THE HAPPY TIME
IN 1981, MY GOOD friend from high school, and later Provincetown, Sam G., became the chef de cuisine of Work Progress. A once trendy restaurant on Spring Street in S0H0, the place had fallen on hard times. It was now under new ownership and Sammy - one of us! - was in charge of putting the kitchen together. It was what a lot of us had been waiting for, our own thing, and the call went out to all our old cronies. From Provincetown came Dimitri, finally enticed from off-season exile at the tip of the Cape by excited promises of culinary history in the making. I would share sous-chef responsibilities with my mentor. From West Village saloons, we recruited every young, pot-smoking, head-banging hooligan we'd ever worked with, filling their heads with dreams of glory. 'We're forming . . . like . . . a rock and roll band, man, an all-star group of culinary superstars . . . kinda like Blind Faith. We're going to tear a new asshole into the New York restaurant scene.'
We fancied ourselves the most knowledgeable and experiencedyoung Turks in town, and our hearts were filled with hope and the promise of enviable futures. We thought we were the only cooks in New York who could quote from the Larousse Gastronomique and Repertoire de la Cuisine, who knew who Vatel, Careme and Escoffier were, what Bocuse, Verge and Guerard were doing across the water, and we were determined to replicate their successes and their fame. There was no one on the horizon we could see who could touch us.
Okay - there was one guy. Patrick Clark. Patrick was the chef of the red-hot Odeon in nascent Tribeca, a neighborhood that seemed not to have existed until Patrick started cooking there. We followed his exploits with no small amount of envy.
'Born under a broiler,' people said.
'He's screwing Gael Greene,' claimed others.
There were a lot of stories, most of them, like most chefs' gossip, apocryphal. But what we did know about Patrick for sure impressed the hell out of us. He was kind of famous; he was big and black; most important, he was an American, one of us, not some cheese-eating, surrender specialist Froggie. Patrick Clark, whether he would have appreciated it or not, was our hometown hero, our Joe Di Maggio - a shining example that it could be done.
As we assembled for menu-planning sessions, the process of getting our kitchen up and running began. We formed in our already dope-fogged brains a plan, a notional movement even, that would sweep away all the moribund old European chefs and dazzle the world with our New American act . . . as soon as we figured out what that was.
We even planned a hit, a sort of Night of the Sicilian Vespers thing, where we'd straighten them all out in one fell swoop. Back in those days, the older European chefs - Soltner and his generation - would attend an annual Chefs' Race, a downhill ski event at Hunter Mountain where contestants would bomb the slopes in full kitchen whites, toques strapped to their chins. Our plan was to lurk in the woods at the side of the trail, also dressed in whites, but luridly adorned with skull-and-crossbones painted in chicken blood. We'd intercept the geezer contingent as they waddled down the slope and whack them rudely with our ski poles, maybe bombard them with foie gras. We were younger and (we assumed) better skiers, so we would have no problem fending off any counterattack. We believed this would be a bold and memorable way to announce ourselves to the world - until the coke ran out and our enthusiasm with it.
I still laugh out loud when I remember our earnest strategy sessions. However cruel and pointless and stupid the idea might have been, it was a measure of our faith in ourselves. Soltner, of course, was a god to us; the idea of whacking him upside the head with my ski poles, or running over his Rossignols with my rented skis was always unthinkable when lucid.
The new owners of Work Progress, our putative masters, were a textbook example of People Who Should Never Own A Restaurant. There were two brothers - one half-smart, the other genuinely dumb - who'd gotten a few bucks from Mommy and Daddy, along with their partner, a slightly more cognizant college friend who could actually read a P and L sheet and crunch a few numbers. Their principal business was investing in off-Broadway shows. As this, apparently, wasn't unprofitable enough, they'd chosen the restaurant business as a way to lose their money more quickly and assuredly.
From the get-go, Sammy, Dimitri and I managed to intimidate the partners right out of their own restaurant. At every suggestionfrom this novice triumvirate, we'd snort with contempt, roll our eyes with world-weary derision and shoot down whatever outrage - be it tablecloths, flatware or menu items - they'd come up with. We were merciless in our naked contempt for every idea they came in with, and we out-snobbed, out-maneuvered and out-bullied them at every turn.
As the three principal masterminds of this culinary Utopia were all P-Town veterans, we constructed our downstairs kitchen along familiar lines - as a faithful re-creation of the kitchens we'd grown up in: insular, chaotic, drenched in drugs and alcohol, and accompanied constantly by loud rock and roll music. When the restaurant opened, we'd begin every shift with a solemn invocation of the first moments of Apocalypse Now, our favorite movie. Emulating the title sequence, we'd play the soundtrack album, choppers coming in low and fast, the whirr of the blades getting louder and more unearthly, and just before Jim Morrison kicked in with the first few words, 'This is the end, my brand-new friend . . . the end . . .' we'd soak the entire range-top with brandy and ignite it, causing a huge, napalm-like fireball to rush up into the hoods - just like in the movie when the tree-line goes up. If our boobish owners and newly hired floor staff weren't already thoroughly spooked by our antics, then they were by this act.
We fought all the time, Sam, Dimitri and I. Waving our cookbooks at each other, we'd squabble endlessly over the 'correct' way to prepare certain dishes. We teased, poked, prodded, sulked, conspired and competed. We wanted to be the best, we wanted to be different, but at the same time, correct. We yearned to bring honor to our clan, and in that vein, we came up with the looniest, most ambitious menu our super-heated, endorphin-overloaded brains could agree on, a sort of Greatest Hits of Our Checkered Careers So Far collection. French classics sat side-by-side with Portuguese squid stew, my Tante Jeanne's humble salade de to mates, dishes we'd lifted out of cookbooks, stolen from other chefs, remembered seeing on TV. There were Wellfleet oysters on the halfshell, oysters Mitcham (in honor of Howard), there was a pasta dish from Mario's - a sort of taglierini with trail-mix and anchovies as I recall - scallops in sorrel sauce (from Bocuse maybe?), calves' liver with raspberry vinegar sauce, swordfish with black beans and white rice, pompano en papillotte, my mom's creme renversee . . .
We were high all the time, sneaking off to the walk-in at every opportunity to 'conceptualize'. Hardly a decision was made without drugs. Pot, quaaludes, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms soaked in honey and used to sweeten tea, Seconal, Tuinal, speed, codeine and, increasingly, heroin, which we'd send a Spanish-speaking busboy over to Alphabet City to get. We worked long hours and took considerable pride in our efforts - the drugs, we thought, having little effect on the end-product. That was what the whole life we were in was about, we believed: to work through the drugs, the fatigue, the lack of sleep, the pain, to show no visible effects. We might be tripping out on blotter acid, sleepless for three days and halfway through a bottle of Stoli, but we were professionals, goddammit! We didn't let it affect our line work. And we were happy, truly happy, like Henry V's lucky few, a band of brothers, ragged, slightly debauched warriors, who anticipated nothing less than total victory - an Agincourt of the mind and stomach.
We were pretty busy initially, and along with the young proteges who held us in something like awe, Sam, Dimitri and I would work all day and late into the night. When the restaurant closed, we'd take over the bar, drinking Cristal which we'd buy at cost - and running fat rails of coke from one end of the bar to the other, then crawling along on all-fours to snort them. The cuter and more degenerate members of the floor staff would hang with us, so there was a lot of humping in the dry-goods area and on the banquettes, 50-pound flour sacks being popular staging areas for after-work copulation. We'd bribed t
he doormen and security people of all the local nightclubs and rock and roll venues with steak sandwiches and free snacks, so that after we'd finished with our pleasures at the Work Progress bar, we'd bounce around from club to club without waiting on line or paying admission. A squadron of punk rocker junkie guitar heroes ate for free at Work Progress so we got free tickets and backstage passes to the Mudd Club, CBGB, Tier Three, Hurrah, Club 57 and so on. And when the clubs closed it was off to after-hours where we'd drink and do more drugs until, weather permitting, we'd hit the seven o'clock train to Long Beach. We'd finish the last of our smack on the train, then pass out on the beach. Whichever one of us woke from the nod would roll the others over to avoid an uneven burn. When we finally arrived back at work, sand in our hair, we looked tanned, rested and ready.
We considered ourselves a tribe. As such, we had a number of unusual customs, rituals and practices all our own. If you cut yourself in the Work Progress kitchen, tradition called for maximum spillage and dispersion of blood. One squeezed the wound till it ran freely, then hurled great gouts of red spray on the jackets and aprons of comrades. We loved blood in our kitchen. If you dinged yourself badly, it was no disgrace; we'd stencil a little cut-out shape of a chef knife under your station to commemorate the event. After a while, you'd have a little row of these things, like a fighter pilot. The house cat - a mouse-killer got her own stencil (a tiny mouse shape) sprayed on the wall by her water bowl, signifying confirmed kills.
Departing cooks and favored waiters, on their last day of employment, were invited to nail their grotty work shoes to a Wall of Fame by Sammy's cellar office. As time went on, row after row of moldering work boots, shoes and sneakers were pounded into the wall, a somewhat grim reminder of departed friends. On slow nights - and there were, disconcertingly, a growing number of these - we'd have fun with food color and sweet dough. Dimitri, it turned out, was remarkably adept at crafting life-like fingers, toes and sexual organs from basic ingredients. He'd fashion frighteningly realistic severed thumbs - skin rudely shredded at one end, bone fragments made from leek white projecting from the wound - and we'd leave these things around for unsuspecting waiters and managers to find. A waiter would open a reach-in in the morning to find a leaking, torn fingertip, Band-Aid still attached, pinioned to a slice of Wonderbread with a frilled toothpick. A floor manager would be called down to the kitchen in the middle of a dinner shift to find one of us standing by a bloody cutting board, red-smeared side-towel wrapped around a hand, and as they approached, one of Dimitri's grisly fingers would drop onto his foot. We experimented constantly, finding to our delight that not only did the sweet dough look like flesh when shaped and colored correctly, but it drew flies like the real thing! Left overnight at room temperature, Dimitri's fake digits could develop into a truly horrifying spectacle.
Eventually, when every member of the staff was thoroughly inured to the sight of a severed, fly-covered penis in the urinal, or finding a bloody finger in his apron pocket, we moved on to even greater atrocities. One night, with his full cooperation, we stripped Dimitri naked, spattered and filled his ears, nose and mouth with stage blood, and wrapped him in Saran Wrap before helping him into a chest freezer in the dark, rear storage area of the restaurant, his limbs arranged in an unnaturally contorted pose - as if he'd been rudely dumped there post-mortem. We then called the manager on the intercom, asking first if he'd seen Dimitri. We hadn't seen him in hours, we explained, and we were worried. Then we asked the poor bastard if he'd be kind enough to grab a box of shrimp out of the freezer for us, as we were short-handed, Dimitri being missing and all, and four tables going out at once. I think you can imagine what the manager experienced: hurrying back to the dank corner of the cellar, a single, bare light-bulb illuminating the chest freezer; he lifts the lid, only to find the nude, fish belly-white, blood-splattered corpse of our missing comrade staring up at him with dead eyes through a thin layer of plastic wrap, the beginnings of a light frost under the film making the already gruesome scene even more terrifyingly real.
We ended up having to give the guy a shot of ammonia inhaler; his knees buckled and he was unable to return to work for over an hour. Dimitri, of course, caught a terrible cold for his efforts, but it was worth it: the manager left shortly after - and he didn't bother to nail up his work boots on our Wall of Fame. But we cared little for managers or owners - or customers for that matter.
By now, unsurprisingly, our restaurant was rapidly failing. I began to see, for the first time, what I would later recognize as 'Failing Restaurant Syndrome', an affliction that causes owners to flail about looking for a quick fix, a fast masterstroke that will 'turn things around', cure all their ills, reverse the already irreversible trend toward insolvency. We tried New Orleans Brunch - complete with Dixieland band. We tried a prix fixe menu, a Sunday night buffet, we advertised, we hired a publicist. Each successive brainstorm was more counterproductive than the one before. All of this floundering about and concept-tinkering only further demoralized an already demoralized staff.
When the paychecks started bouncing, and the vendors started to put us on COD, the owners called in the restaurant consultants. Even then, we knew what that meant: the consul tants usually arrive just ahead of the repo men and the marshals. It was the death knell. We had tried. We had failed. Naturally, we held the owners responsible. It was a tough spot, the ambiance was no good, the music in the dining room sucked, the waiters weren't well trained . . . we tried to console ourselves with the usual excuses. But the truth was, we just weren't good enough. Our food, while charming to some, was unappealing to most. We did not commit seppuku. Sam and Dimitri stayed on, determined to go down with the ship.
But my cousin had hooked me up with my very first chef job, at a spanking-new but already troubled boite in the theater district and I jumped at the offer. I felt bad about leaving my friends behind. And I had the beginnings of a very nasty little heroin habit from all the dope I'd been sniffing - but hey! I was about to become a chef!
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 comf
ortable with after Vassar, Provincetown, the West Village 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 decidedlynot 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 nowheres ville. 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.
Kitchen Confidential Page 12