Two miles off Oak Street Beach, in the Carter H. Harrison Water Intake Crib, the phone rings. The chef looks up from his notebook, glances at the caller ID, and turns instead to a glass bong half filled with a corked ’82 Petrus. He fires it up and takes a long pull on the tube.
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D’Angelo, the 24-year-old son of a New York Stock Exchange trader, embarked on his meteoric culinary career seven years ago, after dropping out of his Upper East Side private school. His father, a habitual restaurant junkie who “collects reservations the way some people collect elephant tusks,” called in a favor and laid down the law—either his wayward son took a job washing dishes at the Mario Batali flagship Babbo, where Dad was a regular, or he was out on the street. Three weeks later D’Angelo turned in his dishrag and parlayed his brief stint at the sink into a series of stages in the restaurants of telegenic figurehead chefs like Rocco DiSpirito and Bobby Flay. “I told people I worked the pass at Babbo for three years. It was surprising how easy it was to get in,” he says. He kept his eyes open, grabbed every chance he could to work prep, and muscled or bribed his way onto the line. “If I had to call INS on some line cook who got territorial about his station,” he says, “I would.”
But D’Angelo felt the lack of face time with his bosses was inhibiting his progress, and he quit just as the itinerant underground restaurant craze was kicking off in Manhattan. “I realized I could cook for people who appreciated me without taking orders from some asshole sous chef with half my chops and no hope of ever rising out of the galley,” he says.
Now D’Angelo is banking on a comeback. He acknowledges that the rumors and his unruly reputation help fill the Crib’s voice mail. But he resists the implication—leveled by a number of his older colleagues—that he hasn’t paid his dues. “I’m no different than any other chef-owner. I’ve worked my ass off. I had to submit a business plan to my investors. I had to go out and grease palms to get my permits and location like anybody else.”
