Chef John Logan soon discovered what a good situation he had as chef of the Ambassador Motor Hotel. The property generated a hefty profit, and as long as that was the case, Mr. Husby did not apply much scrutiny to the operation. To compound the undersight, the general manager had been promoted from the accounting office, and he understood little beyond the ledger books. This left Chef Logan free to run things as he saw fit without fear of functional control from the front office. Chefs in their own kitchens tend to be independent and autocratic, and the situation at the Ambassador allowed Logan even more leeway than most. The only slight restraint on his authority was the union contract that covered his workers. The hotel and restaurant workers’ union, enfeebled by utter corruption, was easily circumvented, however. Besides, the business agent who visited the Ambassador was another Irish immigrant and a crony and regular cotippler of the chefs.
The Irish connection opened a great many doors. In cahoots with a crew of other Hibernian expatriates, Logan formed a group called the Sons and Daughters of Ireland. This “charitable” organization promoted Irish culture and food and the Irish Republican Army, the last in ostensible secrecy. In an era before homegrown, legalized charitable gambling, it sold worthless tickets for the Irish Sweepstakes, pocketing a good share of the proceeds but always skimming off the top for the cause. Twice a year Chef Logan would fly to Ireland to visit his sainted mother, and on those occasions he would go through customs with as much as $250,000 for the IRA taped to his massive body.
Oscar Husby was a savvy promoter, so it was with some satisfaction that he arranged for his chef to have a continuing presence on a local TV show. Each week Chef Logan brought a load of ingredients to the station and, overcoming his stammer with vodka, produced some delicacy on camera while the hostess of the program cooed her delight. Logan also provided recipe cards for the viewers, which led many of them to contact him for catered events. Those who wished to use the facilities at the Ambassador became new customers for Mr. Husby. Those who wished to have a celebrity appearance by Chef Logan in their very own homes got their wish as well, for a substantial fee, without Husby’s knowledge of that fee or the cost of the ingredients quietly removed from the Ambassador’s food inventory.
Other kitchen employees, inspired by their chef’s success, emulated him in any number of similar scams and pilferages. At times the Ambassador’s illicit external catering must have equaled the amounts that actually showed up on the books. At the very least the Ambassador’s kitchen staff and their families and consorts dined sumptuously at a very reasonable cost.
The staff was fairly typical of the time and place. Most were industry veterans who fancied themselves as free agents, always on the lookout for a better kitchen or a more lenient chef. They were of all ages, races, and birthplaces, and for the most part they worked in remarkable harmony. Theirs was a camaraderie born of shared struggle, respect for culinary craftsmanship, and a certain implied contempt for those who could never penetrate the mysteries of their calling. They referred to nonrestaurant types as “civilians,” mere contemptibles who did not wear the starched, double-breasted chef jackets, the salad lady’s baggy smock, or even the snap-buttoned cheap white dishwasher’s shirt. Most had a particular animosity toward the customers, who, it was assumed, were in possession of way too much money and leisure time, while the kitchen crew worked their asses off for pitiful compensation. This sense of disentitlement provided many of them with an imagined excuse for their larcenous behavior. Others translated their frustrations into antisocial or personally destructive behavior patterns. All had fun doing so.
The single most important ingredient in successful kitchens is the ability of the staff to maintain a collective sense of humor. At that time, before any whiff of political correctness had entered the social lexicon, that tribal sense of humor took a rough form: pranks, hazing (that today would be termed harassment), and general silliness. Nicknames were ubiquitous. The broiler cook, a particularly zany individual, was “Squirrel.” A waitress with rhinestoned glasses and frizzy hair was “Spaceship.” A tall, thin, quiet cook with a formidable thirst was inexplicably known as “The Talking Stick.” No one in the Ambassador kitchen sank to the nicknaming nadir of a neighboring restaurant, however, where the slow middle-aged female dishwasher was known simply as “Dipshit.”
The tension in most restaurant kitchens is palpable. At any given moment there are dozens of deadlines occurring simultaneously for a multitude of workers crammed into a single large, hot, and very noisy room. The creation of edibles requires a series of unforgiving checkpoints in the progress of every dish for every table, every banquet, every meal cycle. The stress on individuals can be enormous, and laughter is oftentimes the only relief available to break the inherent tension. Sometimes, quips and banter are sufficient to lighten the mood. At other times spraying a fire extinguisher at a busy cook’s backside or singing a profanity-laced lyric might do the trick. And for the abundantly endowed, there were the belly fights.
Our most prominent belly fighter was Tony Ficocello, who seemed to be working at the Ambassador only to fill his spare time. His main employment was procuring anything and everything for anyone in need. Want some Italian sausage? Tony produced it at home and could bring you what? Twenty pounds? Fifty? Just tell him when and where to deliver it. Fireworks? Guns? He had several pistols in the trunk of his car. Weed? Abortion pills or Spanish fly? Gambling? Tony would bring you to a craps game and drive you home when you were cleaned out. Girls? Well, he had to be careful because his wife didn’t want him crossing into somebody else’s “territory.” Cryptic remarks like that intentionally led us to believe that Tony had ties to the Mafia, which we did not want to know any more about. This translated into special deals that Tony’s clients quietly accepted without asking too many questions. When I went to buy my wedding rings from a jeweler that Tony recommended, the price immediately dropped $150 at the mere mention of his name. He was always genial toward the other workers in the Ambassador’s kitchen, but that geniality was only genuine when directed at his fellow white males. Tony had nothing but ill-concealed contempt for anybody else. In that he was hardly unusual.
After all, the time was the late 1960s, and the traditional social order in America was breaking down, literally under fire. The news of the day was full of body counts from Vietnam, analysis of the generation gap separating young and old, and the first stirrings of feminist awareness and anger, and these issues could hardly be expected to remain outside the kitchen doors. Race relations were the most obvious fracture point, and even though the diverse crews in restaurant kitchens functioned harmoniously most of the time, suspicion and recrimination were not eradicated by the Great Society’s efforts to bring about social justice. Riots in the black ghettoes in 1967 and 1968 only deepened the anxiety, especially among the predominantly poor whites working in service jobs. Their homes were frequently close to the neighborhoods in flames, and their instinctual response was often to parade their own ethnicities in order to counterbalance the newfound assertiveness of peoples of color. What everyone could agree on was, however, the remarkable upsurge in the availability and quality of street drugs in the aftermath of the riots. The consensus was that the government had called off the narcs in order to calm the inner city, and the crew at the Ambassador, regardless of color or creed, did its part in supporting the effort.
While Tony and others maintained their ethnicity as a badge of honor, others had their origins stamped on their passports and visas. Chef Logan had a penchant for hiring Europeans for kitchen positions, their main qualification being apparently that they, like him, were immigrants to the United States. Ferenc was a Hungarian who had fled Budapest two steps ahead of the Russian army in 1956. He maintained an uneasy truce with German Kurt the storekeeper, who sported a wooden hand, a souvenir of his service with the Wehrmacht. Kurt had lost his hand at Stalingrad, as he told it, and had then been invalided back to Germany, where he snagged the job of program director at Radio Berlin. This position seemed like awfully good fortune for a simple infantryman, and in subsequent conversations about his service in the Third Infantry Division, he mentioned dates and places that he remembered from his time on the Russian front. A little digging in the library revealed that mild-mannered, one-handed Kurt had actually served in the Third SS Division Totenkopf, a Nazi unit with a reputation for perpetrating atrocities wherever it happened to be marauding. In retrospect the loss of a hand was probably an insufficient penalty for Kurt’s career of conquest, the radio job a sop to a wounded storm trooper with party connections. Kurt’s only, very minor comeuppance came when Chef Logan held him personally responsible for the Luftwaffe’s flattening of the East End of London during his boyhood.
The kitchen crew, like most others, was a model of diversity decades before anyone used the term or made money espousing it. All sorts, from ancient and thirsty Swiss sauté cooks to Ojibwe reservation refugees, punched the same time clock, mostly without punching each other. The most visible black cook was JohnnyT, the main breakfast cook in the coffee shop’s open kitchen. JohnnyT was a prodigy. He could handle a busy breakfast rush of over three hundred customers without ever having any of the orders written down by the waitresses. The servers merely called out the multipart egg, omelet, and battered menu items they needed, and JohnnyT coolly, quickly, and accurately produced them all. He carried his own egg pans into work each day, and the skillets, his station, and even his jacket were impeccably clean at all times. He would also quietly sing Motown songs as he worked and keep up a stream of innuendo for the waitresses, just out of earshot of the customers. “C’mon to my house after work, baby. You know, the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice!” Or, “What do you mean, this is a ’rush order’? I’m not like your boyfriend; JohnnyT always takes his time.” Since breakfast cooks who can exert his kind of mastery were rare and, in this busy location, indispensable, JohnnyT was respected, almost revered, by the other crew members. The one person in the kitchen JohnnyT—or anybody else, for that matter—respected and deferred to was Miss Del.
The setting for the Ambassador Motor Hotel’s Sunday brunch was the suburban spectacle of the Kashmiri Dining Room and the adjoining Shalimar Cocktail Lounge. The space was decorated in what the motel’s publicity brochures described as “Regal Splendor,” which meant lots of draperies, fake carved sandalwood, and some large brass-plated medallions hung haphazardly on the chintz-covered walls. On the tables each purple water goblet weighed over a pound; the china was stunning black on white; and real, heavy sterling silverware glittered in profusion. Many former Ambassador employees retain complete sets of these accoutrements to this day, having lovingly collected completer pieces one shift at a time. The most avid collectors, the waitresses, were forced to wear cornflower blue dresses with a crimson over-the-shoulder sash bordered with gold braid. They looked like refugees from a high school production of The King and I.
Each Sunday, Oscar Husby and his extended family proudly attended the Ambassador’s Sunday brunch right after church. Because of the owner’s fondness for the brunch, the Ambassador’s kitchen could not get away with saving the week’s leftovers and reworking them into a Sunday feast, as was and is the norm in far too many restaurants. Instead, everything was made fresh, especially the Scandinavian and Jewish selections on the cold-food side of the buffet. For this, large, shallow custom-made ice pans had been built that followed the kidney-shaped contours of the Shalimar’s piano bar. On the ice were placed a couple dozen cold creations produced under the close supervision of Miss Del.
And now I too was under Miss Del’s supervision. She taught me how to cook and grind chicken livers and form them into immense pâtés, how to fill circular molds with multihued gelatins, how to concoct composed salads to her precise specifications (I had to write down the ingredients, which she had cataloged in her memory), and how to peel, chop, and arrange huge volumes of fresh fruit to complement the frozen peaches and melon balls that completed the array. I learned to pipe softened butter to decorate whole smoked salmons, washed the slime off gefilte fish, and ran like a madman to refill and replace dishes as four to five hundred customers ravaged the display each week.
After a month Miss Del went to Chef Logan and informed him that henceforward she would be taking Sundays off because now Stevie (I’ve never allowed anybody else to call me “Stevie”) would be able to handle the cold food. Why, he now knew as much as she did, and she would now be able to do the right thing on Sundays by going to church herself, and she might even include a prayer for his black Irish soul if she wasn’t busy praying for those in greater need of Jesus’s love. Inevitably, Chef Logan o-o-okayed her plan.
For the next two years Chef Logan arrived precisely at brunch-opening time, walked through the dining room to inspect the food, and went back to his office to do paperwork. Never once did he comment, positively or negatively, on the quality of the cold-food display.
The nineteenth century has been called the era of French international culinary hegemony. The diaspora of French kitchen talent that ensued from the exile of their aristocratic patrons during the Revolution sent some chefs into restaurants and others into foreign countries. These expatriates were soon followed by revolutionary and Napoleonic armies, in whose baggage trains traveled a coterie of skilled culinarians. Such service occasionally proved fatal. Joachim Murat, Napoleon’s cavalry commander and brother-in-law, insisted on having his chef, Laguipiěre, included in his personal suite for the invasion of Russia. During the great retreat the old cook succumbed to the Russian winter, along with the heart of the Bonapartist delusion. French cuisine remained, however, victorious.
Despite two decades of incessant warfare during the Revolution and the empire, Paris and its restaurants flourished. Triumphs required celebration, either in the elaborate dining rooms of public restaurants or at grand spectacles in the palaces of the trumped-up new nobility. The newly enfranchised elite had risen from the bourgeoisie by luck or merit, and fine dining became the visible affirmation of their newfound status. The nouveau riche advertised their ascendancy by their choice of finer dining establishments. The emancipated class of chefs served both, sometimes simultaneously. As Napoleon established a new social order, fortunes rose and fell at his whim, and only a few of the new aristocrats had the time or money to re-create the private culinary establishments of the ancien régime. When a master chef’s services were required, he was often borrowed from his own restaurant for the event. Without a doubt, the most celebrated of these double-duty chefs was Marie-Antoine Carême.
Befitting the plot of a romantic novel, Carême was born into an impoverished family of twenty-three children in 1784. At the age of ten, Carême was abandoned by his father at the gates of Paris, after being admonished to find a trade and make something of himself. Carême’s chroniclers have frequently marveled at the serendipity that brought the lad into a caterer’s premises and not those of a cobbler or a wheelwright. More likely than the hand of destiny, the pangs of hunger must have brought the young Carême into a humble cookshop, where he talked his way into an apprenticeship. He was a prodigy, and by the time he was sixteen, he had mastered his craft and applied to work for M. Bailly, the proprietor of the finest pastry shop in Paris.
Bailly recognized Carême’s aptitude, as well as his drive to learn and perfect. Furthermore, Bailly saw that the young cook had a passion for architectural pastry creations, swirling towers of confectionary finesse that amazed and enchanted his fashionable customers, including the new first consul, General Bonaparte. Bailly encouraged Carême to study the architectural drawings in the national library, and thus inspired, Carême soon set the all-time standard for decorative pieces montées (sculptural confectionary centerpieces), creations that often graced the future emperor’s table. A frequent guest at that table—and at every other significant table in Europe during the period—was the Marquis de Talleyrand.
The career of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord is an inspiration to all those who seek to combine the blessings of longevity with the usefulness of treachery. Prior to the Revolution, his aristocratic, but somewhat penurious, family had secured a position for Talleyrand in the clergy—his clubfoot having kept him from pursuing a military career. By 1789, he had bribed and maneuvered his way through the ranks to become the bishop of Autun and was leading the church’s fight for its ancient privileges as the storm gathered. With the fall of the Bastille, Talleyrand quickly and seamlessly changed sides, resigned his priesthood just before being excommunicated, and presided over the dismantling of the vast church property holdings throughout France. This ability to shift with whatever winds were blowing was the hallmark of Talleyrand’s career. He served officially as minister, ambassador, and overall power broker in every French government—monarchy, convention, directory, republic, consulship, empire, and two restorations—until his death in 1834. In each employment he was implicated in seductions, intrigues, betrayals, assassinations, espionage, and embezzlements, all of which brought him great personal wealth, as well as a network of illicit connections that stretched from St. Petersburg to Washington, D.C. During Talleyrand’s final break with Napoleon, at a time when Talleyrand was already selling French state secrets to the tsar of Russia, the emperor of Austria, and the king of England, the former general referred to the former bishop as “shit in a silk stocking.” Talleyrand’s reply: “Pity that so great a man should have been so ill-bred.”
For Talleyrand a lack of breeding and good manners were the most dire human flaws, and throughout his long life he served as the arbiter of taste wherever his intrigues brought him. During the latter years of Napoleon’s reign, Talleyrand remained the most influential person in France—though he was officially out of favor and banned from office—and one of the tools he used to maintain his influence was his talent for lavish dinners and entertainments. In support of this, he maintained a polished culinary establishment, and into that establishment he lured the greatest chef of the day, Marie-Antoine Carême. Setting off to the Congress of Vienna as a defeated France’s ambassador, Talleyrand was accompanied by his diplomatic secret weapon, Carême. On that occasion he told the newly ensconced King Louis XVIII, “Sire, I have more need of casseroles than of written instructions.” Carême’s creations would accompany Talleyrand’s machinations before the crowned heads of Europe.
Talleyrand had ´put Carême on an international stage. The congress was attended by the victorious European heads of state, who met to redraw national borders and redistribute the authority so recently scrambled by Napoleon and his armies. Talleyrand represented a beaten France that was a pariah among nations and a regicidal breaker of the status quo, and the other great powers aimed to have their revenge. In one of the most radical turnarounds in diplomatic history, Talleyrand managed, however, to play one conquering power against another, succeeding by bluff and intrigue, seduction and cajoling in revitalizing France’s fortunes at the bargaining table. No huge indemnity was levied against the French, and the natural (i.e., prerevolutionary) frontiers of France were preserved. France emerged as an equal partner of those states who, before Talleyrand’s diplomacy, were bent on humbling and dismembering her forever.
Many of the negotiations for rapprochement occurred at tables groaning under the products of Carême’s genius. Carême’s mastery of the culinary arts separated him from his predecessors in what one historian called a “seismic shift in the occupation itself,” and his growing fame increasingly made him a symbol of France’s resurgence and a valuable asset for her new rulers. So when Talleyrand wished to ingratiate himself and his government with Russia, he loaned Carême to Tsar Alexander for over a year. England’s hedonistic prince regent was granted the great chef’s services during his coronation festivities, and he also served the Baron de Rothschild. By this stage of his career, Carême was employed on retainer, however, journeying in his own carriage to the Rothschild estates only for special occasions. Rich and renowned, he had transcended any vestiges of the old patronage system, as Voltaire had in literature or Beethoven had in music. By the 1820s, Carême was a free agent, an acknowledged master, and the role model for every culinary practitioner in France. He had transformed the French menu, documented his creations in several comprehensive volumes, and established the role of chef as revolutionary autocrat, as well as chef as romantic hero, ennobled by his struggle. As he wrote in his memoir, Le pâtissier royal parisien:
In this abyss of heat … the man in charge has to have a strong head, be focused on the task, and have the management skills of a great administrator… He sees everything, he acts everywhere at once… . And is it to be believed? In this furnace everyone acts promptly, not a breath is heard; the Chef alone has a right to make himself heard, and everyone obeys his voice.
Chefs everywhere sought to emulate Carême, his cuisine, and, for better or worse, his omnipotence in the kitchen. After he died young in 1833—in the words of Le grande dictionnaire de cuisine, “killed by his own genius”—his legacy lived on, and everywhere cooks aspired to the pinnacle of French culinary practice, haute cuisine.
The Delmonico brothers were two such aspirants. The elder, Giovanni Del-Monico, from Mairengo, Switzerland, had served as a sea captain until 1824. That year he became a landlubber, using his savings to open a wine shop near the Battery in New York City. It failed. He returned to Switzerland to discover that his brother Pietro had become a successful confectioner in Berne. Pooling their resources, they decided to give the New World another try and relocated to New York. There they invested in a small café, which they intended to name Del-Monico and Brother. The sign painter misspelled their name, however, and delivered a sign that read “Delmonico.” Rather than wait for a new one, the brothers simply changed their names, transforming themselves to “John” and “Peter” in the bargain. Assimilation takes many forms.
With Peter cooking and John working the front of the house, Delmonico’s soon attracted a clientele of European émigrés who felt marooned in a land of barbarous food preparation. At that time American home cooking, at least along the Atlantic seaboard, was mostly a holdover from English cooking and thus was execrable. Away from home Americans had few food choices outside boardinghouses, with their rough fare, or saloons, where men could snack while getting drunk. At Delmonico’s, native-born Americans gradually began to discover what their European neighbors were enjoying. Business boomed. By 1830, the brothers were forced to move to bigger quarters as customers flocked to enjoy the French-inspired fare and fine wines and, most of all, to see what a restaurant really was. Customers had the freedom to choose their repasts from an extensive menu while dining in an establishment dedicated solely to their comfort and satisfaction.
The restaurant grew steadily under the direction of the Delmonico family, moving to ever-larger buildings in more fashionable neighborhoods, acquiring a farm on Long Island for growing the best produce, and ultimately incorporating a luxury hotel, the finest in the city. When the family could no longer exert personal control over every aspect of the thriving business, they recruited an established chef from France, Charles Ranhofer, to oversee their kitchens. Arriving in 1862, Ranhofer was a kitchen despot in the mold of Carême; in fact his early career paralleled Carême’s career closely, as did his talent and his attitude. In his memoir Lorenzo Delmonico, who hired Ranhofer, recounted his first meeting with the autocratic chef:
He was perfect in dress and manner, and his attitude was such as to make me feel that he was doing me a great favor by coming into my employment. “You are the proprietor,” he said. “Furnish the room and the provision, tell me the number of guests, and I will do the rest… I am responsible and things must be done as I direct.”
For the next three decades, Ranhofer held sway in the Delmonico’s kitchen, becoming a celebrity in his own right, inventing an array of new dishes, and training the next generation of American chefs in the glories of French culinary practice. He cooked for presidents, visiting royalty, and the robber barons who presided over America’s Gilded Age. So respected (and feared) was Ranhofer that one of his cooks, a victim of terminal despair, specifically exonerated his chef from blame in his suicide note. Almost single-handedly, Ranhofer made the French restaurant the model for all that was flavorful and sophisticated in American dining establishments. He also cemented the haughty, mercurial European chef as an archetype in American popular culture.
My weekend brunch creations kept me busy for a couple years, years in which I graduated from high school and enrolled at the University of Minnesota. I imagined that a college education would be my passport out of kitchen service. Moreover, it supplied me with a nifty student draft deferment, which guaranteed that the only uniform I’d need to worry about was white. It was 1968, and the world was plainly going to hell. New casualty lists appeared in the newspaper every day, alongside accounts of urban violence, drug addiction, and annoying hippies with too much time on their hands. White people classified themselves in a number of ways: hawks or doves, rednecks or heads, boozers or users. Beatles or Stones? Humphrey or McCarthy? Nixon?
Meanwhile, the black employees at the Ambassador had a nervous, haunted look as their neighborhoods burned while they were away serving white people in St. Louis Park. Only my friend JohnnyT, the breakfast cook, remained stalwartly calm. We all knew that most of his serenity was chemically induced, but his cheery demeanor was always welcomed. Life was never so serious that JohnnyT took it seriously. He was his own man, never prone to drama or anger, and we gravitated toward each other because we shared an outsider status. I was a white boy doing black women’s work, and JohnnyT referred to himself as “the fly in the buttermilk” of the all-white coffee shop.
On summer break from college, I cadged a few extra hours at the Ambassador, prepping food for the brunch or helping out wherever needed. The work wasn’t demanding, but it put gas in my car and allowed me to save up some tuition money. One afternoon, Chef Logan came out of his office and walked over to where I was working.
“Mister fucking s-s-student, I need you to be here at 5:30 tomorrow morning.”
I was about to protest the early, unanticipated start time when I realized that the chef had tears welling up in his dark eyes. Clearly, all it was prudent to ask was why.
“I just got a ph-phone call. JohnnyT got into a car wreck a few hours ago. He’s dead, son. And I need a breakfast cook tomorrow. Shit!”
The chef left before anyone could see him crying.
Out here in the Flatlands, a thousand miles from any saltwater other than sauerkraut brine, the restaurant’s repertoire of seafood dishes tended to be thin. Since only frozen fish were generally available, most chefs found that their greatest challenge in preparing ocean fish was in camouflaging their mediocre taste and gummy texture. Lobster tails had to be drowned in butter; shrimp had to be breaded and fried until they curled up on themselves like briny doughnuts whose crumbly coating at least held a gooey tartar sauce all the way to the diner’s maw. We won’t even address the millions of bricks of frozen cod that quivered under a blanket of starchy cream sauce, except to mention that the name of the dish—torsk!—was also the sound that a slab of the stuff made when it dropped into your unsuspecting stomach.
My very favorite preparation, at least at the Ambassador, was something we called Dover Sole Waleska. In order to create this delicacy, the cook took a whole flat fish, frozen hard as a shingle, and thawed its exterior under cold running water. The skin could then be pulled off with a mighty tug, exposing the rigid flesh from mouth to tail. A knife was inserted along either side of the unfortunate creature’s spine, and enough meat was peeled back to form the lips of a four-inch pocket that Georgia O’Keefe—and every cook—could appreciate. The whole thing was then covered in breadcrumbs and deep-fried. After the sole’s final swim, the aforementioned gash was filled with that same starchy cream sauce and augmented with tomato paste and thawed crabmeat. Onto a platter it went, with some lemon wedges, and out to the dining room. There the server struggled tableside to deconstruct this mess and convey it to the salivating guest’s plate. The thought that fishermen on a roiling ocean risked their lives in order to secure the makings for a Waleska is troubling.
Things around the Twin Cities improved dramatically in 1981. That year a young Chicago native named Suzanne Weinstein moved to Minneapolis, determined to open a business of her own. Using contacts she had from a previous job, Suzanne arranged for some New Jersey fishermen to pack some of their catch in shaved ice and ship it overnight to the local airport. Her first consignment was a very large, very ugly tilefish, which she picked up and drove to a Chinese grocery that had a little extra cooler space. Before the day was over, Suzanne had sold the oddity to a local chef. It was the beginning of a multimillion-dollar business called Coastal Seafoods.
In very short order, every nice restaurant in town was featuring Coastal’s fresh fish on its menu. Groupers and bluefish, sea bass and halibuts, snappers and swordfish were suddenly everywhere. Chefs like me would simply call Suzanne to see what was available that day and place their orders. She hustled and provided great service, initially as a one-person operation. The rented cooler gave way to a small warehouse; the car was followed by a refrigerated van. She found herself competing with long-established purveyors whose be-suited salespeople were appalled when Suzanne showed up ahead of them in various restaurant offices, reeking of fish and wearing fatigue pants and a T-shirt with the message “Welcome Visitors from Other Planets.”
As frozen fish became passé here in the heartland, kitchen personnel had to learn the ways of fresh-fish cookery, so different and demanding. Even butchering fresh fish is an art, as so much care is needed to avoid bruising the delicate flesh. Luckily, the structure of these creatures is fairly simple, befitting their station on the food chain. A prehistoric thing like a sturgeon, all studded with knots of bony armor, can mightily resist the efforts of the boning knife, however, even in far more skillful hands than my own. Still, I think I’ve dismembered nearly every common piscine species at least once.
A trip to Boston confirmed this. While there, I was shanghaied into a visit to the venerable New England Aquarium, perhaps the dullest place in a city replete with run-down, dull attractions. The aquarium was one of the first built with the aim of making the visitor fear carp. Instead of majestically gazing down upon the lower forms, the visitor walked into an area where he was literally surrounded by tanks of cavorting sea creatures, all close by and at eye level. The effect was stunning because the viewer immediately felt like a sponge or a shrimp besieged by teeming shoals of oceanic denizens. What’s worse, upon stepping into the midst of the swimming mass, I realized that a great many of their close relatives had been mutilated by my knives. Scads of scrod and every other finny thing cruised by, their frowning mouths and bulging, unblinking eyes giving the impression of their silently and eerily forming the syllables “j’accuse!” Only a thin pane of aquarium glass separated me from their cold-blooded revenge. The hair stood up on my neck, and I retreated quickly. That night I had dinner at the Union Oyster House, secure in knowing that none of the mollusks there would be giving me the evil eye.