New ‘L’ Laudisio dazzles with spot-on dishes, decor

BOULDER – Although he was only 5 or 6 years old at the time, Antonio Laudisio remembers his first job: Swatting flies with a rolled-up newspaper in his father’s Miami restaurant. As the youngest generation in a long line of Italian restaurant owners, he and his sister and three brothers were used to stopping in at the family eatery after school and doing their chores before they went home to play.

But one day, Laudisio’s daily routine was disrupted. “I was about 10 or 11 years old, and shortly after I came home from school I found out that we had been cited for violating child labor laws. Someone was concerned that we were being abused.

“We were being abused, and we never knew it!” he exclaims, laughing.

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For Laudisio, owner of “L” Laudisio and part owner of Mediterranean Restaurant in Boulder, working in a restaurant is simply the family business, begun decades before his ancestors emigrated to America from Naples, Italy in 1905.

“Even in Europe, my family owned restaurants,” he says. “I used to call our restaurant the family life raft.”

Laudisio got his own chance at restaurant ownership in his mid-40s, following a four-year sabbatical he and his wife, Pat, spent on a sailboat. After they finally hit dry land, Laudisio promised Pat she could pick the location of their restaurant-to-be. Pat chose Boulder.

Landlocked Colorado seems an odd option for a seafaring couple, but Pat is a horse lover who wanted plenty of space for her hobby. The couple had been to Boulder before, visiting John Bizzarro, who went to high school with Antonio and worked in the Laudisio family restaurant before moving to Boulder and opening John’s Restaurant.

Joined by his brothers Raimondo and Leonardo, Antonio opened Laudisio Ristorante Italiano in North Boulder in 1986. The restaurant became a popular Boulder eatery, but for the peripatetic Antonio, it wasn’t enough.

“I had all these ideas about restaurants I could open, things I’d been carrying around for years in my head,” he says. One of those ideas was a tapas and wine bar. So in 1993, Laudisio launched Mediterranean Restaurant in downtown Boulder.

For Laudisio, the restaurants had two distinct identities.

“My first restaurant was the immigrant model – if it was open you were in the back and you cooked. But the Mediterranean – I have always considered that my restaurant; not my dad’s model.”

As the years progressed, the restaurants became even more different, particularly after Raimondo and Leonardo died. “Laudisio’s had this great following, but it wasn’t doing the business the Mediterranean was doing,”

Laudisio says. “So I thought, ‘Do I close it; do I redesign it?’ I was thinking of either running away on a boat or opening a new restaurant.”

About that time, Laudisio’s friend Richard Schaden, chairman of Quiznos, suggested they partner to open a bigger Laudisio’s at the new Twenty Ninth Street retail district in Boulder. Laudisio saw it as an opportunity to do all the things he had ever wanted in a restaurant.

“I felt like Plato coming out of a cave. I had this image I wanted to create, but I had to create a business plan, see how many people thought it was a valid idea,” he says.

Laudisio envisioned a design focused around the kitchen, with a central aisle and a double cooking line. The open kitchen would let restaurant patrons “share the adventure of how the dish comes together,” he says. “A good dish is co-created.” The focal point of the kitchen would be a wood-burning pizza oven, and there would be separate risotto and pasta stations with 40 burners overall.

“I drew it on a napkin and went to Richard’s team and asked if it would work,” he says. With the help of Boulder design firm Communication Arts, Laudisio was able to see his dream kitchen come to life – at a cost of “multimillions of dollars. Never let a chef design a kitchen,” he jokes.

The new “L” Laudisio also has a bar built around a 7,000-bottle, acclimatized wine cellar. The cellar is big enough that “L” Laudisio has been able to reduce its pour costs by 30 percent while still continuing to garner Awards of Excellence from Wine Spectator.

The bar also includes a flat-screen TV that displays a software program of a virtual trip to the Italian wine-drinking regions. “I got the idea when I was ordering on Amazon.com, and it would say, ‘People who ordered this also liked this,'” Laudisio says. “The idea behind the software visits to the vineyard is if you like that wine, these are other wines that meet those criteria.”

Besides being bigger and fancier than the previous Laudisio’s, the new restaurant is much more high-tech – from its computer systems to its bold, modern design. “This isn’t mine or my dad’s restaurant; it’s really my children’s. I wanted to empower them -some people say trap them – into getting involved,” Laudisio says. To that end, he’s stepped down from day-to-day operations, leaving things to his son Tavio, 36, who runs the dining room, and his daughter Lucia, 34, who oversees the business end.

Laudisio still visits the restaurant daily, but he’s turning his attention to yet another concept. “I want a place where I can get a farm egg with truffles, or a house-cured ham,” he says. He’d like to turn the space next to “L” Laudisio into CafÇ L, a breakfast space and bakery with room in the back for parties and events.

Even though “I walk around the Twenty Ninth Street shops at night and they’re empty,” Laudisio is sold on the new location of Laudisio’s. “I go to my restaurant and there’s a half-hour wait. Once the (movie) theater’s open, I think this is going to really be a super successful place,” he says.