Kitchen Confidential (10 page)

. you figure you don't need the money.' And he was always heroically willing to cut off his nose to spite his face. Who cares if he needed that fish delivery? If it arrived five minutes late, Bigfoot waited until the driver unloaded it-then he sent it back. I saw him do this with gigantic, multi-ton dry-goods orders that were a bit late. And let me tell you, now I often do the same thing. Make the driver unload, then reload an entire order of canned goods, 35-pound flour sacks, peanut oils, juices, tomato paste and bulk sugar, and I can assure you-your stuff will start arriving on time. Fish not what you wanted? Let the driver go, then call them up and make them send a second truck to pick it up. You say there's twenty servings of product in every box? There had better be, because Bigfoot's gonna weigh it, count it, and record it every time.

Bigfoot's entire office, the last time I worked with him, was a vault with an actual foot-thick titanium steel door, interior bars, set into brick. From there he'd pore over invoices, plan his next moves, torment his purveyors, and send and receive emanations to and from the floor and kitchen. He didn't have to be on the floor all the time. The people who worked for Bigfoot were sure that he could sense what was going on. Think an evil thought, and he'd suddenly be there. Drop a tray and Bigfoot appears. Running low on soup? Bigfoot somehow feels it, as if the entire restaurant were simply an extension of his central nervous system.

A lot of his time was spent figuring out ways to make the restaurant run more efficiently, more smoothly, faster and cheaper. And one of the earmarks of a Bigfoot operation is the tiny design features: the conveniently located hot-water hose for bartenders to melt down their ice easily at the end of the night (into convenient drains, of course), the cute little plastic handles on any electrical plug near any station where the workers' hands might be wet. And everything is always easy to clean and easy to store. Pots hang from overhead racks, always in the same place. Bottles at the bar are arranged in mirror image, radiating out from a central cash register. Careful consideration is taken with every tiny detail, from where employees store their shoes to custom-cut inserts for the steam table.

I can still walk into a West Village bar and tell immediately if the bar manager is a graduate of Bigfoot University. The bottles are arranged in the classic pattern, free (but spicy/salty) bar snacks are laid out, equidistant from one another, along a flawlessly clean, wiped and polished bar. Ashtrays are always empty. And more than likely, the juices are freshly squeezed. Bigfoot's Presidential Guard-in addition to their cleaning and tunneling duties-also squeezed cases of grapefruit, orange and lemon juice every night, keeping them in appropriate storage containers (glass only), as approved by Bigfoot.

Bigfoot's bar customers had every reason to love him. There was a house-approved buy-back policy. Bartenders were chosen for their personalities as well as their ability. A television was always readily at hand, football pool a must, and Bigfoot made regular visits to the bar, handing out box seats to Knicks,

Yankees, Giants, Jets, Mets and Rangers to favored customers. On Super Bowl Sunday, if you'd plunked down a C-note for the Super Bowl pool, drinks were free, and food was brought in from the Second Avenue deli-a kosher smorgasbord replenished throughout the game.

As one might imagine, living under the thumb of such a micro-managing control freak could be tough. Most downtime among employees was spent talking about-you guessed it-Bigfoot. Stories swapped, theories floated, gripes exchanged. But Bigfoot knew. He had a near-supernatural sense of exactly when, at what precise moment, one of his employees had had enough. He could tell when the bullying, the relentless sarcasm, the constant, all-encompassing vigilance had become too exhausting. When one of his people was fed up with staying awake at night anticipating his likes and dislikes, was sick of charting his mood swings, was tired of feeling demeaned and beaten down after being asked, for instance, to clean out the grease trap, was ready to burst into tears and quit, then suddenly Bigfoot would appear with courtside seats for a play-off game, a restaurant warm-up jacket (given out only to Most Honored Veterans), or a present for the wife or girlfriend-something thoughtful like a Movado watch. He always waited until the last possible second, when you were ready to shave your head, climb a tower and start gunning down strangers, when you were ready to strip off your clothes and run barking into the street, to scream to the world that you'd never never never again work for that manipulative, Machiavellian psychopath. And he'd get you back on the team, often with a gesture as simple and inexpensive as a baseball cap or a T-shirt. The timing was what did it, that he knew. He knew just when to apply that well-timed pat on the back, the strangled and difficult-for-him 'Thank you for your good work' appreciation of your labors. And there was also the knowledge that Bigfoot could help you if you asked. Need an apartment? He could help. A dental emergency? No problem. Lawyer? He could hook you up with the best. Need a nice ride to the beach? Maybe Bigfoot could lend you his Corvette, which he never drove. Or his vintage Caddy ragtop, which he never drove either.

But his greatest gift was the Bigfoot System, which I use still. My inventory sheets, for example, are set up like the master's: in clockwise, geographical order. Instead of hopping back and forth, counting and weighing vegetables alphabetically-or by type, like most sheets-I have my sheets laid out the way the food is laid out, allowing me to pass through my inventory in a comfortable, one-directional order, ticking off items. I know if an order has been called in, and if a particular item was, in fact, ordered-the telltale Bigfoot-Style notations appear. Nothing is left to chance. I can tell a Bigfoot restaurant from the street: the waiters are in comfortable clothes-100 percent cotton oxfords or same-colored T-shirts, blue jeans or khakis, road-tested aprons for their order books, and multiple pens (God help you if you don't have a pen in Bigfootland); the cooks are in restaurant-owned and washed whites, the porters in telltale blue coveralls. The phone is always answered in the same way, whoever picks up. All pots and pans are scrubbed down to bare metal; I remember some in my time exploding in the dishwasher from metal fatigue, having been scraped down one time too many. (No problem, Bigfoot will call the company and demand a free replacement! He remembers that lifetime guarantee.)

The most important and lasting lessons I learned from Bigfoot were about personnel and personnel management-that I have to know everything, that I should never be surprised. He taught me the value of a good, solid and independently reporting intelligence network, providing regular and confirmable reports that can be verified and cross-checked with other sources. I need to know, you see. Not just what's happening in my kitchen, but across the street as well. Is my saucier unhappy? Is the chef across the street ready to make a pass, maybe take him away from me at an inopportune moment? I need to know! Is the saucier across the street unhappy? Maybe he's available. I need to know that, too. Is the cute waitress who works Saturday nights screwing my broiler man? Maybe they've got a scam running: food going out without dupes! I have to know everything, you see. What might happen, what could happen, what will happen. And I have to be prepared for it, whatever it is. Staff problems, delivery problems, technical difficulties with equipment, I have to anticipate and be ready, always with something up my sleeve, somebody in the pipeline. My penetration agent in the competition's kitchen is getting hinkey about ratting out his chef? I need another agent in development. Just in case. Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance, as they say in the army-and I always, always want to be ready. Just like Bigfoot.

I MAKE MY BONES FRESH OUT OF CIA, I returned to the city for good. I actually knew a few things by now. During the two-year culinary program, I'd been commuting to a weekend job at a busy West Village saloon where I'd toiled away in a smoky, cockpit-sized kitchen, knocking out brunches and dinners. There had been two summers in Provincetown, which meant I was no longer completely useless on the line. In fact, when the chips were down, and the window was filling up with dupes, I could actually keep my mouth shut and sling food. I had moves. My hands were getting nice and ugly, just like I'd wanted, and I was eager to rise in the world.

On the strength of my diploma-and my willingness to work for peanuts-I landed a job almost right away at the venerable New York institution, the Rainbow Room, high atop Rockefeller Center. It was my first experience of the real Big Time, one of the biggest, busiest and best-known restaurants in the country. I was willing to do anything to prove myself, and when I got in that elevator to the sixty-fourth floor kitchen for the first time I felt as if I was blasting off to the moon.

The Rainbow Room at that time sat a little over 200. The Rainbow Grill sat about another 150. Add to that two lounges where food was available, and an entire floor of banquet rooms-all of it serviced simultaneously by a single, central a la carte kitchen-and you had some major league volume, as well as some major league cooks to go along with it.

The crew at the Room was a rough bunch, a motley assortment of Puerto Ricans, Italians, Dominicans, Swiss, Americans and a Basque or two. They were mostly older guys who'd worked in the hangar-sized kitchen forever, their jobs secured by a union whose only discernible benefits were guaranteed job security and an assured mediocrity of cuisine. These were some hard-case, full-grown, eight-cylinder bastards, none of whom cared about anything outside of their station; the Room management worked them like rented mules.

A long hot line of glowing flat-tops ran along one wall, flames actually roaring back up into a fire wall behind them. A few feet across, separated by a narrow, trench-like work space, ran an equally long stainless-steel counter, much of which was taken up by a vast, open steam table which was kept at a constant, rolling boil. What the cooks had to contend with, then, was a long,

uninterrupted slot, with no air circulation, with nearly unbearable dry, radiant heat on one side and clouds of wet steam heat on the other. When I say unbearable, I mean they couldn't bear it; cooks would regularly pass out on the line and have to be dragged off to recuperate, a commis taking over the station until the stricken chef de partie recovered. There was so much heat coming off those ranges-especially when the center rings were popped for direct fire-that the filters in the overhead hoods would often burst into flames, inspiring a somewhat comical scene as the overweight Italian chef would hurl himself down the narrow line with a fire extinguisher, bowling over the cooks and tripping as he hurried to put out the flames before the central Ansel System went off and filled the entire kitchen with fire-suppressant foam.

It was a madhouse. The cooks worked without dupes. The expediter, a just-off-the-boat Italian with an indecipherably thick accent droned away constantly in an uninflected monotone through a microphone, calling out-presumably-orders and pick-ups. I can still hear him: 'Pickinguppa, one-ah vealuh Orloffah. . and three sole Balmoralla. Orderingah, twenty-three beef Wellingtonna and seventeena chicka for the Belvedera Suite. . orderinga three crespelle toscana seg way. two a steaka one a mediuma rare one-a mediuma. ' In the middle of 300 a la carte dinners, the cooks were required to crank out enormous sit-down banquets of fully plated appetizers and entrees for the private catering rooms. 'Pickinguppa five hunnerta beef Wellingtonna!' and the whole line would break formation, drag long work tables to the center of the kitchen and re-form as a production line like you'd expect to see in an automobile assembly plant. Two cooks at one end of the table would slice and slap, others would pour sauce from giant, long-spouted coffeepots, and two more would drop vegetables and garnish. At the other end of the table, a long line of bolero-jacketed waiters would then clap down silver plate covers, stack the entrees ten or more at a clip onto serving trays, and ferry them like worker ants to the distant banquet rooms-only to return a few moments later.

It was, as I've said, hot. Ten minutes into the shift, the cheap polyester whites we all wore would be soaked through with sweat, clinging to chest and back. All the cooks' necks and wrists were pink and inflamed with awful heat rashes; the end-of-shift clothing change in the Room's fetid, septic locker-rooms was a gruesome panorama of dermatological curiosities. One saw boils, pimples, ingrown hair, rashes, buboes, lesions, and skin rot of a severity and variety you'd expect to see in some jungle backwater. And the smell of thirty not very fastidious cooks-their sodden work boots and sneakers, armpits, cologne, fungal feet, rotten breath-and the ambient odor of moldering three-day-old uniforms, long-forgotten pilfered food stashes hidden in lockers to which the combination was unknown, all combined to form a noxious, penetrating cloud that followed you home, and made you smell as if you'd been rolling around in sheep guts.

The atmosphere was not unlike a Pinero play, very jailhouse, with a lot of grab-ass, heated argument, hypermacho posturing and drunken ranting. Two burly men who'd just as soon kill you as look at you, when talking to each other, would often nestle a hand tenderly next to the testicles of the other, as if to say, 'I am so not gay-I can even do this!' The common language was a mix of Nueva Yorkeno Spanish, Italian and pidgin English. The Spanish and Italians, as is often the case, had no problem understanding each other, but when speaking 'English', one had to conform to the style book: one didn't say, 'That's my knife.' One said instead, 'Is for me, the knife.'

My own personal tormentor for the first few weeks was the chef de garde-manger and shop steward, a big, ugly Puerto Rican with a ruined face named Luis. Luis considered frequent explorations of my young ass with his dirty paws to be a perk of his exalted position; at every opportunity, he'd take a running swat between my cheeks, driving his fingers as far up my ass as my checked pants would allow. I endured this in the spirit of good fun for a while-until I'd had enough. There was a lot of ass-grabbing and ball-fondling going on, after all, and I did want desperately to be one of the guys. But Luis had generally knocked off a half a fifth of cooking brandy by ten each morning, and as his drunken advances threatened to become actual penetration, I was moved to take drastic action.

I was making filling for crespelle toscana in the huge, tilting brazier one morning, stirring mushrooms, diced tongue, ham, turkey, spinach and bechamel with a big, heavyweight, curved Dexter meat fork, a nice patina of rust on its blunt and twisted tines. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Luis coming, his right hand swinging back for a deep wallop between my cheeks. I decided right then I'd had enough; I was gonna straighten this drunken pig out. I quickly, but subtly, turned the big meat fork around and down, so the business end was pointing backwards. I timed my move for maximum impact. When Luis came in with his hand, I came down with the fork as hard as I could, sinking both tines deep into his knuckles with a satisfying crunch. Luis screamed like a burning wolverine and fell to his knees, two wide holes-one on each side of his middle knuckle-already welling up with blood. He managed to get up, the whole kitchen crew screaming and hooting with laughter, his hand blowing up to the size of a catcher's mitt and taking on an interesting black-and- blue and red color. After a visit to one of the fine, union-sponsored medical clinics, the hand was even larger, looking like a gauze-wrapped football and leaking yellow antiseptic.

My life improved immediately. The other cooks began addressing me as an equal. Nobody grabbed my ass anymore. People smiled and patted me on the back when I came to work in the morning. I had made my bones.

My job at the Room, initially, was to prepare and serve a lunch buffet for about a hundred or so regular members of the Rockefeller Center Luncheon Club-mostly geriatric business types from the building who assembled in the Rainbow Grill every day. I had to prepare a cold buffet and two hot entrees, which I'd then serve and maintain from noon to three. This was no easy feat, as the buffet was comprised solely of leftovers from the previous night's service. I'd begin each morning at seven-thirty pushing a little cart with wobbly casters down the line, where the cooks would hurl hunks of roast pork, end cuts, crocks of cooked beans, overcooked pasta, blanched vegetables and remnants of sauces at me. My job was to find a way to make all this look edible.

I have to say, I did pretty well, using every dirty trick I'd learned at CIA. I turned leftover steaks into say, Salade de Boeuf en Vinaigrette, transformed dead pasta and veggies into festive pasta salads, made elaborately aspic'd and decorated trays out of sliced leftover roast. I made mousses, pates, galantines, and every other thing I could think of to turn the scrapings into something our aged but wealthy clientele would gum down without complaint. And then, of course, I'd don a clean jacket and apron, cram one of those silly coffee filter-like chef's hats on my head, and stand by a voiture, slicing and serving the hot entrees.

'Would you care for some Tongue en Madere?' I'd ask through clenched teeth, my face a rictus of faux cheer as I'd have to repeat and repeat for the hard-of-hearing captains of industry who ate the same spread of sauce-disguised leftovers every lunch and for whom the hot entree was clearly the highlight of their day. 'Boiled beef with horseradish sauce, sir?' I'd chirp. 'And would you care for a steamed potato with that?'

The Irish waitresses who worked the Luncheon Club with me were more like nurses after years of this. They had nicknames for our regulars: 'Dribbling Dick' for one ninety-year-old who had a hard time keeping his food in his mouth, 'Stinky' for an apparently incontinent banker, 'Shakey Pete' for the guy who needed his food cut for him, and so on. There were famous names in banking and industry with us every day, all New York laid out below us beyond the floor-to-ceiling picture windows-eating garbage at the top of the world.

Since shanking Luis, I'd been increasingly considered to be a person of substance. The chef, an affable, blue-eyed Italian named Quinto, now felt free to take full advantage of my youth, my resilience and my willingness to work for minimum wage. After coming in at seven, taking care of my retirement village upstairs in the Club, breaking down the buffet (and saving what I could for re-use tomorrow), I was now regularly called on to stick around and help prep for the massive night-time banquets and cocktail parties. Absenteeism being rampant in our little corner of the Worker's Paradise, Local 6, I was taken aside more and more at the last minute and asked to remain until midnight, filling in on the hot line. I worked grill station, saute, fish station-at first only as a commis, hunting and fetching, covering the cooks on breaks, reloading reach-ins, straining sauces, mopping brows, running numbers to the house bookie, collecting bets, and so on. But in no time I was working stations alone, and keeping up my end nicely.

I made thousands and thousands of baby quiches for parties, and gristly little kebabs from the tough, nearly inedible chain that runs along the side of the beef tenderloin. I peeled 75 pounds of shrimp at a clip, seared Wellingtons, made chicken liver mousse (our version of foie gras), and in the course of my labors as general dogsbody, got to know the far recesses and dark corners of the vast Room facilities.

I also got to know the heavy hitters: the silent butcher and his assistant, the mercurial baby-faced chef patissier, the doomed-looking night saucier. And most memorably, Juan, the sixtyish day broiler man, a fierce, trash-talking Basque who, I swear, I saw one time sewing up a very bad knife wound on his hand-right on the line-with a sewing needle and thread, muttering all the while, as he pushed through the flaps of skin with the point, 'I am a tough (skronk!)

mother fucker (skronk!). I am a tough son of beetchl (skronk!). I am tough mother (skronk!) fucker!' Juan was also famous for allegedly following up a bad finger wound with a self-inflicted amputation. After catching a finger in an oven door, he had consulted the union benefit list for amount given for victims of 'partial amputation', and decided to cash in by lopping off the dangling portion. Whether this story was true or not mattered little to me; it was entirely believable after getting to know Juan. He may have been over sixty, but he lifted stockpots without help, wielded the largest knife I'd ever seen, and generally kicked more ass more quickly than any of the younger cooks.

There was a procession of Swiss, Austrian and American sous-chefs, none of whom lasted for more than a few weeks. They were quickly discouraged by our veteran crew from even attempting to impose order or quality control or change of any kind. The lifers like Juan and Luis would tell these eager young neophytes to go fuck themselves right to their faces; the intractable underlings who looked to them as role models would simply feign agreement and then do what they'd always done anyway. Short of murder, you really couldn't be fired. One beefy German sous-chef, after taking more than his share of lip from a lowly commis named Mosquito, had the poor judgment to grab him by the throat, lift him off the floor and shake him. The ensuing storm brought in the moustache Petes from the local, two sinister-looking guys in long coats who'd show up to settle disputes. Sous-chef, commis, chef and all holed up in a room for half an hour, after which the sous emerged, tail between his legs and suitably apologetic, having found out who the bosses really were. Like all his predecessors, he disappeared soon after.

I began to move more freely through the halls, back stairways, offices, dining and storage areas of the Rainbow Room. I made an interesting discovery. There was, in an unused area, a narrow passage through stacked tables, where employees could actually crawl out an open window. On my union-mandated fifteen-minute breaks, I would sit out on a narrow precipice, sixty-four flights up, my legs dangling over the edge, one arm wrapped around a sash, smoking weed with the dishwashers, Central Park and upper Manhattan splayed out before me. The observation deck on the roof was open as well, for a little mid-shift sunbathing.