Kitchen Confidential (21 page)

I'm thinking about going home but I know I'll just lie there, grinding my teeth and smoking. I tell the cabbie to take me to the corner of 50th and Broadway, where I walk downstairs to the subway arcade and the Siberia Bar, a grungy little underground rumpus room where the drinks are served in plastic cups and the jukebox suits my taste. There are a few, cookies from the Hilton at the bar, as well as a couple of saggy, bruised-looking strippers from a club up the street. Tracy, the owner of the joint, is there, which means I won't be paying for drinks tonight. It's 1 A.M., and I have to be in at seven-thirty manana, but the Cramps are playing on the jukebox, Tracy immediately fiddles with the machine so there's twenty free credits-and that first beer tastes mighty good. The Hilton cookies are arguing about mise-en-place. One of them is bitching about another cook nicking salt off his station, and the other cook doesn't see why that's such a big deal-so I'm gonna be involved in this conversation. The Cramps tune is followed by the Velvets singing 'Pale Blue Eyes', and Tracy suggests a shot of Georgian vodka he's got stashed in the freezer.

MY SODS-CHEF, IN AN ideal situation, is like my wife. I'll go further: my sous-chef, in an ideal situation, is closer to me than my wife. I mean no disrespect to my wife, Nancy, whom I adore, and with whom I've been stealing horses since high school. It's just that I spend a lot more time with my sous-chef. The judge, as Nancy likes to remind me, will never believe it.

Steven, my sous-chef from 1993 until recently-when he finally took on a kitchen of his own-was my evil, twin, my doppelganger, my director of clandestine services, a Bilko-esque character who, in addition to the usual sous-chef responsibilities such as running the kitchen in my absence, line cooking at a high level and watching my back, was invaluable to me for his remarkable ability to get things done.

Key to the walk-in lost? Just ask Steven. He'll have that door off its hinges in minutes. Robot-Coupe need a replacement part in the middle of a busy holiday rush? Steven will slip out the door and be back in minutes with the part-slightly used-and with another restaurant's shallots still in it. Want to know what they're thinking in the office? Ask Steven. He's suborned the secretaries and is reading the interoffice e-mail on a regular basis. Need bail money? A codeine pill for that knife wound? A new offset serrated knife real cheap? He's your boy. When I wonder what's in the heart and mind of someone I work with? I ask Steven. He'll take them out, get them liquored up so they blab their guts out, and I'll have a full report by noon next.

All the things I couldn't do-or couldn't be seen to do-he did. And he did them well. In fact, though a highly paid executive chef now for a major corporate outfit, he still works for me one night a week on my grill station, to keep his hand in, I guess. So there is still an action arm to my administration, a covert-action arm.

Having a sous-chef with excellent cooking skills and a criminal mind is one of God's great gifts. In our glory days together, like the capo of a crime family, or the director of the CIA, I could look across the room at Steven, raise an eyebrow, maybe make an imperceptible movement with my chin, and the thing-whatever the thing was at the time-would be done. Espionage, Impromptu Collection of Materiel, Revenge, Disinformation and Interrogation. . our specialties.

I met Steven at the Supper Club. It was 1993, my return to the 'bigs'. I'd been working for Bigfoot at his West Village saloon, comfortable but in career limbo. I took a few weeks off to kick back in the Caribbean, and when I returned, I found a down-on-his luck Jimmy Sears in Bigfoot's kitchen. Bigfoot had been eating dinner at the Gotham recently, and had experienced some kind of culinary epiphany. Suddenly, he wanted a real chef, and Sears, whose restaurant in the Hampton's had just gone under, was sleeping on floors around Manhattan, dodging creditors and ex-girlfriends, and in general, going through a rough patch-prime time for a Bigfoot recruiting effort.

Jimmy was a brilliant cook. He'd come up with Brendan Walsh at Arizona 206, and the food he turned out in his brief time working the Bigfoot mines was so good, I'd stay after my shift was over, sit at the bar and order dinner and pay for it. Seeing what Jimmy could do in the kitchen really inspired me; I'd been slinging hash for way too long, and tasting a real demi-glace again, eating new, exciting food, seeing new presentations, made me remember what I'd enjoyed about food in the first place. I worked hard for Jimmy, and after knocking out a few thousand meals, going skiing together a few times, we'd become pals, and we determined that when Jimmy and Bigfoot's relationship came to an end, as it inevitably would, I'd keep an eye on the talented Mr Sears, maybe come along for the ride when he made his next move.

That clash of wills was not long in coming. A few months later, Jimmy's period of saloon exile was over; he landed the exec chef gig at the Supper Club, a huge restaurant/nightclub/disco on West 47th Street, and began hiring cooks. I was one of the first to get the call.

It was a plum job to be executive chef at the Supper Club. Hell, it was a plum job doing anything at the Supper Club. Perk-o-delic. The main dining room sat about 200, with private banquettes and booths along the walls, a dance floor, and a stage from which a twelve-piece orchestra played '40s swing music. There was an upstairs mezzanine-a holdover from the Club's previous incarnation as a Broadway theater-which sat another 150 or so, with a second bar, and off to the side, also on the second floor, was a smaller venue, a cabaret-cum-VIP lounge called the Blue Room, which sat another eighty. It was a pretty swank place, what they used to call a 'rug-joint' back in the '30s and '40s-a big, glitzy operation with plenty of cracks to fall through, a place where you could easily picture a young Burt Lancaster (just out of the joint), returning to find a young Kirk Douglas (the club owner) counting the night's take in one of the private banquettes. Dinner and dancing to swing music went on from five to eleven, after which the smoke machines would start belching chocolate-smelling fumes, the laser intellabeams would kick into action, the mirror ball would begin turning, a DJ would take over, and the Supper Club would become (for a while) the hottest dance club in town.

Every night there was a different crowd with a different promoter: Chicks with Dicks Night featured towering transvestites and pre-ops tottering around on high heels to house and techno; Soul Kitchen featured pre-disco '70s funk, with early blaxploitation films playing silently on the big screen and 40-ouncers and chicken wings for sale; Giant Step had acid jazz and fusion; Cafe Con Leche nights had salsa nueva and Latin funk; Funkmaster Flex attracted a hip-hop crowd; Noel Ashman attracted Eurotrash and the face-lifted, well-dressed crowd . you never knew, there was every variety of nightlife madness as each night people lined up down the street and around the corner onto Eighth Avenue, waiting to get past our metal detectors and our thirteen burly security goons so they could rip up our bathrooms, crowd around our three bars, smoke weed, snort coke and copulate like bunnies in every nook and cranny of our cavernous pleasure palace.

Jimmy brought me in as an overpaid garde-manger man-120 smacks a night to plate salads and squirt whipped cream on desserts. But Jimmy was not, at that time, an organizational mastermind. I am. Jimmy spent much of his time roller-blading around the city schmoozing; he had a second job, cooking for Mariah Carey and Tommy Mottola; he was secretly working out a deal for his triumphant return to the Hamptons; and of course he was poking everything in a skirt. By the time he'd swing by the Supper Club, little things like ordering, scheduling, rotating food and organizing menus were afterthoughts. I quickly found that doing it myself was easier than waiting for Jimmy to show up and do it for us, and in no time at all I was running the nuts-and-bolts end of the kitchen: making sure that we had the food, the prep, the bodies and information needed to crank out the enormous volume of parties, buffets, hors d'oeuvres and regular menu items the business required. Jimmy's food, as always, was magnificent, but Jimmy himself seldom seemed to be around. After a few months, I was de facto sous-chef, or kitchen manager-the guy everyone came to to find out what the hell was going on-and when I came back after another brief vacation in the Caribbean, Jimmy, though still nominally the chef, was secretly and simultaneously employed as the chef at The Inn at Quogue out in the Hamptons, and Steven Tempel was working in the Supper Club kitchen.

I guess it was a historic moment.

He showed up looking for a saute position, his even more degenerate friend Adam Real-Last-Name-Unknown in tow. I had a few weeks to watch these two in action before Sears slipped off to the Hamptons and his even more reduced 'summer schedule', and I begged, pleaded and implored him not to saddle me with these two coke-snorting, thieving, fire-starting, whoring, boozing and troublemaking miscreants. Jimmy ignored my entreaties.

When Steven and Adam were in the kitchen together, I couldn't turn my back for a second. They were hyperactive and destructive, two evil Energizer bunnies who, when they weren't squabbling and throwing food at each other, seemed always to be dodging out of the kitchen on various criminal errands. They were loud, larcenous, relentlessly curious-Steven can't look at a desk without rifling its contents; they played practical jokes, and set up whole networks of like-minded co-workers. A few weeks after he arrived, Steven already had the whole club wired from top to bottom: the office help would tell him what everyone else was getting paid, security would give him a cut of whatever drugs they impounded at the door, and the techies let him play with the computers so that when an order for, say, swordfish came in, the dupe would also say, 'Fuck Me Hard'.

Maintenance gave him a share of the lost-and-found and split the leftover booty from the promotional events-goody bags filled with cosmetics, CDs, T-shirts, bomber jackets, wrist-watches, etc.; the chief of maintenance even gave Steven the key to a disused office on the Supper Club's neglected third floor, an old janitor's storage room that, unbeknownst to management, had been converted to a carpeted, furnished and fully decorated pleasure pit, complete with working phone. It was a space suitable for small gatherings, drug deals and empire-building. The room was decorated with posters of Latina women penetrating themselves with vegetables, and it had been done up with pilfered carpet remnants and furniture from the adjoining Edison Hotel. As the space was located up a long flight of garbage-strewn back stairs, behind the reeking locker-rooms, down a dark, unlit hall where spare china was stored, management never visited-and a young man could be secure in the knowledge that whatever dark business he was conducting, no matter how loud, unruly or felonious, he was unlikely to be disturbed.

When management finally got wind of the fact that Jimmy was getting paid for not working at the Supper Club, I was made the chef. Unfortunately, Steven had already carved out his own invisible empire within my own. It made things difficult.

The boy could cook, though.

The Club, particularly during the winter party season, when we regularly did banquets and sit-downs for hundreds and hundreds of people, required strength, skill and endurance, and an ability to improvise fast of its cooks. The bulletin board on my office wall was clogged with party sheets; sit-down meals for 300 would lead directly into four buffets and a cocktail reception for 700-often on the same day. The logistics involved in buying the food, preparing it and moving it around for so many people were staggering-the invasion of Normandy every day of the week. Having an enterprising and capable little bastard like Steven around was a powerful asset. Here was a guy who could stay up all night snorting coke and drinking Long Island ice teas, getting into trouble of the most lurid kind, and still show up the next morning and knock out a thousand meals. I may have spent way too much time investigating the criminal activities of the Steven and Adam crime family, always calling one or the other into my office for a tune-up or an interrogation (I must have fired them both at least three times), but they, particularly Steven, always found a way to weasel their way back into my good graces and make themselves invaluable.

Steven, for a while, it seemed, saw the light (to whatever extent that's possible with Steven). One night, Nancy and I bumped into him at a bar in Westhampton. He'd been moonlighting (typical of Steven) for Sears, and when I saw him, he was slurring his words, his jaw twitching from cocaine, his eyes scrambling around in his sockets like caged spider monkeys, and he slapped an arm around my shoulders and announced that he was going to start showing up to work on time, that he was going to start behaving responsibly, that he was going to turn over a new leaf.

I remember Nancy looking at me as if to say, 'Yeah, riiight . He was, of course, promising much more than he could ever deliver. Life with Steven over the last five or six years has been notable for one hideous outrage after another. But he did begin showing up at work on time. He stopped disappearing on two-and three-day benders. He tried, as best he could, to refrain from bringing shame and disgrace upon my house and kitchen. Most important, Steven, suddenly and inexplicably, became the sort of person who, when he says he's going to do a thing, does it. This, more than anything else, is the essence of sous-chefdom. With Steven around, I no longer had to come in in the morning and say, 'Did you take care of that thing?' The thing was always taken care of. I like that. I made him my sous-chef.

Let's revisit, reconstructing from an untrustworthy and incomplete record, the checkered career of Steven Tempel: he grew up on Long Island, attended Johnson and Wales culinary school where, unsurprisingly, he ran into trouble (something about an assault) and was nearly expelled. He worked in a diner in Providence while he was at J and W (Steven, for all his faults, likes money and was never afraid to work), did time at Big Barry's out on the Island, bounced around a progression of knucklehead jobs and eventually migrated to Northern California, ending up at a joint called La Casa Nostra, where he encountered the uncontrollable idiot-savant and baking genius Adam Real-Last-Name-Unknown (nobody knows-as far as the Government is concerned, he doesn't even exist) Like Hunt and Liddy, these are two guys who should never have been allowed in a room together. When they're together, a sort of supernova of stupidity occurs, a critical mass of bad behavior. They like to reminisce about this California idyll period of their lives: snorting coke through uncooked penne, projectile vomiting in the parking lots of strip clubs, driving their owner into insolvency, soliciting, pandering, stealing and in every way leaving a trail of destruction and bodily fluids in their wake. Steven returned to New York, probably one step ahead of the law, and worked brief stints at Mathew's with Mathew Kenney ('Asshole' says Steven), Carmine's, the Plaza Hotel, and some other very decent restaurants for brief periods of time. Along the way, he managed to pick up a very respectable set of line-cooking chops, as well as that peculiar variety of less legitimate skills that continue to serve him well to this day. He remains a remarkable font of knowledge about the inner workings of the restaurant business, the real cogs and wheels. He can fix a broken compressor, repair appliances, pick locks, jury-rig electrical power where there was none before, unclog a grease trap, find a breaker, fix a refrigerator door. And he is a close observer of every detail of human and mechanical activity in the workplace-a guy who notices things-probably a result of all those years looking for opportunities for criminality. Little gets by him. If somebody's running a scam, Steven knows all about it. The idea, more than likely, occurred to him first.