Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [63]
I slept for three weeks. When I woke up, I was determined never again to be a chef.
I'd cook. I had to make money. But I would never again be a leader of men. I would never again carry a clipboard, betray an old comrade, fire another living soul.
I left none too soon. Gino's, in the end, dragged down the entire Silver Shadow empire, bankrupting even the family provisions business. Last I heard of the Shadow, he was doing time in federal lock-up, for tax evasion.
I was about to enter the wilderness.
THE WILDERNESS YEARS
IT is ONE OF the central ironies of my career that as soon as I got off heroin, things started getting really bad. High on dope, I was - prior to Gino's - at least a chef, well paid, much liked by crew and floor and owners alike. Stabilized on methadone, I became nearly unemployable by polite society: a shiftless, untrustworthy coke-sniffer, sneak thief and corner-cutting hack, toiling in obscurity in the culinary backwaters. I worked mostly as a cook, moving from place to place, often working under an alias.
I worked a seedy hotel on upper Madison, a place so slow that the one waiter would have to come downstairs and wake me when customers came in. I was the lone cook, my only companions the hotel super and a gimpy dishwasher. I worked a lunch counter on Amsterdam, flipping pancakes and doing short-order eggs for democratic politicos and their bagmen. I worked a bizarre combination art gallery/bistro on Columbus, just me and a coke-dealing bartender - a typically convenient and destructive symbiotic arrangement. I was a sous-chef at a very fine two-star place on 39th, where I dimly recall preparing a four-course meal for Paul Bocuse; he thanked me in French, I think. My brain, at this point, was shriveled by cocaine, and I made the mistake of telling a garde-manger man that if he didn't hurry up with an order I'd tear his eyes out and skull-fuck him, which did not endear me to the fussy owner manager. I worked a deserted crab house on Second Avenue, steaming blue crabs and frying crab cakes. I cooked brunches in SoHo, I slopped out steam-table chow at a bar on 8th Street to a bunch of drunks.
For a time, I took another chef's job - of sorts - at a moment of need at Billy's, a combo sit-down/take-out upscale chicken joint on Bleecker Street. It was an operation that was to be the flagship of another planned empire, a chain of chicken joints that would stretch across the globe.
At this low point in my career, I didn't care if the place succeeded or not. I needed the money.
My boss was an older Jewish guy, fresh out of prison, who'd named the place after his youngest son, Billy, a feckless ne'er-do-well. He had been, in an earlier life, the head of the counting room at a Las Vegas casino, and after being caught skimming off millions for the 'boys back in New York and Cincinnati', had been offered a friendly deal should he cooperate with the prosecutors. He had, admirably, declined, and as a result spent the last five years eating prison chow. When he got out, a near-broken man, his old buddies in New York, being Men of Honor, set him up with this restaurant - with promises of more to come - as a sign of gratitude for services rendered.
Unfortunately, while in prison, the old man had completely lost his mind. He may have been a stand-up guy, but he was absolutely barking mad.
This was not a classic bust-out operation, where the mob deliberately runs a place into the ground, using a front man/ straw owner to run up bills, then pillage the place for merchandise and credit. I think that the wise guys, who from the early days of start-up were always around, really wanted the poor slob to make money and be a success. They made earnest efforts to help at every turn, enduring much nonsense from their visibly deranged partner.
It