Kitchen XXX-tra Confidential: What Do Restaurants Do Next to Your Food?

About a month ago, my pal William and I met at a popular old bar in Chelsea for a drink. We ordered some burgers and fries, angsted and drank, and the more we drank, the less we angsted. As the merriment drove us deep into the night and on through the wee hours of the morning, the crowd thinned out to a diehard few and the "closed" sign went up on the door.

We bellied up to the old wood slab, expecting the boot, but the bartender cordially asked if we'd like another round and of course we did. Was there a better place to be at 4:30 a.m.? We sipped the foam off our fresh new beers, relaxed and surveyed the crowd. A group of old barflies stood in a cluster by the wooden telephone booths, with fading blue collars and callused hands. Up toward us, two aging, overtly sexy vixens sat on the dog leg of the bar to our left. They were deep in chatter, well drinks in hand, smoking Virginia Slims, occasionally glancing over with a blink or smile. We struck up a conversation, which progressed uneventfully until "Lucy" suddenly announced she'd been in more than 250 porno movies and "Gretchen" here had just done her very first triple-X porn, and would we care to see it?

Will and I glanced at each other for a reality check. This wasn't some seedy dive on 14th St. This bar is a New York Institution. Before we had time to reply, Gretchen summoned the bartender, who happily complied, popping her VHS tape into the deck. After several raunchy trailers and a lot of shushing, the feature presentation hit the screen. It was a detective mystery, complete with 1940s gumshoe costuming, murky lighting and cigarette holders. The acting was stupendous, the dialogue sublime, but, cutting to the chase (as XXX pornos are wont to do), we were soon looking at, mise en scene, this aging neophyte porn star watching herself getting plowed by her overweight, red-titted Slavic costar wearing a gigantic strap-on dildo.

We were shocked to say the least. But we were also intrigued. Who doesn't wonder, walking around the streets of New York, what this or that person might look like naked? Or better (worse?) what they might look like fucking?

"I haven't heard the bar this quiet since we screened Citizen Kane!" bellowed a ruddy-faced regular, breaking the ice, as a closeup revealed the dildo's destination, the essence of Gretchen's mystery: a dark amber parabola of hair framing a hole that seemed to go in forever.

"Cock looks real enough!" the bartender barked critically, wiping a beer spigot with his towel. "But there's something very wrong with those balls!"

And sure enough, the rubber member was long, wide and realistic in all respects (including an artistically inspired, anatomically correct vein running lengthwise up the shaft), but the scrotum was a front with no back. The scrotal facade, as it were, hid a flat, smooth edge where the eye expected (yearned?) to see a full rounded ball sac from behind. This was obviously a low-budget shoot, I thought to myself, but "A" for effort. After all, it was only her first porno.

The plot turned and thickened when the Dick, a real dick, the Dick's dick, entered the bawdy narrative. Grunts of recognition came from the raucous crowd. Apparently (news to me and William) this was another bartender's day job.

"Now that's a real cock there!" an Archie Bunker lookalike raved, enthusiastic.

"Isn't it a great cock?" Gretchen crooned back, above the fray. "It's so long and thick! I just adore that cock!"

"Does he come in your face?" a potbelly inquired from down the bar.

"Be serious," Gretchen shot back, indignant. "I never let a man come in my face on camera. Not even Joe. It's a question of self-respect."

"We'll see about that after you do another 20 triple-X pornos, honey," the veteran warned her naive friend sagely.

More antics ensued. Elements of composition and style were bandied about the room as the tit-fucking, pussy-licking, ass-ramming and genital-slapping shenanigans built to an energetic crescendo: a no-holds-barred, good old-fashioned blowjob.

"Would you look how clean our kitchen looks!" the bartender crowed merrily.

We all suddenly realized this video had been shot in the tavern's very own kitchen.

"Just look at those metal counters sparkle and shine!" he chirped, as Gretchen blew her bare-assed hubby on the steel prep counter next to a stack of china plates and a bin full of setups.

My mood grew somber during a rousing finale as she sucked her sweaty husband's knob into ecstatic release all over her breasts, positioned ominously close to the plates we'd been eating off of all evening. I suddenly blanched at the memory of the food we'd ordered that night.

Note to self: no more bar food. Ever. No more choking down those gamy burgers, cheese melts and fries in NYC bars (no matter how famous) with kitchens used for who-knows-what.

My mind started reeling with a matrix of horrific possibilities. If the staff and associates of a famous New York watering hole could film pornos on the food prep tables to cover their monthly nuts, why wouldn't the staff and associates of other bars and restaurants in the city? They have bills and pipe dreams too. The seedy underbelly of restaurant life revealed in Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential never once hints at the risk of finding poon juice in the prune juice. And what about Chinese food? What are the real ingredients of those vegetarian eggrolls I eat every day for lunch? My whole life, I've worried about "pork" the noun. Now suddenly I'm worrying about "pork" the verb.

I stood up. William was quick to follow. We congratulated Gretchen on her wonderful performance, bid farewell and beat a hasty retreat out the side door. One look at William was all it took to know we were both thinking the same thing. It was like a really bad acid trip. A mind-expanding evening had suddenly morphed into a harrowing adventure of totally unexpected, highly paranoid revelation.

"I think I'll be eating at home for a while," I told William. He nodded in agreement. And with that, we walked down 7th Ave. to the subway, where William caught the L back to Brooklyn and I got on my bike and rode home to the Village.