once you embark on a career dictated by the need for immediate cash flow, it never gets any easier to get off the treadmill. - Anthony Bourdain

I learned to recognize failure.

And, well, for most of my life I’d been way too far up my own ass to be of any use to anyone — something that only got worse after Kitchen Confidential. I don’t know exactly when the possibility of that changing presented itself — but sometime, I guess, after having made every mistake, having already fucked up in every way a man can fuck up, having realized that I’d had enough cocaine, that no amount in the world was going to make me any happier. That a naked, oiled supermodel was not going to make everything better in my life — nor any sports car known to man. It was sometime after that. The precise moment of realization came in my tiny fourth-floor walk-up apartment on Ninth Avenue. Above Manganaro’s Heroboy restaurant — next building over from Esposito Pork Shop. I was lying in bed with my then-girlfriend — I guess you could diplomatically call it “spooning” — and I caught myself thinking, “I could make a baby with this woman.

I know how old most seafood is on Monday — about four to five days old!