To all the people whose backs I climbed over, and all the players who made this history.
Especially Lucius Beebe, my hero since college days. “If anything is worth doing,” he once said, “it is worth doing in style and on your own terms—and nobody goddamned else’s.” I wanted to be as James Villas described him in a Gourmet magazine article called “Lucius Beebe: The Last Magnifico”: the randy and dandy boulevardier, the “eminently polite, generous, witty, and kind gentleman, who was not out to impress anybody and simply relished a civilized evening on the town over ‘a hot bird and a cold bottle.’”
To Kit Wohl of Wohl & Company in New Orleans, who urged me to rewrite it and showed me the way. To Linda Ellerbee, who pushed her to ask me. To Dan Halpern at Ecco for saying yes as well as Kimberly Witherspoon at InkWell Management for urging them to. Especially to Anthony Bourdain, who made this rerun possible, and who, with Kitchen Confidential, let me know I wasn’t the only one.