Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef Read online

  She set out copper cups if you asked for retsina and little glass tumblers if you asked for her own wine, which she brought in a little metal pitcher. At the height of the season, when it got very busy for that push at nine o’clock, especially on Fridays when the ferry from Piraeus churned into port—spilling Albanian Gypsies with mattresses piled on top of their trucks and the weekly mail and trucks carrying fuel and dry goods and Athenian weekenders looking for a relaxing weekend on the silent, iron island, away from the traffic and pollution of the city, a five-hour ferry ride away—you could wait at your table ignored for an uncomfortably long time, as she hustled from the kitchen to the yard carrying plates to different tables, and the cicadas fell from the trees above onto your waiting plates and your hair.

  And at the end of your meal, she would come to the table with a short pencil and start to tally your bill by scribbling directly on the paper tablecloth. She would ask you what you ate and drank, and she added up the numbers, accepted your cash, and after you left, she would clear the table and crumple up the cloth and stuff it in the garbage.

  In my new kitchen I couldn’t discern between a freon tube and a condensation line in a lowboy reach-in refrigerator to save my life, but I had crystal clear understanding about bringing the experience of Margarita—in translation—into it. So Eric began to put together an LLC and an operating agreement and a small group of investors to buy the lease out of bankruptcy court, and I signed all the papers the same way I took off on that one-way People’s Express flight—knowing absolutely nothing about what I was doing, but understanding that I had committed to it.

  And in a very short time, I was power-washing walls in a floor-length rubber apron, rain boots, and ventilated goggles. I killed roaches, poisoned their nests, trapped rats, stuffed their little holes with steel wool and glass shards while my girlfriend, in her own way, walked through the place “purifying” it with a burning sage smudge stick and read me my daily Rob Breszny horoscope in support. My best friends were stopping by after work, scraping the walls, scouring every surface, using skewers and razor blades to get into every crevice of every appliance. We papered up the windows and worked into the night at every opportunity. While I continued to chef for a paycheck at the catering kitchen, I kept two clipboards going side-by-side throughout the day, one for the catering crap and one for my exciting double life lived afterhours, and on that clipboard the lists went on for thirty pages and constantly renewed themselves even after I had crossed off the first thousand tasks in black Sharpie. Items I had never encountered in my professional life—

  —I now tackled bravely.

  In the evenings, people I didn’t know at all passed by constantly, saw the cleanup, and popped their heads in to ask, excitedly, if the old beloved French bistro was finally coming back to life, and when I said “No, I’m sorry, this will be a new place,” their faces sank in sadness and disappointment, and I struggled to feel confident. No fewer than a hundred passersby asked hopefully if this would be a vegetarian restaurant and pointed out that the East Village really needed some good vegetarian places. One guy suggested, earnestly, that we run the same menu as a busy and popular neighboring spot and hope for their overflow. Finally, I locked the door from the inside.

  I didn’t have an ounce of what typically matters, but I had all that. And I wanted to bring all of it, every last detail of it—the old goat herder smoking filterless cigarettes coming down the mountain, crushing oregano and wild mint underfoot; Iannis cooking me two fried eggs without even asking me if I cared for something to eat; that sweet, creamy milk that the milk wallah in Delhi frothed by pouring in a long sweeping arc between two pots held as far apart as the full span of his arms from his cart decorated with a thousand fresh marigolds—into this tiny thirty-seat restaurant. I wanted a place with a Velvet Underground CD that made you nod your head and feel warm with recognition. I wanted the lettuce and the eggs at room temperature. The waiter to bring you something to eat or drink that you didn’t even ask for when you arrived cold and early and undone by your day in the city. I wanted the toasted manti from a Turkish wedding I’d been part of in Göreme-Nevşehir, the butter and sugar sandwiches we ate as kids after school for a snack, the tarnished silverware and chipped wedding china from a paladar in Havana, and the canned sardines I ate in that little apartment on Twenty-ninth Street. The veal marrow my mother made us eat as kids that I grew to crave as an adult. We would have brown butcher paper on the tables, not linen tablecloths, and when you finished your meal, the server would just pull the pen from behind her ear and scribble the bill directly on the paper like Margarita had done. We would use jelly jars for wine glasses. We would put a rubber band around the middle of the wine bottle like I had done with Kostas and Iannis in Athens, and if you wanted to drink only half, you could pay for just half. Like Margarita’s place at that far dark end of the port in Serifos, when we ran out of lamb for the night, we would just run out.

  There would be no foam and no “conceptual” or “intellectual” food; just the salty, sweet, starchy, brothy, crispy things that one craves when one is actually hungry. There would be nothing tall on the plate, the portions would be generous, there would be no emulsions, no crab cocktail served in a martini glass with its claw hanging over the rim. In ecstatic farewell to my years of corporate catering, we would never serve anything but a martini in a martini glass. Preferably gin.

  I wanted all of that crammed into this filthy little gem that Eric was asking to show me as I whizzed by to park my car. The rest, I imagined I could figure out—the hot water booster and the right size grease trap and the payroll service and the proper way to process a credit card transaction. I had a master’s degree, I had figured out more densely loaded text than a standard commercial lease. I called my sister to make my announcement. I’m opening a restaurant. She’d become the food editor at Saveur magazine whose offices were then downtown, near Tribeca, and she was commuting into the city from New Jersey. More than once a week, she crashed on our couch.

  “Can you look at my opening menu and tell me what you think?”

  “What are you going to call it?” she asked.

  “Prune.”

  9

  ONE DAY I UNLOCKED THE RESTAURANT IN THE MORNING, ROLLED up the heavy gate, got the ovens going, and then went downstairs to the basement prep area and turned on all the lights. I unlocked the office door and smelled it immediately and unquestionably: human shit. I looked around, checking and rechecking the soles of my shoes for dog crap. I saw nothing. I put on my whites, an apron, and changed into my clogs, and smelled it again—a big whiff of human feces. I checked the bottom of my clogs. Nothing. I unbolted the back door of the office, which leads to nowhere—a small passageway between buildings with an ultra-narrow and steep stairway up to street level. This is protected by a rickety chunk of chain-link fence so that random derelicts can’t wander down off the street and jump up on the fire escape and rob the apartments above the restaurant.

  As soon as I pushed open the rusty old back door of the office, I found what I was, reluctantly, looking for. Someone with very loose bowels had managed to crawl over the chain-link fence and squat in my office doorway, unloading his guts onto the stoop and the door itself. It was half a mountain of soft, crusted-over, dark brown crap on the outside, where it had been left to dry, and soft, mustardy brown inside, the way guacamole gets when exposed to air.

  I’m not, unfortunately, the kind of person who would ever ask someone else to do something that I myself am not willing to do. So rather than save the delight for the Mexican porter who would arrive in a few minutes, I went and got the gloves and the dustpan and the pine-scented industrial cleaner and began. Some of the shit had settled into a pool in the gravel and debris outside my door. This I could more readily scoop up with the dustpan and knock out into the waiting garbage bag. But the rest of it had to be dealt with in hand-to-hand combat. With a kitchen side towel wrapped around my nose and mouth like an old-time bandit, I scraped and scrubb
ed and shoveled and doused the whole contaminated area until the whole world, it seemed, smelled so much like pine cleaner that it was equally unbearable. For days, like some kind of olfactory chiaroscuro, we breathed pine cleaner, but then, there, at the very bottom of the inhale, there would be a subtle note of human shit.

  As I was finishing and surveying my morning’s work, I looked up the narrow staircase to street level and lurched a couple of steps backward. On the second step from the top was a rat, a dead rat—actually, the more I looked at it, a nearly dead rat. I could see it breathing, its body vaguely rising and falling with its last weakened gasps, and occasionally I could make out the tiniest, subtlest movement in an arm or the neck.

  This challenge I just did not want to tackle, especially not from below and risk having it tumble down onto my head. Or come magically to life just when I approached at eye level and have it gnaw at my face. I wanted a superior vantage point, so I re-entered the office, bolted the back door, walked through the pine-scented gas chamber, up the stairs, through the dining room, and out onto the street. Coming around the side of the building, I reached the top of the staircase and got a better look at the rat. He was still breathing and yet, the rat looked—corporally, if you will—completely dead, as if it had died at least a full day before. It did not seem biologically possible that it was living, the way its eyes were long ago caved in and dried out, and its mouth was in full rigor. Yet, unmistakably, its long plump body was swollen and vaguely undulating. Then—I had no doubt whatsoever—it started to move, ever so faintly.

  The rat started listing heavily to its side, and only at the last second, when it started to slip off the second step, did I realize what I was witnessing. The rat slowly, like a sock filled with coffee beans, slouched over and landed with a pillowy thud on the third step—and then exploded with thousands of maggots teeming inside. What had looked like shallow breathing was the undulence of maggots at a meal. Efrain, the porter, had arrived and was inside sweeping, but I just couldn’t foist that onto someone else. I went and got a gallon of bleach.

  Not even a week later, I was on The Martha Stewart Show demonstrating how to prepare Italian wedding soup. It was a glamorous day. They sent a sleek black car to pick me up. Me! In the backseat of a black Lincoln Town Car all the way up the Taconic to her studios in Connecticut. In my sunglasses, on my cell phone—dialing every friend in my phone’s address book to narrate to them where I was at that very moment—in a private Town Car sent expressly for me.

  And then the hair.

  And then the makeup.

  And then the schlepper who fetches you a bottle of water and a cappuccino and a small plate of fresh cut fruit!

  When the adorable production assistant at the studio had offered me a cappuccino, I was totally thrown. After all, that’s my job; I’m the schlepper.

  “Oh no, no, please, thank you, that’s so nice of you but really, I can do it myself. Just show me where and I can fix myself a coffee or something and I’ll do it myself. Really, thank you, that’s so kind of you.”

  He stared at me a long second and said, “I’ll just get it for you. How do you take it?”

  “Okay. Um, light no sugar.”

  I thanked him profusely when he brought it, and he told me a kind of alarming story about a famous chef from Boston who’d been on the show who was, apparently, a great deal more comfortable than I with the whole being-served-by-the-schlepper routine.

  “Oooph, that sounds ridiculous,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, clearing the empty fruit plate, “I don’t know how you stay so humble.”

  And I nearly burst out laughing with images of maggoty rats and the stench of human shit so very fresh in my mind.

  “Oh, that’s not a problem with this line of work,” I said.

  And then what? The car dumps you back at the restaurant just before service. You swan through the joint in front of all your employees in your heavy for-TV makeup. The waiters and dishwashers and line cooks ooh and aaah appropriately at your general fabulousness and want to know everything about Martha. How was she? Was she a bitch? And on you go in minute detail until it’s three minutes before six and dinner service must start so everyone scatters back to their positions. And you? Fabulous celebrity chef you? Downstairs you see that the prep sink drain hole is clogged with slimy caul fat trimming that no one has bothered to clean out and you, automatically, like a reflex, thrust your hands into the drain and spend a few good humbling moments digging unknown slimy shit out of the prep sink.

  But, there was a brief minute, in the beginning, when I got a little swelled. I got seduced by customers coming up to the pass leading to the open kitchen and heaping praise upon me. I was stunned, glowing, swollen with their attention. Weepy, brimming, beside myself. “This is the best meal I’ve had in New York City!” they said. “This is better than Gramercy!” they claimed. “You’re a genius,” they declared.

  And then, soon after the “best meal” comment, a woman came walking up to the pass, straight toward me. I was smiling my prepared smile, expecting the praise, thinking, “The sweetbreads are amazing.” The woman reached across the slate counter to, I thought for a second, warmly touch me, and then I saw it—her empty cocktail glass with her napkin crumpled up in it.

  “Can you put this somewhere?” she asked, and as I took the glass from her hand, she grabbed the cuff of my chef’s jacket and wiped her shrimp toast fingers on it.

  It took me ten full seconds to climb down from my perch, but when I did I smiled at her, warmly, genuinely, and I said, “My pleasure.” And I meant it.

  10

  ARLINDO IS THIS GUY WHO LIVES IN THE BUILDING THAT THE restaurant is in. He’s from Brazil, I think, about six-foot-two and weighs a bit too much; so much that he has man titties. The reason I know this is because he likes to stand outside on the sidewalk in front of the wide-open French doors of the restaurant with no shirt on in the summer, in rivulets of his own sweat.

  Arlindo came to me very solemnly when we first opened, introduced himself as some sort of officer of the co-op upstairs, and asked if he could speak with me for just a few minutes. Not knowing then (it was October) that he would turn out to be the kind of guy who stands outside on the sidewalk in front of the packed restaurant on a hot day with his naked gut and sagging man titties hanging out, I welcomed him and sat down for what I expected to be some kind of new neighbor chat.

  “What’s up, Arlindo?” I asked, in a friendly, new-neighbor tone. Arlindo leaned in very gravely, hesitated dramatically, broadcasting to me with the pain on his face that what he had to tell me was so very difficult for him, but persevere he must. For my benefit.

  “I am sorry to tell you, to have to be the one to tell you,” he started, in his thick accent and deep, beautiful baritone voice, but then broke off, at 240 pounds, no match for the gravity of the job he had to do. He resumed, “I am sorry to have to tell you this but you need to know that your employees are stealing from you.”

  This was very early on when Prune had just opened, and so far my employees were like, my girlfriend of four years, my best friend from college whom I’d known about ten, and myself. I felt the need to sit back, just an inch or two, in my chair, like when someone casually mentions that they failed to take their bipolar medication that day. “Really?” I asked quietly.

  He knitted his brow in such emphatic sympathy, that eight or ten deep lines of woe sprang up and arched over his sad, sad eyes, like seagull’s wings. “Yes,” he said, solemnly shaking his head.

  “Hunh,” was all I could manage. And then finally, “What are they stealing?”

  “Well, you should see it, behind the building, I am picking up bottles and bottles of Kahlua and so many empty Budweiser cans. They are stealing your liquor and drinking it out back.” At this, I actually scraped my chair back several inches from the table, which maybe he perceived as my shock at the profoundly upsetting nature of the news he had dutifully disclosed to me. But Prune didn’t yet have a liquor lic
ense, and wouldn’t get one for six more months, and when we did get one finally I wouldn’t be stocking Budweiser in a can or Kahlua either, so the sudden backing up of the chair was more about concern for my own safety when I realized I was alone in my restaurant sitting across the table from this man who had just introduced himself as one of my landlords for the next twenty years, or however long my lease was.

  The next time I saw Arlindo was on the sidewalk, in front of the restaurant again, this time in a muscle tee and with his head wrapped in a big bandage like when you dress up for Halloween as a hospital patient and wrap toilet paper around your head a few times. He had just returned from the emergency room to get some stitches because that day, while painting his apartment, he climbed up the ladder to paint the ceiling but had misjudged how far he was from the ceiling fan and got brained by one of the blades, stopping it dead in its tracks with his own head.

  The co-op lets him plant flowers out front and out back of the building and pick out the color of paint for the door trim and other “responsibilities” and they give him the title of something like vice-maintenance manager, which makes him, in fact, an officer of the building. The only weird thing about the title is that it is not, we’ve discovered, an act of charity on the part of the co-op; they are in earnest with this assistant to the vice-maintenance manager office, which I guess, says all it needs to about the business upstairs.