Medium Raw

So I was scraping home fries off the griddle with a spatula and I turned around to plate them up next to an order of eggs over hard when I saw a familiar face across the room. It was a girl I knew in college, sitting down at a rear table with friends. She had been, back then, much admired for her fabulousness (it being the ’70s and fabulousness having then been the greatest of virtues). She was beautiful, glamorous—in an arty, slightly decadent, Zelda Fitzgerald kind of a way, outrageous, smart as hell—and fashionably eccentric. I think she let me fondle her tit once. She had, since college, become a downtown “personality,” poised on the brink of an apparent success for her various adventures in poetry and the accordion. I read about her frequently in the alternative paper of the day. I saw her and tried, instinctively, to shrink into my polyesters. I’m quite sure I wasn’t actually wearing a peaked paper cap—but it sure felt like I was. I hadn’t seen the girl since school, when I, too, it had appeared to some, had a career trajectory aimed somewhere other than a lunch counter. I was praying she wouldn’t see me back there but it was too late. Her gaze passed over me; there was a brief moment of recognition—and sadness. But in the end she was merciful. She pretended not to have seen.

I was ashamed of that counter then, I’m thinking. But not now.

From this rather luxurious vantage point, the air still redolent of endangered species and fine wine, sitting in a private dining room, licking ortolan fat off my lips, I realize that one thing led directly to the other. Had I not taken a dead-end dishwashing job while on summer vacation, I would not have become a cook. Had I not become a cook, I would never and could never have become a chef. Had I not become a chef, I never would have been able to fuck up so spectacularly. Had I not known what it was like to fuck up—really fuck up—and spend years cooking brunches in bullshit no-star joints around town, that obnoxious but wildly successful memoir I wrote wouldn’t have been half as interesting.

Because—just so we all understand—I’m not sitting here at this table among the gods of food because of my cooking.

Dessert arrives and it’s Isle Flotante. A simple meringue, offering up its charms from a puddle of crème anglaise. Everybody roars with delight at this dino-era classic, as old school as it gets. We bask in the warm glow of bonhomie, of our shared appreciation for this remarkable meal. We toast our good fortune with Calvados and Cognac.

Life does not suck.

But the obvious question lingers. I know I’m asking it quietly of myself.

What the fuck am I doing here?

I am the peer of no man nor woman at this table. None of them—at any time in my career—would have hired me, even the guy sitting next to me. And he’s my best friend in the world.

What could my memoir of an undistinguished—even disgraceful—career have said to people of such achievements? And who are these people, anyway? Leaning back in their chairs, enjoying their after-dinner cigarettes, they look like princes. Are these the same losers, misfits, and outsiders I wrote about?

Or did I get it all wrong?

1 Selling Out

I was so supremely naive about so many things when I wrote Kitchen Confidential—my hatred for all things Food Network being just one of them. From my vantage point in a busy working kitchen, when I’d see Emeril and Bobby on the tube, they looked like creatures from another planet—bizarrely, artificially cheerful creatures in a candy-colored galaxy in no way resembling my own. They were as far from my experience or understanding as Barney the purple dinosaur—or the saxophone stylings of Kenny G. The fact that people—strangers—seemed to love them, Emeril’s studio audience, for instance, clapping and hooting with every mention of gah-lic, only made me more hostile.

In my life, in my world, I took it as an article of faith that chefs were unlovable. That’s why we were chefs. We were basically…bad people—which is why we lived the way we did, this half-life of work followed by hanging out with others who lived the same life, followed by whatever slivers of emulated normal life we had left to us. Nobody loved us. Not really. How could they, after all? As chefs, we were proudly dysfunctional. We were misfits. We knew we were misfits, we sensed the empty parts of our souls, the missing parts of our personalities, and this was what had brought us to our profession, had made us what we were.

I despised their very likability, as it was a denial of the quality I’d always seen as our best and most distinguishing: our otherness.

Rachael Ray, predictably, symbolized everything I thought wrong—which is to say, incomprehensible to me—about the Brave New World of celebrity chefs, as she wasn’t even one of “us.” Back then, hearing that title applied to just anyone in an apron was particularly angering. It burned. (Still does a little.)