let things slide . . ."
One Five tanked. The "entertainment" didn't help. We featured musical
attractions so pathetic it would have made Joe Franklin blush: one-armed
piano players, octogenarian cabaret singers, aspiring Broadway ingenues
whose nasal-inflected warbling could shatter glass, haplessly
incompetent yodelers . . . customers would wander through our
magnificent revolving doors, clap eyes on one of these creatures belting
out "New York, New York" with a Yugoslavian accent, and turn on their
heels and run. Like a lot of restaurants in trouble, we got shaken down by
every sleazebag publicist ("I got Joey Buttafuoco to come in tonight;
make sure to comp him!") and corrupt gossip columnist ("My husband is
at loose ends tonight; can you take care of him?"). The press we got from
such largesse usually amounted to something like: "Seen canoodling at
One Five, John Wayne Bobbit and Joey Buttafuoco"—not a mention
likely to inspire a gang-rush of dining public.
But Steven and I were happy. We had the cooks we wanted. We were
making nice food.
When I was hired by Pino Luongo to open up Coco Pazzo Teatro, my
brief Tuscan interlude, I took Steven along. And after that, Sullivan's.
We were a traveling roadshow, and when we moved to another kitchen,
we peeled the best of the cooks we'd left behind with us. Steven, as I
said, is my kind of sous-chef. He loves cooking, and he loves cooks. He
doesn't yearn for a better, different life than the one he has—because he
knows he's got a home in this one. He gets along with just about anyone
at any time, total strangers tending to forgive him his most egregious
excesses, whatever he says or does. He's an ingratiating bastard—totally
without pretense, and you cannot embarrass, shame or insult him. He
knows how bad he is. The Mexican line cooks at Les Halles love him,
and his tortured, completely useless command of kitchen Spanish
amuses the hell out of them—as do his habits of singing Elton John and
Madonna tunes in a high-pitched, atonal voice, prancing shamelessly