A Writer's Life (58 page)

(Months later, after Tucci had opened and the Napa Valley Grill's assets had been liquidated, Michael Toporek was dining with friends at a restaurant in Sag Harbor, Long Island, and found himself sitting in a silk-cushioned chair that was comfortable and somehow familiar. When he looked down to examine it, he realized he was sitting in one of the chairs that he had bought for his Napa Valley Grill.)

In late June 1996, a few days after hearing that Tucci might soon be sold, I met with Gerald Padian at the Tashjian & Padian law firm on East Fifty-sixth Street. The receptionist greeted me by name, having seen me on earlier occasions, and waved me in the direction of Padian's office. He was seated behind his desk, completing a phone call, when I walked in.
Displayed on the wall behind him was a large framed photograph showing Muhammad Ali brandishing his gloved fists over the fallen body of Sonny Liston. After hanging up the phone, Padian stood to shake hands and offered me a chair. We chatted for a while about the Yankees, and then he quickly changed the subject and asked me a question in an offhanded way that caught me by surprise: “How'd you like to buy Tucci?”

Thinking he was kidding, I remained silent.

“No, I mean it,” he said. “You
like
the restaurant business, as you've told me lots of times, and I think you'd really be good at it.”

I did admit that during my boyhood I had often dreamed of owning a restaurant.

“Well, now's the time,” he said, adding that Tucci was on the verge of becoming quite successful. Lowering the food and beverage prices had been a good idea, he believed, drawing more and more customers every night, and he described the new chef as a first-rate employee who was eager to continue doing his fine job in the kitchen. Padian went on to explain that the only reason he was now tempted to relinquish the restaurant was the sudden growth of his law practice, making it increasingly difficult for him to function effectively all day as an attorney and at night as a restaurant owner. His controlling personality, he admitted, had perhaps led him to devote himself excessively to the management of Tucci, while his partners seemed to be too willing to let him do their share of the work. But this situation had to change, he said. He wanted to spend more time with his fiancée (whom he planned to marry within the coming months) and it was also now necessary for him to take more business trips out of town, most recently flying to J. Z. Morris's home state of Indiana to attend to matters involving Morris's multimillionaire father.

As Padian was telling me this, leaning back in his chair with his feet propped up on the desk, his phone was ringing constantly, and while he apologized for each interruption, he readily reached out to accept every call. I sat across from him, thinking about the possibility of my becoming a proprietor in the restaurant world. I wondered what price Padian had in mind, and whether it was
his
share that he was proffering or if the entire five-man partnership intended to unload Tucci. I was intrigued by the notion of fulfilling my boyhood fantasy and also writing about the restaurant business from the
inside
, as George Orwell had done so effectively in
Down and Out in Paris and London
. But it also occurred to me that if I became an investor, familiar as I was with the restaurants at this location, I might become so preoccupied with the economic survival of Tucci that I would never find the time or energy to write anything. Writers are renowned for discovering things to distract them from their work.

I recalled a story about a fellow
Times
man named Meyer Berger, who, after complaining endlessly to his wife about his inability to finish a magazine article, heard her declare one morning that she was leaving him alone in their apartment for the rest of the day and would be locking the door behind her, taking his key with her. She told him that when she returned, later in the afternoon or by early evening, she fully expected that he would have finished his article, adding that he had nothing else to think about, since she had
already
attended to all the household chores: She had washed the breakfast dishes, had prepared his lunch, had cleaned the apartment—even the windows were washed, having been done a day earlier by a service company. Eight hours later, she returned, to find her husband smiling and apparently pleased to see her at home. She discovered, however, that while he had not written a single page, every piece of silver that they owned was on display on the sideboard or in the cupboard, shining, buffed, and freshly polished.

If I invested in Tucci, I was concerned that I would not only be diverted from my writing but would be deprived of the pleasure I had always derived as a restaurantgoer, one who liked going to many different places on a regular basis. I would be confined to one place, night after night. I would be restricted in ways familiar to my friend Sidney Zion when he operated Broadway Joe's, and thus was no longer able to be, as he preferred to be, a man about town venturing in and out of various New York bars and eating places. Another resident of New York named Warner LeRoy, a portly gentleman who favored wearing expensively tailored embroidered jackets and damask waistcoats and was far more experienced and skilled in running restaurants than Sidney Zion had been—LeRoy had founded such splendiferous dining establishments as Maxwell's Plum and Tavern on the Green—told me in an interview that there were two rules a restaurant owner should follow in order to succeed. The first rule, said LeRoy, was to avoid drinking alcohol. (As he mentioned this, I thought about the heavy-drinking Marvin Safir, who had owned Moon's at 206 E. 63rd and had lost $2 million, prompting one of Moon's partners to remark, “The main problem at Moon's was that Marvin Safir was its best customer.”) The second rule, according to LeRoy, was that a restaurant owner should never appear to be bored when in the presence of his customers. This was easier said than done, LeRoy conceded, for sometimes a restaurant's best customers are self-important people who talk too much and are accustomed to being listened to even when they are boring. They are not aware that they are boring, LeRoy went on, and yet it is never the job of a restaurateur to inform them of this; indeed, being as diplomatically inclined as he was, LeRoy said that
whenever he was conversing with boring people, he often nodded his head encouragingly and sometimes raised an eyebrow in a feigned indication of heightened interest. Warner LeRoy's acting abilities were probably linked to his family background. His grandfather had started Warner Bros. and his father had produced and directed
The Wizard of Oz
.

But as a potential proprietor of Tucci, what could I find helpful from my talk with Warner LeRoy? Not much, I thought. I did not want to abstain from my usual predinner dry martini, nor would I want to surround myself almost every night with a social circle of customers, especially those who were presumptuous and tedious. And so when Gerald Padian hung up the phone and resumed our conversation with the question “Have you come to a decision about Tucci?” I replied, “I'm sorry, but I think I'd be better off staying out of it. I'm having enough trouble writing about restaurants, and—”

“Oh, but you'd be
good
at this business,” he interrupted. When I said nothing, he continued in a softer voice: “Won't you at least give it a little thought?”

“Okay,” I said, “I'll think about it, but I'd also like to know a little more about the business, and maybe spend some time hanging around the kitchen.”

“Fine,” Padian said quickly. “I'll arrange it. When would you like to come in?”

“Whenever,” I said.

Padian reached for his phone and spoke for a while to the Tucci chef, Matt Hereford. After hanging up, Padian leaned back in his chair and smiled. “You're hired,” he said. “You can come in tomorrow morning at ten sharp. You'll be working with the chef and the cooks throughout the day. You'll be helping out on the salad station, the pasta station, and the grill. They'll have a uniform waiting for you. And, I promise, you won't have to wash any dishes.”

W
HEN
I
ARRIVED IN FRONT OF
T
UCCI THE FOLLOWING MORNING
, I saw a panel truck parked at the curb and heard the driver cursing to himself as he unloaded boxes of fruit and vegetables along the sidewalk while swatting away the mosquitoes and gnats that were buzzing around his balding head and his rosy-cheeked round face, which was dripping with sweat, even though the shimmering midsummer sun was hidden behind the high-rises and the expected heat wave was hours away from penetrating the streets of the city.

Stacked high along the curb near the truck were several black plastic bags filled with the previous day's garbage from Tucci, which the cartage company was supposed to have collected at dawn and which the insects had been hovering around until being attracted to the newly arrived fresh fruit and vegetables. I paused to count the number of bags. There were twelve. I knew from talking to Padian that cartage companies could tell how well a restaurant was doing by how much garbage it piled up, and so I assumed that the accumulation of a dozen bags supported Padian's notion that Tucci was doing quite well.

The front door was unlocked, but before I entered I heard the driver calling to me in a voice bearing a Slavic or German accent: “Mister, you vill hold open, yah?” He headed toward me, pushing a two-wheeled steel dolly stacked with boxes, and I held open the restaurant's green wood-framed front door as wide as the hinges would allow, and then I stood aside as he brushed past me, nodding his head once and displaying on his face a quirky expression that I accepted as a smile. I followed a few paces behind him as he moved past the rows of empty tables in the dining room and then slowly forced open the swinging doors of the kitchen with the front edge of the dolly.

“Hello, Hans,” said Matt Hereford, sitting on a stool behind the salad table, looking up from the slips of paper spread out in front of him. “They're waiting for you downstairs.” Hans lowered the dolly to the floor
and, after lifting up the top two boxes with his hands and holding them in front of his chest, turned around and walked a few steps to the rear before heading down a narrow wooden staircase to the basement, where the preparatory kitchen was located and where a radio was now tuned loudly to Latin dance music.

“Welcome,” Hereford said, seeing me approaching and getting up to shake my hand. “I'm glad you're here, and hope you'll find it interesting.” He was a slender, soft-spoken, fair-haired individual in his early thirties, whose pale forehead was only a shade darker than the white linen cap that rested upon it, and, as if wishing to lend distinction to his otherwise plain-featured face, he'd endowed it with a Vandyke beard and mustache. His white linen jacket was spotless and hardly wrinkled, and the flat-topped cap that he wore was more like a fez than the high-crowned floppy toques donned by most of the chefs I knew. After handing me a freshly laundered white jacket and cap similiar to what he was wearing, he said, “I hope these will fit.” I removed my Panama hat and tried on the cap, which fit perfectly. Though the jacket was quite large, it was what I preferred because it slipped easily over my beige jacket and it had a collar flap that I could button across the throat and protect my tie and shirt from kitchen splatter.

Hereford gave me a tour of the kitchen, showing me where the grilling was done and where the salads and desserts were prepared. Lined along the white-tiled walls were sinks, stoves, refrigerators, and a dishwasher, and in the middle of the room were counters, a chopping block, and a freestanding rack, on the shelves of which were pots, pans, plates, cooking utensils, and also a white plastic printer that within a few hours would begin relaying the customers' luncheon requests after they had been coded into the dining room's computer by the service staff. Although I did not mention it to Hereford, I had visited this kitchen on earlier occasions, having been shown it initially in 1977 by the French-born proprietor of Le Premier, Robert Pascal, the first restaurateur in this building. It seemed to me that Pascal had been the original owner of nearly everything I now saw in Tucci's kitchen, save for the printer, and the place was in need of restoration and repair. There were dents in the metal cabinets and shelves, cracks in the tiles, and the stove was encrusted.

I followed Hereford down the wobbly steps into the preparatory kitchen, which, like the kitchen above, had white-tiled walls and counters that were obviously not new, but the place abounded with a youthful energy and jolliness that seemed to be in rhythm with the radio music being transmitted by one of the Spanish-language stations. I heard coming from the back of the room the voices of three or four white-capped
workers who were singing along with the recorded sounds of Roberto Carlo as they leaned over sinks and counters while scrubbing potatoes, washing heads of lettuce, and slicing carrots, onions, celery, and cucumbers. I saw Hans kneeling in the center of the room, surrounded by half a dozen boxes that he had opened, and, in his accented way of speaking, but with no lack of self-assurance, he was describing what was packed in the boxes to a tall, broad-shouldered, dark-complected man who stood over him, wearing a white apron and cap. He was the head cook, I was told by Hereford. His name was Miguel Peguero and he was from the Dominican Republic. I had seen Peguero's name on the list of Tucci employees that Gerald Padian had faxed me earlier, and I remembered it because Peguero had been described as a onetime prospect with the Minnesota Twins baseball organization, an infielder who had suffered a career-ending injury during spring training a few years earlier. Now he was on the roster of Tucci, and yet he did not appear to be discontented with where he was; I heard him laughing loudly at something that a fellow worker had called out in Spanish from across the room, and he maintained a bemused expression as Hans knelt in front of him and zestfully directed Peguero's attention to the panoply of fruit and vegetables that was contained in the boxes.