Given these perils . . . why? Why would anyone want to do it?
Inarguably, a successful restaurant demands that you live on the premises for the first few years, working seventeen-hour days, with total involvement in every aspect of a complicated, cruel and very fickle trade. You must be fluent in not only Spanish but the Kabbala-like intricacies of health codes, tax law, fire department regulations, environmental protection laws, building code, occupational safety and health regs, fair hiring practices, zoning, insurance, the vagaries and back-alley back-scratching of liquor licenses, the netherworld of trash removal, linen, grease disposal. And with every dime you've got tied up in your new place, suddenly the drains in your prep kitchen are backing up with raw sewage, pushing hundreds of gallons of impacted crap into your dining room; your coke-addled chef just called that Asian waitress who's working her way through law school a chink, which ensures your presence in court for the next six months; your bartender is giving away the bar to under-age girls from Wantagh, any one of whom could then crash Daddy's Buick into a busload of divinity students, putting your liquor license in peril, to say the least; the Ansel System could go off, shutting down your kitchen in the middle of a ten-thousand-dollar night; there's the ongoing struggle with rodents and cockroaches, any one of which could crawl across the Tina Brown four-top in the middle of the dessert course; you just bought 10,000 dollars-worth of shrimp when the market was low, but the walk-in freezer just went on the fritz and naturally it's a holiday weekend, so good luck getting a service call in time; the dishwasher just walked out after arguing with the busboy, and they need glasses now on table seven; immigration is at the door for a surprise inspection of your kitchen's Green Cards; the produce guy wants a certified check or he's taking back the delivery; you didn't order enough napkins for the weekend - and is that the New York Times reviewer waiting for your hostess to stop flirting and notice her?
I have met and worked for the one perfect animal in the restaurant jungle, a creature perfectly evolved for the requirements of surviving this cruel and unforgiving business, a guy who lives, breathes and actually enjoys solving little problems like the ones above. He is a man who loves the restrictions, the technical minutiae, the puzzling mysteries of the life as things to be conquered, outwitted, subjugated. He rarely invests his own money, but he always makes money for his partners. He never goes anywhere and never does anything except what he's good at, which is running restaurants. He's good. He's so good that to this day, more than ten years after I stopped working for the man, I still wake up every morning at five minutes of six, always before the alarm, and I'm never late to work. Why? Because to disappoint the man - not to live up to his shining example of total involvement would be, even now, treason to my trade. I became a real chef - meaning a person capable of organizing, operating and, most important, leading a kitchen - because of the man. He taught me everything really important I know about the business. He, more than anyone else I encountered in my professional life, transformed me from a bright but druggie fuck-up into a serious, capable and responsible chef. He made me a leader, the combination of good-guy bad-guy the job requires. He's the reason I am never off sick, go to sleep every night running tomorrow's prep lists and menus through my mind. He's also the reason I smoke three packs of cigarettes a day, and know everything there is to know about everyone I work with, why my purveyors cringe when they get my call, and why my wife has to remind me when I get home from work that she's my wife and not an employee.
Let's call him Bigfoot.
BIGFOOT
I FIRST MET BIGFOOT while still at CIA. He was then, and remains, a West Village legend, either loved or despised (and frequently both) by generations of bar customers, waiters, bartenders, cooks, chefs and restaurant lifers. I won't give his name, though everyone below 14th Street who reads this will know who I'm talking about. He'll certainly know. He'll call me.
'Hey, Flaco,' he'll say. He calls me Flaco to this day. There was already a Tony working for him when he took me on, and as Bigfoot likes an organized operation, he needed a distinct name for me. 'Flaco, I read your book . . .'
'Yess . . .' I'll respond, waiting for the shoe to drop.
'There's a typo,' he'll say. 'I don't know a lot about publishing, but . . . it seems to me that . . . maybe someone over there should know how to spell . . .'
Now, the first thing I heard about Bigfoot when I worked for him weekends back in the '70s was that 'he killed a guy'! Whether this is true or not, I have no idea. Though I like to consider him a friend and mentor, we have never discussed it and I have heard, over the years, so many versions from so many unreliable people that I can't vouch for the veracity of even that simple statement. But the point is that this was the first thing I heard about him. That he had killed a guy with his bare hands. And Bigfoot, as you might imagine, is big. As he likes to describe himself, 'a big, fat, balding, red-faced Jewboy', which is typically a less than completely fair description. Bigfoot is not an unattractive guy - he looks like an elongated Bruce Willis - but he is over 6 foot 4, an ex-college basketball player, with enormous hands, strong shoulders and arms and deceptively quizzical eyes. He likes to play dumb - loves to play dumb - and like a sunbathing crocodile, when he makes his move, it's way too late.
'You know . . .' he'd say, 'I'm not a chef. . . and I don't know a lot about food, or cooking . . . so I don't know how to make, say . . . guacamole.' Then he'd shred my recipe and any illusions I might have about him not knowing anything about food, breaking down that preparation ingredient by ingredient, gram by gram, and showing how it could be done faster, better, cheaper. Of course he knew how to make guacamole! He knows to the atom how much of each ingredient goes in for how much eventual yield. He knows where to get the best avocados cheapest, how to ripen them, store them, sell them, merchandize them. He also knows how much fillet you get off every fish that swims, keeps a book on every cook who works for him with their individual yield averages for each and every fish they ever cut for him - so he knows, when Tony puts a knife to, say, a striped bass, exactly how many portions Tony is likely to get compared to the other cooks. Tony averages 62.5 percent usable yield on red snapper, and Mike averages 62.7 . . . so maybe Mike should cut that fish. As an ex-jock, Bigfoot likes scrupulous stats.
Cunning, manipulative, brilliant, mercurial, physically intimidating-even terrifying - a bully, a yenta, a sadist and a mensch: Bigfoot is all those things. He's also the most stand-up guy I ever worked for. He inspires a strange and consuming loyalty. I try, in my kitchen, to be just like him. I want my cooks to have me inside their heads just like Bigfoot remains in mine. I want them to think that, like Bigfoot, when I look into their eyes, I see right into their very souls.
My first night working for Bigfoot - a man I knew nothing of other than the rumor, and the fact that everyone appeared terrified of him - I knocked a few hundred meals out of his cramped kitchen, finished the evening feeling discouraged, exhausted and resigned never to work in his claustrophobic galley again. But the intercom at the bar rang as I was preparing to slink away, and the bartender gave me a curious look and told me, 'Bigfoot wants you downstairs in the office.' Downstairs, in Bigfoot's lair, the big man looked up at me, complimented me on a fine job, and picking up the phone, summoned a waiter with two snifters of brandy. 'We are pleased with the job you did for us this evening,' he began (Bigfoot loves to use 'we' when talking about the management of his restaurants, though in his domain there is never any 'we'). 'And we'd like you to stay on with us - if that's agreeable. Saturday nights . . . and Sunday brunches.' I can't adequately describe the gratification I felt at having pleased the imposing Bigfoot. Though we quickly agreed that he'd be paying me only 40 bucks a shift, I felt, going home that night, like a million. Bigfoot, you see, had purchased my soul for a snifter of Spanish brandy.
I was not alone in handing over my soul to the man. He retained, among other deeply flawed outcasts who'd inexplicably sworn loyalty oaths and joined up for the duration, a Preside
ntial Guard of blue-uniformed porters whom he had personally trained in the manly arts of refrigeration repair, plumbing, basic metal work, glazing, electrical repair and maintenance. In addition to the usual tasks of cleaning, mopping, toilet-plunging and porter work, Bigfoot porters could lay tile, dig out a foundation, build you a lovely armoire or restore a used reach-in refrigerator to factory specs. Nothing pissed off Bigfoot more than having to pay some high-priced specialist for a job he thought he should be able to do himself.
One day I was sitting at the bar, enjoying an after-work drink, when Bigfoot approached and began giving me an uncharacteristic shoulder massage. I thought this a remarkably kind gesture until he told me that his Presidential Guard was at that moment downstairs tackling the difficult problem of repairing a city-owned sewage pipe. The problem had occurred directly below our walk-in. In typical fashion, Bigfoot had induced his Mexican disciples to hammer straight down through 2 feet of concrete, then, like Colditz escapees, tunnel 25 feet through waste-sodden earth beneath the walk-in, and make a hard-left turn to the site of the break. The big hands gently squeezing my shoulders were trying to determine whether I was thin enough to wriggle around the tight corner - through mud and shit - to help the porters, apparently too well fed to fit.
I couldn't hold it against him for trying. 'That's not my job' was not in the Bigfoot phrase book. Toilet overflows while the chef is at hand? He's going right in with a plunger, and fast. No waiting for the toilet guy - he is the toilet guy now. In Bigfoot's army, you fight for the cause, anywhere you are needed. If it's slow in the kitchen, you pick an old saute pan and scrub the carbon off the bottom. Genteel sensibilities are unwelcome. Lead, follow . . . or get out of the way.
I worked for Bigfoot part-time while I attended CIA, and years later - over ten years later - I washed up on his shores again. It was a low point in my career. I was burnt out from my five-year run in the restaurant netherworld as a not very good chef - in rehab for heroin, still doing cocaine, broke - and reduced to working brunches at a ridiculous mom and pop restaurant in SoHo where they served lion, tiger, hippopotamus braciole and other dead zoo animals. I was determined never to be a chef again, sickened by my last gargantuan operation: a three-kitchen Italian place in the South Street Seaport, where I seemed to have spent most of my time as a convenient hatchet man, waking up every morning with the certain knowledge that today I'd be firing someone again . . . I was spent, desperate, unhappy, with a negligible-to-bad rep, in general a Person Not To Be Hired Or Trusted, when Bigfoot called looking for someone to cook lunches at his new saloon/bistro on 10th Street.
We met, and I must have looked like a rhesus monkey - the one in the perils-of-freebase commercial, cornered up a tree, shunned by his monkey pals, exhibiting erratic, paranoid and hostile behavior. I was rail-thin, shaky, and the first thing I did was ask my old pal Bigfoot if he could lend me 25 bucks until payday. Without hesitation, he reached in his pocket and lent me 200 - a tremendous leap of faith on his part. Bigfoot hadn't laid eyes on me in over a decade. Looking at me, and hearing the edited-for-television version of what I'd been up to in recent years, he must have had every reason to believe I'd disappear with the two bills, spend it on crack, and never show up for my first shift. And if he'd given me the 25 instead of 200, that might well have happened. But as so often happens with Bigfoot, his trust was rewarded. I was so shaken by his baseless trust in me that such a cynical bastard as Bigfoot would make such a gesture - that I determined I'd sooner gnaw my own fingers off, gouge my eyes out with a shellfish fork, rub shit in my hair and run naked down Seventh Avenue than ever betray that trust.
There was order in my life again. In Bigfootland you showed up for work fifteen minutes before your shift. Period. Two minutes late? You lose the shift and are sent home. If you're on the train and it looks like it's running late? You get off the train at the next stop, inform Bigfoot of your pending lateness, and then get back on the next train. It's okay to call Bigfoot and say, 'Bigfoot, I was up all night smoking crack, sticking up liquor stores, drinking blood and worshipping Satan . . . I'm going to be a little late.' That's acceptable - once in a very great while. But after showing up late, try saying (even if true), 'Uh . . . Bigfoot, I was on the way to work and the President's limo crashed right next to me . . . and I had to pull him out of the car, give him mouth-to-mouth . . . and like I saved the leader of the free world, man!' You, my friend, are fired.
I fondly recall how once, after a long-time waitress arrived back late from vacation, claiming her flight arrived fifteen minutes after scheduled time, Bigfoot called the airport to check her story and then fired her for lying. Treating Bigfoot like an idiot was always a big mistake. He lived for that. In the man's three or so decades in the life, he'd seen and heard every scam, every bullshit story, every trick, deception, ploy and gag that ever existed or that a human mind could conceive - and was always happy to prove that to anyone foolish enough to try. If Bigfoot asked you a question, and you didn't know the answer, he always preferred an 'I dunno' to a long-winded series of qualified statements, speculation and half-truths. You kept Bigfoot informed of your movements. He would never allow himself to fall victim to 'manager's syndrome' - constantly watching the clock, wondering if and when his employees were going to show up. Where Bigfoot ruled, he knew when they were showing up: fifteen minutes before start of shift. That's when.
Bigfoot understood - as I came to understand - that character is far more important than skills or employment history. And he recognized character - good and bad - brilliantly. He understood, and taught me, that a guy who shows up every day on time, never calls in sick, and does what he said he was going to do, is less likely to fuck you in the end than a guy who has an incredible resume but is less than reliable about arrival time. Skills can be taught. Character you either have or don't have. Bigfoot understood that there are two types of people in the world: those who do what they say they're going to do - and everyone else. He'd lift ex-junkie sleazeballs out of the gutter and turn them into trusted managers, guys who'd kill themselves rather than misuse one thin dime of Bigfoot receipts. He'd get Mexicans right off the boat, turn them into solid citizens with immigration lawyers, nice incomes and steady employment. But if Bigfoot calls them at four in the morning, wanting them to put in a rooftop patio, they'd better be prepared to roll out of bed and get busy quarrying limestone.
Purveyors hated his guts. They'd peel the labels off the cartons they delivered, out of fear that Bigfoot would simply cut out the middleman and order directly from the source. He was an expert in equipment. I recall him getting a leasing company to guarantee a certain number of cubic feet of ice production from a machine he was contracting for. Two minutes after signing, he had his Presidential Guard measuring and weighing ice. When it turned out that the machine fell short by a few pounds or cubic feet, Bigfoot found himself with two new ice machines for the price of one. He loved playing purveyors against each other, driving the price down. Every once in a while, if a meat company, say, promised him the lowest price they could give, he'd have someone call them up, pretending to be their largest account - a 300-seat steakhouse, for instance - and ask for a copy of their last invoice, as theirs had gone missing; could they please fax another one? God help the poor meat guys if Peter Luger was paying two cents less a pound than Bigfoot was.
Nothing made him happier than discovering fraud or deception or even a simple white lie. Once, after years of ordering frozen Bee Gee shrimp from a reputable seafood purveyor, Bigfoot discovered a hastily applied label indicating net weight. When it peeled off, he realized the company had, for years, been printing their own fake labels, heat-sealing them over the actual weight printed on the box, and cheating him out of a few ounces of shrimp every 5 pounds. Next time the company sent Bigfoot a bill, he simply sent them a Polaroid photo of the incriminating box, label peeling off to reveal actual weight. And the next time too. And for almost a year after, Bigfoot didn't pay for fish. He never discussed it with the company - and t
hey never said a word. They just kept sending him free fish until they figured all that retroactive skim was paid back. When Bigfoot finally stopped ordering altogether they didn't wonder why.
Bigfoot paid his purveyors on time - religiously - a very unusual thing to do in a business where a restaurateur's real partners, more often than not, are the suppliers who send him food and material on credit. Given this, pity the poor soul who sent Bigfoot a second-best piece of swordfish.
'What is it?' he'd tell them on the phone, playing the confused dumbo for a while before the metal jaws clamped shut. 'I don't pay quickly enough to get the good stuff? Is there something wrong with my business that you want to send me garbage? Or is it that I'm stupid? Maybe my stupidity makes you figure, well . . . that I want the kind of shit you send me. Or maybe . . . I am stupid . . . maybe I can't recognize fresh fish . . . maybe this smelly piece of shit is really fresh . . . and I just . . . can't recognize it. Maybe I've encouraged you somehow . . . to inconvenience me and my customers. Maybe you could explain to me . . . because I'm having a problem . . . you know . . . figuring it out . . . because I'm so stupid. Or maybe . . . maybe you're just really really rich guys and you don't need my business at all. Things are going so well for you . . . 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.