What do you enjoy more, being at Morandi or Pastis?
Since I’m in the restaurant business, I like all aspects of it. I’m just lucky enough to be on different ends of the management. One of them, being at the door, is more hospitality-oriented; the other one is more operations management, seeing the overall service. So it allows me to be versatile. How’d you get started? I started working with Keith about a year and a half ago but I’d known him for a while. I came to the U.S. for college from Istanbul, and I started working in restaurants to support myself. College expenses are … well, you know. I studied economics, and instead of doing that, I stuck with the restaurant business. What was the first restaurant you ever worked? The first restaurant I worked at in the city was the Garage on 7th Avenue South. My most important job was on the corner of Bleecker St. and LaGuardia, a little place called the Village Grill. That’s where I met Richard Emolo, who is the general manager of Barolo and all Paolo Secondo restaurants. He mentored me on
