Don't Try This at Home

by Andrew Friedman

  Anyway, I'd had a pretty good year and a half living and working in Paris—although it felt a bit provincial after London, where it was already quite rock-and-roll to be a chef; in Paris I was just a fucking cook—when I decided that I'd broaden my experience and take a job at Tour d'Argent. Also, I was eager to get a big fuck-off name on my CV.

  They offered me a job as a chef de partie in the garde-manger', which caused instant resentment among the French commis chefs, who refused to understand how a spaghetti could be a chef de partie. I don't think I got called by my real name once in the whole time I worked in Paris. "Rital" was the favorite insult, but I was also called "wop," "spic," "spaghetti," "macaroni," "chink" . . . anything but my name.

  The only time I even saw my real name was back at Laurent, at Christmas, when we had a vote to see who would do the much-disliked job of playing Father Christmas for the kids' party in the restaurant. I checked the trash afterward, and every piece of paper had my name on it. It was a conspiracy, organized by the sous-chef, who has since become a friend but back then was a bit of a bastard. The only problem, apart from the early start—Father Christmas had to come in early on Saturday—was that I didn't speak much French, so the kids probably got the wrong presents.

  At Tour d'Argent, the work was much harder and more pressurized than it had been at Laurent. There were twenty-five of us in the kitchen, and another four or five in the pastry section downstairs. I thought I had made some progress while in Paris, but now I realized that, to the chefs at Tour d'Argent, I was just as much of an outsider as ever.

  The head chef—I didn't like him at all—used to ask me questions about Italian cooking. At Laurent, now and again I cooked some Italian food—we had a dish of risotto with scallops and champagne sauce, served with Dover sole, and we used to do a bit of tagliolini, and lasagne for staff dinner—so I said I'd cook him some polenta, which I bought from a little Italian shop in the Jewish Quarter.

  I brought it back to the restaurant and showed Chef and the sous-chef all the different ways you can prepare polenta—soft, hard, in diamonds, grilled—but they were unbelievable bastards. They just didn't believe Italians could cook. No matter what I did to the polenta, Chef just crossed his arms and, with a sniff, shook his head. But I refused to give up, and in the following days insisted on making it again, varying the method. The only direction I got from Chef was that he wanted it lighter. So I reduced the amount of grain that I used. "Lighter," he insisted. Then I made it with milk, not water. "Lighter." Then half cream and half milk, with lots of butter whisked in at the end . . . until eventually, one day, he said, "Qz, c'est un vrai puree de mais!" But it never, ever went on the menu.

  One night, I was told to cook dinner for Claude Terrail, the big boss. I cooked him some brill in olive oil and grilled slices of eggplant with roasted tomatoes and marjoram. When he'd finished his meal, he came into the kitchen—the first time I'd ever seen him in there—and demanded, "Who cooked my dinner?"

  I was squirming. I thought he was going to explode.

  To my surprise, however, he shouted at all the other chefs, saying that they were feeding him cream and butter every night, that they were trying to kill him, and that from now on I would be cooking his dinner every night. I was rather pleased with myself, but I didn't know then that it would lead indirectly to the greatest humiliation of my life. If Terrail hadn't liked his dinner, Chef wouldn't have done the terrine, and I wouldn't have been in the fridge . . . but I'm jumping ahead of myself.

  After the episode with Terrail and his dinner, Chef said that we should do something with these vegetables that the boss had liked so much, so we added to the menu a terrine of thin slices of eggplant, zucchini, and peppers, layered with langoustines and set in a little jelly. A serving consisted of two slices of terrine, with three langoustines in each slice. We kept the terrines in the walk-in pastry fridge downstairs, to keep them really cold and make them easier to slice.

  One day, I ran downstairs to get the next terrine, went into the fridge, and saw a chef who seemed to be bending down to look at something on the bottom shelf. I guessed it was one of the junior chefs, and I was just about to kick his ass when he stood up and turned around.

  It was Chef, his mustache twitching. He had picked up a couple of button onions that he had found on the floor of the fridge, and he handed them to me. "Tiens, tiens, petit Italien! Regards-ga, rital!" So I put the onions in my trouser pocket, without thinking, and I rushed upstairs with the terrine. He was obviously trying to make a point about wastage in the kitchen, but I wasn't really in the mood.

  I carried on with the service—we were packed that night, and it went on so late that we were still sending out starters at 11:45 p.m.—and at some point I put my hand in my pocket and felt something wet and horrible. It was the two onions. I whispered "Old bastard!" to myself, and threw them in my trash bin, thinking he would have forgotten about them.

  At one o'clock in the morning we had finally finished for the night. We were all changing, somebody was having a shower, when the plongeur came down and told us that our presence was required upstairs. I could feel that something was wrong.

  We all raced up the stairs, and when we got into the kitchen, everybody was given a plastic garbage bag to cut open and spread out on the floor at his station. By this time I realized what was happening.

  I don't know whether Chef had set me up deliberately or not—maybe he thought I was getting a bit too big for my boots—but I knew that I was wrong: it might not seem like a big deal, just a couple of onions, but as a chef, if you are really dedicated, you can't throw food away. It's the same philosophy that my mother and grandmother had, and the same idea that I try to instill in the chefs who work with me now. It had crossed my mind to throw them in somebody else's bin, but I didn't, and anyway, Chef knew who he'd given the onions to.

  Anyway, at this point, I was just hoping that the onions had miraculously gotten trapped in an empty can or something.

  No such luck. As I turned my bin over onto the plastic sheet, the two onions rolled out onto the floor, and I felt like a very naughty schoolboy. Chef, who was a huge motherfucker, suddenly seemed even huger than normal. He made me feel about two feet tall. He had a big stick in his hand, like a schoolmaster or a sergeant major, so he could search through the stuff you had thrown away, and he stabbed angrily at the two onions.

  I didn't say a word. I just stood there while he shouted at me. It seemed like he shouted for hours, getting ever louder and redder in the face.

  It was the biggest humiliation I have ever felt in my entire life. Chef clearly got a big kick out of screaming at people: I'm sure that was his motivation, nothing to do with wastage or a philosophy of cooking, but still, I knew that I shouldn't have done it. After this, they told me every fucking day that I wasn't good enough to be a chef, and at that point I almost believed them.

  I think it was at exactly that moment that I realized I didn't belong in that world. I left Tour d'Argent a couple of weeks later; I didn't even ask for a certificate. Since that day I have never again applied for a job. I didn't need the fuck-off name on my CV, either. Which, given all the shit I went through in Paris, is a little bit ironic.

  I have never, since then, cooked a mousse. I have never cooked quenelles de brochet again, or lobster Don Carlo, which was a particularly crap dish of lobster with sauce gribiche.

  I occasionally hire a French chef at Locanda Locatelli, mainly for the pleasure of firing him, but I have never cooked another pomme souffle, and I never wear a tall hat. And I still feel just a little bit sick every time I see a button onion.

  A Night at the Opera

  MICHAEL LOMONACO

  A native of Brooklyn, New York, and a passionate proponent of regional American cuisine, Michael Lomonaco earned his culinary degree from New York Technical College, and was the executive chef of f2V and Windows on the World before taking the reins at Guastavino's. Lomonaco is the co-author ofThe '21' Cookbook and Nightly Specials, and host of th
e Travel Channel's show Epicurious. He previously hosted Michael's Place on Food Network. He began his career in such legendary New York restaurants as Maxwell's Plum and Le Cirque.

  IN MANHATTAN, a city full of mythical beings and institutions, ' 21 ' has always shimmered and sparkled just a bit more than the rest. First opened as a speakeasy on New Year's Eve in 1930, the restaurant evolved over generations into a fabled landmark, a legend in its own right, as famous as many of the luminaries who dine there.

  ' 21 ' is the fulfillment of everyone's notion of how an exclusive, clubby New York City restaurant should look and feel. The wood-paneled rooms and upholstered leather chairs contribute to this effect, as do the hundreds of toys that dangle from the ceiling in the central Bar Room—miniature trucks and other vehicles mostly, gifts from prominent regulars—in sharp contrast to the power brokering that goes on beneath them. Then there are the remnants of the restaurant's speakeasy days, like the wine cellar that can be entered only by inserting a long, wiry rod into the lone proper hole among a hundred indistinguishable ones on its vaultlike door.

  Ironically, you couldn't call ' 2 1 ' a hot spot. It doesn't attract young, glamorous movie stars, or even much media attention, though it used to. There is no velvet rope outside. But for generations it has catered to certain select subspecies of New Yorkers awash primarily in old money: political giants, titans of industry, Park Avenue socialites, the media elite, and so on. It has been graced by foreign heads of state, by astronauts, athletes, even by fictional characters (Gordon Gekko takes his young protege there for lunch in Wall Street).

  Most notably, every American president since Franklin De­lano Roosevelt has dined at '21.' During my tenure there—as sous-chef from 1987 to 1988, and executive chef from 1989 to 1996—I was privileged to cook for Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and on one memorable evening, Gerald and Betty Ford and George and Barbara Bush. Mrs. Bush was exceptionally charming. "Can I have dessert?" she asked as she turned her empty dish up at me, proudly declaring herself a member of the "Clean Plate Club."

  '21' isn't a private club, but many of its regulars dine there so often that they treat it like one. If a new staff member doesn't comport himself properly, or if something is askew, they are apt to wave over a dining room captain and, with a stern frown, let him know, so strong is their sense of propriety and possession. Patrons also think nothing of making special requests of the dining room or the kitchen. For instance, it is perfectly normal for a customer to say to his waiter, "I feel like some lamb chops. Do you have any lamb in the house?" When the order makes its way to the kitchen, the chef takes a rack of lamb, butchers it into chops, and prepares it however the diner likes.

  I kept all kinds of provisions on hand for special requests like that. There was peanut butter and jelly—once famously ordered by Cary Grant long before my time—and pasta, although they weren't featured in any regular menu items. There were even some items we kept stocked for the express purpose of feeding Frank Sinatra, who still swung through town once or twice a year.

  Some chefs take umbrage at special requests, but I embraced them. I always thought of that kind of customized cooking as cooking on the edge, flying by the seat of your pants. Plus, I loved it when I'd set a dish of chicken hash before a guest, prepared just the way he liked it.

  Even a billionaire wasn't above smiling like a little kid when I got it right.

  One fall night in 1990, not long after I had returned to '21' as executive chef, Bruce Snyder, the dining room manager, came into the kitchen and told me that he had just received a call from one of our regulars, a prominent Park Avenue socialite who was attending the opera that evening—the premiere of Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball) featuring the great Luciano Pavarotti—and wanted us to set a table for herself and about twenty guests.

  Since they were coming from the Metropolitan Opera House, just uptown at Lincoln Center, they wouldn't be arriving until about eleven thirty, much later than we would normally accept a reservation, especially for such a large party.

  But because she was an important customer, Bruce had agreed. We did whatever we could for our most valued regulars.

  Oh, and there was one other reason.

  Luciano Pavarotti would be their guest of honor.

  At the time of this story, Pavarotti was at the height of his powers, a true living legend. You didn't have to know opera to know Pavarotti, the gigantic, bearded figure who had attained a new level of popular success that July when the Three Tenors—Placido Domingo, Jose Carreras, and Pavarotti himself—debuted as an entity at the World Cup in Rome.

  Our customer didn't want a private room, asking instead that a large table be set up in the middle of the Bar Room, the heart of the restaurant. With a standing bar at one side, diners seated on the outskirts of the room, and all those toys hanging from the ceiling, it had the air of festivity and conviviality that she wanted to lend to her little soiree.

  When Bruce told me Pavarotti was coming, I was ecstatic. Between working at ' 2 1 ' and at another bastion of celebrity, Le Cirque, I had become accustomed to cooking for the rich and famous on a daily and nightly basis. But there were certain figures who transcended the crowd, even in places like those. Mick Jagger was one, as was the King of Spain, who used to visit Le Cirque at the very tail end of lunch service or late in the evening, when most dinner guests were sipping their digestifs.

  Pavarotti was such a figure, one who would siphon the attention of even the most jaded New Yorker. And he was coming to our restaurant for dinner.

  It was then, and remains today, my firmly held belief that moments like these are reason enough to live in New York and work at a place like ' 21 . '

  * * *

  The news that such a guest is coming triggers all sorts of extra activity: the front-of-the-house team ordered flowers especially for this table of honor and let a few waiters and busboys know they'd have to stay late. The wine steward made a survey of the cellar and took the liberty of chilling a variety of champagnes, including our house Billecart-Salmon; a rose; and so on.

  As for me, I was getting more excited by the minute.

  Before I became a chef, I was an actor. If you look real close, you can see me wordlessly menacing Woody Allen in a scene toward the middle of Broadway Danny Rose. For a time during my acting years, I made a living as a stage manager, and all of those old instincts kicked in on that night. I wasn't just getting the kitchen ready to produce food; I was getting ready for our performance.

  The first thing I did was solicit volunteers from the staff, securing a sous-chef, two line cooks, and a pastry cook who were willing to go as late as we had to. I don't think they quite shared my level of enthusiasm—it would have been hard to—but they were game for the challenge.

  Next, I checked my inventory, to make sure everything was perfect. I tasted soups and sauces with even more scrutiny than usual, sniffed raw fish and oysters to guarantee utmost freshness, and examined all the vegetables.

  I also made a mental note of ingredients that looked especially fresh, like the assorted wild mushrooms, in case I was called on to do a little cooking on the edge—especially if I were asked to do it for the great Luciano Pavarotti.

  At about ten thirty, as most of the tables started to empty, Bruce orchestrated his team. They pushed a number of tables together in the center of the Bar Room, draped a huge, white tablecloth over them, then laid out the finest glassware and silverware. A procession of busboys appeared with the flower arrangements and proceeded to carefully decorate.

  I continued to pace nervously around the kitchen, retasting and stirring soups, reassuring myself by reassuring my crew, and generally shuffling about.

  As concerned as I was about Pavarotti coming to '21,' I was equally—if not more—daunted by the prospect of his not showing up. After this buildup, the disappointment would be crushing.

  Shortly after eleven, the private party began to arrive, in subgroups of two, three, and four. They were
fresh from the opera and younger and more vibrant than I expected; most were in their mid- to late forties. They were in full opera dress, designer tuxes for the men and evening gowns and glimmering jewelry for the women. Like so many visitors to '21,' they exuded the casual confidence that comes naturally with power and privilege.

  As they entered the Bar Room and began ordering champagne and martinis, and nibbling on the caviar and foie gras hors d'oeuvres we had set out, the room began to buzz. Word had spread among the late-night diners seated at the smaller tables along the perimeter of the room that this was Pavarotti's group, many of whom, it was clear from their conversation, had enjoyed a private audience with him backstage after the performance.

  Before too long, the restaurant was pulsating with one shared thought, as vivid as a flashing neon sign: "Pavarotti is coming. Pavarotti is coming."

  As I stood outside the kitchen doors, leaning against the wall, I seemed to be the only one bothered by the unmistakable fact that Pavarotti had not arrived with this crowd. Was it possible that he wasn't going to show? Between my personal connection to the performing arts, a fondness for music, and an Italian American background in which the likes of Pavarotti constituted a certain kind of royalty, I was unabashedly excited at the opportunity to cook for him. But this uncertainty . . . it was killing me. I must have looked like a nervous wreck.

  Joe, a veteran captain of whom I was enormously fond, stood by me for a moment, witnessing yet another of my sighs.