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By Root 697 0

I was surrounded by blue-eyed Northerners, people who felt that even I - though not Italian was still preferable to someone from the South. Shrewd, conspiratorial, absolutely obsessed with which way the tide was going, by who was in and who was out, and by the daily mood of our leader, some of these characters lived and breathed the kind of existence you'd expect of a Medici. These guys were good! Good at the politics and shifting alliances of a big, essentially Italian business, good at the kind of stuff I though I'd always been good at. They were expert at keeping the boss as happy as he needed to be, while at the same time deftly neutralizing potential competitors and detractors. I was in way over my head - and we're not even talking about my relative ignorance of the cuisine. This was a jungle that, however beautiful and exotic, was decidedly not my jungle.

Gianni was right about everything, and perhaps I should have listened more carefully. But Pino - and I'm sorry to disappoint his enemies here - was always perfectly correct with me: charming,straightforward, generous and truthful. He never said he'd do a thing for me and then failed to do it. I liked the guy, and if I bumped into him today, I'd say so. I liked that he could tell you all about exhaust fans, electrical outlets, point of sale and the history of pasta, that he knew everybody by name in all of his many restaurants, that he knew about the faulty compressor in the number two freezer in one of them, and that he could list every ingredient of every dish in every restaurant. He was on top of things - if relentlessly so. I had to respect that after working for so many knuckleheads over the years. Here was a guy who only a few years earlier had been a busboy, speaking only a few words of English, and now he ran an empire. Not too shabby. Admittedly, the atmosphere around his many functionaries and underlings was paranoid and conspiratorial. Fear, treachery, speculation, supposition and anticipation permeated the air. The pressure to perform at a high level was enormous. Everyone was very eager to please, the rewards being so potentially enormous, and the punishment for failure so sudden and final.

My first mission was not only to hire twenty-five to thirty talented cooks, but to hire more of them than my chef de cuisine did. The idea was to pack my crew with as many loyalists - guys and girls who were answerable personally to me and who could be trusted to watch my back - as I could, before my chef de cuisine overloaded me with his people, folks who wouldn't tell me if my hair was on fire, much less that somebody was waiting in the wings with their knife out.

Steven and I raped every kitchen we could think of. We stripped the Boathouse clean, lifting practically their whole line in one week, convincing many to leave without even giving notice. We pillaged other chefs' kitchens, sniffing around for the disgruntled, the underpaid, the unhappy, the susceptible and the ambitious. We conducted vast cattle calls, relay interviews, three or four of us at a time, simultaneously interviewing herds of applicants who'd answered our newspaper ads. The quality of applicant from these mass gatherings was discouraging; we managed to cull maybe two or three cooks from literally hundreds of illiterate loners, glue-sniffing fry cooks, and wack-jobs who'd never cooked professionally before. My chef de cuisine, on the other hand, was engaged in a similar recruiting drive, and to much better result. From Paglio and Torre de Pisa, both excellent Italian restaurants, he was peeling off some really superb Ecuadorian pasta, grill and saute cooks, largely people he'd worked with before. All of us were making enemies of many a restaurateur as we bribed, begged, cajoled and induced people to drop everything and come immediately to work for us. We knew, of course, that many of these cooks wouldn't work out, that we'd actually need more like forty cooks, figuring that in the first few weeks we'd have to winnow out the losers and still have some extra good ones in holding pattern. It was