Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [56]
Tom was famous among his wide circle for his meat loaf, his jalapeno corn pudding, and Fred for his dill bread and jalapeno jelly, and in spite of the fact that meat loaf was a tad lower in the hierarchy of menu items than I would have liked - I was still the chef, and nominally in charge of my own kitchen - I was not unhappy about continuing with these cherished signature dishes. The meat loaf got a lot of press from friendly gossip columnists, and in the first months at Tom's, limos full of famous people lined up outside to try the stuff: John and Angelica Huston, Liv Ullman, Jose Quintero, Glenda Jackson, Chita Rivera, Lauren Bacall come to mind.
The entire staff outside of the kitchen was gay, a situation I was entirely comfortable with after Vassar, Provincetown, the West Village and SoHo. The gossipy, self-effacing, overtly queer atmosphere was not only fun but, in many ways, completely in line with the gossipy, self-effacing, overtly depraved world of chefs and cooks. The waiters and bartenders could always be counted on for funny personal anecdotes of sexual misadventures-particularly as this was the early '80s - and they were always willing to share, in hilarious and clinical detail, their excesses of the previous night.
Our bar crowd, however, the guys you saw when you first walked in the door at Tom's, were almost uniformly like their hosts, older gay men. The floor staff and bartenders, far younger and hunkier, uncharitably referred to the restaurant as a 'wrinkle room' and made much fun of the somewhat sad, even desperate longings of some of our clientele. We may have been in the gossip columns a lot, and dinners, when I arrived, were still fairly busy for pre- and post-theater, but Tom's was decidedlynot hot - not with an average age of sixty staking out the bar making goo-goo eyes at the bartender.
We were busy for pre-theater, a mad rush to get them in and get them out in time to make curtain, followed by nearly three hours of complete inactivity. The far end of West 46th Street in 1982 was nowheres ville. Only predators, Guardian Angels and junkies seemed to walk by; the whole crew, kitchen, floor and even Tom and Fred would hang out and gossip to stay amused, hoping for a second pop when the shows let out near eleven. Work Progress was by now only a few weeks from complete ruin, so I began peeling away a few key men; Dimitri became my sous-chef, and a couple of other cooks and dishwashers followed me uptown as well. I did my best to punch up the menu, putting on some beloved American regional/comfort dishes I thought in keeping with the meat loaf and jalapeno corn pudding theme. We fooled around with a lot of retro classics like chicken pot pie, fried chicken steak with cream gravy, black-eyed peas and collards, ham steak with red-eye gravy, New England clam chowder, San Francisco cioppino, and the like. I did my best to work the line responsibly, spend Tom and Fred's money wisely, and generally behave in such a way as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of my very kindly new masters.
But things were already not going as planned. Tom and Fred had taken over the entire building, and dropped big money making it over into the bistro of their dreams. They'd purchased a lovely serpentine zinc bar at an auction in France, put in all-new equipment, built living quarters, office space and a small prep kitchen upstairs. It had, I'm sure, cost them a lot of money. But I don't think they were prepared for a sudden requirement that they extend the range-hood exhaust vent another 200 feet and three floors