Now that I owned and had Stars all to myself, we had to really face running it. My typical day started at six in the morning. I would stop at Stars for a coffee and to check how many of the flowers had to be replaced. I was doing the arrangements myself because flowers and the flower market brought me peace and sanity. Also I wanted to find out how much labor and cost it took to install the five arrangements: two six-foot-tall and four-foot-wide beauties that reached from on top of each end of the bar to the eighteen-foot ceilings, and three other restaurant-size ones.
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF STARS
That day the espresso machine fouled my cappuccino, so I left a note to the opening bartender wondering what it was in his job description and checklist that he didn’t understand about flushing the machine every day with cleaner. Of course my note was written in state-of-the-art California human resources language rather than mine. I didn’t want a pouty and whiny bartender when I returned for my next coffee.
I bought twelve-foot-long wild rose runners, massive magnolia and just-fruiting fig branches, and twenty dozen cut flowers. After a fast gossip with a couple of the less discreet vendors about which restaurants were not paying their bills, I stuffed all the flowers in the Citroën Deux Chevaux van and drove back to Stars. As I walked through the doors, the bartender forced a smile and held out a new cappuccino. As soon as the flowers were done I visited the basement and greeted the Latino-Tibetan-Vietnamese prep crew. These were my favorite employees, and twenty minutes with them could have been the last really good moments of the day, depending on what I would hear at the morning managers’ meeting at ten. So I savored the time talking about washing lettuce by hand and showing them again how to peel fava beans (never blanched) and peel and cut the cardoon for a lobster dish slated for one of that night’s private parties. Without these little teaching sessions (which worked both ways), and sometimes despite them, the day—which could last until two the next morning—could go really bad.
I checked on the toilets, the homeless outside, the basement pumps, the carpet, the “take” from the day before, and sat with my chef, bartender, assistant, private dining manager, dining room manager, sous chef, and bookkeeper. We knew it was going to be a rough day, so I canceled my daytime once-a-week bartending and called in the spare.
The mayor was in for lunch with a new girlfriend and so was his old one with someone else, so seating in the preferred section was going to be delicate. Our most regular couple, and also our most demanding, hated the mayor and, when drunk (every time), would go over and tell him why his lack of Irish ancestry left him less than a man. They too were booked at the same time as the mayor. Joan Collins and Barbra Streisand were booked at lunch for the same time and the same table and, knowing restaurateurs never have the benefit of coincidence, I wondered aloud if one of them was for the same time the following week. Either way I would be asked to sit with both after lunch, cutting into my time to prepare for dinner and the private parties.
Herb Caen put the pressure on with a note saying he hoped we would do our “usual eleven out of ten” for “Baby Denise” that night. Parsifal was opening at the opera, which meant starting an hour earlier. Lunch would be frantic to end early. Denise Hale’s party for Zubin Mehta would leave us a little more than the usual fifteen minutes to turn “the Club” from regular seating into a fairyland of special decor that would have strained London’s Ritz when there were four staff members for every two guests. Carol Channing was with that party, and her anti-allergy lunch box had to be taken from her the moment she entered and kept at the maître d’ stand so she didn’t worry it would be contaminated. Godfrey, Denise’s chauffeur, was to be there at 5 P.M. with her pink lightbulbs, the candle stands, tablecloths, and napkins. All the special plates, glasses, decor, and flatware would have to be polished by 5 P.M. and put nearby in the hallway out of sight for the minutes we had to set up her party. I told the bartender to make new special ice cubes with Evian for Denise’s husband and San Francisco patriarch, Prentis Cobb Hale, and to leave a note for the evening bartender to have his Waterford glass, little tray, and two pieces of bread ready for his arrival by 7:45.
“It’s your neck,” I reminded the dining room manager, and continued briefing.
The security guards for the jewels worn would have to be fed. The piano had to be moved and tuned in place for the reception, then moved back for the later bar crowd. That took eight people and me. Chilies had to be crushed for Zubin Mehta no earlier than 8 p.m., and cookies set aside for the chauffeur. The North Station guys alerted us that Danielle Steel was wearing her two-million-dollar-each Graff twin diamonds, one on each hand. The dining room staff alerted that her Dior dress cost $150,000, that no waiter was allowed near her, that the red wine would have to be poured only by the manager, and that she needed a special stool because she couldn’t sit down in that dress. Our insurance company had to be alerted about the jewels and the dress. There was to be a special cake, which Mrs. Mehta had arranged to arrive by private jet from Los Angeles by six o’clock. An alert was to be sent out to me and the pastry chefs if no one had seen it by then.
There were two private dinners that night other than Denise’s, one for twenty-five in the Grill Room and one for forty in the “JT’s” room. The chef reported all the food was prepped. The late-arriving wine steward said he’d checked the wines and one selection of the parties’ wines was missing.
“Find it!”
The flowers were being supplied by the hosts of the parties. I reminded the manager about our 10 percent service charge for that, and to make sure Denise was not charged for the cake Mrs. Mehta was bringing.
“Whatever you do, if I am busy, make sure the security guards have the homeless out of there by seven o’clock.” I heard a shout from the men’s room as one of the bookkeepers ran into a particularly scrofulous homeless man taking a bath from the sink. We threw him out, and the dishwasher cleaned up the piles of wet old newspaper that had been used as underwear. With concealed rage I reminded everyone to keep the front door locked until 11 A.M. and told them to reclean the room. Then I went up to my office.
The first meeting was about the ever-mysterious and always emotional annual health insurance policies, the monthly financials, the bank loan payment now at $35,000 a month, cash flow, and the cash for my trip. The second was with my assistant about my seven-day round-the-world press trip in two days’ time.
DENISE AGAIN
The phone rang. Denise would be late for the afternoon decor meeting because her red dress being flown in by Gianfranco Ferré had not yet arrived. But the new fragrance presents for her guests, Fendi, had. Her driver would drop them off.
I told my assistant to copy the letter from Wolfgang Puck’s wife, Barbara Lazaroff, after we had launched Wolfgang and her frozen desserts in San Francisco, and put it on the staff board for all to see: “For my darling adorable *talented* #1 boyfriend—it was fabulous. See me for the other list of adjectives in private!” And to post BBC’s famous chef Ken Hom’s letter saying how “fantastic” we all were.
The other letters to be answered included one from Frank Stitt at the Highlands Bar & Grill wondering if he could come and observe the kitchens for a couple of days; from Diana Kennedy with “abrazos” suggesting a trip with Alice Waters and Dick Graff (of the Institute of Wine & Food) to see her in Mexico; thanks from restaurateur Danny Meyer for his “fabulous” dinner at Stars and offering jobs in New York to any of my staff; from chef Jasper White loving the Stars excitement; from chef Jan Birnbaum scolding me for not offering him a job, forcing him to take the Quilted Giraffe job instead; from Bill Rice at Food & Wine saying I was one of the first to be nominated for the “Dining Hall of Fame”; from Willy Bishop, now in the North County Jail, saying, “I don’t know what the fuck is happening here . . . but I need money”; from Cook’s magazine’s Chris Kimball saying he needed by the next day my nominees for their “Who’s Who” (I wrote in Joe Baum, Marion Burros, the Chino Ranch, M. F. K. Fisher, Judith Jones, Diana Kennedy, John Mariani, and James Villas); from Bruce Neyers at Joseph Phelps Vineyards saying the previous week’s trade tasting at Stars “was quite simply the benchmark against which we will undoubtedly compare all future tastings”; and from the chef Michael Chiarello, then at Toby’s in Miami, saying that the Stars crew was the “most intense, totally committed group” he had seen. He wanted “to be just like you when I grow up.”
I answered those and letters from the Soviet ambassador about my proposal for a culinary exchange between “our two countries”; from New York magazine’s Gael Greene saying how beautiful our fish had been at the Citymeals-on-Wheels at Rockefeller Center and asking me to do another; from Martha Stewart about her supper at Stars after we judged a March of Dimes together; from March of Dimes director Elaine Whitelaw asking me to do an event in Houston; and from amfAR’s (American Foundation for AIDS Research) Mathilde Krim and fourteen other organizations inquiring about donations.
I dictated letters to the chefs Alain Ducasse and Gerard Besson (always my first lunch stop in Paris) to thank them for coming to Stars; to Jacques Pépin and Madeleine Kamman for saying Stars was their favorite restaurant in San Francisco; to Julia Child for our breakfast together; to Terry Durack and Jill Dupleix, my favorite Australian food writers, who wanted to fly to Stars from Sydney for the night; and to Coudert Frères, from whom I hoped to make arrangements to buy the Grand Restaurant Colbert in Paris. Then there were the hate letters.
One woman was “very angry” at having spent ninety dollars for five people in Stars Cafe, which had butcher paper on the tables. She accused me of “fraud” for calling a salad of mixed greens with oil and vinegar a “green salad,” a dish she said was defined as having vegetables in it. And she said that if a steak could not be cut with a fork it was not a steak. She called me a “cheat,” so I penned in return very politely what a salad was, what made up a great New York steak, and advice that she should get new teeth. Another letter hated the noise and the color of the walls, and insisted I was a “screwup.” All possibly true, I replied, but give us another chance.
LUNCH
Then it was time for lunch service. I blew up a page from a profile on James Beard in Gastronome in which he was questioned on food fads (“Chacun a son mauvais gout”) and hung it on the cooking line. There were three appetizers, seven salads, one soup, four sandwiches, seven grills and main courses, and six desserts for me to taste—a teaspoon each. After that I just wanted to go home. Six hours into the job, and ten to twelve more to go. After the lunch service was over and I had said hello to half the 225 guests, I sat down to my own—a salad. The fork was about to enter my mouth when I heard an urgent, if not desperate, “J.T.!” My chef, Mark Franz, had arrived and was gesturing from the kitchen door down to the basement, where there were offices, wine, food storage, and the sump pump.
“The drains again—backed up big-time.”
There was a scream from the ladies’ toilet as something gray and uninvited came up through the floor drain. I looked into the kitchen and saw the same. If it was not stopped in a few minutes, Stars could be closed for twenty-four hours by the health department, and they were fifteen feet across the alley from our entrance. The opera started in three and a half hours, and Denise was due in twenty minutes for the third of many meetings about the lightbulbs to be changed for her party.
I ran down the stairs, back into the farthest reaches of the basement. The water was an inch deep, around the large-oil-drum-sized, five-foot deep hole in the floor, now overflowing with what looked like the bottom of San Francisco Bay. Two dishwashers, two sous chefs, and some prep crew were gawking. The faces turned to me signaled a silent but very clear “do something.” It was clear that this was something they could not be asked to do. It was a job for the one at whom the buck stopped.
I flipped off my now-soaked Italian loafers, peeled off my Hermès blazer, and jumped in. Having to not breathe underwater meant I had less than a minute to save the day. I bent over double in the confined space filled with sewage water and pulled out a cook’s towel that had been sucked into the pump. The group hauled me out, and burst out laughing. A tampon was lodged on my shoulder, and a piece of onion skin was stuck to my forehead as a third eye. They wrapped me in garbage bags so I could get home without ruining the Connolly leather in my car.
Back in Stars an hour later, pink-skinned from all the scrubbing and disinfectant, I found the bar-hound regulars bowing to me. A few curtsied. For a moment I thought I was a sewage hero. It turned out that San Francisco’s most important magazine, Focus, had come out with its annual awards, including “Classics of San Francisco,” which included the Opera House, M. F. K. Fisher, Levi Strauss, and Jeremiah Tower, “self-proclaimed monarchist who overthrew the ancient regime of Continental chefdom, ushering in a new era of endless experimentation, American regionalism, and California cuisine.” After the ribbing I needed a tetanus booster shot from a customer who was also our Stars doctor who, alerted and bribed with a glass of champagne, plunged the needle in while suggesting we reroute the sewage away from the sump.
AFTERNOON
In the hour before the bar filled up with operagoers, we had the afternoon managers’ meeting to go over the details of the rest of the evening again. The topics other than the night’s events and its overtime costs were Halloween: no leather chaps with bare asses or nipple rings this year; the policy again that managers may not take employees home with them when they already have someone there; the ongoing and never solvable problem of staff meals; the annual January closing for cleaning; the location of the thirty-three bottles of Leroy wines, back then valued at $1,000 each, for Lalou Bize-Leroy’s tasting in two weeks and where to store them; and the right message to the managers about the details and extravagance of my press trip. They knew already that, like James Beard, I was “born with an airline ticket in my mouth.”
Then I tasted wines with the Joseph Phelps manager Bruce Neyers, who always showed up around martini time; with the liquor salesman “Fast” Eddie Cayson to change the house vodka; with the wine rep Madeleine de Jean, to change the champagne by the glass from Billecart to Clicquot; gave a lesson to the staff on what “corked” wine really is and tastes like; met with the ADA inspectors and refused to talk to the Channel 4 TV crew, who were checking measurements in the men’s room again; heard with deep shock a favorite (five days a week at the oyster bar) young customer tell me he had AIDS and ask if I could pay for his AZT; still reeling from that, was therefore not shocked when a naked streaker ran from one door through the restaurant; greeted the public utilities inspectors at their usual bar stools drinking so many Sapporo beers that I was practically a Japanese national hero.
At five thirty the flowers for one of the private parties had still not been arranged. The dinner was at six. I ran to my office and grabbed the flowers, made four centerpieces, and delivered them to the tables as the hostess walked in. “Just checking them myself to see they are perfect,” I lied. She adored the lie. For the other private party thirty minutes later, one of the reserved wines had not arrived. I took the host to the wine cellar and let him pick wines from the right side of my private collection. The wine was on me. The Mehta cake had not arrived, but I got a call from the pilot of the Lear: they were about to land. I checked on the homeless at the front door. It was raining, so they hadn’t moved. My nemesis was shouting he wanted to kill me and chased me inside Stars. I hit the panic button at the podium, and when the North Station guys showed up and moved the homeless down the street, some of the customers cheered and some called me a fascist.
EVENING
Right on schedule our most regular customers arrived. The O’Deas were already smashed, telling me they were not moving from the table until they got to see the Mehtas, to whom they were going to give several pieces of their now-blurred minds about the Three Tenors.
Denise arrived and, bathed in the light of the hastily installed pink lightbulbs, wondered aloud if they were the right color.
“Well, here comes Zubin, so they had better be,” I said.
“Remember,” she whispered in my ear, “the Haut-Brion is for me and Zubin. All the others get the Jordan.”
At that moment, Sally Jordan walked in and asked what wine we were drinking tonight. I told her the usual, and the usual: hers and the bottles wrapped in napkins. She looked at me, and the corners of her mouth twisted into an unspoken “That Denise!”
“I guess I’ll have to have the Jordan.”
The menu:
Dinner for the Zubin Mehtas
Scallop Hash with Lobster Sauce
Black Truffled Braised Beef
Cèpes Mashed-Potato Timbale
Passion Fruit Stars Cream with Raspberry Sauce
Jordan Chardonnay 1988
Jordan Cabernet Sauvignon 1987
Halfway through the dinner I saw that the waiter had let the napkin fall off the mystery bottle. I couldn’t have Denise busted, so I raced to the table and told everyone that the Haut-Brion was my gift: I just wanted to see if the host and hostess liked it before I offered it to the group.
That really cost me.
The cake arrived in the arms of a chauffeur.
Meanwhile I ran between the two kitchens attached to the private rooms to cook and help serve. Since I was cooking also for the Mehta party, the three menus became confused in my head, and I directed one of the dishes to the wrong room, though, thank God, not to Denise. I went out to the hostess and lied that I had not liked the fish I had recommended a few days earlier and changed it at the last moment. Of course I would not charge her for the dish.
That cost me more.
She loved that I was cooking.
I was summoned over to the edge of Denise’s party. One of the guests, almost as smashed as the O’Deas, who were now glowering at the Mehtas, told me that her Oscar de la Renta (he was at the head table) had been ruined by water in the ladies’ room, and that the “water” was not water. I would have to pay for the dress ($3,500). On checking out the cause of the dampness, my maître d’ whispered to me that perhaps the woman had peed herself since there was no “water” on the floor. I sent a note to her on my card saying Stars would be happy to pay for the dry cleaning—even when, as she informed me, it would have to go to New York.
The day was becoming expensive. I wondered if I could send the dress in the Mehtas’ plane to New York.
The wife of a famous local rock star grabbed me on her way back from the ladies’ room.
“Darling, the light in there is bright enough to sear the makeup right off a whore’s face!”
I tilted my head at the manager to check out the lights.
“And, furthermore, the counter is wet, so I lost all my fucking coke.”
That I didn’t have to pay for, thank God.
The bathroom bulbs were indeed white. The dining room hosts had forgotten to change them to pink. I hoped that Denise didn’t have to pee before I could get one of the staff to find the bulbs so I grabbed a busboy and the spares at the podium and put them in.
The dining room manager then told me that Denise was ready for dessert, but that Mrs. Mehta did not want the planned forty wild strawberry soufflés we were about to put in the oven. Only the cake.
That cost me several hundred dollars in ingredients and lost revenue, since it was now too late to put the soufflés on the supper menu or offer them to the private parties and charge a supplement.
The waiters hauled the cake to the table draped and ready. Denise and Mrs. Mehta came over to the cake. Then Mehta handed me the knife and asked if I knew how to cut cake.
“Use this,” she said.
Visions of sinking it into her head instead of the cake temporarily unbalanced me, but a quick “excuse me” before I did and a nip of champers at the bar put me right. Back at the cake table, sticking the knife into the cake nearly broke my wrist. Halfway in it was solid. Trying to pull it out nearly dislocated my back. The cake was still 50 percent frozen. Now I was standing there in front of forty of America’s finest with Excalibur in my hand. The look on my face brought a couple of managers running.
“Get Mark [the chef] now!”
Somehow, and against the adderlike whispers of Mrs. Mehta that it had to be cut right there and right now, the cake was removed to the kitchen and sawed into pieces. I retired to the end of the bar farthest from the party for a breather before they left. Then I shook hands good-bye with the sixty-odd private dining guests after a speech in each room and went back to the bar. My stomach felt as if the sump pump was getting its revenge, so I pushed the champagne away for a Fernet-Branca.
ALMOST MIDNIGHT
I shook hands with everyone from Denise’s party and saw her glare. After all had left and the flowers were being put in her car, she showed me her bill. She never paid them at the moment but always wanted to see them. The computer had automatically added a cake charge even though the waiter had written: “Cake—comp JT.”
“Frank,” I said loudly to the dining room manager, who had been at both meetings, “come over here and kill yourself.” This was one rap I was not going to take. But the party had been a success because her tycoon trophy hunter and patrician rancher husband had the last word. As usual.
“Well, what do you expect from a chef? They’re all goddamn cheats,” roared Prentis.
“If I were, Prentis, I would be as rich as you.”
He shook with repressed laughter and went down the corridor on his cane. “And don’t forget to get the goddamn ladies’ room fixed.” I saw them into their car and waved good-bye. I had earned some oysters and Montrachet. Then a little voice behind me.
“J.T.?”
I recognized one of my favorite people at Stars, my Ethiopian head valet, Solomon.
“J.T. We have lost a car.”
I was then momentarily distracted as Gianni Versace walked in with some of San Francisco’s socialite switch hitters, and I showed him to the best table in the house. He had just come from the opening of the opera, for which he had designed the costumes.
At the bar, someone male, young, Asian, and handsome motioned me over. “Would you tell Mr. de W. with Versace that I would like to meet him? My name is Andrew Cunanan.”
I did, and he sat at their table.
Meanwhile, it seemed to Solomon that I had forgotten his valet problem. “It’s not just any car, J.T. It’s a new Mercedes 560 SEL.”
I went to the front door and saw a couple standing there on the sidewalk. Had Solomon looked everywhere? With no sign of the car except for the owners’ valet parking stub, I told Solomon to give them my keys. I told the extraordinarily patient customers that my 560 would be there in two minutes, and did they mind it was silver, and could I have their telephone number? I gave them Solomon’s number and prayed my car had enough gas in it.
Solomon drove me home, and I told him to leave a note on the opening chef’s desk to say that I might be a little late in the morning. And for no one to call me if the customers in my car ran out of gas in Mill Valley!