A Taste of New York

It’s a chilly morning in Manhattan, and I’m late to meet Michael Imperioli at Viand Cafe, an old-school Upper West Side coffee shop. I know him a bit, as we’ve played some shows together and chatted occasionally online, but we’ve never really had any kind of conversation at length. As I walk in, I spot him out of the corner of my eye, inconspicuous and yet so at home inside this classic diner. It feels like I’m looking at a photograph. 

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As I slip into the worn booth seats, out of breath, I’m reminded why he’s such a well-loved New York City icon and staple of the city’s film, music, and—now—nightlife scene. He orders a grapefruit, and I have white toast. We discuss his new bar Scarlet, his band Zopa, and, of course, his career working in front of and behind the screen. But first, Michael Imperioli—who loves cooking meals for his family and friends at his home—tells me about his personal recipe for vegetarian meatballs, a variation of his grandmother’s classic meal.

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Julia Cumming: So the first thing that I need to do is to ask you about your meatball recipe. 

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Michael Imperioli: All right, so I made it yesterday. I used two packs of impossible meat, two eggs lightly beaten together, about a cup and a half or two cups of grated cheese, either Parmigiano-Reggiano or Pecorino Romano, or a combination of both. Maybe half a cup to three quarters cup of breadcrumbs. A handful of chopped parsley, three to four cloves of minced garlic, a little bit of salt, black pepper, dry oregano, and some garlic powder. Combine all the ingredients. Don't work them too much. Just combine it till it's done, and then you make the meatballs. Preheat the oven to 350 and bake. It should be about 24 if you make them small. Put them in the oven for like 20, maybe 25, minutes depending on how your oven temp is. 

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Then I make homemade marinara sauce with a 28-ounce can of peeled San Marzano tomatoes, and put them in a food mill. Then a couple of cloves of garlic sautéed in oil. If you've got some basil, you could throw the stems in and sauté with the garlic and oil. When the garlic starts to get a little golden, you take the stems out, put the tomatoes in, add salt, pepper, a little oregano, and cook it up. Towards the end, you put a little spoonful of butter and a pinch of sugar. 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and then I usually wait till the meatballs have cooled before I combine them with the sauce. If you want to put them with pasta, you can make spaghetti and meatballs.

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JC: They sound amazing.

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MI: There is a difference in texture, but I'm using the recipe that I used to make regular meatballs with. 

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JC: Where do you like to eat now in New York?

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MI: I like Superiority Burger. It's great.

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JC: Can we go? Because me and my partner are regulars. He has to be a regular everywhere, and it is very expensive to be a regular at Superiority Burger. It's making an extreme dent in the bank account. But the joy that comes from being there and getting a martini… and also he's vegan so there's not many places we can eat together.

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MI: It's delicious. I also like Hop Kee on Mott Street and Da Nico in Little Italy; it's kind of the last Italian spot on Mulberry Street that's any good. Forlini's was a really good place, too. I like Jody Williams’ restaurants Via Carota and Buvette. She's an old friend. Actually my brother used to work with her. Before she opened her own places, she was a chef, and she still serves my grandmother's meatball recipe that my brother gave to her.

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JC: So if you're ever feeling homesick, you can just visit. 

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MI: From when I was three to 12, we lived in the house that my mother grew up in; we lived on the second floor, and my grandparents lived on the first floor, and every Sunday was my grandmother’s meatballs with pasta and tomato sauce. It was never better than that.

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JC:. Let's talk about your new bar, Scarlet. What has brought you to do this now in this moment in your life in New York? 

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MI: I worked in the restaurant business from when I was 17 until I was 26. I did everything: I was a line cook, a prep cook, busboy, waiter, bartender, food runner. When I met Victoria [Imperioli, his wife] in ‘96, she had just opened a bar in Chelsea. We started running it together. My brother and my best friend started working there. We had that for 10 years, and then in the last couple years, we opened the theater [Studio Dante] and ran both. The theater had a little bar with really good off-Broadway plays. Then we moved back to this neighborhood after we befriended a guy who owns a couple of restaurants in the area, and there was a storefront open next to him. He had seen some of Victoria's work, particularly from the Architectural Digest tour of the house. You know the Wiltern in Los Angeles? She renovated all the backstage areas and restored its Art Deco details.

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JC: We played there last year; it was amazing.

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MI: You must have been in those dressing rooms, that was her. She has a lot of experience with that time period. So they started talking, and soon she was building the bar. I was like, Well, let's put our heads together and come up with the story behind it. I think it is really gonna turn into a mostly neighborhood bar. 

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JC: What do you drink at Scarlet?

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MI: I drink alcohol very, very rarely. They have these Belgian non-alcoholic beers that I really like that I haven't seen anywhere else. They also have really good mocktails. Years ago, non-alcoholic beers were horrible, but now they're tasty And with vegetarian food options, too. I was a vegetarian for a long time—even when I was a teenager in New York City in the '80s—for a long time it was very difficult. Forget about if you left the city. LA was okay, but everywhere else was very hard.

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JC: We've never talked about your relationship to music in the '80s and potentially seeing my parents' band Bite the Wax Godhead…

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MI: Yeah, I saw your parents' band in the mid ‘80s. We both played at the same venue. The first band I was in had only played one show and it was at McGovern's, where Bite the Wax Godhead played often. I learned guitar playing in that band. And there was no singer; it was kind of a No Wave influenced band. I was just making sounds, playing what I thought sounded cool. We never recorded any records, but we made some demos and played that one show at McGovern’s. To be in your teens and ‘20s at that time, everything was very accessible. It was easy to find these venues and hang and meet people. It felt like the world was a lot smaller then. There was no social media, so you had to seek these things out yourself.

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JC: You had to be there.

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MI: You had to be there. 

JC: That's what I miss about the SideWalk Cafe, where I got my start doing open mics on Monday night when I was young. Now it’s a sports bar called Offside, with beer pong in the back. I have a fantasy that if I ever make it in a meaningful way, I want to buy it back and restore it to its scumbaggery.

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MI: Yeah, scumbaggery but also a fertile ground for people to experiment and express themselves. I mean, that's what spots like McGovern's and CBGB were, too.

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JC: Extremely fertile. When I think about a time with no social media, everyone was welcome as long as you kept showing up. That's the only requirement. Maybe you're a punisher. Maybe you're weird. Maybe you're a reject. Maybe you're lost. But if you just keep going, eventually you'll be accepted, and you'll have a place. That's still what New York and being an artist is about. I used to think that as long as you had a house or had an apartment, you were doing great. 

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MI: I kind of still think that way honestly. There was a certain feeling, then, of possibilities. Anything could happen, and it was very exciting. But I really feel in the last five years that there's been a resurgence. With new music now—and especially alternative rock or punk or whatever you want to call it—there's a vitality that I haven't seen in a while, and it's very exciting.

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JC: I totally agree. With my band Sunflower Bean, for a long time it felt—and very unpleasantly—that we were on an island. Now, there is a sort of post-pandemic boom of venues and people who are willing to invest their time and do the groundwork. That's also how I felt when I saw Zopa [Imperioli's band] once just before we met at Baby's All Right. Once you started playing tons of shows with Zopa, it brought you to the forefront of the music scene. But I know that you've had the band for a long time.

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MI: We did a couple shows in LA in 2013 when I was living in California, and then I wasn't in New York enough for us to play. So we didn't play at all. We did record our first album in 2012 but didn't release it. Then in 2019 I got a sublet here, and a book that I wrote came out, this novel The Perfume Burned His Eyes, and I was doing live readings about Lou [Reed]. I read from the book at different venues in LA, some of which were on Lydia Lunch's Verbal Burlesque tour. It was really fun, and then I moved back.

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JC: What happened during the pandemic?

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MI: I got on social media for the first time and connected to a lot of music people. Around the same time, one of us found someone to put our record out. When things opened up and I was back in New York, I already had a new bunch of musicians I wanted to do shows with. We hit the ground running. Even so, Zopa's first show was in 2006, six or seven years before the hiatus, and it was not easy to get people to come. Even during the time I was on The Sopranos and after—even if you're known as an actor or whatever celebrity—it was not easy to get people to go to shows. We were playing shows like Mercury Lounge, Cake Shop, and Knitting Factory. We did Arlene's, that's still there. Cake Shop was a fun venue. I saw some good shows there too. I saw Bush Tetras; I saw A Place to Bury Strangers.

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JC: I played a few of my first shows there, until they became very strict about being under 21. That was when I was 13, so all of a sudden all the shows I had to book were on Saturday afternoons, and everyone had to pay 14 dollars to get sodas. What was the decision to finally get on social media?

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MI: You know, I was doing The White Lotus, and they had a social media person on staff, and I talked to her about it. When we moved back to New York, I thought, What am I gonna do on a regular basis? And I thought, I'm just going to use social media to promote people that inspire me, other artists, musicians, actors, writers, poets, painters—and Buddhism. Then I made a post about My Bloody Valentine, and it got a lot of attention; and through that I started connecting to more and more music people, musicians, music fans, and venues.

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JC: What’s next for Zopa?

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MI: We have an album that's done. We put out the first album and this EP that we recorded in 2008 this year.

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JC: I want to hear it. Do you feel the same way about your first album as when you were recording it nine years ago?

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MI: Well the truth is, when we recorded we didn't really know how to put it out. The cool thing was when it finally did come on and people started listening to it, it sounded like we just made it. Genre-wise, it sounded kind of fresh. When we started playing together again, our sound changed quite a bit and went from New York post-punk into a little bit more shoegaze, a little more psychedelic, a little different town, which has been really fun.

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JC: We should do a recording exchange. I’ll send you what I’ve been working on, and you can send me the album.

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‍MI: Yes, let’s do it. I really love it. I'm really, really happy with it.

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Photo assistant REBECCA STEIGHNER.
Fashion assistant SEAN KEITH JOHNSON.