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I'd seen On The Waterfront. And I learned fast.

THE HAPPY TIME

IN 1981, MY GOOD friend from high school, and later Provincetown, Sam G., became the chef de cuisine of Work Progress. A once trendy restaurant on Spring Street in S0H0, the place had fallen on hard times. It was now under new ownership and Sammy - one of us! - was in charge of putting the kitchen together. It was what a lot of us had been waiting for, our own thing, and the call went out to all our old cronies. From Provincetown came Dimitri, finally enticed from off-season exile at the tip of the Cape by excited promises of culinary history in the making. I would share sous-chef responsibilities with my mentor. From West Village saloons, we recruited every young, pot-smoking, head-banging hooligan we'd ever worked with, filling their heads with dreams of glory. 'We're forming . . . like . . . a rock and roll band, man, an all-star group of culinary superstars . . . kinda like Blind Faith. We're going to tear a new asshole into the New York restaurant scene.'

We fancied ourselves the most knowledgeable and experiencedyoung Turks in town, and our hearts were filled with hope and the promise of enviable futures. We thought we were the only cooks in New York who could quote from the Larousse Gastronomique and Repertoire de la Cuisine, who knew who Vatel, Careme and Escoffier were, what Bocuse, Verge and Guerard were doing across the water, and we were determined to replicate their successes and their fame. There was no one on the horizon we could see who could touch us.

Okay - there was one guy. Patrick Clark. Patrick was the chef of the red-hot Odeon in nascent Tribeca, a neighborhood that seemed not to have existed until Patrick started cooking there. We followed his exploits with no small amount of envy.

'Born under a broiler,' people said.

'He's screwing Gael Greene,' claimed others.

There were a lot of stories, most of them, like most chefs' gossip, apocryphal. But what we did know about Patrick for sure impressed the hell out of us. He was kind of famous; he was big and black; most important, he was an American, one of us, not some cheese-eating, surrender specialist Froggie. Patrick Clark, whether he would have appreciated it or not, was our hometown hero, our Joe Di Maggio - a shining example that it could be done.

As we assembled for menu-planning sessions, the process of getting our kitchen up and running began. We formed in our already dope-fogged brains a plan, a notional movement even, that would sweep away all the moribund old European chefs and dazzle the world with our New American act . . . as soon as we figured out what that was.

We even planned a hit, a sort of Night of the Sicilian Vespers thing, where we'd straighten them all out in one fell swoop. Back in those days, the older European chefs - Soltner and his generation - would attend an annual Chefs' Race, a downhill ski event at Hunter Mountain where contestants would bomb the slopes in full kitchen whites, toques strapped to their chins. Our plan was to lurk in the woods at the side of the trail, also dressed in whites, but luridly adorned with skull-and-crossbones painted in chicken blood. We'd intercept the geezer contingent as they waddled down the slope and whack them rudely with our ski poles, maybe bombard them with foie gras. We were younger and (we assumed) better skiers, so we would have no problem fending off any counterattack. We believed this would be a bold and memorable way to announce ourselves to the world - until the coke ran out and our enthusiasm with it.

I still laugh out loud when I remember our earnest strategy sessions. However cruel and pointless and stupid the idea might have been, it was a measure of our faith in ourselves. Soltner, of course, was a god to us; the idea of whacking him upside the head with my ski poles, or running over his Rossignols with my rented skis was always unthinkable when lucid.

The new owners of Work Progress, our putative masters, were a textbook