When I got back to the hotel Roget had already put the word out to everybody to not say a single word to me in regard to the food show. He could be kind like that sometimes. I guess he had figured that I had been embarrassed enough for one day. It didn’t last long.

A couple of days later Dorothy Hamill was in the Hotel for Ice Capades. You would have thought she was Mick Jagger by the way Roget was going off. She ordered a Seafood Louie salad. You don’t see it very often now, but in the seventies that salad was on every menu.  Roget had told me to make a perfect Louie. Tom quickly jumped on my station to try to hog some glory. Roget had gone to his office to get this book that he had famous people sign whenever he fed them. When he got back to her table with the book, we had already served the salad. Right after she signed it, she took a bite and quickly spit it out. We had served Dorothy Hamill rotten crab! Roget calmly walked back to the line.

“Who made the salad?”  He sweetly asked.  He knew that if he acted pissed off none of us would admit to it. Tom instantly responded.

“I did Chef.”

“We both did Chef,” I spouted off. Roget then grabbed two tablespoons and loaded them up with crab.

“Eat it.”  Tom smelled it first.

“No way Chef, it’s rotten.”

“Eat it. Now!” Roget screamed. He scared me so I hurried and took the whole spoon in my mouth.  I chewed a couple of times before I gagged and threw up in the garbage can. To this day I have never served any kind of seafood salad with out smelling it first. Years later when I worked at the Princess I tried to do the same thing to one of my cooks and they went to human resources and I almost got fired. Times have changed.

Tom got fired right on the spot for not eating the rotten crab. Tom got fired once a month. Roget would say, “After you’re done with your shift, you’re fired.” If you didn’t finish your shift and do a great job cleaning up, then you were really fired. The rotten crab lesson was nothing more than Roget teaching me that I have to take responsibility for failure, learn from it, and move on. Just like many of Roget’s lessons, I didn’t understand the gist of this one until many years later.

There was this ski bum that would come down from Alaska every winter to ski.  In the summer he was the chef of a restaurant in Anchorage called Elevation 92. His name was Chuck, and he was very cool. Chuck skied every single day, seven days a week, and drove a Porsche. Shane the first apprentice was the first one to take me skiing, but Chuck was the one who really taught me how. In fact, Chuck really took an interest in my career, my personal life, and in me.

“When I was your age Todd all I cared about was making go carts out of lawn mower engines. Don’t listen to those waiters, they may give you a hard time now but you’re going to be making ten times as much as they do in just a few years.” Chuck was right.

One time I stole a bottle of gin from the Hotel, and Chuck found out about it.  He was so disappointed in me that I never stole anything from anywhere I worked again.

“You know Todd, I really liked you, but now whenever something’s missing I am always going to wonder if it was you that took it, and how can you like someone like that?” It broke my heart when he said that.

Chuck is the only person that I ever told that I had shot up. Instead of dogging me for it, he confided in me and told me that he had tried it also. We talked about being able to taste it and smell it, and how it was the best feeling that you could ever feel. But at the same time he told me that it was just too good, and that I should never do it again, because very few people that do that can ever stop. I listened to Chuck and I never shot up again. Well, that is, at least not until my son died, fifteen years later. Chuck then slipped in that he had a gram of coke in the glove box of his Porsche. I don’t think he really had any coke in there. I just think he was testing me to see if I would break into his car and steal it. I would never do something like that; he just didn’t know it yet.

The first time I ever heard of Scottsdale was from Chuck, he would visit there to see his aunt. When he did, he would ask me to watch his apartment and feed his cats. Chuck has been in Scottsdale for as long as I have now, and I have never understood why we could never be as good of friends down here as we were in Utah.

Jimmy was the chef of The Roof; he had been with Roget since France. He graduated from the Cordon Bleu. I mean really graduated from the real Cordon Bleu. It was not like today where every single shitty little culinary school says that they’re Cordon Bleu accredited. Talk about selling out. Jimmy was a funny little man. He was a no non-sense kind of guy at work, but he still smoked pot outside the work place. I remember that every Saturday night we always would go over to Jimmy’s apartment to watch Saturday Night Live. However, we could never really watch the show because everybody was always arguing about food. I just sat and listened to every side of every argument, taking it all in to be used at a later date.

Roget taught me everything about food, but it was Jimmy that made sure I listened. One thing about great chefs is that if they went out of their way to teach you how to cook, they will always pop in for a free meal at the least expected time later. Fifteen years after the last time I had seen Jimmy, I walked out into my dining room in Sedona and there was Jimmy, sitting all by himself.

“I heard that you were cooking some pretty cool food here. Show me.” I did.

The food at the Roof was great. Roget and Jimmy had been running it for about ten years before I even started my apprenticeship. It was the crowned jewel of the Hotel. Every cook at the hotel aspired to be up there, but there were only five shifts a night. There were two pantry shifts, the grill, the middle, and sauté.  Jimmy always worked sauté, and Bruce, his sous chef, worked sauté on Jimmy’s days off.  He worked the middle the balance of the week. Bruce had been Jimmy’s sous chef for over ten years. He was a great man who commanded respect, but he was also a speed freak. He was addicted to the drug, but to the actual feeling of speed.  This included cars, dirt bikes, and crotch rocket street bikes. It didn’t matter what it was, if it went fast Bruce was on it. He had a 260 Z that he kept racing tires on and it was fast as hell. He used to take Shane and I on what he would call “high speed cruises.” The Z was a two-seater, so we would put a beanbag in the back and tie the hatch half way down. That’s where I would ride. Bruce was an excellent driver, but I really hated going on those drives. I seriously thought I was going to die.

I remember the first time I ever had Veal Cordon Bleu at the Roof. I used to bread them as a kid for Werner, a restaurant we lived at, but I certainly didn’t remember it tasting that good. It didn’t. I learned that you don’t bread Cordon Bleu in advance; you just simply soak the veal in heavy cream, and lightly dredge it in flour before you sauté it. It was so good that I had Jimmy make me one every single night. The Roof used white asparagus and Dungeness crab legs, complimented with most perfect of Béarnaise sauces. I will, to this day, fix myself this for dinner even when it’s not on any menu that I am preparing.

The Roof had the same classic French menu that most gourmet restaurants had at that time. The difference was that we only used the best ingredients, and they were painstakingly prepared with the greatest care and concern possible. Every single plate of food was top full of love from the person that prepared it. The crew on the Roof was so tight that no one would even think about talking smack about someone else. It just wasn’t tolerated. There was no need, because we were a family. There wasn’t one single man on that line who was married or had a family outside of the line brigade. We all left work every night after deciding where we would all meet later. It was Shane’s place most of the time. He had a killer stereo, and a ping-pong table, plus a house with large front and back yards.

The core group of my high school friends ended up at Shane’s house just about every weekend. Mike was always over there. Someone would always be around to buy you beer and there was always a hell of a lot of great weed to smoke.

We all know that I had a totally fucked up childhood with no father to speak of.  However, what God failed to give me as a child, he paid me double for in my adolescence and I truly believe that the most important developmental time for a man is his teenage years. Chuck, Jimmy, Roget, Shane, and Bruce were the best role models that any boy could hope to emulate when he is trying to figure out how to be a man. Sure we smoked beer and drank a lot of pot every night (something we used to say to each other all the time).  We even dropped acid a couple of times a month while skiing. But, the daily dedication to our love of food and to each other was unparalleled by the greatest of perfect Mormon families.