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By Root 740 0

had expanded a profitable family provision business into a smoking-hot restaurant catering to the Upper East Side Mortimer's, Elaine's, Coco Pazzo crowd, spun that restaurant off into another restaurant next door with a well-liked Italian race-car driver freeloader as front man, and followed those successes with a string of high-quality places in the Village and elsewhere. It had seemed, for a while, as if he could do no wrong. He was hiring chefs by the bunch; my old friend Sammy already worked for him, and he'd apparently asked Sammy, 'Do you know any more like you?' and Sammy had said, 'Sure!' which is how I (and eventually Dimitri) got involved in one of the biggest, ugliest train wrecks of an organization in the history of New York.

The Silver Shadow couldn't keep track. Gino's New York two kitchens, two dining rooms, outdoor cafe and 300 seats opened on the waterfront nearly simultaneously with its slightly smaller sister in Baltimore's Harbor Place. Plans were under way for more of them in Boston, New Orleans and elsewhere. It was Big '80s time, with all that implied: too much money, too much coke, both in the hands of hyperactive, overconfident yuppie businessmen and investors - and at Gino's, it reached critical mass. The Shadow seemed to start up a new enterprise every other day. In the food court across the way from Gino's, he opened a gelato shop and a thin-crust pizzeria, then zipped off to Italy to buy warehouses full of plates, flatware, gelato bases, furnishings - and then forgot where he put them. Chefs, managers, sous-chefs, partners rotated in and out with no rhyme or reason to their comings and goings; there were always a few chefs in the pipeline, shacked up in hotels, on full salary, waiting for the call telling them where to go. The Silver Shadow bought chefs the way most people buy TV Guide at the supermarket an impulse buy at the register, after they do their real shopping.

I had been hired, typically of the Silver Shadow, on impulse, and immediately tasked to take over Let's-Call-It-Dexter's, his relatively small American bistro on the Upper East Side.

'They really need you over there!' crowed the Shadow enthusiastically. 'They're really looking forward to meeting you!'

So, I quit the Columbus Avenue pick-up joint I'd been working, and hustled over to Dexter's. They had, it turned out, no idea I was coming. Worse, Dexter's and the Shadow's other restaurant - a Northern Italian place next door - shared the same kitchen and the same chef and crew; there were simply two different kitchen doors leading to two different dining rooms. The chef, a mincing, freakish-looking albino, was apparently quite capably taking care of business without me - and he let me know so immediately. After grudgingly introducing me to the kitchen crew who, it was immediately clear, held him in high regard, he took me aside and said, 'I don't care what the Shadow fucking told you, this is my kitchen . . . and you ain't doing nothing more than picking spinach as long as I'm here - which is forever!'

No way was I going to be stuck in a corner, in a hostile kitchen, working under this geek. I'd been promised a chef's job - my own kitchen, with all that implied - and the idea of two chefs sharing responsibility for one crew was ridiculous, even if the albino had been willing. And I didn't care to pick spinach, even for a thousand dollars a week.

I left immediately, calling the Shadow from a pay-phone.

'What have you done to me?' I inquired, pissed off. 'They'd rather rub shit in their hair over there than let me in! You have a chef already!'

'No problem,' replied the Shadow, as if he'd just now remembered that the two restaurants shared a kitchen. 'They really need you in Baltimore. Go down to Gino's on the waterfront, see the GM; he'll fill you in and give you some expense money.'

Which is how I found myself on the TurboLiner to Baltimore, junk-sick, confused, with an overnight bag, and no idea of my mission.

Baltimore sucks.

If you haven't been there, it's a fairly quaint excuse for a city. (At the time I was there