So for purposes of fiction, organized criminality offers plenty of drama, plenty of situations in which characters find themselves in extreme circ.u.mstances with presumably difficult choices to make: Should I shoot my best friend today? What happens if I don"t? Can I trust Paulie? After I kill him, when his kids come over to play with my kids, what should I tell them about Daddy"s disappearance? Should I cooperate with the prosecutors? Can I survive the rest of my life eating jail food? These are the Big Questions in my kind of crime fiction.
And of course, crime can be funny.
The line between crime fiction and real-life crime becomes fuzzy, often hilariously so. All the real gangsters have seen The G.o.dfather, One, Two, and maybe Three. They"ve seen Good-fellas. And these films made a powerful impression. Recently I visited my favorite Web site, gangland.coma"an online repository for up-to-date organized crime arcanaa"to find a transcript of New Jersey"s De Cavalcante crime family members enthusiastically speculating on which among their number had provided inspiration for the Tony Soprano character on The Sopranos. Real-life gangster "Crazy Joe" Gallo, prior to falling down dead into his linguine with white clam sauce, is said to have practiced his Tommy Udo imitation in front of the mirror every morning. (You remember Tommy, the Richard Widmark character in Kiss of Death} The famous scene in which the giggling Widmark binds and gags an old lady into her wheelchair, then pushes her down a flight of stairs? "Heee-heee . . . heee . . . heeee"?) And there must be scores of aspiring Joe Pescis out there, taking the occasional break from the daily grind of extortion and murder to do dead-on impressions of Joe: "What? I amuse you? I"m a clown?"
There is a powerful element of pure comedy, of cla.s.sic schtick in the business of crime. With so many natural wordsmiths, mimics, movie fans, and pract.i.tioners of a century-old oral tradition, is it any wonder? And as Monty Python so astutely demonstrated many years ago, the basic elements of comedy all come down to the unexpected head injury, repeated blunt-force trauma to the skull. Whether it"s Oliver Hardy getting a good smack upside the nut with a mishandled ladder, or a Colombo loanshark getting his brains spattered all over the dashboard of his shiny new Buick, the principle is the samea"and it spells funny.
Joe Pesci, thinking that today he"s gonna be a "made guy," looks down at the floor, sees that the carpet has been rolled upa" and has time only to say, "O/? s.h.i.t!" before getting two behind his ear. Cla.s.sic! Just like Oliver Hardy should know that a ladder will soon be bouncing off his facea"because it bounced off his face in the scene before, and in the scene before thata" Pesci"s character should know that when a close personal friend invites you to a sit-down with the bosses, or says that you can have the front pa.s.senger seat ("That"s okay . . . you sit in front"), there"s every likelihood that a fatal head injury is imminent. There"s a historic inevitability to both comedy and organized crime, and the punch lines are often the same.
Times, sadly, are changing. Traditional criminal groups like New York"s Cosa Nostra, Boston"s Winter Hill Gang, Chicago"s Outfit are being replaced by newer and less amusing stylists, clever mobs of ruthless Russians, Serbs, Israelis, Asians, Jamaicans, Colombians, and Nigerians whose appreciation of the cla.s.sics seems lacking. Their crimes, for the most part, are so sophisticated and so boring that simply reading about them induces coma. Notoriously close-mouthed, even by professional standards, these recent arrivals to America"s sh.o.r.es are less likely to provide the kind of recorded admissions that thinned the ranks of their predecessors and entertained generations of readers and moviegoers. Some of these guys, I don"t even know if they"ve seen The G.o.dfathera"much less Mean Streets or Good-fellas^. I doubt sincerely whether they will honor the tradition of amusing movie audiences.
The bad guys of the future will probably look and sound and act more like Bill Gates than "Fat Tony" Salerno . . . and the world will be a bleaker place for it. No more "Gentleman Jimmy" Burkes hijacking loads out of Kennedy airport. Tomorrow"s criminals will simply move tiny blips from place to place on their computer screens, theoretical felonies that take place somewhere in the ether. Monies from the Bank of Smerzsk will somehow find their way to another account in the Grand Caymans, or to a sh.e.l.l corporation in the former Soviet Republic of Torporistan. And the man who presses the "enter" key will have all the seething menace and dangerous charisma of a certified public accountant.
So I"m looking elsewhere these days. Crips, Bloods, La "M," the Aryan Brotherhood, El Rukna"they just don"t do it for me. They kill like sharks, as remorselessly and predictably, for reasons as silly as choice sneakers. Our secret services, particularly the CIA, have such a long history of incompetence at the manly arts of a.s.sa.s.sinationa"and as organizations have come to resemble nothing more than Midwestern cow collegesa"that there"s little hope of returning to the fun-filled days of pragmatic killers, ideologically driven cold warriors, and Yalie pranksters. While the Israeli Mossad still provides the occasional item of interest (I particularly enjoyed the exploding cell-phone gag!), recent developments do not bode well for the future. The remnants of the KGB seem too preoccupied with stealing the silver and pilfering what"s left of their former empire to actually whack anybody, so there"s no help there either. As the modern-day ranks of the Five Families increasingly emerge from the shallow end of the gene pool, we see fewer and fewer instinctive funnymen like Gotti or Sammy Gravano (or even that kooky, kuh-razy Brit comedy duo, the Kray twins), and it gets harder and harder to imagine a modern-day Cosa Nostra killer with the wit, charm, and cold competence of The G.o.dfather"s Clemenza, instructing his accomplice after murdering an incompetent and possibly treacherous coworker, "Leave the gun. Take the cannolis."
As John Gotti said, complaining (on tape, naturally), about people talking too much: From now on, I"m telling you that if a guy just so mentions "La," and he goes ... I heard nine months of tapes of my life (in court). I was actually sick and I don"t wanna get sick. Not sick for me, sick for "this thing of ours," sick how naive we were five years ago. I"m sick we were so f.u.c.king naive.
I empathize with John. His underboss, Sammy, to whom he made the above comments, turned cooperating witness and put John in the can for life without. The government generously rewarded Sammy by forgiving him his part in nineteen brutal murders, a small price to pay for his testimony and for a very revealing, very funny book.
For a while, I had an ex-mobster friend named Joe "Dogs," who after his best pal tried to kill him, also became a government witness. He called from time to time, late at night, wanting to talk about nothing in particular: the city, restaurants he used to be able to go to. He liked to gossip about recent arrests of old friends, wonder aloud about book dealsa"as he too has a second career as a writer. I think it"s the New York accent he missed most, that he couldn"t talk with anyone where he was now the way he used to talk when he was a functionary for the Gambi-nos. He missed the good old days.
I know how he felt.
ADVANCEDCOURSES.
i haven"t seen much of America. I don"t know much about my own country, but I"m learning fast. In between the airports, minibars, and newsrooms, the hideous sprawl of industrial parks, chain hotels, and generic food that make up the thirty-city journeys I"ve been on to promote my books, I"ve begun to glimpse the America they once wrote sappy songs about: the purple mountains, twisting rivers, mill towns, wheat fields, and wide open s.p.a.ces. And I"ve met a lot of cooks.
They come to readings in their civilian clothes, but I know them from their facesa"the gaunt, haunted, thousand-yard stares, the burns on their forearms, the pink and swollen hands, the way they hold themselves in that permanent defensive crouch. The look that says, "Expect the worst and you"ll never be disappointed." In those faces there"s pain, hope, and a deep appreciation for irony. And when they take me, as they often do, to eat and drink and drink some more, to talk about the thing we do, there are inevitably a few who distinguish themselves, a vanguard who wants to hear of chefs and cooks in other cities and what they"re "selling." They want to know how far they can go. What"s next? When will it happen?
"Monkfish liver! Can you sell them? How many people order them?" one will say. "I herda them," says another. "The f.u.c.king burger . . ." groans another, "I can"t get it off the menu. I tried, but they scream." "Give them the d.a.m.n burger," says another, "and f.u.c.king salmon if they want it too. Just slip them the good ADVANCEDCOURSES.
stuff slowly, when they"re not looking. A little here, a little there, as a special. Choke them with burgers but slide them tuna rare. Give them their salmon, but make it ceviche. They"ll come around. They"re coming around."
In Milwaukee, where cooks complain of monstrous portions and demands for steak fries, one chef features an item called "Something Strange But Good" on his menu, sneaking a little something new to his regulars. The sirloin has already been replaced by onglet. The fish is being served rarer every week. It"s a beginning. All over the heartland, lamb chops become lamb shanks. Calves" liver and onions give way to sweetbreads and tongue. Throughout the Midwest, foie gras is spreading all over the menu in mousses, torchons, in seared amuse-gueules given away free, readying customers for the sucker-punches of foie gras "cappuccinos" and "foams" to follow.
In Iowa City, they talk of "slow food," regional products, artisa.n.a.l cheeses from nearby Wisconsin, local venison, wild duck, and range-free pork and lamb and beef. In Madison, chefs and cooks apologize when they tell me where they"re working, places with predictable names and predictably grim menus, but they"re all near hopping with enthusiasm, waiting for their chance.
In Kansas City, along with the high-end, white-tablecloth joints, they"re still pa.s.sionate about their barbecues. No two locals seem to agree on which place is best, whether sweeter or spicier is better, and they can discuss the subtle differences in style and flavor as it moves out from the city center to the suburbs. (Spicy in the center, sweeter as it moves farther afield.) Digging into ribs, chopped brisket, pulled pork, spicy slaw, and baked beans at Oklahoma Joe"s (an una.s.suming cafeterialike s.p.a.ce situated in a combination gas station-convenience store), I enjoy the most tender, inspiring barbecue I"ve ever experienced: greasy, sticky, served on plastic trays between slices of white bread. It"s a revelation.
In Saint Louis, a goateed chef with a mountain drawl tells me he"s thrown out his salamander grill and microwave. "Won"t have any a" that cheatin" in my kitchen. Nope. Won"t have it." He nearly tears up at the thought of cutting into a hunk of lamb or duck before it"s rested.
There"s a curiosity about new food among the public, even when it"s coupled with apprehension. "Saw you eatin" that snake heart on the TV. How"d that taste? That pho stuff didn"t look half bad, though, I gotta say." And they can find pho themselves, because everywhere I go are Vietnamese restaurants; Thai, Hmong, and Chinese markets; families of emigres operating small businesses, many looking and tasting just like the ones back home. There are Mongolian, j.a.panese, Korean, Indian, and Pakistani joints popping up everywhere. America"s cool, if you look hard enough, if you wander far enough from the strip malls and theme restaurants and Starbucks and Mickey D"s. Things have changed. Things are different now. Every day.
NAMEDROPPING DOWN UNDER.
HOLY s.h.i.t, AINSLEY HARRIOTT is flicking huge!
I"m in Sydney, Australia, drinking vodka at Fix, the bar behind Luke Mangan"s restaurant, Salt, when I look over and see Ainsley, whom I"ve said some very nasty things about in print (meant every d.a.m.n word too), and realize that this guy, towering over the crowd, coulda"should he be so inclineda" probably kick my a.s.s. Watching him on TV, cudding housewives and doing the cooing, squealing Jerry Lewis schtick, I figured the guy had to be a shrimp. I figured a guy that flouncy wasn"t the sort to maybe see me in a bar someday, reach down, smash a beer bottle against the wall, and then grind it into my neck. Now I"m not so sure. Jesus he"s big! His shoulders are the size of basketb.a.l.l.s . . . Maybe I should start worrying about Jamie Oliver too. Haven"t been so nice to him either. He could be studying some lethal form of martial art; he"s already got a f.u.c.king paramilitary, I heard. "Oliver"s Army?" What is that? Are they like Saddam"s Republican Guard? Do they do Oliver"s bidding, up to and including eliminating his enemies? Is some gla.s.sy-eyed acolyte with a faux c.o.c.kney accent gonna drive by on a Vespa and let loose with a full clip from a Tec-9? I"d really better think about this.
Fortunately, the evening progresses without senseless butchery. Ainsley even sits down at the same table briefly, gives me a friendly smile and a knowing tap at a copy of my booka"which either means he has the forgiving nature of a saint, or I simply haven"t been nearly enough of a s.h.i.t. Rick Stein, the very likable celebrity chef, restaurateur, and serial pyromaniac, sits across from me. Rick is apparently on a mission to burn down Australia, one cooking demo at a time. No television chef is as charming when confronted by sudden, unexpected columns of smoke or flames leaping from a pan. I like Rick. He"s a veteran like me, a chef with book deals and a television show, and over drinks we pondered the mysteriesa"as I often do with other chefsa"of the "celebrity chef" phenomenon, both of us feeling maybe a little bit guilty about traveling around staying in hotels for free, while our comrades of old still sweat and strain day after day in the infernos of real kitchens, making real food, for real customers. Is it a good thing? Why now? What does it all mean?
First of all, what is a "celebrity chef"? Well, it"s a celebritya" meaning well known, bordering on famousa"who is, or was at one time, a chef. This definition would exclude amateurs, neophyte cooks, and sous-chefs plucked off the chorus line by TV producers and elevated through the magic of television to "chef" status. If you"re a comely young fry cook with an adorably boyish forelock and you get yanked into a TV studio, given the moniker of, say, the Adenoidal Chef, and suddenly housewives in seventeen countries are squirming in their caftans while you make green curry, that doesn"t make you a chef. After fame comes, if someone is silly enough to build a restaurant around your stupid, well-known mug, good for you. It still don"t make you a chef. Britney Spears has a restaurant built around her persona and image. That doesn"t make her a chef.
Why now, though? What the h.e.l.l happened? What is wrong (or right) with society that even a son of a b.i.t.c.h like me gets a d.a.m.n TV show? Why do people even care about chefs? What changed? When I started cooking back in the seventies, the prospect of it becoming a glamour profession was laughable in the extreme. Cooking was something you did between other jobs; it was the last refuge for scoundrels, misfits, and tormented loners. Full-time employees of the "Hospitality Industry" did not enjoy high status or require the services of publicists, voice NAMEDROPPING DOWN UNDER.
coaches, elocution tutors, dermatologists, and hair stylists. They required only free liquor, as much food as they could pilfer, a few shekels at the end of the week, and maybe the occasional b.l.o.w. .j.o.b from a sympathetic waitress. Now, my fry cook is pestering me all the time. He wants to know when he gets his "wide-screen TV, b.i.t.c.hes and ho"s." He"s saving up for his own publicista"as soon as he learns to speak English.
Maybe people just aren"t f.u.c.king enough. There was a definite upsurge in the fortunes of chefs with the early eighties discovery that indiscriminate s.e.xual activity can kill you. Certainly people seem to be eating morea"evidence, perhaps, of sublimated desire. As chefs rushed to acquire basic communication and diplomatic skills, thighs expanded in seemingly direct proportion. "Food p.o.r.n" began to take hold around the world: buyers of lavishly photographed, expensively bound cookbooks gaped longingly at pictures of people doing things on paper, or on television, that they would probably never try themselves at home. Are celebrity chefs seen as safer, nonthreatening alternatives to, say, rock and rollers, or p.o.r.n stars of the past? Given the choice between having that cute, perky Jamie Oliver in your kitchen or Tommy Lee, Jamie"s presence would seem less likely to lead to penetration or the theft of prescription drugs.
But that can"t be all, right? Maybe Rick Steina"and Nigella Lawson, for that mattera"appeal to some other need, some deeper emptiness in our collective souls. Rick can honestly be called a celebrity chef. He"s put in his time in professional kitchens. Like me, he"s getting a little old to put in fourteen-hour shifts every day in a hot a la carte kitchen. Celebrity chefdom can be a pretty nice score, an appropriate payoff for years of toil and uncertainty. Nigella is a celebrity, no question about that, but is she a chef? Of course not. Which is fine. Her show is about eating well, not so much about cookinga"about the good stuff, like pork fat and pork skin, becoming approachable, even fun. But Rick Stein and Ms. Lawson share a common and profound appeal, I think. If you"re like millions and millions of others of generations X and Y, or a lingering boomer, maybe you left home for school or work when you turned eighteen, ran away to the big city, Mom and Dad an embarra.s.sing reminder of childhood whom you occasionally phone up on holidays. As you sit in your lonely apartment, you feel a yearning, a longing for a sense of family, of belonging. Disconnected as you are from roots you still feel ambivalent about, those big family meals in movies are looking strangely good. A vestigial "nesting" impulse takes hold and you find yourself watching Rick or Nigella, thinking, "Gee, I wish he were my older brother, or dad, and he was cooking for me." Or "I wish Nigella were my sister, or mom, cooking me that slow-roasted ham. I wish that leftover sc.r.a.p of pork she"s nibbling on in the middle of the night were in my refrigerator."
Let"s face it: Nigella probably cooks better than your mother. And she"s a lot better looking, and cooler. Nigella wouldn"t mind if you smoked weed in your bedroom before dinner, would she? She wouldn"t criticize you if you came home with your nose pierced and a fierce, full-back tattoo depicting Saint Peter and Dee Dee Ramone shoveling coal down the crack of your a.s.s. Of course not. She"d say, "Remember to clean that nose with alcohola"and wash your hands for dinner! We"re having roast suckling pig with quince chutney."
So maybe the celebrity chef racket isn"t all bad. Even Jamie Oliver at his most frenzied and annoying is probably, on balance, a force for good. The celeb chef thing, at its best, entices the unknowing, the fearful, the curious to eat a little better, maybe cook once in a while. And it provides much-needed late-career lucre for older, broken-down, burned-out chefs like, well . . . me.
Of all the food-crazy countries in the English-speaking world, Australia is perhaps the most rabidly enthusiastic. It"s the Gold Rush for chefs Down Under. In Melbourne, chefs like Paul Wilson of Radii, Raymond Capaldi of Fenix, and Donovan Cooke of Ondine walk down the street after work like frontier-era gunslingers. There are chef-friendly drinking establishments that cater to the needs (and the propensity for bad behavior) of NAMEDROPPING DOWN UNDER.
the alcohol-starved late-night chef posse. And all anyone wants to talk about is food and restaurants. Restaurants open and close, chefs bounce from place to place like Manhattan at its most capricious. Both Melbourne and Sydney boast scores of terrific restaurants, and everyone knows the names of their chefs. Chefs are like sports stars here: Everyone knows their stats, the teams they played on in the past. Tetsuya Wakuda, whose cookbook hasa"along with the French Laundry Cookbooka"been considered prime "chef p.o.r.n," meaning books that we professional chefs take to bed with a flashlight in our lonelier moments, is generally considered to run the best restaurant in Australia. His kitchen cranks out an absolutely amazing, jewellike degustation menu that has to be experienced to be believed. Tetsuya, though shy and very serious, is more than ready for his media moment. It"s only a matter of time before they get their hooks in him.
On the other hand, you"ve got Donovan Cooke, a chef from Hull, England, who can trace his culinary credentials back to early Marco Pierre White days. His Ondine in Melbourne is easily one of the best going; his tuna a la ficelle with horseradish cream, oxtail ravioli, fennel, and oxtail broth (a playful take on the beef cla.s.sic) is one of the best G.o.dd.a.m.n things I"ve ever eaten in a restaurant. But it"s very hard to picture Donovan with his own television show. While his contemporaries took elocution lessons and learned front-of-the-house survival skills, Donovan kept his thick accent, bounced around Michelin-starred restaurants in France (his French is an amazing thing to hear, believe me), and peppers his sentences with the real language of chefs and cooks. He cooks like a Michelin-starred Frenchman and looks like a football hooligan. When I dropped in on him unannounced, he was standing behind a busy stove, cranking out meals, personally working the saute station. He is absolutely obsessed with flavora"and sauce making in particulara"and seems to want to talk about nothing more than the nuts and bolts of emulsion, reduction, fortification ... all in delightfully non-TV-friendly terms: "You reduce the f.u.c.king jus, right? And you don"t b.l.o.o.d.y skim it. You emulsify the f.u.c.king fat right ina" at the last second. If the sauce breaks? What do you mean if the sauce breaks? If the sauce breaksa"you"re a f.u.c.king c.u.n.t." That"s a celebrity chef I want to see on TV.
MYMANHATTAN.
i"m a new yorker, so it should come as no surprise that I think my city is the greatest city in the world. I like living in the city where so many of my favorite films take place, where nearly every street corner reminds me of some piece of lurid personal or criminal history. "Crazy Joe Gallo was shot here . . . Big Paul Castellano got whacked there . . . Used to score there . . . That place used to be a speakeasy . . . My old methadone clinic . . . That used to be an after-hours club . . ." It may not be the most beautiful city. It"s not the nicest city (though it is, sadly, getting nicer). And it"s certainly not the easiest city to live in. One minute you"re on top of the world, and the nexta"like when you wish to light up a smoke at a bar and can"ta"you"re wallowing in misery and self-pity, unable to decide between murder and suicide. But it is exactly those famously manic highs and lows that make New York, and Manhattan in particular, like nowhere else. I mean, you can talk London or Paris or Barcelona all you like, but we"re open all night: I can pick up the phone around midnight and get just about anything I want delivered to my apartment: Chinese food, Lebanese, sushi, pizza, a video, a bag of seedless hydro, a human head.
I think I know what I"m talking about here. I"ve been other places. I travel a lota"about eight months out of the year. And while I love London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Melbourne, Hanoi, Salvador, Saint Petersburg, Tokyo, and Saint Sebastian like old friends, I miss my city when I"m away too long. As much as I enjoy getting lost, disappearing into another place, another culture, another cuisine, there are places and flavors, sounds, smells, and sights I begin to yearn for after three or four weeks eating fish heads and rice.
When people from other cities, planning a trip to New York (or the city, as we locals are apt to call it), ask me where they should eat, where they should go, where they should drink during their stay, they are often surprised at my answers. Sure, we have some of the best high-end restaurants in the world here, but that"s not what I miss when I"m wiping fermented bean paste off my chin, or trading shots of bear-bile-infused rice whiskey in Asia. When visiting Manhattan one should go for things that we do really well and the rest of the world doesn"t.
Example? Deli. We have it; you don"t. Even Los Angeles, with no shortage of Jews, can"t get it right. For whatever mysterious reasons, no city on the planet can make deli like New York deli and the first thing I start to miss when away from home too long is breakfast at Barney Greengra.s.s, The Sturgeon King, on Amsterdam Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street. Sunday breakfast at Barney"s is one of those quintessential New York things to do: a crowded, ugly dining room, unchanged for decades; wobbly tables; brusque waiters; generic coffee. But their eggs scrambled with dark, caramelized onions and lox, served with a fresh toasted bagel or bialy, are ethereal, and the home-team crowd of Upper West Siders is about as "genuine New York" as you can get. Grab a copy of the Sunday New York Times and a copy of the Post, and dig in. If your waiter seems indifferent, don"t let it bother youa"he"s like that with everybody. You can buy some of the legendary smoked sturgeon or Nova Scotia salmon at the counter to take away, but you will surely be committing a sin against G.o.d if, after breakfast, you neglect to purchase a pound of what is far and away the best chopped liver on earth. Hand-chopped chicken livers, schmaltz (chicken fat), sauteed onions, and hard-cooked eggs . . . it"s the benchmark to which all others should aspire.
No visit to New York is complete without a proper pastrami sandwich, and New Yorkers will argue over who"s got the best like they"re fighting over Bosnian real estate. But a safe bet is Katz"s Deli on East Houston for a nearly-as-big-as-your-head pile of steaming hot pastrami, sliced paper thin and stacked between fresh seeded rye bread. The appropriate beverage is a Dr. Brown"s cream soda or Cel-Ray. And be nice to your waitress; chances are she can kick the s.h.i.t out of you.
Pizza is another subject on which New Yorkers have strong opinions. If you feel like humping out to Brooklyn, to Di Fara"s, you can get the best of the best. But I like the white clam pizza at Lombardi"s on Spring Street, when I don"t feel like getting my pa.s.sport punched for a pie. They serve only whole pies at Lombardi"s, so if you want to master the manly New York art of walking down the street while eating a slice of pizza, you"ll have to grab one at any of the ubiquitous mainstream joints. Just remember: feet slightly apart, head tilted forward and away from chest to avoid the bright orange pizza grease that will undoubtedly dribble down. Be aware of the risk of hot, molten "cheese slide," which has been known to cause facial injury and genital scarring.
Everybody has seen Central Park on television, and yes, it is dramatic and beautiful, but I love Riverside Park, which runs right along the Hudson River from Seventy-second Street up to Grant"s Tomb. On weekends during warm months, there"s a large Dominican and Puerto Rican presence, huge picnics with radios blaring salsa and soca music, large groups of family and friends playing basketball, volleyball, and softball while slow-moving barges and tankers scud by on the river.
Speaking of sports, the West Fourth Street basketball courts on lower Sixth Avenue host some of the best nonprofessional, street basketball in the world. Professionals have been known to drop bya"and they get a game, much of it elbows and shoulders. A large crowd rings the outer fence three and four deep to watch some of the city"s most legendary street players.
When I"ve been home for a while and I need to treat myself to an expensive spirit-lifting experience, I always think sushi. And Yasuda on East Forty-third Street is the place to go for old-school Edo-style sushi and sashimi, the fish serveda"as it should bea"near room temperature, the rice still warm and crumbly. I always book the omakase (the tasting menu, literally, "you decide") on a day when Yasuda serves up sublime, tasty bits of screamingly fresh, rare, hard-to-get, flawlessly executed seafood. I can spend a whole afternoon there, eating whatever comes my way, working my way through every available option: mounds of sea urchin roe; top-drawer fatty otoro tuna; sea eel; yellowtail; mackerela"and the occasional surprise. On a recent visit I was served some Copper River salmon roe, before season, from the chef"s personal stash. If I find myself in the neighborhood late at night, just across the street, through an anonymous office building lobby, down a flight of fire stairs to a cellar and through a plain door, is Sakagura, a huge, nearly all-Asian late-night joint with a mammoth selection of sakes and accompanying snacks. Guaranteed to inspire exclamations of "How did you find this place?!" among your envious friends.
Sneer at hot dogs all you want. A well-made wiener is a thing of beauty. Actually, even a bad hot dog can be a beautiful thinga"if you"re eating it at Yankee Stadium washed down with a warm, watery beer (as long as the Yanks are winning). I"ll go so far as to say you will never understand New York, or New Yorkers, until you"ve eaten too many bad hot dogs and drunk too much cheap beer at a night game at the stadium. Similarly, Rudy"s Bar on Ninth Avenue serves terrible hot dogs too. Free ones. But ambiance counts for a lot, and after plenty of mid-afternoon drinks (never go at night) listening to their magnificent jukebox, watching the daytime drinkers slump over onto the bar, those lightbulb-warmed weenies suddenly seem like a good idea. If you want a quality hot dog, however, the best by consensus is at the legendary Papaya King on East Eighty-sixth Street. Be sure to enjoy your dog with their frothy delicious papaya drinka"and if you put ketchup on your dog I will f.u.c.king kill you.
New York"s subway system is certainly not among the best in the world, and I miss the full-length graffiti pieces, the tribal markings that once made the cars so menacing and evocative of cla.s.sic New York films like Death Wish. But I still love the people-watching late at night on the Number 9 or A train. The sound of people talking, that gorgeous, jazzlike mix of Brook-lynese, Spanglish, Noo Yawk; the hard faces New Yorkers put on like masks to get through the day. There are, once in a great while, magical moments, when united by a shared laugh or outrage, pa.s.sengers will let the veil drop and actually acknowledge each other with a sardonic smile, a shaken head, a caustic remarka"or like one time, when a deranged drunk was hara.s.sing a tired-looking woman and the entire car rose up and chased him off the train, a momentary united front.
For late-night bad behavior, I am a devoted regular at Siberia Bar, located on Fortieth Street in h.e.l.l"s Kitchen, a few doors east of Ninth Avenue. There"s no sign. Just look for the unmarked black doors under the single red lightbulba"and leave your conscience at the door. If Satan had a rumpus room, it would look a lot like Siberia: squalid, dark, littered with empty beer cartons, the ratty furniture stained with the bodily fluids of many guilty souls. It"s my favorite bar on earth; it has a great jukebox of obscure mid-seventies punk cla.s.sics, and no matter how badly you behave at night, no one will remember the next day. The crowd is dodgy and unpredictable. You never know who"s going to be draped over couches upstairs, or listening to live bands in the dungeonlike cellar; rock and rollers, off-duty cops, drunken tabloid journalists, cast and crew from Sat.u.r.day Night Live, slumming fashionistas, smelly post-work chefs and cooks and floor staff, kinky politicos, out-of-work bone-breakers, or nodding strippers. It"s heaven.
If I gotta put on a tie or a jacket, the food better be d.a.m.n gooda"and the food at Scott Bryan"s Veritas on East Twentieth Street is always worth struggling into a shirt with b.u.t.tons. It"s also got the best wine list and one of the most knowledgeable sommeliers in New York. (Not that it matters to me; I usually drink vodka.) Scott"s a friend, so I often sit at the bar and snack off the appetizer menu, but his braised dishes and seafood mains are always exceptionally good. Eric Ripert"s Le Bernardin on West Fifty-first Street is, in my opinion, the best restaurant in New York, but then Eric is also a pal, so don"t trust me. (The Zagats, Michelin, and the New York Times, however, are similarly enthusiastic.) Le Bernardin is my default special-event destinationa"even though Eric busts my b.a.l.l.s fiercely every time I dine there: "What are you doing here? You sell-out! This ees not your kind of place! What ees happening to you? You"ve changed, man. You used to be cool!"
The ultimate New York dining experience, however, may not be in a restaurant at all. For me, it"s a rainy, lazy night at home in my apartment. I"ll smoke a fat spliff, lay out some old newspapers on the bed, and call out for Chinese. I"ll eat directly out of that cla.s.sic New York vessel, the white cardboard takeout container, and watch a rented movie from nearby Kim"s Video. Kim"s specializes in hard-to-find exploitation, genre, cult, and art-house favorites, organized by director, so I can say, give me a Dario Argento, an early John Woo, Evil Dead II, The Conformist, or that Truffaut film where the two guys are both f.u.c.king Jeanne Moreau. Food never tastes better.
HARD-CORE.
gabrielle Hamilton, at thirty-eight, with no expression on her face, gazes out the open French doors of Prune, her restaurant on New York"s Lower East Side, and considers my question: "How has kitchen culture changed since you got in the business?"
"No one has s.e.x with each other anymore," she replies, almost wistfully. "It"s no longer "Mom and Dad divorce and you have to wash dishes." Now, it"s "Mom and Dad sent me to cooking school." People now choose to be chefs. It"s clean, educated, squeaky."
Though she is seven months pregnant, avoiding alcohol (and the smoke from my cigarette) a.s.siduously, Hamilton clearly still misses the bad old days. She misses "sitting at the bar after closing, drinking for a few hours. It"s amazing how you can get a third wind after you"ve been covered in meat juice all day."
Her particular road to becoming a chef and owning her own restaurant was not an easy one. Hamilton grew up one of five kids in Lambertville, New Jersey, an industrial town of lumberyards and factories (now undergoing something of a renaissance as a weekend getaway). Her father, a theatrical designer, and her French mother split up when she was eleven. After a year with her mother in Vermont, she returned to New Jersey to live with her father. By age twelve, she was working in restaurants.
"Were you a problem child?" I ask.
She gives me a very dry, sardonic smile and replies, "Only if you consider kleptomania and drugs a problem." After school, and for summer jobs, she began washing dishes at The Picnic Basket in New Hope, Pennsylvania. "I needed the money," she says. "I wanted the money." Restaurants were "the only thing I knew how to do." Fortunately, her mother, an excellent cook, had given her and her siblings "a lot of skills already." At various establishments, she continued to wash dishes, bus tables, wait on customers. "I did everything," she says, "bartended, pastry . . . everything." At fifteen, she got her first cook"s position. She rolled into New York in the early eighties and worked as a food stylist and catering employee until 1999, when she opened Prune.
When Hamilton says she did "everything," it"s sort of like Keith Richards with sleepy understatement telling you he "used to party a little"; her description is tantalizingly inadequate. Stories of Hamilton"s long hard road of "wilderness years" between dish jobs and later chefdom have become something of an urban legend. According to who you talk to, there were brief stints in everything from stripping to murder-for-hire. Of course, I believe them all. She"s hard-core. Example? Much later, when I ask her what she first looks for in a potential employee, she responds with, "First thing? If I"m standing there in my whites in the dining room, and they ask me "Is the chef here?" They"re not getting the job."
You should probably know that she is, by turns, ardently feminist, reactionary, and refreshingly (even painfully) candid. She is absolutely devoid of artifice, and she has a very low tolerance for bulls.h.i.t. New York"s freebie paper, The New York Press, included her in its list of New York"s fifty Most Loathsome People last year, and it"s not hard to imagine her steppinga"if not stompinga"on some toes. It"s no surprise that I like and admire her tremendously. Had she written her version of Kitchen Confidential before I did, I"d probably still be flipping steak frites.
Her original concept for Prune? "It was a reaction to years of s.h.i.tty catering," she admits. Prune was about "what it wasn"t.
New York, in "99, was still in long menu scrip mode." Hamilton says she wanted to open a place whereeverything wasn"t stacked and drizzled. The menu was "everything I grew up eating. I wanted the food to have a close, familiar feel . . . like in a household. I"m not an inventor."
The celeb chef thing "b.u.ms me out," she complains, before admitting that she doesn"t even own a TV. It"s easy, however, to read the above, or experience Hamilton"s withering gaze of disapproval, and miss the heart of the matter. Chefs reveal their true natures with their menus, with their food, and with the nature of the environments that they choose to serve it in.
Prune is a cozy, warm, inviting, and informal restaurant with a tiny, open kitchen, a few plainly appointed tables, and an ancient zinc bar. The menu is pure, unvarnished sentimentality, soulful comfort dishes pilfered, plucked, and remembered from the childhood she hada"and from what is also, perhaps, the childhood she wished she"d had.
Pasta kerchiefs with poached egg, French ham, and brown b.u.t.ter is straight from Hamilton"s own past. Roasted marrow bones with parsley salad (my favorite dish in the world, by the way) is a lift from London chef Fergus Henderson"s St. John (Hamilton was kind enough to call him and tell him she was appropriating his signature dish). Fried sweetbreads with bacon and capers, monkfish liver with warm b.u.t.tered toast, and lamb sausages with escarole and romesco sauce join Italian wedding soup on the appetizer menu. The bar menu sports radishes with sweet b.u.t.ter and kosher salt and sardines with Triscuits and mustarda"a dish that Hamilton loves because "it got me through every poor time in my life."
For main courses, Prune offers roast suckling pig with pickled tomatoes and crackling, whole grilled fish, braised rabbit legs, rib eye with parsley shallot b.u.t.ter, ruby shrimp boiled with sausage, potatoes, and corn; as for the daily specials, even the most cynical professional would find them as inviting and comforting as slipping half-drunk into a warm bath.
"I like no garnish, noncomposed plates," she says.
She loves Asian food, particularly Thai, Burmese, and Sze-chuan, but refuses to incorporate any of its influence into her own cooking. "No. Won"t allow it. Can"t have cilantro on the menu. That"s not what this place is about."
So what, then, is Prune about?
Like a lot of American chefs, Hamilton is conflicted on the subject of the French.
"I hate the f.u.c.king French," she snarls unhesitatingly. When pressed, she grudgingly concedes a fondness for "their cheese, wine, and perfume." But here, I think it"s Hamilton who is full of s.h.i.t. Prune exudes France from every pore. She can run from French terminology and French menu descriptions, she can lard her menu with nostalgic Americana of long-ago summers and still-remembered meals with friends, mix in some rural Brit and a little country Italian. But Gabrielle"s French mother"s cooking hangs over the place. Prune looks French. It feels French. Before the smoking ban, it was a smoker"s paradise. Even the laid-back bistro att.i.tude is stealth French.
Perhaps eager to put the boot in again, she agrees enthusiastically that Spain is indeed "the New France" but shrinks from the tiny bite, pinchos/tapas thing: "I still have an attention span. I can eat a meal." At the end, "I want to feel fed" (words most Frenchmen would probably agree with). Pressed to name some chefs she admires, she gives me the biggest, warmest smile of the day as she names Veritas"s Scott Bryan (heavy French influence) and his one-time underboss Mark Ladner (okay, he"s cooking Italian at Lupa, but there"s a French cook in there somewhere). "I love what they do."
Like a lot of chefs I know who can date their careers back to the good old/bad old days of the eighties, Gabrielle Hamilton is a survivor and a cynic, and like all cynics, a failed romantic. Sorry Gabrielle. I can smell the French on you. It"s the radishes with b.u.t.ter and salt on the bar that gave you away. You can run from the past, but you can"t hide. None of us can.
She feeds me some braised lamb before I leave, and once again (and I"ve been trying for years) I attempt to convince her to write the women"s version of Kitchen Confidential. "You"d make me look like a freakin" manicurist!" I insist. "This is a book that needs to be written. Isn"t there enough testosterone in this genre?!" I point out that she"s already a writer, having been published many times in Food & Wine magazine, and that publisher pals of mine have been asking.
She waves away the idea and stands up, ready to get back to the downstairs prep kitchen where her crew are setting up for dinner service.
"I"m not going to write the Great American Novel," she sighs. "But we"ll feed a few people."
WHENTHE COOKING"S OVER (turn out the lights, Turn out the lights) food and sin are two words thata"in the English-speaking world, anywaya"have long been linked. Food is a matter of the senses, a pleasure of the flesh, and when one antic.i.p.ates eating a good meal, one"s body undergoes physiological changes similar to those experienced prior to . . . other functions. The lips engorge, saliva becomes thick, the pulse quickens. Early moralists who believed that taking too much pleasure at the table led inexorably to bad charactera"or worse, to s.e.xa"were (in the best-case scenario, anyway) absolutely right. Everything about a restaurant setting conspires toward that end, be it the peach-colored mood lighting that makes you look more alluring and attractive, to the floral arrangements and decor, to the vigorous upselling of wines and spirits. Like rock and roll, the desired end result is to make you happya"and to get you in the sack.
The same folks (or their more recent equivalents) who looked disapprovingly at unrestrained gourmandism were just as quick to identify musica"particularly jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and rolla"as the enemy, an evil force likely to lead their sons and daughters to unsuitable mates, unwanted pregnancies, and "wild" behaviors. And in this too, as has long been established, they were right.
Good food does lead to s.e.x. As it should.
And in a perfect world, good music does too.
It is surely no coincidence, then, that the kind of music most chefs and cooks like to listen to, especially after work, is exactly the kind of stuff, heard in exactly the kind of places, that Mama was afraid of. Chefs, whose own personal appet.i.tes are rarely confined to food, have always, often notoriously, had a healthy enthusiasm for life"s other pleasures. We are, after all, in the pleasure business. It is our job to give pleasure to our customers. How can we be expected, one might ask, to regularly and reliably give pleasure if we do not ourselves fully experience it and understand ita"in all its strange and fabulous permutations?
Perhaps you should keep that in mind next time you find yourself out late and spy a chef, after work, drunkenly and maniacally bobbing to an old AC/DC tune, well on the way to being seen in flagrante delicto with the hostess from your previous dinner. The chef isn"t fooling around, or letting off steam, or even behaving inappropriately. The chef is just fulfilling a responsibility to fully understand the subject: doing research.
If food can lead to s.e.x, and if music can lead to s.e.x, and if the three have often been seen in each other"s company ... is there a direct connection between food and music? Does the music that chefs listen to while they cooka"and in their off hours when they are free to roam like the savage, unrestrained beasts we know them to bea"lead in some direct way to culinary creativity? Do chefs see music and the places and lifestyle surrounding music as inspiration, or merely as release?
After years of personal introspection and research, and close questioning of some of the country"s more accomplished chefs, I arrived at some conclusions.
In my own career, there have always been two soundtracks for each kitchen: one for the workday and another for the late hours after work, when, pumped up with excess adrenaline, my fellow culinarians and I would head out to the clubs or the bars, where we"d drink and review the events of the day. We"d tell stories, share our pain, gripe about bosses and customers, and do what chefs and cooks do when they travel in packs: talk shop. The things I cooked, like the people I knew, I a.s.sociate with certain songs, certain bands, nightclubs long gone, bars both nearly forgotten and still with us. The places and the songs changed, but certain patterns have held true over the years.
During the mornings, while prep cooks roasted bones and chopped vegetables for stock and the line cooks set up their stations, portioned fish, and made sauce, it was a time for fairly melodic fare. The kitchen sound system, usually a food-encrusted boom box with considerable functional eccentricities, would play nothing too jangly or nerve-racking: Curtis May-field, Isaac Hayes, Depeche Mode, Neil Younga"sentimental, atmospheric fare likely to make us feel good about ourselves while cleaning squid or tearing the abductor muscles off scallops. The service period (when, admittedly, most chefs don"t allow music, but read on) was usually given over to the large and usually omnipresent Latino contingent: salsa, soca, mariachi, and Mexican pop. When the rush was over, while last orders dribbled out and the cooks began to break down their stations, I usually stepped in with louder, more nihilistic sounds, designed to get us through the last hours of cleaning drudgery and off to the bars with hearts still pumping: mostly mid-seventies/early-eighties punk: the Clash, the New York Dolls, my beloved Ramones, and others whom I still a.s.sociate with my first happy years of cooking professionally in New York. Those were the bands we went to see then, after our kitchens closed and we"d had a few freebies at the bar. Most of those placesa"in fact, all of thema"are closed now: Max"s Kansas City, CBGB"s, the Mudd Club, Club 57, Hurrah, along with after-hours venues like AM/ PM, the Nursery, and the Continental. All day long, the job was about control and maintaining command of one"s ingredients, environment, and personnel. After work it was about losing control.
One constant, then and now, is my still ironclad ground rule regarding music both during and after work: In any kitchen where I am in control, there is a strict NO Billy Joel, NO Grateful Dead policy. If you are seen visibly enjoying either act, whether during or even after your working hours, you can clean out your locker now. You"re fired.
Like a lot of my peers, I"m much older and maybe even a little nicer now and pretty much done with nightclubs and any place where there are likely to be crowds or dancing. People I drink with, and listen to music with, tend to gather not at clubs but at favored dive bars where the music and ambiance suits our taste and our demographic. A good jukebox is vital.
In every city in America where there are restaurants, there are bars where chefs and line cooks go to relax and kick back. It"s never sleek or sw.a.n.k; it"s usually a dive, someplace nonjudg-mental and forgiving of the occasional bad behavior (and with a liberal pouring policy). It"s always open late, as it must be to accommodate cooks" hours, a place where cooks are likely to meet others in their field who share their peculiar half-lives, people who understand what they"ve accomplished and endured during the last ten or twelve or seventeen hours, and who don"t mind the lingering scent of smoked salmon or garlic.
In New York, there"s Siberia Bar, a dark, shabby, nearly undecorated dump on West Fortieth Street in h.e.l.l"s Kitchen. No sign on the door, just a red lightbulb. Inside are sagging, hideously stained couches, friendly bartenders familiar with restaurant folk and their peculiarities, anda"on both the ground floor and in the dank, brick-lined cellara"jukeboxes br.i.m.m.i.n.g with cla.s.sic Dead Boys, James Brown, Stooges, Modern Lovers, and Velvet Underground. In Chicago, there"s the superbly grotty Rainbow Club and the tiny Matchbox, where you"re likely to find cooks from Tru or Blackbird or hotel kitchens listening to head-banging anthems. In New Orleans, the last stop for bar-crawling cookies is the supremely squalid and at times terrifying Snake and Jake"s Christmas Club Lounge, where winking Christmas lights, a shotgun-shack motif, an esoteric playlist, and "flexible" hours of operation attract some of the Crescent City"s finest pract.i.tioners of the culinary arts.
Miami has the magnificently unreconstructed Club Deuce in South Beach, where original members of the "Mango Gang," among them Douglas Rodriguez and Norman Van Aken, used to congregrate, presumably to discuss early experiments with fusion. During the recent South Beach Food & Wine Festival, after the official parties ended, numerous celeb-chef attendees found themselves propped up at the Deuce"s serpentine bar watching off-duty ladies of the night play pool. As I lurched back to my hotel, the lion-hearted and still-going-strong Nancy Silverton (of La Brea Bakery in L.A.) was considering grabbing some greasy tacos across the street.
But it"s Atlanta that can lay claim to the best of the best (which is to say worst) chef-friendly dives in America: the legendary Clermont Lounge, a sort of lost-luggage department for strippers, who performa"perfunctorilya"on a stage behind the bar. An Atlanta inst.i.tution, attended at one time by nearly every citizen high and low, the Clermont changes character somewhat after midnight. The seemingly lost and hopeless give way to a hipster/restaurant trade contingent. Control of the jukebox (maintained strictly by the performers until then) is given over to a DJ. Though the dancers remain, there is decidedly nothing at all erotic about the spectacle. Cooks, male and female alike, applaud the Clermont"s legendary headliner, the decidedly Ru-benesque "Blondie," who recently celebrated nearly two decades at the venue. More than one chef and many cooks in Atlanta cherish their personally crushed and autographed can of Pabst Blue Ribbon from the veteran entertainer.
Well, of course, some of you might be saying at this point. This kind of degenerate, libertine behavior in marginal establishments is to be expected from this writer and his ilk. What about our better, more accomplished chefsa"the ones who are actually known and celebrated for their cooking, not some obnoxious memoir? Surely the three- and four-star hotshots, the guys we read about in the Times and Gourmet, have more refined tastes in musical venues? The French gurus, like Daniel Boulud, for instance, they"re retiring after their shifts to sip a little wine by the fire, maybe listen to old Serge Gainsbourg, right?
Wrong.
Boulud"s tastes run toward the Black Crowes and the Rolling Stones. He"s even had speakers installed in his kitchen, though he says, "I"ve yet to work on a playlist for them. I"ve focused all my energy on music for the lounge." After work, he likes to run up to Harlem to St. Nick"s Pub or to Luci"s c.o.c.ktail Lounge to listen to electric blues. Listening to the Devil"s Music even influences his craft, he admits. "I let music set the mood when I"m cooking at home or travelinga"and thinking what I"d like to cook."
Laurent Manrique of San Francisco"s Aqua and fellow Glimmer Twin Eric Ripert of New York"s Le Bernardin are, probably unbeknownst to their more restrained clientele, both dance club maniacs who claim that staying up all night listening to techno and trance music at skull-vibrating, molar-rattling volume is a vital part of the creative process.
"As much as in the kitchen there are boundariesa"in the nightclub there are no boundaries," says Manrique. "It"s two strong extremes. In the clubs, you let yourself go. With dance music, like with food, you go from simplicity to complexity: strong rhythm, one melody, then another. Dishes can be like that. First fish, then spice, then sauce. In harmony." Both chefs have loyalties to specific DJs. In San Francisco, Manrique is partial to DJ Deep Dish at dance club Ruby Skye, while with Ripert in New York it"s DJ Junior Vasquez at Twilo.
Given the heaving throngs, the ear-splitting volume, and Ripert"s well-known penchant for expensive tequila, do they ever come up with any actual dishes during these baccha.n.a.ls?
"It"s happening all the time," says Manrique.
"Music has never led me to a finished dish," says Laurent Gras, formerly of San Francisco"s Fifth Floor and the Waldorf Astoria"s Peac.o.c.k Alley in New Yorka"now at Bistro du Vent. While like Manrique and Ripert he likes dance clubs and dance musica"naming DJs Danny Tenaglia, Sander Kleinberg, Paul Oakenfold, and Sasha as favoritesa"he specifies that they give him "inspiration . . . the freedom and creativity to remove a concept from tradition and express pure emotion. The depth and combination of flavorsa"like soundsa"can be easily transcribed as a succession of ingredients and harmony. Ba.s.s evokes dark colors. Treble, clear colors. Music can move my eye from materials and pictures to forms and colors." As an example, Gras describes the effect of one dance club mix from DJ Tiesto called "Open Your Eyes" on his cooking: "It had a beautiful and powerful melody that made me think of combining cocoa and tomato. I put these flavors onto the main ingredient, swordfish. I felt it needed these powerful, powerful combinations and yet needed to be very delicate and light. With a beautiful presentation, of course. The (eventual) dish was a tomato and duck consomme, a touch spicy, with swordfish coated with cocoa nib and grilled on the barbecue. It turned out to be a beautiful dish."