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Interview with Mark Pastore, Founder, Incanto Restaurant
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- When starting a new business, is passion more important then experience?
- Innovation comes from being conscious about what you do and continually asking the question, “How can I do this better every day”
- “Sustainability is leaving the world better off before you touched it.
- How serving foods that aren’t popular can be the best marketing tool you’ve got… a sustainable business is not based on a marketing ploy, it’s simply a commitment to live your life and run your business sustaineably.
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
Bill Baren:
I’m Bill Baren of Green Business Innovators and I’m here at the back offices of Incanto Restaurant in San Francisco. Incanto is committed to delicious Italian food with sustainable practices. I’m joined by Mark Pastore, the founder and owner of Incanto. Thank you, Mark. Thank you for allowing us to enter your world.
Mark Pastore:
It’s nice to be with you, Bill. Thank you.
Mark Pastore: Sure. I grew up in an Italian-American family and had a life changing experience when I was 21 years old in Italy. I always loved cooking growing up, but when I went to Italy, it made me really think about eating. Europeans eat differently than Americans do. When I came back to the United States, I started a career that lasted about 13 years. But at the back of my mind, I was always interested in food and I would spend all of my spare time reading cookbooks and traveling on food-related vacations. Ultimately, the passion grew strong enough that in 2001, I left my old life and decided to start an Italian restaurant.
Bill Baren: So you’ve made your passion and your love your career these days?
Mark Pastore: Yes, which many people warned me about, but I can’t say that I have any regrets.
Bill Baren: Did you have any formal training or a methodology that you used when you first started?
Mark Pastore: No, I would like to tell people that I’m an untrained professional. I guess, I had started two businesses prior, neither of which had been in the food world. So I had a little bit of background about how to hire people and, hopefully, manage a business. But I was a complete novice to restaurants and to the food world. In fact, I’d never even worked in a restaurant until the day we opened our doors.
Bill Baren: So was that training in the line of fire?
Mark Pastore: It was, I was a deer in the headlights for the first few months, but I’ve been fortunate to be able to work with some exceptionally talented people in this field. I think, why train somebody who’s never been in the business if you can work with really smart people who have more experience than you and you’re going to end up learning.
Bill Baren: So how were you able to come upon these partnerships?
Bill Baren: For anyone who might not know, can you tell us a little bit about “Slow Food?”
Mark Pastore: Sure. Slow Food is an international organization that is dedicated to preserving and promoting traditional ways of cultivating, preparing and consuming food. So it started as a reaction against the opening of the first McDonald’s in Italy, which opened in Piazza Di Spagna in Rome. The thought behind it is that food is a very, very important and how we treat food is a very important part of our cultural heritage. Human’s relationship with food speaks a lot about our relationship with the earth and with each other. As food becomes more industrial and less personal, I think, we risk losing part of what it is that makes what it means to be human beings.
Bill Baren: Yes. So tell me a little bit about how your ideas around sustainability influenced what’s happening in the restaurant now and how you set about creating it?
Mark Pastore: Well, I think, anybody who cares a lot about food has to think about its place in the world at large, and sustainability is a lot of things for a lot of people. But at the end of the day, it really means doing your very best to leave the world better off than before you touched it. Most people right now think about sustainability in how food is produced, and we certainly care a great deal about how the sustainability of how our food is grown, the husbandry practices that are used for the animals and animal parts that we serve, and then also how we handle the food. So just a few examples:
Working with small farms, most of whom are either certified organic or are essentially using all the practices of an organic farm but haven’t gone through the fairly expensive government certification process. When it comes to simple things like how the food arrives to us, produce arrives to a restaurant like ours in waxed cardboard boxes. Waxed cardboard boxes actually aren’t recyclable. So we work with a lot of small farmers and these boxes are kind of expensive. One of the things we do at Incanto is we are pretty maniacal about recycling and returning boxes, plastic bags, like if you get a bag of onions or a bag of carrots or a bag of potatoes, we actually don’t throw away that bag. We return it to the farmer who gave it to us, down as far as twist ties and rubber bands that you see around produce. I don’t know if you walked into our side entrance, but you saw a few scattering of boxes out there. By Wednesday, that will be a large pile, and we have a farmer that we return all those boxes to. In fact, some of our produce comes from a big distributor, local organic produce distributor. We take the boxes that big distributor gives us and return them to the small farmer. So the small farmer can save a dollar, a dollar fifty per box, which is meaningful for a small farmer. So there’s that.
There’s how you cook the food. There’s an old saying that says that, “You can tell more about a chef by what’s in his garbage can than what’s on the plate.” That saying dates back long before there was a green movement and it really relates to the economics of cooking which is whether you’re a home cook or a restaurant chef, the best cooks never throw products, never throw things away. They utilize all parts of the plant, all parts of the animal, whether it’s taking the tops off carrots and celery and putting them into a vegetable stock rather than just throwing them away. When we serve radishes here in Incanto, they always come with the greens on them because radish greens are completely edible and they’re a beautiful flavor as well.
So we serve about 750-800 dinners each week here at Incanto and we generate three cans of garbage each week. It’s the kind of can that our family of four we have in San Francisco that would be picked once per week. We generate three of those per week, while serving 800 people. That’s pretty low waste.
But there’s another part of sustainability that I think has become one of Incanto’s trademarks. Rather than focusing on the production side, that is, how food is grown and prepared, we’re also asking questions about sustainability of consumption. We’ve become known as a restaurant that’s promoting something known as “whole beast” or “whole animal” dining. In a very short description, that means that we serve a lot of parts of the animal that most restaurants don’t serve and that most people don’t eat. That includes things like brains or ears or tongues or tails or feet.
For us, that really comes down to a few important things. First, being that these are actually very delicious parts of the animal, and if you are going to make the choice to be a carnivore, we think that there’s more to a cow than simply steak or hamburger. There’s more to a pig than bacon and pork chops. If we are going to make this choice to be carnivores, let’s be honest with ourselves and let’s experience the full range of taste and textures and flavors offered by an animal.
At their heart, these are foods that, typically, if we didn’t grow up eating them, you and I, either our parents or grandparents or great grandparents probably grew up eating many of these foods. For a variety of reasons, they’ve fallen out of favor, but that doesn’t mean that these parts, the animal don’t exist anymore. So we think that it’s an important part of our cultural heritage to preserve these kind of foods, these kind of ingredients, and these kind of recipes, and that’s another reason that we serve these parts of the animal. At the end of the day, we call it sustainable eating and it’s one of the reasons to come to Incanto.
Bill Baren: Are these items on the menu tend to be the popular ones?
Mark Pastore: Well, in a way, yes they are, for Incanto because there’s grown to be a following of people who come to Incanto, specifically, because they know that we serve these kind of foods. Now, for the “average” person who walks in up the street, they’re looking for spaghetti and meatballs or veal parmigiana, some people are a little taken aback when they explain that pig’s trotter is a pig’s foot, or that lamb fries means lamb testicles. But the sad thing is that most people who turn up their nose at these kinds of foods have never even tasted them or never experience them, and it’s become such a strong cultural taboo that we are raising, probably, a second or third generation of kids who won’t have even tried liver. But they’re convinced that they don’t like it.
Bill Baren: So what part does the education of your customer play into what you do?
Mark Pastore: Well, hopefully, it’s never the first part. Because at the end of the day, people are here to have a nice dinner and that’s really our job is to be hospitable and offer people a good dining experience. But it is one of our subversive goals is, hopefully, to slip a little bit of education in there when possible. We’re lucky to be in a city like San Francisco. For many diners in San Francisco, dining in a restaurant like Incanto or many other restaurants in the city, is a form of traveling. It’s a form of either traveling in place or time. I would say, the majority of people who walk through our doors are looking to have an experience here. They’re looking to have an experience that’s different than the one they might have at home. So doing something different is a way for us to give them that experience.
Mark Pastore: Yes. I never really thought about it that way, but I think that would be a very flattering way for us to think about it.
Bill Baren:
So I wanted to ask you about this event that you’ve done in the past, the dining from the Head to Tail. Is that still going on?
Mark Pastore: It does, we do it every year. Is this thing going to be like–can I talk about 2008? Is that all right?
Bill Baren: Sure.
Mark Pastore: This year, it’s going to be on June 9th and June 11th. While our menu regularly features a variety of meats, here and there on the menu, it’s never more than five or six dishes out of 25 that we serve. For the Head to Tail Dinner, our menu is exclusively a variety of meats, and it’s people who want to have a dinner from start to finish that is comprised of many things that most people haven’t eaten or don’t regularly eat. So in the past, we’ve served crispy pig’s ears, we’ve served duck tongues, we’ve served pig’s bladders stuffed with beans and blood. We’ve served shaved cold tripe salad. You name it, we’ve served it.
Bill Baren: And how’s the reception been?
Mark Pastore: We do a number of special dinners throughout the year, whether they’re wine maker dinners or a dinner every February that honors our farmers. The Head to Tail Dinner is the dinner for which Incanto is best known, and it’s really our best-attended dinner of the year. In fact, that’s why we did two evenings of it this year. We found that doing it only one night, we don’t have enough capacity to serve all the people who want to attend.
Bill Baren: So, it’s interesting. It sounds like, by really specializing and by really going after the avid fan and a foodie, you know, you’re able to really market your business.
Mark Pastore: You know, I would say we set out to serve these foods because they please us and because we believe in them. We didn’t set out to serve these foods because we had a hundred phone calls from people asking us, “Could you please serve duck tongues?” But what’s ended up happening is that we’ve really found an audience for these types of foods, and that’s all the more gratifying because we found an audience of people who appreciate and love the same things that we do.
Bill Baren: So in a sense, you’re marketing just from being authentically wanting to do what it is that you love.
Mark Pastore: Yeah, I guess so. It really defies conventional logic to serve things that aren’t popular. That isn’t what a traditional person would call “smart marketing.” But in a backwards kind of way, it has served our purpose.
Bill Baren: So speaking of marketing, how do you market your business? You’ve been around for almost six years now.
Mark Pastore: That’s an interesting question. First and foremost, we market our business by being ourselves. We really don’t have a calculated marketing strategy where we sit down and say, “Gosh, what is the audience out there and what’s the best way for us to appeal to them?” We really try to be, in the words of Bill and Ted, we try to be excellent and kind of let the chips fall where they may.
Bill Baren: So what’s your philosophy, on your part, in mitigating some of the climate change?
Mark Pastore: Well, I actually spent a year of my life in 1998 doing research on global climate change for a Washington DC think-tank called the Office of Technology Assessment. I had a little bit of the early insight into where climate change was going. There’s only so much that a small restaurant that serves dinner six nights a week can do in and of itself. So our philosophy is to leave a small footprint as we can, while serving our first goal, which is to give people a great dining experience and to hope that some of the things that we do are a little bit contagious. In that they can go beyond the four walls of our restaurant to maybe, if we can change the way a few of our diners think about food and eating and if we can maybe influence a few other restaurants, then hopefully, we can affect the problem positively in a way that’s more than just the 800 dinners a week that we serve here.
Bill Baren: Yes. So what motivates you? I heard you work quite a lot. What motivates you to work so much in your businesses?
Mark Pastore: You know, just a love for what I do. I just really enjoy–sometimes I think, it’d be fun to have a flower shop. Because with the exception of people sadly coming in to buy flowers for somebody who’s sick or passed away, most of the people walking into a flower shop are there to buy flowers to celebrate life, and having a restaurant is kind of like having a flower shop. For the most part, people are coming through our doors because they are seeking a pleasurable experience and that’s a pretty wonderful thing to be involved with is to help provide an environment for people to have pleasure. That inspires you to want to work.
Bill Baren: This isn’t your only business. Tell us about some of your other ventures.
Mark Pastore: Well, Chris Cosentino, the chef here in Incanto, and I are partners in a little company called Boccalone that makes more than 20 types of traditional Italian cured meats, salumi or charcuterie. This grew out of Incanto, these are all products that we made here at the restaurant and we had enough demand from our guests to do this in more of a retail venue. So we have a club of people who subscribe, twice a month they get a mixed box of fresh sausages and cured meats that we produce at Boccalone. They include regular things like and prosciutto and salame and mortadella to some of the more off-the-beaten-track things like ciccioli, which is mostly made from pork renderings and pork skin and it’s a type of terrine to things like salt-cured pork liver. Once again, we’re kind of doing things that we love and seeing if there are people who are willing to experience them.
Bill Baren: You’re opening up a retail location?
Mark Pastore: We are going to be opening a retail location here in San Francisco sometime later this year.
Bill Baren: Thank you. So what’s your relationship to innovation? Innovation in your industry, innovation in how you think about your business?
Mark Pastore: Well, I guess, I would say that’s been the virtue–the negative of my never having worked in a restaurant is that I didn’t necessarily know how to do it. But the big positive I’ve never had to work in a restaurant is that I was able to look at every aspect of what we do with a fresh set of eyes. I was looking at really purely as a consumer, as a diner, because what I knew about restaurants largely came from having been a consumer who eats out in restaurants.
So we were able to tackle some things like water, I was taught it’s a little goofy at the beginning of a meal, when a server would come over in a nice restaurant and you’d have this little dance of whether you were going to be a cool diner and purchase bottled water or whether you’re going to be a cheapskate and drink tap water. That was something that we wanted to remove from the equation at Incanto. So we became one of the first restaurants in the United States to consciously make a choice that we were not going to sell bottled water and to serve local water that we filtered and chilled and offered in a complimentary version, either still or sparkling. That was six years ago, and now, a lot of other restaurants are coming on board with that.
Another area that we’ve innovated a little bit is in how we serve wine. We serve all Italian wine list, it’s a little bit confusing for many people who don’t know much about Italian wine. So to make it fun and accessible, we developed this little reusable paper colors that we put at the stem of the glass that informs the diner what wine they’re drinking - the producer, the denomination of the wine, and the vintage of the wine. It helps make it a little fun, we hope, for people. Also, if you’ve got a wine, if you’ve ever been in a restaurant and had a wine you really like by the glass, but then couldn’t remember what it was. Well, this is something you can take with you and go out shopping and look for that wine.
Bill Baren: So now that you’ve been in business for six years. When you first came in, it’s like you were saying, you were fresh, you were coming in from the perspective of the consumer. Now that you’ve been in the restaurant business for six years, you’re becoming much more an expert in the restaurant game. So how do you continue to stay fresh and innovative?
Mark Pastore: Well, I think, the easiest way to do that is to travel. Unfortunately, that isn’t always easy to do if you’re busy working in your restaurant. But, I think, the great thing about restaurants is that you’re really only as good as the night before. Everyday, you have to start from scratch and you have to essentially design your product, you have to build your product, you have to sell your product, and then you have to support your product.
Restaurant doesn’t really give you a chance - the thing that characterizes the best restaurants in the world, whether they’re super high end restaurant with the French Laundry or whether it’s that great taqueria down the street or even a hot dog stand, all the great restaurants in the world care about being better today than they were the day before. That is an attribute that not only our great restaurants share but all great business people share. So we just try to always everyday, think about one or two things that we can do better. Even when they’re very, very small things like the way we fold our napkins or where we store a certain item, if we can find a way to do things a little bit better then, eventually, that’s going to translate into better experience for our guests. That’s the ultimate goal.
Bill Baren:
That’s a really good, great place for us to end, to have better experience for our guests. Thank you.
Mark Pastore:
Thank you, Bill.
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