knuckleheads over the years. Here was a guy who only a few years
earlier had been a busboy, speaking only a few words of English, and
now he ran an empire. Not too shabby. Admittedly, the atmosphere
around his many functionaries and underlings was paranoid and
conspiratorial. Fear, treachery, speculation, supposition and anticipation
permeated the air. The pressure to perform at a high level was enormous.
Everyone was very eager to please, the rewards being so potentially
enormous, and the punishment for failure so sudden and final.
My first mission was not only to hire twenty-five to thirty talented
cooks, but to hire more of them than my chef de cuisine did. The idea
was to pack my crew with as many loyalists—guys and girls who were
answerable personally to me and who could be trusted to watch my back
—as I could, before my chef de cuisine overloaded me with his people,
folks who wouldn't tell me if my hair was on fire, much less that
somebody was waiting in the wings with their knife out.
Steven and I raped every kitchen we could think of. We stripped the
Boathouse clean, lifting practically their whole line in one week,
convincing many to leave without even giving notice. We pillaged other
chefs' kitchens, sniffing around for the disgruntled, the underpaid, the
unhappy, the susceptible and the ambitious. We conducted vast cattle
calls, relay interviews, three or four of us at a time, simultaneously
interviewing herds of applicants who'd answered our newspaper ads. The
quality of applicant from these mass gatherings was discouraging; we
managed to cull maybe two or three cooks from literally hundreds of
illiterate loners, glue-sniffing fry cooks, and wack-jobs who'd never
cooked professionally before. My chef de cuisine, on the other hand, was
engaged in a similar recruiting drive, and to much better result. From
Paglio and Torre de Pisa, both excellent Italian restaurants, he was
peeling off some really superb Ecuadorian pasta, grill and sauté cooks,
largely people he'd worked with before. All of us were making enemies
of many a restaurateur as we bribed, begged, cajoled and induced people
to drop everything and come immediately to work for us. We knew, of