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Moosey came by to visit yesterday and we had Turkish cay and pumpkin spice cake with some slices of fresh cantalope. He talked to me about his business and we figured out things he could do differently at some of his restaurants. He’s a bad boy, no doubt, but he has always had this mysterious charm that gets me everytime. I’ve come to accept him for who he is and enjoy his company without expectations. For some reason, that seems to offer the most enjoyable of relations – no expectations, lively conversation, and a certain something something that floats just underneath a thin surface.

I went out last night and we were having just normal conversation, and one of the girls, who was having her period, responded so nastily to something I said that I jumped back as if a snake had come out of nowhere and bit me. Hormones are a bitch. Yesterday, at lunch my male friend was rueing the loss of his libido at 51 years of age and saying he missed the hormones that used to course through his veins. I wouldn’t miss some of my girlfriends’ hormones when they spill over and make them absolutely intolerable. Geez Louise.

Great article in the NYT on Besh. A friend recently was telling me that he had suffered through some bad service at August and another friend of his had also. I still want to see for myself as I haven’t been to August in a little bit of time only because my new found circle doesn’t seem to be hip to dining out on the high end.

Personally, I don’t want Besh to be Iron Chef – I want him to be Home Chef – here in New Orleans and not scattered all about being celebrity chef. I think that will make him more successful than ever.

But I want to say this about him – he is genuinely the nicest guy in the world aside from being an extremely talented chef. When we came back after Katrina, Steve and i ran into him at Deluca’s in NY and he misunderstood that Steve is an architect, so when I said we had moved back to NO and Steve had left his firm in SF, and he offered his wife’s help in locating Steve a position at a law firm in New Orleans. What a doll. And he looks like a cuter Jackson Brown.

From Disaster, a Chef Forges an Empire
BAYOU BOY The New Orleans chef John Besh, in the back of a pickup near his home in Slidell, La.
By KIM SEVERSON
Published: October 31, 2007
New Orleans

BEFORE Katrina, John Besh was simply a good chef with a fancy restaurant that had a habit of making top 10 lists around the country.

After Katrina, he became known as the ex-Marine who rode into the flooded city with a gun, a boat and a bag of beans and fed New Orleans until it could feed itself.

His post-Katrina narrative has turned him into a spokesman for his city’s culinary recovery. He is the anti-Emeril, a polite, bona fide hometown boy who is less bam! and more bayou. That he looks good on television hasn’t hurt. On “The Next Iron Chef” last Sunday night, Mr. Besh beat another chef on his quest to join the Food Network’s all-star cooking team.

But behind that telegenic Southern humility and unquestioned generosity lies a man who approached life after Katrina with a kind of military focus that has made him one of only a few chefs in New Orleans who are much better off than before the storm.

Just before Katrina, Mr. Besh had bought out his investor in Restaurant August, his downtown flagship. When the storm shut the city down, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to cover the rent and payments on his business loans.

Through a series of aggressive moves in the months after the storm, Mr. Besh expanded his empire. The number of restaurants in his group doubled to four, including the new Lüke, a downtown brasserie with a private line of beer, and La Provence, a rustic French restaurant and mini-farm north of New Orleans that he bought earlier this year after the death of its owner, Chris Kerageorgiou, Mr. Besh’s mentor and partner in a pig-raising venture.

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He is now responsible for 310 paychecks, up from 167 before the storm.

In hindsight, it turns out that the smartest move Mr. Besh made was quickly arranging a series of lucrative emergency catering contracts, feeding thousands of law enforcement, government and oil rig workers. The contracts, some of which lasted for a year and a half, made him enough money to bankroll the expansion of his businesses.

The bottom line also got a boost from Harrah’s, which owns the casino where Mr. Besh has been running a steakhouse since 2003. The company paid him as a consultant until the restaurant could open again.

“We just did what we thought was right at the time,” he said.

As he and his partner, Octavio Mantilla, began to rebuild, Simone Rathlé, a longtime friend in the public relations business Mr. Besh hired when he opened August six years ago, went to work.

“He was like numb and just freaked out,” she said. “He owned this restaurant and owed a lot of money. He was doing things for survival. He needed to pay his bills and I needed to promote him to get people to go to his restaurant to help him to pay his bills.”

She flew him to fund-raisers and put him in front of any journalist she could think of. Soon Mr. Besh was leaning into the role as spokesman for New Orleans like a politician with a cause. Even today, whether he’s cooking at a charity event, shooting a holiday magazine spread or appearing on television, he stays on message.

“I’ll tell ya’ll, it’s been trying,” he said as he braised short ribs on the “Today” show set earlier this month. “There are so many beautiful things happening in the city, but at the same time there’s a ways for us to go.”

Commitments have been piling up. He’s writing a book and designing a line of flavored butters for Whole Foods, with a local dairy. On Nov. 22 he will star with Wynton Marsalis in an episode of “Iconoclasts,” the Sundance Channel series that makes unlikely celebrity matchups.

Meanwhile, Food Network fans are cheering him on in the “Next Iron Chef” competition. The finale is Nov. 11, and the smart money is on Mr. Besh to make it at least that far.

Spend some time with Mr. Besh, and it becomes clear that he knows how to work his assets, which include an addictive laugh, deep blue eyes and hair that always looks a few days away from really needing a cut.

He is a practiced bad boy. His idea of a joke is to send his Israeli-born chef at the Besh Steakhouse at Harrah’s on a nine-hour drive with a car full of Berkshire pork to a Tennessee smokehouse for what Mr. Besh calls “ham camp.”

With a tendency toward dispensing compliments that rival Eddie Haskell’s, Mr. Besh walks through the world with the playfulness of the class clown and the confidence of the star quarterback.

“He just shines,” said Bruce Seidel, the executive producer who cast Mr. Besh both for an “Iron Chef” andouille challenge against Mario Batali (Mr. Besh won) and for “The Next Iron Chef” series.

Even though New York producers are taken with the Louisiana bayou-boy persona and his humble message of hope, it can wear thin. On a recent episode of “The Next Iron Chef,” the host, Alton Brown, issued a warning: “The judges feel the Southern gosh-darn cook thing is growing a little old.”

In New Orleans, it is a rare person who criticizes Mr. Besh’s newfound stardom. Chefs and food writers in a town thick with both might grumble about service lapses at August or the naked capitalism of the $1,200 California wine and $58 New York strip at Besh Steakhouse, but his success is generally regarded as a good thing.

“When he rises, he raises it for all of us,” said Leah Chase, the 84-year-old Creole chef of Dooky Chase’s. “I like people who know what they have to do and just do it.” (But the TV appearances don’t impress her. “I’ve got to call John and say I think he’s above that Iron Chef,” she said.)

In Slidell, the little town north of here where Mr. Besh, 39, was raised and still lives, his culinary degree, European training and a cell phone full of high-powered numbers aren’t all that important.

“He thinks he’s from Paris, France,” a relative likes to joke. “But he’s just from Slidell, Louisiana.”

During a recent family breakfast at his Pottery Barn-perfect five-bedroom house on a bayou in a new subdivision, Mr. Besh discussed his strategy for avoiding the problems that come when chefs stretch themselves too thin.

“Unlike a lot of chefs, I don’t try to pretend I’m in every one of my kitchens every day,” he said. Although he likes to cook at August at least five days a week, the partners and chefs at his three other places get room to run things as they see fit.

That kind of structure lets him leave town a lot, grabbing every opportunity that comes his way. He likes it, sure, but he also feels that he has to do what he can while he has the chance.

“This is my home and my life,” he said, dishing out pork grillades and stone ground grits to his four boys, the oldest of whom is 11 and the youngest 3. “But when I think about the sacrifices all the people who work with me have made and my children and all the help the city still needs, I think who am I to turn down the chance to be on this new Iron Chef show and everything else that has come my way?”

Mr. Besh and his wife, Jenifer, grew up together, but didn’t fall in love until Mr. Besh, his studies at the Culinary Institute of America cut short by a tour leading an infantry squad during the Persian Gulf war, came back home to Louisiana ready to settle down. They’ve been married 16 years, and their lives are a tangle of kids, relatives and friends they’ve both known since Catholic school.

Mrs. Besh is a lawyer who has stopped practicing except to occasionally look over her husband’s contracts. Ask her how she feels about her husband’s new fame and she’ll raise an eyebrow and say, with the slightest hint of sarcasm, “I am the happiest girl in Slidell.”

If the storm sharpened Mr. Besh’s naturally competitive drive, it softened his cooking in many ways. Before the storm, locals sometimes criticized him for being too far out on the cutting edge, which is an easy place to be in a town where people still get a little itchy if there’s no trout amandine on the menu.

“When he went through his foam phase it was a little nauseating,” said Poppy Tooker, a local cooking teacher. “It was like crawfish jelly with spit on top.”

Although he still plays on the edge, foaming this or that or using methyl cellulose to create fried oyster stew that comes to the table as a liquid encased in a perfect cube of crust, most dishes are more direct. The August menus, still sophisticated, are built from even more Louisiana ingredients than before. He uses his own eggs and Berkshire pork and is trying to figure out how to raise a mix of Brahma and Charolais cattle, which he hopes will mirror the flavor of the beef he tasted in the Loire Valley.

“I’m cooking with a lot more soul now,” he said. “I want my food to have meaning.”

From his first days in a kitchen, misfortune has shaped Mr. Besh as a cook. He took to the stove at 9 after his father, who was out for a bike ride, was hit by a drunk driver and became paralyzed. Mr. Besh pitched in by cooking breakfast. Then, encouraged by his dad, he moved on to the game and fish he and his family pulled out of the Louisiana woods and bayous.

When Mr. Besh wanted to get as far away from Louisiana as possible, he signed up for the military. But the reality of war in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait sent him back home, ready to get serious about his cooking career. Then came Hurricane Katrina.

And life’s hard turns keep coming. Almost a year ago, Kathleen, one of his four older sisters, died of cancer at 46. One of her last wishes was a white Christmas, so Mr. Besh rented a snow machine and covered his yard in frozen Louisiana water.

And after surviving all of it, he says that there is only one thing left that scares him.

“I’ve only got this one shot,” he said. “I don’t want to mess it up.”

A friend reading from a borrowed book, Richard Russo’s Straight Man, mentioned a reference in the text to a young woman who enchants the protagonist and while she eats a peach, causes him to ponder “eating a peach,” – of course it harkens to Prufrock’s daring to eat a peach once he’s grown old and I found the poem for my friend to send it and as I read it, I thought how lovely of him to remind me of Eliot’s poem, and to suddenly be immersed in a poem that perhaps resonates now more than when I first read it 20 years ago!

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

T. S. Eliot

S`io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, “ What is it? ”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening.
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains.
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys.
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me.
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair–
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin–
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time `
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all–
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all–
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep. . . tired . . . or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet–and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “ I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”–
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor–
And this, and so much more?–
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow, or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
. . . . .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous–
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

After more than a decade I began to feel like my marriage was more like a gay relationship than not. Our life had become and appeared to be decidely predictable and childless and how should I say – lacked unpredictability that made me feel ilke someone was throwing the dirt on my grave way before my time.

I think women bring to the relationship the unknown. A woman I was speaking with last week said that her boyfriend was leaving her because she was too unpredictable. Even S used to say that he would have never gone out with me five years before he met me because I am “irrational” – read: unpredictable.

I go back to my role model of choice – who would I be in another life? – Cleopatra, no less. Capricious, sensuous, powerful Cleopatra – her love with Antony ended in mutual suicide because it burned too hot – but she was criticized endlessly then and now for her unpredictabiility. Who would criticize Egypt as Antony referred to Cleopatra – only men would see this mystery as a flaw.

I had lunch today with friends and asked the gay man at the table if I am right – what about this unpredictability and he agreed, male couples (not necessarily those in their twenties) tend to know what they want and then go about leading their lives according to those desires (if all goes right – we are talking generalities here).

In anticipation of the run I’m doing on Sunday morning – I love this quote in the NYT:

“If I’m happy, I train better and I race better. And the fact that I’ve got a little angel in my life makes me run better.”
PAULA RADCLIFFE, who holds the world record in the women’s marathon, on her 10-month-old daughter and her plans to run in New York on Sunday

Loca, pent up, wanting to run and jump has been trying to negotiate her post-surgery condition. The first night home, we went for a short walk, but as we went to cross the footbridge, her achiness became acute and she wobbled across the bridge. Now she is fearful of the bridge. She lies down when we get to it and won’t budge. I forced her across this morning, wanting her to be exposed to what has become her phobia before it expands any larger than what it is now.

Reminds me of me when I had my first panic attack on the Causeway. I was working 50 hours at a law firm as a paralegal. Taking two classes at night at UNO. And my father had recently passed and I was going to the synagogue in the morning and evening to say Kaddish for him. All this while commuting from Covington across the Causeway. When the paramedics pulled me off the bridge and the doctor was examing me, he said maybe you do too much?

You think?

Last night, I got all dolled up and went to meet my friends at Swirl, but the night ended quickly. I should have known something was wrong when I’ve been nursing a headache for the past two days – and I usually don’t get headaches – and I had my first glass of red wine and almost spit it out. I drank a bunch of water, feeling like I was dying from dehydration, and then early on, came home and had a bowl of split pea soup and went to bed.

Everyone around here is sick and I have come in contact with them all although they all plead “not contagious” – I should have known better. So today, I’m keeping it on the low key – trying to make sure I don’t go full on into this whatever this is. Although it is so beautiful right now I’d love to walk or ride my bike to the quarter and hang out. I just might have to do that anyway.

Here was my daily affirmation: In peace I was created. In peace I remain.

Times Picayune reports this morning that Endymion will ride in MidCity after a two year hiatus caused by Katrina – can I get an AMEN!

One of my favorite cartoons is Scooby Doo – and now I believe Shaggy lives here too. There is a guy, no lie, that hangs out around Swirl, who is a dead ringer for Shaggy.