So you know you need one cube. Don’t put two, don’t put half. You put one cube every day for that dish. You put one half spoon of pepper, not one full, not one half spoon…. Okay, I say this, I weigh my coffee every day. I have my sugar because I want to have my coffee. I take one coffee a day and I want to have my best coffee every day. So I cannot just put sugar and coffee, right? One day will be good, one day hmm. I weigh my coffee every day because I want to have my best experience every day.

SB: It’s so funny, it reminds me of something connected to Calvin Klein. And I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this story, and this is sort of a funny tangent to end on, but Calvin Klein used to take his coffee specifically by color. It was a Pantone chip color, and he wouldn’t drink his coffee unless it was the color of this Pantone chip.

RS: No, I didn’t know that. [Laughter] But he was very particular. He is very particular. He came to Via Carota a year ago or something like that, and Jody was like, “Go to say hi.” I said, “Jody, he will not even recognize me.” “Go to say hi.” So I went to say hi. And as soon he saw me, he jumped out and grabbed me and kissed me and everything because I was his denim guru, the Italian denim guru.

SB: I think we can end there. Thanks, Rita.

RS: Thank you, Spencer.

This interview was recorded in The Slowdown’s New York City studio on June 20, 2024. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The episode was produced by Ramon Broza, Emily Jiang, Mimi Hannon, Emma Leigh Macdonald, and Johnny Simon. Illustration by Diego Mallo.