TRICKY DICK'S COFFEE HOUSE: 1) READY, FIRE, AIM

A Throwback Thursday Serial About Living in London in the '70s

Note to Readers: There are three more Corruption in Monaco installments. They will appear tomorrow, Sunday and Monday.

This new serial will appear Thursdays.

In the late 1980s I worked as a literary agent in New York City.

I had been an investigative reporter in London but discovered after relocating to the USA that freelance on this side of the pond was little more than a euphemism for unemployed.

In Britain, newsrooms were full of freelancers doing “day-shifts” and counted on for bringing in stories. But here, newsrooms were overstaffed—and freelancers were reduced to making a hobby of collecting rejection slips.

Part of a literary agent’s job is taking acquisition editors from book publishers out to lunch. It was important to know what sort of genres and titles any given editor was looking to acquire. Wining and dining them was the best way to find out.

One such editor I got to know was Meg Blackstone, then at E.P. Dutton.

Dining with Meg at some trendy new brasserie in midtown Manhattan we somehow ventured into my background in London and I regaled her with tales about Tricky Dick’s, a coffee house I created (an accidental spinoff from the family bakery business) and ran on-and-off near the end of and beyond my second decade on this planet during the mid-1970s.

Meg seemed riveted by the quirky characters I spoke of and suggested I write a book about it.

I did not consider myself much of a writer back then, which is why I was representing authors rather than doing it myself. (As a journalist I enjoyed research and investigation but had not yet found my writer’s voice.)

So: All these decades later, here is the Tricky Dick’s story, dedicated to the very inspiring and warm-hearted Meg Blackstone, to whom I am deeply grateful for believing me worthy of becoming a writer.

The plan was that there was no plan; the ready, fire, aim approach that was my life back then.  

I was 19, out of high school, not yet in college, putting it off a year. 

The date was 1974. The setting, London. 

Five years earlier my parents had transplanted our family from the hills of Beverly in Southern California into the British capital. We had arrived for a three-week summer vacation and simply did not return, swapping sunny blue skies for clouds and rain at little more than my father’s whim.  

Maybe he was suffering mid-life crisis.  That phrase wasn't yet fashionable but he was mid-40s, three boys to feed, entrepreneurial and I guess he saw a last chance at grabbing a hold of life before it grabbed a hold of him.

As I look back now, it should have been more traumatic.  The house and all material things I had known as a child—boxes of baseball cards (Pete Rose as a rookie, Mickey Mantle as a 1962 MVP, worth thousands now)— junked. But it wasn’t. 

My father returned on his own, sold the house, gave the dog away and held a garage sale.  

Goodbye ranch house and neighborhood with friends, traded for a Knightsbridge apartment over the Scotch House (woolens and cashmeres) with an inverted view of a shopping arcade's rain-stained glass roof.

Our former neighbors must have wondered if my father had ground his wife and three sons into pig meat.  (No one called the cops.)

It was a rough year, starting with an English comprehensive school, very different from Beverly High 90210.  And if you needed a pint of milk or a loaf of bread past 5:30 in the afternoon or on Sunday, you were plum out of luck.  

Soon, enterprising Pakistanis and Indians (“uncivilized barbarians," they were called) would open “late-night” (till 9 o’clock) convenience stores and as a consequence be victimized in bad neighborhoods by “Paki-bashing” skinheads wearing Dr. Martin boots.

As the dark, rainy months unfolded, my father's entrepreneurial project disintegrated. But a new business idea began to germinate in his mind, as conceived by my mother. 

There were always a dozen such conceptions in my dad’s head as he fought the clock, so no one took him too seriously.  

If you want to make money, you're supposed to find a gap and fill it. My parents soon discovered such a gap. In London's continental-style delis, run mostly by Israelis, you'd find German or Austrian cheesecake albeit unpleasantly laced with sultanas, lemon rind and grit.  

My mother's own recipe for a New York-style sour cream-topped cake had been the envy of her women's circle in California. I remember as a kid opening the fridge and staring at her luscious cheesecake every quarter-year when it was her turn to entertain “the girls."  I recall these occasions because it meant a thorough hair brushing and face scrubbing for my younger brother, Michael, and me.  (We would run but we could not hide…).

Our family visited the Hard Rock Cafe a few weeks after it opened in June 1971 and for dessert ordered one slice of cheesecake between us. (These were lean times).

Sara Lee frozen gunk appeared.  

My father bolted from his chair and delivered a proclamation:  "This country needs real American cheesecake!" 

Thus inspired, he ran off and collared the owner, Peter Morton, a dark, sinewy kid of 23—another refugee from LA.  "This stuff isn't fit for roaches."  My father held up a plate of picked-at Sara Lee.  "My wife can make you real cheesecake."

"Do you have a bakery?" asked Morton.

"No."  

"Have you ever made cakes before?" 

"No."  

(Details like these never bothered my father.)  

Morton must have seen the desperation in my father’s eyes.  Because by this time our family’s money was running out and, entrepreneurially, my dad had already been pitched the proverbial two strikes.  

"Bring me a cheesecake," sniffed Morton.  "I'll let you know."

My mother baked a spectacular cheesecake and my father rushed it down to Hard Rock. 

After three days he called Peter Morton for a verdict.

"Cheesecake? What cheesecake?" 

It had never got past the kitchen staff, which devoured it in one tea break—a good omen.

My father ran a second cake down and handed it personally to Morton’s partner, Isaac Tigrett, who telephoned the next day and said:  "Awesome, man, I'll take five cakes tomorrow and five every day after that!"

So in the summer of ‘71 my parents rushed out to buy pots and pans and mixers and utensils and in a closet-sized kitchen my mother began baking five cakes a day in an oven built for two.

My father delivered the cakes in a battered sedan.  

My grandmother scrubbed pie pans. And my brother and I earned pocket money grinding McVities biscuits (the Graham Cracker’s British cousin) in an old milk shake mixer, an Osterizer, one of the few appliances shipped from California, which required an electrical current transformer larger than itself to avoid electrocuting ourselves or blowing up the house. 

My father soon picked up a half-dozen new customers including Richoux (a fancy Mayfair coffee shop) and Continental (a Charing Cross Road deli). Word of mouth brought a few others into our fold: the Playboy Club and several West End hotel restaurants.  

Within a few weeks my mother was baking 40 cakes a day, from six in the morning till eight at night, seven days a week. 

I'd eat cheesecake for breakfast and come home from the American School in London (ASL) each afternoon to four long rows of cooling cheesecakes inside the living room. 

Somehow, my mother found time to give cheesecake a sister:  Apple cake spiced with cinnamon. With that also in demand, my parents became desperate for commercial premises.  

Aside from space restraints, what they were doing (operating a catering enterprise out of their home) was probably unlawful.  It was certainly impractical.  As for business licenses, name registrations and other official nonsense—who had time for that?

They found a small shop on Finchley Road, an artery that connects central London to the northwest suburbs.  It sold light-fixtures, explaining its religious ceiling: Holy.

And they settled on a name:  Kaysens Cheesecake.  (Later, just plain Kaysens.)

(For the first few months they called themselves Chasen's Cheesecake. Until a trademark lawyer cautioned that the famous West Hollywood restaurant might one day object.)

The first production team at Kaysens comprised of Fahmi, a young Kuwaiti with a lisp my father poached out the back door of Lindy's bakery in Golder's Green; Lalit, an Indian baker's apprentice, part of a deal my father hatched with Lalit's older brother to buy broken McVitie's biscuits out the back gate of the Harlsden factory where they were produced; and Simon, a bearded, 6'6 tall Englishman with Marxist pretensions. 

It was Simon's job to deliver cakes in a tiny Austin mini-van.   He would contort his tall, gawky frame behind the wheel of the toy-sized vehicle, his long unkempt curly hair flattened like an iron against the van's ceiling.

Brunch in the bakehouse, usually 11 o’clock, was an anarchist's picnic.  Production would grind to a halt while my father and Fahmi would fry a dozen eggs and a pound of thick English bacon on an old stove in the corner. Simon always made it back for breakfast, even if it meant interrupting his route.

Fahmi would nab whatever cooking utensils he needed from next door, a raunchy rundown restaurant called One Dollar Bill, owned by an Israeli named Abe who slept all day and worked late at night to avoid creditors and debt collectors.

Before becoming One Dollar Bill the restaurant was called Gigi and remembered by local shopkeepers only for its late hours.  Precious little else was open past midnight in London back then aside from the nightclubs and clip joints in Soho. Gigi had capitalized on this with some kind of special late-night license that everyone took for granted.  

I had fleeting memories of seeing Gigi bustle, not understanding what it was about when I jumped off a Number 26 bus that deposited me close to home after an evening's booze-up down the Marylebone pubs (Hennekey's, the Queen's Head, later, The Aristocrats) where underage ASL teen males drank pints of Double Diamond beer on Friday and Saturday nights and the young ladies drank “vodka and lime” (Rose’s lime juice).

Lore along our plaza of seven shops—including a butcher and a bodega—was that Gigi had been successfully run by an Austrian couple who served good food and encouraged backgammon tournaments.  They built up a trade and sold the lease to Abe, who ran it as a hobby—and into the ground.

My first time inside One Dollar Bill was with a few ASL chums.  Abe’s majordomo dragged us in from the street, his pay obviously derived from such aggressive tactics.  It was empty and sad and the menu proclaimed, The old management welcomes you back. 

I was with Clas, a Swedish buddy, and Amy, from Columbus, Ohio. Every autumn you'd harvest a new set of friends at ASL; every summer you'd say goodbye, in most cases, forever.  (Years later, you discover those brief friendships are among your most treasured.)

We sat in One Dollar Bill, amused by majordomo scurrying around, making a big deal over three hot chocolates and a toasted cheese sandwich.  And we pumped coins into a neglected jukebox and listened to Don McLean sing Starry, Starry Night three or four times.

Back to Fahmi, the erratic and free-spending Kuwaiti baker.  He'd take us (my ASL friends) to The Purple Pussycat, a Finchley Road discotheque, after the pubs closed at 11 p.m. and pay everyone's cover, trying in vain to strike a spark with one of the teenage girls in our clique.  

By summer, Fahmi was gone and the bakehouse was lumbered with his childhood friend, Nabil, a Jordanian, who spoke not a syllable of English but was big and strong and could carry heavy crates of tinned apples from the street to the shop basement for storage.

When I ventured to Sweden with Clas in July and returned home broke my mother put me to work in the bakehouse where I scrubbed cheesecake tins for a buck an hour.  The first day I worked five hours. Come evening, dog-tired but euphoric, I met Bob Miller and other ASL buddies at the pub inside St. John's Wood tube station and drank bottled Holsten lager, paid for with money I'd actually earned. 

It tasted damn good that way.