Medium Raw

He’d made a tactical error putting the “Benedict sampler” on the menu, he realized. Though wildly popular and a successful exercise in marketing, the dish had quickly become his nemesis. Customers could choose two of six different eggs Bennie preparations per order, allowing for over twenty different combinations of poached egg varietals and interchangeable components. The outcome was predictable: a simple four-top led easily to a dupe as long as your fucking arm. By the time the customer at position one had finished pairing the “Nova Benedict” with a “Mexi-Benedict” and substituted tenderloin from the “Bernaise” for the chorizo—and then swapped out regular hollandaise for the saffron hollandaise and asked for the eggs well done—and the doofus across the table at position three has done the same—but different—well, multiply this times four at one table and extrapolate for the whole main-floor dining room and mezzanine, and you’ve got yourself the kind of morning that any cook who’s ever worked a busy Saturday-night shift, and followed that with an injudicious number of Fernet-Branca-and-ginger-ale shots, hates and fears in their bones.

The rest of the brunch menu was filled with slightly tweaked conventional-wisdom classics, a savvy but unimaginative variation on the standard document that experience tells you you absolutely need in order to fill your restaurant on a Sunday morning and afternoon. In addition to the obligatory eggs, there was a club sandwich of turkey and avocado, an equally inevitable “veggie club,” skewers of tomato and mozzarella, French toast, roast beef hash, huevos rancheros—and sliders (albeit with black truffle and Brie)—and there was fried calamari and a lobster mac ’n’ cheese and a fruit platter and the tragically inescapable “classic” Caesar salad. The addition of chicken to the Caesar being, of course, an option.

It says something about a person when you put chicken Caesar on the menu. You’ve crossed a line and you know it. It’s the chef version of sucking Ron Jeremy’s cock. If you do it late in your career, any notions of future stardom are usually pretty much out the window.

But Erik Hopfinger was already a star.

Arms crossed, front and center of a group of shorter, less menacing-looking chefs, his giant-size, bald, bullet-headed, heavily pierced, and tattooed image glowered at the world from buses, billboards, and the pages of glossy magazines everywhere. His was the principal face of season four of Top Chef, the best and most watched of the competitive cooking shows. Of the contestants, Erik had obviously been designated the “bad-ass.” He was older, more experienced (in years, anyway), and with an imposing—if not threateningly transgressive—look; so much, one would imagine, had been expected of him on the show. You could tell that from how they’d photographed him for the posters: like the lead singer of a band—or a top-billed professional wrestler. (In fact, Erik looks like a bit of both.) The producers, I think it is safe to suppose, anticipated much drama from Chef Hopfinger over the course of a long and closely contested competition.

Unhappily for everybody, he barely made it through episode one.

I know this because I was a judge on that episode.

And he got sent home from the field of battle by episode three. Today, though, he was still famous and, at the very least, among friends. In between the smart-looking couples at the large, oblong bar, heavily inked young men drank in groups of two and three. Fellow cooks. The home team. You could tell the cooks from the civilians by what they drank. Civilians drank the free mimosas. The industry types were deep into the Fernet shots. Somewhere in the dining room were Erik’s best friend, his girlfriend—and his mom. He was getting paid good money for a five-day workweek (almost unheard of in the industry). And dinner service ended at the unbelievably early hour of ten p.m. so Circa could make the changeover to its principal business, which was the club/lounge thing.

“I couldn’t get into auto mechanics,” he said later, at the bar across the street, a pint of beer in his hand, watching the dust motes float over the beer taps in the late-afternoon light. He fell into a vocational cooking class instead.

Perhaps now is the time to picture him, an imposingly tall, wide, barrel-chested guy, silver hoop earrings in both ears, multiple rings, the goatee, the tats. He cultivates a shave-headed piratical look. But what doesn’t come across in the photos is his sweetness. The voice doesn’t really fit the appearance; his eyes dart away from you when he talks. He seems…shy. From within the hulking body and the designed-to-intimidate look—half pirate, half Aryan Brother—there’s a vibe of a scared and damaged little boy, someone who might burst into tears at any moment. Which is to say he’s a very likeable guy. You want—shortly after meeting him—to give him a hug.