The Tom Tom Club

If you’re going to name a restaurant after yourself, you either have delusions of grandeur or don’t give a damn what people think about you. Or both. In the case of Macaluso’s, at the corner of 39th and Terrace, there couldn’t have been any other option. The restaurant’s owner, Tom Macaluso, already had a reputation as a “personality,” and that was his most marketable skill. He wasn’t a chef, he wasn’t possessed of a swarthy Mediterranean charm and he wasn’t socially connected.

What the quick-witted Macaluso — a 52-year-old native of Queens, New York, who walks and talks like a character out of The Sopranos — has, in abundance, is a unique style that’s becoming harder to find in the corporate restaurant culture, where menus are dumbed down for suburban diners and individuality is almost a sin. There is no other restaurant in the city like Macaluso’s.

That said, not everyone loves Tom; his bellowing manner can be abrasive, especially if he’s in one of his more volatile Italian moods. Macaluso knows he has alienated his share of customers since he opened his fourteen-table dining room in 1993. But he insists he has mellowed over the years. He no longer gets his revenge on customers who don’t show up for their reservations by calling them after midnight to say, “Dear, we’re still holding your table for you. Where are you?”

Former Macaluso’s fan John Hastings is still fuming that he and a friend had to wait at the bar for 45 minutes (“Without so much as a crust of bread!” he yells) only to be told by a blasé Macaluso, “I’m afraid we’re not going to have a table for you after all.” Hastings never returned.

“I’ve made a few bad calls where I’ve frightened customers out the doors,” Macaluso admits, shrugging. “But you know what? That’s me. It’s part of what I do, and my customers have come to expect it. Some nights I’m not in the mood to bark at people, and my customers complain that I’m not abusing them!”

But love him or loathe him, Macaluso is a scrappy survivor of one of the toughest businesses to be in right now.

“A distinctive personality is the most important quality for an independent restaurant owner. That’s the one thing the independently owned restaurant has over the chain operations,” says veteran restaurateur Jerry Gaines, who owned several of his own establishments before quitting to become a real estate agent. “At the chains, managers can change overnight. A hands-on restaurant owner has much more personal contact with his customers. He can turn a complaint into a friendship simply by fixing a problem.”

Macaluso certainly hasn’t been one of those supervisors who disappears overnight. Long before he opened his namesake restaurant, he spent seven years as the no-nonsense manager of Nabil’s, saying exactly what was on his mind. If that meant he issued a torrent of hilarious insults, so be it. “When the restaurant was on Broadway,” he remembers, “there would be nights when I was the only waiter, bartender, dishwasher and cook. Mouthy? You bet I was.”

These days, Macaluso doesn’t really need to do his act for patrons who settle into the claustrophobic, unevenly lit dining room, with its tables cloaked in starched linens and decorated with fresh flowers that Macaluso has arranged himself. A lot of this restaurant’s joie de vivre now comes from the customers themselves or from a staff of generally savvy servers who have been working there for years, including jazz singer Colleen Cassidy and the suave David Petty. (“All the customers lust after him,” Macaluso says. “And luckily, he’s an excellent waiter too.”)

Another veteran of Macaluso’s world is chef Scott Warren, who makes do with a shockingly tiny kitchen. Other chefs in town have vastly more elaborate setups, but they don’t produce the sort of culinary miracles that seem so effortless for Warren. His crab cakes, for example, are steaming puffs of fresh, seasoned crabmeat under a delicate shell that seems as if it will burst at the nudge of a fork; he serves them with a spicy, smoky sauce of fresh tomato and pancetta.

I have friends who say that their main complaint with Macaluso’s isn’t Tom’s occasional gruffness or the dated look of the dining room or “all those damn wind-up toys taking up space at the bar.” Instead, they grouse that the menu never changes. But it’s reassuring to know that when I need a fix of calamari, I can always find Warren’s light and greaseless flash-fried version, which practically floats above an accompanying dish of lemony garlic aïoli.

Besides, Warren’s menu does change. One innovation is a trio of golden pork-and-shrimp-stuffed wontons, poking up like the domes of an old Russian church from a Black Sea of intoxicating port wine sauce, a mahogany-colored, garlicky affair deftly sweetened with orange juice and rice vinegar. I wouldn’t allow it to be taken off the table until I’d soaked up every drop with pieces of a crusty baguette.

For other splendid starters, customers can request a half order of one of Warren’s six pasta dishes. (The full-size entrees include a salad.) I’m especially fond of the tangle of capellini in a basil-scented arrabbiata sauce scattered with fat sautéed scallops and shrimp. For more decadent tastes, there’s a pile of tortellini in a creamy carbonara sauce. (It’s named for businessman and philanthropist Steve Metzler, a longtime customer and friend of Macaluso’s.)

For his dinner offerings, Warren gives the proper reverence to a meaty rack of lamb crusted with rosemary and mustard and to a grilled filet mignon with a rich, slightly salty wild-mushroom Beaujolais sauce. He’s more playful with slices of Long Island duck, artfully arrayed on a mound of risotto laden with parmesan and asiago and splashed with a tart-sweet sauce of port and lush blackberries. His fork-tender pale veal flank steak is slightly bland, but who cares? It’s accompanied by a thick slab of oven-browned au gratin potatoes flavored with tangy British-made Stilton.

One night I brought along my friend Carmen, who had had been avoiding Macaluso’s for a few seasons. “The lighting is really all wrong for Latin-American women,” she said, looking down at her reflection in a goblet of Simi Sauvignon Blanc. Alas, she was underwhelmed by her dinner too. It was that night’s seafood special, a swordfish provencal smothered in a frothy sauce of onion, garlic and white wine. “You would need a microscope to find any garlic in this,” she said.

I offered to give her some of my salmon, perfectly crusted with powdered pine nuts, then pan-seared and highlighted with pesto. But she sullenly nibbled on her risotto until our plates were whisked away and dessert arrived.

The coffee-colored flan, intensely flavored with vanilla bean, was “very good,” Carmen said begrudgingly. “Not as good as my own. But good.” And a white chocolate cheesecake (made by Napoleon Bakery, which also makes the restaurant’s baguettes) was almost as potent as a liqueur or a cup of Macaluso’s very hot, very black coffee.

But none of these endings packs the same punch as a tableside visit from Macaluso himself. “It’s a business that sucks the life out of you,” Macaluso says of his trade, “but I love it. You have to love it to keep doing it. I mean, there are nights that you wonder why you’re doing it. Like the time these two tanned, spoiled brats came in here and started bragging about their vacation….”

And off he goes, Tom and his celebrated tongue. Without them, this city would be a lot more boring.