Kitchen Confidential
CHEF OF THE FUTURE!
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.