he returned to work the next day, not only was he jarringly bald, but his head was a bright strawberry-red, blistered and oozing skullcap of misery. No one talked to him until his hair grew back. Dimitri saw himself, I think, as a Hemingwayesque, hard-boozing raconteur Renaissance man, but he was completely under the thumb of his mother, a severe, equally brilliant gynecologist, whose daily calls to the Mario kitchen were much imitated.
'Alloo? Is Dih-mee-tree zere?'
We'd met before, of course, the previous year, when he'd known me, no doubt, as 'Mel'. But I was a broiler man now, a CIA student, a curiosity. It was permissible for Dimitri to talk to me. It was like Hunt and Liddy meeting; the world would probably have been a better place had it never happened, but a lot of fun was had by all.
Dimitri was scared of the outside world. He lived year-round at the tip of the Cape, and he liked to fancy himself a townie. He did a damn good imitation of a local Portuguese fisherman accent, too. But Dimitri was-as the Brits say-quite the other thing. We'd have drinks after knocking off at our respective restaurants and try to outdo each other with arcane bits of food knowledge and terminology. Dimitri, like me, was a born snob, so it was only natural that when our lord and master, Mario, decided on two employees to cater his annual garden party, he selected his two would-be Escoffiers, the Dimitri and Tony Show.
Our early efforts were, in the cold light of day, pretty crude and laughable. But nobody else in town was doing pate en croute or galantines in aspic, or elaborate chaud-froid presentations. Mario tasked his most pretentious cooks with an important mission, and we were determined not to let him down-especially as it allowed us time off from our regular kitchen chores and all the overtime we needed. We threw ourselves into the task with near-fanatical once-in-a-lifetime zeal and prodigious amounts of cocaine and amphetamines.
As a fly-fisherman, Dimitri made his own lures; this obsessive eye for detail carried over to his food. For Mario's garden party, we spent days together in a walk-in refrigerator, heads filled with accelerants, gluing near-microscopic bits of carved and blanched vegetables onto the sides of roast and poached fishes and fowls with hot aspic. We must have looked like crazed neurologists, using tweezers, bamboo skewers and bar straws to cut and affix garnishes, laboring straight through the night. Covered with gelee, sleepless after forty-eight hours in the cooler, we lost all perspective, Dimitri at one point obsessing over a tiny red faux mushroom in one corner of a poached salmon, muttering to himself about the distinctive white dots on the hood of the Amanita muscara or psilocybin mushroom, while he applied dust-sized motes of cooked egg white for 'authenticity'. He buried all sorts of horticultural in-jokes in his work-already insanely detailed Gardens of Eden made of leek strips, chives, scallions, paper-thin slices of carrots and peppers. He created jungle tableaux on the sides of hams that he considered, 'reminiscent of Rousseau's better efforts' or 'Gauguin-like'. When I jokingly suggested Moses parting the Red Sea on the side of a striped bass, Dimitri got a faraway look on his face and immediately suggested a plan.
'The Israelites, in the foreground . we can use straws to cut the olives and egg whites for their eyes. But the Egyptians pursuing in the background. . we can cut their eyes with bar straws, you know, the zip-stix! So they're smaller, you see! For perspective? I had to physically restrain him from attempting this tableau.
We had been under refrigeration for three days straight when we finally collapsed in the Dreadnaught's cocktail lounge at 4 A.M., unshaven, dirty and crazed. We woke up a few hours later, covered with flies attracted by the tasty, protein-rich gelee that covered us from head to toe.
The garden party was, to be modest, a smashing success. No one in dowdy old
'Alloo? Is Dih-mee-tree zere?'
We'd met before, of course, the previous year, when he'd known me, no doubt, as 'Mel'. But I was a broiler man now, a CIA student, a curiosity. It was permissible for Dimitri to talk to me. It was like Hunt and Liddy meeting; the world would probably have been a better place had it never happened, but a lot of fun was had by all.
Dimitri was scared of the outside world. He lived year-round at the tip of the Cape, and he liked to fancy himself a townie. He did a damn good imitation of a local Portuguese fisherman accent, too. But Dimitri was-as the Brits say-quite the other thing. We'd have drinks after knocking off at our respective restaurants and try to outdo each other with arcane bits of food knowledge and terminology. Dimitri, like me, was a born snob, so it was only natural that when our lord and master, Mario, decided on two employees to cater his annual garden party, he selected his two would-be Escoffiers, the Dimitri and Tony Show.
Our early efforts were, in the cold light of day, pretty crude and laughable. But nobody else in town was doing pate en croute or galantines in aspic, or elaborate chaud-froid presentations. Mario tasked his most pretentious cooks with an important mission, and we were determined not to let him down-especially as it allowed us time off from our regular kitchen chores and all the overtime we needed. We threw ourselves into the task with near-fanatical once-in-a-lifetime zeal and prodigious amounts of cocaine and amphetamines.
As a fly-fisherman, Dimitri made his own lures; this obsessive eye for detail carried over to his food. For Mario's garden party, we spent days together in a walk-in refrigerator, heads filled with accelerants, gluing near-microscopic bits of carved and blanched vegetables onto the sides of roast and poached fishes and fowls with hot aspic. We must have looked like crazed neurologists, using tweezers, bamboo skewers and bar straws to cut and affix garnishes, laboring straight through the night. Covered with gelee, sleepless after forty-eight hours in the cooler, we lost all perspective, Dimitri at one point obsessing over a tiny red faux mushroom in one corner of a poached salmon, muttering to himself about the distinctive white dots on the hood of the Amanita muscara or psilocybin mushroom, while he applied dust-sized motes of cooked egg white for 'authenticity'. He buried all sorts of horticultural in-jokes in his work-already insanely detailed Gardens of Eden made of leek strips, chives, scallions, paper-thin slices of carrots and peppers. He created jungle tableaux on the sides of hams that he considered, 'reminiscent of Rousseau's better efforts' or 'Gauguin-like'. When I jokingly suggested Moses parting the Red Sea on the side of a striped bass, Dimitri got a faraway look on his face and immediately suggested a plan.
'The Israelites, in the foreground . we can use straws to cut the olives and egg whites for their eyes. But the Egyptians pursuing in the background. . we can cut their eyes with bar straws, you know, the zip-stix! So they're smaller, you see! For perspective? I had to physically restrain him from attempting this tableau.
We had been under refrigeration for three days straight when we finally collapsed in the Dreadnaught's cocktail lounge at 4 A.M., unshaven, dirty and crazed. We woke up a few hours later, covered with flies attracted by the tasty, protein-rich gelee that covered us from head to toe.
The garden party was, to be modest, a smashing success. No one in dowdy old
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