Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [92]
I met Steven at the Supper Club. It was 1993, my return to the 'bigs'. I'd been working for Bigfoot at his West Village saloon, comfortable but in career limbo. I took a few weeks off to kick back in the Caribbean, and when I returned, I found a down-on-his luck Jimmy Sears in Bigfoot's kitchen. Bigfoot had been eating dinner at the Gotham recently, and had experienced some kind of culinary epiphany. Suddenly, he wanted a real chef, and Sears, whose restaurant in the Hampton's had just gone under, was sleeping on floors around Manhattan, dodging creditors and ex-girlfriends, and in general, going through a rough patch prime time for a Bigfoot recruiting effort.
Jimmy was a brilliant cook. He'd come up with Brendan Walsh at Arizona 206, and the food he turned out in his brief time working the Bigfoot mines was so good, I'd stay after my shift was over, sit at the bar and order dinner and pay for it. Seeing what Jimmy could do in the kitchen really inspired me; I'd been slinging hash for way too long, and tasting a real demiglace again, eating new, exciting food, seeing new presentations, made me remember what I'd enjoyed about food in the first place. I worked hard for Jimmy, and after knocking out a few thousand meals, going skiing together a few times, we'd become pals, and we determined that when Jimmy and Bigfoot's relationship came to an end, as it inevitably would, I'd keep an eye on the talented Mr Sears, maybe come along for the ride when he made his next move.
That clash of wills was not long in coming. A few months later, Jimmy's period of saloon exile was over; he landed the exec chef gig at the Supper Club, a huge restaurant/nightclub/disco on West 47th Street, and began hiring cooks. I was one of the first to get the call.
It was a plum job to be executive chef at the Supper Club. Hell, it was a plum job doing anything at the Supper Club. Perk-o-delic. The main dining room sat about 200, with private banquettes and booths along the walls, a dance floor, and a stage from which a twelve-piece orchestra played '40s swing music. There was an upstairs mezzanine - a holdover from the Club's previous incarnation as a Broadway theater - which sat another 150 or so, with a second bar, and off to the side, also on the second floor, was a smaller venue, a cabaret-cum-VIP lounge called the Blue Room, which sat another eighty. It was a pretty swank place, what they used to call a 'rug-joint' back in the '30s and '40s - a big, glitzy operation with plenty of cracks to fall through, a place where you could easily picture a young Burt Lancaster (just out of the joint), returning to find a young Kirk Douglas (the club owner) counting the night's take in one of the private banquettes. Dinner and dancing to swing music went on from five to eleven, after which the smoke machines would start belching chocolate-smelling fumes, the laser intellabeams would kick into action, the mirror ball would begin turning, a DJ would take over, and the Supper Club would become (for a while) the hottest dance club in town.
Every night there was a different crowd with a different promoter: Chicks with Dicks Night featured towering transvestites and pre-ops tottering around on high heels to house and techno; Soul Kitchen featured pre-disco '70s funk, with early blaxploitation films playing silently on the big screen and 40 ouncers and chicken wings for sale; Giant Step had acid jazz and fusion; Cafe Con Leche nights had salsa nueva and Latin funk; Funk master Flex attracted a hip-hop crowd; Noel Ashman attracted Eurotrash and the face-lifted, well-dressed crowd . . . you never knew, there was every variety of nightlife madness as each night people lined up down the street and around the corner onto Eighth