THENASTYBITS (10 page)

So I'm looking elsewhere these days. Crips, Bloods, La "M," the Aryan Brotherhood, El Rukn—they just don't do it for me. They kill like sharks, as remorselessly and predictably, for reasons as silly as choice sneakers. Our secret services, particularly the CIA, have such a long history of incompetence at the manly arts of assassination—and as organizations have come to resemble nothing more than Midwestern cow colleges—that there's little hope of returning to the fun-filled days of pragmatic killers, ideologically driven cold warriors, and Yalie pranksters. While the Israeli Mossad still provides the occasional item of interest (I particularly enjoyed the exploding cell-phone gag!), recent developments do not bode well for the future. The remnants of the KGB seem too preoccupied with stealing the silver and pilfering what's left of their former empire to actually whack anybody, so there's no help there either. As the modern-day ranks of the Five Families increasingly emerge from the shallow end of the gene pool, we see fewer and fewer instinctive funnymen like Gotti or Sammy Gravano (or even that kooky, kuh-razy Brit comedy duo, the Kray twins), and it gets harder and harder to imagine a modern-day Cosa Nostra killer with the wit, charm, and cold competence of
The Godfather's
Clemenza, instructing his accomplice after murdering an incompetent and possibly treacherous coworker, "Leave the gun. Take the cannolis."

As John Gotti said, complaining (on tape, naturally), about people talking too much:

From now on, I'm telling you that
if
a guy just so mentions "La," and he goes
... I
heard nine months
of
tapes
of
my life (in court). I was actually sick and I don't wanna get sick. Not sick for me, sick for "this thing
of
ours," sick how naive we were five years ago. I'm sick we were so fucking naive.

I empathize with John. His underboss, Sammy, to whom he made the above comments, turned cooperating witness and put John in the can for life without. The government generously rewarded Sammy by forgiving him his part in
nineteen
brutal murders, a small price to pay for his testimony and for a very revealing, very funny book.

For a while, I had an ex-mobster friend named Joe "Dogs," who after his best pal tried to kill him, also became a government witness. He called from time to time, late at night, wanting to talk about nothing in particular: the city, restaurants he used to be able to go to. He liked to gossip about recent arrests of old friends, wonder aloud about book deals—as he too has a second career as a writer. I think it's the New York accent he missed most, that he couldn't talk with anyone where he was now the way he used to talk when he was a functionary for the Gambi-nos. He missed the good old days.

I know how he felt.

ADVANCED
COURSES

i haven't seen much
of America. I don't know much about my own country, but I'm learning fast. In between the airports, minibars, and newsrooms, the hideous sprawl of industrial parks, chain hotels, and generic food that make up the thirty-city journeys I've been on to promote my books, I've begun to glimpse the America they once wrote sappy songs about: the purple mountains, twisting rivers, mill towns, wheat fields, and wide open spaces. And I've met a lot of cooks.

They come to readings in their civilian clothes, but I know them from their faces—the gaunt, haunted, thousand-yard stares, the burns on their forearms, the pink and swollen hands, the way they hold themselves in that permanent defensive crouch. The look that says, "Expect the worst and you'll never be disappointed." In those faces there's pain, hope, and a deep appreciation for irony. And when they take me, as they often do, to eat and drink and drink some more, to talk about the thing we do, there are inevitably a few who distinguish themselves, a vanguard who wants to hear of chefs and cooks in other cities and what they're "selling." They want to know how far they can go. What's next? When will it happen?

"Monkfish liver! Can you sell them? How many people order them?" one will say. "I herda them," says another. "The fucking burger . . ." groans another, "I can't get it off the menu. I tried, but they scream." "Give them the damn burger," says another, "and fucking salmon if they want it too. Just slip them the good

ADVANCED
COURSES

stuff slowly, when they're not looking. A little here, a little there, as a special. Choke them with burgers but slide them tuna rare. Give them their salmon, but make it ceviche. They'll come around. They're coming around."

In Milwaukee, where cooks complain of monstrous portions and demands for steak fries, one chef features an item called "Something Strange But Good" on his menu, sneaking a little something new to his regulars. The sirloin has already been replaced by onglet. The fish is being served rarer every week. It's a beginning. All over the heartland, lamb chops become lamb shanks. Calves' liver and onions give way to sweetbreads and tongue. Throughout the Midwest, foie gras is spreading all over the menu in mousses,
torchons,
in seared
amuse-gueules
given away free, readying customers for the sucker-punches of foie gras "cappuccinos" and "foams" to follow.

In Iowa City, they talk of "slow food," regional products, artisanal cheeses from nearby Wisconsin, local venison, wild duck, and range-free pork and lamb and beef. In Madison, chefs and cooks apologize when they tell me where they're working, places with predictable names and predictably grim menus, but they're all near hopping with enthusiasm, waiting for their chance.

In Kansas City, along with the high-end, white-tablecloth joints, they're still passionate about their barbecues. No two locals seem to agree on which place is best, whether sweeter or spicier is better, and they can discuss the subtle differences in style and flavor as it moves out from the city center to the suburbs. (Spicy in the center, sweeter as it moves farther afield.) Digging into ribs, chopped brisket, pulled pork, spicy slaw, and baked beans at Oklahoma Joe's (an unassuming cafeterialike space situated in a combination gas station-convenience store), I enjoy the most tender, inspiring barbecue I've ever experienced: greasy, sticky, served on plastic trays between slices of white bread. It's a revelation.

In Saint Louis, a goateed chef with a mountain drawl tells me he's thrown out his salamander grill and microwave. "Won't have any a' that cheatin' in my kitchen. Nope. Won't have it." He nearly tears up at the thought of cutting into a hunk of lamb or duck before it's rested.

There's a curiosity about new food among the public, even when it's coupled with apprehension. "Saw you eatin' that snake heart on the TV. How'd that taste? That pho stuff didn't look half bad, though, I gotta say." And they can find pho themselves, because everywhere I go are Vietnamese restaurants; Thai, Hmong, and Chinese markets; families of emigres operating small businesses, many looking and tasting just like the ones back home. There are Mongolian, Japanese, Korean, Indian, and Pakistani joints popping up everywhere. America's cool, if you look hard enough, if you wander far enough from the strip malls and theme restaurants and Starbucks and Mickey D's. Things have changed. Things are different now. Every day.

NAME
DROPPING
DOWN
UNDER

HOLY
SHIT, AINSLEY HARRIOTT
is flicking huge!

I'm in Sydney, Australia, drinking vodka at Fix, the bar behind Luke Mangan's restaurant, Salt, when I look over and see Ainsley, whom I've said some very nasty things about in print (meant every damn word too), and realize that this guy, towering over the crowd, could—should he be so inclined— probably kick my ass. Watching him on TV, cudding housewives and doing the cooing, squealing Jerry Lewis schtick, I figured the guy had to be a shrimp. I figured a guy that flouncy wasn't the sort to maybe see me in a bar someday, reach down, smash a beer bottle against the wall, and then grind it into my neck. Now I'm not so sure. Jesus he's big! His shoulders are the size of basketballs . . . Maybe I should start worrying about Jamie Oliver too. Haven't been so nice to him either. He could be studying some lethal form of martial art; he's already got a fucking paramilitary, I heard. "Oliver's Army?" What is that? Are they like Saddam's Republican Guard? Do they do Oliver's bidding, up to and including eliminating his enemies? Is some glassy-eyed acolyte with a faux cockney accent gonna drive by on a Vespa and let loose with a full clip from a Tec-9? I'd really better think about this.

Fortunately, the evening progresses without senseless butchery. Ainsley even sits down at the same table briefly, gives me a friendly smile and a knowing tap at a copy of my book—which either means he has the forgiving nature of a saint, or I simply haven't been nearly enough of a shit. Rick Stein, the very likable celebrity chef, restaurateur, and serial pyromaniac, sits across from me. Rick is apparently on a mission to burn down Australia, one cooking demo at a time. No television chef is as charming when confronted by sudden, unexpected columns of smoke or flames leaping from a pan. I like Rick. He's a veteran like me, a chef with book deals and a television show, and over drinks we pondered the mysteries—as I often do with other chefs—of the "celebrity chef" phenomenon, both of us feeling maybe a little bit guilty about traveling around staying in hotels for free, while our comrades of old still sweat and strain day after day in the infernos of real kitchens, making real food, for real customers. Is it a good thing? Why now? What does it all mean?

First of all, what is a "celebrity chef"? Well, it's a celebrity— meaning well known, bordering on famous—who is, or was at one time, a chef. This definition would exclude amateurs, neophyte cooks, and sous-chefs plucked off the chorus line by TV producers and elevated through the magic of television to "chef" status. If you're a comely young fry cook with an adorably boyish forelock and you get yanked into a TV studio, given the moniker of, say, the Adenoidal Chef, and suddenly housewives in seventeen countries are squirming in their caftans while you make green curry, that doesn't make you a chef. After fame comes, if someone is silly enough to build a restaurant around your stupid, well-known mug, good for you. It still don't make you a chef. Britney Spears has a restaurant built around her persona and image. That doesn't make her a chef.

Why now, though? What the hell happened? What is wrong (or right) with society that even a son of a bitch like me gets a damn TV show? Why do people even care about chefs? What changed? When I started cooking back in the seventies, the prospect of it becoming a glamour profession was laughable in the extreme. Cooking was something you did between other jobs; it was the last refuge for scoundrels, misfits, and tormented loners. Full-time employees of the "Hospitality Industry" did not enjoy high status or require the services of publicists, voice

NAME
DROPPING
DOWN
UNDER

coaches, elocution tutors, dermatologists, and hair stylists. They required only free liquor, as much food as they could pilfer, a few shekels at the end of the week, and maybe the occasional blow job from a sympathetic waitress. Now, my fry cook is pestering me all the time. He wants to know when he gets his "wide-screen TV, bitches and ho's." He's saving up for his own publicist—as soon as he learns to speak English.

Maybe people just aren't fucking enough. There was a definite upsurge in the fortunes of chefs with the early eighties discovery that indiscriminate sexual activity can kill you. Certainly people seem to be eating more—evidence, perhaps, of sublimated desire. As chefs rushed to acquire basic communication and diplomatic skills, thighs expanded in seemingly direct proportion. "Food porn" began to take hold around the world: buyers of lavishly photographed, expensively bound cookbooks gaped longingly at pictures of people doing things on paper, or on television, that they would probably never try themselves at home. Are celebrity chefs seen as safer, nonthreatening alternatives to, say, rock and rollers, or porn stars of the past? Given the choice between having that cute, perky Jamie Oliver in your kitchen or Tommy Lee, Jamie's presence would seem less likely to lead to penetration or the theft of prescription drugs.

But that can't be all, right? Maybe Rick Stein—and Nigella Lawson, for that matter—appeal to some other need, some deeper emptiness in our collective souls. Rick can honestly be called a celebrity chef. He's put in his time in professional kitchens. Like me, he's getting a little old to put in fourteen-hour shifts every day in a hot a la carte kitchen. Celebrity chefdom can be a pretty nice score, an appropriate payoff for years of toil and uncertainty. Nigella is a celebrity, no question about that, but is she a chef? Of course not. Which is fine. Her show is about eating well, not so much about cooking—about the good stuff, like pork fat and pork skin, becoming approachable, even fun. But Rick Stein and Ms. Lawson share a common and profound appeal, I think. If you're like millions and millions of others of generations X and Y, or a lingering boomer, maybe you left home for school or work when you turned eighteen, ran away to the big city, Mom and Dad an embarrassing reminder of childhood whom you occasionally phone up on holidays. As you sit in your lonely apartment, you feel a yearning, a longing for a sense of family, of belonging. Disconnected as you are from roots you still feel ambivalent about, those big family meals in movies are looking strangely good. A vestigial "nesting" impulse takes hold and you find yourself watching Rick or Nigella, thinking, "Gee, I wish he were my older brother, or dad, and he was cooking for me." Or "I wish Nigella were my sister, or mom, cooking me that slow-roasted ham. I wish that leftover scrap of pork she's nibbling on in the middle of the night were in my refrigerator."

Let's face it: Nigella probably cooks better than your mother. And she's a lot better looking, and cooler. Nigella wouldn't mind if you smoked weed in your bedroom before dinner, would she? She wouldn't criticize you if you came home with your nose pierced and a fierce, full-back tattoo depicting Saint Peter and Dee Dee Ramone shoveling coal down the crack of your ass. Of course not. She'd say, "Remember to clean that nose with alcohol—and wash your hands for dinner! We're having roast suckling pig with quince chutney."

So maybe the celebrity chef racket isn't all bad. Even Jamie Oliver at his most frenzied and annoying is probably, on balance, a force for good. The celeb chef thing, at its best, entices the unknowing, the fearful, the curious to eat a little better, maybe cook once in a while. And it provides much-needed late-career lucre for older, broken-down, burned-out chefs like, well . . . me.

Of all the food-crazy countries in the English-speaking world, Australia is perhaps the most rabidly enthusiastic. It's the Gold Rush for chefs Down Under. In Melbourne, chefs like Paul Wilson of Radii, Raymond Capaldi of Fenix, and Donovan Cooke of Ondine walk down the street after work like frontier-era gunslingers. There are chef-friendly drinking establishments that cater to the needs (and the propensity for bad behavior) of

NAME
DROPPING
DOWN
UNDER

the alcohol-starved late-night chef posse. And all anyone wants to talk about is food and restaurants. Restaurants open and close, chefs bounce from place to place like Manhattan at its most capricious. Both Melbourne and Sydney boast scores of terrific restaurants, and everyone knows the names of their chefs. Chefs are like sports stars here: Everyone knows their stats, the teams they played on in the past. Tetsuya Wakuda, whose cookbook has—along with the
French Laundry Cookbook
—been considered prime "chef porn," meaning books that we professional chefs take to bed with a flashlight in our lonelier moments, is generally considered to run the best restaurant in Australia. His kitchen cranks out an absolutely amazing, jewellike degustation menu that has to be experienced to be believed. Tetsuya, though shy and very serious, is more than ready for his media moment. It's only a matter of time before they get their hooks in him.

On the other hand, you've got Donovan Cooke, a chef from Hull, England, who can trace his culinary credentials back to early Marco Pierre White days. His Ondine in Melbourne is easily one of the best going; his tuna a la ficelle with horseradish cream, oxtail ravioli, fennel, and oxtail broth (a playful take on the beef classic) is one of the best goddamn things I've ever eaten in a restaurant. But it's very hard to picture Donovan with his own television show. While his contemporaries took elocution lessons and learned front-of-the-house survival skills, Donovan kept his thick accent, bounced around Michelin-starred restaurants in France (his French is an amazing thing to hear, believe me), and peppers his sentences with the real language of chefs and cooks. He cooks like a Michelin-starred Frenchman and looks like a football hooligan. When I dropped in on him unannounced, he was standing behind a busy stove, cranking out meals, personally working the saute station. He is absolutely obsessed with flavor—and sauce making in particular—and seems to want to talk about nothing more than the nuts and bolts of emulsion, reduction, fortification
...
all in delightfully non-TV-friendly terms: "You reduce the fucking jus, right? And you don't bloody skim it. You emulsify the fucking fat right in— at the last second. If the sauce breaks? What do you mean if the sauce breaks? If the sauce breaks—you're a fucking cunt." That's a celebrity chef I want to see on TV.

MY
MANHATTAN

i'm a new yorker
, so it should come as no surprise that I think my city is the greatest city in the world. I like living in the city where so many of my favorite films take place, where nearly every street corner reminds me of some piece of lurid personal or criminal history. "Crazy Joe Gallo was shot here . . . Big Paul Castellano got whacked there . . . Used to score there . . . That place used to be a speakeasy . . . My old methadone clinic . . . That used to be an after-hours club . . ." It may not be the most beautiful city. It's not the nicest city (though it is, sadly, getting nicer). And it's certainly not the easiest city to live in. One minute you're on top of the world, and the next—like when you wish to light up a smoke at a bar and can't—you're wallowing in misery and self-pity, unable to decide between murder and suicide. But it is exactly those famously manic highs and lows that make New York, and Manhattan in particular, like nowhere else. I mean, you can talk London or Paris or Barcelona all you like, but we're open all night: I can pick up the phone around midnight and get just about anything I want delivered to my apartment: Chinese food, Lebanese, sushi, pizza, a video, a bag of seedless hydro, a human head.

I think I know what I'm talking about here. I've been other places. I travel a lot—about eight months out of the year. And while I love London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Melbourne, Hanoi, Salvador, Saint Petersburg, Tokyo, and Saint Sebastian like old friends, I miss my city when I'm away too long. As much as I enjoy getting lost, disappearing into another place, another culture, another cuisine, there are places and flavors, sounds, smells, and sights I begin to yearn for after three or four weeks eating fish heads and rice.

When people from other cities, planning a trip to New York (or
the
city, as we locals are apt to call it), ask me where they should eat, where they should go, where they should drink during their stay, they are often surprised at my answers. Sure, we have some of the best high-end restaurants in the world here, but that's not what I miss when I'm wiping fermented bean paste off my chin, or trading shots of bear-bile-infused rice whiskey in Asia. When visiting Manhattan one should go for things that
we
do really well and the rest of the world doesn't.