Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (8 page)

Which is to say: if you’re lucky enough to be able to do the above, do not fuck up.

Like I said, all the great chefs know each other.

Let me repeat, by the way, again, that I did none of the things above.

It’s a little sad sometimes when I look out at a bookstore audience and see young fans of
Kitchen Confidential
, for whom the book was a validation of their worst natures. I understand it, of course. And I’m happy they like me.

But I’m a little more comfortable when the readers are late-career hackers and journeymen, like I was when I wrote the book. I like that they relate to the highs and lows, the frustrations and absurdities, that they, too, can look back—with a mixture of nostalgia and very real regret—on sexual liaisons on cutting boards and flour sacks, late-night coke jags, the crazy camaraderie that seems to come only in the busiest hash-house restaurants—or failing ones. I wrote the book for them in the first place. And it’s too late for them anyway.

But the young culinary students, thousands and thousands of them—new generations of them every year, resplendent in their tattoos and piercings—I worry that some of them might have missed the point.

At no point in
Kitchen Confidential
, that I can find, does it say that cocaine or heroin were
good
ideas. In fact, given the book’s many episodes of pain, humiliation, and being constantly broke-ass, one would think it almost a cautionary tale. Yet, at readings and signings, I am frequently the inadvertent recipient of small packets of mysterious white powder; bindles of cocaine; fat, carefully rolled joints of local hydro, pressed into my palm or slipped into my pocket. These inevitably end up in the garbage—or handed over to a media escort. The white powders because I’m a recovered fucking
addict
—and the weed ’cause all I need is one joint, angel dust–laced by some psycho, to put me on TMZ, running buck-naked down some Milwaukee street with a helmet made from the stretched skin of a butchered terrier pulled down over my ears.

Smoking weed at the end of the day is nearly always a good idea—but I’d advise ambitious young cooks against sneaking a few drags mid-shift at Daniel. If you think smoking dope makes you more responsive to the urgent calls for food from your expeditor, then God bless you, you freak of nature you. If you’re anything like me, though, you’re probably only good for a bowl of Crunchberries and a
Simpsons
rerun.

On the other hand, if you’re stuck heating up breakfast burritos at Chili’s—or dunking deep-fried macaroni at TGI McFuckwad’s? Maybe you need that joint.

Treating despair with drugs and alcohol is a time-honored tradition—I’d just advise you to assess honestly if it’s really as bad and as intractable a situation as you think. Not to belabor the point, but if you look around you at the people you work with, many of them are—or will eventually be—alcoholics and drug abusers. All I’m saying is you might ask yourself now and again if there’s anything else you wanted to do in your life.

I haven’t done heroin in over twenty years, and it’s been a very long time as well since I found myself sweating and grinding my teeth to the sound of tweeting of birds outside my window.

There was and is nothing heroic about getting off coke and dope. There’s those who do—and those who don’t.

I had other things I still wanted to do. And I saw that I wasn’t going to be doing shit when I was spending all my time and all my money on coke or dope—except more coke and dope.

I’m extremely skeptical of the “language of addiction.” I never saw heroin or cocaine as “my illness.” I saw them as some very bad choices that I walked knowingly into. I fucked myself—and, eventually, had to work hard to get myself un-fucked.

And I’m not going to tell you here how to live your life. I’m just saying, I guess, that I got very lucky.

And luck is not a business model.

T
here is no debating that it’s
“better” to cook at home whenever—and as often as—possible.

It’s cheaper, for sure. It’s almost always healthier than what you might otherwise be ordering as takeout—or eating at a restaurant. And it is provably better for society.

We know, for instance, that there is a direct, inverse relationship between frequency of family meals and social problems. Bluntly stated, members of families who eat together regularly are statistically less likely to stick up liquor stores, blow up meth labs, give birth to crack babies, commit suicide, or make donkey porn. If Little Timmy had just had more meatloaf, he might not have grown up to fill chest freezers with Cub Scout parts.

But that’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m interested in whether we
should
cook as a moral imperative—as something that every boy and girl should be taught to do in school and woe to him or her who can’t. I’m talking about pounding home a new value, a national attitude, the way, during the JFK era, the President’s Council on Physical Fitness created the expectation that you
should
be healthy if you were a kid. That you
should
, no, you
must
be reasonably athletic. That at the very least you must aspire to those goals, try your best—that your teachers, your schoolmates, and society as a whole would help you and urge you on. There would be rigorous standards. Your progress would be monitored with the idea that you would, over time, improve—and become, somehow, better as a person.

With encouragement, of course, came the unstated but implied ugly flip side: negative reinforcement. If you couldn’t keep up, you were, at best, teased and, at worst, picked on.

So, I’m not suggesting we put kids who can’t cook into the center of a hooting circle of bullies and throw a fat rubber ball at them until they cry—which was the traditional punishment for perceived crimes of “spazdom” back in my time.

But I do think the idea that basic cooking skills are a virtue, that the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill, should become as vital to growing up as learning to wipe one’s own ass, cross the street by oneself, or be trusted with money.

Back in the dark ages, young women and girls were automatically segregated off to home-economics classes, where they were indoctrinated with the belief that cooking was one of the essential skill sets for responsible citizenry—or, more to the point, useful housewifery. When they began asking the obvious question—“Why
me
and not
him
?”—it signaled the beginning of the end of any institutionalized teaching of cooking skills. Women rejected the idea that they should be designated, simply by virtue of their gender, to perform what would be called, in a professional situation, service jobs, and rightly refused to submit. “Home ec” became the most glaring illustration of everything wrong with the gender politics of the time. Quickly identified as an instrument of subjugation, it became an instant anachronism. Knowing how to cook, or visibly enjoying it, became an embarrassment for an enlightened young woman, a reminder of prior servitude.

Males were hardly leaping to pick up the slack, as cooking had been so wrong-headedly portrayed as “for girls”—or, equally as bad, “for queers.”

What this meant, though, is that by the end of the ’60s,
nobody
was cooking. And soon, as Gordon Ramsay has pointed out rather less delicately a while back, no one even remembered
how.

Maybe we missed an important moment in history there. When we finally closed down home ec, maybe we missed an opportunity. Instead of shutting down compulsory cooking classes for young women, maybe we would have been far better off simply demanding that the men learn how to cook, too.

It’s not too late.

Just as horsemanship, archery, and a facility with language were once considered essential “manly” arts, to be learned by any aspiring gentleman, so, perhaps, should be cooking.

Maybe it’s the kid in the future who can’t roast a chicken who should be considered the “spaz” (though, perhaps, not made the recipient of a dodgeball to the head when he bungles a beurre blanc). Through a combination of early training and gentle but insistent peer pressure, every boy and girl would leave high school at least prepared to cook for themselves and a few others.

At college, where money is usually tight and good meals are rare, the ability to throw together a decent meal for your friends would probably be much admired. One might even be reasonably expected to have a small but serviceable list of specialties that you could cook for your roommates.

Cooking has already become “cool.” So, maybe, it is now time to make the idea of
not
cooking “un-cool”—and, in the harshest possible ways short of physical brutality, drive that message home.

Let us then codify the essentials for this new virtue:

What specific tasks should every young man and woman know how to perform in order to feel complete?

What simple preparations, done well, should be particularly admired, skills seen as setting one apart as an unusually well-rounded, deceptively deep, and interesting individual?

In a shiny, happy, perfect world of the future, what should
every
man, woman, and teenager know how to do?

They should know how to chop an onion. Basic knife skills should be a must. Without that, we are nothing, castaways with a can—but no can-opener. Useless. Everything begins with some baseline ability with a sharp-bladed object, enough familiarity with such a thing to get the job done without injury. So, basic knife handling, sharpening, and maintenance, along with rudimentary but effective dicing, mincing, and slicing. Nothing too serious. Just enough facility with a knife to be on a par with any Sicilian grandmother.

Everyone should be able to make an omelet. Egg cookery is as good a beginning as any, as it’s the first meal of the day, and because the process of learning to make an omelet is, I believe, not just a technique but a builder of character. One learns, necessarily, to be gentle when acquiring omelet skills: a certain measure of sensitivity is needed to discern what’s going on in your pan—and what to do about it.

I have long believed that it is only right and appropriate that before one sleeps with someone, one should be able—if called upon to do so—to make them a proper omelet in the morning. Surely that kind of civility and selflessness would be both good manners and good for the world. Perhaps omelet skills should be learned at the same time you learn to fuck. Perhaps there should be an unspoken agreement that in the event of loss of virginity, the more experienced of the partners should, afterward, make the other an omelet—passing along the skill at an important and presumably memorable moment.

Everyone should be able to roast a chicken. And they should be able to do it well.

Given the current woeful state of backyard grilling, a priority should be assigned to instructing people on the correct way to grill and rest a steak. We have, as a nation, suffered the tyranny of inept steak cookery for far too long. There’s no reason that generation after generation of families should continue to pass along a tradition of massacring perfectly good meat in their kitchens and backyards.

Cooking vegetables to a desired doneness is easy enough and reasonable to expect of any citizen of voting age.

A standard vinaigrette is something anyone can and should be able to do.

The ability to shop for fresh produce and have at least some sense of what’s in season, to tell whether or not something is ripe or rotten might be acquired at the same time as one’s driving license.

How to recognize a fish that’s fresh and how to clean and filet it would seem a no-brainer as a basic survival skill in an ever more uncertain world.

Steaming a lobster or a crab—or a pot of mussels or clams—is something a fairly bright chimp could do without difficulty, so there’s no reason we all can’t.

Every citizen should know how to throw a piece of meat in the oven with the expectation that they might roast it to somewhere in the neighborhood of desired doneness—and without a thermometer.

One should be able to roast and mash potatoes. And make rice—both steamed and the only slightly more difficult pilaf method.

The fundamentals of braising would serve all who learn them well—as simply learning how to make a beef bourguignon opens the door to countless other preparations.

What to do with bones (namely, make stock) and how to make a few soups—as a means of making efficient use of leftovers—is a lesson in frugality many will very possibly
have
to learn at some point in their lives. It would seem wise to learn earlier rather than later.

Everyone should be encouraged at every turn to develop their own modest yet unique repertoire—to find a few dishes they love and practice at preparing them until they are proud of the result. To either respect in this way their own past—or express through cooking their dreams for the future. Every citizen would thus have their own specialty.

Why can we not do this? There is no reason in the world. Let us then go forward. With vigor.

Y
ou knew things were going to
get bad when Steve Hanson, without warning or visible regret, announced that he was going to shut down his restaurant, Fiamma. A few months of unsatisfactory receipts, true—but they’d recently won a very effusive three stars from the
New York Times
; the chef, Fabio Trabocchi, had been getting a lot of favorable attention and a lot of goodwill from the blogs and the food press. It was just before Christmas, no less, and there was every reason in the world—in an ordinary year—for an owner to find reason to believe things would get better, to hang on. But not this year. Hanson had examined the numbers, glanced at the headlines, taken a quick but hard look at the future—and decided he didn’t like what he saw. He shut the doors on Fiamma and another of his restaurants, the Times Square Ruby Foo, in the same week.

Whatever people might think of Steve Hanson’s restaurants, no one has ever credibly accused the man of being stupid. Evil, perhaps. Unlikable, probably. But even his detractors won’t deny his intelligence. If Hanson was choosing this moment, and this time—before the holiday season, no less—to drop the hammer on his show pony, arguably the
best
of his restaurants, the one all the opinion-makers actually
liked
, this
meant something.
This was a warning sign. To seasoned restaurant insiders, this was a blood-chilling indicator that things were not just bad—but that they were going to get a whole helluva lot worse.

In a business that lives and breathes dreams, delusions, superstition, and signs, where everybody, from the busboy to the owner, is always trying to figure out what it all might mean—Why are we busy today? Why not yesterday? When will we be busy again?—everybody scrambled to battle stations, trying to figure out what it all could mean, and what they could do to stop it, hopefully before “it” (whatever “it” was) happened.

The year 2008 was the
annus horribilis
, as they like to call such times, the year of the Disaster—The Fear. The stock market plunged, retirement funds became worthless, the rich became poor, the gainfully employed jobless, the eminently respectable suddenly targets for indictment. In a flash, thousands of loud, over-testosteroned men flush with cash and eager to play “whose dick is bigger?”—the secret-sharers, the hidden backbone of the fine-dining business—vaporized into an oily cloud, possibly/probably never to return. What “it” meant in real terms was that, nearly overnight, sales were dropping in the neighborhood of 30 percent. Or worse. Most chefs you talked to admitted to 15 to 18 percent. A few more honest ones would grudgingly admit to upwards of 30—while trying to keep the concern out of their voices. This was fixable. No reason to panic, they insisted. To admit how bad things were—and how absolutely petrified with fear many of them were—was bad luck. The accumulated wisdom of the restaurant business dictates that admitting such things, publicly accepting reality, is bad ju-ju. It only makes things worse, spreads the fear, worries creditors—and, worst of all, frightens away potential customers.

But it was worse than that.

It wasn’t just that sales were down at the medium-range and up-market restaurants in town—it was
which
sales were down. It’s one thing to take in $20,000 in receipts on a given night. It’s another thing if most of that money represents
food
sales. What a lot of people won’t tell you is that, for many full-service fine-dining restaurants (the kind with elaborate service, freshly changed floral arrangements, “chef ’s tables,” and a private dining room), the prevailing business model before the crash was the reliance on the “whale customer,” the regular patronage of the kind of customers who’d spend a few hundred dollars on a meal—and ten
thousand
(or more) on wine. The percentages on wine are generally excellent—and it requires relatively little in the way of labor or equipment. The margin on food, however, is razor-thin in the best of times—even when the prices on the menu appear to be outrageously expensive. The best ingredients cost a LOT of money. The quality and sheer number of personnel needed to handle those ingredients also require a lot of money. And by the time those ingredients are trimmed down, cooked off, sauced, garnished, and accompanied by the kind of bread, butter, and service one would expect them to keep company with—there’s not a lot of profit left over.

The many in the finer of the fine-dining rooms of New York were, in some sense, being subsidized by the few who spent big dollars on wine. A few years back at Veritas, a bar customer was pointed out to me. He’d blown through as much as $65,000 in
one month
, giving out tastes to fellow oenophiles and strangers alike at the bar. That kind of customer can help a chef be a little more generous with the truffles.

Another worrisome feature of what was happening on Wall Street was the little-appreciated fact that, tucked away out of view of regular customers, was an entire revenue stream of corporate customers, organized groups of high rollers, dropping big, expensable Monopoly money on a dependable basis. It had been a perfect arrangement: thousands and thousands of dollars in business from people who didn’t want to be seen spending it—conducted mostly out of view of a public for whom the sight of bankers and brokers enjoying themselves had never been attractive. Better yet, these masters of the universe usually had set or limited menus that could be cranked out relatively quickly and easily by kitchen staff. Half the work at minimal effort and premium prices. This was a blue-chip relationship for high-end restaurants, which could, around the holidays, amount to millions of dollars in revenue. Much of it conveniently spent on wine and liquor. That’s as close to free money as it gets. Though you could never tell from the dining room, many more restaurants than are ever willing to admit it were designed and built from the get-go to do this kind of two-tracked business. They simply could not survive, operating the way they had before, without it.

Suddenly, overnight, that whole economy was in doubt. What was once a gusher turned into a dribble. When your customers are getting called out in the newspapers for eating at restaurants like yours, that is not an environment conducive to your interests. If a company wasn’t currently making a profit for its shareholders, it was now a liability to be seen holding expensive corporate retreats—much less throwing a truffle dinner at Daniel. CEOs who were being vilified for flying private jets and grilled in front of congressional committees for their profligate spending and the obscene scale of their bonuses—they sure didn’t want to get busted eating at Masa.

There was panic.

In the blink of an eye, hidebound attitudes and behaviors, which had only yesterday been so deeply ingrained as to be instinctive, completely reversed overnight.

Suddenly, everywhere you went, people were uncharacteristically…polite.

Velvet ropes disappeared.

Hostesses who only last week would look right through you with blank, model stares now became as welcoming as your beloved granny: almost painfully accommodating and eager to please. Phones that used to ring forever were picked up on the first toll. A civility bordering on desperation replaced studiously affected contempt. Tables became available where once there had been no possibility of there
ever
being a table.

Even walk-ins were treated with courtesy in the hope that any accrued goodwill might pay off later.

“I’m so sorry we can’t accommodate you today but…how about next Thursday?” replaced the curt rebuff.

Chefs who hadn’t been near their dining rooms, much less their kitchens, in some time suddenly returned—and even made a point of cooking.

Tom Colicchio was among the fastest to grab hold of the situation. Rightly seeing his television celebrity as an asset, he quickly put it to work in the service of his restaurant and announced “Tom Tuesdays” at Craft—where he, himself, stood there for all to see and cooked a special menu.

Half-price specials, half portions, à la carte options appeared where they’d once been unthinkable. Soon, you could order off the menu—individual dishes—in the cocktail waiting area at Per Se, where, previously, the only option had been the full ride through a tasting menu—and only in the dining room. Prices dropped, specials changed to less pricey, less intimidating creations. The words “two for one,” “free bottle of wine,” “half-price,” and even “early bird dinner” began appearing on menus, signs, and Web sites. Comfort-food classics like fried chicken started appearing at weekly special-event dinners held late at night—at places where such quotidian fare would not, under ordinary circumstances, be expected.

But these were not ordinary times—and everyone knew it.

Many customers, particularly of fine-dining restaurants—the kind of people who invested in stocks and bonds—had lost as much as half their net worth in a matter of days. They could hardly be counted on to have the same priorities—to behave as before. Sure, it was not unreasonable to hope that there was still room for restaurants and menus and a level of dining directed at the luxury market—people willing to pay top dollar for the very best. They’d always be there. But there would also be, restaurateurs quickly surmised, plenty they would no longer be willing to pay for.

“I may have money to pay for this white truffle fettuccine,” one imagined them to say, “but fuck me if I’m paying for the restaurant to buy that flower arrangement over there!”

That gap would need to be filled. By ordinary customers. We’d better start being nice to them, went the feeling. Pronto.

If there’s a new and lasting credo from the Big Shakeout, it’s this: People will continue to pay for quality. They will be less and less inclined, however, to pay for bullshit. The new financial imperatives—accompanied, perhaps, by some small sense that ostentatiously throwing a lot of money around unnecessarily might not be
cool
right now—dovetailed perfectly with the rising hipness of the more casual Momofuku and L’Atelier fine-dining models (which had been around for some time), as well as other, more mysterious forces, long simmering under the surface and just now bubbling to the top to be acknowledged and identified. Wiser heads saw this shift as presenting opportunities.

A lot of restaurants closed. And, as always, a lot of restaurants opened to take their places. Industry boosters will point to those aggregate numbers as a means of minimizing the severity of what happened. But who among them will survive? Who will still be standing a year from now? Two?

In the middle of the worst period of crisis, when everyone was predicting the End of Opulence, Chris Cannon and Michael White bravely opened up the
very
opulent Marea on Central Park South. True, the room is ultra-swank. The prices for the food—which unapologetically courts (and deserves) four stars—are expensive. But what’s interesting is the wine list. It’s cheap. Or, shall we say, unusually focused on moderately priced, lesser known boutique wines and cult wines of Italy. You pay a lot of money for dinner at Marea—but, significantly, you do
not
get gouged on wine. In fact, if anything, you are gently steered toward more sensible choices.

As the prices of raw ingredient continued to rise—and pressure on customers tightened—chefs were caught in the middle. Even traditional “must-have” dishes like salmon and sirloin steak were becoming so expensive to serve that many couldn’t make money on them. And customers still wanted organic and sustainable—yet affordable at the same time.

David Chang suggested a way forward in an article in
Esquire
, predicting an inevitable move toward an entirely new expectation of the ratio between protein and vegetables or starch on plates of the future—more along the lines of the Asian model. A concentration on not only “lesser” cuts of meat, like neck, shoulder, and shank—but a lot less meat altogether. A future scenario where meat and bone would be used more as flavoring agents than as the main event, Chang proposed, would not necessarily be a bad thing. That would be more affordable, and would force chefs to be more creative and less reliant on overkill, on bulk, to make their point—and it would be better for a population increasingly at risk of growing morbidly obese.

Hard times, he seemed to be saying, might actually help push us in a direction we were already coming to think we wanted to go—or that we
should
be going but hadn’t yet actually gotten around to.

Belt-tightening implies a bad thing. But it also means you’re getting thinner.

Serendipitously enough, many chefs have been wanting to go in that direction for decades. They’d
never
loved selling salmon or halibut or snapper anyway—because they were boring. They’d always liked smaller, bonier, oilier fishes, for instance, not because they were cheaper but because they believed them to be good. Now, perhaps, was the time to strike. For every chef struggling to convince their restaurant’s owner to put mackerel or (God forbid) bluefish on the menu, now they had a very compelling, even unassailable argument: we just can’t
afford
to sell salmon. So, indeed, there
was
light, maybe, in the darkness.

If ever a time called for braised beef shoulder or round or flank steak—this was it.

Something else was happening, too. As young investment bankers moved from the banquette to the unemployment line, they were being replaced by a whole new breed of diner. Jonathan Gold, who’s right about everything (except the virtues of Oki Dog), said in an
LA Times
roundup of 2009 that there were “more high profile LA area restaurant openings in the last year or so than we saw in the previous five,” but “something truly new was going on that
may fundamentally change the way we look at restaurants
” (italics mine).