drugs.
APOCALYPSE NOW
THEY WERE ASSEMBLING MACHINE-GUNS for sale in the
employee bathroom when I arrived. All the line cooks were hunched
over Armalites and M-16s, while outside, in the nearly unmanned
kitchen, orders spewed out of the chattering printer and were ignored.
Let's-Call-It-Gino's was a gigantic, two-story Northern Italian place on
the waterfront, and the latest, most foolish venture from a guy everyone
called the Silver Shadow, named for his Rolls-Royce and the fact that he
never spent more than three or four minutes in any one of his restaurants.
When I first walked in the door, it was like the Do Luong bridge scene in
Apocalypse Now, where Martin Sheen shows up in the middle of a
firefight, Hendrix blaring in the background, and inquires of a soldier,
"Where's your CO?" To which the soldier replies, "Ain't you?" Nobody
knew who was in charge, what was going on, who was ordering the food,
or what was going to happen next. It was a big, expensive and crowded
asylum, run almost entirely by the inmates. Money flowed in—God
knows it was busy enough—and money flowed out, but where? No one
seemed to have any idea, least of all the Silver Shadow.
Gino's, and its sister restaurant in Baltimore, were classic Don't Let This
Happen To You examples of over-reaching by a successful restaurateur.
The Silver Shadow had expanded a profitable family provision business
into a smoking-hot restaurant catering to the Upper East Side
Mortimer's, Elaine's, Coco Pazzo crowd, spun that restaurant off into
another restaurant next door with a well-liked Italian race-car driver
freeloader as front man, and followed those successes with a string of
high-quality places in the Village and elsewhere. It had seemed, for a
while, as if he could do no wrong. He was hiring chefs by the bunch; my
old friend Sammy already worked for him, and he'd apparently asked