Speaker 5 0:11

Hello everybody, and welcome. You are listening to The Restaurant Guys. I'm Mark Pascal, and I'm here with Francis Schott. Together we own Stage Left and Catherine Lombardi Restaurants in New Brunswick, New Jersey. We're here to bring you the inside track on food, wine, and the finer things in life. back when Francis and I started this show on the radio, every morning we'd get together and we'd talk about certain things and decide what was gonna make the show and what wasn't gonna make the show. Well, today's show is a couple of those things that we thought wouldn't make the show, but then actually did

0:42

They made us laugh then, and they're still making us laugh now. We really hope you enjoy this show

Speaker 2 0:49

Hey, Francis. How are you?

Speaker 3 0:50

I'm great, thanks.

Speaker 2 0:51

I have to talk about something, that came in the last couple weeks.

Speaker 3 0:54

Our solicitations for possible show topics?

Speaker 2 0:56

Well, sure. obviously people send us a lot of books. Francis and I, uh, we get to read a lot of this stuff. We get to look at a lot of this stuff.

Speaker 3 1:02

We get to throw a lot of this stuff away.

Speaker 2 1:04

We get to... And you know, and we through it and decide who we wanna interview and who we don't wanna interview. But-

Speaker 3 1:08

It usually goes like this: no, no, no, no, no, ooh, maybe, no, no, no. But,

Speaker 2 1:12

but every once in a while, one of the nos, one of the no topics, is something so freaking hilarious that I have to share it with you all.

Speaker 3 1:22

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2 1:22

The, the book that I have in front of me is called Skinny Italian. It's done by Teresa, one of the, the Real Housewives of New Jersey.

Speaker 3 1:30

Oh my God.

Speaker 2 1:31

And it is an unbelievable... now again, I'm, I apologize, I've never seen Real Housewives of New Jersey.

Speaker 3 1:38

I have.

Speaker 2 1:38

But I feel like I have some, some little bits and pieces of it now. I

Speaker 3 1:42

have seen it.

Speaker 2 1:42

You have really?

Speaker 3 1:43

Mm-hmm. Yes.

Speaker 2 1:44

I am currently ashamed of you. I'm

Speaker 3 1:46

sorry. It is, it is a train wreck, and I gotta tell you something. What I, what I can tell you now that I've seen The Real Housewives of New Jersey, and I've lived in New Jersey, they are, they are not exaggerated. They, those people exist.

Speaker 2 1:59

They definitely exist.

Speaker 3 2:00

They come from Nutley, where Marc is from.

Speaker 2 2:01

They definitely exist. They come from Bloomfield. And a lot of them live in Nutley,

Speaker 3 2:03

and Bloomfield- They live

Speaker 2 2:04

all around and Belville and-

Speaker 3 2:06

And they're not even a m- the, those people on the show-

Speaker 2 2:08

And they are freaking

Speaker 3 2:08

phenomenal are not even, like, crazy extreme for what the culture of Jersey is. Oh my God. It's like the Jersey Shore, you know, same thing. Those people really exist.

Speaker 2 2:16

Okay. You can go- On the back cover, "Eat spaghetti and still fit into your skinny jeans." Okay? I think it- That's on the back cover. I

Speaker 3 2:22

think-

Speaker 2 2:22

That, I gotta say, as I was, as I was about to, as I said no to this book, that we were not gonna get her on to interview her, I caught the back cover. I was like, "Wait a second. I need to look a little deeper in here." And here's what we're gonna say. There are some little bits and pieces of, of good advice, things that we say. You know, eat real food. Uh, shop around the edges of the supermarket. Buy organic. A lot of the things that are in here are, the fewer ingredients, the better, things like that. But one of the tips is, avoid stripper food. Okay?

Speaker 3 2:57

What, what is, what do strippers eat? I, how would I know? My, my mom- I've never dined with a stripper hold

Speaker 2 3:01

on.

Speaker 3 3:01

It's been a fantasy of mine for a long time, but I've never, never actually dined with a stripper.

Speaker 2 3:04

Want an easy way to remind yourself of whether food is healthy for you? Never eat food that is also a stripper's name. Cookie, Candy, Cupcake

Speaker 3 3:14

Oh my God. Oh my God.

Speaker 2 3:15

See, I disagree though, because I eat Bambi. Okay? So I gotta- Oh, no so I gotta argue with you there.

Speaker 3 3:22

Oh, Bunny.

Speaker 2 3:23

I ate Bunny. I eat Bunny.

Speaker 3 3:24

I ate Bunny. Come on.

Speaker 2 3:25

I eat- That's all- I eat stripper foods. Anyway-

Speaker 3 3:27

Oh,

Speaker 2 3:28

no the book, and, and- Hold on a second and I know that some of you- Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait I know that some of you are gonna buy this book 'cause of the stuff that I'm about to read to you. Uh-huh. Go ahead.

Speaker 3 3:34

I just, uh... I just wanna contemplate that for a moment. Don't eat stripper food as a rule. What would Michael Pollan say?

Speaker 2 3:43

Forget What Would Jesus Say. What Would Michael Pollan Say? What Would Michael Pollan,

Speaker 3 3:45

yeah.

Speaker 2 3:46

That's very funny. Oh, good one. In the book, there are little excerpts, and I don't know who Joe is, but I think I know who Joe is.

Speaker 3 3:54

Joe, her husband?

Speaker 2 3:55

The... I don't know. It says, "But there are juicy bits from Joe." Juicy

Speaker 3 3:58

bits.

Speaker 2 3:59

Okay, and hold on. Hold on. Yeah. I gotta, I gotta work my way into my nutley Italian- Where

Speaker 3 4:04

you come

Speaker 2 4:04

from before I can read this.

Speaker 3 4:06

Your people.

Speaker 2 4:07

Your people I can't read this until I get all the way into my character. Yeah, okay. Hold on.

Speaker 3 4:11

All right.

Speaker 2 4:12

Okay. Juicy bits from Joe. Yeah. Ready?

Speaker 3 4:15

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 4:16

This one time, Theresa and I were making lasagna from scratch for company, and to hurry things up, we decided to stick the eggs in the microwave. Don't ever do that."

Speaker 3 4:27

That's a juicy bit from Joe. First- Joe had to buy a new microwave

Speaker 2 4:31

First of all, we forgot that we had eggs in there, so they started exploding really loudly. We couldn't figure out what was going on. It sounded like gunfire or something. Yes.

Speaker 3 4:42

They were on the floor looking for the, the pistols.

Speaker 2 4:44

We were ducking. Uh, guests were hiding. It was crazy.

Speaker 3 4:50

Guests were hiding.

Speaker 2 4:51

When we realized the eggs-

Speaker 3 4:53

Oh

Speaker 2 4:53

in the microwave, ah, marone. What a mess we had on our hands. There was eggs- Oh I'm sorry. There was eggs everywhere. Maybe that's what put Theresa off from cooking our pasta from scratch. Our lasagna nearly gave us a heart attack."

Speaker 3 5:12

Oh my God.

Speaker 2 5:14

This is a juicy bit from Joe. Oh, that's a juicy bit from Joe. That is the exact quote. I changed none of the words. So anyway, I don't encourage you to buy this book, except it's freaking hysterical. Mm-hmm. Okay? And, you know, there are recipes in here, and like I said, some, some little bits of good advice, but the little juicy bits from Joe are... That, that was just one beautiful little juicy bit from Joe, and how much fun is that?

Speaker 3 5:38

Can we please throw away that book now?

Speaker 2 5:41

Yes, we can. I'm completely done with it now. Thank you very much. I laughed. I cried. Thank you. I made macaroni.

Speaker 3 5:49

Thank you very much. I guarantee you that every one of Mark's grandmother's recipes is better than every recipe in that book.

Speaker 7:21

I wanna talk about a happy topic. there was a great article in The New York Times by Oliver Strand, and the article was entitled, Bacchus Keeps His Clothes On," worst title of an article I've ever encountered.

Speaker 3 7:33

Can I tell you something amusing just happened in the studio? Literally, Francis's microphone fell into his lap in the middle of that sentence, and it amused me.

Speaker 7:41

Cause I tried to follow it, I tried to follow it with my mouth into my

Speaker 3 7:45

lap. Francis began to go lower, and lower, and lower, and lower, and then finally got back to the

Speaker 7:48

microphone. Yeah, you gotta tighten that screw every once in a while, I guess. Um, okay. "Bacchus Keeps His Clothes On," it talks about a trend that I think is awesome. Let me just read a little bit from it. Uh, "By tradition, a bachelor or bachelorette party is a night of Dionysian excess. However that unfolds is a matter of taste. for some, it entails a liberating number of drinks and a close encounter with the taut, spray-tanned skin of an exotic dancer. But for one recently married man and his friends, it meant bottles from a good winemaker to accompany the crispy golden skin of a roast suckling pig." It goes on about how they had a great party, and it was all about great food and late-night cocktails. And it talks about how men and women are taking the bachelor and bachelorette party.

Speaker 3 8:27

it's- They're making a gastronomic bachelor party instead of a striponomic- bachelor, bachelor party.

Speaker 8:34

Striponomic.

Speaker 3 8:35

A new word.

Speaker 8:35

I just made that up. I, you know what? I think that should only apply to, to women who strip with fake breasts. They're st- they're-

Speaker 3 8:40

I think it should be- It's- women who strip for the money.

Speaker 8:42

No.

Speaker 3 8:42

It's

Speaker 8:43

No, that's, that's funny 'cause you're thinking economic, and I'm thinking animatronic, you know? I've never understood the bachelor party, the standard American bachelor party. I'm about to get married to a woman, and so I go out-

Speaker 3 8:57

Who I've pledged my life and loyalty to

Speaker 8:59

and so I go out and get so drunk that I'm going to have, somewhere along a broad spectrum for all the bachelor parties I've been to, uh, passing or extremely intimate contact with one or several strippers in front of my friends. First of all- First of all, I don't do anything in front of my friends in that, in that arena. s- so I don't understand that. I really don't.

Speaker 3 9:20

Well, I, I think there's a trend here, and there's a trend here for a reason. And I think that part of the reason this is trending this way towards nicer places, and frankly, Francis and I see more and more of these types of events. Part of the reason you have this trend, A, is because people are more into food than they were 20 years ago. Right. B, and I think more importantly is, people are getting married older.

Speaker 9:40

Yeah,

Speaker 3 9:41

and I got married kind of on the, on the younger side, and was one of the first bachelor parties. So There was a... drinking frenzy at my bachelor party. But As my friends got older, as they got married at 29 and 30 and 32 and 34, well, maybe we went to Chicago to go to a ball game, or we did something else that wasn't just the drinking pornographic frenzy that a lot of these bachelor parties have become. So I think the natural progression there is, you know what? I'm 35 years old. I love great food. Why don't we make my bachelor party be more angled towards that? Mm-hmm. I'm over strip clubs for whatever reason. I'm over them, or I never liked them in the first place. You, you

Speaker 10:21

never liked them in the

Speaker 3 10:22

first place. I never liked them in the first place, but I'm over them.

Speaker 10:24

Mm-hmm. Right, right, right.

Speaker 3 10:25

And that wasn't part of my bachelor party. It wasn't part of... And it's, I think the, the whole drink to excess, party to excess thing, as you get older, becomes- But- -less enjoyable,

Speaker 10:37

so. But I, I also don't... I don't think it's only about being older. I think it's about, like you said, people are more into food. you can have a memorable-

Speaker 3 10:44

Right

Speaker 10:45

memorable meal-

Speaker 3 10:46

Right

Speaker 10:47

and evening afterwards, and cocktails, go to a couple of places-

Speaker 3 10:50

Uh, there may be no naked women in it, but you can have a very memorable evening I just wanna warn about one thing, because as bachelor parties and these types of things move from some of the seedier places into some of the nicer places- Please don't think that you can have a traditional bachelor party in one of these non-traditional places.

Speaker 11:08

Oh.

Speaker 3 11:09

Because do you remember... And I, and, uh, we're gonna go to story time.

Speaker 11:12

I remember.

Speaker 3 11:12

I remember. Okay. Francis and I worked at a really, really nice restaurant.

Speaker 11:15

Nice place. Still a nice place.

Speaker 3 11:16

Yeah. Still a nice place, still exists. And in this nice place, somebody-

Speaker 11:21

The owner of a flea market

Speaker 3 11:22

somebody rented the top floor of this restaurant, which was open to the bottom floor. So you, from downstairs you could see the upstairs.

Speaker 11:29

And they wisely didn't tell us, this is wise if you wanna dupe a restaurant- Um, they didn't tell us it was a bachelor party, but we found out about it as the guests began to arrive. And you hear the words bachelor party, we're talking about the other kind of bachelor party, and you think- Oh, no."

Speaker 3 11:44

And, and we were right. And

Speaker 11:45

oh, no.

Speaker 3 11:46

Oh, no. I'm sorry, sir. That woman's gonna have to put her clothes back on. Oh.

Speaker 11:53

And, uh, and it's funny 'cause I was there that night too, and I wanna be, "I'm sorry, sir. That woman's gonna have to put her clothes back on, uh, in just a minute." Uh...

Speaker 3 12:00

If you wanna have a non-traditional bachelor party in a non-traditional place, that's fine. Don't have a traditional bachelor party in a non-traditional place. Quick

Speaker 12:06

story. One of the oldest restaurants in New York, lots of private rooms, a place where we... A steakhouse we go to a lot. Mm, I know,

Speaker 3 12:11

I know the place you're talking about.

Speaker 12:12

my buddy's, bachelor party, and I was the best man at his wedding, and he said, "Listen, I do not want a stripper. I do not want a stripper. I I don't want a stripper. It's nothing that appeals to me." Right. I'm

Speaker 3 12:21

getting married because there's only one person that I wanna be

Speaker 12:23

with. It... And, they never appeal to me anyway. And so I'm like, "Okay, no problem." So I call up this restaurant who, because they have these private manly rooms, are used to bachelor parties, and I, I don't know what I was thinking, but I told them it was a bachelor party, and they're like, "Okay, listen. First of all, $1,000 security deposit in case you break anything." I should've just said it was my Aunt Tilda's birthday party. So, all right, $1,000, and they want it run through, not a guarantee, they want it run through, $1,000 in their hand- With your

Speaker 3 12:49

signature

Speaker 12:50

with your signature on it. So, so $1,000, and they all... This list of rules. It's a three-page long list of rules that must have come from what other guys have done.

Speaker 3 13:02

It's funny. Francis and I have a lot of policies and procedures for the restaurant and people look at us like, What? No shots?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah, no shots. There's a, there's a reason for that." That's a John Smith rule. "No doubles?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah, no doubles." You know, there's all of these rules and they're all because, well, there's a lesson learned.

Speaker 13:18

Well, well, the rules for the bachelor party were something like- You may not, attach to the 34th Street and 7th Avenue sign a, any sign that says, John's Bachelor Party this way." Like, okay, good to know. Can't do that. Uh, you may not, have a, a man in a chicken suit standing outside. Uh, you may not have a gorilla gram. and you know every one came from somewhere. Oh,

Speaker 3 13:43

absolutely.

Speaker 13:44

they have a $1,000 deposit, and one of the big rules is no strippers, no strippers, no strippers, no strippers, and if you have a stripper, we're gonna throw the stripper out, and we keep your $1,000.

Speaker 3 13:54

That's a rule.

Speaker 13:55

So I'm like, "Okay, guys, listen. No strippers, no strippers, no strippers, no strippers." And my buddy has this one friend who had a real alcohol problem at that point, and he's a real wild man. sober, was a nice and funny guy. Starting to get drunk, starting to get lit up, was a really funny guy. He was funny.

Speaker 3 14:11

Mm.

Speaker 14:11

After midnight, I don't wanna be around this guy. Right. Yeah. Get me out of there. I don't wanna be around him. Trouble is coming, and it may be funny until... But trouble's coming. There's a fight. Somebody's getting arrested. I just don't wanna be around.

Speaker 3 14:21

Red and blue lights are coming. We don't know if it's the police or the ambulance- Right. ...but the lights are, the flashing lights are coming.

Speaker 14:25

So anyway, so I'm out with this guy, and now this guy's a guest at the bachelor party. And so I'm like, "I know that Bob," we'll call him Bob. "I know that Bob's a problem," right? So I'm like, "Listen, everybody." No strippers. "You are not costing me $1,000 over this." No strippers. No strippers. Right. And my buddy doesn't want this anyway. so everything's going fine. We're in the private room upstairs at this steakhouse, and in walk three strippers.

Speaker 3 14:49

Do you lose $3,000 then?

Speaker 14:52

Um, that's what happened. Drunk guy found the strippers coming out of another party in the same restaurant And hire them-

Speaker 3 15:00

Rest- restaurants making a fortune on security deposits this time

Speaker 15:03

hire them- to come into our room. I'm like, "You found a stripper?" You know, because when he was sober he had the-

Speaker 3 15:12

You don't even have references.

Speaker 15:14

He, when he was sober, he was sober enough not to book the stripper in advance, but he found like an a la minute stripper on the street ready to go, like in a convenience window. And so the strippers walk in. I'm like, "I'm gonna kill you, Bob." so that went on for 15 minutes, and they got out of there, And anyway, the restaurant did not charge me, But that was my experience with bachelor parties. Would've much rather gone... Well, and, but that's what we did. We went out to a steakhouse.

Speaker 3 15:36

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 15:37

And except for my-

Speaker 3 15:37

You were having that alternative bachelor party-

Speaker 15:39

Except there they were and you didn't get to do it those strippers, strippers everywhere and not a drop to drink. That doesn't make any sense at all. There was

Speaker 3 15:45

plenty to drink.

Speaker 15:45

We'll be back in just a moment. You're listening to the Restaurant Guys and restaurantguysradio.com