Kitchen Confidential (2 page)

I took it in my hand, tilted the shell back into my mouth as instructed by the by now beaming Monsieur Saint-Jour, and with one bite and a slurp, wolfed it down. It tasted of seawater. . of brine and flesh. . and somehow . of the future.

Everything was different now. Everything. I'd not only survived-I'd enjoyed.

This, I knew, was the magic I had until now been only dimly and spitefully aware of. I was hooked. My parents' shudders, my little brother's expression of unrestrained revulsion and amazement only reinforced the sense that I had, somehow, become a man. I had had an adventure, tasted forbidden fruit, and everything that followed in my life-the food, the long and often stupid and self-destructive chase for the next thing, whether it was drugs or sex or some other new sensation-would all stem from this moment.

I'd learned something. Viscerally, instinctively, spiritually-even in some small, precursive way, sexually-and there was no turning back. The genie was out of the bottle. My life as a cook, and as a chef, had begun. Food had power.

It could inspire, astonish, shock, excite, delight and impress. It had the power to please me. . and others. This was valuable information. For the rest of that summer, and in later summers, I'd often slip off by myself to the little stands by the port, where one could buy brown paper bags of unwashed, black-covered oysters by the dozen. After a few lessons from my new soul-mate, blood brother and bestest buddy, Monsieur Saint-Jour-who was now sharing his after-work bowls of sugared vin ordinaire with me too-I could easily open the oysters by myself, coming in from behind with the knife and popping the hinge like it was Aladdin's cave.

I'd sit in the garden among the tomatoes and the lizards and eat my oysters and drink Kronenbourgs (France was a wonderland for under-age drinkers), happily reading Modesty Blaise and the Katzenjammer Kids and the lovely hard-bound bandes dessinees in French, until the pictures swam in front of my eyes, smoking the occasional pilfered Gitane. And I still associate the taste of oysters with those heady, wonderful days of illicit late-afternoon buzzes. The smell of French cigarettes, the taste of beer, that unforgettable feeling of doing something I shouldn't be doing.

I had, as yet, no plans to cook professionally. But I frequently look back at my life, searching for that fork in the road, trying to figure out where, exactly, I went bad and became a thrill-seeking, pleasure-hungry sensualist, always looking to shock, amuse, terrify and manipulate, seeking to fill that empty spot in my soul with something new.

I like to think it was Monsieur Saint-Jour's fault. But of course, it was me all along.

IN 1973, UNHAPPILY IN love, I graduated high school a year early so I could chase the object of my desire to Vassar College-the less said about that part of my life, the better, believe me. Let it suffice to say that by age eighteen I was a thoroughly undisciplined young man, blithely flunking or fading out of college (I couldn't be bothered to attend classes). I was angry at myself and at everyone else. Essentially, I treated the world as my ashtray. I spent most of my waking hours drinking, smoking pot, scheming, and doing my best to amuse, outrage, impress and penetrate anyone silly enough to find me entertaining. I was-to be frank-a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking. Rudderless and unhappy, I went in with some friends on a summer share in Provincetown, Cape Cod. It was what my friends were doing and that was enough for me. Provincetown was (and is) essentially a small Portuguese fishing village all the way out on the fish-hooked tip of the Cape. During the summer months, however, it became Times Square/Christopher Street-by-the-Sea. This was the '70s, remember, so factor that in when you conjure up the image of a once quaint New England port town, clogged with tourists, day-trippers, hippies, drifters, lobster poachers, slutty chicks, dopers, refugees from Key West, and thousands upon thousands of energetically cruising gay men. For a rootless young man with sensualist inclinations, it was the perfect getaway.

Unfortunately, I needed money. My on-again-off-again girlfriend spun pizza for a living. My room-mates, who had summered in P-town before, had jobs waiting for them. They cooked, washed dishes, waited tables-usually at night-so we all went to the beaches and ponds each morning, smoked pot, sniffed a little coke, dropped acid and sunbathed nude, as well as indulging in other healthy teenage activities.

Tired of my drain on the household finances, one annoyed and practical room-mate hooked me up with a dishwashing gig at the restaurant where she waited tables. Dishwashers (sudbusters, aka pearl divers) were the most transient breed in the seasonal restaurant business, so when one goofball failed to show up for work for two days, I was in. It was my introduction to the life-and at first, I did not go happily.

Scrubbing pots and pans, scraping plates and peeling mountains of potatoes, tearing the little beards off mussels, picking scallops and cleaning shrimp did not sound or look attractive to me. But it was from these humble beginnings that I began my strange climb to chefdom. Taking that one job, as dishwasher at the Dreadnaught, essentially pushed me down the path I still walk to this day. The Dreadnaught was-well, you've eaten there, or someplace like it: a big, old, ramshackle driftwood pile, built out over the water on ancient wooden pylons. In bad weather, the waves would roll under the dining-room floor and thud loudly against the sea wall. Grey wood shingles, bay windows, and inside, the classic Olde New Englande/Rusty Scupper/Aye Matey/Cap'n Whats's decor: hanging fishnets, hurricane lamps, buoys, nautical bric-a-brac, the bars fashioned from halved lifeboats. Call it Early Driftwood.

We served fried clams, fried shrimp, fried flounder, fried scallops, French fries, steamed lobsters, a few grilled and broiled steaks, chops and fish fillets to the mobs of tourists who'd pour into town each week between the 4th of July and Labor Day.

I was surprisingly happy in my work. The Dreadnaught management were an aged, retiring and boozy lot who stayed out of the kitchen most of the time. The waitresses were attractive and cheerful, free with drinks for the kitchen and with their favors as well.

And the cooks? The cooks ruled.

There was Bobby, the chef, a well-toasted, late-thirtyish ex-hippie who, like a lot of people in p-town, had come for vacation years back and stayed. He lived there year-round, cheffing in the summer, doing roofing and carpentry and house-sitting during the off-season. There was Lydia, a half-mad, matronly Portuguese divorcee with a teenage daughter. Lydia made the clam chowder for which we were somewhat famous, and during service dished out the vegetables and side dishes. She drank a lot. There was Tommy, the fry cook, a perpetually moving surfer dude with electric blue eyes, who even when there was nothing to do, rocked back and forth like an elephant to 'keep up the momentum'. There was Mike, an ex-con and part-time methadone dealer, who worked salad station.

In the kitchen, they were like gods. They dressed like pirates: chef's coats with the arms slashed off, blue jeans, ragged and faded headbands, gore-covered aprons, gold hoop earrings, wrist cuffs, turquoise necklaces and chokers, rings of scrimshaw and ivory, tattoos-all the decorative detritus of the long-past Summer of Love.

They had style and swagger, and they seemed afraid of nothing. They drank everything in sight, stole whatever wasn't nailed down, and screwed their way through floor staff, bar customers and casual visitors like nothing I'd ever seen or imagined. They carried big, bad-ass knives, which they kept honed and sharpened to a razor's edge. They hurled dirty saute pans and pots across the kitchen and into my pot sink with casual accuracy. They spoke their own peculiar dialect, an unbelievably profane patois of countercultural jargon and local Portugee slang, delivered with ironic inflection, calling each other, for instance, 'Paaahd' for 'Partner' or 'Daahlin' for 'Darling'. They looted the place for everything it was worth, stocking up well in advance for the lean months of the offseason. A couple of nights a week, the chef would back his Volkswagen van up to the kitchen door and load whole sirloin strips, boxes of frozen shrimp, cases of beer, sides of bacon into the cargo area. The speed racks over each station-containing bottles of cooking wine, oil, etc. for easy access during service-were always loaded with at least two highball glasses per cook; Lydia liked to call them 'summertime coolers', usually strong Cape Codders, Sea Breezes or Greyhounds. Joints were smoked in the downstairs walk-in, and cocaine-always available, though in those days very expensive and still considered a rich man's drug-was everywhere. On payday everyone in the kitchen handed money back and forth in a Byzantine rondelay of transactions as the cooks settled up the previous week's drug debts, loans and wagers.

I saw a lot of bad behavior that first year in P-town. I was impressed. These guys were master criminals, sexual athletes, compared to my pitiful college hijinks. Highwaymen rogues, buccaneers, cut-throats, they were like young princes to me, still only a lowly dishwasher. The life of the cook was a life of adventure, looting, pillaging and rock-and-rolling through life with a carefree disregard for all conventional morality. It looked pretty damn good to me on the other side of the line.

But if there was one moment where I saw clearly what I wanted, it was at the end of that summer. I'd moved up a bit by now. Mike had gone missing on a meth jag and I had been promoted to the salad station plating shrimp cocktails, cracking oysters and cherrystone clams, mixing canned lobster meat with mayonnaise and filling champagne glasses with strawberries and whipped cream.

The Dreadnaught line was a long, narrow affair: a cold station by the exit door to the parking lot, a double-decker lobster steamer where we'd kill off the 1~ and 2-pounders by the dozen, stacking them up like cordwood before slamming shut the heavy metal doors and turning the wheel, giving them the steam. Then came a row of deep-fryers, a range, a big Garland pull-out broiler, a few more burners, and finally a brick hearth for charcoal grilling, all of this bordered by the usual pass-through on the other side-wooden cutting board/counter with sunken steam table, and below that, the low-boy reach-in refrigerators for reserve supplies. By the far-end open hearth, where Bobby, the chef, worked, was a Dutch door, the top half kept open so incoming tourists could get a peek at some lobsters or steaks grilling as they entered and get in the mood.

One weekday, a large wedding party arrived, fresh from the ceremony: bride, groom, ushers, family and friends. Married up-Cape, the happy couple and party had come down to P-town for the celebratory dinner following, presumably, a reception. They were high when they arrived. From the salad station at the other end of the line, I saw a brief, slurry exchange between Bobby and some of the guests. I noticed particularly the bride, who at one point leaned into the kitchen and inquired if any of us 'had any hash'. When the party moved on into the dining room, I pretty much forgot about them.

We banged out meals for a while, Lydia amusing us with her usual patter, Tommy dunking clams and shrimp into hot grease, the usual ebb and flow of busy kitchen. Then the bride reappeared at the open Dutch door. She was blonde and good-looking in her virginal wedding white, and she spoke closely with the chef for a few seconds; Bobby suddenly grinned from ear to ear, the sunburned crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes growing more pronounced. A few moments later she was gone again, but Bobby, visibly trembling, suddenly said, 'Tony! Watch my station,' and promptly scooted out the back door.

Ordinarily, this alone would have been a momentous event. To be allowed to work the busy broiler station, to take the helm-even for a few minutes-was a dream come true. But curiosity got the better of all of us remaining in the kitchen. We had to look.

There was a fenced-off garbage stockade right outside the window by the dishwasher, that concealed the stacked trash and cans of edible waste the restaurant sold to a pig farm up-Cape, from the cars in the parking lot. Soon, all of us-Tommy, Lydia, the new dishwasher and I-were peering through the window, where in full view of his assembled crew, Bobby was noisily rear-ending the bride. She was bent obligingly over a 55-gallon drum, her gown hiked up over her hips. Bobby's apron was up, resting over her back as he pumped away furiously, the young woman's eyes rolled up into her head, mouth whispering,

'Yess, yess. . good. . good. While her new groom and family chawed happily on their flounder fillets and deep-fried scallops just a few yards away in the Dreadnaught dining room, here was the blushing bride, getting an impromptu send-off from a total stranger. And I knew then, dear reader, for the first time: I wanted to be a chef.

I DON'T WANT YOU to think that everything up to this point was about fornication, free booze and ready access to drugs. I should recall for you the delights of Portuguese squid stew, of Wellfleet oysters on the halfshell, New England clam chowder, of greasy, wonderful, fire-red chorizo sausages, kale soup, and a night when the striped bass jumped right out of the water and onto Cape Cod's dinner tables.

There was, in 1974, no culinary culture that I was aware of. In P-town in particular, there were not, as there are today, any star chefs-school-trained, name-on-the-jacket characters whose names and utterances were tossed around by foodies, photos swapped like baseball cards. There were no catch-phrases like 'Bam!' and 'Let's kick it up a notch!' bandied about on television for a credulous public like there are today. These were early times in American food. Squid was considered a 'garbage fish', practically given away at the docks. Tuna was sold mainly as cat-food, or to canneries, and to a few enterprising Japanese who were thought to 'confuse things' with the high prices they paid. Monkfish was yet to be called lotte and make its appearance on Manhattan dinner tables. Most fish in P-town was slapped boneless and skinless onto sizzle-platters, drizzled with clarified butter and paprika and then broiled to death. The parsley sprig and the lemon wedge were state-of-the art garnishes. Our few culinary heroes at the Dreadnaught were admired more for their studliness on the line-meaning number of dinners served each night, amount of pain and heat endured, total number of waitresses screwed, cocktails consumed without visible effect. These were stats we understood and appreciated.

There was Jimmy Lester, the Broiler King, whom we thought a lot of. He'd worked for years at a nearby steakhouse and was famous for the remarkable number of steaks and chops he could handle at one time on his big roll-out broiler. Jimmy had 'moves', meaning he spun and twirled and stabbed at meat with considerable style and grace for a 220-pound man. He was credited with coming up with 'the bump'-a bit of business where a broiler man with both hands full of sizzle-platters or plates knocks the grill back under the flames with his hip.

We liked that.

The mishandling of food and equipment with panache was always admired; to some extent, this remains true to this day. Butchers still slap down prime cuts with just a little more force and noise than necessary. Line cooks can't help putting a little English on outgoing plates, spinning them into the pass-through with reverse motion so they curl back just short of the edge. Oven doors in most kitchens have to be constantly tightened because of repeatedly being kicked closed by clog-shod feet. And all of us dearly love to play with knives. The boys across the street were considered to be a championship team, the perfect example of the culinary ideals of the time. Mario's Restaurant was a hugely successful Southern Italian joint and the Mario crew were feared and respected because they did more covers, by a few hundred each night, than almost anyone else in town. It was fairly sophisticated stuff for the time: whole legs of veal were actually butchered on the premises, stocks were made from real bones (not commercial base), sauces were made from scratch with quality ingredients-and the Mario crew were the loudest, crudest, most bad-ass bunch of cookies in town. When they'd swing by the Dreadnaught for a few pops after work, they made our ragtag bunch of part-time roofers feel small. They were richer, more confident, and moved with even more swagger and style than our motley crew of oddballs and amateurs. They moved in a pack, with their own dialect-a high-pitched, ultra-femme, affected drawl, salted with terms from eighteenth-century English literature and Marine Corps drill instructor-speak-a lush, intimidating, sardonic secret language, which was much imitated.

'You, sir, are a loathsome swine. Too damn ignorant to pour piss from a boot! Your odor offends me and my shell-like ear gapeth to hear thy screams of pain. I insist you avert your face and serve me a libation before I smite your sorry ass with the tip of my boot-you sniveling little cocksucker!' They had women's names for each other, a jarring thing to hear as they were all huge, ugly-looking and wild-eyed, with muscles and scars and doorknocker-sized earrings. They looked down on outsiders, frequently communicated with only a glance or a smile, and moved through the streets and bars and back alleys of P-town like Titans. They had more coke, better weed, bigger gold, prettier women. They loved rubbing our noses in it.

'How many?' they'd ask after a busy Saturday night. '0h . one-fifty, two hundred,' Bobby would reply, fluffing the number a little. 'We did . what? How many was it, Dee Dee, daahlin?' the Mario chef would ask casually, Four-fifty? Five?' 'Six, I think,' Dimitri, the Mario pasta man, would reply-a man who would later playa major part in my career. 'Yes six. Slow night, I dare say. Pathetic, don't you know. Pig-dogs must have eaten their mung elsewhere tonight. Dairy Queen, probably. And then there was Howard Mitcham. Howard was the sole 'name chef' in town.

Fiftyish, furiously alcoholic, and stone-deaf-the result of a childhood accident with fireworks-Howard could be seen most nights after work, holding up the fishermen's bars or lurching about town, shouting incomprehensibly (he liked to sing as well). Though drunk most of the time, and difficult to understand,

Howard was a revered elder statesman of Cape Cod cookery, a respected chef of a very busy restaurant, and the author of two very highly regarded cookbooks: The Provincetown Seafood Cookbook and Creole, Gumbo and All That Jazz-two volumes I still refer to, and which were hugely influential for me and my budding culinary peers of the time.

He had wild, unruly white hair, a gin-blossomed face, a boozer's gut, and he wore the short-sleeved, snap-button shirt of a dishwasher. Totally without pretension, both he and his books were fascinating depositories of recipes, recollections, history, folklore and illustrations, drawing on his abiding love for humble, working-class ethnic food of the area.

Howard loved seafood. All seafood. Unlike most of us, he knew what to do with it. He loved the less popular fishes of the day, using tuna, squid, mackerel, bluefish and salt cod to great advantage. His signature dish was haddock amandine, and people would drive for hours from Boston to sample it. He was the first chef I knew to appreciate fully the local Portugee cuisine: the spicy cumin-scented squid stews, the linguica-Iaden kale soups, the coupling of fish and pork sausages. And he was a strident advocate for the mystical powers of the Quahog, that humble, slightly tough local clam.

Once each summer, Howard and friends-mostly artists, local fishermen, writers and drunks-would throw a party called the John J. Gaspie Memorial Clambake, in honor of a departed fisherman friend. It was a major social event for P-town's year-round residents, and for those of us who worked the season in the restaurant business. Howard and friends would dig pits in the beach and drop shiny new trash cans into the holes, then fill them with quahogs, lobsters, codfish, vegetables, potatoes and corn, allowing them to simmer over glowing coals buried deep in the sand while everyone drank themselves silly.

To us at the Dreadnaught, Howard was a juju man, an oracle who spoke in tongues. We might not have understood Howard, but we understood his books, and while it was hard to reconcile his public behavior with the wry, musical, and lovingly informative tone of his writings, we knew enough to respect the man for what he knew and for what he could do. We saw someone who loved food, not just the life of the cook. Howard showed us how to cook for ourselves, for the pure pleasure of eating, not just for the tourist hordes.

Howard showed us that there was hope for us as cooks. That food could be a calling. That the stuff itself was something we could actually be proud of, a reason to live. And that stuck with some of us from those early frontier days. He influenced a lot of my friends. I read a Molly O'Neill column in the New York Times Magazine recently, in which she was describing the delights of Portuguese-influenced Cape Cod food like white beans, kale and chorizo, and I knew she'd eaten the old man's food, and probably read his books too. Without his name being mentioned, Howard's reach had extended across the decades to my Sunday paper-and I was glad of it.

There was another inspiring moment: a rough, choppy, moonlit night on the water, and the Dreadnaught's manager looked out the window suddenly to spy thousands of tiny baitfish breaking the surface, rushing frantically toward shore. He knew what that meant, as did everyone else in town with a boat, a gaff and a loaf of Wonderbread to use as bait: the stripers were running!

Thousands of the highly prized, relatively expensive striped bass were, in a rare feeding frenzy, suddenly there for the taking. You had literally only to throw bread on the water, bash the tasty fish on the head with a gaff and then haul them in. They were taking them by the hundreds of pounds. Every restaurant in town was loading up on them, their parking lots, like ours, suddenly a Coleman-lit staging area for scaling, gutting and wrapping operations. The Dreadnaught lot, like every other lot in town, was suddenly filled with gore-covered cooks and dishwashers, laboring under flickering gaslamps and naked bulbs to clean, wrap and freeze the valuable white meat. We worked for hours with our knives, our hair sparkling with snowflake-like fish scales, scraping, tearing, filleting. At the end of the night's work, I took home a 35-pound monster, still twisted with rigor. My room-mates were smoking weed when I got back to our little place on the beach and, as often happens on such occasions, were hungry. We had only the bass, some butter and a lemon to work with, but we cooked that sucker up under the tiny home broiler and served it on aluminum foil, tearing at it with our fingers. It was a bright, moonlit sky now, a mean high tide was lapping at the edges of our house, and as the windows began to shake in their frames, a smell of white spindrift and salt saturated the air as we ate. It was the freshest piece of fish I'd ever eaten, was due to the dramatic quality the weather was beginning me right in the brainpan, a meal that made me feel better better for eating it, somehow even smarter, somehow to the cortex, a clean, three-ingredient ingredient high, Could anything be better than that?

and I don't know if it to take on, but it hit about things, made me It was a protein rush eaten with the hands.

As the season came to an end, the regular crew began to fade away, off to work ski resorts in Colorado, charter boats in the Caribbean, restaurants and crab-shacks in Key West. After Labor Day, I got my chance to move up for the last few weeks before the Dreadnaught closed for the year. I worked the fry station, dunking breaded clams and shrimp into hot oil for a while, racked up a serious body count of lobsters on the double-decker steamer, and finally was moved up yet again to do a few shifts on the mighty broiler. I cannot describe to you the sheer pleasure, the power of commanding that monstrous, fire-breathing iron and steel furnace, bumping the grill under the flames with my hip the way I'd seen Bobby and Jimmy do it. It was tremendous. I couldn't have felt happier-or more powerful in the cockpit of an F-16. I ruled the world for a few short weeks, and I was determined to make that station my own the following season.

Sadly, things didn't turn out as planned. The next summer, Mario bought our faltering restaurant. Mario was kind enough to allow those of us who'd worked there the previous year to audition for our old jobs with a few shifts in his kitchen. I was thrilled by the opportunity, and headed up to P-town that April filled with hope and confidence, certain I'd make the cut, land that top-tier broiler job, the big money, the gig that would surely make me one of the pirate elite, an ass-kicking, throat-slitting stud who could lord it over the salad men and fry cooks and prep drones at less successful restaurants.

I pulled into town, I remember, wearing-God help me-a spanking-new light blue Pierre Cardin seersucker suit. The shoes, too, were blue. Here I was, hitchhiking into a town that for all intents and purposes was a downscale, informal Portuguese fishing village and artists' colony, a town where people dressed unpretentiously in work clothes-denims, army surplus, old khakis-and in some deranged, early '70s bout of disco-inspired hubris, I chose to make my entrance in gull-wing shouldered Robert Palmer-wear, just itching to show the local yokels how we did it in New York City.

They were pounding veal in the kitchen when I arrived; the whole crew, on every available horizontal surface, banging on veal cutlets for scallopine with heavy steel mallets. The testosterone level was high, very high. These guys were the A-Team, and they knew it. Everybody knew it. The floor staff, the managers, even Mario seemed to walk on eggs around them, as if one of them would suddenly lunge through the bars of their cage and take a jagged bite. I alone was too stupid to see how over my head I was among these magnificent cooking machines. I'd served a few hundred meals, at a relaxed pace, in a not very busy joint, in the off-season. These guys drilled out four, five, six hundred fast-paced, high-end meals a night!

It was Friday, an hour before service, when I was introduced to Tyrone the broiler man, whom I'd be trailing. Looking back, I can't remember Tyrone as being anything less than 8 feet tall, 400 pounds of carved obsidian, with a shaved head, a prominent silver-capped front tooth, and the ubiquitous fist-sized gold hoop earring. While his true dimensions were probably considerably more modest, you get the picture: he was big, black, hugely muscled, his size 56 chef's coat stretched across his back like a drumhead. He was a gargantua, a black Viking, Conan the Barbarian, John Wayne and the Golem all rolled into one. But unintimidated as only the ignorant can be, I started shooting my stupid mouth off right away, regaling my new chums with highly exaggerated versions of my adventures at the old Dreadnaught-what bad boys we had been. I blathered on about New York, trying to portray myself as some street-smart, experienced, even slightly dangerous professional gun-for-hire of the cooking biz.

They were, to be charitable to myself, not impressed. Not that this deterred me in the slightest from yapping on and on. I ignored all the signs. All of them: the rolling eyes, the tight smiles. I plunged on, oblivious to what was happening in the kitchen right around me; the monstrous amounts of food being loaded into low-boys and reach-ins for mise-en-place. I missed the determined sharpening of knives, the careful arranging and folding of side towels in kitty-cornered stacks, the stockpiling of favorite pans, ice, extra pots of boiling water, back-up supplies of everything. They were like Marines digging in for the siege at Khe Sanh, and I registered nothing.