Medium Raw

To some extent, I suspect, what is often the French Michelin star model might be at work here as well: the three-star chef ’s mother ship simply doesn’t and can’t ever make as much money as his more casual bistros or brasseries. (Those end up, in very real ways, subsidizing the more luxurious original—or, at the very least, offering a comfortable cushion should costs at the higher-end place rise or revenues decline. You can’t start laying off cooks at a three-star every time you have a bad week.)

Gordon Ramsay is maybe the most classic example of the force that keeps well-known chefs constantly, even manically, expanding. In Ramsay’s case, multiple television shows on both sides of the Atlantic coincide with a huge worldwide expansion of hotel-based restaurants. He already has the most successful cooking-competition show on TV with Hell’s Kitchen. He is a millionaire many, many times over, and yet he keeps expanding—to his eventual peril (the twelve restaurants he opened in the last few years have yet to turn a profit). No matter what your opinion of Ramsay’s food, or his awful but wildly popular hit show, or his much better Kitchen Nightmares on the BBC, there is no denying that he is a workaholic. There don’t seem to be enough hours in the day to contain his various endeavors and enterprises, and yet he goes on.

In Gordon’s case, one need only look at his childhood—as described in his autobiography. He grew up poor, constantly on the move, with an untrustworthy and unreliable dreamer of a father. No sooner had his family settled than they would have to move again—often one step ahead of the debt collectors. You know What Makes Gordon Run.

Very likely, an impulse similar to that of his onetime mentor and sometimes nemesis, Marco Pierre White. Whatever riches they may have acquired or may yet acquire, there is and always will be the lingering and deeply felt suspicion that come tomorrow, it will all be gone. No amount is enough or will ever be enough, because deep in the bone they know that the bastards could come knocking at any minute and take it all away.

David Chang, whose crazy-ass pony ride to the top of the heap has just begun, feels, I suspect, all of the above motivations: a deadly combination of too few seats at his high-end standard-bearer restaurant, an ever-increasing number of talented loyalists, and a feeling that he’ll never be truly good enough at anything.

And then, of course, there’s the example of the iconic French Michelin-starred chef, one of the most celebrated and well represented (by sheer number of restaurants) in the world, who, in my presence, said simply:

“Enough bullshit. It’s time to make money.”

It was vanity that had kept me from being the Imodium guy. Not integrity. I wasn’t “keeping it real” declining their offers—and similar ones. I was just too narcissistic and loved myself a little too much to be able to handle waking up in the morning, looking in the bathroom mirror—and seeing the guy from TV who complains about freckling the bowl with loose diarrhea (until Imodium came along to save the day!). I didn’t take the cookware gig ’cause I didn’t want to find myself in an airport someday, approached by a disgruntled customer of whatever crap central warehouse actually produces that stuff, complaining about my substandard saucepot scorching his paella. I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t like to be called on bullshit—unless knowingly bullshitting.

So I didn’t take the forty grand a month they offered me to slap my name on a South Beach restaurant, ’cause I figured—even if I don’t have to actually do anything for the money other than show up once in a while—there’s that exposure. I could be on the other side of the world—but if the bartender at this joint, run by strangers, serves one underage girl, one customer gets slipped a roofie, one aggressive rat pops its head up out of the toilet one night and grabs a chunk of somebody’s nut-sack, it’s gonna be “outrage at bourdain restaurant” in the tabloids. And that would conflict with my image of myself as somehow above that kind of thing.

But when my daughter came along and I continued to say “no,” I knew I wasn’t saving my cherry for principle. I’d just been waiting to lose it to the right guy.

2

 The Happy Ending

I was born at New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City in 1956, but I grew up in the leafy green bedroom community of Leonia, New Jersey.