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The Chicken-Fried Philosopher Goes to Vietnam

The founder of Black-Eyed Pea, GoodEats, and a half-dozen other restaurants travels halfway around the world to find his next big idea for Dallas.
By Gene Street |
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We mixed the flour and salt and pepper and seasonings—the same homemade batter Mama Street used to make—and rolled the monkey meat in it until it was white. I began to scout around for the deep fryer. After some pantomiming, the manager told us that only restaurants in the big hotels had deep fryers. Not enough electricity, too much dangerous wiring. Well then. We really were going to cook like Mama Street, my mother, Dace’s grandmother, Billye, who supplied all the recipes for my first restaurant. She and my father Snookie spent eight weeks in our kitchen showing us how to make everything. Billye’s kitchen never had a deep fryer, either. So Dace poured an inch of sesame oil into a wok and put the fire to it. Next thing you know, oil was splattering and bubbling, and I remembered why I always wanted to own restaurants, not cook in them.


“You can do it, son,” I said, in a supportive father-son voice. “Bill Clinton and I will be right here if you need anything.”


He flipped the monkey steak, now tender, twice until brown. It took three minutes and it came out—okay. We did a little better with the dog, topping it off with homemade rice-flour cream gravy.


I asked Luong why everyone in the kitchen got along so well, and he told me that the owners were husband and wife, and most of the employees were related to them in one way or another. There’s an old saying in Texas: never get your wife involved in your restaurant. The staff is afraid to disagree with her, the gossip says she’s only around because of her wedding ring, and more than likely the only thing she knows about restaurants she learned in high school at the Dairy Queen. She’ll want to hang new curtains, have the bartender push white wine and light beer, and if you’re not careful she’ll make everybody get a manicure. She’ll want to dry-clean the uniforms, stick fresh flowers in the bathrooms, and bring her sorority sisters in for a three-hour lunch (on the house). All this sounds good and all of it costs money and then one day you’re running a restaurant where the expenses are running you.


The truth is that the profit margin in food today is about 10 percent, and that’s if everything’s running smoothly and the oven doesn’t break and the city doesn’t sue over illegal outdoor tables and the waiters don’t steal all the ribeyes and you don’t get a bad magazine review or, God forbid, held up at gunpoint and somebody gets shot or lightning strikes and burns the whole place down—all of which has happened to me. It’s no way to get rich. You see any restaurateurs on the Fortune 500? Not hardly. Ray Kroc didn’t own all those McDonald’s; the franchisees did. And he passed on to hamburger heaven before CEOs drew eight-figure salaries. I made my big score not by running a restaurant but by selling one, handing over all the Black-Eyed Peas to some Brits in 1986. Until that day, I wouldn’t have made the Fortune 5,000,000.


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Here in Vietnam they have a different idea: you’d better get your wife involved. With high taxes and too much rain and what I’m guessing is beaucoup kickbacks and bribes, you’d better get your children and aunts and uncles and grandparents and grandchildren inside the tent to hold down labor costs. Over here, they think of it as teamwork. My friend Than says the women are just happy to have a job and the men cave in on all decisions to the person with the most education. So there are no fights. I like the idea in theory: one talented member of the family cooks, one greets the customers, another handles the books. If you get those three areas covered, you’ve just about got it licked.


But when I think about getting my mother and my four wives, one of whom will only talk to me by fax, and my six children, three of whom would want to wash their hands in Comet after touching a dirty plate, and my deacon brother, my Dime Box cousins, and my Lubbock in-laws all together to run a restaurant, I picture a kitchen smackdown with tears, shouts, threats, walkouts, oaths, the police being called in, and all the while, hungry customers sitting out front, wondering just who is about to shoot whom back there in the kitchen.


• • •

I was lying awake in bed at 2 a.m. at the Saigon Caravelle, staring at the ceiling and thinking about how life takes you down forks in the road you never even saw.


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Here’s a thing most people don’t know about me: I volunteered for the Air Force at the age of 23. That’s right: the Wild Man of Oak Lawn, the guy who was so scared of a board of directors meeting that he hid under his desk, that man actually enlisted in the armed forces. It was 1963. I wanted to see the world, so I joined up. My father was for it. He knew they’d shave off my golden locks. My mother hoped I’d come back scared straight and become a deacon at Salado Baptist Church. I was in uniform for five years, doing time in Okinawa, Guam, the Philippines, and Taiwan, but I never saw Vietnam. I spent the bulk of my tour in Taichung, a town outside of Taipei, Taiwan, with an ocean between me and the action. I never fired a gun, except on the firing range; never pulled the pin on a single grenade. I never crawled through a mud paddy at night, praying I wouldn’t brush a landmine.


My son was in the next bed, his stomach still boiling with the house special, moaning in his sleep about his wife and children back in Texas. I couldn’t doze, couldn’t close my eyes for thinking about what could have happened if I’d ended up here, in South Vietnam, trading shots with Viet Cong, instead of inspecting airplanes in Taiwan. Why did fate, or God, toss my file folder in the Taichung stack instead of the Da Nang stack? The high point of my war was working as the assistant to the assistant manager of the Officers’ Club, where I caught the bartending bug. I decorated my tent with folk art and, yes, truth be told, chased the little darlins. When I see someone like John McCain or Bob Kerrey talk about his war experience, I can’t relate. They were in a different movie.


Still, I must have been put there for a reason, because a funny thing happened during my time in Taichung. My interest in rock ’n’ roll languished, and my interest in free enterprise caught fire. Once it was clear that I wasn’t going to be in combat, I looked around for other ways to prove myself. Not to the Air Force—they could see I was just marking time until the war ended or something better came along—but to myself. I discovered a loophole in Air Force regulations, what the business professors I had after the war would call a perfect collision of pent-up demand and plentiful supply.


Servicemen, I found out, had the right to buy items at the PX such as air conditioners, radios, even refrigerators. Not everyone had the money or the inclination to make the investment, but hundreds of the appliances were sitting in a nearby warehouse all the same. It occurred to me that if the servicemen were to buy these items (as they had every legal right to do), then sell them to me (at a profit), I could pass them along to members of the local Taiwanese population who, struggling under the austere regime of Chiang Kai-shek, might enjoy owning a decadent American appliance. I found a broker, no doubt a Chinese Mafia guy, who was willing to pay me a nice bonus and move the merchandise. Next thing you know, Whirlpools and Frigidaires were making their way out of the Army warehouse and into Taiwanese homes. Looking back, I’m sure the Mafia charged their customers huge markups, but I was too busy counting my own money to ask questions. It was a nice sideline for a lonely soldier boy so far from home, but, as my mama could have predicted, it was not enough.


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I discovered that each serviceman also had the right to purchase a single brand-new, American-made automobile. What could go wrong? The pipeline was already established, the players already in place. Sure enough, cars were bought and sold, big profits were made, and I became something of a player on the local scene. For a while there, I was known as a fixer, a man who could cover up a bar fight or get hold of hard-to-find comforts of home. Everything was as smooth as a sled on snow until local officialdom began to hear about a U.S. serviceman living like a sultan, having suits and steaks flown in from Okinawa, holding parties in a house on the hill known as Peaceful Acres. One day the call came, and the news was harsh: a lawyer told me the Taiwanese government wanted to know why a puny captain had a bank account of $26,000. In what seemed like the blink of an eye, my empire came tumbling down, my bank account vanished, the loophole in the U.S. regulations was shut, and I decided to pack my bags and retire. My Taiwanese moneymaking days and my brilliant Air Force career were over.


I learned some lessons there that have helped ever since—keep your friends close and your enemies closer, for one—but I was thinking about all that in my Saigon bed because of the day that my son and I had spent touring the tunnels at Cu Chi. If you’ve heard of these, you know the Vietminh dug 150 miles of underground tunnels, starting in the 1940s, where they hid and worked and went to school and gave birth while fighting the French. These are more than just passageways: these are command centers where battles were planned, makeshift hospitals where the wounded were treated, with some rooms several stories deep. The kitchens had my favorite touch: exhaust pipes that poked up miles away so the smoke would not give away their positions. From above ground, the tunnels are invisible—as harmless as the grease trap I never had at the first Black-Eyed Pea on Cedar Springs. It was just a hole in the floor where I poured grease. When health inspectors came around, I filled it with water and they walked right by.


In Cu Chi, as many as 10,000 people lived underground at one time. The discipline it took just to dig the tunnels with hand tools—sneaking out at night to dump the dirt, forcing a pipe upward through 40 feet of clay to open an air hole—boggles the mind. In the ’60s, these tunnels were taken over by the Viet Cong, who added gruesome booby traps for invaders. One wrong step and you fell into a pit with spikes at the bottom. Skinny American soldiers were sent down into the narrow openings of the tunnels to investigate, until we found out how dangerous that was. In 1966 I was skinny, cocky, and eager to prove myself. The guy sent down one of these tunnels could have been me.


It could’ve been me, and now I was in a hotel room in Saigon with my 37-year-old son, not sleeping, thinking about my kids and their lives and my life, thinking about what might have been.


• • •

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