course, that many of these cooks wouldn't work out, that we'd actually
need more like forty cooks, figuring that in the first few weeks we'd have
to winnow out the losers and still have some extra good ones in holding
pattern. It was crazy and exciting and not good for any of our karmic
account balances—but this was the big one, after all.
When I wasn't conducting clandestine meetings in the parking lots of
restaurants and smoky Irish bars with potential job applicants, or helping
out Gianni at Le Madri, or sorting through truckloads of incoming
equipment, I was meeting with Pino and his executive chef of Toscorp:
the warm and wise Marta Pulini, a tiny, talented, fiftyish one-time
contessa. We would meet in the kitchen of Mad 61 or in the offices of
Toscorp on 59th Street, fine-tuning the menu, taste-testing, poring over
menu copy and haggling over prices. Originally, the idea was that the
Coco Pazzo Teatro menu would be "fun" and "theatrical", and described
in defiant English on the menu, regardless of its country of origin.
Center stations had been constructed in the dining room at Teatro where
food from the kitchen would be "finished" on futuristic induction
burners, carved or taken off the bone if necessary, and presented
tableside by rigorously trained and designer-outfitted waitrons.
Every week, before and after Coco finally opened, there would be a
regular chefs' meeting in a conference room at the Toscorp offices. If I
was the last to arrive at a meeting, the conversation would frequently
change suddenly from Italian to English. The Coco opening was still a
few days away when, in the middle of a chefs' meeting—probably a
conversation about whose dry aged #109 rib was better, De Bragga or
Master Purveyors, or whether we could all agree on a single olive oil so
we could get a better price (we couldn't)—Pino suddenly stuck his head
round the door and said ominously, "Anthony, could I see you a minute?"
The mood in the room was one of tangible relief. Beads of sweat had
sprouted on many a forehead as the other chefs realized what a close call
it had been, that it might have been them summoned without warning to