This is a hard thing for me to admit, because as a kid, I was somewhat obsessed with the old Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson noir detective novels. I watched the black-and-white movies made from the best of them (Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, in particular) and, in my own more black-and-white moments, occasionally thought of chucking my knives, turning in my whites for a rain-damp trenchcoat and fedora, and becoming a gumshoe myself. Granted, my fantasy also would have required my going back in time to the 1940s, growing a face like Bogart's, looking better in a hat than I actually do and moving to a place where it was always pissing down gray rain, but that is neither here nor there. A fantasy second life is a fantasy second life. When you're daydreaming, little things like climatology and the space-time continuum don't exist. And not for nothing, but I also entertained the occasional fantasy of a life as a food writer (which came with its own unique set of impossibilities), and I somehow made that work.
Anyway, I actually made one weak attempt at becoming a private investigator many years ago. It was during one of my banquet jobs — working at a place that had a whole warren of ballrooms and meeting rooms and conference spaces. In the kitchen, the majority of our work day was taken up by assembling cookie trays for the Asian-American Accountants Association in B-6, sandwich platters for the Eastern States Wingnut Manufacturing Coalition meeting on the mezzanine, and awful towers of gritty spelt brownies and off-brand canned diet sodas for the Lose Weight Now! Ask Me How! shysters conning the fatties in the main events room. In the evening, there'd be the occasional wedding, corporate meet-and-greet or whatever, but the night I'm remembering was one when a career fair had rolled in, taking up two full rooms and demanding nothing more of us than twenty cases of generic bottled water.
Which was fine, since we got paid whether we were carrying water or carving steamship rounds, but with the career fair hogging so much square footage and not much else on the books, the cooks got pretty bored. At one point, I just changed out of my chef's coat and into a sweater and walked around the career fair myself — curious about what sort of employment might be out there for people who, unlike me, had actually finished college or owned a tie.
Unfortunately, most of the booths were populated by doughy older women passing out informational packets on the joys of envelope-stuffing, or smooth-talking jerkoffs in horrific poly-blend jackets trying to convince brain-dead dropouts and single moms that they could turn their lives around by studying welding, small engine repair or broadcast journalism through the mail. But then I found a guy looking to train and hire private investigators. I was intrigued — primarily because of my interest in the field, but also because he was wearing a tiny silver tie tack in the shape of a Chief's model .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver, the preferred firearm of private dicks everywhere for its ability to fit comfortably in a trenchcoat pocket without leaving an unsightly bulge and blow small holes in Peter Lorre without leaving a mess on the carpet.
I quickly discovered that the company the guy ran (or was pretending to run) investigated bogus insurance and workers' comp claims. It wasn't nearly as glamorous as trying to figure out who'd killed the beautiful blond heiress or what happened to the congressman's missing wife. But it was still worthwhile, the guy said, and, more important, quite lucrative. Besides, the game was all the same. Most of being a private investigator was about sitting around and waiting in a car, in an alley, day and night, in the sun and the rain. In fact, 90 percent of the job, he explained, was about putting yourself in the right place and then watching, waiting for something interesting (and hopefully illegal) to happen.
At this point in our conversation, the guy with the tie tack asked if I wanted to go out in the parking lot and check out his sweet crime-fighting van. I demurred politely and went back to the kitchen, another fantasy wrecked.
Good thing, too, because I would have made a terrible private investigator, as evidenced by my work for my Aqua review (see review).
While I knew from the start that something about this "restaurant" was squirrelly, it wasn't until later that I figured out for sure how things were being done. While there, I'd seen the cooks working with no ventilation inside the center bar and knew from my understanding of building and health codes that there was no way they could actually be cooking anything without hoods and screens and grease traps. So finally, I decided to watch Aqua stock up for the night — hence my idea for a stakeout. I knew (or at least assumed — correctly, as it turned out) that all the deep prep and, in many cases, production work was being done at Chadrom's other restaurant, Opal, across the street. Therefore, all I needed to do was find a place where I could sit, wait and watch to see exactly how much of the actual cooking was being done off-site.
I know now that the smart move would have been to simply go to Opal, take a seat on the patio and have a few cold drinks while I waited, like a civilized human being. Too bad I didn't think of that until much later. Instead, I decided to hang out in the dust along the side of a building on Ninth Avenue, just down the hill, where I would have a good view of both Opal and Aqua without, you know, looking like I was trying to have a good view. Instead, I looked like a particularly bold daytime gigolo when I got there about 2 p.m. Two hours later, I finally saw what I was waiting for. By that point, I'd been hit up for change three times, smoked half a pack of cigarettes, gotten a wicked sunburn on the back of my neck and decided that even if Bogart himself came back from the dead, asked me to partner up with him working a dirty divorce case in 1940s Los Angeles and let me have all the best one-liners, there was no way in hell I was ever going to become a P.I.
But I did get to see the train of white jackets and busboys dodging traffic on Lincoln as they carried laden trays from the actual kitchen at Opal to the bar full of Easy-Bake Ovens at Aqua. I got to see the hotel pans full of cooked-off shrimp, the cut and slow-cooked ribs just waiting to be rewarmed for service, the pots of God-knows-what and trays of pastry-wrapped salmon sweating under the veil of plastic wrap — ruined long before they even saw the inside of the restaurant that was going to be serving them.
And while an argument could be made that what Aqua and Opal are doing isn't all that different from what any normal kitchen does — par-cooking entrees and prepping apps so that everything is ready to fly the minute an order comes in, dissimilar only in the distance between prep kitchen and line — there's definitely a difference in the final product. No matter what harebrained scheme an owner or chef comes up with for the prep and presentation of his menu (and trust me, Aqua's isn't even close to the strangest I've heard of), dinner should never taste anything but the best and freshest it can. I don't want to pay good money for reheated cuisine, for some other kitchen's leftovers. And neither should anyone else.
Leftovers: I got word last week that the new Ritz-Carlton Denver, at 1881 Curtis Street, has named a chef. Andres Jimenez is coming from a Ritz-Carlton property in Las Vegas, where he stood post as executive sous, and bringing some serious credentials with. Prior to his turn in Sin City, he was in the kitchen at Aria in the Key Biscayne Ritz (which Food & Wine named one of the fifty best hotel restaurants in America); he trained at the Ecole de Cuisine et Patisserie du Cordon Bleu in Paris and did apprenticeships with Georges Blanc and Roland Pierroz in Switzerland.
None of which answers the most serious question: Can the man cook a steak? We'll find out this fall, when the Ritz-Carlton and its signature Elway's restaurant open to the public.
Meanwhile, just a few blocks from the future Ritz, Francis Carrera has hired his own muscle to walk the streets in front of the Buenos Aires Grill, at 2191 Arapahoe Street (his Buenos Aires Pizzera is close by, at 1307 22nd Street), to keep less-appealing night creatures away from his patrons as they head to and from their cars.
Finally, on July 3, Kevin Taylor will reopen Rouge at the Teller House just in time for the new Central City Opera season. By the way, there's no connection between this place and Le Rouge, which opened March 1 at 1448 Market Street and is now offering a complimentary buffet from 5 to 7 p.m. every Friday through the summer. Since Eric Roeder (ex of Bistro VendÔme) is the consulting chef, you don't need a private eye to figure out that could be a real steal.
