knocking off at Le Bernardin, who could keep it together, show up on
time, keep their mouth shut, and do the right thing—even if he woke up
every morning naked and covered with puke on a cold bathroom floor.
Steven would scour the lunatic fringe, other chefs' kitchens, flipping
through the amazing mental Rolodex he kept in his head, the two of us
embarking, again, on a clandestine head-hunt that often stripped rival
kitchens bare. I loved those first interviews, laying eyes on old friends,
new recruits, a motley collection of psychopathic grill men, alcoholic
garde-mangermen, trash-talking chick sauciers, Ecuadorian pasta cooks,
deranged pâtissiers, cooks who thought that Sylvester Stallone was
keeping them under constant surveillance ("Sly knows I wrote
Cliffhanger—and he knows I know too much," said one cook who'd
apparently been communicating telepathically with Stallone while
flipping burgers at Planet Hollywood). "I needa two Heineken, seven
o'clock!" said my old friend Chinese Davey, from Bigfoot days, his hand
scraped raw from extracting bottles of beer from a chained cooler night
after night. "Every night! Seven o'clock! Two Heineken!! No Budwasser!
Heineken!" He got the job. "I am there, Chef!" said Manuel, the pasta
stud, on the phone from a very busy midtown kitchen. "I am with you!"
He dropped his apron in the middle of pre-theater rush, told the chef to
fuck himself, and rushed right over. Always liked that guy. He needed
Sundays off, to go to church, he said. No problem. And God help me, I
even hired Adam . . . now and again.
"I'm never going to slink home again, knowing I fucked up," I'd tell
Steven in one of our many post-game analysis sessions. "Things go sour
here? It won't be for lack of trying on my part. I ain't never gonna dog it,
I'm never going home at the end of the shift feeling ashamed. I don't care
if the crackpots we work for deserve it or not, I . . . we are gonna give a
hundred percent. We're gonna fight Dien Bien Phu over and over again
every night. I don't care if we lose the war—we're professionals, man.
We're the motherfuckin' A-Team, the pros from Dover, cool breeze . . .
and ain't nobody ever gonna say we dropped the ball, let the side down,