• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

It was a horror. Our purveyors were all sinister Greek jobbers who bought cheap and sold cheap. Our floor staff were the lame, the halt and the ugly, and our only business was a lunch crowd from nearby city agency offices: cheapskates and well-done eaters all. Dinner? We might as well have been stationed on an ice floe in Antarctica; the whole neighborhood closed down at six, and as we were the antithesis of hip, and as yet without booze, no sane person would travel out of their way to visit our little Bogie Brattle Museum. I tried, to go along with the witless Casablanca concept, a sort of French/North African theme, making a (I thought) very nice tagine with couscous like I'd enjoyed in France, merguez, and some Southern French Mediterranean dishes. It was clearly hopeless. Even my boss, the deli-master, knew. I think he was stoically flushing money down the tubes to keep his wife out of his hair.

Things had apparently gotten so grim at Tom's after my departure that Dimitri joined me in my Bogie-themed hell. I was now within walking distance of readily available heroin, so I was reasonably satisfied, and Dimitri, while not exactly enjoying the fame and fortune I'd promised him in P-town, was soon getting regular blowjobs from one of the Rick's Cafe waitresses. Life was not all bad.

I was three for three for my last three restaurants. Fortunately, I was still young, so I could comfortably blame other factors on my unhappy success rate: bad owners, bad location, ugly clientele, crappy decor . . . I could live with that. I still had hope.

My problem was the money. I was making too much of it. Instead of doing the smart thing, taking a massive pay cut to go work for one of the now numerous emerging stars of American cooking, I continued my trajectory of working for a series of knuckleheaded, wacko, one-lung operations, usually already hemorrhaging when I arrived. Instead of running off to France, or California, or even uptown to work in one of the three-star Frog ponds as commis - the kind of Euro-style stage that helps build resumes and character, I chased the money. I was hooked on a chef-sized paycheck - and increasing dosages of heroin. I was condemned to become Mr Travelling Fixit, always arriving after a first chef had screwed things up horribly, the wolves already at the door. I was more of an undertaker than a doctor; I don't think I ever saved a single patient. They were terminal when I arrived; I might, at best, have only prolonged their death throes.

Having only recently achieved my dream of becoming a chef, I disappeared into the wilderness, feeding on the expiring dreams of a succession of misguided souls - a hungry ghost, yearning for money, and drugs.

APOCALYPSE NOW

THEY WERE ASSEMBLING MACHINE-GUNS for sale in the employee bathroom when I arrived. All the line cooks were hunched over Armalites and M-16s, while outside, in the nearly unmanned kitchen, orders spewed out of the chattering printer and were ignored.

Let's-Call-It-Gino's was a gigantic, two-story Northern Italian place on the waterfront, and the latest, most foolish venture from a guy everyone called the Silver Shadow, named for his Rolls-Royce and the fact that he never spent more than three or four minutes in any one of his restaurants.

When I first walked in the door, it was like the Do Luong bridge scene in Apocalypse Now, where Martin Sheen shows up in the middle of a firefight, Hendrix blaring in the background, and inquires of a soldier, 'Where's your CO?' To which the soldier replies, 'Ain't you?' Nobody knew who was in charge, what was going on, who was ordering the food, or what was going to happen next. It was a big, expensive and crowded asylum, run almost entirely by the inmates. Money flowed in God knows it was busy enough - and money flowed out, but where? No one seemed to have any idea, least of all the Silver Shadow.

Gino's, and its sister restaurant in Baltimore, were classic Don't Let This Happen To You examples of over-reaching by a successful restaurateur. The Silver Shadow