person who, when he says he's going to do a thing, does it. This, more
than anything else, is the essence of sous-chefdom. With Steven around,
I no longer had to come in in the morning and say, "Did you take care of
that thing?" The thing was always taken care of.
I like that. I made him my sous-chef.
Let's revisit, reconstructing from an untrustworthy and incomplete
record, the checkered career of Steven Tempel: he grew up on Long
Island, attended Johnson and Wales culinary school where,
unsurprisingly, he ran into trouble (something about an assault) and was
nearly expelled. He worked in a diner in Providence while he was at J
and W (Steven, for all his faults, likes money and was never afraid to
work), did time at Big Barry's out on the Island, bounced around a
progression of knucklehead jobs and eventually migrated to Northern
California, ending up at a joint called La Casa Nostra, where he
encountered the uncontrollable idiot-savant and baking genius Adam
Real-Last-Name-Unknown (nobody knows—as far as the Government is
concerned, he doesn't even exist). Like Hunt and Liddy, these are two
guys who should never have been allowed in a room together. When
they're together, a sort of supernova of stupidity occurs, a critical mass
of bad behavior. They like to reminisce about this California idyll period
of their lives: snorting coke through uncooked penne, projectile vomiting
in the parking lots of strip clubs, driving their owner into insolvency,
soliciting, pandering, stealing and in every way leaving a trail of
destruction and bodily fluids in their wake. Steven returned to New
York, probably one step ahead of the law, and worked brief stints at
Mathew's with Mathew Kenney ("Asshole" says Steven), Carmine's, the
Plaza Hotel, and some other very decent restaurants for brief periods of
time. Along the way, he managed to pick up a very respectable set of
line-cooking chops, as well as that peculiar variety of less legitimate
skills that continue to serve him well to this day. He remains a
remarkable font of knowledge about the inner workings of the restaurant
business, the real cogs and wheels. He can fix a broken compressor,