Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [19]
Our early efforts were, in the cold light of day, pretty crude and laughable. But nobody else in town was doing pâté en croûte or galantines in aspic, or elaborate chaudfroid presentations. Mario tasked his most pretentious cooks with an important mission, and we were determined not to let him down especially as it allowed us time off from our regular kitchen chores and all the overtime we needed. We threw ourselves into the task with near-fanatical once-in-a-lifetime zeal and prodigious amounts of cocaine and amphetamines.
As a fly-fisherman, Dimitri made his own lures; this obsessive eye for detail carried over to his food. For Mario's garden party, we spent days together in a walk-in refrigerator, heads filled with accelerants, gluing near-microscopic bits of carved and blanched vegetables onto the sides of roast and poached fishes and fowls with hot aspic. We must have looked like crazed neurologists, using tweezers, bamboo skewers and bar straws to cut and affix garnishes, laboring straight through the night. Covered with gelée, sleepless after forty-eight hours in the cooler, we lost all perspective, Dimitri at one point obsessing over a tiny red faux mushroom in one corner of a poached salmon, muttering to himself about the distinctive white dots on the hood of the Amanita muscara or psilocybin mushroom, while he applied dust-sized motes of cooked egg white for 'authenticity'. He buried all sorts of horticultural in-jokes in his work - already insanely detailed Gardens of Eden made of leek strips, chives, scallions, paper-thin slices of carrots and peppers. He created jungle tableaux on the sides of hams that he considered, 'reminiscent of Rousseau's better efforts' or 'Gauguin-like'. When I jokingly suggested Moses parting the Red Sea on the side of a striped bass, Dimitri got a faraway look on his face and immediately suggested a plan.
'The Israelites, in the foreground . . . we can use straws to cut the olives and egg whites for their eyes. But the Egyptians pursuing in the background . . . we can cut their eyes with bar straws, you know, the zip-stix! So they're smaller, you see! For perspective!' I had to physically restrain him from attempting this tableau.
We had been under refrigeration for three days straight when we finally collapsed in the Dreadnaught's cocktail lounge at 4 A.M., unshaven, dirty and crazed. We woke up a few hours later, covered with flies attracted by the tasty, protein-rich gelée that covered us from head to toe.
The garden party was, to be modest, a smashing success. No one in dowdy old Provincetown had ever seen anything like it. We became instantly notorious, and we made the most of it, printing up business cards for a planned catering venture called Moonlight Menus. The cards, commissioned from a local artist, depicted us sneering in toques. We proceeded to hand these things out to local businessmen, telling them blithely that not only did we not need, or even want their business, but they couldn't possibly afford us, as we were easily the most expensive and exclusive caterers on the entire Cape! Two highly trained specimens like us had more than enough business, thank you very much.
There was, of course, no business. But the strategy worked. In the coke-soaked final weeks of 1975 P-town, there were plenty of local businessmen eager to impress their friends with an elaborate end-of-season bash. And we were only too happy to encourage them in even grander pretensions, filling their heads with names