It is, of course, ludicrous for me to be insulted on behalf of strangers who would probably find my outrage completely misplaced, embarrassing, and probably even deranged. I don’t claim to speak for them and am unworthy, in any case, of doing so. I’m just saying that some of the shit I see some people doing to food on television causes a physical reaction in some deeply buried reptile part of my brain—and that makes me angry. It makes me want to say mean things. It probably shortens my life every time it happens.
One might expect Thomas Keller, who famously insists on storing his fish in their natural “swimming” position, to feel this way about food being mistreated. But me? Where do I get off, one might well ask?
It’s more an affliction than the expression of any high-minded ideals.
I watch Mark Bittman enjoy a perfectly and authentically prepared Spanish paella on TV, after which he demonstrates how his viewers can do it at home—in an aluminum saucepot—and I want to shove my head through the glass of my TV screen and take a giant bite out of his skull, scoop the soft, slurry-like material inside into my paw, and then throw it right back into his smug, fireplug face. The notion that anyone would believe Catherine Zeta-Jones as an obsessively perfectionist chef (particularly given the ridiculously clumsy, 1980s-looking food) in the wretched film No Reservations made me want to vomit blood, hunt down the producers, and kick them slowly to death. (Worse was the fact that the damn thing was a remake of the unusually excellent German chef flick Mostly Martha.) On Hell’s Kitchen, when Gordon Ramsay pretends that the criminally inept, desperately unhealthy gland case in front of him could ever stand a chance in hell of surviving even three minutes as “executive chef of the new Gordon Ramsay restaurant” (the putative grand prize for the finalist), I’m inexplicably actually angry on Gordon’s behalf. And he’s the one making a quarter-million dollars an episode—very contentedly, too, from all reports.
The eye-searing “Kwanzaa Cake” clip on YouTube, of Sandra Lee doing things with store-bought angel food cake, canned frosting, and corn nuts, instead of being simply the unintentionally hilarious viral video it should be, makes me mad for all humanity. I. Just. Can’t. Help it.
I wish, really, that I was so far up my own ass that I could somehow believe myself to be some kind of standard-bearer for good eating—or ombudsman, or even the deliverer of thoughtful critique. But that wouldn’t be true, would it?
I’m just a cranky old fuck with what, I guess, could charitably be called “issues.”
And I’m still angry.
But eat the fucking fish on Monday already. Okay?
I wrote those immortal words about not going for the Monday fish, the ones that’ll haunt me long after I’m crumbs in a can, knowing nothing other than New York City. And times, to be fair, have changed. Okay, I still would advise against the fish special at T.G.I. McSweenigan’s, “A Place for Beer,” on a Monday. Fresh fish, I’d guess, is probably not the main thrust of their business. But things are different now for chefs and cooks. The odds are better than ever that the guy slinging fish and chips back there in the kitchen actually gives a shit about what he’s doing. And even if he doesn’t, these days he has to figure that you might actually know the difference.
Back when I wrote the book that changed my life, I was angriest—like a lot of chefs and cooks of my middling abilities—at my customers. They’ve changed. I’ve changed.
About them, I’m not angry anymore.
There are songs I’ll never listen to again. Not the ones that remind me of the bad times.
It’s certain songs from long ago when everything, whether I knew it or not at the time, was golden. Those I can’t abide. Those hurt. And what’s the point of doing that to oneself? I can’t go back and enjoy them any more than I did at the time—and there’s no fixing things.
I was sitting in a restaurant fairly late one night, a neighborhood place my wife and I pop out to now and again. The dinner rush was over and the dining room was only half-filled with customers. We’d just gotten our drinks and finished ordering food when the woman at the next table said, “Tony,” and pointed at her husband, the middle-aged man sitting across from her. “It’s the Silver Shadow,” she said.
It had been more than twenty years since I’d seen the Shadow, as I called him in Kitchen Confidential. And the picture I’d painted of him and the outrageous maelstrom of multiunit madness that surrounded him had not been flattering. I’d always liked the Shadow—no matter how bat-shit crazy things were in his kingdom, or how badly I’d fared there—and I was happy to see him again. I didn’t know what happened with him in the intervening years, though I’d heard stories, of course. He now owns two very good, very sensibly scaled restaurants, one of them in New York and one in a very nice place—the kind where a person might take a vacation.
I didn’t recognize this man, would never have connected him with his younger self. I remember the Shadow as looking like a well-fed, overprivileged grad student (though slightly older)—someone whose yearbook photo from high school one could easily imagine. He looked good now—though considerably older and maybe a little tired-looking. His wife looked the same. She’d looked gorgeous then—she looked gorgeous now. Though friendly during what could have been a far more awkward conversation about the book, she would casually refer to it as “fiction.”
The Shadow was more circumspect. He talked about the reaction when the book came out. Everyone had recognized him right away, he said. His daughter might have told him about it first. “Dad, there’s this book—about you!” He described reading it as “devastating.” He said he cried. And, of course, I felt fucking awful. Like I said, I’d always liked the guy. I’d seen him guilty of a lot of really hubristic, lunatic shit back in the day—but I’d never seen him, unlike so many of his fellow mini-moguls of the time, deliberately fuck anybody over.
After dinner, I ran home and reread his chapter. Yes. There were machine guns in the bathroom…Yes. Cocaine was sold over the service bar. Representatives of a Sicilian-American fraternal organization did indeed come by on a weekly basis to solicit donations. The whole fleet of Shadow restaurants did seem, to even the casual observer, to steam full-speed ahead without anybody having any idea who—if anyone—was at the tiller. But as I did a quick fact-check of my version of the Shadow story, I realized that while I’d gotten the lurid details right, I’d sounded so—shocked, so outraged, so unforgiving of his excesses. I’d made the guy sound like an idiot—which he surely was not.
If the Shadow was ever guilty of anything, it was that he had been very much a creature of his time. Only on a much larger scale. Like I said to him that night, as we sat at our separate tables, reflecting on the past, “Hey. It was the ’80s…We made it through. We’re still here.”
I’d like to say that that was a comfort to the man—or that it might have served as an explanation—even an apology. But I don’t think so.
I have, on the other hand, seen Pino Luongo fuck people over many times. And enjoy it while he did it.
My chapter on Pino made him look like a son of a bitch—but it was still the nicest thing anyone has ever written about the guy. He seemed to think so. We’ve seen each other a few times since the book came out. He even asked me to write the foreword to his memoirs. I happily did, and, as a result, will never get a table at certain restaurants in town where his name—still—is never to be spoken. “I got fucked by Pino” is something I’ve heard from just about every Italian chef I know—usually accompanied by a smile and a shrug. It is worth mentioning that they are now, all of them, at the top of their profession. Most will acknowledge a connection between that early “learning experience” and their current success, maybe even a debt, to the former Dark Prince for teaching them the ways of this sometimes cold and cruel world.