heart of the theater district where they knew and were liked by so many.
Tom was famous among his wide circle for his meat loaf, his jalapeño
corn pudding, and Fred for his dill bread and jalapeño jelly, and in spite
of the fact that meat loaf was a tad lower in the hierarchy of menu items
than I would have liked—I was still the chef, and nominally in charge of
my own kitchen—I was not unhappy about continuing with these
cherished signature dishes. The meat loaf got a lot of press from friendly
gossip columnists, and in the first months at Tom's, limos full of famous
people lined up outside to try the stuff: John and Angelica Huston, Liv
Ullman, José Quintero, Glenda Jackson, Chita Rivera, Lauren Bacall
come to mind.
The entire staff outside of the kitchen was gay, a situation I was entirely
comfortable with after Vassar, Provincetown, the West Village and
SoHo. The gossipy, self-effacing, overtly queer atmosphere was not only
fun but, in many ways, completely in line with the gossipy, self-effacing,
overtly depraved world of chefs and cooks. The waiters and bartenders
could always be counted on for funny personal anecdotes of sexual
misadventures—particularly as this was the early '80s—and they were
always willing to share, in hilarious and clinical detail, their excesses of
the previous night.
Our bar crowd, however, the guys you saw when you first walked in the
door at Tom's, were almost uniformly like their hosts, older gay men.
The floor staff and bartenders, far younger and hunkier, uncharitably
referred to the restaurant as a "wrinkle room" and made much fun of the
somewhat sad, even desperate longings of some of our clientele. We may
have been in the gossip columns a lot, and dinners, when I arrived, were
still fairly busy for pre- and post-theater, but Tom's was decidedly not
hot—not with an average age of sixty staking out the bar making goo-
goo eyes at the bartender.
We were busy for pre-theater, a mad rush to get them in and get them out