Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [86]
'Doogie, you syphilitic, whitebread, mayonnaise-eating, Jimmy Sear-ass wannabe - next time you slip a special order in without checking with me first? Me and Carlos gonna punch two holes in your neck and bump dicks in the middle!'
Doogie cringes, laughs nervously and scurries out on to the floor, trailing muttered apologies.
'Chef,' says Omar, looking guilty, 'no mas tomates . . .'
My jaw drops, and I see white.
I ordered tomatoes. I had thought that tomatoes had arrived then remember I broke up the order between three companies. I call Segundo on the intercom, tell him to come up horita. I'm also furious with Omar for waiting until we're out of tomatoes to tell me there are no more.
'What the fuck is going on?' I ask Segundo, who slouches in the doorway like a convict in the exercise yard. 'No Baldor,' he says, causing me to erupt in a blind, smoking rage. Baldor, though a superb produce purveyor, has been late twice in recent weeks, prompting me to make some very uncivil telephone calls to their people - and worse, forcing me to do business with another, lesser company until they got the message and began delivering earlier. Now, with no tomatoes, and no delivery, and the rush building, I'm furious. I call Baldor and start screaming right away: 'What kind of glue-sniffing, crack head mesomorphs you got working for you? You don't have an order for me? What?! I called the shit in myself. . . I spoke to a human! I didn't even leave it on the tape! And you're telling me you don't have my order? I got three fucking produce companies! THREE! AND IT'S ALWAYS YOU THAT FUCKS ME IN THE ASS!' I hang up, pull a few pans off the flame, load up some more mussels, sauce a duck, arrange a few pheasants, and check my clipboard. I'm in the middle of telling Cachundo to run across the street to Park Bistro and ask the chef there if we can borrow some tomatoes when I see, from my neat columns of checked-off items on my clipboard, that in fact I ordered the tomatoes from another company, that I didn't order anything from Baldor. I have no time to feel bad about my mistake - that'll come later. After screaming at the blameless Baldor, my anger is gone, so when I call the guilty company, I can barely summon a serious tone. It turns out that my order has been routed to another restaurant - Layla, instead of Les Halles. I make a mental note to refer to my restaurant as 'Less Halluss' in the future. The dispatcher at the guilty company apologizes for the mix-up, promises my order within the hour and gives me a hundred dollars in credit.
More ducks, more pheasant, lots of mussels, the relentless tidal wave of pork mignons . . . finally lunch begins to wind down. I enjoy a cigarette in the stairwell while Carlos continues drilling out steaks, chops and paillards, nothing for my station. D'Artagnan arrives, my specialty purveyor, bearing foie gras, duck legs, and an unexpected treat - a 200-pound free-range pig, whole, which Jose, one of my masters, has ordered for use in pates and tete du pore by the charcutier. Now, I can lift a 200pound, living breathing human - for a few seconds anyway - but dragging 200 pounds of ungainly dead weight by the legs through the restaurant and down the stairs to the boucherie requires four strong men. The boucher, charcutier, dishwasher and I wrestle the beast down the stairs, its head bouncing gruesomely on each step. I now know what it must be like to dispose of a body, I mutter. I do not envy the Gambino crime family - this is workl
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