Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Angelo Amabile A taste for home
“I have an appreciation for what we do but also for my staff. I appreciate the dishwashers, the garde manger who prepares the salad to my executive chef because I also worked in different spots on the line in the kitchen to really understand what is it that they do that is so important to an operation.”
FAYETTEVILLE — Teen-aged Angelo Amabile was making wine in the basement of his Queens apartment building again.
The tradition of making wine together was a given family event. Whether they were making it in Salerno, Italy, or New York City, the process was still the same — aging wine in barrels for months, until pouring it into a glass or bottle one sunny spring day.
“I don’t know if that was a superstition or not, but my mother always told me that, so every time we [finished making wine] it was a cool and sunny day,” says Amabile, owner of Vetro 1925 Ristorante. “Otherwise, it might turn the wine bad — and that has happened,” he says, with a self-deprecating laugh that is part of his natural charm and the signature tone in the ambient noise of the restaurant.
Having been a busboy, server and dishwasher before his years as maitre d’, manager and captain gives him a humility and approachability that customers love
Weaving among tables, he takes his time chatting with guests, suggesting wines, and getting to know them.
“What amazes me and is interesting to me is that he can remember guests and what wines they love,” says restaurant co-owner and partner Marcia Harris. “He makes a special effort to keep the wines in stock that regulars like. He has that natural ability to hit a table that needs to be spoken to and knows the right amount of timing [to spend].”
Fayetteville, with its old brick, shotgun-style buildings in the historic downtown square, reminds him of Greenwich Village, and its rich history and culturally diverse people (not unlike Italy) make him feel at home.
Amabile grew up in Salerno, a part of the country known for the best seafood in Italy. There his mother spoiled him, his brother and . their friends with homemade breads and pastas, seasoning the dishes with home-bottled herbs and spices.
It was a lesson of love in asparagus, mushrooms, vinegar and oil, with schools of fusilli and buffalo mozzarella.
Amabile learned much about hard work from his father, a machinist and a factory foreman who traveled to other countries to provide for his family. The money he sent back to Italy was used to buy land for vineyards and olive groves that would support them over the years.
When his parents followed work to Germany, then Switzerland, Amabile and his brother, Marco, went
to boarding school in nearby Como, a town on the Switzerland-Italy border, where he picked up a love for math and science.
A few years later the family followed Amabile’s grandfather, a trader on Wall Street, to New York. Amabile was 15 when he landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport in February 1977. The snow came up to his knees.
“After living in Switzerland and Italy and here in the U.S … at a certain point I didn’t know where I belonged,” Amabile says.
He started with the basics. He finished high school and enrolled as an electrical engineering major at Queens College, where he adjusted to the fast-paced, business-centric way of life.
“I worked after school and before school,” he says. “That’s how the lifestyle is. I don’t have the luxury to just go to school and that’s it. But I was working in beautiful restaurants and I had such a great time.”
A friend in Little Italy introduced him to restaurant work and suggested he start at Il Cortile, a family-owned restaurant on Mulberry Street.
As a busboy, he made his way past stone sculptures, bright murals and archways, from the garden room to the lounge with his hands full. Always eager to move up the ladder, he still mentions that it took him two months to make server. Once he secured that role, he jealously guarded it.
“I worked so hard to make $100, you have no idea,” Amabile says. “I worked from 9 a.m. to midnight. I was introduced into a role to appreciate each level of position” in the restaurant business.
His upward trajectory began when he helped open Harry’s Bar in New York, a luxury Cipriani restaurant and an exact duplicate of the legendary original in Venice.
Giuseppe Cipriani’s legacy was born of his friendliness with customers at a hotel bar in Venice. After he lent money to one, the customer repaid him three times the original amount and allowed him to open his own Venice bar. The success of the first location led to 12 others worldwide.
Joining an institution with an emphasis on customer service that goes beyond friendship into unwavering loyalty shaped Amabile’s view on the restaurant life.
Once the establishment was up and running, the elite opening crew from Venice left. All except Amabile, that is. He was rewarded with a meeting with Arrigo and Giuseppe Cipriani, the founder’s son and grandson.
“Meeting Cipriani was an everlasting experience,” he says. “He taught me how food is cultivated from the land and how it’s worked to be presented in front of you. There’s an appreciation of food there [in Italy].
“It’s not just eating, it’s appreciating what people do and how they do it, what does it take for them to … bring [it to] you as a guest.”
Following the visit, Amabile was promoted to head captain of the restaurant.
DINING DEVOTEE
As Amabile fell in love with the beautiful, busy, colorful, friendly life of restaurants, he had less and less time for class. He dropped out of college and moved to Manhattan to devote even more hours to learning every side of the business.
Moving from Harry’s Bar to Cesarina, a restaurant partnered by the Villa d’Esta Hotel on Lake Como in Italy, Amabile continued his training in luxury eateries with the finest chefs, managers and owners.
He had four more years under his belt when the Four Seasons Hotel snapped him up to open a location on 57th Street in New York.
Though the job was less oriented to food and beverage, Amabile saw it as an ideal opportunity to hone his hospitality skills and make business connections. The added benefits of insurance and stable hours were an incentive, since he had a wife and daughter to care for.
The bulk of his hours were spent in the hotel, but his heart remained with restaurants, where he continued to serve during lunch hours.
It was Bice, an upscale midtown New York restaurant, that put his passion to use as a maitre d’. As with all the other moves that came before it — busboy to server, head captain to manager and now maitre d’ — Amabile gained them all with the exact same skill.
“I stole every position with my eyes,” he says. “I always paid attention not to the job that I was doing but [how] to progress to the next role, what is it that I need to do, to learn for me to get up there.
“Nobody tells you that because they’re afraid to lose their job. So that’s exactly what I did.”
The exhaustive attention to detail and intimate knowledge of each role landed him a chance to maitre d’ at the elite San Domenico restaurant on Central Park South.
“Each job I did something different, but it was working for San Domenico downtown, the setting of the restaurant and the clientele pushed me in a direction that made me learn and exposed me to so many different people.”
Having John F. Kennedy Jr., Luciano Pavarotti, Diane Sawyer and Oprah Winfrey as regular guests changed the restaurant experience for Amabile and challenged him in new ways. Among those evenings, one that stands out as a particular hurdle was waiting on Pavarotti, Metropolitan Opera conductor James Levine and Italian conductor Riccardo Muti at the same time.
As much fun as it was — and it was fun — Amabile never devoted himself to one place because he knew tying himself to a certain name would come with pride.
“I was never a fanatic of the places that I worked,” Amabile says. “I knew that when I left the place, it was back to me and me alone.”
OPPORTUNITY MEETS LUCK
In coming years, Amabile continued to accept many of the offers presented to him — to manage a restaurant in Charleston, S.C., to open a branch of a gourmet food distribution company and then to manage wine buying for a chain of restaurants in Houston.
“I’ve always worked hard, moving from one location to another to get experience,” he says. “I have an appreciation for what we do but also for my staff. I appreciate the dishwashers, the garde manger [keeper of the food] who prepares the salad to my executive chef because I also worked in different spots on the line in the kitchen to really understand what is it that they do that is so important to an operation.”
But the opportunities he didn’t accept say as much about his dedication to the industry as the ones he did take.
Turning down many offers to be a food and beverage director in the Caribbean, where he could have stayed indefinitely, Amabile continued to rise in the profession and devote himself to the creativity and connectedness of the cafe.
All that varied experience prepared him for owning a restaurant since someone who has done it all knows when to be understanding, and when to expect more.
“He and Marcia are great to work for,” says Laurie Hendricks, private events coordinator for Vetro. Having worked in the luxury industry for years, she knows a good business owner when she sees one.
“They are very understanding if anything ever comes up. When we had the ice storm [last winter] and some of our employees couldn’t make it, Angelo was washing dishes with the rest of them.”
“He doesn’t just sit at the bar and drink wine and let everybody else do the work,” Harris says. “He has empathy for the staff. He also understands their jobs, what they should be doing. Having been in those jobs, he knows what it is.”
The two met in Houston and opened a restaurant in Tulsa, but it wasn’t as well received as they had hoped. One weekend while visiting for a Razorbacks football game, heart surgeon Dr. James Spann suggested that they open a restaurant in Fayetteville, a college town that would welcome the native Italian cuisine and an avant garde dining experience.
Before then, Amabile wouldn’t have fully considered the offer, but experiencing the electric excitement and tradition of a home game caught his attention.
With an eye toward the downtown square, not unlike an Italian piazza, they started to review property. One little brick building stood out.
VETRO 1925
It had once been the McRoy and McNair Fayetteville Printing Co. and provided office supplies for a number of community leaders. That legacy was the main selling point, but having an architect who understood intimately Fayetteville and Italian influences was key, too.
Tim Maddox, principal of deMx architecture, had lived in Arkansas and Italy. He was just what Amabile was looking for.
“The first day that Marcia and Angelo were in town, we met [there] and it was a hollowed-out empty space,” Maddox says. “I tried to understand his vision. Angelo said he wanted the restaurant to be about food, color and energy.
“We had designed restaurants before but not in terms of their atmosphere.”
Maddox realized that history was important to Amabile, so he helped him to create something special by using as much of the original structure as possible.
He tore down plaster to expose the old brick walls, kept the original hardwood floor (and added new pieces to complete it), uncovered old windows and used an old vault in the decoration of the space.
To bring Angelo’s restaurant name, Vetro — Italian for “glass”— to life, Maddox created a glass ribbon bar that is held up by steel pieces and lighted with a variety of colorful LEDs for a vibrant, attention-drawing centerpiece.
Its folding glass facade, which goes across the bar, down the wall and onto the floor, echoes the design of the Florence train station, and the boxy glass dining area near the front resembles an old Italian storefront.
“For me, a project isn’t real until I have a client. Angelo has been a great client because he allowed us to design,” which Maddox says is rare. “I could tell right away that Angelo was a visionary.”
And he was right. The result of Angelo’s vision and Maddox’s design has since been awarded with the Excellence in Preservation Through Rehabilitation Award, the Adaptive Reuse Award, the American Institute of Architects Merit Award and more.
It is the stimulating visual experience that Amabile wanted his guests to enjoy first. And the menu, which changes with the seasons, helps dispel stereotypes about Italian food.
“There’s no such thing as Italian cuisine,” he says. “We don’t use dips, we don’t fry our pasta, we don’t use jalapeno.”
Through his friendly sharing of food and wine expertise at the restaurant, Amabile can share his culture.
“We’re a small restaurant and sometimes we go to the extreme to please our guests. That’s what we do. There’s no rocket science. It’s just trying to bring the best possible product to the table and spark a guest’s imagination.”