(Bonus Episode) The underground menu at Anthony Scaramucci's restaurant, Hunt & Fish Club

In this week's bonus, Anthony Scaramucci compares the challenges involved at his restaurant Hunt & Fish Club with Ruthie's at The River Cafe. Plus, he shares some of the items on the underground menu, including the secret meatballs.

Ruthie's Table 4, made in partnership with Moncler.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You were listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair.
I have a menu from your restaurant, So that's something
else that binds us in common. You see the chefs,
they're planning the menu for your and you also you
bring a lot of love to your customers. So I
don't know anybody that comes to this restaurant it doesn't
feel like they're in some way getting a familial element

(00:22):
to the experience. So you have done an amazing job
with that. And I give you a lot of credit
for that. And I will say this to people that
don't own restaurants because I have to own a restaurant
in a very hard business. It's very hard to run.
The operating margins are tight. The food has to be perfect,
you know they say that. You know, they say in
politics that terrorists us to be lucky once and we

(00:44):
have to be right one hundred percent of the time.
But in a restaurant, you could have one bad meal.
It cannot get judged. To me, you can knock out
fifty customers forever. They get on the phone and they
give you a bad yell rating, or they tell twenty
to friends, I had a bad meal. No one comes back.
I forbid that your restaurant is the cis restaurant that
I've ever been in my own a restaurant. What's the
name of the restaurant. So the name of the restaurant,

(01:05):
we named it after the John Gotti Social Club. So
the old mafia Don and Queens had a social club
called the Hunt and Fish Social Club, and so we
named the restaurant the Hunt and Fish Club. And so
it was a little knock on that effect. John Gotti Junior.
When John Travolta was playing his father in the movie Gotti,
they did their after party at our restaurant. And so

(01:25):
restaurants on forty fourth Street, it's one right in the
theater is a great place to go for the theater.
We hire a lot of the Broadway musicians to come
on a Wednesday night if there and saying, oh please,
you gotta come. I don't know if you called the meatballs,
but we have an underground menu. Want a restaurant because
we're a couple of us are Italians, So we have

(01:48):
my grandmother's meatball recipe you can ask for. We've had
French onion soup. We have New England clam child. Yeah,
that's the traditional stage crab cake and bacon. I'd like
to have that. What's a but it has a cheddar
beer sauce on the site on the side. On the
we have cavatelli bolonnaise yocky with lobster gavia. That's very

(02:11):
it's really delicious. Sounds good. So you have this restaurant.
Do you eat there? Ten years ago? There? I eat there.
You know, I'm in New York. I try to If
I'm in New York for the week, I try to
get there one at least one night. So yeah, I
have a lot of meals there. My kids love it.
We have chicken fingers for the kids, French fries. You know,
there's some off the menu stuff that we'll give to people.
Did you ever do another one? So we opened one

(02:33):
at Laguardi Airport, So we have a Hunt and Fish
Grill at Laguardi Airport. We're in partnership with the port authority.
We're going to open one at Kennedy in Terminal one.
Uh and so yeah, we're open to the idea of
opening a few more of them. We got crushed during COVID, so,
unlike some of the restaurants in New York, city, and
for us, we had a cloak. We had no out

(02:55):
because we were in the theater distri there was no
place to put any alfresco dining. So we closed for
fifteen months, and then we had to make a mission
critical decision. We each had to put money in to
keep the staff and to keep the thing going. And
so we made that decision the four of us, which
I think was a great decision. Everybody got to keep
their jobs. We reopened. The business absolutely sucked. I'm not

(03:19):
going to be sue. We were way down. Our traffic
numbers were up here in twenty twenty, really high. They
started out in the pits because in downtown New York,
the corporations were letting people work at home. This was
a corporate watering hole. It was a corporate hotspot. We
did tons of corporate events and Christmas parties, but closing

(03:42):
dinner parties for investment, banking transactions and all of that
business went by the wayside as people were operating off
of Zoom and more or less staying out of the city.
So it's five years after COVID and we're now back
to the March twenty twenty numbers. But I'll tell you
we we took in a lot of water. You get

(04:04):
involved with the menu, do you give them my opinions.
I just have two things on the menu that I
care about. So the two things I care about are
the meatballs, which they're actually not on the menu. That's
sort of if you know me, you can ask for
the meatballs. Okay, So everyone asked for the media asked
for the meatballs because we have a little bit of

(04:24):
an underground menu because work we're Italians and I want
to have meatballs at the table, and our chef makes
an amazing meatball. And then the other thing that I
love is we have a very expensive Italian ice cream machine,
so we make our own ice cream, and so that
was a big deal for me. The peasant food in

(04:44):
southern Italy is simple. It's a couple of ingredients, and
if you get the combo of the ingredients right, it's
the best sort of food. It's also clean. I'll say
something about your restaurant, which unfortunately is not so true
in New York or America, because we poison our food
in America. We're just being honest with everybody. But you've

(05:06):
got like clean food here, well prepared without a lot
of harsh ingredients or preservatives or I mean it's hard
to believe, but chlorination and chicken and things like that.
So the food here, I always lose weight when I'm
in the UK, even though I'm eating and I'm eating bread.

(05:27):
So I had the facacio coming in if I had
I'm just letting you know, if I had American fagachio,
I'd be up like three pounds after eating it. But
here you can eat the fagato no problem, and you
go home losing a little bit of weight. So come here.
People here love what they're doing, and the restaurant years
the people that are here consuming they love it as well.

(05:48):
So I give you a lot of credit for that.
And you're an expat. And also I think you figured
it out as an expat, which is even more impressive.
I've been here a long time. Thank you for listening
to Ruthie's table for in partnership with Montclair