Kitchen Confidential

  When I wasn't conducting clandestine meetings in the parking lots of restaurants and smoky Irish bars with potential job applicants, or helping out Gianni at Le Madri, or sorting through truckloads of incoming equipment, I was meeting with Pino and his executive chef of Toscorp: the warm and wise Marta Pulini, a tiny, talented, fiftyish one-time contessa. We would meet in the kitchen of Mad 61 or in the offices of Toscorp on 59th Street, fine-tuning the menu, taste-testing, poring over menu copy and haggling over prices. Originally, the idea was that the Coco Pazzo Teatro menu would be 'fun' and 'theatrical', and described in defiant English on the menu, regardless of its country of origin. Center stations had been constructed in the dining room at Teatro where food from the kitchen would be 'finished' on futuristic induction burners, carved or taken off the bone if necessary, and presented tableside by rigorously trained and designer-outfitted waitrons.

  Every week, before and after Coco finally opened, there would be a regular chefs' meeting in a conference room at the Toscorp offices. If I was the last to arrive at a meeting, the conversation would frequently change suddenly from Italian to English. The Coco opening was still a few days away when, in the middle of a chefs' meeting - probably a conversation about whose dry aged #109 rib was better, De Bragga or Master Purveyors, or whether we could all agree on a single olive oil so we could get a better price (we couldn't) - Pino suddenly stuck his head round the door and said ominously, 'Anthony, could I see you a minute?'

  The mood in the room was one of tangible relief. Beads of sweat had sprouted on many a forehead as the other chefs realized what a close call it had been, that it might have been them summoned without warning to the inner sanctum, for a private and serious discussion with the ultimate leader. I stood up, puzzled, and left the room to meet in camera with Pino.

  He led me to his office, closed the door, sat back on his comfortable-looking couch and threw one leg over the other.

  'Anthony, do you have any . . . enemies?' he asked.

  'Huh?' I stammered unintelligently, not having any idea what he could be talking about.

  'I received a call,' he began slowly. 'Someone . . . someone who . . . doesn't like you, who saw the Times notice . . . Have you been stealing sous-chefs?'

  'I . . . I . . . no! . . . I don't know.' I managed to squeak, my voice constricting with terror.

  'They say . . . this person says you are stealing sous-chefs. That you are . . . a pothead. Who,' he mused, inquisitively, 'who could hate you that much?'

  I was completely thrown. I denied, flat out, stealing any sous-chefs - though, of course I'd been stealing every goddamn cook and dishwasher I could lay my hands on. Later, much later, I recalled, during one of the cattle calls, hearing an applicant for a floor job mention her boyfriend was a sous-chef, and at a restaurant I knew. The chef there was someone I thought to be an utter prick, and I might have said something about why don't you have him give me a call. There might have been some inappropriate ex parte communications between my representative(Steven) and this person. And I later found out that the sous-chef in question had simply used our presumed interest in his services to jack up his current chef for a fat and not easily afforded raise. But at the time, all I was thinking in Pino's dimly lit private office was that my Great Opportunity was slipping away fast - and before I'd even gotten started.

  I was completely flummoxed, but I did manage to assure Pino, truthfully, that as far as pot or drugs were concerned, that would never be an issue, we would never have to have that conversation. He waved the matter off, boring in more on who could hate me so much as to find out his private number, take the time and energy to call him up and badmouth me, hoping to torpedo my Great Opportunity. I couldn't think of anyone.

  Pino suddenly smiled warmly. He looked . . . well. . . pleased.

  'You know, Anthony,' he said, 'I have many, many enemies. It's good, sometimes, to have enemies - even if you don't know who they are. It means you are . . . important. You must be important. . . important enough to have an enemy.' He clapped me on the back on the way out the door. I was thoroughly charmed - if damn near shattered by the experience.

  In the opening weeks at Coco Pazzo Teatro, I lost 11 pounds. These were not pounds I had to spare, I'm a bony, whippet-thin, gristly, tendony strip of humanity, and after two weeks running up and down the steps at Teatro from prep kitchen to a la carte kitchen - like some hyperactive forest ranger, always trying to put out brush fires in order to avoid actual conflagrations - I looked as if I'd been breathing pure crack in some VC tiger cage for the last ten years. I had twenty-five cooks, plus dishwashers, porters, visiting specialists, moonlighting pasta makers, managers, assistant managers, waiters, runners and other entities to contend with, deal with, schedule and replace. The New York Times reviewer had already been in; we had someone who knew her by appearance staked out at the door full-time, just to be ready. Celebrities, friends of the house and Pino himself were all dropping in at all hours. The cooks worked entirely on a call system - no printed-out dupes - and managing the crew alone was a full-time job. My second sous, Alfredo, was already on the verge of cracking under the pressure.

  'They don't respect me,' he complained of the Ecuadorian line cooks. 'Tell them! Tell them I can fire them if I want to.' This was not what I was looking for in a sous-chef. If the cooks were giving him attitude, my telling them that the guy could fire them was not going to make them respect him. The fact that Alfredo, alone among all of us, wore a big, floppy chef's hat on his head (made all the more ridiculous by his limited height) didn't help, nor did the fact that he was a rather proud Colombian. The Ecuadorians hated him and razzed him at every opportunity. When he began mulling aloud the possibility that maybe I should just put him back on the line and forget about all this sous-chef stuff, I promptly rescheduled him. He ended up bursting into tears and going over my head to the oily general manager, begging for his job back. I was appalled at this ultimate betrayal and reluctantly reinstated him, swallowing a poison pill I knew in the end would help kill me. This was a good friend and a good cook, whom I've never hired again. It's a measure of what pressure can do - and did - to both of us.

  The restaurant itself was beautiful. Randy Gerber's Whiskey Bar was right next door, the outer space-style lobby of the Paramount could be reached through a side door in the dining room, and the walls were done in Morandi-inspired murals, warm Tuscan colors against blond, unfinished wood. The waiters dressed like Vatican Guards. But the most truly amazing feature of my temporary kingdom was to be found deep in the bowels of the Paramount Hotel, through twisting catacomb-like service passageways adjoining our downstairs prep kitchen. If one squeezed past the linen carts and discarded mattresses and bus trays from the hotel, and followed the waft of cold, dank air to its source, one came upon a truly awe-inspiring sight: the long-forgotten Diamond Horseshoe, Billy Rose's legendary New York nightclub, closed for generations. The space was gigantic, an underground Temple of Luxor, one huge, uninterrupted space. The vaulted ceiling was still decorated with Renaissance-style chandeliers and elaborate plasterwork. The original rhinestone-aproned stage, where Billy Rose's famously zaftig chorus line once kicked, was still there, and the giant space where the horseshoe-shaped bar once stood was empty, the floorboards torn up. Around the edges of the cavernous chamber were the remnants of private booths and banquettes where Legs Diamond and Damon Runyon and Arnold Roth stein and gangsters, showgirls, floozies and celebrities - the whole Old Broadway demi-monde of the Winchell era - used to meet and greet and make deals, place bets, listen to the great singers of the time and get up to all sorts of glamorous debauchery. The sheer size, and the fact that you had to slip through a roughly smashed-in wall to enter the chamber, made the visitor feel he was gazing upon ancient Troy for the first time.

  Upstairs, in the real world, however, things were going quickly sour.

  I was, I'm telling you for the record, unqualified for the job. I was in deep waters and fast-flowing ones at that. The currents could change at
any time, without warning. One day, I attended a chefs' committee meeting on the East Side and returned to find that the whole menu had been changed back into Italian! This included the listings on the computer, so that when I expedited that evening, I found myself in the unenviable position of having to read off items in Italian, translate them into English in my head, and call them out to my Ecuadorian crew in Spanish. I had to learn some fast mnemonic tricks to keep up, like: 'I want to Lambada - just for the Halibut,' so that I would remember that lambatini was Italian for halibut, or 'I fucka you in the liver' to recall that 'fegato' meant liver.

  I worked seventeen hours a day, seven days a week, surrounded by a front-of-the-house crew who'd been, for the most part, with the company a long time, and were fiercely dedicated to all things Pino. They were so gung-ho in their ambitions, or so frightened of failing, that they'd cheerfully drag a knife across your throat if you so much as dropped a fork. The GM was an over groomed tall blond northern Italian, an unctuous and transparently duplicitous cheerleader who was always urging his terrorized waiters to 'smile' and 'have fun' - while he calmly planned their imminent termination. This was a guy who would daily invite me over to the Whiskey Bar, supposedly to discuss strategy, buy me a drink, and then make repeated overtures about how we were a great 'team' and how 'we' were going to 'work together' against 'the others' - while all along he was doubtless dishing me as an alcoholic rube. I suspect that I was providing a valuable service to him on these trips - by providing official cover for his own need of a strong drink.

  I soon found myself paralyzed by it all. I was just too tired and too confused and too spiritually empty to move this way or that. There was always something that needed doing, and none of it pleasant. Then sudden austerity measures required that I begin laying off crew and working line shifts in addition to my other duties (which I was having a hard time with already). Poor Steven and I were firing people whom, only a few weeks earlier, we had lured away from good-paying jobs - so many of them that often Steven would be letting somebody go in one room while I demolished someone's life in another. Each firing, each incident, each accident then had to be recorded on an appropriate form for the truly vapid director of human resources, who rambled on earnestly in New Agey patter about self-actualization and job satisfaction and fairness in hiring and appropriate down time - when she knew that the whole business rested firmly on the backs of a mob of underpaid, overworked and underfed (ten minutes for chicken leg, penne and salad, every single day, lunch and dinner) Ecuadorians of dubious legal status. Listening to this witless, hypocrite ramble on as if we all worked for Ben and Jerry rather than the realpolitik Kissingeresque Pino was to dream of smacking her stupid face with a pepper-mill, give her something to write about.

  At one point, near the end, Steven and Alfredo, both reaching the end of their ropes as well, summoned me for a quiet word at a nearby bar, Scruffy Duffy's.

  'They're gonna screw you, man,' they said. 'You gotta do something. You're fucking up! They're gonna get you!'

  By this time I was thoroughly wiped out.

  'Guys, I know, believe me . . . I know. But I'm not prepared to do any better than I'm doing now. I'm going on all eight cylinders, I'm doing the best I can, and I know I'm gonna get fucked sooner or later. When it happens it happens. I'm not prepared to anything I'm not doing already. Sorry.'

  When Mad 61 suddenly and unexpectedly closed, supposedly the result of a pissing contest between Pino and the Barney's owners, the Pressmans, I knew my goose was cooked. More as an academic exercise than out of real interest, I inquired of the reptilian GM and my chef de cuisine what they thought would happen here, now that there were fifty or so longtime loyalists footloose and fancy free and looking for work elsewhere in the company. I knew the answer, of course; I just wanted to see if they'd lie to my face. They didn't disappoint me.

  A bunch of us went out for drinks one night and I found myself among a party of eight, all of whom knew that of which I had yet to be informed: namely that I would be asked to step down, to work with the nauseating and sadistic little creep who was my chef de cuisine. (I caught him constantly hitting the Ecuadorians on the shoulder, them not knowing whether to take it as a joke or not, and immediately I offered a bounty of five dollars for every time one of them hit him back.)

  The next night, at the end of the shift, the GM had a martini waiting for me at the bar. I knew it was over. He began, elegantly couching his words in all sorts of qualifiers, yammering on about redeployment, unfelt and insincere praise for my work etcetera. I quickly cut him off. I'd injured my thumb earlier, and in spite of a butterfly closure and three layers of bandage, it just wouldn't stop bleeding; blood drained onto my pants leg as he talked, fell on the floor in big noisy droplets.

  'Just cut the shit and tell me what you have to,' I said. 'Am I canned or what?'

  'No, no . . . of course not,' he said, flashing a mouthful of pearly-white teeth at me, 'We'd like you to stay on - as chef de cuisine.' I declined his offer, packed up my stuff and went immediately home where I slept, nearly without interruption, for three and a half straight days and nights.

  There is little I miss about the experience at Coco Pazzo Teatro. I do miss the food: strawberries macerated with balsamic vinegar, sugar and a little mint, Patti Jackson's wonderful watermelon parfait, the incredible focaccia, robiola and white truffle pizza, the carta di musica flat bread, served with sea salt and olive oil, the homemade pasta and freshly made tomato sauces.

  And I think fondly of Pino, the times I sat at the table with him and some of his other chefs, sampling food, each taking a bite and passing to the left. I miss hearing him regale us with stories of his first few years in America, his difficulties and pleasures, and I think fondly of his enthusiasm for food, the food he ate as a little boy in Italy - the squid and octopus and mackerel and sardines - a time and place far from the life he lives now: the sharp-cut suits, cellphones and fancy chauffeur-driven cars, the attendants and supplicants. Despite all the things that some chefs who've been through Pino's wringer have to say about him much of it undoubtedly true - I owe him a big one. He taught me to love Italian food. To know it a little. He taught me, by extension, how to cook pasta, really cook pasta, and how to manage three or four ingredients in a noble, pure and unaffected way. He also taught me to watch my back better, and to make the most of my opportunities. I picked up a slew of recipes and techniques that I use to this day.

  And I owe him something else, for which I am grateful, as I am to my old chef de cuisine, too. I amassed a lot of phone numbers in my brief time at Coco Pazzo Teatro and at Le Madri: some very fine Ecuadorian talent.

  The next job I landed, I peeled off some of the best cooks in his organization. They are close pals and valued associates to this day.

  DESSERT

  A DAY IN THE LIFE

  THANKS TO MY BIGFOOT training I wake up automatically at five minutes before six. It's still dark, and I lie in bed in the pitch-black for a while, smoking, the day's specials and prep lists already coming together in my head. It's Friday, so the weekend orders will be coming in: twenty-five cases of mesclun, eighteen cases of GPOD 70-count potatoes, four whole forequarters of lamb, two cases of beef tenderloins, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of meat, bones, produce, seafood, dry goods and dairy. I know what's coming, and the general order in which it will probably arrive, so I'm thinking triage - sorting out in my head what gets done first, and by whom, and what gets left until later.

  As I brush my teeth, turn on the shower, swallow my first couple of aspirin of the day, I'm reviewing what's still kicking around in my walk-in from previous days, what I have to unload, use in specials, merchandize. I hear the coffee grinder going, so Nancy is awake, which leaves me only a few more minutes of undisturbed reflection on food deployment before I have to behave like a civilian for a few minutes.

  I watch the local news and weather with my wife, noting, for professional reasons, any major sporting events, commuter traffic and, most important,
the weekend weather forecast. Nice crisp weather and no big games? That means we're going to get slammed tonight. That means I won't come crawling home until close to midnight. By now, half-watching the tube, and half listening to Nancy, I'm fine-tuning the specials in my head: grill station will be too busy for any elaborate presentations or a special with too many pans involved, so I need something quick, simple and easily plated - and something that will be popular with the weekend rubes. The people coming to dinner tonight and Saturday night are different from the ones who eat at my restaurant during the week, and I have to take this into account. Saddle of wild hare stuffed with foiegras is not a good weekend special, for instance. Fish with names unrecognizable to the greater part of the general public won't sell. The weekend is a time for buzzwords: items like shrimp, lobster, T-bone, crabmeat, tuna and swordfish. Fortunately, I've got some hamachi tuna coming in, always a crowd-pleaser.