Medium Raw

It’s a different Pino one encounters these days. A happier, more lighthearted version. Maybe because he is now unburdened by the weight of empire, he is free to be the more playful and child-like version of himself we saw on rare occasions back in the day. The one that would break through at the table for a moment now and again as he told a story or reached for a freshly grilled sardine.

Bigfoot is not Drew Nieporent—as so many people have suggested. I don’t know why anyone would make a connection between the two, as they are as unlike each other as any two people could be. Drew is a romantic. Bigfoot is not. Anybody who ever worked with Bigfoot, drank in proximity to Bigfoot—or even brushed up against him in the ’70s, ’80s, or ’90s—recognized him immediately in Kitchen Confidential. And, of course, he’s still at it. He owns and operates a saloon in the financial district, where, I have no doubt, he is, at this moment, staring at some tiny design feature trying to figure out how to make it work better—or sorting through the dissembled parts of an ice machine, figuring out how to fix it himself so the crooked fucks who usually do these things can’t gouge him. He’s gazing innocently at some applicant for a waiter job with guileless-looking eyes and pretending to be a little less intelligent than he is, savoring the moment when he can spring the trap. He’s sitting at the bar, measuring the distance between peanut bowls, or contemplating some new menu gimmick or just enjoying being Bigfoot as much as his nature will allow. He has, after all, no choice in the matter.

To this day, there are bars in the West Village where the guy behind the stick has been there twenty years or more. Find one of those one quiet afternoon, sit down, and have a pint or two—and, after a few, ask the bartender to tell you some Bigfoot stories. He’ll have plenty of them.

My old sous chef, Steven Tempel, left New York for Florida, worked briefly for a corporate dining facility (how he passed the piss test I can only guess), left that job, married his longtime, long-suffering sweetheart, had a son, split with his wife, and moved to the small Upstate New York town of Speculator, where he opened a bar and grill named Logan’s—after his son. Though one of the best, most capable cooks I ever worked with, Steven had always said from the beginning that his highest ambition was to open a diner, so, in some sense, his dreams—of all the characters in the book—have come true.

I visited the Logan’s Web site to see what he’d put on his menu, secretly hoping to see some vestige of all those menus, all those restaurant kitchens we’d worked together. Steven had always been un-apologetic about how low-rent his culinary ambitions were—and I vividly recall the kind of food he’d eat or prepare for himself to eat, even when we were surrounded by caviar, fresh truffles, and soon-to-be-endangered animals. But I still held out some foolish hope that some sign of all those times—with Pino, at Supper Club, Sullivan’s, One Fifth—would peek through from in-between the quesadillas, chicken wings, and burgers on the Logan’s menu. I smiled and was pleased to see an incongruous osso bucco on the home page (as Steven’s had always been very good), but when I clicked on the current menu, it was gone, the scroll down an unbroken litany of very sensible sports-bar classics. No vestige of the former Steven in evidence. Which was, of course, just what I should have expected. He had never been sentimental about food. And certainly never been apologetic about anything.

Almost alone among the people I knew and worked with and wrote about in Kitchen Confidential, maybe it was Steven—the guy who never looked back—who figured it all out.

Last I saw the guy, Adam Real Last Name Unknown had an honest job with a company selling prepared stocks and sauces. Strange thing for a baker of his talents to do, but by then it was strange that he had any job at all, so thoroughly had he burned his bridges. And he held that position—whatever it was—for what was, for him, quite some time, maybe a year or two, before disappearing back into the netherworld of what Steven describes to me as “doing the unemployment thing.” Naturally, the prick still owes me money.

I’m sure there’s some neat moral or lesson to be learned from the Adam Real Last Name Unknown story. The idiot savant who made the best bread any of us had ever tasted. The self-sabotaging genius who couldn’t and wouldn’t allow himself to succeed. The lost boy—among many lost boys. I’ll always remember him crying when his cassata cake started to sag. If anybody ever needed a hug, it was Adam. Unfortunately, he would have stuck his tongue down your throat or picked your pocket if you’d tried. Like with all the true geniuses—there’s rarely a happy ending.