#55 Two Mentors Who Died Young

But in my dreams

I slew the dragon

– Colin Hay

I understand the allure of the culinary version of the rock-and-roll lifestyle. Work hard, play hard, live fast, die young, yeah yeah yeah. I’ve gone a ways down that road before, but even Marco Pierre White is still alive and trending on YouTube, so everyone just relax. Lest we reflect too fondly on the bad old days of drinking behind the line, getting high in the walk-in, and snorting coke in bathroom stalls, here are the stories of two of my mentors who died young.

I just looked up their obituaries to make sure I had the dates of their deaths correct, and I can’t quite believe how long they’ve been gone already. Seeing the pictures of them in their prime has me clenching my jaw and blinking back tears. They weren’t angels, or heroes, or famous, but when they were alive, they were ravenously alive. And yet they seemed to take Charles Bukowski’s advice–“find what you love and do it till it kills you”--as a personal challenge.

Kendrick Anderson

I can’t even remember how I got from Chapel Hill to Nantucket Island in late May of 1997 after graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill. I think my friend Brian, who had spent a previous summer with me working in restaurants up there, probably drove me up I-95, spent a few days on the beach while I looked for work, and then took off. It was–and probably still is–very difficult to book automobile passage on the old steamship ferry, and if you’re just a working grunt like I was, you can get where you need to go on the little island either walking or biking.

I worked through that summer until early December for Chef Rick Anderson at The Quaker House. It’s an old inn with a few rooms upstairs and a restaurant downstairs. Rick and his wife Stephanie were the new owners; Stephanie came from a well-off local family whose generational wealth, like many maritime others on Nantucket, was of Portuguese descent.

Rick’s buddy Jimmy Boyle flew out from The Rain Tree in the Pacific Northwest to help us open. The work was challenging and the days were long. Other than the three of us, we had a Danish exchange student who helped with breakfast and a pastry cook who prepped desserts in the morning and covered my day off on GM. The galley kitchen was tiny, just big enough for one cook. My GM station was a hollowed-out space under a stairwell with a single-door reach-in and a shelf up above for plates.

The food wasn’t remarkable–all entrees were served with whipped potatoes and sauteed veg–but it was scratch cooking with fresh, local ingredients. Rick and Jimmy had become best friends at NECI (New England Culinary Institute), and they knew the right way to do things, even if they often veered off course. I recall Jimmy telling me “I don’t ever want to see you do what I’m about to do.” How’s that for leading by example?

I roomed with a friend of Rick’s, a local drunk and knucklehead named Tommy. Tommy’s mother lived downstairs in the creepy old house in which I rented a room upstairs. She had a mirror in the hallway so that she could see the front door from her rocking chair in the living room. When I came home, no matter the time, she was in that chair, her blank reflection staring at me.

Rick and Jimmy’s diet seemed to consist mostly of Stolichnaya and Marlboro Reds, cut with the occasional tray of tacos from down the block. After the first two weeks of business at The Quaker House, Jimmy had to get back out to his own restaurant. Rick often came downstairs to the basement prep kitchen with a cranberry and vodka (a Cape Cod, of course), shaken and strained, to start the day. He kept nitrous chargers up on a ceiling tile in the dry storage room downstairs. Shift drinks were usually a pint container of Beam and Coke.

I moved back to the mainland that Fall and had a couple of detours before getting to the CIA at Hyde Park in March of 1998. Keeping in touch back then meant phone calls or letters, neither of which Rick was good at, or secondhand sources. I heard some awful stories about things Rick and Tommy had gotten into, stories whose truth I’ve never tried to ascertain. I hope they’re pure fabrications, let’s put it that way.

Many years later, when Elizabeth and I lived on Park Street in St. Helena, CA, Rick called me out of the blue, nearly ten years, four time zones, and several phone numbers and addresses later. He was living and working in Mendocino, a remote, chilly coastal town perched on bluffs above the Pacific Ocean. I couldn’t make out very well what he was saying–he sounded sedated–but eventually I gathered that he was in a great deal of pain, probably from his hip but likely more widespread, and was unable to get to the market downstairs for groceries. Would I please call the market and order and pay for a list of groceries that he needed? The people who ran the market knew Rick, and they would bring everything upstairs to him. He sounded terrible.

Weeks later–months? It’s been so long, I can’t recall–he came to visit Elizabeth and me to have dinner and stay the night. Our older boy was still very small then, and I don’t think the younger one was even born yet. I was apprehensive, thinking Rick would screech into our quiet neighborhood of old folks and little ranch homes, blaring Boston from his car speakers and smoking a cigarette, or worse, as he walked up our driveway.

He surprised me. He was calm and polite, his green eyes alight and alert rather than bloodshot, his freckled face handsome rather than puffy. I don’t recall the details of that visit–just my own relief and calm. I cooked dinner and watched him sit on our couch and look out the front window, playing quietly with our little boy. His own college-age son, Malcolm, had made his way to the west coast, whether to work on a ship or study, I’ve forgotten. That was the last time I saw Rick. He died on July 18, 2016, at the age of fifty.

Terrell Brunet

“Y’all scared?” The CIA Chef Instructor for our Skills One class–our first class in a real kitchen after six weeks of classroom work–strode up to us as my fellow students and I waited outside the classroom door. The nametag on his immaculate chef’s jacket read T. BRUNET. “You should be.”

Chef Brunet had us on the run. At the CIA, your “Skills Chef” has an outsize influence on your entire education, because while most instructors have you for one seven-day or fourteen-day block, whomever teaches you Skills I and II is your lord and master for two fourteen-day blocks of slicing, searing, braising, and probably a few broken bearnaises.

The experience I’d gained with Rick at The Quaker House put me out in front of most of my classmates when it came to kitchen acumen. I was able to ask Chef Brunet more interesting questions and dive a little deeper into the course material, and I soon started working as an assistant with him for the Adult Education classes he taught on Saturdays. The theme of the course he taught was Creole cuisine, which he’d absorbed by birthright in his hometown of Mandeville, LA, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain opposite New Orleans. Day-drinking (BYOB) was encouraged for the students in that class.

The sixteen-week section in the middle of the CIA curriculum is the “externship”, which entails going to work under the auspices of the CIA at a restaurant approved by the school for some real-world experience. I had trouble deciding on a restaurant. Chef Brunet’s friend, David Honeysett, had just started a job as Executive Sous Chef at a brand-new restaurant in Chelsea (NYC) called The Tonic. The Executive Chef was Chris Gesualdi, who’d worked for Thomas Keller as Sous Chef at RaKel and had also earned three stars from Ruth Reichl of the Times when he was the chef at Montrachet. The problem was that The Tonic wasn’t on the ‘approved’ list, and a restaurant had to be open for a year to even be considered.

I wrote letters to Tim Ryan, the VP of the CIA, beseeching his help with approval. I don't know what other strings were pulled, but permission was granted, and off I went. (You can read more about my experiences at The Tonic in my article “Finding Meaning in a Meaningless Task”.) Chef Brunet led me to Chef Honeysett, and therefore to Chef Gesualdi and to Chef Thomas Keller, and to my first job out of the CIA: The French Laundry.

I clearly remember Chef Brunet telling my parents how proud he was of me on graduation night. He tendered compliments in such tiny and infrequent doses that his praise meant a great deal. We kept in touch on and off while I worked at The French Laundry. And when I left that restaurant after two years, I headed down to a terrible backwater of a town in northwest Louisiana to work with Chef Brunet again.

He’d left the CIA and moved back closer to home. Gone were the green-and-gold collared white chef jacket. Gone was the tall white toque, the clean shave, and the brown curls. In their place were a shaved head, a graying goatee, silver hoop earrings, and a denim chef jacket. Jefferson, LA, was a long long way from both The CIA and from The French Laundry.

Let’s just say things didn’t work out for any of us in Jefferson. The crew–all former students of Brunet–went our separate ways; I ended up staying at his brother’s house in Mandeville. Brunet and I had some wild nights at Ruby’s Roadhouse on the North Shore, but it wasn’t at all clear to me–or him–where he was headed next.

I’d landed a job with John Besh at Restaurant August, and secured an apartment up near Audubon Park. (A few weeks earlier, I’d had a falling-out with Brunet over a misunderstanding about a rent payment.) After the move, Elizabeth and I drove across the causeway to see him from time to time for crab cakes at his mom’s house or vodka martinis on his stepdad’s boat, but we soon lost touch.

One gray San Francisco day two years later, I pulled up to a four-way stop sign near our Russian Hill apartment in my Tacoma pickup truck. In a yellow sportscar opposite me, turning right, was Brunet in a yellow sportscar. We goggle-eyed each other and drove around the block, double parked on Union Street, and got out and hugged there on the sidewalk. I mean … what are the freaking chances??? I didn’t have his contact info, and I don’t believe that he or I knew the other had moved to SF. After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, he’d looked up an old friend and was managing The Elite Cafe, and I’d run into him while he was apartment-hunting.

We kept in touch throughout the years after that. He’d come up to Napa Valley for lunch now and then, and the “proud papa” Chef Brunet had returned. He loved saying that one of his best students had gone on to earn a Michelin star. He’d married a kind, lovely, and much younger woman named Neely. They moved to West County (Sonoma County west of Highway 101) out in the sticks. We drove to see them for an outdoor gumbo party one summer afternoon, and dealt with the minor chaos that always seemed to surround Brunet: stray dogs, unruly teenage son, drunk neighbors (the other party guests). And the chicken & sausage gumbo was off the charts.

When Chef Terrell Brunet died on March 5, 2021 at the age of fifty-eight , I wasn’t able to go out to Oakland for the funeral. I wrote letters of condolence to his son, Trey, and his mom, Dottie. Neely was kind enough to send me his favorite knife: a 12-in Henckels Pro that I use almost daily in my kitchen at home. (It’s in rotation with a Mac Pro that I bought while working at The French Laundry and a Wusthof that came with Elizabeth's student knife kit when she attended Le Cordon Bleu.) It arrived razor-sharp, and I try to keep it that way. What better gift to be handed down from one chef to another?

It makes me sad to write this–but most of my memories of these men, the overpowering balance of them, in fact–are happy, fun, wistful, poignant, hilarious, and powerful. I can see Rick, red-faced, growling and grunting, wrestling a chain net full of bay scallops into the boat on a frigid November morning when he woke me up early to go scalloping with him on Nantucket Bay and the donkey motor gave out. There’s Brunet taking me into an uptown bar on St. Charles Avenue, Mardi Gras floats lined up outside, ordering a Cosmopolitan at ten in the morning and asking me, “What the hell do you mean you’ve never heard of Jerry Jeff Walker?”

I’m well aware that I’m the same age as Rick was when he died, and still a bit younger than Brunet. So to all of you chefs and cooks out there, you bartenders and servers and managers too–yes, this industry is hard and it’s fun. A lot of times, for a lot of people, it’s too hard and too fun. You’re probably not a rock star, and you’re definitely not Keith Richards. Take from these true stories of mine what you will. Is it really better to burn out than to fade away?