The Sidebar: Oh, Alcohol. Again.

Barbara Lynch in a tail spin, Danny Trejo on post-prison sobriety, and pasta, Al Forno-style.

Tail Spin

What if you (hypothetical you) never got sober? What if I (the real me) hadn’t gotten sober 16 years ago? What would a life look like? I found myself thinking about that on Wednesday after reading Julia Moskin’s investigative article in The New York Times about allegations against award-winning Boston chef Barbara Lynch. (If you haven’t read the piece, click on the link – it is a gift link, no paywall.)

Lynch has been accused of various forms of workplace abuse, and it’s easy to file this story – as some of the 996 commenters have – alongside all the others about the horrors of restaurant culture. I worked in restaurant kitchens, so I’m not unfamiliar with the pressures, the shouting, the drinking. But to me, and I’m sure to every alcoholic reading the piece, this is the story of a real-time addiction tragedy playing out publicly. First it made me wince; then it made me sad.   

All of Lynch’s increasingly bizarre behavior is drinking-related (including getting sloshed frequently in the bars of her own restaurants, publicly berating employees, inappropriately touching employees…and being unable or unwilling to support her employees with empathy after the fentanyl death of the restaurant group’s well-liked executive chef, Rye Crofter, who had previously been sober for 10 years). This is stuff that non-alcoholics don’t do; it is stuff that late-stage alcoholics who have reached the “I don’t give a s—t stage” do.

I feel so sure that if Barbara Lynch could time travel into a sober future for herself, she would look back at how the last few years unfolded, how she sabotaged her own hard work and success (and how that whirlpooled out to affect so many others), and wish she had opened her parachute sooner.

By some accounts she has been offered help (in one instance, after a DUI); by other accounts she has been enabled and protected (keys taken away, Ubers called, meetings rescheduled). But there’s no doubt in my mind (I know I’m not supposed to take other people’s inventory, but here I go…) that she knows she is sick. I hope she finds the willingness to accept help. And soon.

Only a month or so into my sobriety, I was reluctantly attending a 12-step women’s meeting one night in Norwalk, Connecticut. I didn’t really like this particular meeting and I was always trying to worm my way out of it. But a wise person who was helping me get sober kept “suggesting” that it would be a good idea for me to go. She also astutely pointed out that perhaps I didn’t like listening to these women because I saw something of myself in them that I didn’t like. (Oh, shoot, she was so right about that – I was busted!).

But on this night, the speaker introduced herself by saying she had recently been released from prison. Okay, I’m paying attention.

She then went on to tell the story of the morning years before when she had driven in a blackout. She had been up all night drinking and realized she was supposed to be at her beloved niece’s birthday party. She (apparently) jumped in the car to race to her sister’s house and ran through a red light, colliding with a car driven by an elderly husband and wife who both subsequently died from their injuries. She had killed two people in a blackout.

And here’s the kicker: Even after she had been arraigned and was awaiting trial, she went into a neighborhood pub where people knew who she was – and sat at the bar and got drunk.

This is what alcoholics do; if things are going well, they drink; if things are going badly, they drink. This woman, even after a tragedy of this enormity, was still an unrecovered alcoholic (she got sober in prison) and the only tool she had to deal with it was to drink more.

I can tell you honestly that there were many nights, coming home from restaurant outings or after-work drinks, that I drove with one eye shut so that the yellow line in the middle of the road would stay in focus instead of blurring into two lines.

So as I sat listening to this woman speak, I couldn’t help but think, “What if that had been me?” Or, as recovered alcoholics are fond of saying, “But for the grace of God, there go I.” It might sound like yet another cliché or slogan, but seriously, this is one very nasty disease. And it creeps up behind you like a ghostly monster, wrapping its bony fingers around your neck, slowly tightening its grip, and squeezing the life out of you. 

Some people never slip the grip; others manage to wiggle out before too much damage is done, to themselves and the people around them. I still don’t know why some people get the gift of sobriety and others do not. I did; my grandmother and two cousins (who all met premature deaths) did not.

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Post-Prison Sobriety

Then there are people like actor Danny Trejo, who not only escape from the monster but turn around and beat the crap out of it!

I don’t even know much about Trejo – I never watched Breaking Bad or any of the movies where he has earned the distinguished honor of dying on screen 65 times. But his new cookbook caught my attention on the Instagram feed of my cooking colleague Raquel Pelzel, who is now editorial director of Clarkson Potter. She mentioned in her post that the new book, Trejo’s Cantina, has a lot of non-alcoholic cocktails in it because Trejo has been sober for a long time.

So I bounced over to Trejo’s Instagram and saw an interview he did this past week on Mayim Bialik’s popular mental health podcast, Breakdown. (There are plenty more episodes over there that look interesting if you have the time to listen.)  I watched nearly the whole thing (Danny Trejo: I Was As Sick As My Secrets), totally falling for the charms of this man, now a Los Angeles icon, whose childhood was filled with violence and drugs and whose prison time included stays at San Quentin and Folsom as well as a long stint of solitary confinement.

On the day he walked out of prison, sober, he returned to his mother’s house in the neighborhood where he says he had probably robbed every house on the street as a kid. Deciding that he would begin fresh by being helpful to people, he went straight over to the lady next door to help her with her trash cans. The poor woman was terrified when she saw him coming but eventually let him drag the heavy cans to the curb.

Trejo remembers how good it felt to be of service, and since then, he says, “Everything good that’s happened to me has been the direct result of helping someone else.” And help he has, not only in mentoring people in recovery, but by finding ways to give back to his community, especially when it comes to feeding people.

In the podcast, it’s clear that Mayim Bialik has recently read (and found very moving) Trejo’s bestselling 2022 memoir, co-written with actor and writer Donal Logue, Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood. In speaking with Trejo, she tries to sort out (or “break down,” as the podcast promises to do) where the miracles and the good karma have intersected with Trejo’s charisma and determination to result in so many years of sobriety. It’s clearly hard to put a finger on it.

But that’s the mystery of recovery.

Al Forno-Inspired Pasta

Circling back to the restaurant life, I thought I’d end on a positive (and delicious) note – a simple weeknight recipe inspired by my time working in the kitchen at Al Forno restaurant in Providence, R.I. more than 30 years ago. Chef-owners Johanne Killeen and George Germon’s high-heat cooking techniques (that wood-fired grilled pizza!) and insistence on fresh ingredients profoundly influenced my cooking, and this pasta sauce made from roasted tomatoes and peppers is an example of my ongoing obsession with high heat roasting.

Pasta with Roasted Cherry Tomato-Bell Pepper Sauce

Make this now with grocery store ingredients; make it this summer with garden tomatoes and peppers. Tip: instead of grating your Parmigiano, pulse-chop it in a mini food-processor until it forms tiny pebbles. The cheese will have much more presence in your final dish. For a variation, add a chopped anchovy to the roasting pan when you add the garlic.

Serves 2 (or 3 to 4 as a starter or side) 

• 12 ounces grape or cherry tomatoes, halved (about 2 1/8 cups)

• 1 large (7 to 8-ounce) red, orange or yellow pepper, seeded and chopped into medium-large (3/4-inch) dice (about 1 2/3 cups)

• 2 tablespoons olive oil

• Kosher salt

• Freshly ground pepper

• 2 to 3 teaspoons chopped fresh garlic

• 1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar

• A good pinch of red pepper flakes (optional)

• 1 anchovy, chopped (optional)

• ½ pound curly pasta, such as celentani

• 1/3 cup (more if you like) coarsely ground Parmigiano Regianno  

• 2 tablespoons (less or more!) roughly chopped (or small leaves of) parsley, basil, mint or a combination

1. Heat the oven to 425 degrees F. In a heavy 3-quart baking dish (Pyrex is good), combine the tomatoes, the peppers, the oil and ½ teaspoon salt. Toss thoroughly. Pop the pan in the oven and roast, stirring once halfway through (and rotating the pan) for 32 to 35 minutes, until the vegetables are shrunken, deeply colored, and the tomatoes have released much of their moisture. 

2. Remove the baking dish from the oven. Add the garlic, the balsamic vinegar, and the red pepper flakes (if using) and stir well, scraping the sides of the pan as you go. Return the pan to the oven and cook for 3 to 5 minutes longer. 

4. Meanwhile, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the pasta and cook until al dente, according to the package instructions. Take the pasta pot off the heat, and before draining it, pour some of the pasta water into a small cup or bowl. Drain the pasta in a colander and return it to the pasta pot. Season it with 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt.

5. Pour and scrape the contents of the roasting pan into the pot with the pasta. Add two or three tablespoons of the pasta cooking water to the roasting pan and scrape the sides and bottom down to get all that flavor from the stuck-on bits. (Add more water if necessary.) Add that to the pot of pasta. Toss well. Add half of the Parmigiano and half of the herbs. Toss well again, taste for salt, and portion into servings. Garnish with the remaining Parmigiano and herbs.