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By Root 703 0

nose and mouth with stage blood, and wrapped him in Saran Wrap before helping him into a chest freezer in the dark, rear storage area of the restaurant, his limbs arranged in an unnaturally contorted pose - as if he'd been rudely dumped there post-mortem. We then called the manager on the intercom, asking first if he'd seen Dimitri. We hadn't seen him in hours, we explained, and we were worried. Then we asked the poor bastard if he'd be kind enough to grab a box of shrimp out of the freezer for us, as we were short-handed, Dimitri being missing and all, and four tables going out at once. I think you can imagine what the manager experienced: hurrying back to the dank corner of the cellar, a single, bare light-bulb illuminating the chest freezer; he lifts the lid, only to find the nude, fish belly-white, blood-splattered corpse of our missing comrade staring up at him with dead eyes through a thin layer of plastic wrap, the beginnings of a light frost under the film making the already gruesome scene even more terrifyingly real.

We ended up having to give the guy a shot of ammonia inhaler; his knees buckled and he was unable to return to work for over an hour. Dimitri, of course, caught a terrible cold for his efforts, but it was worth it: the manager left shortly after - and he didn't bother to nail up his work boots on our Wall of Fame. But we cared little for managers or owners - or customers for that matter.

By now, unsurprisingly, our restaurant was rapidly failing. I began to see, for the first time, what I would later recognize as 'Failing Restaurant Syndrome', an affliction that causes owners to flail about looking for a quick fix, a fast masterstroke that will 'turn things around', cure all their ills, reverse the already irreversible trend toward insolvency. We tried New Orleans Brunch - complete with Dixieland band. We tried a prix fixe menu, a Sunday night buffet, we advertised, we hired a publicist. Each successive brainstorm was more counterproductive than the one before. All of this floundering about and concept-tinkering only further demoralized an already demoralized staff.

When the paychecks started bouncing, and the vendors started to put us on COD, the owners called in the restaurant consultants. Even then, we knew what that meant: the consul tants usually arrive just ahead of the repo men and the marshals. It was the death knell. We had tried. We had failed. Naturally, we held the owners responsible. It was a tough spot, the ambiance was no good, the music in the dining room sucked, the waiters weren't well trained . . . we tried to console ourselves with the usual excuses. But the truth was, we just weren't good enough. Our food, while charming to some, was unappealing to most. We did not commit seppuku. Sam and Dimitri stayed on, determined to go down with the ship.

But my cousin had hooked me up with my very first chef job, at a spanking-new but already troubled boite in the theater district and I jumped at the offer. I felt bad about leaving my friends behind. And I had the beginnings of a very nasty little heroin habit from all the dope I'd been sniffing - but hey! I was about to become a chef!

CHEF OF THE FUTURE!

I WAS TWENTY-TWO YEARS old and the chef of a new theater district restaurant on West 46th Street (Restaurant Row). As would become something of a recurring theme in my career, I was following close on the heels of the departed opening chef who'd turned out, it was said, to be an alcoholic psychopath, a compulsive liar and a thief. I, it was hoped, was the solution to the problem: a fresh-faced, eager kid just out of culinary school, who would respond to my novice owners' wishes, and was willing and capable of turning an already bad situation around.

Tom H., as the place was called, was a classic vanity/boutique-type operation. Named for one of its owners, it was a small, glass and crushed velvet jewelbox of a place on the ground floor of a three-story brownstone. Tom, the principal owner, had been a clothing designer, and with Fred, his longtime lover, had been a popular host