Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (29 page)

T
here 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.