Off The Menu: The Most Important Customer

It has been a long, long time since I’ve been as eager to see a summer come to an end as I am now. It is cliché among anyone who spends more than weekends here to say that the traffic and the crowds have been worse this year than ever before.

But what I will remember the most about this summer is not what was there, but what was absent.

I feel like the industry, for me at least, has operated under an odd cloud of loss all summer long—a deep, subtle but biting pang with each sudden reminder of what is gone.

No, to those of you who know me, I am not talking about La Superica being gone, though that loss also is lingering still in my subconscious.

The vast majority of those toiling in kitchens and on floors this summer are thoroughly unaware of the void I’m referring to. Some of those who were aware might have almost welcomed it. You see, the South Fork restaurant business lost one of its most outsized figures at the start of the summer.

It seems a tragic irony befitting O. Henry that Ben Krupinski died in the first year when his longtime flagship restaurant, East Hampton Point, was being managed by someone other than his own employees.

Ben was not really a restaurateur in the truest sense. And, yet, I would venture to guess, no restaurant owner in the Hamptons has ever been such a huge personality or played as big a part in the operations of any restaurant he owned.

First of all, you would be hard-pressed to find someone who lives in East Hampton who did not work at East Hampton Point at some period of their lives, or had close friends who did. My back-of-the-envelope calculation: Out of 65 or so employees of the restaurant each summer, from 1993 to 2017, I’m going to fathom a guesstimate that an average of 55 were first-timers each summer. That is more than 1,300 people who worked in just that one restaurant—who are now pillars of the South Fork community in all walks: doctors, bankers, politicians, farmers, builders, bankers, pool cleaners, writers and real estate agents.

They all will know exactly the role Benny played.

Benny wasn’t a working owner who played a key role in the restaurant’s day-to-day operations, like Liz and Arie Pavlou do at Bistro Été. And Benny wasn’t a roll-up-his-sleeves-and-bus-tables owner when the staff started to get lost in the weeds, like Mark Smith or Mike Nolan or David Lowenberg do on any given night at any and all of the restaurants they own. He wasn’t even “the face” of his restaurants, greeting regulars like old friends and keeping an eye on the finer details of the place, like Ted Conklin.

But he also wasn’t completely aloof from the business, like the gang of billionaires and playboys who bought themselves bragging rights in the last few years.

Benny played two roles at his restaurants. He was the fastidious landlord, effectively, storming through the buildings, unannounced, during off hours and unloading fits of rage and questions on unexpecting and often unqualified underlings (usually 18-year-old hostesses just answering phones during the day, with little knowledge of anything beyond the number of reservations on for that night).

Benny never left everything up to others. He wanted to see the plant, to hear the numbers, to know the strategy himself.

His other, and more important, role was as the single-most important and most difficult customer.

Benny evolved, slowly, over the last two decades from a simple bub who wanted overcooked steak and really, really hot soup and bread, to a wannabe pretentious snob, to a pointlessly pretentious snob, to a knowledgeable connoisseur, to, finally, someone who just wanted to eat what he wanted to eat when he wanted to eat it, and asked for it nicely, and was happy to pay handsomely for it.

His foibles—often absurd but rarely baseless—were the prime mover for the staff at all his restaurants. Each night, as they prepared to serve dinner to hundreds of customers, his presence, or the threat of it, was actually what they prepared for. The other patrons were just lucky beneficiaries.

Readying for him to throw a curveball—this Diet Coke is “expired” (if you checked the date code on the can, he’d be right: It was a month or more old)—consumed far too much time. But, in the end, it spurred the staffs to be far sharper and better It has been a long, long time since I’ve been as eager to see a summer come to an end as I am now. It is cliché among anyone who spends more than weekends here to say able to handle the quirks of regular customers than they might have been with anyone but the most fastidious and well-trained manager.

When Ben and Bonnie and Willy died in June, one of my former co-workers who had long outlasted me under Ben’s thumb said, “I’ve watched them eat dinner more than I have my own parents.” And it’s true. Ben was a constant, the constant, at his restaurants.

It occurred to me while writing this that I am the age Benny was when I started working for him. I try to picture him then, this feared figure who breezed in and out of our lives, but was, in so many ways, the ever-present driver even when he wasn’t visible. We talked about him, made fun of him, feared him, at seemingly all times.

His generosity to those his interests landed on—especially those with less fortunate backgrounds—has been well documented and never forgotten by those who knew him, even when what they remember most is fearing him. Some, maybe only a few, also acknowledge how much they ultimately learned from him, even about a business he actually knew very little about.

Evidence the fact that when they returned to the South Fork for the Krupinskis’ funeral, two former employees, both with soaring careers in the restaurant world elsewhere, pledged to leave their jobs for the summer and return to Cittanuova for a few months just to help out their former teammates.

I was a little disappointed that the managers overseeing the restaurants the Krupinskis owned didn’t make an effort this summer to commemorate these owners who played such gargantuan roles in the establishments. I’d suggested black tablecloths over “Ben’s table,” as they were uniformly known, at each.

But even in his absence, Ben’s presence was large in those dining rooms.