Bourdain Read online

  ALEX GETMANOV: In early eighties New York, Tony and Sam [Goldman] and I did a lot of bad things together. Freebase—the three of us would kill an ounce of coke in a weekend, and drank I don’t know how many quarts of Rémy or Martell, just to taper down, and eat a bunch of valium.

  SAM GOLDMAN: Everything that Tony said about what he learned as a dishwasher was true. He was a show-up guy. He wasn’t a genius cook. Like myself, he was a proficient mechanical cook. He knew the drill. It didn’t matter if we were fucked up on acid. I remember after this one weekend at WPA, we woke up Monday morning like, “What happened the last few days?” It turns out that we had been really busy and we’d done a good job. That was being a chef in those days, with that flavor of recreational drugs: as long as you showed up and did the job, nobody fucking cared.

  I remember driving around with Tony in the East Village, in this little red Rabbit I had, before we were doing heroin, trying to find it. It was what the cool kids were doing, and Johnny Thunders was doing it, and we all kind of idolized Lou Reed’s life, and you know Lou Reed has done it. It was a natural progression of drug addiction. We did a lot of junk together.

  ROBERT VUOLO: Tony, his addiction was always odd to me. I’m gonna be somewhat frank here: it felt often part of the persona that he wanted to portray of himself. He sort of constructed this image of himself that he wanted to perpetuate, and it involved this streety, kind of on the edge of the law—I wouldn’t say gangster, but he romanticized that kind of lifestyle. Tony was always playing with how he looked to other people; he was very conscious of it. There was a little bit of a distance between the things he did and who he was.

  SAM GOLDMAN: I never had a fight with Tony. Well, that’s not entirely true. We had one really big fight, and it was about which version of “Sweet Jane” was the best version. And once we fought about how much cheese should go into a Mornay sauce.

  HILLARY SNYDER, KITCHEN COLLEAGUE: They thought the Escoffier cookbook was the bible, you know, and they always referred to it. And I think Tony was especially proud of it because of his French heritage.

  ROBERT VUOLO: Tony was very well spoken and smart, and he knew his stuff, and worked very hard in many respects.

  ALEX GETMANOV: He’d really picked up the classic French idea of “the job must get done” no matter what, no matter how you feel or what’s going on. There was this famous story of Vatel, chef and steward from the time of Louis XIV. He was a perfectionist, and he would do these stunning banquets and parties for the king’s court. He was very unpopular with a lot of people; they hated him. Somebody screwed him over for a major party. The main fish ingredients for his dish failed to arrive, so he fell on his sword and killed himself. Tony used to laugh about this guy, but you could tell was admiring him all the same.

  JAMES GRAHAM, KITCHEN COLLEAGUE: Tony and I met working at WPA. I was eighteen, and he was twenty-two or twenty-three. A few years later he got his first chef job, at Chuck Howard’s, and I worked with him there a little bit, and then he recruited me to work at Nikki & Kelly. I was part of a codependent, dysfunctional team.

  LENNY MOSSE, KITCHEN COLLEAGUE: I was working at Nikki & Kelly, on Seventy-Seventh and Columbus. I was the sous chef there. This was 1983. The owners had just fired the chef, who had locked himself in the office with a mountain of coke. They hired Tony, and he brought in Sam [Goldman] and Alex [Getmanov].

  JAMES GRAHAM: I put a lot of faith in mentors like Tony and Sam, who were really not qualified for mentorship. But [at Nikki & Kelly] Tony gave me license to run a kitchen staff of fifteen, and he couldn’t be happier, because that meant he didn’t have to cook.

  He didn’t mind if I fucked things up; he was so elastic. If things went bad, he would just patch that over right away with a smile and charm.

  One day, everything had gone to hell in a handbasket. Tony had disappeared to go tanning. That was a thing; his nickname at the time was Zonker, after the character from the Doonesbury cartoon strip, Zonker Harris, who was a professional tanner. He would tan, I think, largely to hide the pallor of heroin. He would play hooky, to go to the beach with Lenny, and tan aggressively. He looked like a Versace bag.

  NANCY BOURDAIN: We used to joke about George Hamilton, and it was a joke, but he did like to have a healthy tan. I didn’t know about tanning places till Tony turned me on to them.

  CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: He definitely liked being tanned, definitely. I remember him joking that he would be competing in the George Hamilton Tanning Olympics. He liked sprawling out in the sun, like a seal on the beach, and just getting tanned. I mean, for him, a great day was tan for four, five hours, swim a little bit, have some beers and some beachy fried food.

  ROBERT VUOLO: Summer of 1983, we were all working at Nikki & Kelly, and there was an effort, on Tony’s part, to kind of relive what his Provincetown lifestyle was about. All of us, and a handful of waitresses, would get up early and go to Long Beach on the train, go to the beach and have a bunch of food and smoke a lot of marijuana and sun ourselves. There was a little bit of a tanning competition that summer, primarily between Lenny and Tony. Somewhere in the early afternoon, around two, we would catch the train back into Manhattan, and go to the Upper West Side and work, then party all night, and do the same thing the next day.

  JAMES GRAHAM: So, the kitchen went to shit one day; three people didn’t show up, I was trying to keep it together, and it was just a disaster. Tony showed up at 4:45, five minutes before dinner service, and within ten minutes, he had everybody charmed and laughing and at ease, and everything was fine. My prep cook turned to me and said, “You can’t stay mad at this guy, he’s magic!” All day long we were cursing his name, but five minutes in, we were all good. He just put everybody at ease; he was that charismatic, and that charming.

  NANCY BOURDAIN: At one point, I was selling advertising. I said to Tony, “You should do this; you’d make a million dollars.” People just listened to him. If he believed, he could sell anything.

  ROBERT VUOLO: He was such a charmer. Tony’s ability to get wherever he needed to get was very much because of his persona and his ability to talk and charm. It was a little dangerous, it was seductive, and very exciting. What he was always able to do was make everyone excited about the thing that we were all involved in.

  HILlARY SNYDER: Tony was always way more knowledgeable than skillful, in terms of his cooking. I mean, Tony was a brilliant guy, very smart, so he had a lot of nerdy knowledge about food that was always appreciated. He might have been arrogant, but he did not live in a world without mirrors. He was aware. He had an idea of, ultimately, how his skill set ranked, you know?

  A lot of us had that bullshit public persona back then, because it was—the punk rock thing was happening, and it was a defensiveness. There was a bit of an arrogant attitude. Sometimes it was more on the paper-tiger end of the scale, and then there were some people who could really back it up. I always thought Tony was somebody who could back it up.

  LENNY MOSSE: Tony was never afraid to be an asshole. He was never afraid to say what he was thinking, the unpopular opinion, his truth. Tony was this gangly, kind of goofy guy. He was manic, and he had a lot of energy. He was impulsive. I mean, no one decides to become a heroin addict after long, careful consideration.

  JAMES GRAHAM: The money, and the attention, and the glamour of Nikki & Kelly—he was extremely happy there, because he was getting all this attention, from women especially. He liked that it was a well-oiled machine; we were all cooking, and he was in the dining room, flirting with movie stars. He loved that.

  ROBERT VUOLO: It was a real coming-of-age, my association with Tony, Sam, and Alex. During the course of the next seven or eight years, I worked with some combination of those three in various restaurants around New York. An average job length was somewhere around six months, which seemed like an enormously long period of time, but looking back, it was extraordinarily brief.

  HILlARY SNYDER: I worked for Sam [Goldman] for years and years, just following him around from res
taurant to restaurant. So that’s how I got to know Tony, through Sam, and we also had another mutual friend in common: heroin, which was a great relationship for a while.

  We used together a lot, but we did not cop together a lot. He was copping while I was cooking. We were all knucklehead drug users back then; he was kind of an absentee chef, like, MIA. Which, look, if you’re an executive chef, you don’t have to be on the line, necessarily, but the truth of the matter is, a lot of the times, Tony and Sam were just out on the street, copping.

  LENNY MOSSE: Sam and Tony were junkies, but they had kind of a “nothing stops me” mentality at work. On the line, they would turn their heads and throw up into garbage cans. Sometimes Tony would leave the kitchen to score [heroin].

  CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: I did not realize that Tony was going through heroin addiction. I didn’t know that. Other than being scarecrow skinny, he hid it very well. I mean, I knew he was into weed; he’d smoke that in front of me. I didn’t give a shit. I remember being kind of horrified when I found out about the heroin. You have an image in your head of somebody who’s strung out and is completely useless; somebody who is holding up grocery stores to feed his habit. Tony went to work every day, though I did learn later that he had been desperate at points, and was basically selling his books on Broadway to get a few dollars to go find more heroin. But, as far as I know, I don’t think he robbed any bodegas or anything like that.

  ROBERT VUOLO: It really became apparent to me that he was struggling with heroin when we were working at Nikki & Kelly. That was probably his biggest chef job at that point. It was a very high-volume restaurant, and he put together a remarkable kitchen crew.

  He had an odd idea that it was OK to run out of food by Sunday afternoon or evening, because I think he loved the idea of getting rid of all of that food and starting anew on Monday. The problem was that it created this kind of chaos, because brunches were really busy there. He just would disappear on Sundays, and call in mid-afternoon.

  One afternoon I picked up the phone and he said, “How are things going in there?” and I was like, “Oh my god, it’s kinda crazy, I gotta tell you, we’re running out of this, we’re running out of that, the place is packed, I’m not sure what we’re gonna do,” and he said, “OK great! I’ll check in with you a little later,” and got off the phone.

  It was apparent that he heard nothing of the urgency in that message; he just kind of heard what he wanted to hear. That was the point where I was thinking, OK, he is separating on some level? Is he not taking this job as seriously as those of us who are on the front lines? There was a certain amount of antipathy that started to evolve at that point.

  That restaurant, I think it was a high-stress situation for him, and that’s when he started to do heroin on a more regular basis. We all started to notice it. One busy night I went down into the dry goods area to get something, and walking past the linen area, there were these enormous bags of linens and Tony was passed out on them.

  The owners of Nikki & Kelly were crazy scumbags with way too much money, and it was sort of chaotic and very, very busy; one of the busiest places on the strip at that point. I can’t tell exactly what prompted the owners to do this, but they brought in a consultant—I don’t know what his credentials were—but he spent a few weeks in the kitchen and around the restaurant, and by the end of it, we were all fired. The consultant suddenly took over as chef, and brought in his own crew, and we were all gone.

  JAMES GRAHAM: When we moved into Gianni’s, it was a huge pay boost, and a huge facility, all this equipment.* He just moved right into that and charmed everybody. Morale was phenomenal.

  The kitchen was so big that it took an expeditor to run service, and Tony loved that, because then he could just do his cartoon voices and his narration. He loved making fun of food writers, so every dish that we would put out, instead of just saying, “Take this to table nineteen,” he would put on some voice and be like, “One overdecorated horror after another,” making everyone laugh. He was so good at that, and so spontaneous. Everyone believed that he was going to be a professional cartoonist or a comedian.

  He was always doing caricatures of people—he would do them right on the walls. The bathroom of Gianni’s was just a gallery of portraits of the staff, because Tony would go into the bathroom, to get high, probably, and do a cartoon of me, spilling soup.

  He put all of his energy into cartooning. It wasn’t until after that time, when we were working at La Dolce Vita, on Thirteenth Street, and Alex was the head chef—at that time, Tony was starting to lose faith in his cartooning. We would look at Tintin comics together. I remember I found a book of [Tintin creator] Hergé’s work, and I brought it in and we looked at it together, and Tony said, “Yeah, this is why I’ll never make it as a cartoonist. I’m just not this good. I can’t compete with this.”

  It was when we were at Gianni’s that Tony started shooting up regularly.

  ROBERT VUOLO: The drug-work stuff started to get heavier; both Tony and Sam battled their way through it.

  HILlARY SNYDER: He just became more and more unemployable, and, you know, once you get to a certain echelon, your reputation will catch up with you. If you’re doing fine dining, haute cuisine, those circles are tighter. So if you rip off a place or burn a kitchen down, people are gonna find out about it.

  I think he might have been involved with some thievery at some point. But aside from that, the one thing I know for sure is his absenteeism was really bad.

  CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: I would always try to go to the restaurants he worked at. I always wanted to sort of show the flag. I don’t know if it was important to him. I have no idea whether he cared. I like to imagine he cared and thought it was nice, but he never would have said the words “It means a lot to me that you’re here.” Never.

  He had a couple of bouts where he would go for a little bit of time here and there without a job. I don’t remember any of them being really long, but, you know, there would be times. I did wonder at times, Does he think I’m being patronizing by showing up; am I looking down on him in some way? You know, me with my office job and blah, blah, blah. There were a couple of his jobs where I kind of shrugged and said, in my heart of hearts, “Couldn’t you do better than this?” I didn’t voice that to him, but I knew that our mother would say it, probably, at some point. That would be exactly the kind of comment that she would verbalize, and she probably would think that she was being helpful in some way.

  Our mother had this miraculous knack for asking things in a way where you just kind of knew that there was a disappointment there.

  ROBERT VUOLO: I remember running into him in the early nineties. He was working the wet bar at a restaurant called Formerly Joe’s, which was behind the Riviera, on West Tenth and West Fourth Street. He had this whole thing: “I’m gonna write this book.” He was always a very talented guy; he was one of these guys who you felt like could do almost anything. He was a good writer, he was a good illustrator, and he was brilliant, smart, and well spoken. I remember reading some of his shorter pieces, and they were all sort of kitchen related, but there was a point where you could tell that he was struggling a little bit, and it wasn’t totally clear to me when he said, “I’m working on this book,” that it was actually something that he was really working on.

  JAMES GRAHAM: Tony was the guy who made me want to be a chef, and ten years later, he was the guy who made me want to get out of the business. I saw him being miserable and unhappy, not able to do what he wanted, and being hostage to these big jobs that were really a servant’s job; there was no prestige.

  CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: Early on, I thought he was happy enough. I guess I first started understanding that this wasn’t really what he wanted to do, longer term, around the time our dad died. That was when he started to say, “I don’t wanna do this anymore. This isn’t how I want it to be. The long hours, and the low pay, and no health insurance, and no prospects, and constant—restaurants close, a new one opens, a new one closes, the turmoil�
��—the many things he wrote about in Kitchen Confidential, in terms of egos and consequent failure among restaurant owners. He was getting a bit tired of that.

  ROBERT VUOLO: We had a thing at Nikki & Kelly: someone got a bunch of those bandannas that the Japanese pilots wore during World War II, before they were about to kamikaze into the side of a warship, and that was so much part of that persona we were all sucked up into. Actually, you needed something around your forehead to keep from sweating all over your food, so it just added to the dramatics. And we were all into movies together. We had a tape of the soundtrack of Apocalypse Now going on in the kitchen for months.

  HILlARY SNYDER: I think a lot of us, as cooks, identified with Martin Sheen, who was the army assassin who was sent to kill Marlon Brando’s character because he had gone insane. And then the insane person, you know, the Marlon Brando character, was almost always the restaurant owner, you know what I mean? And also just being fascinated with how absurd it all was; and, you know, that was another thing I think we all heavily identified with, the absurdity, the irony, that you don’t really know your ass from your elbow as a cook unless you’ve been doing it for five years. It’s a pretty intense skill set, and to be able to do your job properly, you’re wearing a lot of different hats, right? And you gotta have a lot of different sets of knowledge, including scientific stuff. I mean, the properties of an egg would just astound people, you know?

  And then there’s floor staff. So here you are, right, dedicating your life to the craft, and then there’s the floor staff, these waiters and waitresses who would rather be doing something else with their lives, who are making two and three times what you’re making in a night—the absurdity of that was always a big deal, and still is. He just felt so much injustice that there was not—the cooking profession was not given the weight that it deserved. I was so proud of Tony, later, for making this such a public issue, that not only are kitchen staffs heavily immigrant in fine dining, I mean, they cook everything really fucking well, and they don’t complain about shit, and they bust their asses, but wages have not changed since, I don’t know, the late seventies, early eighties? Cooks still make the same damn money. I was really proud he made that such an issue.