Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [64]
We did things differently at Billy's.
My cooks, for one: every one of them came from the Fortune Society, guys who spent their off-hours in halfway houses, allowed out only to work. I was used to working with a fairly rough bunch, a lot of whom, at one time or another, had had problems with the law - but at Billy's, every single one of my cooks was still basically a convict. I can't say that it was an unhappy arrangement, either; for once I knew my cooks were going to show up at work every day, if they didn't, they went back to prison.
And credit was easily obtained. I knew, from previous experience, how difficult it is to set up terms for a new restaurant; even getting a week's credit with some of these companies was usually a lengthy process, involving credit applications, a long wait, initial periods of cash on delivery. At Billy's, no sooner was I off the phone than stuff was arriving, often on sixty-day terms. Produce and dry-goods people who'd been loath to offer even two weeks at other places I'd worked were suddenly all too happy to give me all the time I wanted.
My boss spent a lot of time on the phone, investigating the serious business of horses and their bloodlines, and how well they ran in mud or on grass. Billy himself, at eighteen, was happy to drive his sports car around and chase girls. So my day-to-day was spent mostly with some genial gentlemen from an Italian Fraternal Organization. They helpfully told me where to buy my meat and poultry and how to meet the folks who would be supplying my linen, bread, paper goods and so on. I had a lot of meetings in cars.
'The bread guy is here,' I'd be told, and a late-model Buick would pull up out front. An old guy in a mashed-down golf cap would beckon me from the driver's seat and then get out of the car. The older guy in the passenger seat would slide over, indicating he wanted me to get in, sit next to him and talk. We'd sit there in the idling car, talking cryptically about bread, before he brought me around to the trunk to examine some product. It was a strange business.
Yet some things were off-limits. Trash removal, I found, was a mysteriously pre-arranged division of labor. When I called around for price quotes, told them who I was calling for, I was repeatedly quoted prices far exceeding the national debt until I called the company I'd obviously been intended to do business with. 'Oh yeah, Billy's!' said the voice on the phone, 'I was waiting for youse to call!' and quoted me a very reasonable price. I rang up a meat company, inquiring if they'd care to sell me tens of thousands of dollars of burger patties a year, and they gave me a flat 'No!' They wouldn't even quote me prices. I was confused by this until years later, when I read a Paul Castellano biography called Boss of Bosses, and recognized the name of the meat company as a business operated by another family.
And there was the Chicken Guy, who also met me in a car, and showed me samples in a trunk. When I introduced him to my boss, the old man bitched about the price, telling the Chicken Guy, in his blood-smeared white butcher's coat, that the price was too high, that he could 'just fly to fucking Virginia, buy the stuff direct,' and 'Do you know who I'm with anyway?!'
The Chicken Guy was not impressed. He spat on the floor, looked my boss in the eye and said, 'Fuck you, asshole! You know who I'm with?! You can fly to fuckin' Virginia and buy direct all you want - you still gonna pay me! Frank Fuckin' Perdue pays me, asshole! And you're gonna pay me too!
My boss was suitably chastened - for a time.
But he got