Next the worms, which look like, well, worms. But Tony appears relieved. “At least they’re small. In Saigon I had tree grubs the size of my thumb, and it was like eating fried Twinkies. You know, soft in the middle.” He piles some on a tortilla with guacamole, bites down, and gives it the thumbs-up. “Smoky, with nice texture. They could be a hit at bars if you served them with tequila shooters,” he says, extracting a thin, silky hair from his tongue.
Just when I think Tony’s being a really good sport, Mexico’s most beloved dish, chiles en nogada, appears. Sent by Jesús, the 20-year-old chef, it consists of peppers stuffed with dried fruits, pine nuts, and cinnamon-scented meat, bathed in a white almond sauce and sprinkled with pomegranate seeds. Echoing the red, white, and green of the Mexican flag, chiles en nogada is more than a food: It’s a national heritage.
Eddie and Martin dig in. El Exigente takes a cautious bite. He looks askance at the camera and gives a brief nod. “Good.” He puts down the fork—and doesn’t pick it up again. Matthew tries to coax a better response. There’s some muttering about fruit and pine nuts, but before I can get close enough to hear, Matthew’s retired his camera, his hands flying in exasperation.
“I get so frustrated,” he confides later on. “I throw out a question and he won’t answer. The camera makes him claustrophobic—when we move in, he pulls away. We’ll run into someone and they’ll ask, ‘How was Portugal?’ and Tony will enthuse, and I’ll be kicking myself because I can’t get him to say anything while we’re there. I have to remind myself he’s a writer, not a TV guy.”
Of all the professions, chefs are probably among the least equipped to be on television. Many of them get into the restaurant business to avoid the limelight. They work in small, overheated spaces and have rotten communication skills and unlovable habits. Tony fits this profile with one exception: Though he talks street and acts tough, his vocabulary is far too advanced for him to qualify as an honest-to-goodness thug.
He grew up in the leafy suburbs of New Jersey, the son of a record-company executive and a journalist. But as early as fourth grade, he says, things started to go wrong. “I was sent to private school and thrown in with these kids who lived in giant Georgian piles and whose parents never came home.” He took his first hit of pot at 12, his first tab of acid at 13. “Suddenly,” he says, “the price of recreation became very high.”
He went to Vassar College and made a lucrative business of writing other kids’ papers and selling drugs, but he dropped out after two years. His main accomplishment of those days, he says, was hooking up with his future wife, Nancy, to whom he’s been married for 15 years. A former ad exec, Nancy devotes her time to fielding calls from journalists and determining when her husband’s prose is suitable for distribution. She is also the subject of the most frequently asked question on book tours—as in “Your wife, Nancy ... How does she put up with you?”
Like army recruits who discover a sense of self-worth on the front lines, Tony found his behind the line of a grill. “I’d go home dirty, having worked like a dog, but knowing I’d accomplished a hundred and fifty dinners. My teachers used to say I needed a controlled environment. In the kitchen I found one.”
By the beginning of the go-go ’80s, Tony had moved to New York City, where he watched ten restaurants go under, observed plenty of underworld crime, and met the other loves of his life: heroin and cocaine. He did those drugs like he did all things, to the extreme (one year he dropped a $70,000 inheritance on cocaine), but after two robberies at knifepoint and “all the usual horror stories,” he finally bottomed out. He kicked the drugs in the mid-’80s, retired his rebel image (at least temporarily), and then entered a fallow period of job jumping and depression that he refers to as his “wilderness years.” He also published two novels that disappeared without any notice.
In 1998, just after he’d signed on as executive chef at Les Halles, he began an article about the restaurant business that he hoped to sell for $100 to a local city paper. At his mother’s suggestion, he sent it to one of her friends at The New Yorker. A month later, the phone rang in the kitchen of Les Halles; it was David Remnick, the magazine’s editor in chief. Three months later, the article appeared in print. Titled “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” it was like a punch in the stomach to every New Yorker who had ever eaten in a restaurant (i.e., everybody).
He told readers never to order fish on Mondays (because the week’s final delivery is always on Friday), to eat hollandaise (“a veritable petri dish of biohazards”) only if they didn’t mind melted butter recycled from some stranger’s table, and that chefs put aside particularly tough, nerve-riddled pieces of meat for customers who order it well-done.
“You could smell the kitchen from that article,” recalls Bloomsbury USA editorial director Karen Rinaldi, who, upon finishing the piece, phoned Tony’s agent and offered him a book contract on the spot.
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