Kitchen Confidential (3 page)

I should have seen this well-practiced ritual for what it was, understood the level of performance here in Marioland, appreciated the experience, the time served together which allowed these hulking giants to dance wordlessly around each other in the cramped, heavily manned space behind the line without ever colliding or wasting a movement. They turned from cutting board to stove-top with breathtaking economy of movement, they hefted 300-pound stockpots onto ranges, tossed legs of veal around like pullets, blanced hundreds of pounds of pasta, all the while indulgently enduring without comment my endless self-aggrandizing line of witless chatter. I should have understood this femme/convict patois, this business with the women's names, the arcane expressions, seen it for what it was: the end result of years working together in a confined space under extreme pressure. I should have understood. But I didn't.

An hour later the board was filled with more dinner orders than I'd ever seen in my life. Ticket after ticket kept coming in, one on top of the other, waiters screaming, tables of ten, tables of six, four-tops, more and more of them coming, no ebb and flow, just a relentless, incoming, nerve-shattering gang-rush of orders. And the orders were all in Italian! I couldn't even understand most of the dupes, or what these waiters were screaming at me. The seasoned Mario cooks had an equally impenetrable collection of code names for each dish, making it even more difficult to make sense of it all. There were cries of 'Ordering!' and 'Pick up!' every few seconds, and 'Fire! " more food going out, more orders coming in, the squawk of an intercom as an upstairs bartender called down for food. Flames 3 feet high leaped out of pans, the broiler was crammed with a slowly moving train of steaks, veal chops, fish fillets, lobsters. Pasta was blanched and shocked and transferred in huge batches into steaming colanders, falling everywhere, the floor soon ankle-deep in spaghetti alIa chitarra, linguine, garganelli, taglierini, fusilli. The heat was horrific. Sweat flowed into my eyes, blinding me as I spun in place.

I struggled and sweated and hurried to keep up the best I could, Tyrone slinging sizzle-platters under the broiler, and me, ostensibly helping out, getting deeper and deeper into the weeds with every order. On the rare occasions when I could look up at the board, the dupes now looked like cuneiform or Sanskrit-indecipherable.

I was losing it. Tyrone, finally, had to help the helper. Then, grabbing a saute pan, I burned myself. I yelped out loud, dropped the pan, an order of osso bucco milanese hitting the floor, and as a small red blister raised itself on my palm, I foolishly-oh, so foolishly-asked the beleaguered Tyrone if he had some burn cream and maybe a Band-Aid.

This was quite enough for Tyrone. It went suddenly very quiet in the Mario kitchen, all eyes on the big broiler man and his hopelessly inept assistant. Orders, as if by some terrible and poetically just magic, stopped coming in for a long, horrible moment. Tyrone turned slowly to me, looked down through bloodshot eyes, the sweat dripping off his nose, and said, 'Whachoo want, white boy? Burn cream? A Band-Aid? Then he raised his own enormous palms to me, brought them up real close so I could see them properly: the hideous constellation of water-filled blisters, angry red welts from grill marks, the old scars, the raw flesh where steam or hot fat had made the skin simply roll off. They looked like the claws of some monstrous science-fiction crustacean, knobby and calloused under wounds old and new. I watched, transfixed, as Tyrone-his eyes never leaving mine-reached slowly under the broiler and, with one naked hand, picked up a glowing-hot sizzle-platter, moved it over to the cutting board, and set it down in front of me.

He never flinched.

The other cooks cheered, hooted and roared at my utter humiliation. Orders began to come in again and everyone went back to work, giggling occasionally. But I knew. I was not going to be the Dreadnaught's broiler man this year-that was for damn sure. (They ended up kicking me back down to prep, one step above dishwasher on the food chain. I had been shown up for the loudmouthed, useless little punk that I was. I was, I learned later, a mal carne, meaning 'bad meat' in Italian, referred to as 'Mel' for weeks after. I had been identified as a pretender, and an obnoxious one at that.

I slunk home that night in my blue Pierre Cardin suit as if it was sackcloth and ashes. I had not yet found a summer rental, so I was sleeping over the walk-in in the back room at Spiritus Pizza. My torment, my disgrace was complete. After a few days of sulking and self-pity, I slowly, and with growing determination, began to formulate a plan, a way to get back at my tormentors. I would go to school, at the Culinary Institute of America-they were the best in the country and certainly none of these P-town guys had been there. I would apprentice in France. I would endure anything: evil drunk chefs, crackpot owners, low pay, terrible working conditions; I would let sadistic, bucket-headed French sous-chefs work me like a Sherpa. . but I would be back. I would do whatever was necessary to become as good as, or better than, this Mario crew. I would have hands like Tyrone's and I would break loudmouth punks like myself over the wheel like they'd broken me. I'd show them.

BURNING WITH A DESIRE for vengeance and vindication, I applied myself to gaining entry to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. My Vassar friends-those who remained on speaking terms with me after two years of truly disgusting behavior on my part-thought I was out of my mind, but then they thought that anyway. I'm sure that there was a collective sigh of relief on Vassar's rolling, green, well-tended campus that I would no longer be around to cadge free drinks, steal drugs, make pointedly cruel remarks and generally lower the level of discourse. My idols of that time had been, all too predictably,

Hunter Thompson, William Burroughs, Iggy Pop and Bruce Lee; I had had, for some time, a romantic if inaccurate view of myself as some kind of hyperviolent, junkie Byron. My last semester at Vassar, I'd taken to wearing nunchakus in a strap-on holster and carrying around a samurai sword-that should tell you all you need to know. The most romantic thing I had done in two years was to chop down about an acre of Vassar's lilacs one night with my sword, so that I could fill my girlfriend's room with the blossoms.

CIA was a bit of a departure. I'd love to tell you it was tough getting in. There was a long waiting list. But I reached out to a friend of a friend who'd donated some heavy bucks to the school and owned a well-known restaurant in New York City, and about two weeks after filling out my application I was in. I was an enrolled student at an institution where everyone wore identical white uniforms, funny paper hats and actually had to attend class. Like I said, it was a bit of a departure. But I was ready.

CIA is located in the buildings and grounds of a former Jesuit monastery on a Hudson River clifftop, a short cab ride from Poughkeepsie. In my buttoned-up chef's coat, check pants, neckerchief and standard-issue leatherette knife roll-up, I arrived determined but full of attitude.

My knives set me apart right away. I had my by now well-worn high-carbon Sabatiers rolled in with the cheap school-supply junk: hard-to-sharpen Forschner stainless steel, peeler, parisienne scoop, paring knife and sheer. I was older than most of my fellow students, many of whom were away from home for the first time. Unlike them, I lived off campus, in Poughkeepsie with the remnants of my Vassar pals. I'd actually worked in the industry-and I'd had sex with a woman. These were not the cream of the crop, my fellow culinarians. It was 1975 and CIA was still getting more than their share of farm boys, bed-wetters, hicks, flunk-outs from community colleges and a few misfits for whom CIA was preferable to jailor juvenile detention. Hopeless in the kitchen, happy in their off-hours to do little more than build pyramids of beer cans, they were easy marks for a hard case like myself. I nearly supported myself during my two years in Hyde Park playing seven-card stud, Texas hold-em, no-peek and acey-deucey. I felt no shame or guilt taking their money, selling them beat drugs or cheating at cards. They were about to enter the restaurant industry; I figured they might as well learn sooner rather than later. If the Mario crew ever got hold of some of these rubes, they'd have the fillings out of their teeth.

It was very easy going for me. The first few months at CIA were spent on stuff like: 'This is the chef's knife. This is the handle. This is the blade,' as well as rote business on sanitation. My food sanitation instructor, an embittered ex-health inspector (judging from the scars on his face, the last honest man in that trade), regaled us with stories of pesticide-munching super rats, the sex lives of bacteria and the ever-present dangers of unseen filth.

I took classes in food-handling, egg cookery, salads, stocks, soups, basic knifework. But after spending way too many hours deep in the bowels of Marioland, peeling spuds, making gallons of dressings, chopping vegetables and so on, I knew this stuff in my bones.

Of course, my stocks in class always tasted far better than my classmates'. No one could figure out how I coaxed such hearty flavor out of a few chicken bones, or made such wonderful fish fumet with fish racks and shrimp shells, all in the limited time available. Had my instructors given me a pat-down before class they might have learned my secret: two glassine envelopes of Minor's chicken and lobster base inside my chef's coat, for that little extra kick. They never figured it out.

The CIA of 1975 was very different from the four-year professional institution it is today. Back then, the desired end-product seemed to be future employees at a Hilton or Restaurant Associates corporate dining facility. A lot of time was spent on food destined for the steam table. Sauces were thickened with roux. Escoffier's heavy, breaded, soubised, glaceed and over-sauced dinosaur dishes were the ideal. Everything, it was implied, must come with appropriate starch, protein, vegetable. Nouvelle cuisine was practically unheard of. Reductions? No way. Infusions? Uh-uh. We're talking two years of cauliflower in mornay sauce, saddle of veal Orloff, lobster thermidor, institutional favorites like chicken Hawaiian, grilled ham steak with pineapple ring and old-style lumbering classics like beef Wellington. The chef/instructors were largely, it seemed, burn-outs from the industry: bleary-eyed Swiss, Austrian and French ex-cronies, all ginblossoms and spite-along with some motivated veterans of major hotel chains, for whom food was all about cost per unit.

But it was fun. Pulled sugar, pastillage work, chaud-froids, ice-carving. You don't see a lot of that in the real world, and there were some really talented, very experienced old-school Euro-geezers at CIA who passed on to their adoring students the last of a dying style. Charcuterie class was informative and this old style was well suited to learning about galantines and ballottines and socles and pates, rillettes, sausage-making and aspic work. Meat class was fun; learning the fundamentals of butchering, I found for the first time that constant proximity to meat seems to inspire black humor in humans. My meat instructor would make hand puppets out of veal breast and his lamb demo/sexual puppet show was legendary. I have since found that almost everybody in the meat business is funny-just as almost everyone in the fish business is not.

They'd let us practice our knife work on whole legs of beef, my novice butcher class-mates and I absolutely destroying thousands of pounds of meat; we were the culinary version of the Manson Family. Fortunately, the mutilated remains of our efforts were-as was all food at CIA-simply passed along to another class, where it was braised, stewed or made into soup or grinding meat. . before ending up on our tables for dinner. They had figured out this equation really well. All students were either cooking for other students, serving other students or being fed by other students-a perfect food cycle, as we devoured our mistakes and our successes alike.

There were also two restaurants open to the general public, but a few fundamentals were in order before the school trusted us with inflicting our limited skills on the populace.

Vegetable Cookery was a much-feared class. The terrifying Chef Bagna was in charge, and he made the simple preparing of vegetables a rigorous program on a par with Parris Island. He was an Italian Swiss, but liked to use a German accent for effect, slipping quietly up behind students mid-task, and screaming questions at the top of his lungs.

'Recite for me . schnell! How to make pommes dauphinoise!!' Chef Bagna would then helpfully provide misleading and incorrect clues, 'Zen you add ze onions, ya?' He would wait for his flustered victim to fall into his trap, and then shriek, 'Nein! Nein! Zere is no onions in ze potatoes dauphinoise!' He was a bully, a bit of a sadist and a showman. But the man knew his vegetables, and he knew what pressure was. Anyone who couldn't take Chef Bagna's ranting was not going to make in the outside world, much less make it through the penultimate CIA class: Chef Bernard's 'E Room'.

Another class, Oriental Cookery, as I believe it was then called, was pretty funny. The instructor, a capable Chinese guy, was responsible for teaching us the fundamentals of both Chinese and Japanese cooking. The Chinese portion of the class was terrific. When it came time to fill us in on the tastes of Japan, however, our teacher was more interested in giving us an extended lecture on the Rape of Nanking. His loathing of the Japanese was consuming. In between describing the bayoneting of women, children and babies in World War II, he'd point at a poster of a sushi/sashimi presentation on the wall, and say in his broken, heavily accented English, 'That a raw a fish. You wanna eat that? Hah! Japanese shit!' Then he'd go back into his dissertation on forced labor, mass executions, enslavement, hinting darkly that Japan would pay, sooner or later, for what it had done to his country.

The joke went that everyone gained 5 pounds in baking class. I could see what they meant. It was held in the morning, when everyone was starving, and after a few hours of hard labor, hefting heavy sacks of flour, balling and kneading dough, loading giant deck and windmill ovens with cinammon buns, croissants, breads and rolls for the various school-operated dining rooms, the room would fill with the smell. When the finished product started coming out of the ovens, the students would fallon it, slathering the still-hot bread and buns with gobs of butter, tearing it apart and shoveling it in their faces. Brownies, pecan diamonds, cookies, profiteroles-around 10 percent of the stuff disappeared into our faces and our knife rolls before it was loaded into proof racks and packed off to its final destinations. It was not a pretty sight, all these pale,

gangly, pimpled youths, in a frenzy of hunger and sexual frustration, shredding bread. It was like Night of the Living Dead, everyone seemed always to be chewing.

If there was an Ultimate Terror, a man who fit all of our ideas of a Real Chef, a monstrous, despotic, iron-fisted Frenchman who ruled his kitchen like President for Life Idi Amin, it was Chef Bernard. The final class before graduation was the dreaded yet yearned-for 'E Room', the Escoffier Room, an open-to-the-public, three-star restaurant operated for profit by the school. Diners, it was said, made reservations years in advance. Here, classic French food was served a la carte, finished and served off gueridons by amusingly inept students. Our skipper, the mighty septuagenarian Chef Bernard, had, it was rumored, actually worked with Escoffier himself. His name was mentioned only in whispers; students were aware of his unseen presence for months before entering his kitchen.

'Wait till “E Room”,' went the ominous refrain, 'Bernard's gonna have your ass for breakfast. ' Needless to say, the pressure, the fear and the anticipation in the weeks before Escoffier Room were palpable.

It was an open kitchen. A large window allowed customers to watch the fearsome chef as he lined up his charges for inspection, assigned the day's work stations, reviewed the crimes and horrors and disappointments of the previous night's efforts. This was a terrifying moment, as we all dreaded the souffle station, the one station where one was assured of drawing the full weight of Chef Bernard's wrath and displeasure. The likelihood of a screw up was highest here, too. It was certain that at least one of your a la minute souffles would, under real working conditions, fail to rise, rise unevenly, collapse in on itself-in some way fail to meet our leader's exacting standards. Students would actually tremble with fear before line-up and work assignments, praying, 'Not me, Lord. Not today . please, not the souffle station.'

If you screwed up, you'd get what was called the 'ten minutes'. In full view of the gawking public and quavering comrades, the offending souffle cook would be called forward to stand at attention while the intimidating old French master would look down his Gallic shnozz and unload the most withering barrage of scorn any of us had ever experienced.

'You are a shit chef!' he would bellow. 'I make two cook like you in the toilette each morning! You are deezgusting! A shoe-maker! You have destroyed my life! . You will never be a chef! You are a disgrace! Look! Look at this merde . merde. . merde!' At this point, Bernard would stick his fingers into the offending object and fling bits of it on the floor. 'You dare call this cuisine! This . this is grotesque! An abomination! You. . you should kill yourself from shame!'

I had to hand it to the old bastard, though, he was fair. Everyone got ten minutes. Even the girls, who would, sad to say, invariably burst into tears thirty seconds into the chef's tirade. He did not let their tears or sobs deter him. They stood there, shaking and heaving for the full time while he ranted and raved and cursed heaven and earth and their ancestors and their future progeny, breaking them down like everybody else, until all that remained was a trembling little bundle of nerves with an unnaturally red face in a white polyester uniform.

One notable victim of Chef Bernard's reign of terror was a buddy of mine-also much older than the other students-who had just returned from Vietnam. He'd served in combat with an artillery unit and returned stateside to attend the CIA under the GI Bill and had made it through the whole program, had only four days to go before graduation, but when he saw that in a day or two his number would be up and he, without question, would be working the dreaded souffle station, he folded under the pressure. He went AWOL, disappearing from Hyde Park forever. Boot camp and the Viet Cong had not been as bad as Chef Bernard's ten minutes, I guess.

When my time came to stand there in front of my fellow students, and all the world, and get my ten minutes, I was ready. I could see Chef Bernard looking deep into my eyes as he began his standard tirade, could see him recognize a glimmer of something familiar somewhere in there. I did the convict thing. The louder and more confrontational the authority figure got, the more dreamy and relaxed I became. Bernard saw it happening. I may have been standing at rigid attention, and saying all the right things, 'Oui, Chef! Non, Chef!' at all the right moments, and showing the right respect, but he could see, perhaps in my dead fish-eye gaze, that he wasn't getting anywhere with me. I think the old bastard might have even smiled a little bit, halfway through. There seemed to be a twinkle of amusement in his eyes as he finally dismissed me with feigned disgust. He knew, I think, that I had already been humiliated. He looked in my eyes and saw, perhaps, that Tyrone and the Mario crew had done his work for him. I liked Chef Bernard and respected him. I enjoyed working under him. But the fat bastard didn't scare me. And he knew it. He could have smacked me upside the head with a skillet and I would have smiled at him through broken teeth. He saw that, I think-and it ruined all the fun.