yet to come into play. And the food wasn't mine. I came quickly to hate
(unjustifiably) Tom's now-not-so-famous meat loaf as an immovable
object, and I settled not very happily into a position that was more
overpaid line cook than chef. What I learned at Tom's was a sad lesson
that has served me well in decades since: I learned to recognize failure. I
saw, for the first time, how two beloved, funny and popular guys can end
up less beloved, not so funny and much less popular after trying to do
nothing more than what their friends told them they were good at.
Friendships, I'm sure, were destroyed. Loyal pals stopped coming,
causing real feelings of betrayal and embitterment. In the end, I guess,
we all let them down. I found a job in the Post and jumped ship at the
first opportunity.
Rick's Café was an even more boneheaded venture: an absolutely idiotic,
Bogart-themed restaurant on a deserted street in Tribeca, run as a caprice
by the near-brainless wife of a successful Greek deli owner. One look at
this sinkhole—the faux-taverna decor left over from a previous
establishment, the framed photos of Bogie and Ingrid Bergman, the
(always fatal) absence of a liquor license—and I should have run for the
hills. I could recognize failure when I saw it, but I was desperate to get
away from Tom's. And the deli owner paid me cash money from a fat
roll in his pocket. It seemed like an okay place to lie low while I looked
for a real chef's job.
It was a horror. Our purveyors were all sinister Greek jobbers who
bought cheap and sold cheap. Our floor staff were the lame, the halt and
the ugly, and our only business was a lunch crowd from nearby city
agency offices: cheapskates and well-done eaters all. Dinner? We might
as well have been stationed on an ice floe in Antarctica; the whole
neighborhood closed down at six, and as we were the antithesis of hip,
and as yet without booze, no sane person would travel out of their way to
visit our little Bogie Brattle Museum. I tried, to go along with the witless
Casablanca concept, a sort of French/North African theme, making a (I
thought) very nice tagine with couscous like I'd enjoyed in France,