Book Birthday – The Cook and the Gangster

Happy Book Birthday!!

The Cook and the Gangster came out February 22, 2022!!

The Cook and the Gangster was inspired, in part, by a visit I made with a friend to Tarrytown, NY. We’d gone there to measure the footprint of the remains of the Spratt Mansion which, among many other things, was the basis for the Old House in the TV soap opera Dark Shadows.

If you said I was obsessed with the Spratt Mansion, you’d be making an understatement and them some! We spent the entire weekend with a sheet of grid paper and one of those long metal tape measure thingys – a few months later, we got the actual footprint for the building and found that we were only about a foot off. (Keep in mind we were measuring a pile of rubble made of concrete and rusty pipes….)

We stayed in a Super8 in Nyack and every day we’d drive across the bridge to the site and measure. One day…this is how it all relates…we went to an Italian restaurant in Sleepy Hollow.

The restaurant (I think) was next to the animal hospital on Broadway but is no longer there. I could not find a single record of the place ever having existed and – you know me – I searched!

So okay…we went into that restaurant and sat down. They didn’t put us near the windows even though we were the only people in the place. It was around noon on a lovely weekend…but the place was empty.

A nice waitress sat us, and, as was usual with me, I wanted to discuss the menu with her. Had she tried the Chicken Balslamico, I asked? She shook her head and (I will never forget this) said, “We’re not allowed to eat the food.” (In my experience, waitstaff are encouraged to eat the food so they can talk about it, right?)

I looked around again at the empty restaurant…near the back was a bar – there was a TV over the bar, and beyond the bar was an open door to what I assumed was the kitchen – but later heard, oh, I don’t know, another TV going with what sounded like a horse race.

I ordered the chicken balsamico which was amazing! Basically grilled chicken in a balsamic vinegar and red wine sauce, though I have been unable to find a recipe on the internet that matches what I had that day. I am still looking.

But I digress…

Halfway through our meal, a gentleman walked in. He was – I kid you not – wearing a dark velour jumpsuit with gold chains around his neck. In his hand he had a bulging paper bag. He went into the back and five minutes later, he came out and the paper bag in his hand was flat.

I looked at my friend and explained to her what had just happened. She didn’t believe me. But what had happened explained everything else….you don’t really need to have a working restaurant if that’s not how you make your money! Still, I am dreaming about that chicken balsamico…. (I like to think that one guy screamed at another guy and said, “Just make the damn chicken balsamico!!!” even though they really didn’t have any cooks back there….)

And the restaurant stuck in my mind and became the basis for the restaurant “The Three Cassidys” which Cassidy Lane works at, which he is working at when he sees the snippet of a documentary and finds his one true, long lost love, Levi.

Most of the Dark Shadows references in the story are based on things I actually saw and experienced.