American Flavor by Andrew Carmellini

Author:Andrew Carmellini [Carmellini, Andrew]
Language: rus
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins US
Published: 2012-02-25T22:43:10+00:00

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I was a weekend cook for Governor Cuomo at the mansion up in Albany while I was at school. But when I wasn’t working for money, I staged in every restaurant that would take me. Back then, my goal was to work for David Bouley. He was the first American chef ever to get a four-star review from the New York Times; I spent a good chunk of my hard-earned cash on dinner at his restaurant one night, and I was absolutely blown away. So, like any red-blooded young cook, I volunteered to work for free. It was absolute madness. The crew showed up at 11 in the morning, and no one left till 2 a.m. They moved every second of the day. It was crazy and amazing and overwhelming: the energy and focus was like nothing I’d ever seen. It was exactly what I wanted.

So when I graduated in 1991, I moved right down to Manhattan. But it turned out I couldn’t swing a job at Bouley: back in the day, getting a position at a really great restaurant in the city was tough. It’s not like now, when there are tons of high-quality places around; back then, there were only a handful, and suddenly there were a lot of young cooks fighting for those gigs. So instead of signing on to the vanguard of the American food revolution, I ended up cooking at an old-school high-end Italian restaurant in midtown. Six days a week, fourteen hours a day, paying about 75 cents a month.

In the secret plan I’d been carrying around in my head, the great job was going to come with a great apartment, for almost no money, in Manhattan. But I figured out pretty fast that wasn’t going to happen, either. Instead of a kick-ass bachelor pad in some tower in the sky, I ended up on the second floor of an old Greek lady’s house in Astoria, Queens, with my buddies Dante and Perry. Dante was working at a high-end American restaurant in midtown; Perry had a gig at a Greek restaurant near our place. It was everybody’s first apartment, and when we moved in, we didn’t have any furniture. There was a sofa already in the living room, and there was a bed with a mattress in my room. I wasn’t sure where it came from, but it looked like it had been around a long time. It was free, so—you know—nothing tastes better, right? But since Perry and Dante and I had about a dollar fifty between us, we couldn’t afford to buy any other furniture. No problem. Dante and I went down to the King Kullen—America’s First Supermarket!—and convinced the store manager to give us a bunch of old cardboard boxes from the produce section. We took them home and we duct-taped them together, and voilà! We had nightstands, dressers, a coffee table—everything you need to start out life in the big city.

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