Kitchen Confidential (12 page)

The next day, someone from management came by and made an unusually frank suggestion: if I wanted a long, successful and, most important, healthy career in the restaurant business, perhaps I should step down and let that nice Luis continue his good works as shop steward. It would, I was assured, 'be in everybody's best interest.' He didn't have to tell me twice. I made a few discreet inquiries of a few trusted veterans and quickly resigned from my newly elected position. Luis once again picked up the reins of power, as if he'd known all along what would happen. I didn't raise a stink and a few weeks later left the Rainbow Room entirely. I'd seen On The Waterfront. And I learned fast.

IN 1981, MY GOOD friend from high school, and later Provincetown, Sam G., became the chef de cuisine of Work Progress. A once trendy restaurant on Spring Street in SoHo, the place had fallen on hard times. It was now under new ownership and Sammy-one of us!-was in charge of putting the kitchen together. It was what a lot of us had been waiting for, our own thing, and the call went out to all our old cronies. From Provincetown came Dimitri, finally enticed from off-season exile at the tip of the Cape by excited promises of culinary history in the making. I would share sous-chef responsibilities with my mentor. From West Village saloons, we recruited every young, pot-smoking, head-banging hooligan we'd ever worked with, filling their heads with dreams of glory. 'We're forming . like a rock and roll band, man, an all-star group of culinary superstars kinda like Blind Faith. We're going to tear a new asshole into the New York restaurant scene.'

We fancied ourselves the most knowledgeable and experienced young Turks in town, and our hearts were filled with hope and the promise of enviable futures. We thought we were the only cooks in New York who could quote from the Larousse Gastronomique and Repertoire de la Cuisine, who knew who Vatel, Careme and Escoffier were, what Bocuse, Verge and Guerard were doing across the water, and we were determined to replicate their successes and their fame. There was no one on the horizon we could see who could touch us.

Okay-there was one guy. Patrick Clark. Patrick was the chef of the red-hot Odeon in nascent Tribeca, a neighborhood that seemed not to have existed until Patrick started cooking there. We followed his exploits with no small amount of envy.

'Born under a broiler,' people said. 'He's screwing Gael Greene,' claimed others.

There were a lot of stories, most of them, like most chefs' gossip, apocryphal. But what we did know about Patrick for sure impressed the hell out of us. He was kind of famous; he was big and black; most important, he was an American, one of us, not some cheese-eating, surrender specialist Froggie. Patrick Clark, whether he would have appreciated it or not, was our hometown hero, our Joe Di Maggio-a shining example that it could be done.

As we assembled for menu-planning sessions, the process of getting our kitchen up and running began. We formed in our already dope-fogged brains a plan, a national movement even, that would sweep away all the moribund old European chefs and dazzle the world with our New American act. . as soon as we figured out what that was.

We even planned a hit, a sort of Night of the Sicilian Vespers thing, where we'd straighten them all out in one fell swoop. Back in those days, the older European chefs-Soltner and his generation-would attend an annual Chefs' Race, a downhill ski event at Hunter Mountain where contestants would bomb the slopes in full kitchen whites, toques strapped to their chins. Our plan was to lurk in the woods at the side of the trail, also dressed in whites, but luridly adorned with skull-and-crossbones painted in chicken blood. We'd intercept the geezer contingent as they waddled down the slope and whack them rudely with our ski poles, maybe bombard them with foie gras. We were younger and (we assumed)

better skiers, so we would have no problem fending off any counterattack. We believed this would be a bold and memorable way to announce ourselves to the world-until the coke ran out and our enthusiasm with it.

I still laugh out loud when I remember our earnest strategy sessions. However cruel and pointless and stupid the idea might have been, it was a measure of our faith in ourselves. Soltner, of course, was a god to us; the idea of whacking him upside the head with my ski poles, or running over his Rossignols with my rented skis was always unthinkable when lucid.

The new owners of Work Progress, our putative masters, were a textbook example of People Who Should Never Own A Restaurant. There were two brothers-one half-smart, the other genuinely dumb-who'd gotten a few bucks from Mommy and Daddy, along with their partner, a slightly more cognizant college friend who could actually read a P and L sheet and crunch a few numbers. Their principal business was investing in off-Broadway shows. As this, apparently, wasn't unprofitable enough, they'd chosen the restaurant business as a way to lose their money more quickly and assuredly.

From the get-go, Sammy, Dimitri and I managed to intimidate the partners right out of their own restaurant. At every suggestion from this novice triumvirate, we'd snort with contempt, roll our eyes with world-weary derision and shoot down whatever outrage-be it tablecloths, flatware or menu items-they'd come up with. We were merciless in our naked contempt for every idea they came in with, and we out-snobbed, out-maneuvered and out-bullied them at every turn.

As the three principal masterminds of this culinary Utopia were all P-Town veterans, we constructed our downstairs kitchen along familiar lines-as a faithful re-creation of the kitchens we'd grown up in: insular, chaotic, drenched in drugs and alcohol, and accompanied constantly by loud rock and roll music. When the restaurant opened, we'd begin every shift with a solemn invocation of the first moments of Apocalypse Now, our favorite movie. Emulating the title sequence, we'd play the soundtrack album, choppers coming in low and fast, the whirr of the blades getting louder and more unearthly, and just before Jim Morrison kicked in with the first few words, 'This is the end, my brand-new friend the end ' we'd soak the entire range-top with brandy and ignite it, causing a huge, napalm-like fireball to rush up into the hoods-just like in the movie when the tree-line goes up. If our boobish owners and newly hired floor staff weren't already thoroughly spooked by our antics, then they were by this act.

We fought all the time, Sam, Dimitri and I. Waving our cookbooks at each other, we'd squabble endlessly over the 'correct' way to prepare certain dishes. We teased, poked, prodded, sulked, conspired and competed. We wanted to be the best, we wanted to be different, but at the same time, correct. We yearned to bring honor to our clan, and in that vein, we came up with the looniest, most ambitious menu our super-heated, endorphin-overloaded brains could agree on, a sort of Greatest Hits of Our Checkered Careers So Far collection. French classics sat side-by-side with Portuguese squid stew, my Tante Jeanne's humble salade de tomates, dishes we'd lifted out of cookbooks, stolen from other chefs, remembered seeing on TV. There were Wellfleet oysters on the halfshell, oysters Mitcham (in honor of Howard), there was a pasta dish from Mario's-a sort of taglierini with trail-mix and anchovies as I recall-scallops in sorrel sauce (from Bocuse maybe?), calves' liver with raspberry vinegar sauce, swordfish with black beans and white rice, pompano en papillotte, my mom's creme renversee .

We were high all the time, sneaking off to the walk-in at every opportunity to 'conceptualize'. Hardly a decision was made without drugs. Pot, quaaludes,

cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms soaked in honey and used to sweeten tea, Seconal, Tuinal, speed, codeine and, increasingly, heroin, which we'd send a Spanish-speaking busboy over to Alphabet City to get. We worked long hours and took considerable pride in our efforts-the drugs, we thought, having little effect on the end-product. That was what the whole life we were in was about, we believed: to work through the drugs, the fatigue, the lack of sleep, the pain,

to show no visible effects. We might be tripping out on blotter acid, sleepless for three days and halfway through a bottle of Stoli, but we were professionals, goddammit! We didn't let it affect our line work. And we were happy, truly happy, like Henry V's lucky few, a band of brothers, ragged, slightly debauched warriors, who anticipated nothing less than total victory-an Agincourt of the mind and stomach.

We were pretty busy initially, and along with the young proteges who held us in something like awe, Sam, Dimitri and I would work all day and late into the night. When the restaurant closed, we'd take over the bar, drinking Cristal-which we'd buy at cost-and running fat rails of coke from one end of the bar to the other, then crawling along on all-fours to snort them. The cuter and more degenerate members of the floor staff would hang with us, so there was a lot of humping in the dry-goods area and on the banquettes, 50-pound flour sacks being popular staging areas for after-work copulation. We'd bribed the doormen and security people of all the local nightclubs and rock and roll venues with steak sandwiches and free snacks, so that after we'd finished with our pleasures at the Work Progress bar, we'd bounce around from club to club without waiting on line or paying admission. A squadron of punk rocker junkie guitar heroes ate for free at Work Progress-so we got free tickets and backstage passes to the Mudd Club, CBGB, Tier Three, Hurrah, Club 57 and so on. And when the clubs closed it was off to after-hours where we'd drink and do more drugs until, weather permitting, we'd hit the seven o'clock train to Long Beach. We'd finish the last of our smack on the train, then pass out on the beach. Whichever one of us woke from the nod would roll the others over to avoid an uneven burn. When we finally arrived back at work, sand in our hair, we looked tanned, rested and ready.

We considered ourselves a tribe. As such, we had a number of unusual customs, rituals and practices all our own. If you cut yourself in the Work Progress kitchen, tradition called for maximum spillage and dispersion of blood. One squeezed the wound till it ran freely, then hurled great gouts of red spray on the jackets and aprons of comrades. We loved blood in our kitchen. If you dinged yourself badly, it was no disgrace; we'd stencil a little cut-out shape of a chef knife under your station to commemorate the event. After a while, you'd have a little row of these things, like a fighter pilot. The house cat-a mouse-killer-got her own stencil (a tiny mouse shape) sprayed on the wall by her water bowl, signifying confirmed kills.

Departing cooks and favored waiters, on their last day of employment, were invited to nail their grotty work shoes to a Wall of Fame by Sammy's cellar office. As time went on, row after row of moldering work boots, shoes and sneakers were I pounded into the wall, a somewhat grim reminder of departed friends. On slow nights-and there were, disconcertingly, a growing number of these-we'd have fun with food color and sweet dough. Dimitri, it turned out, was remarkably adept at crafting life-like fingers, toes and sexual organs from basic ingredients. He'd fashion frighteningly realistic severed thumbs-skin rudely shredded at one end, bone fragments made from leek white projecting from the wound-and we'd leave these things around for unsuspecting waiters and managers to find. A waiter would open a reach-in in the morning to find a leaking, torn fingertip, Band-Aid still attached, pinioned to a slice of Wonderbread with a frilled toothpick. A floor manager would be called down to the kitchen in the middle of a dinner shift to find one of us standing by a bloody cutting board, red-smeared side-towel wrapped around a hand, and as they approached, one of Dimitri's grisly fingers would drop onto his foot. We experimented constantly, finding to our delight that not only did the sweet dough look like flesh when shaped and colored correctly, but it drew flies like the real thing! Left overnight at room temperature, Dimitri's fake digits could develop into a truly horrifying spectacle.

Eventually, when every member of the staff was thoroughly inured to the sight of a severed, fly-covered penis in the urinal, or finding a bloody finger in his apron pocket, we moved on to even greater atrocities. One night, with his full cooperation, we stripped Dimitri naked, spattered and filled his ears, nose and mouth with stage blood, and wrapped him in Saran Wrap before helping him into a chest freezer in the dark, rear storage area of the restaurant, his limbs arranged in an unnaturally contorted pose-as if he'd been rudely dumped there post-mortem. We then called the manager on the intercom, asking first if he'd seen Dimitri. We hadn't seen him in hours, we explained, and we were worried. Then we asked the poor bastard if he'd be kind enough to grab a box of shrimp out of the freezer for us, as we were short-handed, Dimitri being missing and all, and four tables going out at once. I think you can imagine what the manager experienced: hurrying back to the dank corner of the cellar, a single, bare light-bulb illuminating the chest freezer; he lifts the lid, only to find the nude, fishbelly-white, blood-splattered corpse of our missing comrade staring up at him with dead eyes through a thin layer of plastic wrap, the beginnings of a light frost under the film making the already gruesome scene even more terrifyingly real.

We ended up having to give the guy a shot of ammonia inhaler; his knees buckled and he was unable to return to work for over an hour. Dimitri, of course, caught a terrible cold for his efforts, but it was worth it: the manager left shortly after-and he didn't bother to nail up his work boots on our Wall of Fame. But we cared little for managers or owners-or customers for that matter.

By now, unsurprisingly, our restaurant was rapidly failing. I began to see, for the first time, what I would later recognize as 'Failing Restaurant Syndrome', an affliction that causes owners to flail about looking for a quick fix, a fast masterstroke that will 'turn things around', cure all their ills, reverse the already irreversible trend toward insolvency. We tried New Orleans Brunch-complete with Dixieland band. We tried a prix fixe menu, a Sunday night buffet, we advertised, we hired a publicist. Each successive brainstorm was more counterproductive than the one before. All of this floundering about and concept-tinkering only further demoralized an already demoralized staff.

When the paychecks started bouncing, and the vendors started to put us on COD, the owners called in the restaurant consultants. Even then, we knew what that meant: the consultants usually arrive just ahead of the repo men and the marshals. It was the death knell. We had tried. We had failed. Naturally, we held the owners responsible. It was a tough spot, the ambiance was no good, the music in the dining room sucked, the waiters weren't well trained. we tried to console ourselves with the usual excuses. But the truth was, we just weren't good enough. Our food, while charming to some, was unappealing to most. We did not commit seppuku. Sam and Dimitri stayed on, determined to go down with the ship.