By Scott Morgan
Christian Pataki found his love when he was a kid, and like so many of us, he found his love was sandwiches. He would one day turn this love into his life’s work and follow his dream internationally. And he would find out the hard way why so very many more people follow their restaurant dreams to the United States instead of South America.
First things first: Pataki, owner of the recently-opened CrisPanino restaurant at 1507 Parkway Avenue, grew up in Ewing, fortunate enough to have a mother, a native Argentinean, who worked in the hospitality industry. Her job exposed the growing epicure to the world of food and her touch with toasty sandwiches gave him the early understanding of how much more sandwiches and small plates could be than they might at first appear.
“My mother worked with Hyatt as a restaurant manager,” Pataki says. “A lot of times she couldn’t find a babysitter, so I spent a lot of time in her office.” At the ripe old age of 7, Pataki became acutely aware of the life of someone who manages restaurants.
At 18, Pataki wanted to be a chef. As (bad) luck would have it, he got hit by a truck on the Sullivan Way. “I got a settlement and thought I was the richest kid in the world,” he says. He had $30,000 in his pocket, a go-nowhere job in the food industry, and a whole suitcase full of that youthful, late-90s-style bravado that believed going to a foreign country to start your life as a whiz-bang culinary prodigy is going to work out fantastically.
To be fair, things did start out pretty well. He’d been to Argentina to visit family a few times already, so he was familiar with the place. He found work and he met a girl.
Her name was Leonela, whom he met after briefly dating Leonela’s sister. They eventually married, although it did take him a while to convince her he was cool — flowers and poetry really work on pretty girls from Argentina, Pataki points out.
But, as things have a tendency to do, the shimmer of life in Argentina wore off a shade, and the newly married Patakis moved to the United States in 2000. Now 20 years old, Pataki became the general manager of the Peacock Inn in Princeton and then held a few other restaurant jobs in the area. But he wasn’t happy. He wanted to run his own kitchen and that wasn’t happening here. And the Great Recession was suffocating every industry in the country. The logical decision? Go back to Argentina.
So in 2009, Pataki and Leonela went back, with the faith that the American dollar’s strength would make them super-wealthy in Argentine pesos, and the belief that this lone economic factor would be all they’d have to contend with. He would open CrisPanino, a restaurant that served hot sandwiches, i.e., panini, and tapas, in Buenos Aires. “We figured if it blew up, we’d still be fine,” he says.
The universe, of course, thought that was hilarious. “Everything that could go wrong in my personal life went wrong,” Pataki says. While he was back in the States, he got a call from Argentina that his 4-year-old daughter had contracted E-coli poisoning and was near death. “I literally fell to the ground,” he says. A year-long special diet straightened her out and she’s fine today.
Pataki and his new family also had to cope with what can only be described as the insanity of doing business in Buenos Aires. The restaurant did fine he says — so well that he was able to open a second location, and the business model worked. In fact it was still working when a bus crashed through his restaurant’s wall and, Dark Knight-style, just backed out and drove away. The police offered shrugged shoulders and little else.
There was the healthcare system that didn’t get high marks. There was the education system that needed a ladder to get to the healthcare system’s marks. There were the supermarkets where one cashier worked on a Saturday afternoon (despite that the stores had 10 registers), and not because the store was broke, Pataki says, but because the store owners knew that people had to shop and would wait in line because they had no other options, so why waste a good salary on more workers?
There was the 9 a.m. gunpoint robbery of his restaurant and the ensuing lack of police help to catch the guy who did it. “They told me, ‘We know who it is and we don’t go into his neighborhood,’” Pataki says.
There was the time the gas company removed his gas meter, because why not? He had to shut down a week to get that straightened out.
Then Pataki met the guy from the ‘union,” which is in quotation marks because, yeah, that word doesn’t quite mean the same thing to you as it did to the local representative. Unwillingness to join the union and bask in its protective graces was frowned upon, despite that Pataki had no interest in being a member.
The accumulation of bad luck was getting to him and Leonela. It might have been salvageable, however, if it wasn’t for the guy who got shot dead on the doorstep of his home in the middle of the night. At this point, Pataki says, he and Leonela did “some critical thinking.” Their conclusion: “This is maybe not the best place to be when you have U.S. citizenship.”
In 2011 the Patakis moved back into their Ewing home, which, to his relief and surprise, didn’t sell while they were in Argentina. They knew they’d have to start from scratch, he says, but at least there was no readjustment period. “It was like we just woke up the next morning. Like the whole Argentina thing was just a nightmare.” He even found a former boss on Facebook who gave him his old job back. “It really was like we never left,” he says.
Pataki still wanted that restaurant, though. He just couldn’t shake the high of having run his own business, despite the gunfire and union dues. He loved being the boss. Loved creating the food, the mood, the ideals of his restaurant around his own personality.
The reason he veered toward the panini and tapas idea is simple. “When I go to a restaurant, I’m very indecisive,” Pataki says. He wants to try everything. So a restaurant of small plates, built to share and sample, is his idea of heaven.
Besides this, Leonela wasn’t very well-prepared for work in the United States. And if they were going to make their own way, well, they were going to make it doing what worked in Argentina. Only they’d have more guarantees of better working conditions, better regulations that ensure public health, and better ingredients (which, Pataki says, are scarcer and more limited than in the United States).
In August, Pataki opened CrisPanino in Ewing as a family affair. Leonela helps with operations, his mother helps out up front, and his father, who’s a whiz with woodworking, constructed much of the seating and customer areas himself.
The name, by the way, is a portmanteau of “crispy panino,” and the word “panino,” for those who don’t speak Italian, is the singular form of the Italian word for sandwich. Pataki considers himself gleefully obsessed with perfecting the blends that make a perfect sandwich experience — the heated breads, the spices, the aromas, the ingredients, the textures. He’s also a fanatic for tapas — which, for those of you who might not know this, are not a singular dish, like tacos. Tapas are small plates of Spanish origin. Spaniards eat dinner very late, Pataki explains. Tapas are small late-afternoon or evening meals to help carry them until dinner.
So tapas themselves can be anything, and CrisPanino has all kinds of culinary concoctions, from chorizo-sautéed shrimp to Chinese potstickers.
The food and vibe has caught on immediately, and CrisPanino already has customers who come in for breakfast, lunch, and dinner on the same day. One of those customers is Ewing resident Ray Bancroft, who, much to Pataki’s delight, has taken it upon himself to be CrisPanino’s loudest cheerleader.
“I tell everybody about this place,” Bancroft says. “I keep saying, you really gotta try it, it’s unbelievable.’”
Bancroft’s favorite is the Cubano sandwich, but he also recommends… well, actually, he recommends everything. Bancroft found the place while out with a friend. He figured, being adventurous, that he’d have to try this new place the next day. He went for lunch and loved it so much he went back for dinner that same day. He describes the vibe as “like being in somebody’s living room.”
He has only one problem with CrisPanino. “The menu is so high you get a stiff neck looking at it,” he laughs.
For Pataki, the restaurant and the immediate word of mouth its generating are godsends. He works from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. and loves every minute of it, and, so far, things in Ewing have been a tad less dramatic than they were in Buenos Aires.
He’s also happily raising two healthy daughters, one born in Argentina and one born in New Jersey. The thought has struck him and Leonela that only one of his daughters could be president. But then he realizes something: “One could be the president of the United States and one could be the president of Argentina,” he says.
And if she is, he hopes she fixes the supermarket and bank lines while she’s in office there.
CrisPanino, 1507 Parkway Avenue. Phone: (609)-771-1414. On the web: crispanino.com
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