Medium Raw

Still Here

There are songs I’ll never listen to again. Not the ones that remind me of the bad times.

It’s certain songs from long ago when everything, whether I knew it or not at the time, was golden. Those I can’t abide. Those hurt. And what’s the point of doing that to oneself? I can’t go back and enjoy them any more than I did at the time—and there’s no fixing things.

I was sitting in a restaurant fairly late one night, a neighborhood place my wife and I pop out to now and again. The dinner rush was over and the dining room was only half-filled with customers. We’d just gotten our drinks and finished ordering food when the woman at the next table said, “Tony,” and pointed at her husband, the middle-aged man sitting across from her. “It’s the Silver Shadow,” she said.

It had been more than twenty years since I’d seen the Shadow, as I called him in Kitchen Confidential. And the picture I’d painted of him and the outrageous maelstrom of multiunit madness that surrounded him had not been flattering. I’d always liked the Shadow—no matter how bat-shit crazy things were in his kingdom, or how badly I’d fared there—and I was happy to see him again. I didn’t know what happened with him in the intervening years, though I’d heard stories, of course. He now owns two very good, very sensibly scaled restaurants, one of them in New York and one in a very nice place—the kind where a person might take a vacation.

I didn’t recognize this man, would never have connected him with his younger self. I remember the Shadow as looking like a well-fed, overprivileged grad student (though slightly older)—someone whose yearbook photo from high school one could easily imagine. He looked good now—though considerably older and maybe a little tired-looking. His wife looked the same. She’d looked gorgeous then—she looked gorgeous now. Though friendly during what could have been a far more awkward conversation about the book, she would casually refer to it as “fiction.”

The Shadow was more circumspect. He talked about the reaction when the book came out. Everyone had recognized him right away, he said. His daughter might have told him about it first. “Dad, there’s this book—about you!” He described reading it as “devastating.” He said he cried. And, of course, I felt fucking awful. Like I said, I’d always liked the guy. I’d seen him guilty of a lot of really hubristic, lunatic shit back in the day—but I’d never seen him, unlike so many of his fellow mini-moguls of the time, deliberately fuck anybody over.

After dinner, I ran home and reread his chapter. Yes. There were machine guns in the bathroom…Yes. Cocaine was sold over the service bar. Representatives of a Sicilian-American fraternal organization did indeed come by on a weekly basis to solicit donations. The whole fleet of Shadow restaurants did seem, to even the casual observer, to steam full-speed ahead without anybody having any idea who—if anyone—was at the tiller. But as I did a quick fact-check of my version of the Shadow story, I realized that while I’d gotten the lurid details right, I’d sounded so—shocked, so outraged, so unforgiving of his excesses. I’d made the guy sound like an idiot—which he surely was not.

If the Shadow was ever guilty of anything, it was that he had been very much a creature of his time. Only on a much larger scale. Like I said to him that night, as we sat at our separate tables, reflecting on the past, “Hey. It was the ’80s…We made it through. We’re still here.”

I’d like to say that that was a comfort to the man—or that it might have served as an explanation—even an apology. But I don’t think so.

I have, on the other hand, seen Pino Luongo fuck people over many times. And enjoy it while he did it.

My chapter on Pino made him look like a son of a bitch—but it was still the nicest thing anyone has ever written about the guy. He seemed to think so. We’ve seen each other a few times since the book came out. He even asked me to write the foreword to his memoirs. I happily did, and, as a result, will never get a table at certain restaurants in town where his name—still—is never to be spoken. “I got fucked by Pino” is something I’ve heard from just about every Italian chef I know—usually accompanied by a smile and a shrug. It is worth mentioning that they are now, all of them, at the top of their profession. Most will acknowledge a connection between that early “learning experience” and their current success, maybe even a debt, to the former Dark Prince for teaching them the ways of this sometimes cold and cruel world.

From his once-dominating position at the top of the heap of Italian fine dining in New York City, Pino fell hard. A very ill-considered expansion put his whole organization into deep shit—from which, I gather, he had some difficulty climbing out. There was also the fact that now everybody does what Pino used to do. All the authentic, Tuscan-style touches, oily little fishes, little-known pasta cuts he struggled so hard to convince his customers to eat, are all over menus now. They’re everywhere. As are survivors of his reign of terror.

Even though I was traumatized by my brief experience with Pino, it still hurts when I drive by the space where Le Madri used to be. What a wonderful restaurant that was. It represented the very best of Pino’s nature. So many incredible people passed through those kitchen doors, whom I learned so much from so quickly. It was a magical place.

In the end, they tore the building down.

Pino now is often to be found at his restaurant, Centolire, on Madison Avenue. He greets customers in chef ’s whites—before disappearing back in the kitchen, where he often cooks.

It’s a different Pino one encounters these days. A happier, more lighthearted version. Maybe because he is now unburdened by the weight of empire, he is free to be the more playful and child-like version of himself we saw on rare occasions back in the day. The one that would break through at the table for a moment now and again as he told a story or reached for a freshly grilled sardine.

Bigfoot is not Drew Nieporent—as so many people have suggested. I don’t know why anyone would make a connection between the two, as they are as unlike each other as any two people could be. Drew is a romantic. Bigfoot is not. Anybody who ever worked with Bigfoot, drank in proximity to Bigfoot—or even brushed up against him in the ’70s, ’80s, or ’90s—recognized him immediately in Kitchen Confidential. And, of course, he’s still at it. He owns and operates a saloon in the financial district, where, I have no doubt, he is, at this moment, staring at some tiny design feature trying to figure out how to make it work better—or sorting through the dissembled parts of an ice machine, figuring out how to fix it himself so the crooked fucks who usually do these things can’t gouge him. He’s gazing innocently at some applicant for a waiter job with guileless-looking eyes and pretending to be a little less intelligent than he is, savoring the moment when he can spring the trap. He’s sitting at the bar, measuring the distance between peanut bowls, or contemplating some new menu gimmick or just enjoying being Bigfoot as much as his nature will allow. He has, after all, no choice in the matter.

To this day, there are bars in the West Village where the guy behind the stick has been there twenty years or more. Find one of those one quiet afternoon, sit down, and have a pint or two—and, after a few, ask the bartender to tell you some Bigfoot stories. He’ll have plenty of them.

My old sous chef, Steven Tempel, left New York for Florida, worked briefly for a corporate dining facility (how he passed the piss test I can only guess), left that job, married his longtime, long-suffering sweetheart, had a son, split with his wife, and moved to the small Upstate New York town of Speculator, where he opened a bar and grill named Logan’s—after his son. Though one of the best, most capable cooks I ever worked with, Steven had always said from the beginning that his highest ambition was to open a diner, so, in some sense, his dreams—of all the characters in the book—have come true.

I visited the Logan’s Web site to see what he’d put on his menu, secretly hoping to see some vestige of all those menus, all those restaurant kitchens we’d worked together. Steven had always been un-apologetic about how low-rent his culinary ambitions were—and I vividly recall the kind of food he’d eat or prepare for himself to eat, even when we were surrounded by caviar, fresh truffles, and soon-to-be-endangered animals. But I still held out some foolish hope that some sign of all those times—with Pino, at Supper Club, Sullivan’s, One Fifth—would peek through from in-between the quesadillas, chicken wings, and burgers on the Logan’s menu. I smiled and was pleased to see an incongruous osso bucco on the home page (as Steven’s had always been very good), but when I clicked on the current menu, it was gone, the scroll down an unbroken litany of very sensible sports-bar classics. No vestige of the former Steven in evidence. Which was, of course, just what I should have expected. He had never been sentimental about food. And certainly never been apologetic about anything.

Almost alone among the people I knew and worked with and wrote about in Kitchen Confidential, maybe it was Steven—the guy who never looked back—who figured it all out.

Last I saw the guy, Adam Real Last Name Unknown had an honest job with a company selling prepared stocks and sauces. Strange thing for a baker of his talents to do, but by then it was strange that he had any job at all, so thoroughly had he burned his bridges. And he held that position—whatever it was—for what was, for him, quite some time, maybe a year or two, before disappearing back into the netherworld of what Steven describes to me as “doing the unemployment thing.” Naturally, the prick still owes me money.

I’m sure there’s some neat moral or lesson to be learned from the Adam Real Last Name Unknown story. The idiot savant who made the best bread any of us had ever tasted. The self-sabotaging genius who couldn’t and wouldn’t allow himself to succeed. The lost boy—among many lost boys. I’ll always remember him crying when his cassata cake started to sag. If anybody ever needed a hug, it was Adam. Unfortunately, he would have stuck his tongue down your throat or picked your pocket if you’d tried. Like with all the true geniuses—there’s rarely a happy ending.

My old chef, “Jimmy Sears,” who may or may not be John Tesar, just opened his own place, Tesar’s Modern Steak and Seafood in Houston—after successful (for him) runs in Vegas and Dallas. Then, two months later, he left his own restaurant. Tesar was probably the single most talented cook I ever worked with—and the most inspiring. Walking into Bigfoot’s kitchen one day and finding him holed up “incognito” as the new (and ridiculously overqualified) chef was a pivotal moment for me. His food—even the simplest of things—made me care about cooking again. The ease with which he conjured up recipes, remembered old recipes (his dyslexia prevented him from writing much of value), and threw things together was thrilling to me. And, in a very direct way, he was responsible for any success I had as a chef afterward. It was he, after all, who took me along to Black Sheep, and then Supper Club.

Just as I was inspired and swept along by John’s strengths, I was a direct beneficiary of his weaknesses and foibles. When he fucked up, I stepped up. When he left Supper Club, I had my first chef ’s chef job in a decade.

It was John who first hired Steven and Adam (a mixed blessing, to be sure). And it was John who helped introduce me to a far more skilled pool of chefs and cooks than I’d been used to—like Maurice Hurley (who’d work at Le Bernardin, then run over after his shift to do banquets for me at Supper Club), his brother Orlando, Herb Wilson, Scott Bryan, a whole graduating class of guys who’d worked together out in the Hamptons—or come up with Brendan Walsh at Arizona 206.

Looking back at a lot of the people I’ve known and worked with over the years, I see a common thread starting to reveal itself. Not universal, mind you, but there all too often to be a coincidence: a striking tendency among people I’ve liked to sabotage themselves. Tesar pretty much wrote the book on this behavior pattern: finding a way to fuck up badly whenever success threatens, accompanied by a countervailing ability to bounce back again and again—or, at the very least, survive.

My old pal, role model, and catering partner from Provincetown, whom I referred to as Vladimir, disappeared off the face of the earth back in the ’80s. I’ve heard he went back to school, went into computers or something. Though a photograph of him looking like a Mexican bandit adorns the front covers of countless thousands of copies of Kitchen Confidential all over the world, I have not heard a peep out of him, and he has not, to my knowledge, ever tried to contact me. He, unlike everybody else, got out—not too long after the time period I covered in the chapter titled “The Happy Time.” Vladimir (real name, Alexey) was older than us—and maybe he recognized what we didn’t yet: that the way we were going, times wouldn’t be that happy for long.

Those songs, from those days, from those first years working in New York—though I heard them first in the early days of heroin addiction—that honeymoon period when it’s fun and exciting and oh so…bad to be a junkie, they still hit hard, a mix of exhilaration and loss: “Mad World,” by Tears for Fears, The Bush Tetras, dFunkt, James White & The Blacks, early Talking Heads, Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message,” The Gap Band—all the background noise of that time. Those songs will always be a bit dangerous. Music to score by.

My chef and high school buddy, Sam, went fully down the rabbit hole with me—starting in the early ’80s. He’s on that cover, too, standing there with us, leaning against a wall, all of us holding our knives defiantly. It just took him a lot longer to climb his way out. He did some time in a federal prison—which, he says, saved his life. Clean and sober for some time now, he sells meat in California. Maybe you’ve seen him in such shows as…mine.

Beth Aretsky, the self-named “Grill Bitch,” after a long career in professional kitchens, came to work as my assistant, basically running my life for me when things got so crazy and complicated after Kitchen Confidential and the TV thing and I found myself the kind of person, suddenly, who needed such things as an assistant. She was my right hand, enforcer, and confidante for ten years—and, occasionally even my bodyguard. On book tour one time, when I was menaced by an overaggressive vegan, she slapped him up against a wall with a forearm to the neck. She has walloped overly liquored, overly friendly female fans with the occasional blunt objects as well. Beth married a man she’d been seeing periodically for years and years in the Caribbean—and the two promptly had a baby girl together. She left the service for a more secure, parent-friendly position a year ago—one where, presumably, martial art skills will not be required.

Les Halles Tokyo, the excuse—the purpose—for my first trip to Asia, my first, mind-blowing experience on the other side of the world, closed down shortly after. I will always be grateful to Philippe Lajaunie, the owner, for giving me that life-changing experience—and sharing it with me. People say, and I can well believe, that he is a difficult man to do business with. Strangely enough, even when I was doing business with him as owner of Les Halles, we never actually talked business. He is the best of traveling companions. Relentlessly curious, tireless—and totally without fear.

José de Meirelles, his former partner and the guy who hired me at Les Halles, has gone on to other things, taking sole control of the very successful kosher French brasserie Le Marais, in New York City’s diamond district—and opening a Portugese/Spanish-style tapas place (since closed). Les Halles Washington, DC, closed its doors, and Les Halles Miami changed ownership. Thank God, the way I look at it. They were always, in my experience, a drag on the reputation and finances of the mother ship on Park Avenue—and the successful downtown branch on John Street. I still love those two restaurants, still swing by whenever I can, and am much relieved that their bastard cousins in the hinterlands have stopped being a problem.

Tim the waiter still holds court in the dining room of Les Halles on Park, milking his notoriety for everything he can. If you go to dinner there and inquire of me, he will tell you that you just missed me, that I’m in Thailand having a sex change, or in a Turkish prison, or dog-sledding the Antarctic. Anything but the truth—which means I probably haven’t been around for quite some time.

The kitchens of Les Halles, finally, and deservedly, are now being run by Carlos Llaguna Morales, who started cooking on the fry station many years ago. He is a fantastic cook—far better than I ever was—and, to my surprise, a much better organizer. The dark recesses of Les Halles’ old cellars are now sparklingly clean and bright, compared to my time. The food handling and control systems, a whole different story. And though the kitchen is the same size, with the same number of cooks, the dining room has expanded into the space that used to house the deli next door, nearly doubling the number of seats. Where, in the old days, we considered a night of three hundred and fifty dinners to be a Monster, they now do as many as six to seven hundred.

In 2007, I got the bright idea that I’d go back to Les Halles and work my old station. The Tuesday double shift, no less—where I used to come in at eight a.m., set up, cook the line for lunch, then slam straight into dinner, behind the stove the whole time. That the dining room had gotten so much bigger and busier, and that I’d gotten so much older, didn’t really occur to me until the date was nearly upon me. I’d figured that it would make good television.

As the implications and likely outcome began to dawn on me, I struggled to find a solution, a distraction, some way to mitigate what could very well be a public butt-fucking of historic proportions.

So I invited Eric Ripert out for dinner and plied him with high-end tequila (which is something of a weakness of his), and when he was in suitably good spirits and nicely relaxed, the time was ripe. I suggested he join me for a rollicking good time cooking together at Les Halles. It’ll be fun, you know…

The result is something I’m very proud of. I managed (just) to bully my way through the night (a not very busy one, by current Les Halles standards). It was hard. Very hard. Made harder by the fact that I could no longer read the dupes. When I’d try and slip on my reading glasses, by the time they reached my nose, they were invariably smeared with grease. My knees were creaky, to say the least. But my moves were still there. I could still—if just barely—do it. But at the end of the night, I knew that to do it again tomorrow—as any real cook would have had to do—was out of the question.

Eric, to my surprise, was smooth. I’d hoped that he, who’d never in his life worked in a turn-and-burn joint like mine, who’d never had to hustle out hundreds of plates—much less grill steaks in such quantities and at such speeds—I figured he’d be thrown for a loop. But no. He made it through elegantly, his uniform as snow-white at the end of the shift as when he’d begun. It was enraging. He does, to this day, however, complain bitterly about how “understaffed” the kitchen is at Les Halles. That it’s “inhuman” to pump out so many meals with so few cooks. And “impossible.” He won’t let go of the subject, either.

I’m proud of the television show that came out of it—because it demonstrated in specific, realistic, and very visual terms not just how a busy kitchen works, but how fucking hard it is; how much it requires of a person, the kind of teamwork, the kind of endurance, the mindset, choreography, and organization—and what it takes away.

When people ask me if I ever miss it, my answer is always the same.

No. I don’t.

I know people want me to say yes. Yes, of course I miss it. But I had enough. I had twenty-eight years of it, I tell them, twenty-eight years. I was forty-four years old when Kitchen Confidential hit—and if there was ever a lucky break or better timing, I don’t know about it. At forty-four, I was, as all cooks too long on the line must be, already in decline. You’re not getting any faster—or smarter—as a cook after age thirty-seven. The knees and back go first, of course. That you’d expect. But the hand-eye coordination starts to break up a little as well. And the vision thing. But it’s the brain that sends you the most worrying indications of decay. After all those years of intense focus, multitasking, high stress, late nights, and alcohol, the brain stops responding the way you like. You miss things. You aren’t as quick reading the board, prioritizing the dupes, grasping at a glance what food goes where, adding up totals of steaks on hold and steaks on the fire—and cumulative donenesses. Your hangovers are more crippling and last longer. Your temper becomes shorter—and you become more easily frustrated with yourself for fucking up little things (though less so with others). Despair—always a sometime thing in the bipolar world of the kitchen—becomes more frequent and longer-lasting as one grows more philosophical with age and has more to despair about.

You’re basically done—or on your way to being done. Your brain knows it. Your body knows it—and tells you every day. But pride persists.

What I do miss, I tell them, and will always miss, is that first pull on a cold beer after work. That is irreplaceable. Nothing approaches that. That’s the kind of satisfaction no bestseller can ever beat—no television show, no crowd, no nothing. That single moment after a long and very busy night, sitting down at the bar with your colleagues, wiping the sweat off your neck, taking a deep breath, with unspoken congratulations all around—and then that first sip of cold, cold beer. It tastes like victory. Happy waiters, flush with tips, are ringing out, the cooks look pleased with you and with each other, and you remind yourself that nothing came back the whole night.

Maybe it’s Curtis Mayfield, “Superfly,” that comes on the sound system then—put on by a sympathetic bartender—or “Gin and Juice” (also for the old folks), or something the moment somehow, by collective will, requires: “Gimme Shelter” or The Stooges’ “Dirt.” Songs from some other time—not this one—songs that will always mean something to somebody present, but maybe you had to be there.

You look at each other with the intense camaraderie of people who’ve suffered together and think,

“We did well tonight. We will go home proud.”

There are nods and half-smiles. A sigh. Maybe even a groan of relief.

Once again. We survived. We did well.

We’re still here.