Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [72]
How did J, a chef with limited Italian experience in my background, a guy who up to now had sneered at Italian food, had even written a book about a young Italian American chef who'd wanted nothing more than to get away from the red sauce and garlic and Parmesan cheese of his childhood and cook French, and was willing, ultimately, to betray his own family rather than cook fried calamari - how did I end up as the opening chef of Pino Luongo's newest, high-profile Tuscan venture?
I don't really know.
I was enjoying a period of unemployment after the moribund One Fifth had finally succumbed - lying around my dusty apartment, watching daytime TV, interrupting my pleasurable torpor occasionally to fax out the occasional resume or two when my old crony, Rob Ruiz, another Bigfoot protege, called me.
'Tony! It's Elvis! [Bigfoot always called him Elvis] What are you doing? I'm at Le Madri . . . They need a sous-chef? You should get down here right away!'
'It's Italian,' I said.
'Doesn't matter. Just get down here. Meet the chef! He wants to meet you. Believe me - you'll like it!'
Now, I like Rob. He's a dyed-in-the-wool, bone-deep, old-school sonofabitch - a guy who knows what's going on in every restaurant in New York, who can call up just about any purveyor in New York and get them to supply his restaurant with free stuff, cheaper stuff, better stuff, and fast. He's a prodigious drinker, a funny guy, and generally he knows a good thing when he sees it. We have a lot of history between us, all of it good. I said, 'Why not?' My schedule, after all, was pretty loose - if you didn't count Rockford Files reruns at five and Simpsons at seven. I managed to find some clean clothes, make myself look presentable, and hurried down to Chelsea.
Le Madri was, and remains, in my opinion, the very best of Pino's many restaurants, a place designed around Pino's love for 'Mama cooking', meaning the Tuscan home cooking of his youth, as prepared at home by mothers and grandmothers coupled with the sort of cold-blooded professional efficiency for which he is justifiably notorious. The chef, Gianni Scappin, was a likeable, light-complected Italian who wore his jacket buttoned all the way up, with a bone or ivory clasp around a very proper little kerchief. He met with me in his downstairs office, predisposed to like me, I think, by the excellent job that Rob was still doing as his steward and purchaser. What Gianni wanted sounded reasonable: show up six shifts a week, create some lunch specials, make soup, do a little prep, keep an eye on the Ecuadorians, help out on the line as needed - maybe expedite a bit - and one night a week, work the saute station. The money was good, and Gianni impressed me. The kicker was his casual question, near the end of our interview, if I was interested in becoming the executive chef at Coco Pazzo Teatro, scheduled to open in a few weeks. 'I don't want it,' he said. 'I'm too busy.'
Thus began my crash course in all things Tuscan.
A few hours earlier, I'd been lying dazed and hopeless in my unmade bed, wondering whether to take another nap or call out for pizza. Now I was the sous-chef at one of the best Italian restaurants in New York, with an inside track - I was assured to become the executive chef at Pino Luongo's latest celeb-friendly restaurant in the ultra-cool, Philippe Starck-designed, Schrager-owned hotel. It was a dazzling development.
And I was dazzled. Remember, I was not a fan of Italian food. But when I arrived that first day at Le Madri, saw that the walk-ins were absolutely empty, saw how tomato sauce, chicken stock, pasta, bread - in short, everything - was made fresh (the tomato sauce from fresh, seeded, peeled tomatoes), I was stunned. Meat, fish and produce deliveries arrived and the cooks would fall on them like marauders, yanking out what they needed - frequently right off the truck