One of the most nerve-racking restaurant experiences of my life was on May 6th, 2019. It was lunch at Little Prince, a small French bistro named for its location on Prince Street in Manhattan, and a play on the children’s book of the same name. My guest that afternoon wasn’t a date, a partner, or even a friend. It was my father, Tony Crocitto. My father has spent over 30 years working in all areas of food. Tony’s restaurant expertise follows him everywhere he goes. This skill is both a blessing and a curse - on one hand, you’re guaranteed to love any restaurant of his choice. On the other, you’re going to get a lecture on the restaurant’s operations; if anything goes wrong, you may want to order a double espresso after dinner and settle in for a night of critiques.
This brings us back to Little Prince. I had been once before and loved it, so when the choice was mine it was the first restaurantI thought of. Tony and I went to Asian restaurants more often than not and I insisted on a change of pace. The food was authentic and adjacent to the simple bistros I went to in Paris several years prior. The atmosphere was modest compared to other French restaurants I’ve been to in New York City. Butter, the backbone of all of France, was abundant in each dish.
At my suggestion, Tony started with the French onion soup, which played host to a baguette slice under the melted gruyere. The skirt steak followed for his main course. My father and his mother often lamented for a time when skirt steak was much cheaper and a dinnertime staple for them. When Tony told me he wanted to cook up some skirt steak for this feature, he stated “Skirt steak is expensive, you know.” Growing up, I rarely had it home as a protest to its new value, making it one of my favorite cuts to this day. I opted for lighter fare for my main, which was roasted salmon on a bed of spinach and garnished with smoked tomato butter - texture overtook taste for this dish, with crisp skin and tender meat, accented by the smoothness of the tomato butter. Dessert was carrot cake topped with cinnamon gelato, all doused with a caramel drizzle. I was blown away by the spices mixing between the cake and the gelato. I knew that the carrot cake was made in-house, but I inquired about the cinnamon gelato and was thrilled to find out it came from Il Laboratorio Del Gelato nearby (where I went for more later that summer). The meal was perfect, and my father approved as well.
Though I sometimes tease my father for his restaurant analyses, I credit him for teaching me proper etiquette, respect for servers and waiters, and to love food. For all of those things, and more, I am eternally thankful. Tony is about a decade removed from the grind of cooking in a restaurant, but still works in a kitchen full time. I spoke with him to hear more about his career, and how he continues to find joy in food.
VWC: Could you start by introducing yourself a little bit?
TC: My name is Anthony Crocitto, but my son calls me Tony for this article. My friends call me Tony, my family calls me Anthony, I answer to either.
VWC: That’s it?
TC: That’s it.
VWC: Then let’s cut straight to the food. Can you talk to me a little bit about your earliest memories of food? Do you remember what you ate at home? Did you guys ever go to restaurants as a family?
TC: I have always been interested in food since the earliest days I can remember. I remember being allowed to help my mother bread the veal cutlets when I was a youngin’ and being the official pasta taster for most of my life. From there, I always enjoyed interesting food and I was quite interested in Asian food from high school all the way through. I’ve explored Asian food quite extensively, but not too many other types of cuisine...I like to find a good restaurant no matter what the food was. And that’s where I would go. I always said a good restaurant was a good restaurant and that’s where I would go, no matter what the food was.
VWC: What kind of Asian restaurants were in New York City in the 1970s when you were in high school?
TC: Well, Chinatown was Chinatown. There was a place a couple of my friends and I would go to...they wouldn’t serve us the dishes we asked for because they didn’t think we’d eat them - they thought they were too Asian. But there was a very nice Hunan restaurant on Avenue U in our immediate area in Brooklyn that we went to all the time. It was a family operation, we went there so many years that we watched the whole family grow up.
VWC: You mentioned helping out with the veal cutlets and being the pasta taster as a youngin’. When did you start really cooking meals?
TC: I got the first inkling that I might like this whole thing with food when I was in the Coast Guard and I had kitchen duty. I learned the difference between cooking at home and cooking professionally when I nearly dropped the steamship round, which weighed about 80 pounds, on my foot. I got much more interested in it after I got out of the Coast Guard [1977-1981]. I started reading the New York Times food section, which changed my life. It put me into a different place with food, it made me think of food in a different way. Eventually, it led me to go to cooking school.
VWC: Can you remember any specific chefs, authors, or recipes that jumped out to you at that time?
TC: Pierre Franey, Jacques Pépin, and Craig Clairborne. They had a 60-minute gourmet column and I used some of the recipes I found in that for many years.
VWC: How did you adjust to culinary school? By that time you’ve already been in the Coast Guard, you’ve worked as a paralegal…
TC: No, I never worked as a paralegal, I just went to school for it. I couldn’t get a job as a paralegal.
VWC: My mistake. So then how did the transition into culinary school happen for you?
TC: Well I was still working full time from 8 AM to 4 PM and then I went to school at night from 4:30 PM to about 11 at night. I loved cooking school, I fell right into it. I always had some knife skills from my fish handling days so that’s how I started to really feel comfortable.
VWC: What kind of coursework was it? Did you have a concentration in a specific kind of cuisine?
TC: No, it was general cuisine. Mechanical skills, butchery, things like that. It was also the business side of it. It taught you the basics of running a kitchen, running a dining room, running a restaurant - how to pay the bills, and the outstanding fact that 90% of restaurants fail after five years.
VWC: So they gave you the idea that the industry was not going to be glamorous.
TC: No, no. It was a school based in reality, not fantasy. Basically they told us that what you learn here is enough to get your foot in the door and where you learn how to cook. I think the most important thing they taught us was that when you come out of school, you don’t know anything.
VWC: After completing the six months at culinary school, did the way that you started eating, cooking, and dining change?
TC: You have to remember, I came away with more than just a food education from cooking school - that’s where I met your mother. I actually got a job right away out of school at a restaurant in Manhattan, The Brighton Grill which is no longer around. I don’t know where you want to put this, but you can put this somewhere in your article: Not a single restaurant I ever worked at is still in existence. I started right on the line as the middleman, the guy who cooked the vegetables for the different dishes. It was a very good introduction, and then I moved over to saute cook. It was a good first job - it threw me into the fire, got me over the nerves. Your mother worked there on the salad station and she used to give me cold towels to cool me off.
VWC: What are some misinterpretations that people have about your profession?
TC: The worst thing that ever happened to the cooking profession was televised restaurant TV shows. It has glamorized it and has shown the tippity top of the iceberg of what working in a restaurant is really like. However, when you first start, you make no money, you work like a dog, you have to prove yourself everyday - you’re either going to self-improve, or you’re not going to make it. You see this upper echelon on TV of restaurants and chefs with super fine dining restaurants, and it’s not the same as the grill on the corner. There are a lot more cooks at those grills on the corner than at top restaurants. I always said the best place to work was the place you couldn’t afford to eat in, because there you’re going to learn something. Most people would say you want to work at a restaurant for a year so you can see all four seasons - none of these things are put out in any of these TV shows. Everything has dramatic effects. Some of the TV chefs are very very good, some of them you wouldn’t even want to work next to on the line.
VWC: That might lead into my next question. I understand you worked at the restaurant Stars in San Francisco back when Stars kind of set the tone for fine dining in San Francisco. What kinds of positions did you have there, and how did you handle working at such a high profile place?
TC: I got the job through the reference of someone who didn’t even know me well. I went to Stars and interviewed with the executive chef there, and he said I liked your reference so I’ll hire you. I was very fortunate to get the job. I started at $7.50/hour chopping tomatoes, garlic, and anything else that came my way.
VWC: Would that have classified you as a prep cook?
TC: Yes - I was prepping but I wasn’t hired as a prep cook. I worked my way into doing the warm salad station, which was the first step for the hot cooking. Stars had a number of different stations; in a restaurant, we call the different areas of the kitchen stations. We had the pizza station, the salad station, the hot appetizer station, the pastry station, the grill, and the saute station - in fact that was the exact order they were in.
VWC: How many years did you work at Stars?
TC: I worked at Stars from 1986-1989. I really liked it, I fell right into it. I was able to impress enough people with my attitude and my ability that I moved up the ranks pretty quickly. I made a good impression on the owner, Jeremiah Tower, and that started me on my way up the ladder. I worked nights for quite a while and then when the lunch chef left, I was promoted to that position for 18 months which was a position that suited me perfectly. Working lunch was seen by a lot of people as a step backwards because dinnertime has the prestige. But at Stars, lunch was an interesting place. We had the power brokers from city hall, a lot of arts people, and a lot of socialites would come in and have their lunch there. My position also made me the trainer of waiters. If I had to train the waiters as the liaison to the kitchen, I had to understand their job and what they were doing.
VWC: Tell me about some of your favorite food and restaurants in San Francisco at that time.
TC: There were a lot of Asian restaurants I liked, your mother’s influence was strong on that. I think 75% of the time we ate Asian food, and I had no problem with that. Dim sum, sushi at Ebisu, and Korean barbecue buffets. I found most of the Italian restaurants lacking.
VWC: In recent years you’ve phased out of working in restaurants but you’re still cooking. What is your work now, and how does that relate to the rest of your career?
TC: I cook food. I cook for people to eat, and that hasn’t changed. I cook different kinds of food for different kinds of people, so that’s what’s changed. Right now I cook at an assisted living facility. My professional title is “Cook.” We call the assisted living facilities the retirement home for old cooks, too. A couple of people I worked with have done the same thing, we were tired of the restaurant grind. But cooking is cooking and food is food. I don’t believe that a lot of the modern trends in restaurants would have suited me. I’m not a fan of this scientific cooking at all, whether to eat it or do it. The joy and reward you get from cooking is to see and hear people enjoying your food because you ain’t making good money doing it.
VWC: Do you think that good food is objective or subjective? What does “good food” mean to you?
TC: Let’s start with the most basic premise in that it doesn’t make you sick.
VWC: Hmm, that’s a little bit of a lower standard than I was expecting but I suppose that is the bare minimum.
TC: There is a term that has served me well in my business and that is called perceived value. Think of how you can go to a dinner and spend $500 on dinner for two and be thrilled, or you can go to a restaurant and spend $20 on dinner for two and feel that you got your pocket picked. Cost definitely enters into it. But good food is something that makes you feel better after you eat it. Not full, but it just makes you feel better. There are many places you can go and fill up your belly. But when you take a bite of something and it puts a smile on your face, that to me is the difference. Or when you eat something and you just go “Yes.” Food doesn’t have to be that way every meal; not every meal is going to blow your mind. I think that’s a problem a lot of people in the restaurant business have, they think every meal has to be that way.
VWC: I have a couple more questions before we finish up. First, what are some of your favorite things to cook now, whether at home or at work?
TC: At work, I have my name attached to fish and chips. It’s a batter that I developed, nothing exotic, but it’s really good. I make that all the time with basa fish, it’s outstanding. I’m very proud of it. At home, I eat very simply. I rarely cook anything exotic because I look forward to having simple things to eat. Pastas, barbecue stuff.
VWC: What would your last meal be?
TC: Italian sausage. One of my favorite food groups is sausage.
VWC: I do recall once asking what your favorite food was and you told me it was a hot dog, so that holds up. Give me a full plate, a full dish. You’ve got anything you want at your disposal
TC: Polenta, Italian sausage, and a glass of wine.
A printed version of this article appears in Digest Magazine’s Summer 2021 issue.
