Cooking Dirty
Page 38
50. In the end, I never did. It was a wonderful introduction to the world of professional writing—my boss holding out on my paychecks week after week to get me to write more, those checks then being held as well. There are still days I want to rent a big truck, fill it with rabid wolverines, back it up to the offices in the middle of the night and empty it through one of the windows. Not that I’m bitter or anything.
51. Anthony Bourdain being the chef turned writer who wrote the wildly successful Kitchen Confidential and the man to whom I more or less owe my entire career.
52. It was the one about the butter—about doing the cooking class and making a super-high-fat French Sauternes sauce—which is just another proof of the old cook’s adage about the only thing better than butter being more butter.
53. I should say here that it wasn’t these guys until much later—until I got to a point in this new, second career where I actually was writing about guys like Paul Bocuse and trading e-mails with Eric Ripert.
54. Obviously, when talking to the press, one wants to put one’s best food forward. One wants to talk of one’s rigorous training, delicate artistry, the calm and competency of one’s crew. What one will never admit to on the record? That the grillman is banging the hostess, where the mysterious $2.5 million in start-up capital came from, that your cooks’ paychecks all bounced last week, every purveyor in the city has you on COD, and that even while you’re talking to me, you’ve got your dealer on line two just waiting to take last night’s profits off your hands in trade for a couple grams of Bolivian marching powder.
55. Most of them knuckleheads, thumb-suckers, idiots or worse, but some serious contenders, too—middleweight tradesmen, both local and national. Just so I wouldn’t get a big head about it, one afternoon Patty showed me some of the candidates I’d bested: ones who’d handwritten reviews in pencil, who’d misspelled the name of the newspaper they wanted to write for, the chef who’d reviewed his own restaurant just so he could say what a genius he was, and the guy who actually wrote that an appetizer at a particularly loathsome chain restaurant had “blowed me away.”
56. This is not an exaggeration. I received more than one.
57. Les Amis is a relatively harmless organization of chefs, restaurant owners and other food-industry people who get together in half-goofy secrecy to slap each other on the back, drink ridiculously expensive wine and eat meals prepared by guest chefs who must work in strict accordance with recipes and preparations laid down by Escoffier himself. It’s a guys-only group (the women have their own organization, Les Dames d’Escoffier) and basically just an excuse for a bunch of like-minded hedonists to get together, drink too much, eat too much and behave badly in private. You know, like the Elks club. Or the American Communist Party.