Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain Read Free Book Online Page B

that.
    I didn't want to be a killjoy. To dampen the enthusiasm at this proud and happy event by being a naysayer and a cynic was too close to what I'd been at Vassar, and those days, I liked to think, were behind me. I was sneakier in my strategy to put an end to this outrage. I submitted my own earnest proposal, requesting that I be allowed to contribute a piece montee to the festivities, even going so far as to submit a sketch of my proposed project:
    It would be a life-sized tallow sculpture, depicting a white-toqued baby Jesus, with knife and steel in his tiny hands, held by an adoring Madonna. Needless to say, my beef-fat Madonna horrified the graduation committee. Rather than offend my disturbingly sincere, if quirky, religious beliefs, they scotched the whole display. An animal-fat Sistine Chapel was not something they wanted all those parents and dignitaries to see. And who knows what could happen if they opened the door for me? What other demented expressions of personal hell might wind up lining the Great Hall?
    The ensuing ceremony was thus spared the prospect of decomposing aspics depicting Moses parting the Red Sea, or melting wedding cakes. A few days later, I had my diploma. I was now a graduate of the best cooking school in the country-a valuable commodity on the open market-I had field experience, a vocabulary and a criminal mind. I was a danger to myself and others.

Kitchen Confidential
    THE RETURN OF MAL CARNE
    MY TRIUMPHANT RETURN TO Provincetown-halfway through the program at CIA-came the following summer. Newly invigorated with obscure cooking terms, The Professional Chef and the Larousse Gastronomique under my arm, and my head filled with half-baked ideas and a few techniques I'd seen and maybe even tried a few times, I rejoined myoId comrades at the Dreadnaught, to much curiosity and amusement. A little knowledge can be dangerous and annoying. . but I had actually learned some useful things. I'd been working in the city weekends while at school, I could work a station without embarrassing myself, and I was enthusiastic about my new, if modest, skills. I was determined to outwork, outlast and in every way impress myoId tormentors at Mario's.
    Dimitri, the pasta man, was years older than I was. Then in his early thirties, running to fat, with chunky-framed glasses and a well-tended handlebar moustache, he was markedly different from his fellow cooks at Mario's. Born in the USA of a Russian father and a German mother, he was the only other cook in P-town who'd been to cooking school-in his case, a hotel school in Switzerland. Though he claimed to have been expelled for demonstrating the Twist in that institution's dining hall, I always doubted this version of events. He became the second great influence in my career.
    A mama's boy, loner, intellectual, voracious reader and gourmand, Dimitri was a man of esoteric skills and appetites: a gambler, philosopher, gardener,
    fly-fisherman, fluent in Russian and German as well as having an amazing command of English. He loved antiquated phrases, dry sarcasm, military jargon, regional dialect, and the New York Times crossword puzzle-to which he was hopelessly addicted.
    It was from Dimitri's fertile mind that much of what I'd come to know as Mariospeak had originated. Brainy, paranoid, famously prone to sulking, he both amused and appalled his co-workers with his many misadventures, his affected mannerisms and his tendency to encounter tragicomic disaster. Fond of hyperbole and dramatic over-statement, Dimitri had distinguished himself after a particularly unpleasant breakup with a girlfriend by shaving his head completely bald. This would have been, in itself, a rather bold statement of self-loathing and grief, but Dimitri pushed matters to the extreme; the story went that he had no sooner revealed his snow-white skull to the world than he went to the beach, got drunk and sat there, roasting his never-before-exposed-to-the-sun scalp to the July ultraviolets. When