I remember now, from a distance, my earlier, dumber self, watching Emeril hawking toothpaste (and, later, Rachael endorsing Dunkin’ Donuts and Ritz Crackers) and gaping, uncomprehending, at the screen, wondering, “Why would anybody making the millions and millions of bucks these guys are making endorse some crap for a few million more? I mean…surely there’s some embarrassment to putting your face next to Dunkin’ Donuts—what with so many kids watching your shows—and Type 2 diabetes exploding like it is…Surely there’s a line not to be crossed at any price for these people, right?”
Later, I asked exactly that question of my fellow chefs—backstage at Top Chef one evening, while waiting for the camera crew to set up for the next shot. I was talking with two chefs far more talented, far more creative—and more accomplished than I had ever been—guys with (unlike me) actual reputations to lose. Where does one draw the line, I asked of them? I mean…there they were, avidly comparing notes on which airlines gave you more free miles in return for “menu consultation,” which products were offering what moneys—and at no point was either of them saying about any particular product: “Burger King…not ever…no WAY!” or, after considering the question for a moment, “Okay. Mmmm. Lemme think. Astro-Glide? No. I don’t care how much money they’re offering. I ain’t endorsing that!” Like I said, I asked, “Where. Exactly. Is the line for you guys?”
The two of them looked at me like I had a vestigial twin hanging from my neck. Pityingly. They actually mocked me.
“Are you asking, ‘How much would I have to pay you to taste a booger?’” said one, as if talking to a child. The two of them resumed their conversation, comparing soft-drink money to frozen pasta dinners, as if I were no longer there. This, clearly, was a conversation for grown-ups, and they considered me too clueless, too dumb, too unsophisticated about the world to be included in the discussion.
They were right. What was I talking about anyway?
The notion of “selling out” is such a quaint one, after all. At what point exactly does one really sell out? To the would-be anarchist—invariably a white guy in dreadlocks, talking about forming a band and “keepin’ it real” while waiting for Mom and Dad to send a check—selling out is getting a job.
Certainly, anytime anyone gets up in the morning earlier than one would like, drags oneself across town to do things one wouldn’t ordinarily do in one’s leisure time for people one doesn’t particularly like—that would be selling out, whether that activity involves working in a coal mine, heating up macaroni and cheese at Popeye’s, or giving tug jobs to strangers in the back of a strip club. To my mind, they are all morally equivalent. (You do what you’ve got to do to get by.) While there is a certain stigma attached to sucking the cocks of strangers—because, perhaps, of particularly Western concepts of intimacy and religion—how different, how much worse, or more “wrong,” is it than plunging toilets, hosing down a slaughterhouse floor, burning off polyps, or endorsing Diet Coke? Who—given more options, better choices—would do any of those things?
Who in this world gets to do only what they want—and what they feel consistent with their principles—and get paid for it?
Well…I guess, me—until recently.
But wait. The second I sat down for an interview, or went out on the book tour to promote Kitchen Confidential…surely that was kind of selling out, right? I didn’t know Matt Lauer or Bryant Gumbel or any of these people. Why was I suddenly being nice to them? In what way was I different than a common whore, spending minutes, hours, eventually weeks of my rapidly waning life making nice to people I didn’t even know? You fuck somebody for money, it’s cash on the barrel. You pick up the money, you go home, you take a shower, and it’s gone—presumably having used as much emotional investment as a morning dump. But what about week after week of smiling, nodding your head, pretending to laugh, telling the same stories, giving the same answers as if they’d just—only now—occurred to you for the first time?
Who’s the ho now? Me. That’s who.
Jesus—I would have given Oprah a back rub and a bikini wax, had she asked me when her people called. Fifty-five thousand copies a minute—every minute Oprah’s talking about your book (according to industry legend)? I know few authors who wouldn’t. So I guess I knew—even back then—what my price was.
There’s that old joke, I’ve referred to it before, where the guy at the bar asks the girl if she’d fuck him for a million dollars—and she thinks about it and finally replies, “Well, I guess for a million dollars, yeah…” At which point he quickly offers her a dollar for the same service. “Fuck you!” she says, declining angrily. “You think I’d fuck you for a dollar? What do you think I am?” To which the guy says, “Well…we’ve already established you’re a whore. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”
It’s a crude, hateful, sexist wheezer of a joke—but it’s as applicable to men as to women. To chefs as to any other craftsmen, artists, or laborers.
What was my problem with my peers—no, my betters—grabbing the endorsement dollars left and right: the branded pots and pans, kitchen utensils, ghostwritten cookbooks, commercials for boil-in-a-bag dinners, toaster ovens, California raisins? I’d turned them all down.
I’d deluded myself for the longest time that there was…“integrity” involved…or something like that. But as soon as I became a daddy, I knew better.
I’d just been haggling over the price.
There’d never been any question of integrity—or ethics—or anything like that…For fuck’s sake, I’d stolen money from old ladies, sold my possessions on a blanket on the street for crack, hustled bad coke and bad pills, and done far worse in my life.
I started asking people about this. I needed guidance from people who’d been navigating these murky waters for years.
Among the more illuminating and poignant explanations, one came from—of all people—Emeril. We were guest hosts/roasters at a charity roast of a mutual friend, Mario Batali. In a quiet moment between dick jokes, we talked, as we sometimes do, me asking with genuine curiosity why he continued to do it. He was, at the time, being treated very shabbily by the Food Network—I could see that he’d been hurt by it—and I asked him why he gave a fuck. “You’ve got a large, well-respected restaurant empire…the cookbooks…the cookware line”—which is actually pretty high-quality stuff—“presumably you’ve got plenty of loot. Why go on? Why even care about television anymore—that silly show, the hooting audience of no-necked strangers? If I was you,” I went on, “it would take people two weeks to reach me on the phone…I’d be so far off the fucking grid, you’d never see me in shoes again…I’d live in a sarong somewhere where nobody would ever find me—all this? It would be a distant memory.”
He didn’t elaborate. He smiled tolerantly, then began listing the number of children, ex-wives, employees (in the hundreds) working for Emeril Inc., establishing for me in quick, broad—and slightly sad—strokes the sheer size of the Beast that had to be fed every day in order for him to be Responsible Emeril—and do right by all the people who’d helped him along the way and who now relied on him, in one form or another, for their living. His success had become an organic, ever-expanding thing, growing naturally larger, as it had to, for to shrink—or even stay the same—would be to die.
Mario has twelve restaurants and counting, watch and clog endorsements, the cookware, the books, the bobblehead doll, NASCAR affiliation, and God knows what else—nothing ever seems to be enough for the man. Above and beyond the fact that he raises millions of dollars for various charities—including his own—he’s clearly not in it for the money. Always expanding, always starting new partnerships, trying new concepts. In Mario’s case, I think, it’s about ego—and the fact that he’s got a restless mind. It’s not, and never was, enough—or even interesting—to Batali to make money. If that had been the case, he’d have never opened Babbo (or Casa Mono, or Del Posto, or Otto, or Esca); he’d have opened his version of Mario’s Old Spaghetti Factories, coast to co
ast—and been swimming in a sea of cash by now. No.
Mario, I know for a fact, likes to swing by each of his New York restaurants at the end of the night and take a look at the receipts. He’s excited by the details. He gets off on successfully filling a restaurant that everyone said was doomed, of bringing the food cost below 20 percent. He likes to do the difficult thing, the dangerous thing—like take a gamble that what America needs and wants right now is ravioli filled with calf brains, or pizza topped with pork fat. For Mario, I’m quite certain, to be ten times richer—twenty times—and NOT take crazy-ass chances on restaurant concepts that no one ever expressed a desire for would mean to expire from boredom.
All Mario enterprises are coproductions. Every restaurant begins with an alliance, a moment of truth, where Don Mario evaluates the creativity and character of another person, looks into their heart, and makes a very important decision. In this way, the success or failure of whatever venture he’s embarked on is already determined long before he opens the door. So it’s never just business. It’s always, always, personal.
Thomas Keller and Daniel Boulud—both with successful, revered, and respected mother-ship restaurants, have talked at various times about the necessity of holding on to talented people; the need to grow with the talents, experience, and ambitions of loyal chefs de cuisine, sous-chefs, and other longtime employees who want and deserve to move up or to have “their own thing.” It becomes a simple matter of expand—or lose them.
To some extent, I suspect, what is often the French Michelin star model might be at work here as well: the three-star chef ’s mother ship simply doesn’t and can’t ever make as much money as his more casual bistros or brasseries. (Those end up, in very real ways, subsidizing the more luxurious original—or, at the very least, offering a comfortable cushion should costs at the higher-end place rise or revenues decline. You can’t start laying off cooks at a three-star every time you have a bad week.)
Gordon Ramsay is maybe the most classic example of the force that keeps well-known chefs constantly, even manically, expanding. In Ramsay’s case, multiple television shows on both sides of the Atlantic coincide with a huge worldwide expansion of hotel-based restaurants. He already has the most successful cooking-competition show on TV with Hell’s Kitchen. He is a millionaire many, many times over, and yet he keeps expanding—to his eventual peril (the twelve restaurants he opened in the last few years have yet to turn a profit). No matter what your opinion of Ramsay’s food, or his awful but wildly popular hit show, or his much better Kitchen Nightmares on the BBC, there is no denying that he is a workaholic. There don’t seem to be enough hours in the day to contain his various endeavors and enterprises, and yet he goes on.
In Gordon’s case, one need only look at his childhood—as described in his autobiography. He grew up poor, constantly on the move, with an untrustworthy and unreliable dreamer of a father. No sooner had his family settled than they would have to move again—often one step ahead of the debt collectors. You know What Makes Gordon Run.
Very likely, an impulse similar to that of his onetime mentor and sometimes nemesis, Marco Pierre White. Whatever riches they may have acquired or may yet acquire, there is and always will be the lingering and deeply felt suspicion that come tomorrow, it will all be gone. No amount is enough or will ever be enough, because deep in the bone they know that the bastards could come knocking at any minute and take it all away.
David Chang, whose crazy-ass pony ride to the top of the heap has just begun, feels, I suspect, all of the above motivations: a deadly combination of too few seats at his high-end standard-bearer restaurant, an ever-increasing number of talented loyalists, and a feeling that he’ll never be truly good enough at anything.
And then, of course, there’s the example of the iconic French Michelin-starred chef, one of the most celebrated and well represented (by sheer number of restaurants) in the world, who, in my presence, said simply:
“Enough bullshit. It’s time to make money.”
It was vanity that had kept me from being the Imodium guy. Not integrity. I wasn’t “keeping it real” declining their offers—and similar ones. I was just too narcissistic and loved myself a little too much to be able to handle waking up in the morning, looking in the bathroom mirror—and seeing the guy from TV who complains about freckling the bowl with loose diarrhea (until Imodium came along to save the day!). I didn’t take the cookware gig ’cause I didn’t want to find myself in an airport someday, approached by a disgruntled customer of whatever crap central warehouse actually produces that stuff, complaining about my substandard saucepot scorching his paella. I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t like to be called on bullshit—unless knowingly bullshitting.
So I didn’t take the forty grand a month they offered me to slap my name on a South Beach restaurant, ’cause I figured—even if I don’t have to actually do anything for the money other than show up once in a while—there’s that exposure. I could be on the other side of the world—but if the bartender at this joint, run by strangers, serves one underage girl, one customer gets slipped a roofie, one aggressive rat pops its head up out of the toilet one night and grabs a chunk of somebody’s nut-sack, it’s gonna be “outrage at bourdain restaurant” in the tabloids. And that would conflict with my image of myself as somehow above that kind of thing.
But when my daughter came along and I continued to say “no,” I knew I wasn’t saving my cherry for principle. I’d just been waiting to lose it to the right guy.
The Happy Ending
I was born at New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City in 1956, but I grew up in the leafy green bedroom community of Leonia, New Jersey.
I did not want for love or attention. My parents loved me. Neither of them drank to excess. Nobody beat me. God was never mentioned—so I was annoyed by neither religion nor church nor any notions of sin or damnation. Mine was a house filled with books and music—and, frequently, films. Early in my childhood, my father worked days at Willoughby’s camera store in Manhattan—and on weekends would come home with a rented 16-millimeter projector and classic movies. Later, when he became an executive at Columbia Records, I got free records for most of my adolescence. When I was twelve, he’d take me to the Fillmore East to see the Mothers of Invention or Ten Years After or whoever I was listening to that year.
Summers meant barbeques and Wiffle ball games in the backyard. In school, I was not bullied any more than the next kid—and maybe even a little less. I got the bike I wanted for Christmas. My counselor at camp did not molest me.
I was miserable. And angry.
I bridled bitterly at the smothering chokehold of love and normalcy in my house—compared to the freedom enjoyed by my less-well-looked-after friends. I envied them their dysfunctional and usually empty houses, their near-total lack of supervision. The weird, slightly scary, but enticing stashes of exotica we’d find in their parents’ secret places: blurry black-and-white stag films, bags of weed, pills…bottles of booze that nobody would notice when missing or slowly drained. My friends’ parents always had other, more important things on their minds, leaving their kids to run wild—free to stay out late, to sleep over when and where they saw fit, to smoke weed in their rooms without fear of being noticed.
I was pissed about this. How come I couldn’t have that? As I saw it, my parents were the only thing standing between me and a life spent taking full advantage of the times.
Much later, standing in some particularly bullshit kitchen, more of a saloon than anything resembling a real restaurant, I wasn’t the sort of person to look back in puzzlement and regret, wondering where I might have gone wrong. I never blamed bad choices—like the heroin, for instance—or bad companions for my less than stellar career trajectory. I don’t and never did refer to my addiction as my “disease.” I’d wanted to become a junkie, after all, since I was twelve years old. Call it a character flaw—of which drugs were simply a manifestation, a petulant “fuck you” to my bourgeois parents, who’d commit
ted the unpardonable sin of loving me.
At any given moment, when I’m honest with myself, I can look back and say that, on balance, I’d probably make exactly the same moves all over again. I know what brought me to those crummy kitchens, the reeking steam tables, the uncleaned deli-slicer, yet another brunch shift—I did.
Life, even in the bad old days, had been perfectly fair to me. I knew this.
Even when it was McAssCrack’s Bar and Grill I was working at, I knew I was pretty lucky. Lucky to be alive, given the precarious business of scoring dope every day in the ’80s New York City. Lucky to be in reasonably good health, given what was happening around me—and all the people who came up with me who weren’t around anymore. There was even love in my life through it all, however improbable—a criminal partnership of long standing.
As much as I hated standing there in the bad times, pre-poaching eggs for service, letting them slip off the spoon into a bus tub of ice water, I couldn’t blame anybody. Like I said, I made my choices. One after the other.
Then again, I could blame my dad, I guess. For all the joy he brought me when he came home with the Sgt. Pepper album. Or Disraeli Gears. An argument could be made, I guess, that this kind of exposure at an early age could lead one to an appetite for distraction—if not destruction. And maybe nine years old was a little young to see Dr. Strangelove—to find out that the world was surely going to end in a nuclear apocalypse (and soon). And that it would be funny when it happened. Perhaps this contributed to the nihilistic worldview I’d adopt later as a world-weary eleven-year-old.
Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook Page 3