Pizza chef's firing no surprise

I wasn't surprised to hear that one of the city's most celebrated young chefs was fired last week at the trendy River Heights restaurant Pizzeria Gusto.

I wasn't surprised because I'd fired him myself one night last November.

He had acted disrespectfully to my wife and me when we gently told him there was a problem with the food. We left that night vowing never to return.

That's why I wasn't surprised Scott Bagshaw was gone. What surprised me, though, is the way he went.

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A "closed" sign had already cost the partners in Pizzerio Gusto tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

And now it's Tuesday and, as restaurant owner Bobby Mottola arrives for work, there's a poison-pen sign pasted over the "closed" sign on the front door.

"Under Bad Management. No Chef, No Staff, No Recipes. That Chef Deserves His Revenge And We Deserve To Go Bankrupt..."

Apparently one of the kitchen staff kept one of the knives. As did chef Bagshaw, whose comments to the Free Press shortly after his departure dripped of what the note suggested.

Revenge.

"They've got nothing. The intellectual property of the recipes, they don't have that either. They've got a menu but they don't have a way to recreate it."

Nevertheless, as I sat at a table in Pizzeria Gusto interviewing Mottola, the restaurant's lawyer had recovered most of the recipes and a pair of new chefs -- including Marcus Pederson, who Fort Garry Hotel managing partner Richard Bel graciously loaned Motolla -- were already working on replicating the menu for reopening Tuesday at dinner.

It turns out I wasn't the only one who had a problem with Bagshaw's attitude, which is why Mottola and his partners were contemplating the chef's departure even before a book appeared in which Bagshaw delivered his own coup de grace.

It wasn't the ill-advised Kitchen Confidential-style comment to a Red River College student/author about a lost weekend of binge-drinking and drug-taking years earlier in Australia that finished Bagshaw at Gusto.

It was a reference to the "perks" of having an open kitchen.

"We play the 'would you' game," Bagshaw laughed, referring to himself and his sous chef. "You know, 'Would you sleep with her?' type of thing."

That was the final insult for Bobby Mottola, his father, Don, and their other partner.

Mottola said that's as far as he originally got in the book, a book Bagshaw wanted the restaurant to sell, if you please.

"I didn't read about the bender in Australia," Mottola said.

Then he made this admission: "If anybody has a checkered past in this building it's me."

Wisely, Motolla left what he meant by his "checkered past" to my imagination.

But that's history now, and he's proud of being 10 months sober -- a process that's made watching his prize chef's seeming self-destructive behaviour all the more painful and frustrating.

"No one wanted Scott Bagshaw to succeed more than us."

Apparently not even Scott Bagshaw.

I called the former Pizzeria Gusto chef late Thursday afternoon.

He was unrepentant about the quote in the book that the Mottolas found so offensive and what he said to the Free Press about the restaurant being left with "nothing" after he had gone. But he was feeling uneasy about a blog on the prestigious British newspaper The Guardian, which sided with the restaurant owners.

Ultimately, I asked him why he acted disrespectfully to my wife and me last year.

What it came down to is Bagshaw felt we had sent his food back too often.

"It had happened on more than one occasion," he said. "Repeatedly," he added.

That was his impression, but it wasn't my, or my wife's, recollection.

Bagshaw elaborated: "When it happens repeatedly you start to feel... you start to feel you're not good enough. I gave up. And that's how I felt on that night. When you get rejected enough I don't know what more you can do."

Later Thursday, I told Motolla about my conversation with his former chef. How in the end he apologized for how he handled my wife and me, and how the conversation with this supremely gifted man had left me feeling both sad and concerned for Scott Bagshaw.

Motolla listened.

Then, Friday night, we talked again.

Motolla said what I told him the day before had affected him, too.

"I kind of felt like texting the guy and saying, 'We'll both get through this. Keep your head up."

Mottola paused briefly, then he said:

"But I've done that so many times before."

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 3, 2010 B1