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Pino suddenly smiled warmly. He looked . . . well. . . pleased.

'You know, Anthony,' he said, 'I have many, many enemies. It's good, sometimes, to have enemies - even if you don't know who they are. It means you are . . . important. You must be important. . . important enough to have an enemy.' He clapped me on the back on the way out the door. I was thoroughly charmed - if damn near shattered by the experience.

In the opening weeks at Coco Pazzo Teatro, I lost 11 pounds. These were not pounds I had to spare, I'm a bony, whippet-thin, gristly, tendony strip of humanity, and after two weeks running up and down the steps at Teatro from prep kitchen to a la carte kitchen - like some hyperactive forest ranger, always trying to put out brush fires in order to avoid actual conflagrations - I looked as if I'd been breathing pure crack in some VC tiger cage for the last ten years. I had twenty-five cooks, plus dishwashers, porters, visiting specialists, moonlighting pasta makers, managers, assistant managers, waiters, runners and other entities to contend with, deal with, schedule and replace. The New York Times reviewer had already been in; we had someone who knew her by appearance staked out at the door full-time, just to be ready. Celebrities, friends of the house and Pino himself were all dropping in at all hours. The cooks worked entirely on a call system - no printed-out dupes - and managing the crew alone was a full-time job. My second sous, Alfredo, was already on the verge of cracking under the pressure.

'They don't respect me,' he complained of the Ecuadorian line cooks. 'Tell them! Tell them I can fire them if I want to.' This was not what I was looking for in a sous-chef. If the cooks were giving him attitude, my telling them that the guy could fire them was not going to make them respect him. The fact that Alfredo, alone among all of us, wore a big, floppy chef's hat on his head (made all the more ridiculous by his limited height) didn't help, nor did the fact that he was a rather proud Colombian. The Ecuadorians hated him and razzed him at every opportunity. When he began mulling aloud the possibility that maybe I should just put him back on the line and forget about all this sous-chef stuff, I promptly rescheduled him. He ended up bursting into tears and going over my head to the oily general manager, begging for his job back. I was appalled at this ultimate betrayal and reluctantly reinstated him, swallowing a poison pill I knew in the end would help kill me. This was a good friend and a good cook, whom I've never hired again. It's a measure of what pressure can do - and did - to both of us.

The restaurant itself was beautiful. Randy Gerber's Whiskey Bar was right next door, the outer space-style lobby of the Paramount could be reached through a side door in the dining room, and the walls were done in Morandi-inspired murals, warm Tuscan colors against blond, unfinished wood. The waiters dressed like Vatican Guards. But the most truly amazing feature of my temporary kingdom was to be found deep in the bowels of the Paramount Hotel, through twisting catacomb-like service passageways adjoining our downstairs prep kitchen. If one squeezed past the linen carts and discarded mattresses and bus trays from the hotel, and followed the waft of cold, dank air to its source, one came upon a truly awe-inspiring sight: the long-forgotten Diamond Horseshoe, Billy Rose's legendary New York nightclub, closed for generations. The space was gigantic, an underground Temple of Luxor, one huge, uninterrupted space. The vaulted ceiling was still decorated with Renaissance-style chandeliers and elaborate plasterwork. The original rhinestone-aproned stage, where Billy Rose's famously zaftig chorus line once kicked, was still there, and the giant space where the horseshoe-shaped bar once stood was empty, the floorboards torn up. Around the edges of the cavernous chamber were the remnants of private booths and banquettes where Legs Diamond and Damon Runyon and Arnold Roth stein and gangsters, showgirls, floozies and celebrities - the