A Writer's Life

by Gay Talese

  Since the place where Peguero had been hired as a dishwasher had a rapid rate of employee turnover, he was soon promoted to more interesting and challenging assignments at the salad station and the grill. Three years later, in 1996, after he had worked for a while as a cook in a second restaurant, he accepted a higher salary to serve directly under Matt Hereford in Tucci’s kitchen. Hereford prepared the menus, made decisions regarding the workers’ schedules, and was nominally in charge of everything that occurred in the rear of the restaurant. But it seemed to me, after I had spent a few days there, that the workers saw Peguero as their leader, even though he never asserted himself, nor did he set himself apart from the others. Still, he was obviously a presence, one to whom the others came for advice and consultation, and they usually nodded in agreement with what he said to them. He was inches taller than his coworkers, being a six-footer, and had big shoulders, narrow hips, a long dark-skinned face, and brown eyes that were large and alert, and he moved around the floor and up and down the staircase with agility and grace, showing no signs of his old injury.

  He and Matt Hereford both arrived for work at approximately the same time, shortly after 9:00 a.m., but it was my impression that Peguero worked harder and certainly put in longer hours. Hereford would sometimes leave the building prior to the serving of dinner. Hereford was then dating a sister of Gerald Padian’s fiancée. Peguero would spend much of the morning and afternoon in the preparatory kitchen, wielding a knife delicately and precisely in separating fat from meat, and removing myriad fish bones with his tweezers, and then at approximately 6:00 p.m., he was upstairs in the main kitchen, beginning to cook dinner; he was there until nearly midnight.

  Flanking him at the grill almost every night was the assistant cook, Ray Perez, who had been born in Brooklyn of Mexican parents, and Lindomar De Mouvra, a Brazilian who performed many tasks but specialized in none of them. Working at an adjacent counter, which was closer to the kitchen’s swinging doors, was the pasta cook, José Rosendo, who was a native of Mexico, and the pizza maker, Andres Artigas, who had been born in Uruguay. There were one or two kitchen workers who shied away from conversing with me; perhaps they feared that I would expose them as illegal aliens, or maybe they were unable to communicate in English. There was a dishwasher, however, who spoke English quite well, and he took the initiative in introducing himself to me shortly after I had met Miguel Peguero.

  “Hello,” he said, extending his right hand after drying it off with a towel. “My name is Manuel Bonete, and I am from Ecuador.”

  “Ecuador,” I repeated, “that’s where Lorena Bobbitt is from. You know who she is, don’t you?”

  “Oh yes,” he said enthusiastically. “She is very famous in my country.” After I had mentioned seeing her many times in person at the trial, he told me that she had visited Ecuador during the past week and had been at the palace in Quito to attend a luncheon hosted by Ecuador’s president, Abdalá Bucaram.

  A few months later, I read in the New York Times that the Ecuadorean congress had voted to remove President Bucaram from office because of what it called his “mental incapacity.”

  Inasmuch as Gerald Padian had not established a limit to the frequency of my visits to Tucci, I came and went with regularity throughout the summer of 1996 and into the winter of 1997, usually appearing when there were no customers and when the employees, who had become quite accustomed to my presence, were so preoccupied with their tasks that they more or less ignored me, allowing me to wander around at will. As I explored the vastness of the basement, which was nearly one hundred feet long and twenty-five feet wide—and which housed a wine cellar, a pantry, a glass-enclosed office, two bathrooms, a cloakroom, and the preparatory kitchen, which took up most of the space—I reminded myself that this area had once been the domain of a dozen dray horses. They had slept and been fed here when Frederick J. Schillinger operated this building as a warehouse, beginning in 1907. A freight elevator had transported the horses up to their wagons, which had been parked within what was now the main dining room of Tucci. The dining room had been renovated and repainted so many times during the last two decades as a result of the rotating restaurateurs that there were few remaining signs of the fine work done here by the celebrated Sam Lopata, who had designed this building’s first restaurant, Le Premier, in 1977. Although the critic Mimi Sheraton had condemned Le Premier’s cuisine and high prices, she had raved about its design, calling it an “absolute stunner … a dazzlement of Art Deco splendor at its most sensual and flattering … as romantic as a valentine.”

  Sam Lopata, who was thirty-four at the time, had been born in Paris during the Nazi occupation. His father, a milliner, had been arrested during a roundup of Jews and would not survive Auschwitz. In 1971, after studying architecture at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Lopata moved to New York, where he eventually befriended his fellow Frenchman, the restaurateur Robert Pascal, who had commissioned him to create the ambience at Le Premier. Lopata then moved on to design several other restaurants in New York and elsewhere. In 1986, he was named “Restaurant Designer of the Year” by Time magazine. Ten years later, he died of cancer in New York at the age of fifty-four. In the Times obituary, the onetime owner of the restaurant Lutèce, André Soltner—who had once hired Lopata to provide Lutèce with a face-lift—described Lopata as “an indefatigable perfectionist who approaches walls and floors, tables and chairs, as an artist approaches a canvas.” But the only reminder of Lopata’s decorative style within 206 East 63rd Street in 1997 was the five-tiered coffered ceiling of the auxiliary dining room on the second floor of Tucci.

  The dining room staff at Tucci consisted of five waiters, three waitresses, a bartender, and two “runners,” the latter being young men who carried trays laden with food from the kitchen to the seated customers. The dining room crew were entirely fluent in English, although only two of them were native-born Americans. One was the bartender, an attractive and vivacious red-haired woman named Elizabeth Edwards, whose possessive boyfriend had been a nightly visitor to the bar until the management had ordered him to stay away. The other was a dark-haired, stocky waiter in his late thirties named Andy Globus, whose grandfather had been a neurosurgeon and his father an advertising executive. After Andy had dropped out of the Borough of Manhattan Community College in the early 1970s, he had drifted into restaurant service and had worked in several places before coming to Tucci in 1996. Andy Globus’s associates at Tucci were at least ten years his junior, and they included a waiter from Romania named Givan Stevans, a waiter from Sardinia named Vittorio Scarpa, a runner from Bangladesh named Mohammed Matin, and a waitress from Poland, Monica Kosciolowiez, who had come to the United States on a student visa and divided her time between waiting tables at night and attending classes during the day at nearby Hunter College.

  Andy Globus shared his nearby flat on First Avenue with a Tucci waiter from Russia, Konstantin Avramov, a tall and prematurely balding man of twenty-seven with an oval face, brown eyes, a courteous manner (his father and grandfather had both been Soviet diplomats, serving, respectively, in Czechoslovakia and Austria), and a well-defined muscular body that he maintained by working out in a gym for two hours every afternoon. Konstantin Avramov had been born in Moscow in 1970, and at seventeen was called into the army, serving for two years and considering himself lucky not to have been sent to Afghanistan, which he viewed as comparable to America’s involvement in Vietnam. After being discharged as a sergeant in 1990, following the completion of Russia’s withdrawal from Afghanistan a year earlier, Konstantin returned to Moscow filled with a sense of malaise and estrangement. He had no idea what he wanted to do. As a teenager, he had grown up feeling quite comfortable with the political system, and, while it did not encourage individual ambition unless it served the system’s interests, he believed that the government’s intent was to satisfy the basic needs of the people, offering job security and pensions and at least a modicum of identity with the awesome power and status of the state.r />
  He had been raised in relatively privileged circumstances, he told me one afternoon at Tucci, recalling his comfortable and happy family and the fact that his parents and grandparents had often hosted dinner parties for their many friends and acquaintances employed within the government. His family and their guests took turns entertaining one another in their homes, never in restaurants, and he described his mother as a superb cook who planned the menu several days in advance of a party. He had always been impressed with her social energy and culinary creativity, her way of preparing traditional Russian food heavily flavored with Asian and European spices, which he thought had prompted within him a curiosity about people living in faraway places.

  Konstantin’s first job after leaving the army was as a trainee in a Moscow hotel owned by a Canadian corporation, and it was then that he began to sense that his country was beginning to decline as a superpower. Many of his fellow veterans and ex-schoolmates, lacking his family’s connections, were unable to find jobs. “Nobody is offering us anything” was the phrase that he often heard, and there were also complaints about the high cost of things that had formerly been affordable and available. The grocery store patronized by his mother now had many empty shelves, and the dinner parties were quickly discontinued. A friend of Konstantin’s began traveling regularly to Belgium to obtain luxury cars to drive back and sell to members of the newly emerging enterpreneureal class that was prospering in the wake of the national crisis. After the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, Konstantin quit his job at the hotel and left for Belgium to join his friend in the car-selling enterprise.

  A year later, more affluent than he imagined he would ever be, he flew with his friend to the United States, arriving at JFK. After sleeping for three nights on airport benches without being queried by security personnel, Konstantin and his companion rode the subway into Queens and rented an apartment in a neighborhood that had many Russian-speaking residents. Later in the year, on his own, Konstantin moved into an East Village apartment and found a job in a floral shop in the West Twenties that was managed by a Polish man who spoke Russian no better than Konstantin spoke Polish, but they communicated well enough to work together. Konstantin remained on the job for nearly three years, meanwhile gaining fluency in English, and, after taking six hundred dollars from his savings, he registered for classes at a training school for waiters and bartenders on Seventh Avenue near Thirty-seventh Street. His first restaurant job was in a French bistro on First Avenue at Fifty-seventh Street, near the Queensboro Bridge. A year later, in 1995, he was waiting tables in the Museum of Modern Art’s restaurant on West Fifty-third Street, and in 1996 he found work at the newly opened Tucci, where he met Andy Globus and moved uptown to share Globus’s apartment.

  Even before I had begun talking at length to Konstantin, I felt as if I had met one of his spiritual kinsmen in the character of the exiled Russian waiter named Boris, whom George Orwell had written about a half-century earlier in Down and Out in Paris and London. Like Konstantin, Boris had spent part of his youth in the Russian army. Boris had served during World War I as a captain, until his rank and income had been eliminated by the Communists during the Revolution, whereupon Boris fled to Paris and, being impecunious and reduced at times to sleeping under the bridges of the Seine, he struggled to support himself as a waiter.

  “ ‘Ah, but I have known what it is to live like a gentleman,’ ” Boris was quoted in Orwell’s book as telling his fellow waiters, most of whom were Italian or German. “There is hardly such a thing as a French waiter in Paris,” Orwell wrote, although he conceded that when a man becomes a waiter, he tends to forget his origins and dwells in a world of illusions. “He lives perpetually in sight of rich people, stands at their tables, listens to their conversation, sucks up to them with smiles and discreet little jokes,” Orwell wrote. “He has the pleasure of spending money by proxy.… He will take pains to serve a meal in style, because he feels that he is participating in the meal himself.” Orwell went on to write about Boris: “Though he had never saved more than a few thousand francs, he took it for granted that in the end he would be able to set up his own restaurant and grow rich.”

  Konstantin had similar aspirations in New York, which he often expressed to me as we sat together at midday in Tucci’s dining room, both of us folding napkins and stuffing newly printed menus into plastic covers. “I will one day own a great restaurant,” he assured me, adding confidentially that he had already met some wealthy New Yorkers who were eager to finance him whenever he was ready to venture out on his own. His personable manner helped him make friends easily at the health club and wherever he associated socially, and it seemed to me that he was the most optimistic of the Tucci employees. It also struck me as ironic that this ex-soldier from the Red Army who had witnessed the crumbling of communism in his homeland would be envisioning his capitalistic ascendancy in the food business while working in this restaurant site, which had known so many failures and foreclosures.

  Still, he arrived for work every day in high spirits and was dressed for success in Armani-style suits that he had purchased on sale. In the evenings, his face flushed and his muscles pumped up as a result of his late-afternoon workout, he moved swiftly around the dining room in his waiter’s attire, catering to his customers efficiently and obligingly. “I really like working at Tucci,” Konstantin told me one day.

  It was not long after my conversation with Konstantin that I learned from Gerald Padian by telephone that he and his partners would be selling the restaurant within a few days. I should not have been surprised, but I was. I was also devastated. I had finally gotten my foot in the door, thanks to my relationship with Padian, and now he was leaving, and if I wanted to continue my research, I would have to try to ingratiate myself with a new group of restaurant owners—headed, according to Padian, by a wealthy man of Greek ancestry from Fort Lee, New Jersey. There was a good chance that Mr. Fort Lee would not want me hanging around his place all day, and then I’d be back to where I was before—a customer, this time at the ninth restaurant to open for business at 206 East 63rd Street.

  “Is there any chance your deal will fail through?” I asked Padian hopefully.

  “No, everything’s set and we’re signing the papers in my office on Monday,” he said, meaning March 10, 1997.

  He had opened Tucci thirteen months before, in February 1996.

  “Do you think that Konstantin and Andy Globus and the rest of them know about this?” I asked Padian.

  “No,” he said, “and I’d appreciate it if you’d keep it to yourself until I tell them after dinner on Sunday night.”

  “I thought your business was doing pretty well,” I said.

  “It was,” Padian agreed, but he repeated what he had often told me before: It was very difficult and time-consuming to be simultaneously responsible for running a law firm and a restaurant. He also reminded me again that his days as a late-night bachelor were soon coming to a close—he was getting married in less than two months and, since he was approaching the age of thirty-five, he believed that he was ready for a home life; and he went on to explain that, inasmuch as none of the other Tucci backers were willing or able to assume the leadership role of the restaurant, he was receptive to the idea of selling the sublease to the 206 East 63rd Street space to the gentleman from Fort Lee. Padian meanwhile promised that he would remain in touch with me, and, before hanging up, he wished me the best of luck with my book.

  Later that day, I received a note from my editor at Knopf, my publisher, asking that I bring him up-to-date on how my work was progressing. My editor had proven himself to be a man of infinite patience, but I knew that he would be feeling some anxiety when a writer was as tardy as I had been in giving him something to read. So I faxed him back with the promise that he would be receiving a written report from me in a day or so, and then I immediately began to review my voluminous notes entitled “Restaurants—a work in progress,” hoping to draw from this material a summarized account of what I was
trying to accomplish and then describing it in an outline that I would send to my editor. I had not read through my research material in quite a while, and as I began to peruse it that evening and on the following morning, picking my way through hundreds of pages of typed notes that were spread out along the two tables that flanked my desk, I realized that I had gathered lots of information that I had forgotten I had collected. Some of it was in the form of extraneous data and detail about Elaine’s or the “21” Club or other restaurants that were not central to my main interest, and there were also many references to what other writers had published in the past about the restaurant business and dining in general, I had excerpted paragraphs from Joseph Wechsberg’s biography of Le Pavilion’s owner, Henri Soulé, including the latter’s remark that a restaurant’s success was very much influenced by the presence of beautiful women. I had paraphrased an observation made in a novel by Philip Roth to the effect that Jewish people liked dining in Chinese restaurants because Chinese waiters could never tell whether or not the customers were Jewish. From a book by Truman Capote I had reprinted a comment made by one of his characters, Lady Ina Coolbirth, who, while having lunch with a friend at La Côte Basque, remarked, “There is at least one respect in which the rich, the really very rich, are different.… They understand vegetables. Other people—well, anyone can manage roast beef, a great steak, lobsters. But have you ever noticed how, in the homes of the very rich, at the Wrightsmans’ or Dillons’, at Bunny’s and Babe’s, they always serve only the most beautiful vegetables, and the greatest variety? The greenest petits pois, infinitesimal carrots, corn so baby-kerneled and tender it seems almost unborn, lima beans tinier than mice eyes, and the young asparagus! the limestone lettuce! the raw red mushrooms! zucchini.…” I also included in my notes from Capote’s book his demurral, “Champagne does have one serious draw-back back: swilled as a regular thing, a certain sourness settles in the tummy, and the result is permanent bad breath. Really incurable.…”