EPICured

By the next year, Hall had already moved to the neighboring Sedona resort, Los Abrigados, and the plaudits were accumulating. He was named a Rising Star of American Cuisine by the James Beard Foundation; in another James Beard award, Julia Child judged him to be one of the best hotel chefs in America. He won an Arizona competition in which chefs were all given the same box of foodstuffs and ask to create something on the spur of the moment.

The resort managers loved him; they leased a car for him because his credit was still reeling from bankruptcy. But all was not rosy.

"There's no doubt that he was very talented in our kitchen," says Edd Zielinski, who was his supervisor. "He was given free rein. However, he didn't have the maturity and the management skills that we required. He could tell people how to cook in the kitchen, but he wasn't a good business manager."

And, increasingly, his antics were embarrassing to the resort.
He commandeered the resort limo, for example, for a rolling, late-night beer party that visited some of the other resorts. Sedona is a world-renowned travel destination, but it is also a small town, and so Zielinski got a phone call from the chief of police.

One night at a special-event dinner, Hall prepared a course that did not go over well. He'd special-ordered wild-wood pigeons from Scotland that had been shot by hunters, then spent three and a half days removing the buckshot with tweezers.

If he had called the dish "squab," the evening might have gone without incident; before it was ever served, there was a buzz in the room about eating pigeon. Then, it arrived at the tables with some buckshot still in it, the blood-red meat served medium-rare.

"It was one of the most delicious things I've ever eaten in my life," Hall says, but it was perhaps too rarefied a taste for the Sedona guests.

Hall says that whenever he serves a meal, he waits by the dish machine to see what comes back uneaten.

"They all freaked," he says. "It was the first time in my career that I've ever had 98 of 100 plates come back untouched."

Hall freaked, too. The meal was being served to showcase a particular brand of champagne. Hall guzzled down five Styrofoam cups of it in a row.

The rest of the meal went flawlessly. After dinner, Hall apologized to the guests and made a crack that "You can take a guy to the park, but you can't make him eat pigeon."

Then he sat down to watch the after-dinner comedy show.
The featured comedian came right out of the chutes with five rapid-fire jokes about the pigeons.

"At which point, Todd got up in his chef's uniform," Zielinski remembers, "and went to the front of the stage--and this was in a room with a couple of hundred people--and began to exchange barbs with this comedian."

"I had no peripheral vision," says Hall. "I was in the room alone with this asshole who was making fun of my food. And I went up there and I said, 'By God, you can stand up there and make more money than I do in three months in one damned night, but let me tell you, I've been working on those fucking birds for four days, and I did the best I could and I failed. Is that so funny?"

The room fell silent, and Hall realized where he was and left the room, mortified.

"That was the day he told us he had a problem," Zielinski says, a substance-abuse problem, and the resort entered him in to and paid for a counseling program.

Hall claims that the counseling was for anger management, not alcohol abuse.
But then after a minor incident early in 1992, when the managers again sat Hall down for a chat, Hall announced that he was leaving Los Abrigados to return to 8700 in Scottsdale.

In August of 1992, Howard Seftel published a stellar review of Hall's cooking in New Times:

"The main dishes at 8700 are cleverly marketed under a variety of headings," he wrote, "making it seem as if there's something for just about everyone. Which there is. And it's all beautifully presented with an almost Japanese eye toward color, texture and arrangement. In the section marked 'American Comfort Foods,' we couldn't resist the game hen baked in Indian red-rock clay. . . . It arrived resembling a large loaf of bread, with the '8700' logo branded into the clay. The waiter cracked it open at the table, revealing a juicy whole bird wrapped in parchment, filled with outstanding blue-corn stuffing."

Hall was up to speed.
And then Cody died the next month.
On his first day back at 8700 after his son's funeral, Hall tangled with the restaurant's management over staffing, he says. The restaurant would not elaborate on the issue, but says that Hall was asked to leave. Hall says he walked out of a meeting and didn't go back.