Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (4 page)

Mario, I know for a fact, likes to swing by each of his New York restaurants at the end of the night and take a look at the receipts. He’s excited by the details. He gets off on successfully filling a restaurant that everyone said was doomed, of bringing the food cost below 20 percent. He likes to do the difficult thing, the dangerous thing—like take a gamble that what America needs and wants right now is ravioli filled with calf brains, or pizza topped with pork fat. For Mario, I’m quite certain, to be ten times richer—twenty times—and NOT take crazy-ass chances on restaurant concepts that no one ever expressed a desire for would mean to expire from boredom.

All Mario enterprises are coproductions. Every restaurant begins with an alliance, a moment of truth, where Don Mario evaluates the creativity and character of another person, looks into their heart, and makes a very important decision. In this way, the success or failure of whatever venture he’s embarked on is already determined long before he opens the door. So it’s never just business. It’s always, always, personal.

Thomas Keller and Daniel Boulud—both with successful, revered, and respected mother-ship restaurants, have talked at various times about the necessity of holding on to talented people; the need to grow with the talents, experience, and ambitions of loyal chefs de cuisine, sous-chefs, and other longtime employees who want and deserve to move up or to have “their own thing.” It becomes a simple matter of expand—or lose them.

To some extent, I suspect, what is often the French Michelin star model might be at work here as well: the three-star chef ’s mother ship simply doesn’t and can’t ever make as much money as his more casual bistros or brasseries. (Those end up, in very real ways, subsidizing the more luxurious original—or, at the very least, offering a comfortable cushion should costs at the higher-end place rise or revenues decline. You can’t start laying off cooks at a three-star every time you have a bad week.)

Gordon Ramsay is maybe the most classic example of the force that keeps well-known chefs constantly, even manically, expanding. In Ramsay’s case, multiple television shows on both sides of the Atlantic coincide with a huge worldwide expansion of hotel-based restaurants. He already has the most successful cooking-competition show on TV with
Hell’s Kitchen
. He is a millionaire many, many times over, and yet he keeps expanding—to his eventual peril (the twelve restaurants he opened in the last few years have yet to turn a profit). No matter what your opinion of Ramsay’s food, or his awful but wildly popular hit show, or his much better
Kitchen Nightmares
on the BBC, there is no denying that he is a workaholic. There don’t seem to be enough hours in the day to contain his various endeavors and enterprises, and yet he goes on.

In Gordon’s case, one need only look at his childhood—as described in his autobiography. He grew up poor, constantly on the move, with an untrustworthy and unreliable dreamer of a father. No sooner had his family settled than they would have to move again—often one step ahead of the debt collectors. You
know
What Makes Gordon Run.

Very likely, an impulse similar to that of his onetime mentor and sometimes nemesis, Marco Pierre White. Whatever riches they may have acquired or may yet acquire, there is and always will be the lingering and deeply felt suspicion that come tomorrow, it will all be gone. No amount is enough or will ever be enough, because deep in the bone they know that the bastards could come knocking at any minute and take it all away.

David Chang, whose crazy-ass pony ride to the top of the heap has just begun, feels, I suspect, all of the above motivations: a deadly combination of too few seats at his high-end standard-bearer restaurant, an ever-increasing number of talented loyalists, and a feeling that he’ll never be truly good enough at anything.

And then, of course, there’s the example of the iconic French Michelin-starred chef, one of the most celebrated and well represented (by sheer number of restaurants) in the world, who, in my presence, said simply:

“Enough bullshit. It’s time to make money.”

It was vanity that had kept me from being the Imodium guy. Not integrity. I wasn’t “keeping it real” declining their offers—and similar ones. I was just too narcissistic and loved myself a little too much to be able to handle waking up in the morning, looking in the bathroom mirror—and seeing the guy from TV who complains about freckling the bowl with loose diarrhea (until Imodium came along to save the day!). I didn’t take the cookware gig ’cause I didn’t want to find myself in an airport someday, approached by a disgruntled customer of whatever crap central warehouse actually produces that stuff, complaining about my substandard saucepot scorching his paella. I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t like to be called on bullshit—unless knowingly bullshitting.

So I didn’t take the forty grand a month they offered me to slap my name on a South Beach restaurant, ’cause I figured—even if I
don’t
have to actually do anything for the money other than show up once in a while—there’s that exposure. I could be on the other side of the world—but if the bartender at this joint, run by strangers, serves one underage girl, one customer gets slipped a roofie, one aggressive rat pops its head up out of the toilet one night and grabs a chunk of somebody’s nut-sack, it’s gonna be “outrage at bourdain restaurant” in the tabloids. And that would conflict with my image of myself as somehow above that kind of thing.

But when my daughter came along and I continued to say “no,” I knew I wasn’t saving my cherry for principle. I’d just been waiting to lose it to the right guy.

I
was born at New York Presbyterian Hospital
in New York City in 1956, but I grew up in the leafy green bedroom community of Leonia, New Jersey.

I did not want for love or attention. My parents loved me. Neither of them drank to excess. Nobody beat me. God was never mentioned—so I was annoyed by neither religion nor church nor any notions of sin or damnation. Mine was a house filled with books and music—and, frequently, films. Early in my childhood, my father worked days at Willoughby’s camera store in Manhattan—and on weekends would come home with a rented 16-millimeter projector and classic movies. Later, when he became an executive at Columbia Records, I got free records for most of my adolescence. When I was twelve, he’d take me to the Fillmore East to see the Mothers of Invention or Ten Years After or whoever I was listening to that year.

Summers meant barbeques and Wiffle ball games in the backyard. In school, I was not bullied any more than the next kid—and maybe even a little less. I got the bike I wanted for Christmas. My counselor at camp did not molest me.

I was miserable. And angry.

I bridled bitterly at the smothering chokehold of love and normalcy in my house—compared to the freedom enjoyed by my less-well-looked-after friends. I envied them their dysfunctional and usually empty houses, their near-total lack of supervision. The weird, slightly scary, but enticing stashes of exotica we’d find in their parents’ secret places: blurry black-and-white stag films, bags of weed, pills…bottles of booze that nobody would notice when missing or slowly drained. My friends’ parents always had other, more important things on their minds, leaving their kids to run wild—free to stay out late, to sleep over when and where they saw fit, to smoke weed in their rooms without fear of being noticed.

I was pissed about this. How come
I
couldn’t have that? As I saw it, my parents were the only thing standing between me and a life spent taking full advantage of the times.

Much later, standing in some particularly bullshit kitchen, more of a saloon than anything resembling a real restaurant, I wasn’t the sort of person to look back in puzzlement and regret, wondering where I might have gone wrong. I never blamed bad choices—like the heroin, for instance—or bad companions for my less than stellar career trajectory. I don’t and never did refer to my addiction as my “disease.” I’d
wanted
to become a junkie, after all, since I was twelve years old. Call it a character flaw—of which drugs were simply a manifestation, a petulant “fuck you” to my bourgeois parents, who’d committed the unpardonable sin of loving me.

At any given moment, when I’m honest with myself, I can look back and say that, on balance, I’d probably make exactly the same moves all over again. I
know
what brought me to those crummy kitchens, the reeking steam tables, the uncleaned deli-slicer, yet another brunch shift—I did.

Life, even in the bad old days, had been perfectly fair to me. I knew this.

Even when it was McAssCrack’s Bar and Grill I was working at, I knew I was pretty lucky. Lucky to be alive, given the precarious business of scoring dope every day in the ’80s New York City. Lucky to be in reasonably good health, given what was happening around me—and all the people who came up with me who weren’t around anymore. There was even love in my life through it all, however improbable—a criminal partnership of long standing.

As much as I hated standing there in the bad times, pre-poaching eggs for service, letting them slip off the spoon into a bus tub of ice water, I couldn’t blame anybody. Like I said, I made my choices. One after the other.

Then again, I could blame my dad, I guess. For all the joy he brought me when he came home with the
Sgt. Pepper
album. Or
Disraeli Gears
. An argument could be made, I guess, that this kind of exposure at an early age could lead one to an appetite for distraction—if not destruction. And maybe nine years old was a little young to see
Dr. Strangelove
—to find out that the world was surely going to end in a nuclear apocalypse (and soon). And that it would be funny when it happened. Perhaps this contributed to the nihilistic worldview I’d adopt later as a world-weary eleven-year-old.

If they ever find me with a crawl space full of dead hookers, I’ll be sure to point the finger at Dad—and Stanley Kubrick.

But if we’re playing the blame game? Top of the list for “it’s all your fault—you made me this way!” goes to two children’s classic films:
The Red Balloon
and
Old Yeller
.

What exactly was the message of
The Red Balloon
anyway? Every time our teachers didn’t show up, they’d haul out the projector and show us this supposedly heartwarming and inspiring story of a little French boy and his enchanted balloon friend.

But wait a minute. The poor kid is impoverished and clearly unloved. He wears the same clothes every day. Immediately on finding his balloon, he’s ostracized by society, banned from public transportation, chastised at school, even ejected from church. His parents are either dead or have abandoned him—as the hideous crone who cruelly throws his balloon out the window at first encounter is clearly too old to be his mom. The boy’s schoolmates are a feral, opportunistic bunch who instinctively seek to destroy what they don’t understand and can’t possess. In fact, nearly every other child in the film is depicted as part of an unthinking mob, fighting viciously among themselves even as they pursue the boy and his balloon through the streets, like a pack of wolves. The boy runs away, is assaulted, separated from his only friend—then reunites with it only to watch it die slowly before his eyes.

The happy ending? Balloons from all over Paris converge. The boy gathers them together and is lifted aloft. He drifts away, dangerously suspended over the city. The end.

Where’s the kid going? To an unspecified “better” place—for sure. Or to a fatal drop when the balloons empty of their helium (as we’ve seen them do just previously).

The message?

Life is cruel, lonely, and filled with pain and random acts of violence. Everybody hates you and seeks to destroy you. Better to opt out altogether, to leap—literally—into the void, escape by any means necessary. However uncertain or suicidal the way out.

Nice, huh? May as well have put a crack pipe in my hand right then. Why wait? Maybe
this
was why I never worked at the French Laundry.

Then there’s
Old Yeller
. Even worse. A more cynical and unconscionably bleak message one could hardly imagine.

The story of a boy and his dog. A
Disney
story of a boy and his dog—which, as all children’s accumulated experience teaches them, means that
no matter what kind of peril the heroes go through, things will always turn out okay in the end.
This, by the time we sat down in that darkened theater, excited, sticky with Twizzlers, we had come to accept as an article of faith. A contract between kids everywhere, our parents, and the fine people at Walt Disney Studios. This was as powerful a bond as we knew, an assurance that held an otherwise uncertain universe together. Sure, Khrushchev was maybe going to drop the Big One on us, but goddammit, that dog was gonna make it out okay!

So, when Old Yeller gets sick with this rabies thing, little Tony is, naturally, not concerned. Pinocchio, after all, got out of that whale situation no problem. Sure, things looked bad for him, too, for a while, but he figured it out in the end. Bumpy ride with Bambi, what with Mom dying, but that ended okay. Like Mom and Dad never forgetting to pick you up at school, the Happy Ending was a dead cert.

It will be okay. It will turn out fine.

No
one will hurt a fucking
dog
.

That’s what I’m saying to myself, sitting there between Mom and Dad, staring up at that screen, breath held, waiting for the miracle.

Then they go and blow Old Yeller’s fucking brains out.

I sit there stunned. “What do you
mean
there’s no cure for rabies? I don’t give a
fuck
they hadda put Yeller ‘out of his misery’! What about
my
misery, cocksucker! They were supposed to fix things! He was supposed to get
better
!! Don’t talk to me about
reality
! I don’t care if it’s a magical fucking rainbow shining out of a fairy princess’s ass makes him better. He’s supposed to get
better
!!!”

From that moment on, I looked at my parents and the whole world with suspicion. What else were they lying about?

Life was clearly a cruel joke. A place with no guarantees, built on a foundation of false assumptions if not outright untruths. You think everything’s going okay…

Then they shoot your fucking dog.

So, maybe
that’s
why until I got my first dishwashing job, I had no respect for myself and no respect for anybody else.

I should probably sue.