by the Supper Club, little things like ordering, scheduling, rotating food
and organizing menus were afterthoughts. I quickly found that doing it
myself was easier than waiting for Jimmy to show up and do it for us,
and in no time at all I was running the nuts-and-bolts end of the kitchen:
making sure that we had the food, the prep, the bodies and information
needed to crank out the enormous volume of parties, buffets, hors
d'oeuvres and regular menu items the business required. Jimmy's food,
as always, was magnificent, but Jimmy himself seldom seemed to be
around. After a few months, I was de facto sous-chef, or kitchen manager
—the guy everyone came to to find out what the hell was going on—and
when I came back after another brief vacation in the Caribbean, Jimmy,
though still nominally the chef, was secretly and simultaneously
employed as the chef at The Inn at Quogue out in the Hamptons, and
Steven Tempel was working in the Supper Club kitchen.
I guess it was a historic moment.
He showed up looking for a sauté position, his even more degenerate
friend Adam Real-Last-Name-Unknown in tow. I had a few weeks to
watch these two in action before Sears slipped off to the Hamptons and
his even more reduced "summer schedule", and I begged, pleaded and
implored him not to saddle me with these two coke-snorting, thieving,
fire-starting, whoring, boozing and troublemaking miscreants. Jimmy
ignored my entreaties.
When Steven and Adam were in the kitchen together, I couldn't turn my
back for a second. They were hyperactive and destructive, two evil
Energizer bunnies who, when they weren't squabbling and throwing food
at each other, seemed always to be dodging out of the kitchen on various
criminal errands. They were loud, larcenous, relentlessly curious—
Steven can't look at a desk without rifling its contents; they played
practical jokes, and set up whole networks of like-minded co-workers. A
few weeks after he arrived, Steven already had the whole club wired
from top to bottom: the office help would tell him what everyone else