William Schenk, JKS, and Karen Johnson, Ravens Catering, for their unceasing willingness to answer questions; Monica Koziol, the Front Range Chef, for her help, guidance, and support in teaching the author how a personal chef operates; the extraordinarily knowledgeable and helpful Wayne Belding and Jeff Mathews of the Boulder Wine Merchant, for sharing their expertise; Katherine Goodwin Saideman, for her close readings of the manuscript; Emyl Jenkins; Commander Debra Grainger, Arvada Police Department; Richard Staller, D.O.; Triena Harper, chief deputy coroner, and Jon Cline, coroner’s investigator, Jefferson County; John Lauck, Criminal Investigator, District Attorney’s Office, First Judicial District of Colorado; Linda Gustafson, Vail; Greg Morrison, Chief of Police, Vail; Allan Stanley, member, Colorado State Parole Board; Carol Devine Rusley; Julie Wallin Kaewert; Kevin Devine, Lake Tahoe Ski Patrol Avalanche Control; Nicole Mains, personal trainer, Boulder Country Club; Jim Gray and Shirley Carnahan, Boulder Renaissance Consort; Elaine Mongeau, King Soopers Pharmacy, Evergreen; Janine Jones, Chris Wyant, and Mark Kimball, The Alpenglow Stube, Keystone Resort; Nate Klatt and Tiffany Tyson, public relations, and Sally Reed, floor director, KRMA-TV, Denver; Jim Buchanan; Keith Abbott; Bob Egizi, security manager, Vail Associates; Suzanne Jarvis, Village Security, Beaver Creek Resort; Tim Batdorff, Toscanini, Beaver Creek; Alan Henceroth, mountain manager, and Jim Gentling, Arapahoe Basin Ski Area; Meg Kendal, Denver-Evergreen Ob-Gyn; Russell Wiltse, Department of Film Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder; and as always, for his knowledge, patience, and suggestions, Sergeant Richard Millsapps of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department, Golden, Colorado.
Greedily she ingorg’d without restraint, And knew not eating Death.—JOHN MILTON,
BOOK IX, 791–792
NATE BULLOCK MEMORIAL FUND-RAISER
FRONT RANGE PUBLIC BROADCASTING SYSTEM
FILMING FROM
THE SUMMIT BISTRO
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CHAPTER 1
Show business and death don’t mix. Unfortunately, I discovered this while hosting a TV cooking show.
Up to then, I’d enjoyed being a TV chef. The job didn’t pay well, but this was PBS. Arthur Wakefield, the floor director, had crisply informed me that most chefs made nothing for guest visits, much less five thousand clams for six shows. He could have added:
So: Bad pay notwithstanding, I was lucky to have the TV job. Actually, I was lucky to have any food work at all. And I certainly didn’t want more than our family and a few friends to know why.
I could not tell my upscale clients—those who’d made
In September, things had gone badly. The county health inspector, giggling from the shock engendered by his surprise visit, closed me down. The bustle in our kitchen immediately subsided. Calls for catering gigs stopped. Suppliers sent letters asking if I wanted to keep my accounts current.
Without my business, an enterprise I’d lovingly built up for almost a decade, I entered a spiritual fog as thick as the gray autumnal mist snaking between the Colorado mountains. I gave up yoga. Drank herb tea while reading back issues of
Truly, the place
To fix the problem, Tom was now tearing out the guts of three new sinks and prying up the floor beneath. He insisted we should heal our temporary cash-flow problem by selling a pair of historic skis he’d bought years before in an odd lot of military memorabilia. In October, I’d started calling antiques dealers while wondering how, during a prolonged closure, I could keep my hand in the food business.
There’d been no takers for the skis. How else to get money? I’d wracked my brain for other ways to work as a cook: Volunteer at a school cafeteria? Roll a burrito stand up and down Aspen Meadow’s Main Street?
Eventually, it had been my old friend Eileen Druckman who’d come through with a job. Loaded with money and divorced less than two years, Eileen had just bought the Summit Bistro at Colorado’s posh Killdeer Ski Resort. Eileen—fortyish, pretty, and blond, with cornflower blue eyes and a full, trembling mouth that had just begun to smile again—had hired a good-looking young chef named Jack Gilkey, whose food was legend in Killdeer. To Eileen’s delight, she and Jack had quickly become an item personally as well as professionally. When I told Eileen my business woes, she and Jack had kindly offered me the position of co-chef at the bistro. But I couldn’t work restaurant hours—seven in the morning to midnight—fifty miles from home. Restaurant workers, I’d noticed, had a high mortality rate, no home life, or both.
Eileen, ever generous, had promptly pitched a cooking-show idea to the Front Range Public Broadcasting System. They’d said yes. I’d demurred. Eileen argued that my cooking on TV, at her bistro, would boost her business plus give her a huge tax write-off. Meanwhile, I could use my television exposure to publicize the new culinary venture I’d finally hit upon: becoming a personal chef. That particular avenue of food work requires no
