EPICured

Another man might have taken that time to grieve or go into therapy, or at least stop to reflect on why life had turned sour.

Instead, Hall threw himself into opening a new restaurant. On Halloween 1992, he opened Todd's New American Cooking, which offered prix-fixe meals.

And again the reviews were raves. Howard Seftel wrote that "Todd's reminds you of the main motivation for eating out . . ." and "If there's better food elsewhere, it's not cheaper, if the food's cheaper, it's not better."

Hall's contemporaries speculate that if Hall had not been pursued by so many demons, the restaurant, on the basis of its food and its concept, might still be around today.

But Hall was stewing himself in cocaine.
And while cocaine makes most people hyper, it made the usually hyperactive Todd Hall drift into a mellow haze.

"It's a wonderful state," he says. "It numbs you."
His wife Stacey thought otherwise. "He got humble and it scared me because that wasn't like Todd," she says. "And he didn't talk, and that's not like him, either."

Because Todd and Stacey were terrified to let their surviving children out of their sight, they kept them close by and underfoot right in the restaurant. Things got scarier after New Year's when their financial backer pulled out, and Hall was forced to borrow money from his staffers to keep the doors open.

His escape from financial doom is nothing short of miraculous.
A regular customer of Todd's named Minnie Lane bailed him out:
"She said, 'Listen, you are dysfunctional and you need help,'" Hall relates. "'I can't make you do anything, but I would like you to just close the damn restaurant. If you have outstanding debts, I'll take care of those for you; just leave the area.'"

Hall contends she gave him tens of thousands of dollars. Lane, whose family owns Lane Furniture, admits that she paid his bills, but she would not comment on the amount.

"It was a gift," Lane says. "I'm happy to be in a position to do things like that."

(Lane also found a house for Hall to live in rent-free when he returned to Phoenix last month to look for a job.)

The Halls closed Todd's in May of 1993 and left Phoenix just as they had arrived, with their remaining possessions packed into a rental truck. Hall claims he cold-turkey left the cocaine problem behind.

They spent a year in Salt Lake City where they still had family. Hall helped reopen the Hotel Utah, where he had done his apprenticeship. Then he was lured to Bass Lake, California, to be chef at a well-known restaurant called Erna's Elderberry House. He found a house to rent 12 miles from the south gate of Yosemite National Park, with four and a half acres of wooded property and a milelong dirt road, "So no one would ever be hit by a car. No one would ever enter our property, no one would ever snatch my kids, no one would ever fall in the pool," he recalls.

If only he could have been protected from himself.

Hall left the Elderberry House after only five months; the restaurant owner, who identifies herself only as Erna, has nothing but good things to say about Hall's abilities.

"He has wonderful food," she says. "It has lots of flavor. He's creative. He's quick."

But she won't say anything about why he left.
"I'm only telling you that he's a good chef," she says. Then she corrects herself.

"No, I'll rephrase that: He's a very talented cook.
"What's the difference? Somebody who is conscientious all the time at work and there when you need them. Someone who takes control of the place."

Hall claims that he gave notice to Erna so that he could once again open his own place, and they quarreled over a special dinner she threw for a group of celebrity chefs. Whatever it was, he admits that when he opened a restaurant at a country club right down the road, he offered the same menu for $25 a plate less than Erna did.

Business was great, but the club closed down for the month of January, and so Hall decided to come back to Phoenix for a visit.

But first, he says, on January 22, 1995, he drove the 40 or so miles into Fresno for groceries and to buy knives for his kitchen and a new pair of shoes.

According to the story he told New Times, he was parking his car near a downtown mall when a female panhandler appeared at his car window and asked for money, which he gave to her. A moment later, he contends, she came back and asked for more, and when he took his money out, he suddenly saw a young black teenager pointing a .38 through the passenger window of the car, demanding he pass over all of his cash.