Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [97]
'I'm never going to slink home again, knowing I fucked up,' I'd tell Steven in one of our many post-game analysis sessions. 'Things go sour here? It won't be for lack of trying on my part. I ain't never gonna dog it, I'm never going home at the end of the shift feeling ashamed. I don't care if the crackpots we work for deserve it or not, I . . . we are gonna give a hundred percent. We're gonna fight Dien Bien Phu over and over again every night. I don't care if we lose the war - we're professionals, man. We're the motherfuckin' A-Team, the pros from Dover, cool breeze . . . and ain't nobody ever gonna say we dropped the ball, let the side down, let things slide . . .'
One Five tanked. The 'entertainment' didn't help. We featured musical attractions so pathetic it would have made Joe Franklin blush: one-armed piano players, octogenarian cabaret singers, aspiring Broadway ingenues whose nasal-inflected warbling could shatter glass, haplessly incompetent yodelers . . . customers would wander through our magnificent revolving doors, clap eyes on one of these creatures belting out 'New York, New York' with a Yugoslavian accent, and turn on their heels and run. Like a lot of restaurants in trouble, we got shaken down by every sleaze bag publicist ('I got Joey Buttafuoco to come in tonight; make sure to comp him!') and corrupt gossip columnist ('My husband is at loose ends tonight; can you take care of him?'). The press we got from such largesse usually amounted to something like: 'Seen canoodling at One Five, John Wayne Bobbit and Joey Buttafuoco' - not a mention likely to inspire a gang-rush of dining public.
But Steven and I were happy. We had the cooks we wanted. We were making nice food.
When I was hired by Pino Luongo to open up Coco Pazzo Teatro, my brief Tuscan interlude, I took Steven along. And after that, Sullivan's. We were a traveling roadshow, and when we moved to another kitchen, we peeled the best of the cooks we'd left behind with us. Steven, as I said, is my kind of sous-chef. He loves cooking, and he loves cooks. He doesn't yearn for a better, different life than the one he has - because he knows he's got a home in this one. He gets along with just about anyone at any time, total strangers tending to forgive him his most egregious excesses, whatever he says or does. He's an ingratiating bastard - totally without pretense, and you cannot embarrass, shame or insult him. He knows how bad he is. The Mexican line cooks at Les Halles love him, and his tortured, completely useless command of kitchen Spanish amuses the hell out of them - as do his habits of singing Elton John and Madonna tunes in a high-pitched, atonal voice, prancing shamelessly around the kitchen like some spastic breakdancer, taping over his sensitive nipples with Band-Aids (to avoid chafe, he insists), powdering his balls on the line with cornstarch, and showing anyone who's interested his latest cold sore, the boil on his ass, an incipient zit. He truly loves the technical aspects of cooking, works fast, clean, and makes pretty plates. He likes to step into other stations when other cooks get in the weeds, chiding them in his horrible Spanish. He loves dish washing when not busy on his station, finds no task too low or too demeaning to take an interest and help. He's a remarkably thoughtful guy - mention you like gummy bears and Steven will show up the next day with a bag. If he stops off at a burger stand for a mayo and mustard and ketchup-slathered grease-burger for breakfast, he'll bring a couple extra