Skin deep magazines3/30/2023 “Hey buddy, don’t you have some cooking experience?” he asked. His eyes were both red and blue from too much whiskey, tobacco and aggravation. His blue oxford shirt was wrinkled, his pleated khaki pants were sliding off his flat ass and his five day beard looked like a fledgling chia pet. His boney frame seemed lost in his preppy get-up. I had been working the floor for about a few weeks when one afternoon, when I arrived for my shift, the owner Ross cornered me by the sequined baby grand piano in the dining room. He was missing a piece of his left ear and drank Rum like water. The chef was a huge French-trained Romanian guy named Boris. It didn’t take long, however, for me to be lured into the kitchen. When I began at Elm City, I was hired as a waiter. Many of my friends and relatives from the suburbs thought I had lost my mind, and many were afraid to visit me. This neighborhood was where I lived and worked. At the other end of the block was Ron’s place, a grungy dive bar and New Haven’s first House of Punk. Pimps with feather-garnished fedoras and dayglo-colored jumpsuits and prostitutes barely dressed in sparkly halter tops, miniskirts, and fishnet stockings sauntered up and down the sidewalks. Directly across the street was Cafe Des Artists, a coffee and ice cream place that was also a colorful head shop and sex toy store where along with your Haagen Daz, you could buy a giant balloon filled with nitrous oxide and an inflatable sex doll for your choice of partying. The Elm City was a stainless steel gourmet diner on the corner of Chapel and Howe streets at the heart of New Haven’s red-light district. It was a complete contrast to the giant Steakhouses that were ubiquitous along the 1-95 corridor and the Italian-American strip mall palaces. The Elm City was also part of the movement to bring good restaurants back to the inner cities. Cooking at the Elm City lit the fire for me to create my own New World restaurant brand a decade later. Kitchens were becoming less stuffy, more diverse, and more American. I was very lucky to have found a job at the Elm City Diner in 1981. It was a turning point in our idea of what cooking and eating were. Jeff Smith, “The Frugal Gourmet,” the folksy minister from Seattle (who was canceled because of a clandestine gay affair) was passionately teaching us how to cook America’s best ethnic neighborhood dishes. PBS and the weekend news magazines introduced us to chefs like Martin Yan, Justin Wilson, Wolfgang Puck, Paul Prudhomme, and Tommy Tang. American regional food was challenging French food for the spotlight. The early 80’s were the dawning of what the press named ”New American” and “American Regional” dining. I landed in a great place at a great time on America’s culinary timeline. By real, I mean chef-run independent kitchens where we actually cooked and built food from scratch. I was in my early 20s when I first began cooking in real restaurants.
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