THENASTYBITS (12 page)

Her original concept for Prune? "It was a reaction to years of shitty catering," she admits. Prune was about "what it wasn't.

New York, in '99, was still in long menu scrip mode." Hamilton says she wanted to open a place whereeverything wasn't stacked and drizzled. The menu was "everything I grew up eating. I wanted the food to have a close, familiar feel . . . like in a household. I'm not an inventor."

The celeb chef thing "bums me out," she complains, before admitting that she doesn't even own a TV. It's easy, however, to read the above, or experience Hamilton's withering gaze of disapproval, and miss the heart of the matter. Chefs reveal their true natures with their menus, with their food, and with the nature of the environments that they choose to serve it in.

Prune is a cozy, warm, inviting, and informal restaurant with a tiny, open kitchen, a few plainly appointed tables, and an ancient zinc bar. The menu is pure, unvarnished sentimentality, soulful comfort dishes pilfered, plucked, and remembered from the childhood she had—and from what is also, perhaps, the childhood she wished she'd had.

Pasta kerchiefs with poached egg, French ham, and brown butter is straight from Hamilton's own past. Roasted marrow bones with parsley salad (my favorite dish in the world, by the way) is a lift from London chef Fergus Henderson's St. John (Hamilton was kind enough to call him and tell him she was appropriating his signature dish). Fried sweetbreads with bacon and capers, monkfish liver with warm buttered toast, and lamb sausages with escarole and romesco sauce join Italian wedding soup on the appetizer menu. The bar menu sports radishes with sweet butter and kosher salt and sardines with Triscuits and mustard—a dish that Hamilton loves because "it got me through every poor time in my life."

For main courses, Prune offers roast suckling pig with pickled tomatoes and crackling, whole grilled fish, braised rabbit legs, rib eye with parsley shallot butter, ruby shrimp boiled with sausage, potatoes, and corn; as for the daily specials, even the most cynical professional would find them as inviting and comforting as slipping half-drunk into a warm bath.

"I like no garnish, noncomposed plates," she says.

She loves Asian food, particularly Thai, Burmese, and Sze-chuan, but refuses to incorporate any of its influence into her own cooking. "No. Won't allow it.
Can't
have cilantro on the menu. That's not what this place is about."

So what, then,
is
Prune about?

Like a lot of American chefs, Hamilton is conflicted on the subject of the French.

"I hate the fucking French," she snarls unhesitatingly. When pressed, she grudgingly concedes a fondness for "their cheese, wine, and perfume." But here, I think it's Hamilton who is full of shit. Prune exudes France from every pore. She can run from French terminology and French menu descriptions, she can lard her menu with nostalgic Americana of long-ago summers and still-remembered meals with friends, mix in some rural Brit and a little country Italian. But Gabrielle's French mother's cooking hangs over the place. Prune looks French. It feels French. Before the smoking ban, it was a smoker's paradise. Even the laid-back bistro attitude is stealth French.

Perhaps eager to put the boot in again, she agrees enthusiastically that Spain is indeed "the New France" but shrinks from the tiny bite,
pinchos/tapas
thing: "I still have an attention span. I can eat a
meal."
At the end, "I want to feel
fed"
(words most Frenchmen would probably agree with). Pressed to name some chefs she admires, she gives me the biggest, warmest smile of the day as she names Veritas's Scott Bryan (heavy French influence) and his one-time underboss Mark Ladner (okay, he's cooking Italian at Lupa, but there's a French cook in there somewhere). "I love what they do."

Like a lot of chefs I know who can date their careers back to the good old/bad old days of the eighties, Gabrielle Hamilton is a survivor and a cynic, and like all cynics, a failed romantic. Sorry Gabrielle. I can smell the French on you. It's the radishes with butter and salt on the bar that gave you away. You can run from the past, but you can't hide. None of us can.

She feeds me some braised lamb before I leave, and once again (and I've been trying for years) I attempt to convince her to write the women's version of
Kitchen Confidential.
"You'd make me look like a freakin' manicurist!" I insist. "This is a book that
needs to be written.
Isn't there
enough
testosterone in this genre?!" I point out that she's already a writer, having been published many times in
Food & Wine
magazine, and that publisher pals of mine have been asking.

She waves away the idea and stands up, ready to get back to the downstairs prep kitchen where her crew are setting up for dinner service.

"I'm not going to write the Great American Novel," she sighs. "But we'll feed a few people."

WHEN
THE
COOKING'S
OVER (turn
out
the
lights,
Turn
out
the
lights)

food
and
sin
are
two words that—in the English-speaking world, anyway—have long been linked. Food is a matter of the senses, a pleasure of the flesh, and when one anticipates eating a good meal, one's body undergoes physiological changes similar to those experienced prior to . . . other functions. The lips engorge, saliva becomes thick, the pulse quickens. Early moralists who believed that taking too much pleasure at the table led inexorably to bad character—or worse, to sex—were (in the best-case scenario, anyway) absolutely right. Everything about a restaurant setting conspires toward that end, be it the peach-colored mood lighting that makes you look more alluring and attractive, to the floral arrangements and decor, to the vigorous upselling of wines and spirits. Like rock and roll, the desired end result is to make you happy—and to get you in the sack.

The same folks (or their more recent equivalents) who looked disapprovingly at unrestrained gourmandism were just as quick to identify music—particularly jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll—as the enemy, an evil force likely to lead their sons and daughters to unsuitable mates, unwanted pregnancies, and "wild" behaviors. And in this too, as has long been established, they were right.

Good food
does
lead to sex. As it should.

And in a perfect world, good music does too.

It is surely no coincidence, then, that the kind of music most

chefs and cooks like to listen to, especially after work, is exactly the kind of stuff, heard in exactly the kind of places, that Mama was afraid of. Chefs, whose own personal appetites are rarely confined to food, have always, often notoriously, had a healthy enthusiasm for life's other pleasures. We are, after all, in the pleasure business. It is our job to give pleasure to our customers. How can we be expected, one might ask, to regularly and reliably
give
pleasure if we do not ourselves fully experience it and understand it—in all its strange and fabulous permutations?

Perhaps you should keep that in mind next time you find yourself out late and spy a chef, after work, drunkenly and maniacally bobbing to an old AC/DC tune, well on the way to being seen in flagrante delicto with the hostess from your previous dinner. The chef isn't fooling around, or letting off steam, or even behaving inappropriately. The chef is just fulfilling a responsibility to fully understand the subject: doing research.

If food can lead to sex, and if music can lead to sex, and if the three have often been seen in each other's company
...
is there a direct connection between food and music? Does the music that chefs listen to while they cook—and in their off hours when they are free to roam like the savage, unrestrained beasts we know them to be—lead in some direct way to culinary creativity? Do chefs see music and the places and lifestyle surrounding music as inspiration, or merely as release?

After years of personal introspection and research, and close questioning of some of the country's more accomplished chefs, I arrived at some conclusions.

In my own career, there have always been two soundtracks for each kitchen: one for the workday and another for the late hours after work, when, pumped up with excess adrenaline, my fellow culinarians and I would head out to the clubs or the bars, where we'd drink and review the events of the day. We'd tell stories, share our pain, gripe about bosses and customers, and do what chefs and cooks do when they travel in packs: talk shop. The things I cooked, like the people I knew, I associate with certain songs, certain bands, nightclubs long gone, bars both nearly forgotten and still with us. The places and the songs changed, but certain patterns have held true over the years.

During the mornings, while prep cooks roasted bones and chopped vegetables for stock and the line cooks set up their stations, portioned fish, and made sauce, it was a time for fairly melodic fare. The kitchen sound system, usually a food-encrusted boom box with considerable functional eccentricities, would play nothing too jangly or nerve-racking: Curtis May-field, Isaac Hayes, Depeche Mode, Neil Young—sentimental, atmospheric fare likely to make us feel good about ourselves while cleaning squid or tearing the abductor muscles off scallops. The service period (when, admittedly, most chefs don't allow music, but read on) was usually given over to the large and usually omnipresent Latino contingent: salsa, soca, mariachi, and Mexican pop. When the rush was over, while last orders dribbled out and the cooks began to break down their stations, I usually stepped in with louder, more nihilistic sounds, designed to get us through the last hours of cleaning drudgery and off to the bars with hearts still pumping: mostly mid-seventies/early-eighties punk: the Clash, the New York Dolls, my beloved Ramones, and others whom I still associate with my first happy years of cooking professionally in New York. Those were the bands we went to see then, after our kitchens closed and we'd had a few freebies at the bar. Most of those places—in fact, all of them—are closed now: Max's Kansas City, CBGB's, the Mudd Club, Club 57, Hurrah, along with after-hours venues like AM/ PM, the Nursery, and the Continental. All day long, the job was about
control
and maintaining command of one's ingredients, environment, and personnel. After work it was about
losing
control.

One constant, then and now, is my still ironclad ground rule regarding music both during and after work: In any kitchen where I am in control, there is a strict NO Billy Joel, NO Grateful Dead policy. If you are seen visibly enjoying either act, whether during or even
after
your working hours, you can clean out your locker now. You're fired.

Like a lot of my peers, I'm much older and maybe even a little nicer now and pretty much done with nightclubs and any place where there are likely to be crowds or dancing. People I drink with, and listen to music with, tend to gather not at clubs but at favored dive bars where the music and ambiance suits our taste and our demographic. A good jukebox is vital.

In every city in America where there are restaurants, there are bars where chefs and line cooks go to relax and kick back. It's never sleek or swank; it's usually a dive, someplace nonjudg-mental and forgiving of the occasional bad behavior (and with a liberal pouring policy). It's always open late, as it must be to accommodate cooks' hours, a place where cooks are likely to meet others in their field who share their peculiar half-lives, people who understand what they've accomplished and endured during the last ten or twelve or seventeen hours, and who don't mind the lingering scent of smoked salmon or garlic.

In New York, there's Siberia Bar, a dark, shabby, nearly undecorated dump on West Fortieth Street in Hell's Kitchen. No sign on the door, just a red lightbulb. Inside are sagging, hideously stained couches, friendly bartenders familiar with restaurant folk and their peculiarities, and—on both the ground floor and in the dank, brick-lined cellar—jukeboxes brimming with classic Dead Boys, James Brown, Stooges, Modern Lovers, and Velvet Underground. In Chicago, there's the superbly grotty Rainbow Club and the tiny Matchbox, where you're likely to find cooks from Tru or Blackbird or hotel kitchens listening to head-banging anthems. In New Orleans, the last stop for bar-crawling cookies is the supremely squalid and at times terrifying Snake and Jake's Christmas Club Lounge, where winking Christmas lights, a shotgun-shack motif, an esoteric playlist, and "flexible" hours of operation attract some of the Crescent City's finest practitioners of the culinary arts.

Miami has the magnificently unreconstructed Club Deuce in South Beach, where original members of the "Mango Gang," among them Douglas Rodriguez and Norman Van Aken, used to congregrate, presumably to discuss early experiments with fusion. During the recent South Beach Food & Wine Festival, after the official parties ended, numerous celeb-chef attendees found themselves propped up at the Deuce's serpentine bar watching off-duty ladies of the night play pool. As I lurched back to my hotel, the lion-hearted and still-going-strong Nancy Silverton (of La Brea Bakery in L.A.) was considering grabbing some greasy tacos across the street.

But it's Atlanta that can lay claim to the best of the best (which is to say worst) chef-friendly dives in America: the legendary Clermont Lounge, a sort of lost-luggage department for strippers, who perform—perfunctorily—on a stage behind the bar. An Atlanta institution, attended at one time by nearly every citizen high and low, the Clermont changes character somewhat after midnight. The seemingly lost and hopeless give way to a hipster/restaurant trade contingent. Control of the jukebox (maintained strictly by the performers until then) is given over to a DJ. Though the dancers remain, there is decidedly nothing at all erotic about the spectacle. Cooks, male and female alike, applaud the Clermont's legendary headliner, the decidedly Ru-benesque "Blondie," who recently celebrated nearly two decades at the venue. More than one chef and many cooks in Atlanta cherish their personally crushed and autographed can of Pabst Blue Ribbon from the veteran entertainer.

Well,
of
course,
some of you might be saying at this point. This kind of degenerate, libertine behavior in marginal establishments is to be expected from this writer and his ilk. What about our better, more accomplished chefs—the ones who are actually known and celebrated for their
cooking,
not some obnoxious memoir? Surely the three- and four-star hotshots, the guys we read about in the
Times
and
Gourmet,
have more refined tastes in musical venues? The French gurus, like Daniel Boulud, for instance, they're retiring after their shifts to sip a little wine by the fire, maybe listen to old Serge Gainsbourg, right?

Wrong.

Boulud's tastes run toward the Black Crowes and the Rolling Stones. He's even had speakers installed in his kitchen, though he says, "I've yet to work on a playlist for them. I've focused all my energy on music for the lounge." After work, he likes to run up to Harlem to St. Nick's Pub or to Luci's Cocktail Lounge to listen to electric blues. Listening to the Devil's Music even influences his craft, he admits. "I let music set the mood when I'm cooking at home or traveling—and thinking what I'd like to cook."

Laurent Manrique of San Francisco's Aqua and fellow Glimmer Twin Eric Ripert of New York's Le Bernardin are, probably unbeknownst to their more restrained clientele, both dance club maniacs who claim that staying up all night listening to techno and trance music at skull-vibrating, molar-rattling volume is a vital part of the creative process.

"As much as in the kitchen there are boundaries—in the nightclub there are no boundaries," says Manrique. "It's two strong extremes. In the clubs, you let yourself go. With dance music, like with food, you go from simplicity to complexity: strong rhythm, one melody, then another. Dishes can be like that. First fish, then spice, then sauce. In harmony." Both chefs have loyalties to specific DJs. In San Francisco, Manrique is partial to DJ Deep Dish at dance club Ruby Skye, while with Ripert in New York it's DJ Junior Vasquez at Twilo.

Given the heaving throngs, the ear-splitting volume, and Ripert's well-known penchant for expensive tequila, do they ever come up with any actual dishes during these bacchanals?

"It's happening all the time," says Manrique.

"Music has never led me to a finished dish," says Laurent Gras, formerly of San Francisco's Fifth Floor and the Waldorf Astoria's Peacock Alley in New York—now at Bistro du Vent. While like Manrique and Ripert he likes dance clubs and dance music—naming DJs Danny Tenaglia, Sander Kleinberg, Paul Oakenfold, and Sasha as favorites—he specifies that they give him "inspiration . . . the freedom and creativity to remove a concept from tradition and express pure emotion. The depth and combination of flavors—like sounds—can be easily transcribed as a succession of ingredients and harmony. Bass evokes dark colors. Treble, clear colors. Music can move my eye from materials and pictures to forms and colors." As an example, Gras describes the effect of one dance club mix from DJ Tiesto called "Open Your Eyes" on his cooking: "It had a beautiful and powerful melody that made me think of combining cocoa and tomato. I put these flavors onto the main ingredient, swordfish. I felt it needed these powerful, powerful combinations and yet needed to be very delicate and light. With a beautiful presentation, of course. The (eventual) dish was a tomato and duck consomme, a touch spicy, with swordfish coated with cocoa nib and grilled on the barbecue. It turned out to be a beautiful dish."

Hubert Keller of Fleur de Lys also likes to stay up late at nightclubs. He too names Ruby Skye as a favorite venue, along with Matrix and Swig, in San Francisco, and the Tabu Ultra Lounge and Ivan Kane's Forty Deuce in Las Vegas (where he recently opened a Fleur de Lys at the Mandalay Bay Resort).

"I often get my best inspirations for a new dish by listening to music. And when I develop a dish I tend to do that late at night."

Keller is not content to just go to nightclubs and let someone else do the DJing. "My wife, Chantal, bought me an incredible DJ setup a few years ago, truly state of the art. To my knowledge, Fleur de Lys in Las Vegas is the only four-star restaurant in the country that has a DJ booth. When I went to Vegas, my commitment to music was nonnegotiable. I insisted. Most people don't know that on some Thursday nights, I actually take a turn as DJ."