The five years following my departure from the Ambassador Motor Hotel take up an inordinate number of lines on my résumé. After a relatively stable decade of work and school, and work and work, I found myself suddenly exploring the job market, or most of it anyway. My tenure as sous-chef of the Sheraton Ritz Hotel lasted less than six months. The chef and I never hit it off, the hours were long, and the salary was short at a hotel that I belatedly learned was a money-losing tax shelter for the Sheraton corporation and already slated for demolition. Moreover, the day I gave my notice, I learned that two of the cooks I supposedly was supervising were in cahoots with a Sikh waiter in the hotel’s posh dining room. Each night, groups of the waiter’s Indian friends would dine extravagantly in our restaurant. Their food was prepared by my cooks off the books in consideration for the drinks and drugs forwarded to them by the Sikh. They were all three apprehended the day after I left and summarily fired. Fortunately, when confronted, they told the management that I had known nothing about their scam.
From there I sought out another kitchen management position and found one working for the Canteen Corporation. Canteen, a food service contractor, ran the dining facility at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank. Their chef had suffered a heart attack and was not expected to recover, so the management was happy to find that I was immediately available. I went to work doing some supervision but mostly preparing elaborate meals for the bank’s officers in their executive dining room. They could afford them, sitting as they were on top of limitless piles of money. I was reminded of this each morning when I reported for work and announced myself at the building’s intercom, which was squarely in the sights of a machine gun. Nevertheless, it was a nice situation for me: new kitchen, fine ingredients, compliant management. The fact that I was basically a mediocre cook went all but unnoticed. And then a miracle occurred.
The old chef was rejected by the angels, recovered, and wanted to come back to work. Canteen now faced the dilemma of what to do with me. Since I seemed capable enough and tended to show up when I was scheduled, they decided that a promotion was in order. They announced that I would receive a raise and be assigned to one of their biggest accounts. I became the chef at the Ford plant in St. Paul. As prestigious as that may sound, the reality of the situation was less than ideal. The workers at the plant were mostly long-term autoworkers who were repeatedly spooked by personnel layoffs, which occurred regularly during the Carter recessions and oil crises. They wanted meat (of no particular derivation) and potatoes (instant mashed, instant gravy) and no bullshit. I tried to give them all three in a kitchen that Henry Ford had value-engineered in 1921, a kitchen that would flood almost daily, with a weak ventilation system that could never quite dispel the twin aromas of automotive enamel and charred mystery meat in a slurry of convenience gravy. Worse, my kitchen was in the center of the sprawling plant, and I had to walk past hundreds of the raucous and frequently drunk production workers on my way to it. “What are you burnin’ today, Cookie?” or “Hey! That Salisbury steak yesterday was shit!” greeted me every day. I was soon looking for a way out.
That exit presented itself in a blind want ad that, alphabetically, followed the COOKS category in the Sunday paper. Some anonymous firm was advertising for a COPYWRITER, and since I had no idea what a COPYWRITER was, I had no idea that I was unqualified for the position. I wrote a letter to that effect, also saying that it might be fun to get together and fill me in on the definition of COPYWRITER, and sent it off to the post office box listed in the ad. I then promptly forgot about the whole thing. Six weeks later I got a call from the firm that had placed the ad. I interviewed and was hired. During the interview they told me what a COPYWRITER was, partly.
My career as a copywriter can be quickly passed over. After a single day on the job, I realized that I had been hired because anybody could get hired at this particular marketing communications firm. Talent or experience were really not parts of the hiring criteria. After I giddily gave my two weeks’ notice at the Ford plant, I spent every spare moment teaching myself to type on an old Smith Corona. I had not picked up that particular skill in high school because the Christian Brothers had assured us that in our halcyon futures all such tasks would be performed by our secretaries. I remain a rotten typist to this day.
But such deficiencies were easily overlooked in the constant turnover of personnel. What we were selling was marketing communications, which meant everything from slide shows to movies to lavish company-meeting programs with all sorts of state-of-the-art electronic bells and whistles. In 1978, state-of-the-art mostly meant coordinating slide projectors with primitive computers and shooting lots and lots of billable 35 mm photos and 16 mm film. The art in all this was convincing our corporate clients that our work looked good and avoiding polysyllabic words in the copy.
The proprietor of this endeavor was a vesuviating alcoholic wife beater who imagined that his character defects somehow amounted to genius. That his clients saw it that way too may be a sad commentary on either the state of their perceptions or the state of the local competition for their marketing communications dollars. Regardless, he was highly regarded in some quarters, despite his wretched personality and ineptitude.
My own ineptitude was more than a match for his, but for a while I was successful, as far as his company was concerned. My screenwriting credits include the riveting Thermo King Pit Stop Dealer of the Year 1978, filmed in living color in picturesque South Boston. I also traveled to Forest City, Iowa, for inspiration for the lyrics to The Winnebago Way, recorded and performed at the motor home company’s annual gathering of plaid-trousered sales varmints:
When the road’s a golden highway,
Stretching westward toward the sun,
And I want to do things my way,
Not be rushed by anyone,
I can climb behind the wheel,
Any month or week or day,
And the freedom that I feel,
That’s the Winnebago Wa-ay.
The next oil crisis all but put them out of business, but they did have a nice tune to hum in the meantime. And my boss made lots of money.
Alas, a year of this constant circus was about my limit. After a particularly gruesome day, I packed my cheap briefcase and walked out. I’m pretty certain that nobody missed me.
The one inadvertent benefit of my career as a copywriter came when I joined the company’s sound engineer in a radio venture. A new community radio station with a whopping ten watts of power had just gone on the air in South Minneapolis. He had joined up as a volunteer programmer and brought me aboard as his early morning sidekick. After a couple of months, the engineer got tired of doing the show and turned it over to me. I stayed on for four more years, broadcasting all kinds of music during ungodly overnight hours, when I could be reasonably certain that nobody was actually listening.
That was where I found myself in the late 1970s, with a string of unsuccessful jobs and nonpaying volunteer work in the depths of Jimmy Carter’s malaise, to the tune of styrene disco music while wearing polyester pants. I’m sure I wondered if anybody else was actually having fun.
We need to imagine that, at about the same time as I was bungling my debut as a short-order cook at the Ambassador, another young man was beginning his studies at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. David Berst’s home had been in Milwaukee where he and his brother were raised by very strict, very Catholic parents. During high school, David had dreamed of working in the hotel business, mostly because it seemed to be a good way to escape Milwaukee and his family. He studied hard and got good grades but surprised everyone when the only scholarship he applied for was in hospitality management at Stout, which he easily won. He moved to Menominee, lived in a dorm, and learned that he, like nearly all the other students at that institution, whatever their respective majors, minored in alcohol consumption. He excelled in both endeavors.
David’s appearance was that of an all-American boy, soft spoken and well mannered. He had bright blues eyes and a sincere look that encouraged trust from all he met. The manager at one of the college town’s bars was so taken with David that, after hiring him to bartend, he discerned the young man’s potential and offered him the closing manager’s position after only a month on the job. David had not even finished his degree, and he already had his first job in hospitality management, a sinecure that offered him many advantages. For the rest of his academic career, neither he nor any of his friends ever again paid for a drink. What’s more, he was able to pay his tuition in cash with banknotes that smelled strongly of beer and Jägermeister.
David was a thief, a lifelong compulsive pilferer. Throughout his career, he lived simply, never took a vacation, and came across as an honest, hardworking citizen, albeit a bit of a loner. He read voraciously, worked out with a personal trainer, and was loyal, often extravagantly so, to his few friends. This outward respectability served as a smokescreen that shielded David from all suspicion, but he was careful never to stay too long at any one job. Partly, he believed the longer he stayed with an employer, the greater the chance someone might put two and two together and implicate him in something. The other, more consuming reason was that, after he had pulled any particular con too long, he grew bored and needed a change of scenery and chicanery. David relished the joy of the chase, the thrill of the hunt. He was always on the lookout for his next quarry.
We first met in the early ’80s when I was substitute teaching at a vo-tech college and David was the campus’s food service manager. He was in charge of cash operations, food purchasing, and supervision of the student interns in his cafeteria. For whatever reason we hit it off well, and when my contract ran out and I left the college, David promised to keep in touch. He did so for over twenty years. Though we seldom saw each other in person, David often called me to talk, and gradually it became apparent that he needed to talk. The subject was almost always the latest bit of larceny he had perpetrated on an unsuspecting public. He described each scam in loving detail, and at first I thought he was just calling to brag about his exploits. As time went by, I realized that David was using me as his confessor. Although he stated that he’d like to have his exploits written down someday, it now seems evident that he wanted to unburden himself of guilt and receive absolution. From me! As a fellow recovering Catholic, I fell into this role more readily than I expected. Besides, David’s revelations were always astounding and more entertaining than any caper fiction. He even provided sound effects during these conversations—the periodic tinkling of ice cubes in his glass.
This conversation took place several months after I left the technical college where David and I met.
Phone rings. Picked up on the third ring.
STEVE LERACH: Hello.
DAVID BERST: Lerach, it’s Berst. How are you?
SL: Fine. You?
DB: Much better, actually great. I finally quit the college.
SL: You quit? Why?
DB: Well, quit might be a little inaccurate. Actually my supervisor, Joe, and I came to a mutual agreement that I should never set foot in the place again [laughs]. If I do, they have the right to shoot me on sight.
Ice tinkling in DB’s glass.
SL: Wow. What happened?
DB: Just a misunderstanding, really. Somebody needed to have a door unlocked or something, so for the first time in his bureaucratic life, Joe showed up earlier than his assigned 8:00 start time. He sees my pickup truck pulled up at the loading dock. That kind of brought things to a head.
SL: What was it doing there?
DB: Loading [laughs]. I don’t think I mentioned my side business to you.
SL: No …
DB: Well, I’m the proprietor of a little company called Pinebrook Fine Foods. We do the meals for four fraternities at the University of Minnesota.
SL: Really? Can you make any money feeding frat houses?
DB: You can if you have almost no cost of goods.
SL: I don’t get it.
DB: For the last year and a half, your tax dollars have been put to good use, nourishing students at our state’s premier institution of higher education. Minnesota, Hail to Thee!
SL: You don’t mean …
DB: Yeah. Every morning the Kraft trucks drop us a load of groceries around 6:00, and at 6:30 my guy Bruce pulls up with my truck and helps me break down the delivery box by box. One for the college and one for Pinebrook. One for the college and two for Pinebrook, et cetera.
SL: Nobody notices?
DB: Nah, not so far. Look, all I had to do was coordinate the menu at the frat houses with our lunch menus here at the college and then order extra food. Bruce shows up and picks up the extra, goes to one of the frat houses, cooks it up there, and then distributes it to the other frats. I bill the frats SIX DOLLARS a meal [laughs deliriously], and my only expense is paying Bruce to do the cooking and keep his mouth shut. The student workers here at the college ruin so much stuff on a good day that nobody ever questions the amounts I purchase. And if one of the houses wants to have a special event with fancy stuff, I just find out what the culinary program here at the college is working with and up the order. America is a wonderful country.
Ice tinkling, swallow.
SL: But you got caught.
DB: Not for that. Apparently, there’s been some problems with the cafeteria cashier’s drawer not balancing. Actually, she’s screwed up on a couple of occasions and taken too much.
SL: Margaret’s stealing too?
DB: Well, not for herself. She’s a Pinebrook employee, too. Look, six months ago there’s a knock on my apartment door, and there stands Margaret, with a big welt under her eye. It turns out her husband, Nigel, this English prick, slapped Margaret when he was drunk, and she ran out of the house. I felt so bad for her. She’s scared and crying, a real mess.
SL: What did you do?
DB: What any concerned and caring boss would do. I invited her in, made her a drink, listened to her story, made her another drink, and then fucked her brains out. And hired her as a Pinebrook employee, in our Cash Recovery Department.
SL: So you had both wholesale and retail covered. Why are you telling me this?
DB: I’m not sure. I guess I need to tell somebody, and I thought you’d appreciate the elegance of the whole thing. Anyway, the school year is almost over at the U, and I’ve already told the frats that Pinebrook can’t service them next fall, so I need to find something new to do.
SL: Well, keep me posted.
DB: Sure thing. Bye.
Restaurant dining in the United States has always had something of an identity crisis. Early on, the country was largely rural and agrarian, with the produce of the hinterlands being consumed closest to its source. Seldom did the majority of the rustic citizenry venture far from their own hearths, and when they did, various boardinghouses and country inns supplied their dinnertime needs. These meals consisted of set, limited menus concocted by the local hostelries. Since much of the early United States had the misfortune of being first settled by natives of the British Isles (no siesta!), it was unsurprising that English, Scottish, and Irish foodways were followed by the population, adapting the native produce to traditional practice.
British and Irish cookery had their roots in the country, as well. Traditionally, the English elite derived its wealth from land holdings in the shires. After parliament prevailed in the English Civil War, political power was concentrated in London, and with their only options disreputable taverns and public houses, gentlemen dined in their urban clubs. Because of their country origins, the British gentry preferred the traditional fare available in rural areas. Overly fancy dishes were regarded with suspicion as an affectation that betrayed an effete Frenchness. Simple, hearty dishes—the roast beef of Merrie Olde England—were the staples of the British diet, a preference that accompanied their colonizing forces around the world.
In the young United States, arrivals from other parts of Europe, like the Delmonico brothers, brought new food notions to the growing urban areas. Here, disciples of French haute cuisine like Charles Ranhofer made steady headway in shaping the tastes of the Anglo-Saxon elite, while middle-class Americans remained grounded in simpler, more traditional fare. Choice of dining venues became a visible differentiator of class and wealth in nineteenth-century America, mirroring the situation of the previous century in France. By the time of the Civil War and the concomitant high tide of the Industrial Revolution, all American cities had at least a few of the French-inspired fine-dining houses. There, gentlemen regally consumed the elaborate dishes that displayed the triumph of French cuisine. As early as Tocqueville’s time, Americans were noted for their huge appetites, amply supplied by the bounty of newly Indian-free farmlands, rich fishing shoals, and cheap immigrant labor. Renowned trenchermen, epitomized by wide-girthed financier Diamond Jim Brady, now showed their status not only by the quantity but also by the quality of their repasts.
But largely, it was gentlemen only at America’s urban restaurants. Female diners feared tainting their reputations by association with restaurant dining rooms, unless they were already celebrities or already notorious in some less public way. Alcohol was the crucial factor in this divide. French-style restaurants necessarily utilized and served the wines, liquors, and liqueurs that pervade the French menu, and polite society made little distinction between the various vendors of Demon Rum. From the 1840s onward, pietistic Protestant congregations began to campaign for temperance in the consumption of alcoholic beverages. After the Civil War the drive for temperance was superseded by growing demands for outright prohibition of the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcohol. Middle-class Protestant women were in the forefront of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and other organizations that campaigned for a “dry USA.” Denied the vote, women flexed their political muscles in this movement, and booze became an issue in virtually every election campaign nationwide. Saloons were smashed by bands of teetotaling female vigilantes, and they saw little difference between establishments that served alcohol. Many conflated restaurants and saloons as dens of iniquity, where their husbands and sweethearts were likely to drink and even enjoy themselves if not kept under strict female supervision. To the Anti-Saloon League, cognac and rotgut were equally abhorrent.
For the dry crusaders and the white upper and middle classes in general, the latter half of the nineteenth century was a disquieting period. The demographics of the United States were changing alarmingly. Immigrants swarmed into the country, beginning with floods of hungry Irish during the potato famine of the 1840s. The Irish were followed by Germans, Italians, Jews, and other eastern and southern Europeans, who had alien cultures that featured alcohol consumption as part of their makeup. Contributing to the uneasiness of the Anglo-Saxon elite was the arrival of waves of Chinese and Japanese from the West, as well as the encroachment of Hispanics and freed blacks from the South.
Restaurants gave these new arrivals to America’s cities a way to stake a claim in the country’s wildly entrepreneurial economy, as well as a place to relax and celebrate with other transplants from the old country. To reduce labor costs and maximize profits, immigrants who owned and operated a restaurant often employed every family member, which meant that women were now a visible part of the workforce, cooking in delicatessens, rolling pasta in trattorias, or even serving schooners of pilsner in their husbands’ Bierstubes. For Anglo-Saxon women of the better sort, already infected with the righteousness of prohibitionism, the thought of their husbands being served by buxom fräuleins in some beer garden was anathema. Their resolve grew. Their only consolation was that domestic servants had never been cheaper or more plentiful.
This conversation took place after David had been a sales rep for Kraft Foods, a large food-service purveyor, for about a year, where he acted as the liaison between the company and several large corporate clients.
Phone rings. Picked up on the second ring.
DB: Lerach? Berst. Sorry I haven’t called lately.
SL: That’s OK. I’m sure you’ve been busy …
DB: Really, really busy all summer. But I have been getting a lot of fresh air.
SL: You? You’ve never been much of an outdoorsman.
DB: Well, I’ve spent every Saturday and Sunday outdoors all day, all summer.
SL: Where at?
DB: At my homegrown-produce stand, of course.
SL: Oh no … where’s this?
Ice tinkling in David’s glass.
DB: [Laughs.] Out in Minnetonka, of course. Right on the side of a county road. Nice and shady. And I guess it really wasn’t a stand, just a couple of banquet tables loaded with produce from my farm.
SL: Your farm?
DB: Well, actually from the Kraft warehouse.
SL: You just walked out of the warehouse with cases of fruits and vegetables?
DB: Of course not. That would be stealing! [Laughs.] You see one of my accounts is SkyChefs, the guys who do all the food for the airlines. They’re big, and they buy hundreds of cases of stuff from Kraft every day. But the guy who does their purchasing is an idiot, so he’s constantly calling me for will-call orders to cover stuff he’s forgotten. So whenever he calls, I write up two invoices for SkyChefs—one for what he needs and one for what I need. I take both invoices to the warehouse, and they load up my truck and deliver to SkyChefs and, incidentally, to that warehouse space with the cooler that I’m renting. Since the idiot calls me every day for an order, by the end of the week, I’ve got a lot of stuff ready for my homegrown-produce stand. I smear a little mud on the melons and take everything out of the boxes that have a place of origin printed on them [laughs]. Did I tell you that I wear bib overalls and a straw hat at the stand?
SL: Business is good?
DB: Sometimes I have to go back to Kraft on Saturday afternoon just to get more stock. It’s entrepreneurialism in action. People really like those locally produced fruits and vegetables, and believe me, the quality is excellent because I hand select every item. And my prices are really reasonable. Too bad the police showed up.
SL: Uh-oh.
DB: Oh, it’s not a big deal really. I guess some of the local grocery stores are pissed because I’m taking away a lot of their business, so they asked the city council to check whether I’ve got a license to have a roadside stand. They send out a couple of cops. Now these cops have been some of my best customers all summer, lots of free stuff for them too. And when they find out I don’t have a license, they apologize to me with all kinds of bullshit about how it’s just not right that the little guy is always getting squeezed by the big stores, and they’re very sorry, but I’ll have to close down the stand … in two weeks! [Laughs maniacally and long.]
SL: But doesn’t SkyChefs reconcile their invoices to their monthly statement? Why haven’t they noticed that they’re being billed for merchandise they didn’t receive?
DB: Oh, that was the hardest part. They were refusing to pay for some of the deliveries they had no record of. So, a couple weeks ago I was up all night with some old invoices and an X-acto knife. I’d cut a line out real carefully, say for three cases of cucumbers, and then paste it onto a blank invoice. I did a bunch of these, hundreds of cut-and-pastes, with my delivery dates on them, Xeroxed them, and then brought them over to show them what they owed. They’re so sloppy they just figured they had lost the invoices, and they paid up—in full!
SL: Wow, this is unbelievable! But it sounds like an awful lot of work for whatever little bit of money you could make selling vegetables. Was it worth it?
DB: Well, first of all, it was FUN. Besides that, last week I put down a big down payment on five wooded acres facing Lake Superior near Bayfield. That’s for my retirement. It’s truly the American Dream [laughs]. Gotta go. Bye.
* * *
By the 1880s, the United States had reached a form we would recognize today. The frontier had vanished, replaced by industrialization and urbanization, and the population was steadily climbing, in numbers and aspiration. The American middle class had seen unprecedented growth since the Civil War as new industries brought the need for an expanded managerial and technical class, both in the conglomerate corporations and in small businesses. Despite periodic recessions, depressions, panics, swindles, and scandals, more money was in the hands of the middle class than ever before. At the same time, new methods of shipping, preserving, and delivering foodstuffs made an array of products more accessible and less expensive than in previous years, and the cost of food actually fell steadily in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The continuing overall prosperity of the middle class made it seem that everyone could be a Carnegie or a Vanderbilt, if not in reality then at least for some moments at the dinner table.
Though the specter of mass immigration may have been disquieting for the American elite, the resultant abundance of impoverished women needing work was a useful factor in middle-class pretension. Compared with today, domestic service in upscale and middle-class neighborhoods was ubiquitous. Maintaining a proper staff was the mark of a family’s progress toward the American dream. Servant head count alone was important, but the ability of a husband and wife to entertain their peers elegantly was an even surer sign of success. Moreover, the wives of these unions, rather than being mere adjuncts of their husband’s good fortune, could express their own worth by managing a successful domestic establishment, marshaling all their forces in gourmandizing display. Shut out of the voting booth, the saloon, and the restaurant, middle-class women could at least act as the majordomos of their own homes.
The servants themselves ran the gamut of newcomers pouring into America. In the Northeast, Irish and Italian girls were preferred, while in the South blacks maintained their traditional roles as the working underclass. Latinas came to the households of the West and Southwest, with a sprinkling of Asians along the Pacific seaboard. Domestic service offered them a step out of the teeming urban ghettoes, whether by day or by live-in service, in ampler households. Faced with the need for employment and the available options of stifling sweatshops or unhealthy textile mills, many women sought out what was available as maids, nannies, and cooks. The pay was low and working conditions varied with every domicile, but like all unskilled immigrants throughout U.S. history, they worked where they could and contributed their salaries to their own families’ upkeep.
Of those hired to be domestic cooks, few had anything but the sketchiest training. Though some developed formidable skills on the job, most merely did their best to provide for their employers’ modest mealtime needs. In an era before convenience foods, gas cookers, or even piped-in water, meeting these needs meant long hours of drudgery for the unskilled immigrant girls. The middle class of the time was still overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon, and the execrable tradition of British cooking remained the predominant preference of polite society. Though a real, French-trained chef might be borrowed from a local restaurant for special occasions, for day-to-day meal preparation the domestic cooks turned out reliably overcooked, underseasoned, starchy, and salty dishes for their patrons. The nutritional experts of the day warned that spicy concoctions were detrimental to gastric good health, besides being the province of the hoards of social inferiors trooping in to Ellis Island. For the genteel, bland and predictable were the hallmarks of the daily menu and further confirmation of their elite status.
It should also be noted that consumption of alcoholic beverages in the home bore far less stigma than imbibing in a saloon or restaurant. In the home, decorum could be maintained by the mistress of the house, while men, left to their own devices at a public house, were far more likely to overindulge in everything overindulgible. Though many women maintained their belief in a dry America, most of their prohibition efforts remained in the realm of public alcohol vending. One of the symbols of domestic power was the possession of the key to the family liquor cabinet, and a prominent aspiration was that booze would appear nowhere else.
When he made this call, David had left Kraft in order to set up another business. He called it Valley Distributing, and it consisted of himself, a refrigerated straight truck, and some rented cooler space in a warehouse. Using the customer contacts he made while working at Kraft, David was then selling fruits and vegetables to a small, but growing, clientele.
Phone rings.
SL: Hello? Oh David, I had a feeling you were going to call.
DB: Why … have you heard something?
SL: No, no. It’s just been a while.
DB: Pretty busy these days, now that I’m CEO of Valley Distributing.
SL: CEO and everything else on the table of organization, I’m assuming.
DB: Well, yeah. Believe me, I don’t need any disgruntled employees shooting off their mouths. Besides, a lot of people don’t enjoy working only in the dead of night [laughs]. Plus it’s hard to get a truck through an alley with the headlights shut off.
The usual ice in the usual tumbler.
SL: How’s business?
DB: Right now it’s a Republican’s wet dream! Did I tell you I picked up the contract for all the produce for the whole local chain of Baja Tortilla Grills? I made a nice presentation to the district manager six months ago. They liked my product and my prices—they had been using Kraft before—so they decided to take a chance on Valley.
SL: How big a chance are they taking?
DB: Huge! Fourteen stores, and they use a lot of lettuce, tomatoes, and avocadoes. They’re busy too. Lunches are huge, and dinner is growing fast. That’s why they need a supplier with my flexibility.
SL: Nothing more flexible than a snake.
DB: I resemble that remark [laughs]. Listen to this—they actually tried to shake me down. Twice!
SL: I bet that cost them some money.
DB: Ohhh yes. After I’ve been delivering to them for a month, their district manager calls me in and asks if I can sharpen the pencil a bit. You know, cut my prices. So I shoot him an offer: Yes, I can knock about seventy-five cents off every case if I can do “after hours delivery.” I feed him the line that delivering to all those locations of his in daytime traffic eats up my time and raises my costs. But if I show up at 4:00 AM everything is quicker and easier.
SL: They have staff in these places at 4:00 AM?
DB: No, but he wants the price break, so get this: HE GIVES ME THE KEYS TO ALL HIS STORES!!! [Maniacal laughter.]
SL: What an idiot.
DB: Yeah, but that’s not the half of it. He runs all these places with two managers: daytimes and nights. College kids who don’t give a fuck. Since I’m so flexible, it means that I let the night managers call in their orders for the next morning before they close the store. They have to guess how much product the morning crew will go through, and since they don’t want to take any shit from the morning guys about outages, they always order high.
So let’s say the guy orders four cases of tomatoes. I get there at 4:00 AM, and there’s three cases already on the shelf in their cooler. I deliver one additional case and bill them for four. Sometimes when I get there, there’s actually five cases already in the cooler. Then I take the extra case, leaving them with four, invoice them for four cases, and deliver the extra one to the next store. Some weeks I sell the same case of tomatoes to as many as three of their stores. And I do this with everything they buy from me. Since my sale price per case is still lower than Kraft’s, they think they’re actually saving money. I’m the P. T. Barnum of produce!
SL: Wow. How long do you think you can ride this particular pony?
DB: Practically forever. See, two weeks ago the Baja district manager calls me up and says he wants to have a little chat with me. I’m thinking, “Uh-oh, this bonehead has finally smelled a rat!” So I go visit him one afternoon, and there’s no police cars in the parking lot …
SL: Good sign.
DB: The two of us have a little heart-to-heart talk, and he tells me how much he appreciates the good service and the reasonable prices, and he just knows I appreciate his business. And in order to show my appreciation, he wants me to kickback a hundred bucks a week to him personally, off the books, to cement our relationship.
SL: Of course, you were shocked.
DB: Absolutely! I practically bit through my lip trying to keep a straight face, but in the end I gave in. He has no idea how much that extra hundred bucks is going to cost him!
SL: W. C. Fields said, “You can’t cheat an honest man.”
DB: I wouldn’t know. I’ve never met one.
SL: Back up a second. How did you ever manage to offer him such low prices in the first place? After all, Kraft and the others have a lot more buying power than you.
DB: And a lot more overhead. They’d be even more expensive if they had decent security.
SL: What do you mean?
DB: Oh, I haven’t told you how I spend my Saturday mornings.
SL: Ah, no.
DB: Well, before I quit Kraft, I managed to acquire one of their delivery driver jackets and hats. So, in full uniform, I pull my truck up to their dock every Saturday morning, when the weekend relief crew is working. I wave at all the guys—I must look vaguely familiar to them—and walk into the sales office. I’ve got all the computer codes, so I download all their customer accounts and price lists so that I know what they’re charging everybody for everything. Believe me, this is useful information when you go out on sales calls, especially when I’m working their customer base.
SL: You have brass balls.
DB: Sometimes it’s even better. A few weeks ago, I’m in there getting my lists, and as I’m leaving, I notice a whole pallet—sixty cases—of avocadoes just sitting there. And I look at all these avocadoes, and they’re really expensive right now, but I remember that I had left my pallet jack at the warehouse, so I shrug my shoulders and start to go. Just then, some warehouse fuckhead cruises through on a forklift. So I asked him to give me a hand. He says, “Sure,” and loads them into my truck. Five minutes later, I had to pull off to the side of Lone Oak Road because I was laughing so hard.
SL: Unbelievable.
DB: You know what’s really unbelievable? That week, my total cost of goods was negative 15 percent! America the Beautiful. We’ll talk soon. Bye.
Ice tinkling. Click.
As I hung up the phone, my wife asked me who had called. When I told her it was David confessing a new scam, she began a lawyerly cross-examination.
“Why hasn’t anybody caught on to this guy? He’s been pulling this stuff for years.”
“I think it’s because he’s so bold that nobody can believe it. Also, he looks so straight and, well, normal that it’s like he’s above suspicion.”
“Let’s get one thing straight: You aren’t getting involved with any of this, are you?”
“No. I’d screw up, get caught, and you would probably testify against me.”
“So you condone what he’s doing?”
“Not at all, but what am I gonna do? Call up some company and tell them they’re getting screwed by their tomato supplier? Look, you probably won’t understand, because you’ve never worked in restaurants, but there’s all kinds of people in the industry who are just trying to preserve what they see as their freedom, their individuality. They couldn’t work in cubicles or factories making widgets. Every day they struggle to express themselves, whether it’s making a better batch of soup or getting a customer to run up the guest check or, in David’s case, pulling a bit of larceny that nobody’s done before. The impulse is the same—do it better than yesterday. Step back and tell yourself ’nice work.’ They’ve learned that the only rewards that matter are the ones you give yourself.”
“Still, don’t get involved.”
“How could I ? If I did anything but listen, I’d be violating the sanctity of the confessional. You can go to hell for shit like that.”
Increasingly, idealistic chefs are preaching the gospel of locally sourced, organic, sustainable ingredients. They enter into partnerships with local farmers, swineherds, cheese makers, vintners, wild-raspberry pickers, dandelion harvesters, and truffle-sniffing dogs, in a back-to-our-roots campaign to bring traditional, renewable food resources to concerned diners. These diners will drive their suvs any distance and pay any inflated menu price in order to feel that they’ve somehow helped to save the earth. After all, freerange chickens that are allowed to eat insects, as well as the intestines of their less aggressive flock mates, just naturally taste better, especially at twice the price.
Partnerships with local producers are nothing new, although those terms are. At my next major career stop, as sous-chef and eventually executive chef at Schiek’s Cafe, we practiced felonious collusion with black market smugglers. And the prices we paid were always lower than those offered by the legitimate purveyors, who only paid lip service to the free market. We encouraged true entrepreneurialism by giving all the little guys a shot at our business, as long as no actual shots were fired.
My first encounter with these submarket forces came one springtime afternoon. There was a loud banging on the restaurant’s back door. On opening it up, I found two Native American guys in sunglasses near an aged Oldsmobile with the motor noisily running. They were standing out of the sunlight, smoking cigarettes, and looking like there might just be plenty of reasons for looking as suspicious as they did. One of them spoke to me while his partner nervously scanned the alley.
“Hey, Chef, you guys serve walleye?”
I was about to answer in the affirmative, but my attention was riveted on the old, old Oldsmobile. It was rusted up to the fenders and carried Red Lake Reservation license plates, American Indian Movement bumper stickers, and a dream catcher dangling from the inside mirror. There was nothing particularly unusual about that, here in precasino Minnesota, but the fact that a steady drip of water was puddling under the rear of the vehicle seemed a bit odd.
“Walleye?” I asked distractedly.
Well, of course we served walleye. At the time walleyed pike, Stizostedion vitreum, appeared on every menu in every restaurant in Minnesota. It was broiled and deep-fried, filleted, sautéed, and puréed. The pike’s mushy blandness made it a favorite of diners with those same traits, and each serving augured up fond memories of overlong stays at mosquito-infested cabins up north. The stuff was iconic, overfished, and increasingly expensive, and most of the locals had no idea that the Minnesota walleye they were devouring came mainly from Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba.
While his partner kept watch, one of the Ojibwe brought me over to the rear of the dripping Olds and popped the trunk with a screwdriver. Inside, under a layer of rapidly melting ice cubes, was about two hundred pounds of random-sized walleye fillets. Some were from old lunkers that yielded sides as long as your forearm, while others were palm sized from fish that the Department of Natural Resources might have used as evidence in court. All were fresh, sweet, and priced right. I raided the petty cash drawer and bought the lot and even went to the bar to get them a couple of road sodas for the long return trip back to the reservation.
After that, the unpleasantness at Wounded Knee and all those inconvenient treaties were forgotten as these two accepted me as the Great White Chef who dispensed money and beer. In the fall I was able to purchase newly harvested, unpolished wild rice, with superb flavor and substantial savings, from the same trunk of the same Oldsmobile. At that time I was also promised a bumper crop of choice cuts of venison, especially that of the hard-to-find fawn variety (whitetail veal), but they did not return. Since we had never had any contact other than their random visits to the alley behind the restaurant, I had no idea what became of them.
Others proffered their goods in the same manner. There was a rough-looking bearded guy who tried to sell me corn-fed wild boar that tasted like conventional pork and a guy who ran jerry cans of maple syrup in from Wisconsin (“Sorry, we don’t even serve breakfast here”). The best by far was, however, a pale, furtive little man who showed up once, and only once, each spring. He had the look of a college professor who ventured out into the sunlight once, and only once, per year, but that was quite enough. His trunk was filled to the brim with musty, lusciously fragrant morel mushrooms. A trunk full of morels is a breathtaking, expensive sight, but the mushroom man would answer no questions about their provenance or even give us his right name. He seemed haunted by the idea that someone might discover his secret woodland morel grotto, where, no doubt, a troop of fairies propagated and harvested this fungal treasure. He carried a very accurate scale, quickly weighing out the amount we specified, even breaking a morel in order to achieve the exact desired weight. Then he was off to the next alley behind the next restaurant to peddle his wares. Meanwhile, we were putting Walleye in Morel Sauce on the menu.