listening, an object of curiosity, a lone gabacho drinking cerveza Modelo, grinning for no apparent reason. Looking down the street, I spied my sous-chef taking an evening stroll with his wife, new baby propped on his arm, young daughter trailing behind, holding her daddy’s other hand. Thirteen years ago, Eddie took that train behind me to Tijuana, swam and waded across the border, then hopped a train to New York. He slept on the subway for his first few weeks, slept on the floors of friends’ apartments when he could, until he got a job as a night porter. Now he’s a sous-chef, a title inadequate to describe his importance. He’s opened and worked at every restaurant in the company – Washington, D.C., Miami, Le Marais – and, of course, for me – at the mothership in New York. Long before I arrived on the scene, he’d been the go-to guy for every chef who walked in the door. Now he’s a fully documented permanent resident (and soon-to-be citizen) of the United States of America, and a newly enrolled student at the French Culinary Institute, where he hobnobs with culinary luminaries like Jacques Pépin and André Soltner. (He’s learning where all that French food he’s been making brilliantly for years really comes from – and why. Eddie knows how to make a gastrite, he just didn’t know what to call it. I wish I could watch him in class, when they show him glaçage or how to make a liaison, or explain the principles of déglacer. He’ll say, ‘Oh, that! No problem. Same like for the ravioli at Les Halles.’) Eddie rents an apartment in Park Slope, owns both a house and a small ranch in his home town of Tlapanala – and considerable livestock. He’s an employer in Mexico, a role model and leader in New York. And he’s my friend. I wish I could take even the slightest credit for the Edilberto Perez story. But I can’t. He did it all. Watching him walk the streets of the place he was born, though, I was filled with pride just for knowing him, and for being lucky enough to have worked with him. Before visiting Eddie, however, I’d had a grim duty to perform. Yet another forced march to television entertainment. ‘Tony . . . Tony . . . listen. It’s a food show. It’s going on the Food Network. We need some variety! We can’t just show you hanging around in Puebla, getting drunk with your sous-chef! Don’t worry! We’re on it. We’ve got some really special ideas.’
That’s why I went first to the state of Oaxaca. So I could be force-fed iguana.
Reasons Why You Don’t Want to Be on Television: Number Four in a Series
I was in Puerto Angel, a fishing village on the Pacific coast, staying at a remote, kooky, overgrown retreat built around a ravine on the slopes of a mountain overlooking the sea. The only other residents were Martin, my driver; two shooters; a burned-out geriatric hippie known as ‘Quiet Dave,’ who spoke in a spacey whisper; the proprietor and his wife and assistants; and a former CIA chief of base for Nha Trang during the Vietnam War and his Chinese girlfriend. As I’d just been to Nha Trang, we had a lot to talk about.
Here’s what I hoped for in Puerto Angel: a neglected stretch of beach, a near-empty, far from luxurious hotel, a few straggling eccentrics. Down the road a ways was the resort town of Zipolite, a sort of Last Stop for well-toasted surfers, backpackers, beach bums, fugitive dope pilots from the seventies, the itinerant jewelry/handicraft set. It’s the sort of place you wake up in – after dropping one hit of acid too many at your 112th Grateful Dead concert – not having any idea how you got there, and far from caring.
We shot a whole-roasted-snapper scene in Zipolite, watched the fishing boats come in at Puerto Angel, the whole town running to meet them as they skipped full throttle through the waves and onto the beach, hulls loaded with fresh tuna. We drove to Huatulco, about twenty miles away, with the idea of doing some snorkel fishing. It was one of those ludicrous, pointless exercises in television artifice so beloved by people who look at life largely through a lens: ‘Get some cool underwater shots of Tony! We can have