March 24 (Bloomberg) -- Pino Luongo remembers the evening the news about Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme first broke last December.

“I was in the dining room talking to my customers when one of them received a phone call about it,” says the chef-owner of Centolire, an Italian restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where we’re having lunch.

“He turned very serious,” says Luongo of his client. “At the same time I heard similar phone conversations at four or five different tables at the restaurant. Some of them got up and left, and I haven’t seen them since.”

Luongo, 55, has been hosting New York’s rich and famous at his restaurants since the early ‘80s: He opened Il Cantinori in 1983 when he was 30 years old, and Sapore di Mare in East Hampton when he was 34. He put up Le Madri in Chelsea, Coco Pazzo and Il Toscanaccio on the Upper East Side, ventured into retail with Tuscan Square at Rockefeller Center and overextended himself as he took on the development of an ambitious chain of 14 restaurants around the U.S., only to watch helplessly as his empire came crashing down around him. Today he’s left with just one restaurant, Centolire.

“Slowly but surely, I had become a junkie,” Luongo writes about the peaks and valleys of his business in his memoir, “Dirty Dishes: A Restaurateur’s Story of Passion, Pain, and Pasta” (Bloomsbury USA, $25), which he co-wrote with Andrew Friedman. “I was addicted to business deals, to expansion and perhaps even to co-dependent relationships and drama.”

American Nightmare

“Writing the book was my catharsis, my way of distancing myself, moving on,” Luongo says, as we dine on cannelloni and panini at his sunny, yellow-walled Centolire, where he recently launched a casual cafe menu with items below $10.

“I was young, I was successful. Greed is something that was exposed, arrogance. Sometimes, when you’ve been so successful, you feel like you’re invincible. And then reality kicks in and you find out you’re not prepared.”

Luongo calls his life story that of the “American dream and nightmare.” Seeking to avoid military service in Italy, he gave up an acting career in Rome and fled to a new life in Queens, New York, in 1980. He spoke no English.

Hardworking and passionate, Luongo found a job as a busboy at Da Silvano in downtown Manhattan.

“I was constantly surrounded by people who were eating, drinking and laughing, and I had no way of participating,” Luongo writes in his book about his frustration with his language barrier. “In order to survive, I also began calling even more on my theater training...I was playing the part of The Busboy. The dining room became the stage, the kitchen became the backstage and the patrons became the audience.”

Star Clientele

As time went by, his English improved, and Luongo was promoted to manager, mingling with the restaurant’s celebrity clients such as Robert De Niro, John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands.

A falling out with the owners led to a short stint at another Italian eatery, till he eventually opened Il Cantinori, a Tuscan farmhouse-style restaurant, which drew its own star clientele, among them, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Richards, Tom Cruise and Richard Gere.

“The kitchen became my way of expressing myself,” Luongo says. “Food became my form of communicating. Making food, welcoming my customers to my dining room, it’s a theater experience.”

His next venture, Sapore di Mare, in the Hamptons on Long Island, New York, drew diners such as Ralph Lauren, Billy Joel, Julian Schnabel, Donna Karan and David Bowie.

Perfect Host

“My desire to be the most gracious host was my number one priority,” says Luongo. “I’ve always viewed all my customers as celebrities. The ones I celebrate the most are the ones who visit me twice a week.”

While Luongo was known as the perfect host in the front of the house, it was a different story behind the scenes.

Best-selling author Anthony Bourdain, who wrote the foreword to Luongo’s book, briefly worked as executive chef at Luongo’s Coco Pazzo Teatro in Manhattan’s Theater District. In his book, “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly” (Bloomsbury, 2000), Bourdain called Luongo “New York’s Prince of Restaurant Darkness” and referred to his own tenure with Luongo as perhaps “the most illuminating, if exhausting” high-pressure learning experience in his restaurant career. Bourdain said Luongo was a “man envied, feared, despised, emulated and admired by many who have worked for and with him.”

Short Fuse

But Luongo says he is a “good motivator” and says many employees have been with him for years.

“I just have a problem with laziness,” he says. “Back in the day I was working 12, 13 hours a day. Eventually you get a short fuse because you keep working and working and you see kids screwing up, and you say, ‘Get the hell out of here.’”

And in spite of everything he’s gone through in the restaurant business, Luongo is again looking to expand.

“The opportunities are there. I tell you, I can smell them. I have the energy, I got the itch, I want to do something else,” he says. “I love to create things, start things from scratch.”

But he’s more cautious this time.

“I’m going to be more careful, more conservative,” he says. “I’m not a junkie anymore. I’m a rehabilitated restaurateur.”

(Yvette Ferreol is a writer for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer on the story: Yvette Ferreol in New York at yferreol@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: March 24, 2009 15:53 EDT