I‘ll admit it: I’m an aspiring actor and writer. I work hard at what I do, and I’d love to be able to believe that the industry is a meritocracy that will eventually reward my efforts. But unfortunately, the young people who find success these days are almost all Beppo babies—people who grew up dining at Buca Di Beppo, the family-style Italian chain restaurant that’s a subsidiary of Planet Hollywood.
In a just world, people with talent would all naturally get discovered, regardless of whether or not they spent their youth eating at one of the over fifty nationwide locations of Buca Di Beppo. In reality, though, that’s just not how things work. Opportunity is not distributed equally, and disproportionately, Beppo babies (people whose childhood diets consisted largely of classic red sauce dishes from Buca Di Beppo) are the ones rising to the top.
It breaks my heart every time. I see some intriguing new actor starring in a television show, then look them up on Wikipedia, and bam, there it is: the dreaded blue hyperlink in the “Early Life” section. The hyperlink is, of course, highlighting the restaurant where they regularly slurped down heaping helpings of Italian staples like eggplant parmigiana or spicy chicken rigatoni, and the article it takes you to is the one for Buca Di Beppo.
Some people don’t seem to understand how being a Beppo baby is such a big advantage in the industry. Well, let me break it down for you. If you don’t have to wonder where your next meal is coming from, you have more freedom to daydream, to experiment, and ultimately to pursue a career path that often takes years to turn a profit. To be clear, the reason you wouldn’t have to wonder where your next meal is coming from is because you’d know it was obviously coming from Buca Di Beppo, because that’s where you’re eating all of your meals. Conversely, kids who grow up having to help choose where to order dinner from, or what to cook if they’re eating at home, are making that decision with valuable mental energy that they’re subsequently unable to use writing pilots.
It’s not that it doesn’t make sense for Beppo babies to pursue the arts. The coherent design concept, kitschy though it may be, gets kids thinking about aesthetics and narrative early on in their development. And the family-style serving setup encourages a mindset of collaboration, which is key in most creative disciplines. But I’d love to see art made by people who grew up eating their pasta at Olive Garden and Noodles & Company too. A diversity of viewpoints makes art more interesting! Someone whose experience of eating lasagna is spinach-forward isn’t approaching their work with the same perspective as someone who’s only ever known Buca Di Beppo’s meat-based recipe. They think in a different way, and they’re going to tell different kinds of stories. That’s worth protecting.
And it’s extra frustrating when Beppo babies try to deny that they had any advantages as a result of their upbringing. You’ll hear people qualify it, saying that while they may have eaten at Buca Di Beppo as a kid, they never got the chance to sit in The Pope’s Room, the Catholicism-themed private dining room that’s a hallmark of every location. Or maybe they’ll point out they only ate at Buca Di Beppo for special occasions like their birthday, when their membership in the Buca eClub got them an annual $20 discount. This misses the point. They’re still in most of the same spaces, meeting most of the same people, and eating most of the same Italian-American comfort food.
At the end of the day, this isn’t necessarily Beppo babies’ fault—we just need more government funding for the arts. As the cost of living continues to rise and media companies continue to find ways to avoid paying artists fairly for their work, breaking into the industry is only going to get even more difficult for anyone whose belly isn’t full from a lifetime of eating huge portions of pasta, pizza, and chocolate chip cannoli. In the meantime, though, Beppo babies could stand to do more to uplift the work of people who don’t share their privileged background. You’ve got a platform, why not use it to help others? After all, those dishes are designed to be split between three to five people.
