Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [93]
Jimmy brought me in as an overpaid garde-manger man - 120 smacks a night to plate salads and squirt whipped cream on desserts. But Jimmy was not, at that time, an organizational mastermind. I am. Jimmy spent much of his time roller-blading around the city schmoozing; he had a second job, cooking for Mariah Carey and Tommy Mottola; he was secretly working out a deal for his triumphant return to the Hamptons; and of course he was poking everything in a skirt. By the time he'd swing by the Supper Club, little things like ordering, scheduling, rotating food and organizing menus were afterthoughts. I quickly found that doing it myself was easier than waiting for Jimmy to show up and do it for us, and in no time at all I was running the nuts-and-bolts end of the kitchen: making sure that we had the food, the prep, the bodies and information needed to crank out the enormous volume of parties, buffets, hors d'oeuvres and regular menu items the business required. Jimmy's food, as always, was magnificent, but Jimmy himself seldom seemed to be around. After a few months, I was de facto sous-chef, or kitchen manager - the guy everyone came to to find out what the hell was going on - and when I came back after another brief vacation in the Caribbean, Jimmy, though still nominally the chef, was secretly and simultaneously employed as the chef at The Inn at Quogue out in the Hamptons, and Steven Tempel was working in the Supper Club kitchen.
I guess it was a historic moment.
He showed up looking for a saute position, his even more degenerate friend Adam Real-Last-Name-Unknown in tow. I had a few weeks to watch these two in action before Sears slipped off to the Hamptons and his even more reduced 'summer schedule', and I begged, pleaded and implored him not to saddle me with these two coke-snorting, thieving, fire-starting, whoring, boozing and trouble making miscreants. Jimmy ignored my entreaties.
When Steven and Adam were in the kitchen together, I couldn't turn my back for a second. They were hyperactive and destructive, two evil Energizer bunnies who, when they weren't squabbling and throwing food at each other, seemed always to be dodging out of the kitchen on various criminal errands. They were loud, larcenous, relentlessly curious - Steven can't look at a desk without rifling its contents; they played practical jokes, and set up whole networks of like-minded coworkers. A few weeks after he arrived, Steven already had the whole club wired from top to bottom: the office help would tell him what everyone else was getting paid, security would give him a cut of whatever drugs they impounded at the door, and the techies let him play with the computers so that when an order for, say, swordfish came in, the dupe would also say, 'Fuck Me Hard'. Maintenance gave him a share of the lost-and-found and split the leftover booty from the promotional events - goody bags filled with cosmetics, CDs, T-shirts, bomber jackets, wristwatches, etc.; the chief of maintenance even gave Steven the key to a disused office on the Supper Club's neglected third floor, an old janitor's storage room that, unbeknownst to management, had been converted to a carpeted, furnished and fully decorated pleasure pit, complete with working phone. It was a space suitable for small gatherings, drug deals and empire-building. The room was decorated with posters of Latina women penetrating themselves with vegetables, and it had been done up with pilfered carpet remnants and furniture from the adjoining Edison Hotel. As the space was located up a long flight of garbage-strewn back stairs, behind the reeking locker-rooms, down a dark, unlit hall where spare china was stored, management never visited - and a young man could be secure in the knowledge that whatever dark business he was conducting, no matter how loud, unruly