Bourdain Read online

  SAM GOLDMAN: I was at Boston University; Nancy and Tony were still back in high school. Jeff [Formosa] called me and said, “I got bad news for you: your best girl and your best friend are—” and I just started laughing, because I was in bed with [another girl] at the time, so I got over that really fast. It never was a thing with Tony.

  NANCY BOURDAIN: We did start dating in high school. I look back and I think, none of us had it that bad, OK? None of us kids had it bad. But, of course, it was, “We gotta get out of this place.” In your senior year, once you had the [college acceptance] letter, you could take your last trimester off, if you learned something. So that was Tony’s thing. Like, “I just want to get out of here, too.”

  CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: Tony graduated from high school one year earlier than normal. He took some summer classes, managed to scrape up enough credits, got himself out after eleventh grade. And mainly the agenda was, he wanted to be with Nancy, who had gone to Vassar, so he went to Vassar.

  SAM GOLDMAN: Tony was a couple of years behind me, but somehow, he managed to graduate from prep school a year early. I think they wanted to get rid of him.

  CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: The French trips, the childhood trips, those are the ones Tony mostly talked about; he would have been ten and then eleven, and I was seven and eight. But I think, for both of us, the more memorable trip was the one we did in 1973, after our father’s aunt died and did the unfortunate favor of leaving her house to our family. Our parents realized pretty quick they had to sell it. The inheritance tax in those days was 65 percent of the estate. They had to get it ready for sale, so Tony and my mom and I went over for pretty much the entire summer. I was thirteen or fourteen, and Tony therefore would have been seventeen.

  We would occasionally dodge out and do stuff together. We got into a couple of the same books. We didn’t have a big supply, and once you ran out of your English-language books, you couldn’t find many around in this place. We had brought this big, fat book, which I still have at home, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, and we both read it. And we were doing work, we were painting the house, and we put in a full indoor bathroom, just to get it ready to sell.

  And it was also memorable, because I think it was the first time we realized—we were alone with our mom for six weeks, and Tony was at the peak of his “I want out of here” phase, and our mom was heading into her “I’m unhappy with my life” years, and so she was acting out a lot that summer, and would get mad about wacky stuff. It was the first time when Tony and I realized, Oh my god, there is something wrong with this woman. I mean, she is really, really unhappy, and she’s maybe gonna go off the deep end.

  It was really the first time that we’d seen it in such intense doses, at close hand, because we were all together, all day for six weeks, for the first time in a long time. And we would talk with each other, out of hearing from her, and we were not particularly kind with some of the things we said that summer.

  We were very happy when our dad finally showed up, and we could start to get a little pressure relieved, and do some fun things as a family.

  Our dad was the type of person, he wasn’t a saint, but he was the type of person who liked quirky people. He liked people who had something unusual about them, and he liked people who were into unusual things. He had a couple of friends—one of them was a guy who worked for a very high-end loudspeaker company, and the guy collected fire engines. He lived in Katonah, New York, and he had a big property, and he always had three or four fire engines, just sitting around on his lawn, and fire engine parts, and firehouse equipment on shelves in the house. Dad loved people like that. It was like, Whatever you’re into, as long as you’re into something.

  He was just a very special man. I had the constant impression that somehow our dad knew everything about everything. He just knew so much, but he was never in your face about it, he was never show-offy, ever. I was into trains for a while, and Tony was really, really into art and drawing, growing up, and took a lot of art classes, and our dad loved that.

  He had a hysterical sense of humor. Tony’s sense of humor came from our dad, but got sharper. Our dad never had a nasty edge to his sense of humor; it was always satiric, spoofing, but gentle. He was just nice. He never hurt anybody, he was never mean to anybody. And we just thought he was great. He was never a particular success, never made a lot of money, but we really just loved him a lot.

  And our mom was much more the other way. She didn’t like quirky and odd, and didn’t like most friends of our dad’s, and she was much more judgmental, and always made very, very clear what her judgment was. Just very, very different personalities. I mean, they loved a lot of the same things, they loved movies, they loved music, they loved kind of the same kinds of restaurants, they loved travel, so many things in common, but then they had this fundamental difference in life attitude, and approaching disagreements.

  3

  “A Lot of Fun to Be Around”

  Young Adulthood

  GLADYS BOURDAIN: I certainly hoped that Tony would go through college and graduate, and have some sort of degree, and proceed from there.

  HELEN LANG, FRIEND: I met Tony in 1973, at Vassar. He was a very striking person, his height, and his whole demeanor. He was firmly ensconced in the bad-boy persona. There were a lot of drugs at Vassar; when I was a freshman, Vassar made the front page of the New York Times for the number of quaaludes available on campus. I was in that whole drug scene, and Tony was obviously drawn to that as well. We hit it off immediately; we became fast friends, drinking buddies, drugging buddies, et cetera. He had a wicked sense of humor and was a lot of fun to be around.

  NANCY BOURDAIN: Tony always seemed to make friends pretty easily. Back at school, a lot of people I got friendly with, I knew through Tony, like Gordon [Howard] and Helen Lang.

  HELEN LANG: I was pretty good friends with Nancy. There was a fourth person whom I became involved with later on, Gordon Howard; he and Tony were really close.*

  NANCY BOURDAIN: Tony was really bad at Vassar. He didn’t work. [He did] terrible things that even I, who had no shame basically, would be embarrassed [of]. He’d be hungry in the middle of the night, after a night of drinking or after taking drugs, and he would show up with a couple of eggs and a fresh green pepper. He’d just go into somebody else’s—they had these town houses and tourist apartments; nobody locked their door—he’d just go rob somebody else’s refrigerator. And I didn’t realize. You can be willfully blind for only so long. I felt bad about it, but I ate the eggs. I cooked ’em. I was complicit. We had a lot of fun.

  HELEN LANG: As far as Tony was concerned, there were no boundaries. At that time, there was a lot of sexual freedom. Everybody whom I knew at the time had multiple partners, and we were all very casual. Very casual drug use, especially the major drugs that we used to do, which were LSD and quaaludes and cocaine.

  We would break into the gym at night and go skinny-dipping in the pool. We were just having a good time. We didn’t do anything seriously criminal, with the exception of breaking every drug law on the books. But other than that, we were pretty well behaved.

  I mean, Tony was somebody whom I considered 100 percent trustworthy. He would never betray a friend. He would never hurt another person. He had a very keen sense of right and wrong, in the way that matters. Not, Oh, I can’t break that rule, but Be a decent human being. I never saw him hurt anyone with his words or his actions. He could be very cutting, but he would never pick on someone who was vulnerable.

  GLADYS BOURDAIN: He and a group of his friends, including his then girlfriend [Nancy], went to Provincetown for a summer and they all found jobs. And he was a dishwasher and decided he liked it.

  NANCY BOURDAIN: My sister was going to Cape Cod for the summer with a friend of hers. [My parents] were going to send me there to straighten me up. They sent me to Provincetown. Tony came up to visit us and, I’ll be honest, he wasn’t looking for a job, but we had a wonderful roommate who said, “You can’t keep staying here and not contribute.
We all work, you know. You gotta do something.” He started dishwashing, I think, at the Flagship.

  ALEX GETMANOV, CHEF (IDENTIFIED IN KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL AS “DIMITRI”): Siro, of Siro’s Italian restaurant fame (or infamy), in Provincetown, for whom I had worked for a lot of years by then—he bought a place across the street, called the Flagship [“The Dreadnaught” in Kitchen Confidential], which was a steak, chop, and fried seafood place. Tony, this brash and somewhat shy, tall, skinny drink of water shows up in our kitchen and wants a job.

  He didn’t impress, in the beginning. He didn’t know anything, and he had this attitude that he could do anything, which doesn’t get you far in a working kitchen. But we hired him. He resented our attitude toward him so much that he claimed that’s why he went to the Culinary Institute of America [CIA]: he was gonna show us.

  What a salesman! Oh my god, he could sell snow to the Eskimos. Getting waiters to push a special, or talking his way into catering gigs in Provincetown.

  The second year he was in Provincetown, we started this silly little catering company called Moonlight Menus, because we were moonlighting on Siro, and we were using his kitchens for the prep, and maybe a very few of his ingredients. We were drugged out, crazed, drunk. Siro gave an annual garden party for charity. Tony and I catered it together, and that was really an insanity.

  We spent eighteen hours, with hardly a break, in the basement of the Flagship. Certain people who shall remain nameless came in and charitably fed us large quantities of white powders of the cocaine type. Somewhere in the wee hours, we just couldn’t deal with it anymore, and mostly it was done, so we crawled off onto a couple of banquettes in the back. The next morning, somebody came in and found us passed out, covered with flies, because we were all sticky with aspic.

  We bit off a lot more than we could chew, but we usually came through. We catered a number of staff parties for different establishments in town, and one absolutely disastrous wedding in a bar and restaurant. They wanted a steamship roast. We’d never done anything of that sort before. Tony talked to a couple of people, and I talked to a few people, and everybody said something different. So we had this forty- to fifty-pound leg of beef, and we cooked it to death. Then we had a fight afterward about who was gonna be out there in the monkey suit, carving, and we settled it that I would do the first half, and he would do the second half. And the working line for the victims was, “Oh, I’m sorry, sir, we haven’t gotten to the rare portion yet,” and then when Tony came on it was, “Oh, you just missed it.”

  There was a lot of food left over. The wife of the owner of the restaurant was like a vulture over it; she scooped it all up, and then they sold it the next day. It’s a rotten business.

  NANCY BOURDAIN: We had a lot of family meals. But when I look back—’cause I’m a pretty good cook now—I was not even a commis; I was the prep girl. I cleaned the pots, I did all the chopping, and soup making. I’d say, “What about the fish or the meat?” He’d say, “Oh, I don’t want you to screw it up. That’s the really important thing.” It’s kind of the easiest part, but I didn’t find that out till later.

  GLADYS BOURDAIN: At the end of the summer, I think it was me who suggested that since he wasn’t showing any interest in college, and he did seem to be interested in that summer’s work, I said, “Why don’t you think about continuing on this path?”

  CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: I don’t know who chose to pull the plug on Vassar. I mean, Tony had never done particularly well there in his own right. He had gotten As on a lot of people’s papers that he had ghostwritten for them, but never did particularly well with his own grades, as far as I heard from my parents. One time we went to pick him up. We were driving home, and we stopped for dinner at a restaurant on Route 22, somewhere near Patterson, New York. I still remember that night of screaming argument at the table. My parents were saying, “Why are we spending all this money, and you’re wasting it?!”

  GLADYS BOURDAIN: Thanks to a friend of mine whose father was the co-owner of ‘21’ Club, Tony was able to get ahead of some on the waiting list for the Culinary Institute [of America], and managed to get in.

  NANCY BOURDAIN: He was [at Vassar] for about two years. I wasn’t really disappointed when he left, because he clearly didn’t want to be there, and he was going to CIA. He kind of buckled down. He’d said that this was something that he wanted to do. Before that, I think Tony always wanted to be a writer. I know he did, so I was surprised how serious he was about the cooking.

  SAM GOLDMAN: Tony was at CIA; I was twenty-four, and I was executive chef at a restaurant in New York. I made him my weekend omelet guy; he used to come down from CIA and make omelets. He was notorious for leaving the kitchen a complete fucking mess.

  CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: I attended Tony’s graduation from the CIA. The capstone of it was a dinner where the graduating class had made a very formal, French-style high-end dinner, and not only were they cooking, but they were also serving it to the guests. I can’t remember what we ate, but I remember the room. They had it all decked out with nice drapes and flags and stuff, and made a very nice show of it.

  I think Tony was pleased to show off a little bit, because he hadn’t been given that many opportunities in high school to show off about anything, and our parents always had some criticism of things he was doing or should have been doing. I definitely think he was proud. I think he was pretty happy about it right then.

  4

  “It Was What the Cool Kids Were Doing”

  The Early New York Years

  CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: Tony and Nancy lived together in her sister’s apartment on Riverside Drive at first, a two-bedroom apartment. And then, later, around 1979, they got their own apartment in that same building, which was a great location—near the subway, near Columbia, with affordable, student-oriented dining available up the street, because obviously, they didn’t have boatloads of money. They had a super view of the Hudson River.

  Those first couple of years, we couldn’t see Tony that often, but we enjoyed seeing them at Easter, because they always had an Easter brunch at their place. And that’s when Nancy’s parents would come over, and they’d have this elaborate pretext that Tony was living elsewhere, because they were not married, and she was a proper Roman Catholic. They eventually got married in September 1985, if I remember right, in one of the chapels at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral [in Manhattan], which is pretty funny, because—I mean, I got married in a church, too, but Tony and I were lifelong atheists and skeptics, and somehow we both ended up getting married in churches. They had a reception on the Upper East Side, which was not huge, but it was nice. And then they could finally actually live together, as far as Nancy’s parents were concerned. It gave them legitimacy, so they didn’t have to play that stupid game anymore.

  And we’d see them at Christmas, sometimes. Tony and I had separated parents at that point, so Christmas in the early eighties was already getting complicated.

  Our parents separated probably around 1979, 1980-ish, and then, a couple of years later, our dad moved in with another woman, and I think was perfectly happy. She was nice to him. Our mom had been kind of mean to him the last couple of years, and so I think he was very happy to be with somebody who was nice to him.

  It was fun being with Tony and Nancy. In those days, Tony liked talking about the Kennedy assassination. Probably, to this day, he was one of the foremost scholars in the United States on the Kennedy assassination. Unheralded and unhailed, or whatever, but I think he knew more about it than many. And he was very into anything to do with double agents, between the Soviet Union and the United States, and turned agents from MI6, and things like that. He knew all their stories. My wife was a Russian studies major in college, so he found a ready audience, and she was, to a degree, interested in hearing him expound on this. He knew so damn much. He was always reading.

  SAM GOLDMAN: When he finished CIA, I got another executive job [at WPA, in New York], and I was in way over my head. I brought Tony and Alex on boa
rd, and they basically made me look really good.

  JEFF FORMOSA: When he was cooking at WPA, he talked about wanting to do a TV show, with chefs sitting around in the kitchen, talking about food, telling their stories. He was always thinking about that stuff.

  SAM GOLDMAN: We really thought we were hotshots, and it turns out we were horrible and had no understanding of the business end of the restaurant business. We were just young and dumb, you know?

  ROBERT VUOLO, KITCHEN COLLEAGUE: I met Tony and Alex and Sam at WPA. These guys, they became my mentors, took me under their wings. I was nineteen. Tony was only four years older than me, but four years, at that age, was significant. I was the kid. They taught me how to cook, and I became part of their social circle as well. They took me to my first sushi dinner ever, at a place called Chin-Ya.

  SAM GOLDMAN: Tony came back from a trip to France in the winter of 1979 or 1980, and we’re sitting around—me, him, and Alex—and Tony goes, “You won’t fucking believe it; over there, chefs are like athletes, rock stars.” And then he made us each cough up $200 and have these amazing photographs done. In that particular moment, he was a visionary.

  HELEN LANG: He told me, “Come over to WPA and I’ll make you something to eat.” I rode my bicycle over there; it was this little restaurant, and the kitchen was in the basement, so I went through those doors that they have in New York that lead to the basement from the outside. He was so happy to see me. He put a napkin down on one of the stools in the kitchen, and he made me a filet mignon with truffles.

  ROBERT VUOLO: There was a certain amount of cocaine and marijuana, and to some degree, heroin. Heroin is not altogether compatible for working the line; it’s an after-hours drug—but cocaine, absolutely. There was an enormous amount of cocaine that got used, and none of us were thinking about any long-term health issues that might arise from it. And marijuana was like an endless— There was a shaftway that you could stand in at the base of the steps at WPA; you could look up to the sky but it was completely enclosed, and cooks could go in there at night and smoke marijuana, completely unseen by anyone inside the kitchen area, so that upped the dramatics of being able to do this in plain sight.