Polenta Man is an endangered species. The problem, says Northrup, is that when she added him to her Tuscan landscape, she didn't realize there was "some tension," as she puts it, between the chef and his landlord, Michael Yelson, who talks of owning "a star of a property."
The tension goes back a bit, to when Yelson's father-in-law was alive and owned the building. Lawrence Levin, Vetri says, would ask him, "Why'd you put your name on the business?"
The naming-rights contest has continued, most recently when Vetri paid to renovate the entrance to the building in stone and deep blues, then bristled when his landlord slapped a Yelson Group sign at eye level.
"Someone slips and falls," Michael Yelson said, "they know who to call."
Art or commerce?
Yelson was in Florida tending to his other business last month when he learned that Philadelphia magazine had, as he put it, "written about my building." Yelson pitches his spray wax for cars on QVC, a product known as Final Detail - "the biggest seller for the past 10 years," says the tanned bantam, whose yellow-accented specs highlight the blond in his feathered hair.
Yelson conferred with his wife about Vetri's image and concluded, "I think it's a very lame attempt for him to advertise his restaurant."
So the official letters started. Yelson suggested in an April 28 missive that Vetri take out a $5,000-a-month billboard on Broad Street.
Another solution Yelson proposed was to make "some sort of monetary compensation" to his real estate corporation to keep the Polenta Man on the wall.
This stirred Barbara Vetri into the mix. She's the chef's mother, who is a lawyer. "Every time she does something, it costs me money," Yelson grouses.
Barbara Vetri seized on the "monetary compensation" line. "Finally your true motives for objecting to the Mural have been revealed . . .," she wrote May 4. "The greed is so fundamentally revolting."
