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.

Kicked Out of the Nest

The last year of my apprenticeship was totally different than the first two and a half years. Suddenly, everything had changed. Hodgi started to deal coke more and more at work. He got John, the director of food and beverage, hooked so bad that he was outside the hotel in his BMW waiting for Hodgi to get off every single night. John had a master’s degree from Cornell in hotel management. What a waste. He got fired and a couple of years later he decapitated himself in a single car accident flying down a canyon going to get just a little more from Hodgi. Hodgi was fired shortly after, and within a couple of years he was pulled out of a lake with a bullet in his head.

The Line Brigade

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.

First place. First bust. First syringe of coke.

I started selling quarter ounces at school and work for thirty bucks. Mike had dropped out, and was working with his dad putting glass in buildings. It only took me a month of selling quarters to get together enough money to rent a three bedroom house for Dawn, Mike, and me. We must have looked at a hundred houses before we found someone who would rent to two seventeen-year-olds in Bountiful, Utah. Dawn and I went to school every day, and I had a great business selling pot. It paid all of the bills plus bought food and clothes. This was great because it meant I could spend my paychecks from work on my new girlfriend Stacey.

It was getting too cold to ride my bike to work so I rode the bus. One time I left my backpack on the bus, and it had thirteen quarter-ounces in one of those fake oilcans designed for stashing shit. I called my mom from work and asked her to go to the bus station and pick up my backpack for me. She went there with my Grandma and when she tried to pick up my pack there were cops there trying to arrest her. I guess they figured out the oil can.

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.