Medium Raw

It had been more than twenty years since I’d seen the Shadow, as I called him in Kitchen Confidential. And the picture I’d painted of him and the outrageous maelstrom of multiunit madness that surrounded him had not been flattering. I’d always liked the Shadow—no matter how bat-shit crazy things were in his kingdom, or how badly I’d fared there—and I was happy to see him again. I didn’t know what happened with him in the intervening years, though I’d heard stories, of course. He now owns two very good, very sensibly scaled restaurants, one of them in New York and one in a very nice place—the kind where a person might take a vacation.

I didn’t recognize this man, would never have connected him with his younger self. I remember the Shadow as looking like a well-fed, overprivileged grad student (though slightly older)—someone whose yearbook photo from high school one could easily imagine. He looked good now—though considerably older and maybe a little tired-looking. His wife looked the same. She’d looked gorgeous then—she looked gorgeous now. Though friendly during what could have been a far more awkward conversation about the book, she would casually refer to it as “fiction.”

The Shadow was more circumspect. He talked about the reaction when the book came out. Everyone had recognized him right away, he said. His daughter might have told him about it first. “Dad, there’s this book—about you!” He described reading it as “devastating.” He said he cried. And, of course, I felt fucking awful. Like I said, I’d always liked the guy. I’d seen him guilty of a lot of really hubristic, lunatic shit back in the day—but I’d never seen him, unlike so many of his fellow mini-moguls of the time, deliberately fuck anybody over.

After dinner, I ran home and reread his chapter. Yes. There were machine guns in the bathroom…Yes. Cocaine was sold over the service bar. Representatives of a Sicilian-American fraternal organization did indeed come by on a weekly basis to solicit donations. The whole fleet of Shadow restaurants did seem, to even the casual observer, to steam full-speed ahead without anybody having any idea who—if anyone—was at the tiller. But as I did a quick fact-check of my version of the Shadow story, I realized that while I’d gotten the lurid details right, I’d sounded so—shocked, so outraged, so unforgiving of his excesses. I’d made the guy sound like an idiot—which he surely was not.

If the Shadow was ever guilty of anything, it was that he had been very much a creature of his time. Only on a much larger scale. Like I said to him that night, as we sat at our separate tables, reflecting on the past, “Hey. It was the ’80s…We made it through. We’re still here.”

I’d like to say that that was a comfort to the man—or that it might have served as an explanation—even an apology. But I don’t think so.

I have, on the other hand, seen Pino Luongo fuck people over many times. And enjoy it while he did it.

My chapter on Pino made him look like a son of a bitch—but it was still the nicest thing anyone has ever written about the guy. He seemed to think so. We’ve seen each other a few times since the book came out. He even asked me to write the foreword to his memoirs. I happily did, and, as a result, will never get a table at certain restaurants in town where his name—still—is never to be spoken. “I got fucked by Pino” is something I’ve heard from just about every Italian chef I know—usually accompanied by a smile and a shrug. It is worth mentioning that they are now, all of them, at the top of their profession. Most will acknowledge a connection between that early “learning experience” and their current success, maybe even a debt, to the former Dark Prince for teaching them the ways of this sometimes cold and cruel world.

From his once-dominating position at the top of the heap of Italian fine dining in New York City, Pino fell hard. A very ill-considered expansion put his whole organization into deep shit—from which, I gather, he had some difficulty climbing out. There was also the fact that now everybody does what Pino used to do. All the authentic, Tuscan-style touches, oily little fishes, little-known pasta cuts he struggled so hard to convince his customers to eat, are all over menus now. They’re everywhere. As are survivors of his reign of terror.

Even though I was traumatized by my brief experience with Pino, it still hurts when I drive by the space where Le Madri used to be. What a wonderful restaurant that was. It represented the very best of Pino’s nature. So many incredible people passed through those kitchen doors, whom I learned so much from so quickly. It was a magical place.

In the end, they tore the building down.

Pino now is often to be found at his restaurant, Centolire, on Madison Avenue. He greets customers in chef ’s whites—before disappearing back in the kitchen, where he often cooks.