Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [57]
Tom and Fred had taken a lifetime lease on the building. They lived on the top floor, fully intending, I believe, to spend the rest of their lives there. So it pained me to see their dream die in increments, to see the realization dawn - with each expensive repair, each slow night, each unforeseen expense - that things were not turning out as hoped. The waiters, not uncharacteristically, joked bitterly about the situation. Where were all of Tom and Fred's friends now, they asked knowingly, now that they were no longer getting comped free meals?
'But Betty Bacall loves that dish!' Tom would protest when I suggested removing a particularly moribund item from the menu. He'd keep certain things on, favorites of celebrity pals, day in and day out, waiting for them to return. But Betty Bacall was not coming to dinner every day, I could have pointed out, nor every week - in fact, she probably wasn't ever coming back. The place was dying. The smell of desperation was in the air. You could detect it halfway down the block - as we were surrounded by equally customer-hungry places - you could see it in Tom's face, and when a few straggling celebrities would on occasion wander through the door, he'd pounce on them like a starved remora.
I soldiered on. I didn't know what else to do. Restrained from putting much of my own imprint on the place - and unprepared, in any case, to offer a viable alternative - I occupied myself with scoring drugs on Ninth Avenue, maintaining a nice buzz at the bar, and keeping a stiff upper lip about our declining fortunes. I may have been the chef but I had in no way learned the chefly arts; there was really no need to at Tom's. I was working with friends, so there was no call for the manipulation, intelligence gathering and detective work of later posts. The place was slow, so the air-traffic controller aspects of chef work had yet to come into play. And the food wasn't mine. I came quickly to hate (unjustifiably) Tom's now-not-so-famous meat loaf as an immovable object, and I settled not very happily into a position that was more overpaid line cook than chef. What I learned at Tom's was a sad lesson that has served me well in decades since: I learned to recognize failure. I saw, for the first time, how two beloved, funny and popular guys can end up less beloved, not so funny and much less popular after trying to do nothing more than what their friends told them they were good at. Friendships, I'm sure, were destroyed. Loyal pals stopped coming, causing real feelings of betrayal and embitterment. In the end, I guess, we all let them down. I found a job in the Post and jumped ship at the first opportunity.
Rick's Cafe was an even more boneheaded venture: an absolutely idiotic, Bogart-themed restaurant on a deserted street in Tribeca, run as a caprice by the near-brainless wife of a successful Greek deli owner. One look at this sinkhole - the fauxtaverna decor left over from a previous establishment, the framed photos of Bogie and Ingrid Bergman, the (always fatal) absence of a liquor license - and I should have run for the hills. I could recognize failure when I saw it, but I was desperate to get away from Tom's. And the deli owner paid me cash money from a fat roll in his pocket. It seemed like an okay place to lie