Kitchen Confidential (13 page)

But my cousin had hooked me up with my very first chef job, at a spanking-new but already troubled boite in the theater district and I jumped at the offer. I felt bad about leaving my friends behind. And I had the beginnings of a very nasty little heroin habit from all the dope I'd been sniffing-but hey! I was about to become a chef!

I WAS TWENTY-TWO YEARS old and the chef of a new theater district restaurant on West 46th Street (Restaurant Row). As would become something of a recurring theme in my career, I was following close on the heels of the departed opening chef-who'd turned out, it was said, to be an alcoholic psychopath, a compulsive liar and a thief. I, it was hoped, was the solution to the problem: a fresh-faced, eager kid just out of culinary school, who would respond to my novice owners' wishes, and was willing and capable of turning an already bad situation around.

Tom H., as the place was called, was a classic vanity/boutique-type operation. Named for one of its owners, it was a small, glass and crushed velvet jewelbox of a place on the ground floor of a three-story brownstone. Tom, the principal owner, had been a clothing designer, and with Fred, his longtime lover, had been a popular host to his many famous friends in the theater, fashion, music and film industries. Tom and Fred were the beloved hosts of hundreds of well-remembered dinner parties. They were genuinely lovely, intelligent, warm-hearted and funny older guys who cooked well, had impeccable taste and were considered (rightly) to be wonderful, charming and entertaining hosts-naturals, it had been said, for the restaurant business, especially a restaurant in the heart of the theater district where they knew and were liked by so many. Tom was famous among his wide circle for his meat loaf, his jalapeno corn pudding, and Fred for his dill bread and jalapeno jelly, and in spite of the fact that meat loaf was a tad lower in the hierarchy of menu items than I would have liked-I was still the chef, and nominally in charge of my own kitchen-I was not unhappy about continuing with these cherished signature dishes. The meat loaf got a lot of press from friendly gossip columnists, and in the first months at Tom's, limos full of famous people lined up outside to try the stuff: John and Angelica Huston, Liv Ullman, Jose Quintero, Glenda Jackson, Chita Rivera, Lauren
Bacall come to mind.

The entire staff outside of the kitchen was gay, a situation I was entirely comfortable with after V assar, Provincetown, the West V illage and SoHo. The gossipy, self-effacing, overtly queer atmosphere was not only fun but, in many ways, completely in line with the gossipy, self-effacing, overtly depraved world of chefs and cooks. The waiters and bartenders could always be counted on for funny personal anecdotes of sexual misadventures-particularly as this was the early '80s-and they were always willing to share, in hilarious and clinical detail, their excesses of the previous night.

Our bar crowd, however, the guys you saw when you first walked in the door at Tom's, were almost uniformly like their hosts, older gay men. The floor staff and bartenders, far younger and hunkier, uncharitably referred to the restaurant as a 'wrinkle room' and made much fun of the somewhat sad, even desperate longings of some of our clientele. We may have been in the gossip columns a lot, and dinners, when I arrived, were still fairly busy for pre- and post-theater, but Tom's was decidedly not hot-not with an average age of sixty staking out the bar making goo-goo eyes at the bartender.

We were busy for pre-theater, a mad rush to get them in and get them out in time to make curtain, followed by nearly three hours of complete inactivity. The far end of West 46th Street in 1982 was nowheresville. Only predators, Guardian Angels and junkies seemed to walk by; the whole crew, kitchen, floor and even Tom and Fred would hang out and gossip to stay amused, hoping for a second pop when the shows let out near eleven. Work Progress was by now only a few weeks from complete ruin, so I began peeling away a few key men; Dimitri became my sous-chef, and a couple of other cooks and dishwashers followed me uptown as well. I did my best to punch up the menu, putting on some beloved American regional/comfort dishes I thought in keeping with the meat loaf and jalapeno corn pudding theme. We fooled around with a lot of retro classics like chicken pot pie, fried chicken steak with cream gravy, black-eyed peas and collards, ham steak with red-eye gravy, New England clam chowder, San Francisco cioppino, and the like. I did my best to work the line responsibly, spend Tom and Fred's money wisely, and generally behave in such a way as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of my very kindly new masters.

But things were already not going as planned. Tom and Fred had taken over the entire building, and dropped big money making it over into the bistro of their dreams. They'd purchased a lovely serpentine zinc bar at an auction in France, put in all-new equipment, built living quarters, office space and a small prep kitchen upstairs. It had, I'm sure, cost them a lot of money. But I don't think they were prepared for a sudden requirement that they extend the range-hood exhaust vent another 200 feet and three floors to project beyond the roof-requiring a new motor the size of a small economy car to provide suction. And there were the bafflers and filters to muffle the damn thing to meet city sound-level requirements. Lunch was quiet, and a decent pre-theater followed by a so-so post-theater rush was not enough to pay for rent, food, liquor, labor, power and all the other hidden and unglamorous expenses of a midtown restaurant. Tom didn't help matters by hovering at the door, peering out into the street in search of a walk-in trade that would never come. The closest we got to that was when one of our aged bar customers got lucky over at the Haymarket, a particularly nasty, mob-run hustler bar over on Eighth, and would treat one of their under-age, dirty and potentially vicious pick-ups to a nice meal.

Tom and Fred had taken a lifetime lease on the building. They lived on the top floor, fully intending, I believe, to spend the rest of their lives there. So it pained me to see their dream die in increments, to see the realization dawn-with each expensive repair, each slow night, each unforeseen expense-that things were not turning out as hoped. The waiters, not uncharacteristically, joked bitterly about the situation. Where were all of Tom and Fred's friends now, they asked knowingly, now that they were no longer getting comped free meals?

'But Betty Bacall loves that dish!' Tom would protest when I suggested removing a particularly moribund item from the menu. He'd keep certain things on, favorites of celebrity pals, day in and day out, waiting for them to return. But Betty Bacall was not coming to dinner every day, I could have pointed out, nor every week-in fact, she probably wasn't ever coming back. The place was dying. The smell of desperation was in the air. You could detect it halfway down the block-as we were surrounded by equally customer-hungry places-you could see it in Tom's face, and when a few straggling celebrities would on occasion wander through the door, he'd pounce on them like a starved remora.

I soldiered on. I didn't know what else to do. Restrained from putting much of my own imprint on the place-and unprepared, in any case, to offer a viable alternative-I occupied myself with scoring drugs on Ninth Avenue, maintaining a nice buzz at the bar, and keeping a stiff upper lip about our declining fortunes. I may have been the chef but I had in no way learned the chefly arts; there was really no need to at Tom's. I was working with friends, so there was no call for the manipulation, intelligence gathering and detective work of later posts. The place was slow, so the air-traffic controller aspects of chef work had yet to come into play. And the food wasn't mine. I came quickly to hate (unjustifiably) Tom's now-not-so-famous meat loaf as an immovable object, and I settled not very happily into a position that was more overpaid line cook than chef. What I learned at Tom's was a sad lesson that has served me well in decades since: I learned to recognize failure. I saw, for the first time, how two beloved, funny and popular guys can end up less beloved, not so funny and much less popular after trying to do nothing more than what their friends told them they were good at. Friendships, I'm sure, were destroyed. Loyal pals stopped coming, causing real feelings of betrayal and embitterment. In the end, I guess, we all let them down. I found a job in the Post and jumped ship at the first opportunity.

Rick's Cafe was an even more boneheaded venture: an absolutely idiotic, Bogart-themed restaurant on a deserted street in Tribeca, run as a caprice by the near-brainless wife of a successful Greek deli owner. One look at this sinkhole-the faux-taverna decor left over from a previous establishment, the framed photos of Bogie and Ingrid Bergman, the (always fatal) absence of a liquor license-and I should have run for the hills. I could recognize failure when I saw it, but I was desperate to get away from Tom's. And the deli owner paid me cash money from a fat roll in his pocket. It seemed like an okay place to lie low while I looked for a real chef's job.

It was a horror. Our purveyors were all sinister Greek jobbers who bought cheap and sold cheap. Our floor staff were the lame, the halt and the ugly, and our only business was a lunch crowd from nearby city agency offices: cheapskates and well-done eaters all. Dinner? We might as well have been stationed on an ice floe in Antarctica; the whole neighborhood closed down at six, and as we were the antithesis of hip, and as yet without booze, no sane person would travel out of their way to visit our little Bogie Brattle Museum. I tried, to go along with the witless Casablanca concept, a sort of French/North African theme, making a (I thought) very nice tagine with couscous like I'd enjoyed in France, merguez, and some Southern French Mediterranean dishes. It was clearly hopeless. Even my boss, the deli-master, knew. I think he was stoically flushing money down the tubes to keep his wife out of his hair.

Things had apparently gotten so grim at Tom's after my departure that Dimitri joined me in my Bogie-themed hell. I was now within walking distance of readily available heroin, so I was reasonably satisfied, and Dimitri, while not exactly enjoying the fame and fortune I'd promised him in p-town, was soon getting regular blow jobs from one of the Rick's Cafe waitresses. Life was not all bad. I was three for three for my last three restaurants. Fortunately, I was still young, so I could comfortably blame other factors on my unhappy success rate:

bad owners, bad location, ugly clientele, crappy decor. . I could live with that. I still had hope.

My problem was the money. I was making too much of it. Instead of doing the smart thing, taking a massive pay cut to go work for one of the now numerous emerging stars of American cooking, I continued my trajectory of working for a series of knuckleheaded, wacko, one-lung operations, usually already hemorrhaging when I arrived. Instead of running off to France, or California, or even uptown to work in one of the three-star Frog ponds as commis-the kind of Euro-style stage that helps build resumes and character, I chased the money. I was hooked on a chef-sized paycheck-and increasing dosages of heroin. I was condemned to become Mr Travelling Fixit, always arriving after a first chef had screwed things up horribly, the wolves already at the door. I was more of an undertaker than a doctor; I don't think I ever saved a single patient. They were terminal when I arrived; I might, at best, have only prolonged their death throes.

Having only recently achieved my dream of becoming a chef, I disappeared into the wilderness, feeding on the expiring dreams of a succession of misguided souls-a hungry ghost, yearning for money, and drugs.

THEY WERE ASSEMBLING MACHINE-GUNS for sale in the employee bathroom when I arrived. All the line cooks were hunched over Armalites and M-16s, while outside, in the nearly unmanned kitchen, orders spewed out of the chattering printer and were ignored.

Let's-Call-It-Gino's was a gigantic, two-story Northern Italian place on the waterfront, and the latest, most foolish venture from a guy everyone called the Silver Shadow, named for his Rolls-Royce and the fact that he never spent more than three or four minutes in anyone of his restaurants.

When I first walked in the door, it was like the Do Luong bridge scene in Apocalypse Now, where Martin Sheen shows up in the middle of a firefight, Hendrix blaring in the background, and inquires of a soldier, 'Where's your CO?' To which the soldier replies, 'Ain't you?' Nobody knew who was in charge, what was going on, who was ordering the food, or what was going to happen next. It was a big, expensive and crowded asylum, run almost entirely by the inmates. Money flowed in-God knows it was busy enough-and money flowed out, but where? No one seemed to have any idea, least of all the Silver Shadow.

Gino's, and its sister restaurant in Baltimore, were classic Don't Let This Happen To You examples of over-reaching by a successful restaurateur. The Silver Shadow had expanded a profitable family provision business into a smoking-hot restaurant catering to the Upper East Side Mortimer's, Elaine's, Coco Pazzo crowd, spun that restaurant off into another restaurant next door with a well-liked Italian race-car driver freeloader as front man, and followed those successes with a string of high-quality places in the Village and elsewhere. It had seemed, for a while, as if he could do no wrong. He was hiring chefs by the bunch; myoId friend Sammy already worked for him, and he'd apparently asked Sammy, 'Do you know any more like you?' and Sammy had said, 'Sure!' which is how I (and eventually Dimitri) got involved in one of the biggest, ugliest train wrecks of an organization in the history of New York.

The Silver Shadow couldn't keep track. Gino's New York-two kitchens, two dining rooms, outdoor cafe and 300 seats-opened on the waterfront nearly simultaneously with its slightly smaller sister in Baltimore's Harbor Place. Plans were under way for more of them in Boston, New Orleans and elsewhere. It was Big '80s time, with all that implied: too much money, too much coke, both in the hands of hyperactive, overconfident yuppie businessmen and investors-and at Gino's, it reached critical mass. The Shadow seemed to start up a new enterprise every other day. In the food court across the way from Gino's, he opened a gelato shop and a thin-crust pizzeria, then zipped off to Italy to buy warehouses full of plates, flatware, gelato bases, furnishings-and then forgot where he put them. Chefs, managers, sous-chefs, partners rotated in and out with no rhyme or reason to their comings and goings; there were always a few chefs in the pipeline, shacked up in hotels, on full salary, waiting for the call telling them where to go. The Silver Shadow bought chefs the way most people buy TV Guide at the supermarket-an impulse buy at the register, after they do their real shopping.

I had been hired, typically of the Silver Shadow, on impulse, and immediately tasked to take over Let's-Call-It-Dexter's, his relatively small American bistro on the Upper East Side.

'They really need you over there!' crowed the Shadow enthusiastically. 'They're really looking forward to meeting you!' So, I quit the Columbus Avenue pick-up joint I'd been working, and hustled over to Dexter's. They had, it turned out, no idea I was coming. Worse, Dexter's and the Shadow's other restaurant-a Northern Italian place next door-shared the same kitchen and the same chef and crew; there were simply two different kitchen doors leading to two different dining rooms. The chef, a mincing, freakish-looking albino, was apparently quite capably taking care of business without me-and he let me know so immediately. After grudgingly introducing me to the kitchen crew who, it was immediately clear, held him in high regard, he took me aside and said, 'I don't care what the Shadow fucking told you, this is my kitchen. . and you ain't doing nothing more than picking spinach as long as I'm here-which is forever!'

No way was I going to be stuck in a corner, in a hostile kitchen, working under this geek. I'd been promised a chef's job-my own kitchen, with all that implied-and the idea of two chefs sharing responsibility for one crew was ridiculous, even if the albino had been willing. And I didn't care to pick spinach, even for a thousand dollars a week.

I left immediately, calling the Shadow from a pay-phone.

'What have you done to me?' I inquired, pissed off. 'They'd rather rub shit in their hair over there than let me in! You have a chef already!'

'No problem,' replied the Shadow, as if he'd just now remembered that the two restaurants shared a kitchen. 'They really need you in Baltimore. Go down to Gino's on the waterfront, see the GM; he'll fill you in and give you some expense money. '

Which is how I found myself on the TurboLiner to Baltimore, junk-sick, confused, with an overnight bag, and no idea of my mission. Baltimore sucks. If you haven't been there, it's a fairly quaint excuse for a city. (At the time I was there it was undergoing massive rehabilitation; an entire neighborhood by the waterfront was being 'restored' into a sort of red-brick and cobblestone theme park.) Bars close at 1 A.M. they start flashing the lights for last call at twelve-thirty. The permanent residents speak of New York and DC with strangely wistful expressions on their faces, as if they can't understand how they ended up here, rather than a few miles north or south, where there's a real city. There's an element of the South, an almost rural quality to Baltimore, an Ozark fatalism that's amusing in John Water's films but not so much fun to live with. Worst of all, I had no idea where to score drugs.

Gino's Baltimore occupied the second floor of a large new structure on the water in Baltimore's Harborplace. The kitchen was bigger than the dining room-which I liked-but the dining room was pretty empty most times, which I didn't like so much. The crew, not uncommonly for most far-flung outposts in a restaurant empire, were already used to being the neglected bastard offspring, largely ignored by their leader. Supplies, which were supposed to arrive from New York, were sporadic. Guidance, such as it was, was erratic in the extreme. I was told immediately that another chef had just preceded me. He had set up a menu, showed the recent culinary graduate cooks how to dunk pasta, and then quit.

My first night, I slept in a vacationing waiter's apartment. It was a strange bed, with a strange cat, in a shabby, two-family Victorian. I lay awake, kicking and scratching, swatting the cat at my feet. The next day, I was brought over to the official residence of visiting dignitaries from New York: a three-story townhouse, brand-new but built to look old, in the center of the fake historical district. It was pretty swank: wall-to-wall carpeting, four bathrooms, vast dining room, living room and top-floor studio. The only problem was, there was no furniture. A bare futon lay in the middle of the floor on the third story, a pathetic black and white TV with coat-hanger antenna the only offered amusement. The spacious kitchen contained only some calcified rice cakes. The only other sign that anyone had ever lived there was a lone chef's jacket on a hanger in one of the closets-like an artifact, evidence of an ancient astronaut who'd been here before me.

It was make-work, and I knew it. The Shadow called to let me know that he wanted me to create a brunch menu and a happy-hour buffet. This was an easy enough assignment, as there were only about three bar customers who spent their evening chatting with the manager; and brunch, such as it was, consisted of about five tables of Sunday tourists who'd wandered into the empty dining room by mistake while window shopping and been too embarrassed to leave after realizing their mistake. The place had been open only a few months and already gave off the distinct odor of doom. Large-scale doom. There were twelve cooks, all new equipment, a bake shop, a pasta-making department. The Silver Shadow had spent millions on this colossal monument to hubris and cocaine. And you could see, in the cooks' faces, that they knew-as sure as they knew that they lived in a second-class city-that they'd be out of work soon. The body was dying; only the brain had yet to receive the message.

I worked fast, spending a lot of time shuttling back and forth to New York to score in bombed-out shooting galleries on the Lower East Side. My pay had never been arranged properly; when I needed money, I simply asked the GM to give me a few hundred, which he seemed happy to do, as money bled quickly out of Gino's every orifice. There was no business at the restaurant, so there was soon nothing to do. When I couldn't make it back to the real city, I'd drink at the Club Charles, an atmospherically crappy dive with a vaguely punk-rock clientele, or watch TV in my lonely room with a view.

I passed the Baltimore job to Dimitri as soon as I could. Maybe it wasn't the nicest thing I ever did, but it was a chef's job, and the money was good-and hey, room and board was free! Once again, I called the Shadow, told him there was nothing for me to do, and was told in response, 'They need you in New York! Get right back! They're really looking forward to meeting you!'

Which is how I found myself in a bathroom full of machine-guns. Gino's New York, unlike its little brother in Baltimore, was still busy-crazy busy-and in every way, an out-of-control madhouse. If I wasn't already a burnt-out case from four years of drug abuse and two years in a Columbus Avenue pick-up joint and the cumulative effects of my whole checkered career to this point, I was after Gino's. Gino's finished me.

Brought in as the chef to replace the man whose jacket I'd discovered in Baltimore, I was shocked-even I was shocked-at the level of debauchery and open criminality. On my first day in Gino's New York, I found that the extremely well-paid head of prep could not so much as peel an onion-when he deigned to show up at work at all. When I inquired, I was matter-of-factly informed by the New York GM that he was the boss's coke dealer, kept around so that the boss and upper management could conveniently re-up if their little screwtop bottles ran empty.

The GM, a jangly, untrustworthy character, who seemed to be high on quaaludes most of the time, would disappear on benders for days at a time. This was problematic, as he had the only keys to the office. When the local wise guys showed up-as they did every Tuesday-looking for protection money (this kept our delivery trucks from having their tires slashed), we had to jimmy the office door to get at the safe. When no one with the combination was around, the assistant manager would simply ask the service bartender for a loan of a few thousand; he was always good for a few grand, as he did a bang-up business dealing coke to the employees.

A quick review of the schedule and time cards for my mammoth kitchen staff revealed more than a few irregularities. Juan Rodriguez, saute man, for instance, had been punching in as Juan Martinez, Juan Garcia, and Juan Perez-all of whom were imaginary creations the front office had been kind enough to keep paying, in spite of the fact that they clearly did not exist. If half the cooks were on the line when they were supposed to be-as opposed to selling guns, or hiding in a stairwell smoking weed, or cooking up freebase in a bathroom, it was a good thing. Expediting was done by whoever happened to be in the kitchen at the time. Food for Baltimore was trucked into our walk-ins, rotated into our stocks, and then shipped out-such as it was-the next day. We made our own pasta . sometimes. We also bought pasta from our other stores, we bought pasta from outside, often all three at once. Gigantic steam kettles simmered with Gorgonzola and garlic cream for our very popular garlic bread. (Eight bucks for a baguette and some goo.) And herds of sightseers, tourists, businessmen, gawkers, rubes and hungry fanny-packers poured through the doors. The food was not bad. God knows we had enough cooks, plenty of equipment, and room to put it. Somehow, things got done, though I have no idea how; the place had its own momentum, like some rudderless ocean liner, captain and crew long gone-it just kept going, plowing through ice fields. Someone with a brain had designed the line: a sensible trough of water for pasta, with cute fitted baskets, ran the length of the range-tops, for easy dunking. Nice refrigerated bains held garnishes and mise-en-place, so that each cook had an artist's palette of easy-access ingredients at hand. Downstairs, a long bar curled around the dining room, serving a lighter menu of trattoria items, sandwiches, quick-grilled foods, cheese, shellfish. Outside, when it was warm, a long barbecue grill serviced the cafe.

I fine-tuned the menu, meeting with the Shadow for a few minutes a day, satisfying him by simply responding to his culinary whims. 'Bagna cauda? I can do that. No problem! Clams oreganata? Why not?' I had no delusions of chefly integrity or personal agenda where Italian menu items were concerned, so I was relatively responsive compared to my mysterious predecessor-and the Shadow seemed happy with me. In fact, after people started asking me, in hushed voices, what the Shadow thinks of this, and what the Shadow thinks of that, I realized that the three or four minutes a day I spent talking to him made me, in the eyes of everyone else in the organization, his closest associate-though I couldn't have told them, if asked, what shade his eyes were, or anything else. With six different things going on, the man was a blur-like Patty Hearst in those security camera photos from the bank job-perpetually in motion, always on the way out the door.

I wasn't really very good at Italian food. I relied on Dimitri for most of my recipes, though his experience at Mario's was almost entirely Southern Italian red sauce and the like. But I got by nodding at whatever high concept the Shadow had a hot nut for that week, my real value to the organization becoming apparent after I had finally had enough and cut loose the coke-dealing head of prep.

The Shadow and upper management were impressed by this. It showed frugality: the man was deadwood after all; he had been absent from work without explanation two Saturdays in a row, and truth be told, he couldn't cook at all. I'd shown balls, too, firing their coke dealer, and they kinda liked that. They couldn't have done it, as the bastard knew too much-and I'd shown real talent and diplomatic skill in the way I'd done the deed: the already financially comfortable prep chief was easily convinced that this showing up at the restaurant thing was an inconvenience, and a distraction from his real calling, and that he'd be happier reverting to his former lifestyle, scooting around New York's bars and nightclubs in expensive Italian automobiles selling drugs. When I sorted out the Rodriguez, Garcia, Perez problem, unloaded a couple of wise-ass slacker waitrons, and replaced some no-show cooks with loyalists from Tom's and Work Progress, the Shadow saw in me my real calling-which was hatchet man.