Piero Selvaggio and the house that wine built: Valentino's grew as its owner's wine sensibility did. Now, the Santa Monica fixture is one of America's best-known Italian restaurants

Cheers, Jan-Feb, 2002 by Sharon Boorstin

When Piero Selvaggio opened his own restaurant in 1972, the only thing he knew about wine was "red" and "white." Yet today, the 165-page wine list at Valentino, the flagship of Selvaggio's mini-restaurant empire, is considered among the best--many say it is the best--in the United States. Who would have thought?

Ask Selvaggio, and the charming Sicilian will shrug his shoulders and blame it on passion. It's a passion that has motivated him to read practically everything ever written about wine and to continually explore new wine regions and labels. He admits it has also made it impossible for him to keep the number of bottles in his wine cellar to under 200,000. Selvaggio's passion for wine has further inspired him to preach the gospel of wine and food pairing. Sit down to lunch with him in his subtly elegant restaurant, and Selvaggio will regale you with such poetic mantras as "Pasta and Chianti do a beautiful dance in the mouth."

His attention to detail is one of the reasons Valentino won the 2001 Cheers Award for Beverage Excellence for best independent restaurant wine program. And he not only has acquired an enormous collection of great wines, he likes others to try them. Unlike many Italian restaurateurs, Selvaggio is more interested in encouraging his customers to try new wines than in making a killing with high wine prices. "Anything that costs me less than $10, I sell for around $25, around two and a half times the wholesale price," he explains. "If the wine costs me more than $50, I sell it for $100, which is only twice the wholesale price."

On Valentino's lengthy wine list, the prices start at $21 a bottle and go up--way up. The check average at Valentino breaks out as 65% for food, 27% for wine, 5% liquor and the rest for beer. About 80% of the alcohol served at Valentino is wine.

"Guests come to Valentino knowing that they will find jewels that they can't find elsewhere, and that they'll get great wine service," explains Selvaggio, "so they're prepared to spend more on wine. They know that Valentino is the house that wine built."

Out of the Way Wonder

Located in an unfashionable neighborhood of Santa Monica, the 30 year-old Valentino has defied all the rules of restaurant longevity in this trend-happy part of the world. In fact, Selvaggio is proud to have played a major role in the development of L.A. as a serious restaurant town. It is a history, he explains, that parallels the growth in production and popularity of California wines.

"When we opened in the early seventies," he explains, "Good California wines were as few and far between as good Southern California restaurants."

Valentino's first wine list was what Selvaggio describes as the "usual two-pager" chosen by the local wine salesman. "I can remember the list by heart," he says, rattling off labels that are a blast from the past: Asti Spumanti, Blue Nun, Lancer's, Matteus, Wente Brothers Grey Riesling, Chianti in a raffia-wrapped flask, Paul Masson Claret and a Louis Martini Cabernet. Selvaggio admits that his early purchasing style was mediocre at best. He bought canned food instead of fresh, and whatever wines were on sale by the case. "We were on a shoestring," he recalls. "It was a miracle we had a wine list at all."

Soon after the restaurant opened, Selvaggio had a rude awakening when a good customer asked to speak to him at the end of dinner. "'Piero,' he said to me," recounts Selvaggio, "'I'm eating well at Valentino, but I'm drinking horribly. You've got to do something about your wine list!'"

Selvaggio, who moved to Los Angeles from Sicily when he was only 18, and worked his way through college by bussing tables at the L.A. institution, Chasen's, decided to get serious about wine before it was too late. His first step was to travel to Napa Valley and familiarize himself with the wines and winemakers at such small producers as Heitz Cellers, Spring Mountain and Mayacamas, pioneers among California's boutique wineries. "At first, I didn't know how to taste wine" Selvaggio admits. "I figured out how to bluff a little until I got comfortable. Once I began to understand wines, though, discovering and tasting became very exciting."

A few years later, after his chef and partner, Gianni Paoletti, left to open his own restaurant, Selvaggio went to Italy in search of a new chef. It was a turning point in his career. "At the best restaurants in Milan, I discovered how much I didn't know," he recalls. "I was awed by well-constructed, beautifully presented dishes made with fresh ingredients. It was the first time I tasted fresh porcini and truffles-and great Italian wines. I was 29, and I vowed that someday my restaurant in L.A. would be as great as those in Italy."

In the 1980s, Selvaggio became the first L.A. restaurateur to import such made-in-Italy products as extra-virgin olive oil, aged balsamic vinegar and fresh raddichio. "I remember how hard it was to get fresh bufala mozzarella," he recalls. "Today, they make it in the U.S., but in those days, I had to fly it in, and by the time it arrived, the cheese was already starting to go sour." Selvaggio also began importing great Italian wines.