Bourdain Anthony - Medium Raw

My old sous chef,Steven Tempel, left New York for Florida, worked briefly for a corporate dining facility (how he passed the piss test I can only guess), left that job, married his longtime, long-suffering sweetheart, had a son, split with his wife, and moved to the small Upstate New York town of Speculator, where he opened a bar and grill named Logan’s—after his son. Though one of the best, most capable cooks I ever worked with, Steven had always said from the beginning that his highest ambition was to open a diner, so, in some sense, his dreams—of all the characters in the book—have come true.

I visited the Logan’s Web site to see what he’d put on his menu, secretly hoping to see some vestige of all those menus, all those restaurant kitchens we’d worked together. Steven had always been un-apologetic about how low-rent his culinary ambitions were—and I vividly recall the kind of food he’d eat or prepare for himself to eat, even when we were surrounded by caviar, fresh truffles, and soon-to-be-endangered animals. But I still held out some foolish hope that some sign of all those times—with Pino, at Supper Club, Sullivan’s, One Fifth—would peek through from in-between the quesadillas, chicken wings, and burgers on the Logan’s menu. I smiled and was pleased to see an incongruous osso bucco on the home page (as Steven’s had always been very good), but when I clicked on the current menu, it was gone, the scroll down an unbroken litany of very sensible sports-bar classics. No vestige of the former Steven in evidence. Which was, of course, just what I should have expected. He had never been sentimental about food. And certainly never been apologetic about anything.

Almost alone among the people I knew and worked with and wrote about in Kitchen Confidential , maybe it was Steven—the guy who never looked back—who figured it all out.

Last I sawthe guy, Adam Real Last Name Unknown had an honest job with a company selling prepared stocks and sauces. Strange thing for a baker of his talents to do, but by then it was strange that he had any job at all, so thoroughly had he burned his bridges. And he held that position—whatever it was—for what was, for him, quite some time, maybe a year or two, before disappearing back into the netherworld of what Steven describes to me as “doing the unemployment thing.” Naturally, the prick still owes me money.

I’m sure there’s some neat moral or lesson to be learned from the Adam Real Last Name Unknown story. The idiot savant who made the best bread any of us had ever tasted. The self-sabotaging genius who couldn’t and wouldn’t allow himself to succeed. The lost boy—among many lost boys. I’ll always remember him crying when his cassata cake started to sag. If anybody ever needed a hug, it was Adam. Unfortunately, he would have stuck his tongue down your throat or picked your pocket if you’d tried. Like with all the true geniuses—there’s rarely a happy ending.

My old chef,“Jimmy Sears,” who may or may not be John Tesar, just opened his own place, Tesar’s Modern Steak and Seafood in Houston—after successful (for him) runs in Vegas and Dallas. Then, two months later, he left his own restaurant. Tesar was probably the single most talented cook I ever worked with—and the most inspiring. Walking into Bigfoot’s kitchen one day and finding him holed up “incognito” as the new (and ridiculously overqualified) chef was a pivotal moment for me. His food—even the simplest of things—made me care about cooking again. The ease with which he conjured up recipes, remembered old recipes (his dyslexia prevented him from writing much of value), and threw things together was thrilling to me. And, in a very direct way, he was responsible for any success I had as a chef afterward. It was he, after all, who took me along to Black Sheep, and then Supper Club.

Just as I was inspired and swept along by John’s strengths, I was a direct beneficiary of his weaknesses and foibles. When he fucked up, I stepped up. When he left Supper Club, I had my first chef ’s chef job in a decade.

It was John who first hired Steven and Adam (a mixed blessing, to be sure). And it was John who helped introduce me to a far more skilled pool of chefs and cooks than I’d been used to—like Maurice Hurley (who’d work at Le Bernardin, then run over after his shift to do banquets for me at Supper Club), his brother Orlando, Herb Wilson, Scott Bryan, a whole graduating class of guys who’d worked together out in the Hamptons—or come up with Brendan Walsh at Arizona 206.

Looking back at a lot of the people I’ve known and worked with over the years, I see a common thread starting to reveal itself. Not universal, mind you, but there all too often to be a coincidence: a striking tendency among people I’ve liked to sabotage themselves. Tesar pretty much wrote the book on this behavior pattern: finding a way to fuck up badly whenever success threatens, accompanied by a countervailing ability to bounce back again and again—or, at the very least, survive.

My old pal,role model, and catering partner from Provincetown, whom I referred to as Vladimir, disappeared off the face of the earth back in the ’80s. I’ve heard he went back to school, went into computers or something. Though a photograph of him looking like a Mexican bandit adorns the front covers of countless thousands of copies of Kitchen Confidential all over the world, I have not heard a peep out of him, and he has not, to my knowledge, ever tried to contact me. He, unlike everybody else, got out—not too long after the time period I covered in the chapter titled “The Happy Time.” Vladimir (real name, Alexey) was older than us—and maybe he recognized what we didn’t yet: that the way we were going, times wouldn’t be that happy for long.

Those songs, from those days, from those first years working in New York—though I heard them first in the early days of heroin addiction—that honeymoon period when it’s fun and exciting and oh so…bad to be a junkie, they still hit hard, a mix of exhilaration and loss: “Mad World,” by Tears for Fears, The Bush Tetras, dFunkt, James White & The Blacks, early Talking Heads, Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message,” The Gap Band—all the background noise of that time. Those songs will always be a bit dangerous. Music to score by.

My chef andhigh school buddy, Sam, went fully down the rabbit hole with me—starting in the early ’80s. He’s on that cover, too, standing there with us, leaning against a wall, all of us holding our knives defiantly. It just took him a lot longer to climb his way out. He did some time in a federal prison—which, he says, saved his life. Clean and sober for some time now, he sells meat in California. Maybe you’ve seen him in such shows as…mine.

Beth Aretsky,the self-named “Grill Bitch,” after a long career in professional kitchens, came to work as my assistant, basically running my life for me when things got so crazy and complicated after Kitchen Confidential and the TV thing and I found myself the kind of person, suddenly, who needed such things as an assistant. She was my right hand, enforcer, and confidante for ten years—and, occasionally even my bodyguard. On book tour one time, when I was menaced by an overaggressive vegan, she slapped him up against a wall with a forearm to the neck. She has walloped overly liquored, overly friendly female fans with the occasional blunt objects as well. Beth married a man she’d been seeing periodically for years and years in the Caribbean—and the two promptly had a baby girl together. She left the service for a more secure, parent-friendly position a year ago—one where, presumably, martial art skills will not be required.