Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [53]
From the get-go, Sammy, Dimitri and I managed to intimidate the partners right out of their own restaurant. At every suggestionfrom this novice triumvirate, we'd snort with contempt, roll our eyes with world-weary derision and shoot down whatever outrage - be it tablecloths, flatware or menu items - they'd come up with. We were merciless in our naked contempt for every idea they came in with, and we out-snobbed, out-maneuvered and out-bullied them at every turn.
As the three principal masterminds of this culinary Utopia were all P-Town veterans, we constructed our downstairs kitchen along familiar lines - as a faithful re-creation of the kitchens we'd grown up in: insular, chaotic, drenched in drugs and alcohol, and accompanied constantly by loud rock and roll music. When the restaurant opened, we'd begin every shift with a solemn invocation of the first moments of Apocalypse Now, our favorite movie. Emulating the title sequence, we'd play the soundtrack album, choppers coming in low and fast, the whirr of the blades getting louder and more unearthly, and just before Jim Morrison kicked in with the first few words, 'This is the end, my brand-new friend . . . the end . . .' we'd soak the entire range-top with brandy and ignite it, causing a huge, napalm-like fireball to rush up into the hoods - just like in the movie when the tree-line goes up. If our boobish owners and newly hired floor staff weren't already thoroughly spooked by our antics, then they were by this act.
We fought all the time, Sam, Dimitri and I. Waving our cookbooks at each other, we'd squabble endlessly over the 'correct' way to prepare certain dishes. We teased, poked, prodded, sulked, conspired and competed. We wanted to be the best, we wanted to be different, but at the same time, correct. We yearned to bring honor to our clan, and in that vein, we came up with the looniest, most ambitious menu our super-heated, endorphin-overloaded brains could agree on, a sort of Greatest Hits of Our Checkered Careers So Far collection. French classics sat side-by-side with Portuguese squid stew, my Tante Jeanne's humble salade de to mates, dishes we'd lifted out of cookbooks, stolen from other chefs, remembered seeing on TV. There were Wellfleet oysters on the halfshell, oysters Mitcham (in honor of Howard), there was a pasta dish from Mario's - a sort of taglierini with trail-mix and anchovies as I recall - scallops in sorrel sauce (from Bocuse maybe?), calves' liver with raspberry vinegar sauce, swordfish with black beans and white rice, pompano en papillotte, my mom's creme renversee . . .
We were high all the time, sneaking off to the walk-in at every opportunity to 'conceptualize'. Hardly a decision was made without drugs. Pot, quaaludes, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms soaked in honey and used to sweeten tea, Seconal, Tuinal, speed, codeine and, increasingly, heroin, which we'd send a Spanish-speaking busboy over to Alphabet City to get. We worked long hours and took considerable pride in our efforts - the drugs, we thought, having little effect on the end-product. That was what the whole life we were in was about, we believed: to work through the drugs, the fatigue, the lack of sleep, the pain, to show no visible effects. We might be tripping out on blotter acid, sleepless for three days and halfway through a bottle of Stoli, but we were professionals, goddammit! We didn't let it affect our line work. And we were happy, truly happy, like Henry V's lucky few, a band of brothers, ragged, slightly debauched warriors, who anticipated nothing less than total