Kitchen Confidential

  Or, I wondered shrewdly. Did he want to see if the applicant had any balls on him. 'Oh yeah' the right answer there might be, 'everybody says you're a miserable, Machiavellian, cold­bloodedrat bastard with a million enemies and balls the size of casaba melons - but I also hear you're fair.'

  Maybe that was it!

  The fact was, though, I'd never heard of this guy before walking in the door. Not a thing. Sure, he got a 24 in Zagat's, but that was about it. It was all I knew of the man! To lie . . . to flatter now. . . when everything was going so well - it could be a fatal mistake.

  So I decided to take a shot at the truth,

  Proudly, with what I later realized must have seemed to be nearly idiotic pride, I answered the 'What do you know about me' question with complete honesty. I stared back into the owner's eyes, smiled, and with forceful determination and complete candor, answered as breezily as I could, considering my heart was pounding in my chest:

  'Next to nothing!' I said.

  It was not the answer he was looking for.

  Both owner and manager gave me tight, shocked smiles. They might have been impressed with my balls, but this was clearly outweighed by an instant appreciation that I was not going to be the next chef - nor would I ever be. I'd got it wrong somehow.

  Oh, they laughed. They were even amused. A little too amused, I thought, as they tidied up the stack of resumes, signaling the interview was over. In what seemed like seconds, I was being politely if quickly escorted to the door, being handed the pro forma kiss-off of 'We have other candidates to interview before we make a decision.'

  I was halfway down the block, already in a full flop-sweat from the August heat and the wringer these guys had put me through, when I realized my mistake. I groaned out loud, practically bursting into tears at the foolishness of it all, as I realized, exasperated, what this proud Scot had actually asked me. This steakhouse owner - whose end-of-week sales reports probably constituted at least 90 percent meat sales - hadn't been asking me what 'I knew about me . . .' He'd asked a more reasonable question for the owner of a very successful steakhouse.

  He'd asked me 'WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT MEAT?'

  And I, like some half-crazed, suicidal idiot-savant kamikaze pilot, had asked him to repeat the question, pondered it thoughtfully, then proudly replied, 'Next to nothing!'

  It was not my finest hour.

  PINO NOIR: TUSCAN INTERLUDE

  OF ALL THE HIGH-PRESSURE, full mind-body crunches, strange interludes, unexpected twists and 'learning experiences' in my long and largely undistinguished career, my brief Tuscan interlude with New York's Prince of Restaurant Darkness, Pino Luongo, was perhaps the most illuminating, if exhausting. The owner of Coco Pazzo, Le Madri, Sapporo di Mare, II Toscanaccio and other businesses, Pino was, and remains, one of the most controversial figures in the business, a man envied, feared despised, emulated and admired by many who have worked for and with him.

  I'll flash forward a few weeks into my account to give you a general idea of what the perception of life under Pino was. I was the newest executive chef in Toscorp, Pino's umbrella company, looking as chefly as possible in my brand-new Bragard jacket with my name stitched in appropriate Tuscan blue, standing in the front cocktail are of Pino's newest: Coco Pazzo Teatro on the ground floor of the swank and stylish Paramount Hotel on West 46th Street. A journalist acquaintance, whom I knew from Vassar, came in with a large party of high-cheekboned models and sensitive-looking young men in designer clothes. Startled to see me, he shook my hand and said, 'Tony! I didn't know you were working for Pino now!' Then he lowered his voice and only half-jokingly added, 'I guess this means that in a few months you'll either own your own restaurant . . . or be ground to dust.'

  How did J, a chef with limited Italian experience in my background, a guy who up to now had sneered at Italian food, had even written a book about a young Italian American chef who'd wanted nothing more than to get away from the red sauce and garlic and Parmesan cheese of his childhood and cook French, and was willing, ultimately, to betray his own family rather than cook fried calamari - how did I end up as the opening chef of Pino Luongo's newest, high-profile Tuscan venture?

  I don't really know.

  I was enjoying a period of unemployment after the moribund One Fifth had finally succumbed - lying around my dusty apartment, watching daytime TV, interrupting my pleasurable torpor occasionally to fax out the occasional resume or two when my old crony, Rob Ruiz, another Bigfoot protege, called me.

  'Tony! It's Elvis! [Bigfoot always called him Elvis] What are you doing? I'm at Le Madri . . . They need a sous-chef? You should get down here right away!'

  'It's Italian,' I said.

  'Doesn't matter. Just get down here. Meet the chef! He wants to meet you. Believe me - you'll like it!'

  Now, I like Rob. He's a dyed-in-the-wool, bone-deep, old-school sonofabitch - a guy who knows what's going on in every restaurant in New York, who can call up just about any purveyor in New York and get them to supply his restaurant with free stuff, cheaper stuff, better stuff, and fast. He's a prodigious drinker, a funny guy, and generally he knows a good thing when he sees it. We have a lot of history between us, all of it good. I said, 'Why not?' My schedule, after all, was pretty loose - if you didn't count Rockford Files reruns at five and Simpsons at seven. I managed to find some clean clothes, make myself look presentable, and hurried down to Chelsea.

  Le Madri was, and remains, in my opinion, the very best of Pino's many restaurants, a place designed around Pino's love for 'Mama cooking', meaning the Tuscan home cooking of his youth, as prepared at home by mothers and grandmothers coupled with the sort of cold-blooded professional efficiency for which he is justifiably notorious. The chef, Gianni Scappin, was a likeable, light-complected Italian who wore his jacket buttoned all the way up, with a bone or ivory clasp around a very proper little kerchief. He met with me in his downstairs office, predisposed to like me, I think, by the excellent job that Rob was still doing as his steward and purchaser. What Gianni wanted sounded reasonable: show up six shifts a week, create some lunch specials, make soup, do a little prep, keep an eye on the Ecuadorians, help out on the line as needed - maybe expedite a bit - and one night a week, work the saute station. The money was good, and Gianni impressed me. The kicker was his casual question, near the end of our interview, if I was interested in becoming the executive chef at Coco Pazzo Teatro, scheduled to open in a few weeks. 'I don't want it,' he said. 'I'm too busy.'

  Thus began my crash course in all things Tuscan.

  A few hours earlier, I'd been lying dazed and hopeless in my unmade bed, wondering whether to take another nap or call out for pizza. Now I was the sous-chef at one of the best Italian restaurants in New York, with an inside track - I was assured to become the executive chef at Pino Luongo's latest celeb-friendly restaurant in the ultra-cool, Philippe Starck-designed, Schrager-owned hotel. It was a dazzling development.

  And I was dazzled. Remember, I was not a fan of Italian food. But when I arrived that first day at Le Madri, saw that the walk-ins were absolutely empty, saw how tomato sauce, chicken stock, pasta, bread - in short, everything - was made fresh (the tomato sauce from fresh, seeded, peeled tomatoes), I was stunned. Meat, fish and produce deliveries arrived and the cooks would fall on them like marauders, yanking out what they needed - frequently right off the truck - so it would be ready for lunch. The quality of food was magnificent. Orders started coming in and I'd have to run down to the butcher who was cutting meat to order. A short, Ecuadorian pasta maker with nubs where two fingers had been rolled garganelli, cut spaghetti alia chitarra, laid out sheet pasta for ravioli and punched out fresh gnocchi which were immediately sent upstairs to be served. On the line, a truly awe-inspiring crew of talented Ecuadorians made focaccia and white truffle oil-filled pizzas, rubbed fresh striped bass with sea salt, filled them with herbs and roasted them until crispy, sliced translucently thin sheets of Parma ham and speck, and prepared an amazing array of pasta dishes, yanking the fresh-
cooked stuff to order out of two simmering pasta cookers and finishing them in pans from a mise-en-place of ingredients so vast and well prepared that I had no idea how they kept them all straight.

  I never really knew how to cook pasta before. Here, dried pasta was blanched in small, undercooked batches and laid out unrinsed and still warm on lightly oiled sheet pans before being finished in sauce a few minutes later. Fresh pasta and thin-cut pasta was cooked to order.

  Pasta was cooked the right way. Meaning, the penne, for instance, after saucing, stood up on the plate in a mound, rather than sliding around on the plate or being left to drown in a bowl.

  'You want to taste the pasta,' explained Gianni, 'not just the sauce.' It was, I must admit, a revelation. A simple pasta pomodoro - just about the simplest thing I could think of, pasta in red sauce - suddenly became a thing of real beauty and excitement.

  All the food was simple. And I don't mean easy, or dumb. I mean that for the first time, I saw how three or four ingredients, as long as they are of the highest and freshest quality, can be combined in a straightforward way to make a truly excellent and occasionally wondrous product. Homey, peasant dishes like Tuscan bread soup, white bean salad, grilled calamari, baby octopus, tender baby artichokes in olive oil and garlic, a simple sauteed calves' liver with caramelized onions, immediately became inspiring and new. The clean, simple, unassuming integrity of it all was a whole new approach, very different from the sauces and squeeze bottles and exotic ingredients of my recent past.

  The fear level was not too bad, possibly because Rob was there. He'd call up on speaker phone at odd times and make hideous groaning and slurping and choking sounds over the PA system. And Gianni seemed comfortably expert in navigating the canals and vias of Pino's empire; he was apparently a centurion in good standing, so I felt comfortably under his protection.

  I was set to meet the man himself in a few days, so he could take a sniff of the new chef candidate with the French-sounding name. Wisely, I decided to do my homework. I read Pino's two excellent books: A Tuscan in the Kitchen - much of which was about the opening of Le Madri - and Fish Talking, an ode to the tiny, oily little fishes and now neglected seafood items of his childhood in Italy. I read them with real interest, particularly Fish Talking, which shared in its appreciation of 'garbage fish' an attitude with my earlier mentor, Howard Mitcham. Pino, whatever you might say about the man, clearly adored food, and it came through in his books as well as in his restaurants. At one point in one of his books, Pino discusses his near heartbreak when standing by the antipasti bar at Coco Pazzo, when he used to ask some of his regular guests to sample some fresh anchovies or sardines only to have them decline. His frustration with the difficulty of trying to get his guests to even try something he found so wonderful made an endearing impression on me.

  I knew, when given an opportunity to cook for the man, what I was going to do.

  We met at Le Madri and went over my resume - thankfully without too much scrutiny. Pino is one of those guys who puts a lot of stock, I think, in his first-hand impressions of character when interviewing a candidate. The meeting went well. I was invited to a taste-off at Mad 61, another Pino operation in the cellar of the uptown Barney's department store where, presumably, I would lead with my best shot: do everything I could to show the man I could cook.

  My fellow chef candidates, and some others already employed by Toscorp who were aiding and abetting the company-wide drive to come up with a menu for the new store, arrived with the usual, 'Look how pretty I can cook' stuff: swordfish tartare with avocado (!), California-inspired faux Tuscan updates, various ring-molded and squeeze-bottled presentations using expensive ingredients. I picked the cheapest, oiliest, and most unpopular fish I knew, one which I'd always liked, and suspected that Pino would like, too: the humble bluefish. I grilled it and added a warm potato and chorizo salad, topped with a little shaved fennel and red onion with mint and basil. Then a braised shoulder of lamb with Sicilian olives, rosemary and garlic on basil-mashed potatoes - as well as a giant raviolone of codfish brandade with crabmeat and lobster . . . just to play it safe. Pino smiled when he saw the bluefish, figuring that if nothing else, I had some balls on me.

  I got the job.

  Salary negotiations were brief. Pino asked me how much I wanted. I asked for a lot more than I thought I deserved. He suggested 5,000 less. That was still a number far, far higher than I had ever - or still, for that matter have - been paid. After leaving Pino's 59th Street offices, I walked on air over to the Oak Room and treated myself to a martini, my voice still too shaky to speak. When I finally managed to call my wife on the phone, I must have sounded like a breathless young girl: 'Dad! You'll never guess! He asked me to marry him!

  An announcement was made in the New York Times. I was introduced to the company publicist, asked to provide a bio, and my short but memorable adventure on Planet Pino had begun.

  In a subsequent meeting - and there would be many, as designing the new menu was a painstaking and tortuous affair - was informed that though I would be executive chef, my chef de cuisine (a ferret-like Italian) would fill in the obvious gaps in my knowledge of Tuscan cuisine and provide the sort of street-level, line-cooking, risotto-stirring experience I was lacking. It seemed like a reasonable idea. I could choose my own team of sous-chefs (two would be required) and cooks, but I had better do it fast, because Coco Pazzo Teatro was set to open in ten days. In that time, we would need a menu, equipment, and somewhere between twenty-five and thirty cooks - all of it ready for a celebrity-studded and media-scrutinized soft opening.

  It was my greatest, most frantic, madcap and mad-dash recruiting drive ever.

  First things first: I called Steven (my perennial sous-chef, but I'll get to him later) and excitedly told him to drop everything, because this was the Big One: the biggest break in our careers! Get over here fast, we need some bodies quickly! Look at this place, I told him, walking him through the rubble of the unfinished restaurant, showing him where the deck ovens and ranges would go, pointing out the tilting brazier, the steam kettle, the pasta machines, the ice-cream makers, the butcher station, the store rooms and offices - everything new and of the finest quality. We were given sixty grand to spend in the next few days, on pots, pans, blenders, beurre mixers, utensils and toys! And that wasn't counting the heavy equipment, which was already in the pipeline.

  Steven responded with his usual speed and skill, and became my sous-chef. Alfredo, let's call him, a nice, talented Colombian American from the Supper Club, came aboard as second sous. It was a race now. Gianni, at Le Madri, had taken one look at my chef de cuisine, shaken his head and warned, 'Watch out for dees guy. He'll stobb you inna back,' making a stabbing gesture as he said it.

  'What? What's his problem? 'He's Sicilian?' I asked jokingly, knowing Gianni's preference for all things Northern.

  'Worse,' said Gianni. 'He's from Naples'.

  I had yet to understand that I was surrounded by blue-eyed Northerners, people who felt that even I - though not Italian was still preferable to someone from the South. Shrewd, conspiratorial, absolutely obsessed with which way the tide was going, by who was in and who was out, and by the daily mood of our leader, some of these characters lived and breathed the kind of existence you'd expect of a Medici. These guys were good! Good at the politics and shifting alliances of a big, essentially Italian business, good at the kind of stuff I though I'd always been good at. They were expert at keeping the boss as happy as he needed to be, while at the same time deftly neutralizing potential competitors and detractors. I was in way over my head - and we're not even talking about my relative ignorance of the cuisine. This was a jungle that, however beautiful and exotic, was decidedly not my jungle.

  Gianni was right about everything, and perhaps I should have listened more carefully. But Pino - and I'm sorry to disappoint his enemies here - was always perfectly correct with me: charming,straightforward, generous and truthful. He never said he'd do a thing for me and then failed to do it. I
liked the guy, and if I bumped into him today, I'd say so. I liked that he could tell you all about exhaust fans, electrical outlets, point of sale and the history of pasta, that he knew everybody by name in all of his many restaurants, that he knew about the faulty compressor in the number two freezer in one of them, and that he could list every ingredient of every dish in every restaurant. He was on top of things - if relentlessly so. I had to respect that after working for so many knuckleheads over the years. Here was a guy who only a few years earlier had been a busboy, speaking only a few words of English, and now he ran an empire. Not too shabby. Admittedly, the atmosphere around his many functionaries and underlings was paranoid and conspiratorial. Fear, treachery, speculation, supposition and anticipation permeated the air. The pressure to perform at a high level was enormous. Everyone was very eager to please, the rewards being so potentially enormous, and the punishment for failure so sudden and final.

  My first mission was not only to hire twenty-five to thirty talented cooks, but to hire more of them than my chef de cuisine did. The idea was to pack my crew with as many loyalists - guys and girls who were answerable personally to me and who could be trusted to watch my back - as I could, before my chef de cuisine overloaded me with his people, folks who wouldn't tell me if my hair was on fire, much less that somebody was waiting in the wings with their knife out.

  Steven and I raped every kitchen we could think of. We stripped the Boathouse clean, lifting practically their whole line in one week, convincing many to leave without even giving notice. We pillaged other chefs' kitchens, sniffing around for the disgruntled, the underpaid, the unhappy, the susceptible and the ambitious. We conducted vast cattle calls, relay interviews, three or four of us at a time, simultaneously interviewing herds of applicants who'd answered our newspaper ads. The quality of applicant from these mass gatherings was discouraging; we managed to cull maybe two or three cooks from literally hundreds of illiterate loners, glue-sniffing fry cooks, and wack-jobs who'd never cooked professionally before. My chef de cuisine, on the other hand, was engaged in a similar recruiting drive, and to much better result. From Paglio and Torre de Pisa, both excellent Italian restaurants, he was peeling off some really superb Ecuadorian pasta, grill and saute cooks, largely people he'd worked with before. All of us were making enemies of many a restaurateur as we bribed, begged, cajoled and induced people to drop everything and come immediately to work for us. We knew, of course, that many of these cooks wouldn't work out, that we'd actually need more like forty cooks, figuring that in the first few weeks we'd have to winnow out the losers and still have some extra good ones in holding pattern. It was crazy and exciting and not good for any of our karmic account balances - but this was the big one, after all.