The Anatole

The year was 1984, and fourteen countries had just boycotted the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. There was a new girl on the music seen that called herself Madonna, and everyone was playing “Like a Virgin.” It seemed as good a time as any to get the hell out of Utah.

My sister Cindy was so excited about the possibility of Stacey, Chelse, and I coming down to Dallas that she had taken my resume to this super hotel with three thousand rooms and fourteen restaurants, called The Loews Anatole. I had three or four telephone interviews with this guy named Morris, the area director of banquets at the Anatole. Morris offered me thirty five thousand dollars a year to be a sous chef in charge of banquets. I accepted. After all, it was ten thousand more than Max was paying me.

Conference

It’s funny when I think about those days now.  All I remember is the food, and it was the bomb.  The food that was served at the Hotel Utah in the late seventies was as good as or better than anything I have seen to date.  Learning how to cook there has been the gift that has kept on giving, my entire culinary career.  Everyone was French, and it was exactly like learning to cook in France.  One thing about the Mormons is that they can afford to hire the best, and they did.  My training was regimented, complex, and diversified.  The kitchen brigade commanded respect, even if we were stoned all the time.

I was nine months into my apprenticeship when the Conference buzzes starting infiltrating the kitchen.  Conference is a four or five day period held annually in the Spring.  Essentially, Conference amounts to vast amounts of Mormons, from across the world, converging in Temple Square to eat, drink, and listen to their prophets speak.  The hotel would do over a thousand meals a meal-period through four different avenues: The Coffee Shop (called “The Coffee Shop” despite the fact that it didn’t serve any coffee), banquet halls, room service, and the gourmet restaurant at the top of the building, appropriately named The Roof.  We would start prepping four days in advance of the five-day conference, totaling nine days of continuous eighteen-hour shifts.  I was intimidated just thinking about it.

My First Trip

School had started, and I was finally in the ninth grade.  There was no more getting stuffed in my locker, or having my books knocked out of my hand as I walked the halls between classes.  It was my third year at Millcreek Junior High and I was as old as any other kid there.  In fact, it was a great new start because for the first time I had something cool to brag about, my dirt bike.  Although, I still had to go to the office every Monday and pick up the free lunch tickets they give kids whose parents were on welfare.  However, it wasn’t as embarrassing as grade school when they would just hand them to you every day in front of all of your friends.

One day, I was in the cafeteria with Mike eating lunch when he told me that he got a new job at El Matador (a local Mexican restaurant) washing dishes.  He told me to come to work with him that day and that he would try to get me on.  I wasn’t going to wash any dishes, but I went down there to see if I could get a job cooking.  The kitchen manager was interviewing me when I told him that I had been the night manager of Sandwich World.  He started laughing at me, and reminded me that I was only in ninth grade.  I thought to myself, “Dude, I owned Sandwich World for a few weeks.”  It didn’t really matter that he was laughing at me, because he hired me as a prep cook.  Mike only worked there a couple of weeks but I stayed on all throughout the school year.