Hoy Brandon - Robertas Cookbook

In the summer of 2007, we put a seed in the ground. We had a simple and not at all original idea: to open a pizza place. What maybe distinguished the idea at the time was where and how we wanted to open that pizza placein a cinderblock warehouse in a neighborhood that was wild western enough that we could afford it and, more important, that we could do almost whatever we wanted.

How we wanted to open our pizza place was on our own, with almost no money except what little we had saved and some donations from friends and family who had even less experience opening restaurants than we did. We werent chefs. We werent front-of-house managers. We werent in any kind of restaurant scene. We didnt even like going out to eatwe didnt think of it as something fun to do. We were musicians and bartenders with at best a year or two of line-cook work between us. There were no investors or backers to answer towhich on the occasions when we didnt have any money at all, and they were many and strung together, seemed like something worth regrettingbut it was the best thing for us. It was the only thing. We wouldnt have worked with anyone who had enough money to make opening a pizza place in Bushwick anything but hard, and they wouldnt have worked with us.

The summer before it had a name, Robertas was a really fun place to hang out. And a comforting place to hang out if you didnt have a job or anywhere else to be or any idea what you wanted to do with your life. So a lot of people came to help us with our demolition derby. Strip the walls and fix holes. Salvage building materials. Move piles of rubble around until we could figure out how to get rid of them. Build a pizza counter. Build a bar. When there are a lot of people around, there are a lot of ideas. Which is probably how there came to be a kiddie pool in the backyard and a chicken called Chicken and an injured dove that went by Motherfucker. When there are a lot of people around there is a lot of creative energy and a lot of exuberance. There is also a lot of noise and mess and conflict. Bones were broken and faces got swollen and people threw up. We cant think of a good thing thats happened that didnt involve some of that.

By the time the restaurant opened, in the cold, dark heart of January, what we had was a family. And a drafty, ramshackle house for that family to live in. Maybe we should have realized that all the bullshitting around it felt like wed been doingduring and in between the genuinely hard work of building the restauranthad been laying the groundwork for the kind of place we wanted to be. Robertas was a place people wanted to hang out.

The rest isnt history. The rest is still happening. The seed sprouted and began to grow. And as anyone with a houseplant or a pet or a kid knows, living things are really needy. We had a family to feed. And a house to maintain. We had amazed ourselves with what we could do and we wanted to do more and we wanted to do it better.

If youve been to the restaurant more than once, you probably saw physical evidence of all that growth and change with your own eyes. Robertas has always been pretty transparent. We like to think that is part of its charm but we know it could just as easily be called a flaw. Has been, actually. It doesnt really matter because we couldnt have done it any other way. It is less that way now. We have an infrastructure that we didnt have in the beginning. That infrastructure is supposed to save us from ourselves. But the truth is that if wed had an agenda or anything resembling an infrastructure when we started out, we never could have created the place that we did or achieved the things we achieved. Had we any self-consciousness or any sense of limits or any inhibitions, we would have failed.

None of this is to say that we got where we are now by accident. We worked hard to get our food and the experience of eating it to a place where we feel like we can compete with anybody. Where we feel like we can legitimately compel someone to travel a good distance to see us, possibly wait an hour or more to sit, and it will be worth it. We worked incredibly hard, and we still work hard, to balance whats expected of us with what we actually want to do, to appreciate what we created and the people who help keep us in existence, without sacrificing too much of the spirit in which the place was built.

To experience Robertas, you have to visit it. Thats the truth. We realize that truth isnt unique to us, but we thought about it a lot during the making of this book. We wanted to convey the experience of being at Robertas to those who havent been, and capture it for those who have been too many times to count. In the end we decided that eating the food and drinking the drinks and having a good time is a much better way to get a sense of what its like at Robertas than reading too much about it. So there are a good number of photographs in this book. A lot happened and still happens at Robertas thats best told visually. And of course there are some stories. Enough to give you a sense of the place and to give you context for the food and drink but not so many that you begin to wonder why we thought youd be interested. And there is a lot of food. So cook the food, drink some cocktails or whatever you like drinking, hang out with some friends, and have a really good time. Thats all were ever trying to do.