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By Root 733 0

tennis tournament. The whole place was taken over by actors, politicians, famous faces, and long-haired Kennedy kids in tuxes and basketball sneakers. Secret Service agents and sniffer dogs combed the kitchen for fissionable material and hidden weapons. I was surprised when they didn't find any. The highlight of the event was a mishap involving honored guest Dina Merrill, sitting near the head of the banquet table with hubby Cliff Robertson. One of our veteran waiters lost control of an entire tray of bubbling tortellini alfredo, depositing an upended pile of Parmesan-laced heavy cream and pasta directly on Ms Merrill's coif. There was weeping and rending of garments in the kitchen that night, I can tell you, the offending waiter nearly suicidal with fear, shame and grief. He was part of a father-son waiting team, Dad having been relegated to running coffee orders for his golden years, and son was despondent. I don't know what he was crying about; it was a union house, after all.

As in any large restaurant operation, there were tiny centers of power, fiefdoms, little empires that seemed to exist outside of the normal hierarchy. Gianni was the pastry chef, and his shop, set apart from the main kitchen, was a relative fortress of solitude and civility in a sea of chaos. I worked with Gianni every once in a while - just to escape the heat and frenzied pace of the main kitchen, and because the quality of life was significantly better in Gianni's tiny kingdom. I could, thanks to Chef Bernard at CIA, throw together a decent souffle when called upon to do so, and I was good at decorating and inscribing cakes, for which there was a lot of call. The Gianni crew consisted of a taciturn Swiss who worked three other jobs and always looked ready to die from fatigue, and an aged ex-Wehrmacht corporal with dyed red hair and moustache who loved to regale me with stories of Weimar era perversions: 'Zey vould feed ze girls bananas,' he said once, leering and winking as he described a purported club for coprophiles. 'Hitler and Goering . . . yah, Goering, zey would go these places.' Daytime with Gianni involved a lot of very fast, very hard work, mostly production-cake assembly, wrapping of the ever-present Wellingtons in pastry dough, rolls, pastries, stacks of crepes for crespelle, cookies, the sectioning of fruit for later dipping in caramelized sugar. All the while, Gianni urged us on with cries of 'Cha! Cha! Via! Let's go!'

But the atmosphere in Gianniland was remarkably happy-go-lucky. At the beginning of the workday a waiter would appear with an urn of steaming hot espresso, and we would actually sit down for a nice demi-tasse, accompanied by homemade sticky buns. Even in the middle of full-bore production, Gianni found time to hurl profiteroles at the skaters sixty-four flights down in the Rock Center rink, all of us having a good laugh when he scored a direct hit. And Gianni was a skilled raconteur. His romantic adventures and misadventures made for much entertainment. Though married, he was relentless in his pursuit of every woman in the restaurant - most of them looked like whichever was the uglier of Cagney and Lacey (the later episodes when they bulked up to cruiser weights). He was always befuddled when one of them would resist his affections: 'So I saya to thees girl, "I bring you out to nice dinner which I pay . . . and I drive you in nice car - a Buick . . . and you no wanna fuck me?" I don't unnerstan!' 'He was kind of charming, totally untrustworthy,conspiratorial, possessing mysterious juice with the ownership, able to operate completely outside the normal chain of command. What I loved about Gianni, though, was that at the stroke of four, when the day-shift ended, we all sat down and had a lovely meal of prosciutto, arugula, sliced tomato and mozzarella on fresh-baked Italian bread, often accompanied by a nice bottle of red wine and more espresso.

Where Gianni got this stuff, I have no idea, particularly since edible food was decidedly not a perk enjoyed by the rest of the staff and kitchen crew. In the main kitchen,