Cooking as Fast as I Can (25 page)

After we all realized the house wasn't going to burn down, we laughed and decided the experience was pretty entertaining. I was quickly learning that from an entertainment perspective, if a meal can't be spectacular, the next best thing is disaster. It's
dramatic, and often demonstrates a useful lesson—in this case the lesson was the importance of cleaning your oven.

On another day the phone rang and it was a book agent named Doe Coover, wondering if I'd given any thought to doing a cookbook.

“Actually, I have,” I said.

Doe Coover specialized in nonfiction, with an emphasis on cookbooks. While shooting
Bay Area Café
I became acquainted with identical twins Mary Corpening Barber and Sara Corpening. They were also regulars on the show, and had just published a book on smoothies. They passed my name on to Doe.

I had long dreamed of doing a cookbook, but had no idea how one went about pursuing it. I knew exactly what it would be—a celebration of the food I'd cooked in all the kitchens of my past: my childhood kitchen in Jackson, my ancestral Greek kitchen on Skopelos, and the best recipes from the kitchens I'd come up in. Doe and I worked up a treatment, and two years later, in 2004,
Cat Cora's Kitchen
would be published by Chronicle Books.

The phone rang again. This time it was the James Beard Foundation, calling to invite me to cook one of their prestigious dinners. I had to laugh. At first I thought they were only getting around to reading the letter Jacques Pépin had sent four years earlier, on the occasion of the dinner I'd cooked for him at Bistro Don Giovanni, but it wasn't that. They'd seen me on TV, knew I had a cookbook in the works. My star was on the rise.

Cooking at the Beard House was a big deal in 2002, a feather in any up-and-coming chef's toque. Even though there was no application process and you had to wait with fingers crossed to be invited, you were still expected to assemble your own brigade, buy the ingredients, including wine, and pack up your own
batterie de cuisine
and ship it to New York, as well as make a contribution to the foundation. It took months to plan, including several special trips to the Foundation's brownstone in Greenwich Village to familiarize myself with the kitchen.

I presented my Spring Wine Country Dinner on April 23, 2002. I served four appetizers: Hog Island oysters with a wild mustard flower mignonette; tomato croquetti with a cucumber crème fraîche; Napa Valley spring onion and green garlic tartlets; and smoked salmon rillette with polenta crackers.

I then demonstrated how to pull mozzarella. I melted mozzarella curd in a big pan of hot salted water. After draining the water, I began lifting and stretching the now-softened curd with a wooden spoon, repeating until it was smooth and stretchy. Then I formed the cheese into balls and dropped them into a bowl of cold salted water to infuse them with more flavor.

I incorporated the fresh mozzarella into warm asparagus and truffled fonduta toast. I then served a foie gras “sandwich” on brioche, and for the main course, Napa lamb chops
scottadita
with young fava beans and fruited mustard (
scottadita
loosely translates into “burned fingers” in Italian, meaning that the dish smells so divine you can't wait until it cools to pick up a chop and dig in, thus burning your fingers). For dessert I made a rhubarb and strawberry
bomboloni
and olive oil–toasted almond gelato. For fun, I sent everyone home with a caramel apple dipped in chocolate and rolled in nuts, wrapped with a thank-you note and recipe.

My parents flew to New York from Jackson, and Jennifer and her parents came from California. Even Rocco showed up to lend his support. After dinner, there was a question-and-answer period. We then broke down the kitchen and all went out to grab a late dinner and toast the success of the evening.

As I flew back and forth across the country I had plenty of time to wonder whether I was being too greedy in snapping up every opportunity that came my way, and what that might mean—for me personally, for my relationship with Jennifer, and also for my long-term prospects.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can sleep on airplanes and those who can't. The former often find themselves snoring the moment the jet starts down the runway, while the latter—
me
—use the time to fret. So much was happening so fast, and yet it couldn't happen fast enough. I always wanted more. Surely there wasn't anything wrong with that. I was as ambitious as any male chef, certainly as Michael, with his endless stream of cookbooks, sustainable farm, and cookware line, or Rocco, with his dialogue coach, line counter, and acting aspirations. Yet I recalled a conversation I'd had recently with a friend, a child development specialist. She was an expert in the psychology of newborn babies. She'd mentioned something in passing that I couldn't shake. If a newborn cries and no one picks her up, one of her first experiences of the world is that she is on her own. Of course, we are all on our own, ultimately. We enter and leave this world alone, but the two-day-old who is picked up and held perceives that it's possible that someone somewhere will have her back. I thought about the week I spent at the Mississippi Children's Home, after I was taken from my birth mom, Joanne, and
before I was adopted by my parents. I'm sure people were as good to me as possible, but I feel certain that there were times when I was left to cry, all alone among the other babies. My first thought, even if I had no language for it, was that if I was going to get anything for myself, I and I alone would be the one to do it. Which meant seizing every moment and saying yes to every opportunity that came my way.

The group that ran Postino remained unmoved by my success. Even though every time I appeared anywhere I was introduced or tagged as “Cat Cora, executive chef of Postino,” they were unconvinced that the PR they were receiving was more valuable than my ability to expedite. When I would tell them I needed a week off to go to New York to shoot
The Melting Pot
, they sighed and pursed their lips as if I were asking them for time off to go on a cruise. The CEO, the VPs, they were all nice enough guys, but they were never able to grasp that my costarring on a nationally televised show on Food Network was helping put Postino on the map and therefore was good for business.

I learned after a while that they weren't that interested in raising Postino's profile. As long as it raked in the dough, the owners didn't mind if Postino remained a great little village restaurant, beloved by the locals. But I had bigger aspirations for it, for us. I wanted to help elevate Postino to a nationally known eatery.

But gradually I was coming to see that I didn't have the support of the company. They let me go shoot my Food Network shows, but they didn't encourage me to go. The more opportunities that came my way, the more they seemed to disapprove. Conflicts arose. The general manager, whom I'd
taken under my wing, turned on me, and one of the sous chefs began lobbying for my position behind my back, presuming I would soon get fired or quit.

I was stuck in an awkward place: Postino was my restaurant, but it wasn't really my restaurant, not in the way that Rocco had Union Pacific, Bobby Flay had the Mesa Grill, or Wolfgang Puck had his mini-empire.

I had never aspired to be a businesswoman, but I knew I had to become one. I had to understand my contracts, to learn to negotiate in my own best interest, to learn what it meant to create and build a company, become a brand, promote it and protect it. I had no idea how one went about doing this; I just knew it had to be done, and I was the only one to do it.

Before I gave my notice I recalled a conversation I'd had with Donna during one of our many arguments: “You know, you're never going to be happy just staying in the kitchen.” She'd meant it as a criticism, but I chose to interpret it as a prophecy. My attitude was “You're absolutely right. Just watch me.”

On January 15, 2003, I called the CEO of the restaurant group and told him I was giving my two weeks. He was furious, and when I offered to stay longer in the interest of making the transition easier, he declined. The thing that made my blood boil? He acted surprised. He was
shocked
that I'd want to leave. That despite my national TV shows, commercials, endorsement deals, newspaper column and food features, starring gigs at food shows around the nation, James Beard Dinner, and impending cookbook, I still didn't find it an honor and a delight to work my ass off for him and feel penalized for wanting to grow. I had spent five years helping to build and nurture Postino, taking it from a ho-hum space on a busy boulevard to a beloved local eatery with national exposure. I wasn't expecting any credit—it
had been part of my job, and I'd enjoyed doing it—but the contempt with which my years of hard work were dismissed was galling.

So I decided to throw myself a big ol' going-away party in Postino's private room, knowing full well that the GM who had turned on me would have to serve the party. I ran up the bill, then stuck Postino with it.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention that I had become pretty full of myself by this time. The turn of the century coincided with the rise of the celebrity chef. The Food Network was getting its mission figured out right about the time Anthony Bourdain's
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
hit the bestseller lists, and the word was out: cooking was sexy. Crazy shit went down in the kitchens of your favorite two-star restaurant. Sex, drugs, and rock shrimp tempura with creamy, spicy sauce. Chefs were no longer lowly service workers, enduring miserably long hours in kitchens hot and cramped enough to cause a prison riot, but rock stars.

Before filming a show, I would put myself on a self-styled “cleanse.” I already ate fairly healthy, but I would go religious about not putting anything impure in my body until after the show was shot. Impure is a euphemism for booze. After the shoot was over I'd go a little crazy. I would hit the town for a few martinis, then make the rounds. I'd set up a handful of get-togethers. The culinary world stays up late. I could show up at a chef friend's apartment at 1:00 a.m. and no one would bat an eye.