The rest of the brunch menu was filled with slightly tweaked conventional-wisdom classics, a savvy but unimaginative variation on the standard document that experience tells you you absolutely need in order to fill your restaurant on a Sunday morning and afternoon. In addition to the obligatory eggs, there was a club sandwich of turkey and avocado, an equally inevitable “veggie club,” skewers of tomato and mozzarella, French toast, roast beef hash, huevos rancheros—and sliders (albeit with black truffle and Brie)—and there was fried calamari and a lobster mac ’n’ cheese and a fruit platter and the tragically inescapable “classic” Caesar salad. The addition of chicken to the Caesar being, of course, an option.

It says something about a person when you put chicken Caesar on the menu. You’ve crossed a line and you know it. It’s the chef version of sucking Ron Jeremy’s cock. If you do it late in your career, any notions of future stardom are usually pretty much out the window.

But Erik Hopfinger was already a star.

Arms crossed, front and center of a group of shorter, less menacing-looking chefs, his giant-size, bald, bullet-headed, heavily pierced, and tattooed image glowered at the world from buses, billboards, and the pages of glossy magazines everywhere. His was the principal face of season four of Top Chef, the best and most watched of the competitive cooking shows. Of the contestants, Erik had obviously been designated the “bad-ass.” He was older, more experienced (in years, anyway), and with an imposing—if not threateningly transgressive—look; so much, one would imagine, had been expected of him on the show. You could tell that from how they’d photographed him for the posters: like the lead singer of a band—or a top-billed professional wrestler. (In fact, Erik looks like a bit of both.) The producers, I think it is safe to suppose, anticipated much drama from Chef Hopfinger over the course of a long and closely contested competition.

Unhappily for everybody, he barely made it through episode one.

I know this because I was a judge on that episode.

And he got sent home from the field of battle by episode three. Today, though, he was still famous and, at the very least, among friends. In between the smart-looking couples at the large, oblong bar, heavily inked young men drank in groups of two and three. Fellow cooks. The home team. You could tell the cooks from the civilians by what they drank. Civilians drank the free mimosas. The industry types were deep into the Fernet shots. Somewhere in the dining room were Erik’s best friend, his girlfriend—and his mom. He was getting paid good money for a five-day workweek (almost unheard of in the industry). And dinner service ended at the unbelievably early hour of ten p.m. so Circa could make the changeover to its principal business, which was the club/lounge thing.

“I couldn’t get into auto mechanics,” he said later, at the bar across the street, a pint of beer in his hand, watching the dust motes float over the beer taps in the late-afternoon light. He fell into a vocational cooking class instead.

Perhaps now is the time to picture him, an imposingly tall, wide, barrel-chested guy, silver hoop earrings in both ears, multiple rings, the goatee, the tats. He cultivates a shave-headed piratical look. But what doesn’t come across in the photos is his sweetness. The voice doesn’t really fit the appearance; his eyes dart away from you when he talks. He seems…shy. From within the hulking body and the designed-to-intimidate look—half pirate, half Aryan Brother—there’s a vibe of a scared and damaged little boy, someone who might burst into tears at any moment. Which is to say he’s a very likeable guy. You want—shortly after meeting him—to give him a hug.

At seventeen, he answered an ad in the local penny-saver and began washing dishes at the Chateau Continental in Briarcliff, New York.

“It was a two-man kitchen,” he said. “Ugly Albanian dudes.” They did about forty depressing covers a night, a mixed bag of delusionally transatlantic fare like Greek salad, beef bourguignon, and stuffed veal chop. He washed dishes, scrubbed pots, peeled potatoes, and did general scut work there for a year and a half before decamping for greener fields and more elevated social status at T.G.I. Friday’s in Tarrytown.

“I started getting laid at Friday’s,” he said, by way of explanation. He made eleven dollars an hour, worked the grill station, drank for free—and by age eighteen had been rewarded for his high standards of burgerdom with a promotion to what would appear on later résumés alternately as “sous chef” and “kitchen manager.”

Around this time, he fell into the professional orbit of friend and hockey buddy, Scott.

Scott was living a relatively high life over at Huckleberry’s in Yorktown, which put even the sybaritic delights of T.G.I. Friday’s to shame.

He had “a cool car and hot chicks,” Erik remembered, an observation that led him to abandon Friday’s for his friend’s kitchen. He enthusiastically took the less prestigious but presumably more rewarding position of “fry monkey” at Huckleberry’s. Asked to remember the menu, he foggily recalls chicken potpie, shepherd’s pie, and tempura. With somewhat more clarity, he recalls being fired twice during the year and a half he worked there—and that he “fucked the whole staff.”

Young Erik was now twenty years old. Examining the murk of his résumé, one would likely find one of those mysteriously soft, gray spots—all too common to cooks of his generation (and mine). What was actually a yearlong “hiatus” as a landscaper disappears, no doubt in between the happy days of wine and frolic at Huckleberry’s and his next restaurant gig at the Thataway Cafe in Greenwich, Connecticut. Departure date at Huckleberry’s moved forward a bit. Start day at Thataway pulled back. In my case, whole years disappear in this way. One’s younger years now a seamless record of full and (as important) steady employment. Or, depending on who’s going to be looking at your résumé, T.G.I. Friday’s or Thataway Cafe can be replaced by “traveling in France.”

Unless—like Erik—you spend three years at the Thataway, “drinking and snorting” and cooking an unchallenging menu of burgers, chicken sandwiches, and flank steaks.

Sometime in the early ’90s (the exact dates being characteristically hazy), Erik Hopfinger answered an ad and found himself working the pantry and grill stations at Eros on First Avenue in Manhattan. He describes it as the first good restaurant he’d ever worked in. The chef had worked at the Quilted Giraffe (a still important restaurant). They made their own charcuterie, roasted fish whole, on the bone, and grilled fresh sardines. Small things, one would think now—but relatively advanced thinking back then—and definitely a big deal for Erik. Nearly two decades later, he puts down his pint glass with a five-mile stare and remembers. It’s the first time since we’ve started talking that he seems genuinely excited talking about food.

“Eros was super-new. I had never worked in the city and was totally overwhelmed. With the spices, the brines, the butchering—and the city itself. I think I took the challenge balls to the wall, you know? Putting in my first real shifts, arriving at two p.m. and working until two a.m. I never asked so many questions in my life.”

“But, soon after this, you bugged out for fucking California,” I challenge him. “You’re learning stuff. It’s just started getting tough, the first good food you’ve cooked in your life. Okay, maybe it’s not the majors yet…but at least you’ve got a foot on the fucking ladder. And then you’re gone? You screw the pooch for California? Why?”

“Scott,” he answered. As if that explained everything.

“When I left for San Francisco, I felt a little shitty. But I was determined to be a chef and thought by being a New Yorker, I’d have a leg up on all those laid-back Cali dudes,” he added in a statement I found unconvincing. The more likely explanation is simply that his bestest buddy was in San Francisco and said he should come out, that it was fun. So he did.