Shortly before the breakup of my first marriage, I embarked on the equivalent of a massive public works project in my apartment: new shelves, furniture, carpets, appliances—all the trappings, I thought, of a “normal” and “happy” life—the kind of things I’d never really had or lived around since childhood. I wrote a crime novel around that time, in which the characters’ yearnings for a white-picket-fence kind of a life reflect my own far more truthfully than any nonfiction I’ve ever written. Shortly after that, I cruelly burned down my previous life in its entirety.

There was a period of…readjustment.

I recall the precise second when I decided that I wanted to—that I was going to be—a father.

Wanting a child is easy enough. I’d always—even in the bad old days—thought fondly of the times my father would carry me aloft on his shoulders into the waves off the Jersey Shore, saying, “Here comes a big one!” I’d remembered my own five-year-old squeals of terror and delight and thought I’d like to do that with a child someday, see that look on my own child’s face. But I knew well that I was the sort of person who shouldn’t and couldn’t be a daddy. Kids liked me fine—my niece and nephew, for instance—but it’s easy to make kids like you, especially when you’re the indulgent “evil uncle.”

I’d never lived in an environment where a child would have been a healthy fit—and I’d never felt like I was a suitably healthy person. I’d think of fatherhood from time to time, look at myself in the mirror, and think, “That guy may want a child; he’s simply not up to the job.” And, well, for most of my life I’d been way too far up my own ass to be of any use to anyone—something that only got worse after Kitchen Confidential.

I don’t know exactly when the possibility of that changing presented itself—but sometime, I guess, after having made every mistake, having already fucked up in every way a man can fuck up, having realized that I’d had enough cocaine, that no amount in the world was going to make me any happier. That a naked, oiled supermodel was not going to make everything better in my life—nor any sports car known to man. It was sometime after that.

The precise moment of realization came in my tiny fourth-floor walk-up apartment on Ninth Avenue. Above Manganaro’s Heroboy restaurant—next building over from Esposito Pork Shop. I was lying in bed with my then-girlfriend—I guess you could diplomatically call it “spooning”—and I caught myself thinking, “I could make a baby with this woman. I’d like to make a baby with this woman. Fuck, I’d not only be happy to make a baby with this woman, I think…I’m pretty sure…I’d actually be good at it.”

We discussed this. And Ottavia—that was (is) her name—also thought this was a fine idea, though of my prospects for a quick insemination she was less optimistic.

“Baby,” she said (insert a very charming Italian accent—with the tone and delivery of a busy restaurant manager), “you’re old. Your sperm. Eez—a dead.”

Assuming a long campaign, we planned to get at it as soon as I returned from shooting my next show. In Beirut.

Of that episode I’ve written elsewhere. Long and short of it: my camera crew and I were caught in a war. For about a week, we holed up in a hotel, watching and listening to the bombs, feeling their impact rolling through the floors. After some drama, we were evacuated from a beach onto Landing Craft Units by American Navy and Marine personnel and taken first to a cargo vessel in the Med and then on to Cyprus.

My network had very generously provided a private jet to take me and the crew back home. None of my crew had ever been on a private jet before, and we slept and played cards and ate omelets prepared by the flight attendant, finally landing on a rainy, gray morning in Teterboro, New Jersey. We walked across the tarmac to a small private terminal, where Pat Younge—the president of the network—and Ottavia, as well as the crew’s wives and family, were there to meet us. It was, to say the least, an emotional homecoming with much hugging and crying.

I took Ottavia back to my crummy apartment and we made a baby. Nothing like eight days of fear and desperation to concentrate the mind, I guess. A few weeks later, we were in a car on the way from LAX into Los Angeles, where I was about to appear as judge on Top Chef, when we got the news from Ottavia’s doctor over the phone. There are photos of me, sitting on a bed in the Chateau Marmont, holding five different brands of drugstore pregnancy tests—all of them positive—a giddily idiotic grin on my face. Strangely, perhaps, I had no fear. At no time then—or since—did I have second thoughts. “What am I getting into?” never flashed across my brain.

I was the star pupil at Lamaze class. If your water ever breaks at the supermarket and I’m nearby? I’m your boy. I know just what to do.

I look back on my less well-behaved days with few regrets. True, the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood demand certain behavioral adjustments. But my timing couldn’t have been better. I find myself morphing—however awkwardly—into respectability just as things are getting really hot on the streets for any of my peers who are even semi-recognizable. The iniquitousness of Twitter and food-and chef-related Web sites and blogs has totally changed the game for anyone with a television show—even me. You don’t have to be very famous at all these days to end up with a blurry photograph on DumbAssCelebrities.com. You don’t want your daughter’s little schoolmates reading about her daddy, stuttering drunk, two o’clock in the morning, at a chef-friendly bar, doing belly shots from a chunky and underdressed cocktail waitress—something that could well have happened a few years ago. In a day when a passing cell-phone user can easily get a surreptitious photo of you, slinking out of the porn shop with copies of Anal Rampage 2 and MILFBusters under your arm, and post it in real time, maybe that’s a particularly good time to trade in the leather jacket for some cotton Dockers.

I love the saying “Nobody likes a dirty old man or a clean little boy.” I was, unfortunately, overly clean as a child—the fruit of a fastidious household. I shall try and make up for those years by doing my best to avoid becoming the former. Like I said, my timing—even without the daddyhood thing—was good.

It’s all about the little girl. Because I am acutely aware of both her littleness (how could I be otherwise) and the fact that she’s a blank page, her brain a soft surface waiting for the irreversible impressions of every raised voice, every gaffe and unguarded moment. The fact that she’s a girl requires, I believe, extra effort. Dada may have, at various times in his life, been a pig, but Dada surely does not want to ever look like a pig again. This can’t possibly be overstated. As the first of two boys, I can’t even imagine what it must be like for a little girl to see her dad leering at another of her sex. This creature will soon grow up to be a young woman and that’s something I consider every day.

I figure, I’m going to spoil the shit out of this kid for a while, then pack her off to tae kwon do as soon as she’s four years old. Her first day of second grade and Little Timmy at the desk behind her tries to pull her hair? He’s getting an elbow to the thorax. My little girl may grow up with lots of problems: spoiled; with unrealistic expectations of the world; cultural identification confusion, perhaps (a product of much traveling in her early years); considering the food she’s exposed to, she shall surely have a jaded palate; and an aged and possibly infirm dad by the time she’s sixteen. But she ain’t gonna have any problems with self-esteem.

Whatever else, she’s never going to look for validation from some predatory asshole. She can—and surely will—hang out with tons of assholes. Dads, I’m assured, can never hope to control that. All I can hope for is that she hangs out with assholes for her own reasons—that she is genuinely amused by assholes rather than needing them to make her feel better about herself.