after town. Throughout my childhood I so wanted to visit the places I read about in school, to travel the landscape of the United States with my family and see all those mysterious and unusual places. My family ended up giving me that gift, in the form of an endorsement to locate Melody Grace McCartney and put two bullets in her head. My life returned to normal in New York. I embraced the love of cooking I’d found, that my mother had instilled in me in the sweetest way as a child, always offering a warm place to hide when tensions would rise in our household, when uncles and friends would arrive home cut and bloody and doubled over in pain, when arguments were so loud I could not find a place out of earshot, when reticent looks were passed around the room from a question like, “What happened to Mario? I haven’t seen him in ages.” My mother could read it in my eyes—it was the thing missing from my brothers’—and would pull me to her chest, tell me she needed my help in the kitchen. She diverted my attention by teaching me how to make homemade ravioli, pinoli and all, by letting me coat the pork and steak in the salmoriglio sauce before grilling, by explaining how the less spice you add to a dish, the greater the flavor. Her ability to distract me from the chaos in our house created a baseline for my life. I was the only one willing to learn her lesson: You’ll be happier if you use your fists for the dough.
I scraped up marginal cash to buy an old storefront in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, right off Wythe Avenue. The place was worth a fortune until it mysteriously burned up two days after I mentioned to my father I had my eye on it; I bought the shell for almost nothing, was swamped with free labor and materials for the next nine months. The details of what made the place so special, like a chandelier dating back to the early 1900s and parquet floors from an even earlier age—all gone. But this is how the Bovaros acquire things. Why bother loosening a bolt with a wrench when you can whack it off with a hammer? But they meant well, in their felonious way. It’s amazing the things family will do for you sometimes.
In the hidden hours of the schedule of my life, between the enforcement of contracts and delivery and removal of money to those clients requesting financial help and help for those requiring our protection, I rebuilt the restaurant from the ground up. The late nights and random free moments were all absorbed by the tasks of hiring electricians and plumbers and designers; I quickly learned the other end of the restaurant business, an area to which I’d had little exposure growing up. As a result of everything in the building having been replaced—virtually a new facility—I took the restaurant to the other end of the spectrum. Instead of trying to recreate the natural history that had burned away, I refurbished and redesigned the place in a cutting-edge, trendy way that could not have been mistaken for anything other than intentional overcompensation, a style just arriving in Williamsburg. Gone were the discs of Sinatra and his peers, in came a twenty-four-hour satellite feed of trance, a barely audible track of what seemed like one song that started in March and didn’t end until November when the power dropped. The menu, originally intended to replicate Country Italian, the food of my youth, turned into an Italian fusion with more contemporary flavors and unexpected elements; a feast of food as you’d expect from an authentic Italian restaurant, with the twists in flavor and presentation you’d expect from places whose menus defied categorization. I spent the last of my available cash on a restaurant sign designed by a local artisan, a wood and metal creation that spread across the brick surface above the awning—SYLVIA. I named the restaurant after my mother, the woman who taught me not only how to love food, but how to understand it, who after a miserable life of nurturing a crime boss and her hoodlum sons, died of ovarian cancer before she would ever see me complete its restoration. And as the staff was assembled, the tablecloths draped on the wooden tables, and the bar stocked, my father told me we’d be laundering money through the back end of the