KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

comrades' confidence that Luis, for instance, wouldn't skip town on a drunk after getting his big payday ...

failed to meet his expectations. I don't remember the finished product going out, but the chef showed ...

a purported club for coprophiles. "Hitler and Goering . . . yah, Goering, zey would go these places." ...

even braised until tender, just poached grey with a few slices of onion— accompanied by leftover pellets o ...

own with the best of the lifers. I could destroy and serve a nice piece of veal or a Dover sole a ...

was required: total dedication. Forget the loved ones. Forget the outside world. There is no life other than ...

quick vote, I was the shop steward. You'd think the union would be happy about this development, or ...

IN 1981, MY GOOD friend from high school, and later Provincetown, Sam G., became the chef de cuisine of Wo ...

apocryphal. But what we did know about Patrick for sure impressed the hell out of us. He was kind of famo ...

The new owners of Work Progress, our putative masters, were a textbook example of People Who Should Never ...

We fought all the time, Sam, Dimitri and I. Waving our cookbooks at each other, we'd squabble endlessly o ...

held us in something like awe, Sam, Dimitri and I would work all day and late into the night. When ...

Departing cooks and favored waiters, on their last day of employment, were invited to nail their grotty ...

worried. Then we asked the poor bastard if he'd be kind enough to grab a box of shrimp out of the fr ...

weren't well trained . . . we tried to console ourselves with the usual excuses. But the truth was, we ...

heart of the theater district where they knew and were liked by so many. Tom was famous among his wide ...

in time to make curtain, followed by nearly three hours of complete inactivity. The far end of West 46t ...

come. The closest we got to that was when one of our aged bar customers got lucky over at the Haymarket, a ...

yet to come into play. And the food wasn't mine. I came quickly to hate (unjustifiably) Tom's now-not-so- ...

merguez, and some Southern French Mediterranean dishes. It was clearly hopeless. Even my boss, the deli-mas ...