Read an Excerpt
A Meal to Die For
A Culinary Novel of Crime
By Joseph R. Gannascoli, Allen C. Kupfer, Brian Thomsen Tom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 2006 Joseph R. Gannascoli and The Literary Group International
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-1210-5
CHAPTER 1
First Course:
Appetizer
Benny lowered the flame under the foie gras he was searing. This was a dish the guys probably rarely had, he thought, and it was going to blow these guys' minds. And when the roasted apricots and the sour cherry syrup were added to the dish, it would be like nothing — nothing — any of them ever got at home, no matter how great cooks their wives, girlfriends, or mothers were.
Benny knew the foie gras would knock the socks off the assembled gentlemen. At least, most of them. No one prepared foie gras the way Benny did, and he took extreme pride in it.
He wondered, though, if the guys would appreciate it. Some of them were likely to be extremely limited in their meal choices, never getting beyond the usual mundane antipasto and pasta dishes.
Well, he was going to change that tonight. And the guys who really loved fine cuisine were going to be in heaven.
At least, until the meal was finished.
As he put the finishing touches on the dishes, Benny eavesdropped on the conversations going on between the men at the occupied table and those still standing around the bar sucking down the free liquor as quickly as they could.
"You know what's the whole problem with these young guys?"
"These punks!"
"Yeah."
"Yeah what?"
"The problem. It's always 'take out.' Take out this one, take out that one."
"Yeah, but it's fast, it's easy. You gotta agree with that."
Benny had heard this particular subject discussed many times over the years. The veterans were always complaining about the new guys, the guys who had, for the most part, yet to prove themselves as loyal soldiers, or were "proven" but were trying to move up the ladder too quickly, without fully paying their dues or paying the proper respect to the right people.
"Yeah, I can agree with that."
"You go in. Then bam! It's in the bag. You come out in no time flat. And on to serious business. You know what I mean?"
"I hear you."
"It's not like there's always time for a sit-down."
"I'm not saying that."
"So what the hell are you saying?"
Benny shook his head, smiling to himself. Same old topic. The old guys bitching about the new guys. So what else was new?
And, actually, Benny realized that discussions weren't much different outside this restaurant, outside this family. Everywhere there were old guys squawking about the new breed, whoever they were, whatever they did. Yogi Berra or Whitey Ford spoke about how the "new" baseball heroes — pumped up on steroids and using corked bats — weren't really as good as the old boys like Mickey Mantle or Warren Spahn. Sinatra knocked the Beatles back in the day — when they first hit American shores — saying their music was noise and wouldn't last. Old folks complained that there hadn't been any "real" comedy on television since "Uncle" Milton Berle and Sid Caesar went off the air. Even average, modern-day baby-boomer parents complain that they were better students than their own kids are because they didn't have calculators or computers to help them back when they were children.
Same old discussion, Benny thought.
Same old shit.
But Benny wondered about the wisdom of holding these discussions in such detail. If, as it had been reported in the press, the feds had incriminating tapes that implicated the capo, they probably got them from informal conversations like these one going on right now, during which someone had a wire taped to his chest.
One of the guys sitting out there in the dining room could be wearing a wire now, he thought. He wouldn't put it past someone like Palumbo. Or Ischia. Or any of them, really.
Benny stopped thinking about it. He could go down the list of all the men present here tonight and still not know. No one was going to insult any of these guys by checking them for a wire or asking too many tactless questions. He sure as hell wasn't.
But he was, he decided, going to watch what he said and did.
His attention turned back to the discussions in the dining room.
"I'm saying that these young guys don't know any better. The 'take-out' thing is not the only solution."
"Yeah, but it's their thing."
"Yeah."
"And as the low man on the totem pole, it's their responsibility."
"Yeah."
"And if the man upstairs doesn't mind ..."
"Now wait a second. The man upstairs doesn't have a problem with the 'take-out' thing because he gets to do things by his own set of rules. I mean, it's not like he has to go hungry when things get rough."
Benny wasn't generally very interested in who was saying what to whom, but he arched his neck to see who it was who was knocking the capo. It didn't really surprise Benny when he realized it was Ischia, perhaps the most "mysterious" of the lot of them.
"Remember the time the man upstairs was fuckin' upset about Marino's closing his restaurant for that second honeymoon?"
Oh no, Benny thought, not the Marino story again.
"Yeah."
"Well, I had to do a drop-off there the next day, and lo and fuckin' behold, what do I see? Marino stretched out on a table in the back, his linen shirt the color of marinara, with little chunks of meat all around. What a mess that place was."
"The man was upset, so someone came up with a solution."
"Damn straight! Fuckin' Wall-Eyed Willy told Marino that he better make some final arrangements before he left, but the stupid shit didn't listen. He works all fuckin' night. The next thing you know Marino never makes the plane for that second honeymoon."
Benny arranged the foie gras on a platter. He had heard this tale about Marino before, too. And although he wasn't anywhere near the scene, nor was he in any way involved in it, he felt he could have told the story more quickly than whoever was doing the talking.
"What about Marino's wife?"
"She was already in Aruba, and man, was she pissed!"
"No kidding."
"What could she expect? The man was up all night making a week's worth of marinara with meat sauce for the man upstairs. Marino must've been exhausted. The son of a bitch passed out right there in the kitchen. Probably spilled a day and a half's worth of sauce all over the place when he fell."
"He finished the sauce, though."
"Of course. He wasn't stupid. The man upstairs gets what the man upstairs wants, right?"
"You got it."
Benny looked over his appetizers one last time. Sigh. Sometimes these guys were more repetitious than Star Trek and I Love Lucy reruns combined on the local network. He added a few Chinese apple pomegranate seeds to garnish where he felt they were needed to make the dishes more visually presentable.
"Marino did catch the next flight south on the following day?"
"Yeah, but that's not all he caught. He caught his wife with a spic cabana boy doing the indoor/outdoor plumbing in the honeymoon suite that Marino had already paid for."
"I guess she didn't think he was coming."
"Well, she fuckin' thought wrong. She made a big mistake."
"And the spic paid for it."
"The man upstairs was happy to oblige. He even sent one of the gaga girls down to keep him company."
"Hey, why not? The man knows good marinara with meat sauce is hard to find."
"Fuckin' A!"
As if on cue — the oft-repeated saga of Marino and his marinara being over — Benny entered from the kitchen, holding a crystal platter in each hand.
"Gentlemen," he announced, "start cumming!"
He placed the platters on the table, one on each end.
"Goddamn, Benny," Aspromonte said. "Those plates are so gorgeous I hate to mess 'em up."
"But you will," Benny wisecracked. "Or these other guys will beat you to it."
"Fuck that!" Aspromonte responded, moving one of the dishes closer to him and grabbing the silver serving spoon.
"Enjoy, gentlemen," Benny said, bowing slightly. "I've got to return to the studio to create my next work of art."
Then he turned and reentered the kitchen.
He knew he had a couple of minutes before he really had to do anything, so Benny grabbed his coat, searched through his pockets for his pack of Marlboro Lights and his Zippo lighter engraved with the E Street Band logo. Stepping outside the side door of the restaurant into the cold night air, Benny fished a smoke out of the pack, stuck it between his lips, and lit it
Benny was always happy when he was cooking; he felt it was his true vocation, his real calling. Even after a long day of preparing meals at his restaurant he would often go home and relax by creating something in the kitchen for his wife and kids. And on those rare occasions when he took a day off from Pazzo Oeuf he liked nothing better than cooking at home while watching the Knicks or the Yankees — depending on which time of year it was — on television.
Regina, his queen (her real name was Deanne, but he called her his regina), loved his cooking and also loved the fact that she didn't have to cook that often. Even Benny's kids, as young as they were, ate almost everything he whipped up. He was glad they would be growing up with a real appreciation of the culinary arts, unlike many kids, whose parents thought a trip to Burger King or opening a supermarket-bought frozen dinner was giving their kids a balanced diet and exposure to a variety of foods.
Benny realized that many of the guys sitting in the dining room were like those kids. They would eat almost anything he would cook, but most of them had no appreciation for the artistry or workmanship that went into preparing a great meal.
He found that fact frustrating sometimes, but had learned to deal with it. Not everyone could appreciate Michelangelo's Pietà either, he reasoned.
He sucked in another drag of his cigarette, then let it out in a long exhale. His mind wandered, although he tried to keep focused on the meal he had to present. But his thoughts drifted anyway.
How the hell did I wind up here? he wondered. Cooking for a bunch of goombahs, one of whom was probably going to wind up tonight with two slugs in his brain.
Or it could be me, he thought.
Fuck!
Had it all come to this? Was this the big payoff for all his work, all the bullshit he'd been through? All he ever wanted to do was to work in the kitchen of somewhere like Commander's Palace in New Orleans. Being the head chef in a place of that caliber was his ultimate goal.
How the hell did I wind up here? he wondered.
He flipped the butt into the street and watched as the red tip sparked as it hit the pavement.
He stepped back into the kitchen. The warmth of the ovens felt good and quickly took the chill out of his bones.
He leaned against the counter, unconsciously shaking his head. No, this isn't what I had in mind when I got started, he thought. Not at all. I just wanted to be a world-class chef, that's all ...
... Culinary school was a fucking waste of time.
Benny had thought about switching to a school for culinary arts when he was attending college, but from what he knew about the programs from people he had spoken to and the brochures the schools themselves had sent him at his request, it seemed like a bigger sea of shit than he was willing to sail through.
So he learned the way he wanted to: by getting the experience firsthand, by working in any restaurant that would hire him. Learning on the job was the way to go for him. And that's what he did, though it had taken some strategy, a bit of exaggeration of his background, and a few big lies to break in.
While his friends had wasted their time watching crap like Three's Company and Starsky and Hutch on television, Benny had watched cooking shows on PBS, though he never let his friends know that for fear of being ragged on endlessly. The last thing he wanted to deal with then was a bunch of assholes from the Gravesend section of Brooklyn knowing he had a "thing" for Julia Child. In his mind he really didn't care about that, because even at a young age he knew he was destined to make his career in the kitchen. But who wanted to have his balls busted all the time at school or in the pool hall or bowling alley?
Also, while his peers were struggling through books such as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Crime and Punishment for their college literature courses, or wasting time on magazines like National Lampoon or Rolling Stone, Benny was reading cookbooks by Jacques Pépin and Graham Kerr, the so-called "Galloping Gourmet." He was, in fact, reading everything that he could get his hands on that had even a passing relationship with anything culinary.
But Benny wasn't all about cooking. There was another side to him.
He also read Sports Illustrated on a regular basis.
When he was younger, Benny had wanted to become a professional baseball player. Like many kids, his ultimate dream was to run out onto the infield of Yankee Stadium and hear the cheers of the fans echoing throughout the Bronx stadium. Benny was still in good shape back then and played second base on his high school baseball team. He also played hockey and football — mostly "street" hockey and touch football — but baseball was his great love.
Next to cooking, that is.
It was simply amazing the amount of information and the number of recipes Benny had absorbed simply by reading books and magazines. After a while, he felt he had a good foundation to pursue a career in the world of culinary arts.
At least, he thought so.
What he was sure of was that he had enough information and grasp of culinary lingo that he could show up at a restaurant, ask for work, and, even though he had no experience whatsoever, bullshit his way in.
Which is precisely what he did.
The day after he turned twenty Benny entered a restaurant specializing in French and northern Italian cuisine on Avenue M in the Midwood section of Brooklyn.
It was called Napoleon.
Benny knew a girl — Rita Cafone — from his high school days whose parents owned the place. He had thought that connection might help him get his foot in the door. And he was right. After speaking to the girl's mother and the head chef — who took an instant liking to Benny's attitude and enthusiasm — and tossing around some kitchen terminology and a recipe idea or two that he had copped from one of Pépin's cookbooks, he was hired. He started the next day, helping the chef and his assistants with the food preparation and its proper storage.
Benny was happy to be working in a restaurant, though shredding carrots and peeling onions was a great distance from what he really wanted to be doing: creating masterful meals. But he was willing to put in the time and pay his dues performing everyday tasks, so he worked diligently and reliably under the direction of the chef and Rita's mother.
Everything went well for a few days.
Then, one night a week later Mrs. Cafone walked into the kitchen near closing time (after the chef had gone home and left Benny to clean up) and saw her daughter kneeling in front of Benny in a corner of the kitchen. Benny hadn't seen Mrs. Cafone come in. He was much too engrossed in the lips that were wrapped around his cock.
Mrs. Cafone flew into a rage and told him in very blunt language to "get his ass" out of her restaurant. Benny was mortified, but the chef, a balding man with a mustache that stood out like Salvatore Dalí's, was absolutely shocked when he got an extremely angry call later that night from Mrs. Cafone.
Benny hurriedly pulled up his pants, threw his apron on a counter, and left the restaurant. He wanted to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. He knew he'd get something a lot worse than fired if Mr. Cafone showed up.
He ran out into the street and headed toward Ocean Parkway. He didn't even know where he was headed; he just wanted to get away from Napoleon.
He just wanted to clear his head. But that wasn't easy.
He was stunned by all that had happened in the past hour. One minute he was cleaning pots and pans. The next he was talking to Rita, who had wandered into the kitchen nonchalantly.
They hadn't spoken to each other in years, and Benny was simply amazed when, after some very mild flirting back and forth between them, she had pushed him against a wall, unzipped his pants, knelt on the floor, and took him in her mouth.
Shit like this just doesn't happen, he thought.
It just doesn't.
Not in real life.
Not in a sane world.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Meal to Die For by Joseph R. Gannascoli, Allen C. Kupfer, Brian Thomsen. Copyright © 2006 Joseph R. Gannascoli and The Literary Group International. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
