Provincetown had ever seen anything like it. We became instantly notorious, and we made the most of it, printing up business cards for a planned catering venture called Moonlight Menus. The cards, commissioned from a local artist, depicted us sneering in toques. We proceeded to hand these things out to local businessmen, telling them blithely that not only did we not need, or even want their business, but they couldn't possibly afford us, as we were easily the most expensive and exclusive caterers on the entire Cape! Two highly trained specimens like us had more than enough business, thank you very much. There was, of course, no business. But the strategy worked. In the coke-soaked final weeks of 1975 p-town, there were plenty of local businessmen eager to impress their friends with an elaborate end-of-season bash. And we were only too happy to encourage them in even grander pretensions, filling their heads with names and dishes we'd culled from my Larousse (few of which we'd actually attempted) and quoting staggering prices. We knew well how much these people were paying for cocaine-and that the more coke cost, the more people wanted it. We applied the same marketing plan to our budding catering operation, along with a similar pricing structure, and business was suddenly very, very good. In no time, we were able to leave our regular jobs at the Dreadnaught and Mario's, lording it over our old co-workers in brand-new Tony Lama boots, and brandishing shiny new Wusthoff knives when we dropped by for a quick visit and a gloat.
Our customers were restaurateurs, coke dealers, guys who ran fast boats out to motherships off Hyannis and Barnstaple to offload bales of marijuana. We catered weddings, parties, private dinners for pizza magnates, successful leather and scrimshaw merchants. All the while, I filled Dimitri's head with the idea that what we were doing here, we could do back in New York-only bigger and better.
Ah, those heady days of happy delusion, spirited argument, grandiose dreams of glory and riches. We did not aspire to be the new Bocuses. No, that wasn't enough. Jacked up on coke and vodka, we wanted nothing less than to be like Careme, whose enormous pieces montees married the concepts of architecture and food. Our work would literally tower over the work of our contemporaries: Space Needles, Towers of Babel, Parthenons of forcemeat-stuffed pastry, carefully constructed New Babylons of barquettes, vol-au-vents, croquembouches . the very words excited and challenged us to reach higher and higher. We had some successes-and some failures.
A steamship round (a whole roast leg of beef on the bone) sounded like a good idea; it was, after all, big. Until we overcooked it. An all-Chinese meal we did was so overloaded with dried Szechuan peppers that we could hear the muffled wails of pain from the next room. And I recall with horror a blue wedding cake, layers of turquoise-colored buttercream and sponge cake, decorated with fruit that looked more like Siegfried and Roy's beach house than anything Careme ever did. But we did have some notable successes as well. Provincetown's first Crown Roast of Veal with Mushroom Duxelle Stuffing and Black Truffle-Studded Madeira Sauce for one-and our mighty Coliseum of Seafood Blanquette.
The client was a restaurant owner, and we oversold ourselves somewhat. Committed to our pastry terrordome, we soon found that there wasn't a mold quite large enough for this ambitious effort. What we wanted was a tasty yet structurally sound 'coliseum' of pastry crust into which we could pour about 5 gallons of seafood stew. And we wanted the whole thing to be covered by a titanic pastry dome, perhaps with a tiny pastry figure from antiquity, like Ajax or Mercury, perched on top.
We didn't know if the thing could be done. Other than old engravings from Larousse we'd never even seen anything like what we were attempting. There was no suitable spring-form mold, something we could line with foil and fill
Our customers were restaurateurs, coke dealers, guys who ran fast boats out to motherships off Hyannis and Barnstaple to offload bales of marijuana. We catered weddings, parties, private dinners for pizza magnates, successful leather and scrimshaw merchants. All the while, I filled Dimitri's head with the idea that what we were doing here, we could do back in New York-only bigger and better.
Ah, those heady days of happy delusion, spirited argument, grandiose dreams of glory and riches. We did not aspire to be the new Bocuses. No, that wasn't enough. Jacked up on coke and vodka, we wanted nothing less than to be like Careme, whose enormous pieces montees married the concepts of architecture and food. Our work would literally tower over the work of our contemporaries: Space Needles, Towers of Babel, Parthenons of forcemeat-stuffed pastry, carefully constructed New Babylons of barquettes, vol-au-vents, croquembouches . the very words excited and challenged us to reach higher and higher. We had some successes-and some failures.
A steamship round (a whole roast leg of beef on the bone) sounded like a good idea; it was, after all, big. Until we overcooked it. An all-Chinese meal we did was so overloaded with dried Szechuan peppers that we could hear the muffled wails of pain from the next room. And I recall with horror a blue wedding cake, layers of turquoise-colored buttercream and sponge cake, decorated with fruit that looked more like Siegfried and Roy's beach house than anything Careme ever did. But we did have some notable successes as well. Provincetown's first Crown Roast of Veal with Mushroom Duxelle Stuffing and Black Truffle-Studded Madeira Sauce for one-and our mighty Coliseum of Seafood Blanquette.
The client was a restaurant owner, and we oversold ourselves somewhat. Committed to our pastry terrordome, we soon found that there wasn't a mold quite large enough for this ambitious effort. What we wanted was a tasty yet structurally sound 'coliseum' of pastry crust into which we could pour about 5 gallons of seafood stew. And we wanted the whole thing to be covered by a titanic pastry dome, perhaps with a tiny pastry figure from antiquity, like Ajax or Mercury, perched on top.
We didn't know if the thing could be done. Other than old engravings from Larousse we'd never even seen anything like what we were attempting. There was no suitable spring-form mold, something we could line with foil and fill
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