Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll

by Andrew Friedman

  Crispo, who moved from La Côte Basque to The Polo to work with Daniel Boulud, remembers one particular cook Boulud brought in from France: “He hated Americans. We sucked. He came off the plane: ‘Everybody sucks.’ But he didn’t speak much English. So it was great getting back at him because he would ask me how to say something and I would tell him completely the opposite, and he would goof up. Somebody would say, ‘Hey, how you doing?’ and he would say, ‘Hey, you suck.’ Then he turned around; he changed. He saw that we were working. Did he ever apologize? No. He’s French.”

  The young Americans were gleaning the knowledge they craved, but at the same time, their eyes were opened to the realities of restaurant life, a far cry from the idealized world portrayed in Great Chefs of France, even in French kitchens.

  “It was incredibly busy,” says Moonen of his days at La Côte Basque. “When it first opened up it was so hot, it was so underventilated, that the plastic coating on the outer part of the fluorescent lights melted and fell to the ground. I was swimming in my sweat in my own boots.”

  “We used to wring our trousers out, never mind our pants, our jackets, from sweat,” recalls Bouley.

  Details like that, however, were nothing compared to the state of affairs at Le Cirque, one of the most celebrated restaurants of the day. But behind the scenes, the high volume and power clientele—regulars included everybody from Woody Allen to Henry Kissinger—produced a constant pressure that led to flaring tempers and some breathtaking shortcuts.

  Arnold Rossman, who began cooking at Le Cirque in 1981, recalls that Sailhac and his sous chefs would often shout, “Dead or alive!” as code to indicate a dish had to be delivered to the pass ASAP.

  “It didn’t matter what shape that food was in, you got it on a plate and you handed it to him,” says Rossman. “I remember the first day. I cut a rack of lamb and they wanted it, let’s say, medium. It was bloody rare but I put it on the plate and I handed it to the chef.”

  The stressful environment also led to frequent turnover. Remembers Rossman: “The first day, my memory is just a blur of screaming, total pandemonium and chaos. The kitchen’s not that big. It was never designed for the kind of volume we were doing. So the night crew was not allowed to set foot in the kitchen until two o’clock in the afternoon. That would give enough time for the day guys to get ready, get up and go, and be doing lunch service because there was the backup crew doing preparation for lunch anyway, once lunch was going. And at two o’clock we were allowed in the kitchen. We walk into the kitchen at two o’clock, and Philippe, the entremetier/sous chef, he’s French, he and the chef are two inches away from each other, screaming at each other in French. I mean the veins in their necks are bulging; they’re literally spitting into each other’s—I don’t understand French at this point and I don’t know what they’re saying but they are furious—back and forth, back and forth. And at one point, that’s it; it’s over. Philippe turns around, he grabs his knives, and he makes a very rude gesture to the chef and storms out. And the chef is heaving. And he starts looking around the kitchen, and our heads are down and all of a sudden I hear, ‘Rossman!’”

  The newbie approached the chef.

  “Rossman, you are the new entremetier.”

  “Oui, Chef.”

  “I’m just standing there, and he goes, ‘What are you doing?’ And I’m like, ‘What do you want me to do?’”

  “You are the new entremetier; get to work.”

  “Chef, I just started yesterday. I have no idea what to do.”

  Sailhac directed Rossman to Ralph Tingle, the sauté cook alongside whom he had worked on his first day. “Go talk to Ralph; he will explain to you what to do.”

  Rossman found Tingle in the back, head down, chopping on his cutting board. He explained the situation and his battlefield promotion.

  “Congratulations,” said Tingle. “What do you need from me?”

  “The chef told me to come to you to explain to me what to do.”

  Tingle went blank, expressionless.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Rossman.

  “I just started the day before yesterday.”

  Terrance Brennan, obsessed with getting into a French kitchen, sent letters to eight New York City restaurants. Only one responded: Lutèce’s Soltner succinctly informed Brennan that there was no room in his brigade. (“I had to look up brigade,” laughs Brennan.) But Soltner invited the young cook to visit him next time he was in New York City. Brennan visited, knocked on the kitchen door, and the great man spent close to half an hour with him, then referred him to Sailhac at Le Cirque.

  Brennan was through the looking glass: “I went in there and I saw all the petit fours. I’ve never seen this stuff before. I’m thinking, Oh my God. And I’m just so naïve about everything.” After a brief interview in Sailhac’s famously cramped office—Brennan had to sit in the doorway—he returned to Virginia, then was summoned back within days when an opening presented itself. Brennan didn’t even ask how much the job paid; he turned around and came right back.

  Brennan replaced none other than Rossman. “I got one day of training from Pierre, the sous chef. One day. And they were talking in French. I didn’t know any French. The assistant saucier was really the légumier, or the vegetable person, doing all the garnishing for all the plates. And I got my ass kicked. Dover sole, I don’t even know. I didn’t know anything. It was an intense kitchen. This is back when Sailhac was in the kitchen, just to put it in context. And nothing taken away from Daniel [Boulud, who succeeded Sailhac], because he made it great, but there were only eighteen people in the kitchen when Sailhac ran it: one sous chef and eighteen in the kitchen. When Daniel took over, he had three sous chefs and thirty-six people in the kitchen.

  “So every single night we’re in the shit. We’re in the weeds. Every night. Monday, Tuesday—doesn’t matter. Six days a week, every night. He’s cussing and screaming. And I’m like, ‘Holy shit! What did I get into?’ And I wasn’t physically in shape. Every plate, I had to bend over in the oven, take it out. Every single plate. Making the garnish and running around. Back then you were nonstop. You were running and you didn’t sit down. You just barely made it for service. I’m not exaggerating. And every single night, be it Monday or a Saturday, over two hundred dinners, three people on the line. Three people! Saucier, me in the middle, and the grill guy. That’s it.”

  Brennan also recalls that during particularly busy services, “the sous chef would come around from doing a little prep for the parties for the next day and throw poussins in the fryolator, throw racks of lamb in the fryolator.” Inclined to think only the best of the French, Brennan figured the frying must have been a secret searing technique practiced in France.

  “But it was just because we were in the shit and he wanted to get it going fast, just to get it out. That I found out later,” says Brennan today.

  That same year, disenchantment with Le Cirque, ironically, led to an early alliance between a French-born chef and an American-born contemporary, both of whom would go on to become industry legends: “I generally loved Sirio but I hated the work environment,” remembers Bouley, who started at Le Cirque in 1981. “I remember talking to my girlfriend at that time about how I’m going to go back to school. I can’t do this. At Le Cirque, there were three of us. Philippe, who was the sous chef, and Alain Sailhac was a lot of time in the office. We did two hundred seventy-seven covers one night. The menu was an encyclopedia. And if someone sat down and said, ‘Can I have sole Véronique?’—it’s not on the menu—you got the Dover sole and you got a can of grapes and you had to make sole Véronique. It was ridiculous. You just could never keep up with the amount of volume. Nothing was cooked to order. You had a big bain-marie with ladles, and a lot of things were cooked in advance sitting up there. When they called for it you threw it on a plate or you threw it on a copper thing and you threw a sauce with it and it went out in the dining room with some vegetables or whatever. It was so hard that you never felt you did anyth
ing right.”

  Bouley developed the opinion that the much-lauded French chefs in New York City were closed off from modern times. The food at Le Cirque, he laments, “wasn’t one hundred percent plated food yet”—a reference to his own nouvelle experiences in France. In time, he’d come to believe that the chefs he was working for in the United States hadn’t eaten the evolved food of modern France, let alone worked in one of those kitchens. “They had learned how to French-cook in New York from a group of French people that was very focused, very tight from almost the World’s Fair. A lot of the restaurants had the same style. La Côte Basque was a little different, but if you went to Pavillon, La Grenouille, Le Cygne, Le Cirque, Le Périgord, they were pretty much all the same kinds of menus.” The contrast between what he’d cooked in France and what he wanted for himself in America and what was available was crushing: “The bodies and the amount of people in the kitchen were not at all conducive to me and my group, which were students of the nouvelle cuisine, so we all felt lost.”

  One afternoon that year, Bouley prepared a lunch for his friend, the pastry chef Jean-Pierre Lemasson, and two friends of his. “I made a pot-au-feu and I had great cheese and Jean-Pierre made all this food. The day before, he said, ‘I forgot I’ve got a friend coming in from France. Can I bring him?’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure. Go ahead. I have plenty of food.’ So he brought him in. That was Daniel Boulud. He came from JFK to my apartment. And we all were talking about how much there is to do here. And Daniel says that was the day that he decided to make his career in New York. There was a gap of forty years and how are we going to transfer this style of eating into what we were taught, nouvelle cuisine, healthier, cleaner, more detailed, plated food, a whole different structure of cuisine. . . . What was the opportunity? So the possibilities were to team up and try to transfer the cuisine into a different direction. We had a pact.” (Asked about this, Boulud—a consummate industry politician—squirms and jokes, “I have no idea what he’s talking about.” Boulud had come to New York to take over the kitchen at The Polo restaurant at the Westbury Hotel, but five years later, in 1986, he replaced Sailhac as chef of Le Cirque.)*

  “HE WAS THE GODFATHER TO THE CHEFS.”

  An advocate for young Americans during these years was Marc Sarrazin, a butcher from France’s Charolles region who came to the United States in 1954, became a salesman for meat wholesaler DeBragga & Spitler, and bought the company in 1973. DeBragga & Spitler supplied many of the best restaurants in Manhattan. Sarrazin* isn’t remembered for his product, but for his vast network and willingness to help cooks and chefs at every level, an unofficial, one-man employment agency for the entire industry.

  “He was the godfather to the chefs,” says Boulud. “He was the agency to the cooks.”

  “When we were kids, if you were at Jean-Jacques Rachou’s for a couple of years and you wanted to move, you’d say, ‘Chef, I don’t want to offend you but I’ve been with you for three years. I’ve learned a lot. I want a new job.’ He’d probably send you to Sarrazin,” says Colameco. “That’s what happened to me. You’d go to his office. Go downtown, walk through that little parking lot, up that long step, and in there would be Marc. He was the guy. All the French restaurants bought meat from him.”

  Sarrazin’s office was an unassuming, wood-paneled affair, lined with photographs of chefs. A meeting there was a real “get” for an aspiring cook, and a sit-down lunch with Sarrazin at one of his favored restaurants meant you had arrived, like a comic’s first shot on Johnny Carson.

  “Being French and being connected with all the French chefs in town, he was the one who helped all those kids from the CIA to enter into La Côte Basque, into La Caravelle, into Le Cirque, into even—not Le Pavillon because that’s too old—but into all those restaurants,” remembers Boulud. “As soon as somebody would lose a job, he would help him find another job. He was distributing meat in the clubs. He was distributing meat in the restaurants. He was distributing meat in the hotels. He was distributing meat in the major larger caterers. Basically he was covering the entire spectrum of the industry and in a very wide range, also, not only New York but the five boroughs. He was very French and very appreciative of everyone, it didn’t matter—and his son was born in America so he had this mentality of an American as well when it came to embracing young talent.”

  “He was the nicest guy,” says Colameco. “It was a different time. If you didn’t buy your meat from him, would it have affected your business? Maybe. There was a kind of a criticism that he had a lock on things. I guess he did. It was business. But beyond that, his personal generosity was amazing. Because we were the first generation of American chefs trying to climb a ladder that was in French or in German or in Swiss, but mostly in French. And you had to get past the gatekeepers and you had to work within the system, and he was the guy.”

  Sarrazin was also known for his indirect interviewing style. “You can learn an awful lot about somebody by the way he dresses, how he or she behaves,” Sarrazin said at the time. “What is the handshake like, does the person light a cigarette without asking.” It was in these telling details that he formed his opinion of talent and character, and helped make matches between cooks and chefs, chefs and owners. By all accounts he spent as much time administering to the affairs of his business as he did doling out advice and counsel. A typical morning found him working the phones, fielding calls from all over the city, and occasionally the country, followed by lunch in one of Manhattan’s grand French restaurants, then came drop-ins on kitchens around the metropolis, where he did business and kept tabs on job openings and other possibilities, and the day was capped with dinner at the likes of Le Cirque and La Côte Basque.

  “WE ALL LIVED LIKE RATS.”

  For newcomers to the city, it was a bizarre double life, cooking refined French food by day, then returning to a squalid residence when the kitchen closed. Line cooks make a paltry living, and the crime-addled New York City of the late 1970s and early ’80s brought that reality into high relief.

  “I was petrified,” recalls Palmer, who took a $78-per-month sublet on West 43rd Street in Hell’s Kitchen. “I’d come home from La Côte Basque and there would be hookers sitting on the building stoop. They all knew my name. They were like, ‘Hey, white boy’s home.’ But I adjusted quickly. I became pretty comfortable very quick.”

  Brennan would leave Le Cirque, return to a place he was renting on Long Island. “I was physically exhausted, the screaming and yelling. I’m beat up and I’m sleeping on a couch with punk rockers. I would stay up until four or five in the morning partying. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, what did I do?’ Then I got an apartment in Queens. I just signed something real quick. It was a dungeon, one of those illegal dungeon apartments. There was no sunlight. I’d come out at nine, ten in the morning and be like Dracula: ‘The sun!’”

  “It was exciting,” says John Schenk, a cook from Buffalo, New York. “The first day I moved here, I had to go into Williamsburg, to the Hasidic community, to buy futons and I didn’t even know what a Hasid was. I came back with the futons. I’m like, ‘You won’t believe what I just saw.’ Didn’t even have the idea that that existed. I remember driving up First Street, where it veers off of Houston, goes on that angle, and it was an über ghetto. Everyone was all over the place. There were fires in the garbage cans. We used to live in Brooklyn, so we’d go over the Brooklyn Bridge and there would be all the hookers standing there by Sammy’s Roumanian on that block. I remember one having this huge razor blade inside her glove. She took off her mitten—I was sitting in the cab—you see this huge razor blade. It was a different world. It was gritty. I liked it a lot.”

  “We all lived like rats, you know?” says Traci Des Jardins. “I lived in a living room and slept on a futon. New York was so dangerous. I lived on the Upper East Side on 82nd between Second and Third so I would catch the subway. I almost got my brains creamed in—I was walking to the subway and there was just a bunch of young kids. And I was by myself. It was just one
of those moments where you say a little prayer and hope that they don’t turn their attention to you. They had baseball bats and shit. They were looking for trouble. And it was just obvious. You’re just walking along and you see that and you can’t turn around. You keep going and you just hope that they’re not going to—you know. So I called my mom. My parents had not been real supportive of what I was up to. I was self-funded and didn’t have any help. And I said, ‘You’ve got to give me one hundred dollars a week to take a cab home at night. I’m going to get killed.’ Everyone I knew got mugged. It was dangerous. I never did, but I felt that threat all the time. So my mom started sending me a hundred bucks a week to take a cab home at night.”

  Danny Meyer, who was beginning to envision what would become his first restaurant, Union Square Café, in the early 1980s, recalls of the restaurant’s neighborhood, “It was really dicey. I remember very well at least three occasions walking to Union Square Café on a Saturday morning and there would be a chalk outline on the sidewalk of someone who had presumably been shot the night before.”

  The city could be grittily seductive to French newcomers as well. Boulud remembers New York as “mad, not very safe, not very clean. I was a little bit lost because I was not a New Yorker then.” He recalls one night in particular after a private party at the Westbury: “There was this guy who organized the party who said, ‘I’m going to show you the town. Let me take you downtown.’ So we went to the Meatpacking District. There was the Hellfire Club* there. It was a basement where they were all hanging on ropes and fucking each other. I mean, there were like cabins where you could watch people getting sucked over or fucked over. It was stables, and you peep over. For us it was all about being a voyeur and curiosity. Every time we had a friend coming from Europe, we said, ‘Okay, we’ve got to take you to a place.’ It was so fucked up downtown.”