Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [96]
Thanks to the Bigfoot Program, I never ran out of food, was always prepared, was never late, and Steven helped enormously. What finally made him a serious character in my eyes was the night he ran a knife through his hand while trying to hack frozen demi-glace out of a bucket. Squirting blood all over the place, he wrapped his hand in an apron and listened to my instructions: 'Get your sorry ass down to Saint Vincent's, they've got a fast emergency room. Get yourself stitched up and get yourself back here in two fucking hours! We're gonna be busy as hell tonight and I need you on the line!' He returned ninety minutes later and managed to work, one-handed, on the saute station, very capably cranking out 150 or so a la carte dinners. I was pleased with this demonstration of loyalty. Working through pain and injury counts for a lot with me.
I don't really know what happened to the Supper Club. The general manager, with whom I had a good working relationship, was suddenly gone. Nightclub operations were shut down, possibly in response to neighborhood complaints about noise, unmanageable crowds in the streets, change in ownership. The new management team was an oily duo of ex-waiters from the Waldorf, a Spaniard and an 'I dunno' who liked to pretend they were French. I answered an ad in the paper for a chef and was quickly in the wind.
I took Steven along.
One look at One Five, and I knew the place was doomed. Jerry Kretchmer, with the hugely talented Alfred Portale in tow, had just failed in the same location. The new owners were two very nice matronly middle-aged ladies with little to no restaurant experience. But I fell in love with the kitchen. It was huge, well equipped and loaded with history. I'd even worked there for a day while at CIA, as part of a 'Day in New York' field trip. The dining room was appointed with the salvage from the ocean liner Normandie, which had sunk mysteriously in New York harbor. It was an irresistible impulse. My predecessor, a jumped-up megalomaniac boob, had already plowed through most of the partners' dough, insisting on a kitchen staff of thirteen people to serve sixty or so dinners a night, so I figured it wouldn't be too hard to make a difference and do some honest toil for these nice ladies, save them a few bucks.
Hiring crew, post-Supper Club, with Steven as my underboss, was always fun. I felt like Lee Marvin, with Steven as Ernest Borgnine, in The Dirty Dozen when they recruit a fighting unit from the dregs of the stockade. Steven and I would meet, and I'd say, 'Who's available?' We'd discuss who was still talking to himself, suffering from paranoid delusions ('But can he still work the line?'), who could be lured away from another job ('Is he happy? How happy? What's he getting paid?'), who was still loyal from the collection of part-timers and freelancers we'd used for party work at the Supper Club, who had evenings free after knocking off at Le Bernardin, who could keep it together, show up on time, keep their mouth shut, and do the right thing - even if he woke up every morning naked and covered with puke on a cold bathroom floor. Steven would scour the lunatic fringe, other chefs' kitchens, flipping through the amazing mental Rolodex he kept in his head, the two of us embarking, again, on a clandestine head-hunt that often stripped rival kitchens bare. I loved those first interviews, laying eyes on old friends, new recruits, a motley collection of psychopathic grill men, alcoholic garde-manger men, trash-talking chick sauciers, Ecuadorian pasta cooks, deranged pâtissiers, cooks who thought that Sylvester Stallone was keeping them under constant surveillance ('Sly knows I wrote Cliffhanger - and he knows I know too much,' said one cook who'd apparently been communicating telepathically with Stallone while flipping burgers at Planet Hollywood). 'I needa two Heineken, seven o' clock!' said my old friend Chinese Davey, from Bigfoot