chef." He's covered with grime, his whites almost black from handling
dirty, food-smeared kitchen floor mats, and hauling hundreds of pounds
of garbage out to the street. I follow him down, walk through the still
wet cellar to the office, plop down at my desk and light my tenth
cigarette of the day while I rummage around in my drawer for a meat
inventory sheet/order form. First thing to do is find out exactly how
much cut, fabricated meat I have on hand. If I'm low, I'll need to get the
butcher on it early. If I have enough stuff on hand to make it through
tonight, I'll still have to get tomorrow's order in soon. The boucherie is
very busy at Les Halles, cutting meat not just for the Park Avenue store,
but for our outposts in DC, Miami and Tokyo.
I kick off my shoes and change into checks, chef's jacket, clogs and
apron. I find my knife kit, jam a thick stack of side-towels into it, clip a
pen into my jacket sideways (so it doesn't fall out when I bend over) and,
taking a ring of keys from my desk, pop the locks on the dry-goods
room, walk-in, reach-ins, pastry box and freezers. I push back the plastic
curtains to the refrigerated boucherie, a cool room where the butchers do
their cutting, and grab the assistant butcher's boom-box from the work-
table. Knives, towels, radio, clipboards and keys in hand, I climb the
Stairmaster back up to the kitchen.
I've assembled a pretty good collection of mid-'70s New York punk
classics on tape: Dead Boys, Richard Hell and the Voidoids,
Heartbreakers, Ramones, Television and so on, which my Mexican grill
man enjoys as well (he's a young headbanger fond of Rob Zombie,
Marilyn Manson, Rage Against the Machine, so my musical selections
don't offend him). I'm emptying the sauté station reach-in when he
arrives. Carlos has got a pierced eyebrow, a body by Michelangelo, and
considers himself a master soup-maker. The first thing he asks me is if
I've got snapper bones coming in. I nod. Carlos dearly loves any soup he
can jack with Ricard or Pernod, so today's soupe de poisson with rouille
is a favorite of his. Omar, the garde-manger man, who sports a thick,
barbed-wire tattoo around his upper arm, arrives next, followed quickly