My worst job ever? That’s easy.
It was 1995, and I was transitioning from making my own magazine to dedicating myself to a new band. I lived on the corner of First Avenue and E. 10th Street in Manhattan, and my rent was $550 a month — which, at the time, was kind of big deal! I needed a bookmark job, basically. Something to hold the page until I was ready turn it.
Mark Israel was an old friend from my days of living as a Hare Krishna monk in Brooklyn — he came to our vegetarian Sunday Feasts every weekend and endeared himself to pretty much everybody — so when he asked if I wanted to help him with his new doughnut business, which had become too difficult to be a one-man operation anymore, I jumped at the chance. I mean, for one, his doughnuts are fucking incredible. But more than that, Mark’s initiative was inspiring and he always seemed to make the impossible possible. Like the time he actually convinced his Lower East Side tenement landlord to let him convert the basement of his apartment building into a commercial kitchen: That’s the kind of old-time New York City DIY fairytale you’ll likely never hear again. I’d already done indie publishing and indie rock; I wanted to be an indie doughnut guy.
But! Some things I didn’t realize until I took the job: Do you remember those old Dunkin’ Donuts commercials where the guy wakes up in the middle of the night and sleepwalks his way into the kitchen muttering, “It’s time to make the doughnuts?” It was kind of like that. My new schedule required waking up at midnight and being at work by 1 a.m., at which point Mark was already awake and working on the dough. For the next four hours, I helped roll and cook and glaze the doughnuts, while Mark and I spoke about our lives, our ambitions, and the hard road of doing it yourself.
At 6 o’clock, I’d get on a bike with bags of doughnuts hanging from every possible hook — front baskets, back baskets, handlebars, and my free hand — and I’d ride all over the city, delivering them to a half-dozen gourmet grocery stores. Somehow, Mark had been doing this all by himself for the past several months. His drive was becoming increasingly inconceivable to me. Because despite the open secret that this was a miserable way to live, Mark Israel never really complained.
A little over a week after I started, as I was riding my bike to the Gourmet Garage in Soho, a cab clipped the handlebars and the bike itself slipped out from underneath me. I jumped out onto a parked car as I watched a steady stream of doughnuts flying out of their boxes and into the air, falling like sugary hail into the middle of Houston Street. I couldn’t help but laugh. I knew it was over, that I’d walk the damaged bike back to the Lower East Side and tell Mark that I couldn’t do this anymore. I simply had to quit. He was gracious as always, but I never got over the feeling that I let him down.
Sixteen years later, Mark Israel’s Doughnut Plant is one of the most revered pastry institutions in New York City — and the world really, including Japan, where there are ten stores alone! — and last Wednesday night, he showed up on Top Chef: Just Desserts as the guest judge for a doughnut challenge. It was wonderful to watch, but from my perspective, Mark was generous with his critiques. If any of these competing pastry chefs were told they’d have to go through what he went through in the 1990s to get past their elimination challenge, I have no doubt: They’d all go home, just like I did.
