Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (27 page)

It’s twelve ten in the afternoon and Justo Thomas has finished cleaning and portioning seven hundred pounds of fish. He cuts a piece of cardboard from a carton and uses it to scrape out the fish scales from the sink. He hoses both basins down, washes his knives, the scale, and all exposed surfaces. He peels the cling wrap off the walls.

He’s done for the day.

In six years at Le Bernardin, and in twenty years cooking in New York restaurants, Justo Thomas has—like the overwhelming majority of people who cook our food—never eaten in his own restaurant.

It’s a central irony of fine dining that, unlike the waiters who serve their food, the cooks are very rarely able to afford to eat what they have spent years learning to make. They are usually not welcome, in any case. They don’t have the clothes for it. Many, if not most, expensive restaurants specifically prohibit their employees from coming as customers—at any time. The reasoning is part practical and part, one suspects, aesthetic. One doesn’t want a bunch of loud, badly dressed cooks laughing and talking in an overfamiliar way with the bartender while trying to maintain an atmosphere of sophistication—of romantic illusion. There is also the temptation to slip freebies to people one works with every day. From the point of view of any sensible restaurateur or manager, it’s generally believed to be a bad thing. Once you let employees start drinking in their own place of work—even on their days off—you’ve unleashed the dogs of war. No good can come of it.

Le Bernardin’s rules reflect this industry-wide policy.

But I figured I had some pull with the chef and asked him to make an exception.

A short time later, I took Justo Thomas to lunch at his own restaurant.

He arrives straight from his shift, having changed into a dark, well-cut suit and glasses with black designer frames, having left work by the service entrance and reentered by the restaurant’s front door. It takes a second for me to recognize him.

He’s nervous but contained—and very happy to be here. He’s dressed right for the room, but his posture and gait are not of a person who lives in spaces like this. His coworkers in the kitchen are excited for him, he says, scarcely believing this is happening, and the floor staff appear happy for him, too—though they do their very best to conceal their smiles. From the very beginning, Justo is treated like any other customer and with the same deference—led to our table, his chair pulled out, asked if he’d care to order from the menu or if he’d prefer the kitchen to cook for us. When wine arrives, the sommelier addresses her remarks to him.

A little bowl of salmon rillettes is brought to the table with some rounds of toast. Champagne is served.

Ordinarily, when Justo goes out to dinner, he’s with his family. They go to a roasted-chicken place or, if it’s a rare special occasion, to a Spanish restaurant for steak and lobster.

When that happens, he does not drink. At all. “I am always the driver,” he says.

Though he is the middle brother, Justo has become, by virtue of his character and what he’s achieved in New York, something of a patriarch. He owns a house in the Dominican Republic. He keeps the top floor for family use and rents out to tenants the first floor and an adjoining structure. His siblings tend to come to him for advice on important matters. His father, he says, taught him the lesson that one should “never let your family be afraid while you’re alive.”

He’s the example for the rest—and he takes that responsibility seriously.

“Family first. Then my job,” he says.

I am enormously relieved when he takes his first sip of champagne—and when he tells me he will indeed be enjoying, along with me, the wine pairing to follow. The kitchen has insisted on doing a tasting menu for their favorite son—and one must, under such circumstances, drink wine. I was concerned earlier. Justo has said that his idea of getting really crazy on vacation is (in between working on his house) taking his family to the beach, buying pizza for his daughter—and maybe having a beer. On a perfect day, he’ll dance with his wife. He will have arranged for a taxi to take them home.

He has made similar arrangements today.

The first course is tuna, layers of thinly pounded yellowfin, layered with foie gras and toasted baguette. Justo enthusiastically cleans his plate—with a critical eye. He recognizes his work, though the cooks have pounded it to paper-thinness. It’s a popular dish—and on the rare occasions when the dinner crew needs to pound more after he’s gone for the day, he doesn’t like it when they use his station. We’re washing the tuna down with a Gelber Muskateller Neumeister from Austria.

“My cutting board is special,” he explains.

Justo handles only fish at Le Bernardin. Oysters, langoustines, prawns, and sea urchin are prepared upstairs in the à la carte kitchen. So, though he’s seen the pricey little boxes of plump, orange sea-urchin roe, stacked neatly in even rows, as he passed by, he’s never eaten the stuff. We get a spiny shell each, the roe on beds of jalapeño-wasabi jam, seasoned with seaweed salt—finished at the last second by our server, who pours wakame-orange-scented broth over them.

“Kasumi Tsuru, Yamahai Gingo,” says the sommelier, serving Justo sake.

“Delicious,” says Justo, closing his eyes. “It’s like…a dream. I don’t want to wake up.”

The next course is seared langoustine with a “salad” of mâche and wild mushroom with shaved foie gras and white balsamic vinaigrette—and it’s one of the most goddamn delicious things I’ve ever put in my mouth. Small, elegant, lushly but not overly rich.

“When I get out of here—I don’t want to brush my teeth,” he jokes—but I know exactly how he feels. You want to keep this taste.

I lose track of the wines at this point. There are a lot of them—and a trilogy of ales, I think. Then more wines. But I do remember a bread-crusted red snapper with zucchini and mint compote coming our way. An extraordinary poached halibut with braised daikon, baby radish, and turnips in a sesame court bouillon.

“You recognize your work?” I ask. I point to the perfect squares of evenly shaped protein on our plates. Justo just nods and smiles—a look of satisfaction on his face.

His last entrée is the crispy black bass with braised celery and parsnip custard in an Iberico-ham-and-green-peppercorn sauce. It’s the fish he likes least to work with—saves until last, the ever-more-popular labor-intensive fuckers that have to be gutted, scaled, fileted, rid of their resilient little pin bones, then squared off just right so the skin can get exactly this crispy without overcooking the meat.

Justo looks particularly pleased to see his nemesis on the plate. Hopefully, all his work now makes some kind of tangible sense.

I find myself looking up at the enormous oil paintings on the dining-room walls. Scenes of fishermen and port towns in Brittany—where Maguy Le Coze, the founder and co-owner of Le Bernardin (along with her brother Gilbert), came from. Where it all started and where the inspiration began for a fish-centric temple of seafood. I wonder what Justo would think of Brittany—and if he’ll ever see it. I find myself wanting to make that happen.

I ask him what he wants to do—when he retires someday—and he answers me with the things he’ll do when he goes back home, mostly involving repairs, improvements, work. But what about when the work is done, I ask? If things could be…perfect?

“When I think everything is perfect I think I’m going to get sick,” he says. “I’ll think—What am I
missing
?”

What about the customers at Le Bernardin, I ask, referring to the older, obviously more comfortable patrons around us. Some of these people will spend more money on a single bottle of wine with dinner than even he—a well-paid man by most standards—will make in months. How does he feel about that?

“I think in life, they give too much to some people and nothing to everybody else,” he shrugs without bitterness. “Without work we are nothing.”

We linger over chocolate
pot de crème
and mascarpone creams and pistachio mousse.

Not visibly affected by the generous pourings of wine, Justo orders an espresso. Sits back in his chair, pleased.

“I got a good job. A good family. I live in peace.”

I
was genuinely angry most mornings
, writing
Kitchen Confidential
. An unfocused, aim-in-a-general-direction-and-fire kind of a rage only exacerbated by the fact that my writing “regimen” (such as it was) consisted of a five thirty or six a.m. wake-up, a hurried disgorging of sentences, reminiscences, and hastily reconstructed memories from the previous night (this after a ten-or twelve-or fourteen-hour day in the kitchen, followed invariably by too much to drink and a topple into bed). I’d spit whatever words I had quickly onto the page—no agonizing over sentences for me, there wasn’t time anyway—then off to work again: put on the sauces, cut the meat, portion the fish, crack the peppercorns, cook lunch, and so on. Three thirty, two quick pints down the street, back to Les Halles, either work the line or read the board, then off to Siberia Bar—or simply sit down with the remains of the floor staff for just one more—get drunk
en place
. Sagged down in the back right passenger seat of a yellow Chevy Caprice, legs twisted uncomfortably behind the bulletproof partition—that’s where I did my best work, thinking about what I was going to write the next day. Window half-cracked and me halfway or fully in the bag, I’d think about my life as New York City rolled by outside.

As I lived then in Morningside Heights, on the Upper West Side, by the time I got home, my taxi would have passed through a near-comprehensive landscape of greatest hits, all my sorrows, all my joys—as I think the song goes. A densely packed checkerboard pattern of mistakes, failures, crimes, betrayals large and small. The occasional happy spot with good associations would make me smile weakly—before plunging me in the other direction as I’d recall how things got all fucked up, went wrong, or simply just came to
…this.
I was always glad to see the spot on Broadway where my then-wife and I had set up our books and records for sale, happy that I wasn’t doing
that
anymore—and that there was no longer a need for either of us to adhere to that kind of unrelentingly voracious math. But I was still angry—in the way, I suspect, that mobs get angry: angry about all the things I didn’t have and (I was sure) I would never have.

I’d never had health insurance, for one thing. Nor had my wife. And that scared the hell out of me—as getting sick was, on one hand, just not an option, and on the other, increasingly likely as we grew older. A sudden pain in the jaw requiring a root canal would hit the financial picture (such as it was) like a freight train. Total destruction. It would mean groveling. Beg the nice dentist in the filthy-looking office on the ground floor of a housing project to accept payment on the installment plan.

Car commercials made me angry, as I’d never owned a car—or so much as a scooter—and, I was quite sure by now, never would. Home ownership was a concept so beyond imagining as to be laughable. I was so far behind on rent, so ridiculously in arrears on income taxes, that on the rare occasion when I went to bed sober, I’d lie there in terror, my heart pounding in my ears, trying desperately to
not
think the unthinkable: that at any time, either landlord or government or the long-ignored but very much still-there folks at AmEx could take everything, everything away. That “everything” amounted only to somewhere between fourteen and four hundred dollars on a good day was cold comfort. It was only a combination of rent-stabilized apartment, a byzantine, slow-moving, and tenant-friendly housing court—and a wife who could work the system that kept a roof over our heads. And that streak of improbable good luck, too, could run out at any minute.

So, I was afraid. Very afraid. Every day and every night and every time I bothered to think about these things—which was a lot, because that’s the way a responsible person with a job who
doesn’t
have a drug habit was supposed to think about things: realistically. Frightened people become angry people—as history teaches us again and again. Facing “reality” after a lifetime of doing everything I could to escape it offered no rewards that I could see. Only punishment. No solution presented itself. I couldn’t go back (that way was blocked for sure), and I couldn’t go forward.

I’d quit heroin and I’d quit methadone and I’d stopped doing cocaine and stopped smoking crack—like everybody tells you to, right? And yet there I was, still broke and still frightened and in a deep financial hole I knew I would never climb out of.

And I was angry about that. Very angry.

I was angry with my wife—very angry, a long-festering and deep-seated resentment that year after year after year she didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t
work
. Strong, smart as hell, with a college degree from a Seven Sisters school, solid white-collar experience, and she’d long ago just…stopped looking. In nearly two decades, after a promising start, nothing but a couple of short-term, part-time gigs stocking books and sorting in-house mail for near-minimum wage. It made no sense to me and I resented it bitterly. To be fair, it consumed me out of all proportion, with the kind of smoldering, barely repressed passive-aggressive anger that poisons everything around it. And that, sure as shit, didn’t help the situation. Waking up and going to sleep with this basic fact—and the way I then handled that resentment—was contaminating everything. I just couldn’t get past it. I didn’t get past it. And I made things worse—far worse—in all the drearily predictable ways. Under-score that sentence.

As partners in crime, we’d been—in my mind, anyway—a Great Couple. As solid citizens? Neither of us seemed to know how.

I was angry, too, that all my little-boy dreams of travel and adventure would for absolutely sure never come true—that I’d never see Paris as a grown-up or Vietnam, or the South Pacific, or India, or even Rome. From my vantage point, standing behind the stove at Les Halles, that much was perfectly clear. And, to tell the truth, I only became angrier when my boss, Philippe, sent me to Tokyo for a week to consult, because now I knew what I was missing. Which was—as anyone who’s been lucky enough to see those places knows—
everything.
It was as if someone had opened a happy, trippy, groovy, and exotic version of Pandora’s box, allowed me to peek inside, into another dimension, an alternate life, and then slammed the thing shut.

I’m sure that many middle-aged, divorced guys could describe a drunken snog with a female croupier in similarly lush—and even apocalyptic—terms. And any “epiphany” I had in Asia was, at the end of the day, already the subject of about a thousand not very good movies. I can only say that once I’d stumbled around Asia’s impenetrably “foreign” streets, surrounded only by people whose language I would never understand, nostrils filled with strange and wondrous smells, eyes boggling at everything I saw, eating things I’d never dreamed could be so good…well…I was doomed. I would ultimately have done anything to get some more of that. (Not that anyone was offering.) I knew, too, somewhere deep inside, that sharing would be out of the question. That’s a bad thing to learn about yourself.

I was angry, too, in the usual ways: with my mom for having me, for being stupid enough to love me. With my brother for not being a fuckup like me. With my father for dying.

And, naturally, I was angry with myself most of all (people like us always are, aren’t we? It’s a Lifetime movie almost anyone can star in)—for being forty-four years old and still one phone call, one paycheck away from eviction. For fucking up, pissing away, sabotaging my life in every possible way.

Five years earlier, after the kind of once-in-a-lifetime, freakishly lucky breaks that have been all too common in my life, the kind of thing most aspiring writers only dream of, I’d published two spectacularly unsuccessful novels that had disappeared without a trace, never making it into paperback. This, the general wisdom taught me, effectively finished me in publishing. About this—and maybe only this—I was actually
not
angry. It had been a nice ride, I’d felt, one on which I’d embarked with zero expectations. I’d kept my day job—never imagining I’d do otherwise. The whole enterprise had dropped in my lap, felt like a scam from the get-go, so I’d thankfully never suffered from any delusions of being a “writer.” Two uninterrupted hours of sitting at an empty table in a Northridge, California, Barnes and Noble on a one-stop, crackpot and equally crack-brained, self-financed book tour had quickly disabused me of such notions.

When I sat down at my desk every morning to write
Kitchen Confidential
and began clacking away at the keyboard, I was both gloriously free of hope that it would ever be read outside of a small subculture of restaurant people in New York City—and boiling with the general ill-will of the unsatisfied, the envious, and the marginal. Let it be funny for cooks and waiters—and fuck everybody else, was pretty much my thinking at the time.

Which worked out okay in the end, as I never could have written the thing had I thought people would actually read it.

So, the result was an angry book in a lot of ways—and, over time, that’s what people have come to expect from me. The angry, cynical, snarky guy who says mean things on
Top Chef
—and I guess it would be pretty easy to keep going with that: a long-running lounge act, the exasperatedly enraged food guy. “Rachael Ray? What’s up with
that
?!” (Cue snare drum here.) To a great extent, that’s already happened.

But looking back at those hurried, hungover early mornings, sitting at my desk with unbrushed teeth, a cigarette in my mouth, and a bad attitude, what was I angry about that I’m
still
angry about today? Who, of all the people and all the things I railed at in that book, really deserved my scorn?

I certainly wasn’t angry at Emeril. And the many dreamers and crackpots I wrote about who’d employed me over the years—whatever their sins—are certainly no worse characters than I’d been. In fact, I
loved
them for their craziness, their excesses, their foolishness—their shrewdness or guile, their wastefulness, even their criminality. In almost every case, their choice of the restaurant business as a lifestyle option had cost them far, far more than it had ever cost me.

I wasn’t ever angry with any of the people who worked with me. Not in a lasting way. It was they, after all—all of them, heroes and villains alike—who’d kept me in the business all those years. I may have called waiters “waitrons” and joked about abusing them, but I had always believed that if somebody who worked with me went home feeling like a jerk for giving their time and their genuine effort, then it was
me
who had failed
them
—and in a very personal, fundamental way.

No. I instinctively liked and respected anyone who cooked or served food in a restaurant and took any kind of satisfaction in the job. Still feel that way. It is the finest and noblest of toil, performed by only the very best of people.

Okay. I
am
genuinely angry—still—at vegetarians. That’s not shtick. Not angry at them personally, mind you—but in principle. A shocking number of vegetarians and even vegans have come to my readings, surprised me with an occasional sense of humor, refrained from hurling animal blood at me—even befriended me. I have even knowingly had sex with one, truth be told. But what I’ve seen of the world in the past nine years has, if anything, made me angrier at anyone not a Hindu who insists on turning their nose up at a friendly offer of meat.

I don’t care what you do in your home, but the idea of a vegetarian traveler in comfortable shoes waving away the hospitality—the distillation of a lifetime of training and experience—of, say, a Vietnamese
pho
vendor (or Italian mother-in-law, for that matter) fills me with spluttering indignation.

No
principle is, to my mind, worth that; no Western concept of “is it a pet or is it meat” excuses that kind of rudeness.

I often talk about the “Grandma rule” for travelers. You may not like Grandma’s Thanksgiving turkey. It may be overcooked and dry—and her stuffing salty and studded with rubbery pellets of giblet you find unpalatable in the extreme. You may not even like turkey at all. But it’s
Grandma’s
turkey. And you are in Grandma’s
house.
So shut the fuck up and eat it. And afterward, say, “Thank you, Grandma, why, yes, yes of course I’d
love
seconds.”

I guess I understand if your desire for a clean conscience and cleaner colon overrules any natural lust for bacon. But taking your belief system on the road—or to other people’s houses—makes me angry. I feel too lucky—now more than ever—too acutely aware what an incredible, unexpected privilege it is to travel this world and enjoy the kindness of strangers to ever, ever be able to understand how one could do anything other than say yes, yes, yes.

I’ve tried. Really.

I can cheerfully eat vegetarian food and nothing but for about five days at a clip—if I’m in India. And I’m open to the occasional attempts by the opposition to make their case.

Unfortunately, those attempts don’t always end happily.

A very nice, truly sweet guy, the boyfriend of a producer I was doing business with a few years back, went out of his way—as gently and as undogmatically as possible—to bring me over to the other side, making it something of a personal mission to get me to acknowledge the possibility of a delicious all-vegan meal. Let me repeat that this was a nice guy, who’d made his choices for what was, I’m sure, a visceral abhorrence for meat. When he saw a pork chop on a plate, I have no doubt, what he really saw was a golden retriever that had died screaming. I’d seen the genuine love this man had for his dogs—the way the poor guy would just tear up at the mention of some awful shelter on the other side of the country. I couldn’t find it in my heart to refuse him. I went out to dinner at what was said to be New York’s premier fine-dining vegan restaurant, a favorite, I was assured, of Paul McCartney’s (not exactly a selling point—but a measure of how earnest were his efforts to get me in the door). The food was expensive and painstakingly—even artfully—prepared, and, admittedly, it did not entirely suck.