Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook by Anthony Bourdain

needed to handle those ingredients also require a lot of money. And by the time those ingredients are trimmed down, cooked off, sauced, garnished, and accompanied by the kind of bread, butter, and service one would expect them to keep company with—there’s not a lot of profit left over.
    The many in the finer of the fine-dining rooms of New York were, in some sense, being subsidized by the few who spent big dollars on wine. A few years back at Veritas, a bar customer was pointed out to me. He’d blown through as much as $65,000 in one month , giving out tastes to fellow oenophiles and strangers alike at the bar. That kind of customer can help a chef be a little more generous with the truffles.
    Another worrisome feature of what was happening on Wall Street was the little-appreciated fact that, tucked away out of view of regular customers, was an entire revenue stream of corporate customers, organized groups of high rollers, dropping big, expensable Monopoly money on a dependable basis. It had been a perfect arrangement: thousands and thousands of dollars in business from people who didn’t want to be seen spending it—conducted mostly out of view of a public for whom the sight of bankers and brokers enjoying themselves had never been attractive. Better yet, these masters of the universe usually had set or limited menus that could be cranked out relatively quickly and easily by kitchen staff. Half the work at minimal effort and premium prices. This was a blue-chip relationship for high-end restaurants, which could, around the holidays, amount to millions of dollars in revenue. Much of it conveniently spent on wine and liquor. That’s as close to free money as it gets. Though you could never tell from the dining room, many more restaurants than are ever willing to admit it were designed and built from the get-go to do this kind of two-tracked business. They simply could not survive, operating the way they had before, without it.
    Suddenly, overnight, that whole economy was in doubt. What was once a gusher turned into a dribble. When your customers are getting called out in the newspapers for eating at restaurants like yours, that is not an environment conducive to your interests. If a company wasn’t currently making a profit for its shareholders, it was now a liability to be seen holding expensive corporate retreats—much less throwing a truffle dinner at Daniel. CEOs who were being vilified for flying private jets and grilled in front of congressional committees for their profligate spending and the obscene scale of their bonuses—they sure didn’t want to get busted eating at Masa.
    There was panic.
    In the blink of an eye, hidebound attitudes and behaviors, which had only yesterday been so deeply ingrained as to be instinctive, completely reversed overnight.
    Suddenly, everywhere you went, people were uncharacteristically…polite.
    Velvet ropes disappeared.
    Hostesses who only last week would look right through you with blank, model stares now became as welcoming as your beloved granny: almost painfully accommodating and eager to please. Phones that used to ring forever were picked up on the first toll. A civility bordering on desperation replaced studiously affected contempt. Tables became available where once there had been no possibility of there ever being a table.
    Even walk-ins were treated with courtesy in the hope that any accrued goodwill might pay off later.
    “I’m so sorry we can’t accommodate you today but…how about next Thursday?” replaced the curt rebuff.
    Chefs who hadn’t been near their dining rooms, much less their kitchens, in some time suddenly returned—and even made a point of cooking.
    Tom Colicchio was among the fastest to grab hold of the situation. Rightly seeing his television celebrity as an asset, he quickly put it to work in the service of his restaurant and announced “Tom Tuesdays” at Craft—where he, himself, stood there for all to see and cooked a special