VANITIES MAGAZINE: I’m struck by the fact that you rented a storefront without knowing what sort of business you were going to open.
GUS ANDRES: Well, why not? The rent was cheap—$45 a month—which Randy and I split. I knew we would come up with something.
VANITIES MAGAZINE: It was a different city back then, wasn’t it?
GUS ANDRES: It was a wonderful time. More innocent. For starters, you simply didn’t have ancient people like me toddling around. People dropped dead at a decent age back then, 60 or 65. And there were all of these soldiers coming back from overseas, just spilling into the city. You cannot comprehend the level of optimism we felt at that particular moment. The country had been through so much in such a short amount of time: The First World War, then the Depression, then World War II. But in 1946 our future looked bright. We had defeated Fascism. We had saved the Free World. And now the soldiers that survived were home and the economy was good and New York was booming. It was simply a heady, heady time to be alive.
VANITIES MAGAZINE: But you did not serve overseas.
GUS ANDRES: Heart murmur.
VANITIES MAGAZINE: How did you feel about that?
GUS ANDRES: When the U.S. joined the Allied forces, I weighed maybe 95 pounds, wet. I don’t think I would have done much good fighting with our boys. What I was good at was selling war bonds at the theaters during Intermission. In that way I contributed.
VANITIES MAGAZINE: Back to the restaurant. You told Alice Stone you were opening a restaurant together and she said?
GUS ANDRES: She was a very savvy woman. She said, “Make me part-owner.”
VANITIES MAGAZINE: Which you did.
GUS ANDRES: Yes, and then she came and sat in the garden with us and we started dreaming up ideas for the café. It was her notion that we should serve a prix fixe menu. She just thought it would be easier, which it was.
VANITIES MAGAZINE: Did Alice Stone have any culinary training?
GUS ANDRES: A childhood of eating with the seasons on a farm in North Carolina. And the most astute palate of anyone I have ever met. Give Alice a taste of anything and she will immediately tell you what it is missing. I can hear her now: Grind in some pepper, grate a little orange zest, add a pinch of salt, throw in a splash of vinegar, let the dough rest for five minutes before kneading it again. Any culinary problem, Alice had a fix. I suppose her official training was the copy of Escoffier that we bought her, from which she learned to make all of the French sauces—though of course she never bothered much with sauce espagnole, which simply takes hours and hours to prepare.
VANITIES MAGAZINE: Under Chef Alice Stone the restaurant became renowned for its excellent cuisine. What are some of the specialties of the house?
GUS ANDRES: Her mousse of course. She made both a lemon and a bittersweet chocolate mousse, and you could choose one or the other for dessert. When we first opened we served the mousse French-style, in big bowls, passed around the table along with softly whipped cream. You simply scooped out what you wanted. It was divine. I couldn’t serve it that way anymore, of course. Either the health department would shut me down or some terribly fat man wearing a T-shirt and sneakers would come in and treat dessert as an all-you-can-eat contest. And then there was Alice’s roast duck with green olives. She only served it once the weather turned cold, but come November clients would start calling up, asking if it was duck season yet.
VANITIES MAGAZINE: Miss Stone worked at Café Andres from 1946 to 1965. Why did she leave? Was there any sort of falling-out between the two of you?
GUS ANDRES: Well, goodness, she was at the café for 19 years. That is a long time to remain at a restaurant, if you ask me, especially one with a prix fixe menu. You can imagine how weary she must have grown preparing the same dish again and again, night after night. Working on Homegrown gave her some distraction, but it didn’t last forever. Plus she had married the most tiresome sort of man, an absolute bore if you must know, and he was jealous of all the time she spent away from home, and so she decided to dedicate herself to him exclusively. She divested her ownership, and she and her husband moved upstate and began an organic farm.
VANITIES MAGAZINE: She began an organic farm in 1965? It’s astounding how ahead of her time she was.
GUS ANDRES: Well, I don’t know if she used the term “organic” or not. She was simply working the earth the way her relatives in North Carolina did. She wanted to grow the best vegetables she possibly could. She was forever haunted by how much better food tasted when she was a child. She’s an interesting bird, that Alice: a wonderful mélange of New York bohemian and sweet, southern country girl.
VANITIES MAGAZINE: Alice was from the South, and you have already mentioned that the café was a refuge for southern writers, especially during the late 40s and 50s. Why do you think southern expatriates were so drawn to the café?
GUS ANDRES: I think it has something to do with the fact that time moves so slowly at Café Andres. To get to the restaurant you must first walk down a long hall. I like to say that the hall serves as the portal to another time and place, like going through the wardrobe to C. S. Lewis’s Narnia. Once you actually step inside you forget the nagging details of your everyday life. I can’t tell you how many of my customers, when going through a divorce, ate lunch at the café every single day during their ordeal, claiming that it was the only place where they felt calm. When I hear southerners reminisce about sitting on the front porch, sipping a drink and watching fireflies, I think it must be an experience similar to what we offer. And we pay careful attention to detail at Café Andres, which I think is a southern thing as well. I am always saying to Randy, “Where would we be in life without our garnishes?” Beauty is so crucial. Why glop on the sauce when you can spoon it over the roast chicken just so? Why bruise the basil when you can so easily avoid that by making sure every leaf is dry and using a good sharp knife to cut it into a chiffonade? Why discard the leaves on a stalk of celery you plan to put on a crudités platter when the leaves—though you wouldn’t want to eat them—add such an air of whimsy and art?
Shakespeare was right, all of life is a stage, but that is especially true of a restaurant. And I think it’s also true of the southern experience. There is a lot of playacting going on in the South. A whole lot of acting indeed. And we all know how deeply eccentric southerners are. As Truman Capote might say, Mama could have shot at Daddy with her pistol over breakfast, but that doesn’t mean the two of them won’t put on their finest and enjoy dinner out at Galatoire’s that night.
VANITIES MAGAZINE: Yet your menu never offered southern food. Why?
GUS ANDRES: I apologize for bringing up Truman again, but it makes me think of how he used to drive Alice mad with his requests for her to make him fried chicken, like his cook at home used to do. She would say to him, “I am not your mammy!” So there was that. And can you blame Alice for being sensitive of the fact that she was cooking for an almost entirely white clientele, with the occasional exception of Jimmy Baldwin? And also, we opened the café in the late 1940s, when “sophisticated food” meant French cuisine. Had we served collard greens and fried chicken, we would have lasted a day. So Alice cooked with a French influence and a southerner’s innate sense of seasonality.
She was the first person I ever met who simply refused to serve raw tomatoes anytime but in the dead of summer. Alice made a wonderful Boeuf Bourguignon, a real customer favorite, but she would only prepare it November through the beginning of March, no matter how often people begged for it year-round. Same with her roast duck with green olives. She was very stubborn that way, very particular about how you should eat and why. And perhaps being stubbornly opinionated about how and when food should be consumed is a more southern trait than whether or not you fry green tomatoes or pickle watermelon rind or eat—I don’t know—pimento cheese.
VANITIES MAGAZINE: Let’s talk about your friend Randall Jones, who you mentioned is a well-known photographer. He photographed several of the more famous artists from the resta
urant, didn’t he?
GUS ANDRES: His photographs remain my most treasured possessions.
VANITIES MAGAZINE: The two of you own a house together on Fire Island.
GUS ANDRES: Well, neither of us could afford to own on our own.
VANITIES MAGAZINE: But he is your partner in every sense of the word, yes?
GUS ANDRES: I see no reason why this line of questioning has any relevance.
VANITIES MAGAZINE: I apologize if I offended you, but the question is relevant. Many from your list of famous clients—Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Carson McCullers—were not only southern but also bisexual or homosexual. Why did they all flock to you?
GUS ANDRES: I don’t even know where to begin to address your impudence, but I’ll start here. The most important piece of information about an artist is not whom he or she invites into his or her bed! Such thinking drives me mad, as if sex is the single and solitary defining thing about a creative person. Read Breakfast at Tiffany’s, my dear. Read In Cold Blood. The exactitude of Capote’s prose, the simplicity of his language that captures the hidden melancholy in all of us . . . this is what is lasting of Truman. This and only this!
VANITIES MAGAZINE: Okay, clearly I’ve struck a nerve, so let’s move on. Who was the most exciting celebrity to walk through the café’s door?
GUS ANDRES: Gold star! Excellent question! Well, let’s see: It was always such a thrill when Jackie O came, as much to see what she was wearing as anything else. But I will tell you, one of the most charming memories I have is when Madeleine L’Engle arrived at the restaurant with her handsome husband, Hugh Franklin. They were both such tall people. She had a rather imperious way about her, softened by her eyes, which had the innocence of a child. They came for dinner one night shortly after the restaurant had opened. I’d be surprised if she were 30. She stood ramrod straight at the host station. I came up to her chest, mind you, which put me right at the eyes of her black fur stole. The eyes on the stole were almond shaped, seemingly alive, and then they blinked! I admit, I let out a little shriek of fright. And Madeleine stroked her stole and said, “Oh, Touché, I thought you were a better actor than that!” It turned out Touché was her poodle, draped around her shoulder to look like a wrap, a trick that Madeleine employed when she needed to take the dog on the subway.
Of course I let her bring the dog to the table. I just decided then and there that the health inspector was not going to walk through the door that night. Madeleine said Touché could stay wrapped around her shoulder the whole evening—that the dog truly was a trained actor—but I said, “No, no, let her curl up beneath the table.” We were a favorite of the Franklins after that, though they moved a year or two later to some falling-down place out in the country.
VANITIES MAGAZINE: Many people have called Café Andres the Elaine’s of its day.
GUS ANDRES: I have heard that comparison made, but it is utterly spurious. For starters, Elaine’s is not known for its food, and we are. But more importantly, back when it was a celebrity haunt Café Andres was a secret place for people who knew how to have a good time. It was not a place to see and be seen. In fact, it was the opposite of that. There were no cameramen lurking outside to take one’s picture, like at the Stork Club. Anytime I got wind that a restaurant reviewer was on the premises I bribed him not to make his review too prominent. We were very selective about who we wanted dining there—though it had nothing to do with one’s level of fame. Not like at Elaine’s, not at all. At Café Andres a charming imp from the Village could get as good a seat as Diana Vreeland. The café was not a place to do business, not a place to social climb. It was a place to while away a few hours in the company of interesting, entertaining people.
VANITIES MAGAZINE: Well, that certainly sounds lovely.
GUS ANDRES: It was. It was a precious, precious time. A time I yearn for still.
8
Letter Home
January 1, 1982
Dear Meemaw,
It is a new year, and life is changing fast. I am apprenticing to become a chef, and I have an apartment—a studio—about which Mike gives me all kinds of hell (sorry, heck) because I don’t have to put up with a roommate like he does. I tell him that it’s a dump, that the only thing good about it is that it’s near the café, but the truth is it has an incredible kitchen, unheard of for an apartment its size.
The studio is not the sort of place I would have found on my own. It’s not the sort of place you find without a connection. Gus Andres, my boss, found it for me. His friend Randy knew someone who knew someone who was moving out, and I was able to slide into the unit without any change in rent. It’s a little tricky, because I never actually signed a lease. The super, who lives in the basement, knows I am here, so I don’t have to sneak around or anything, but I do try to fix any small things that need repair, so as to not make unnecessary demands on him. Makes me grateful that Daddy taught me that stuff, actually. Makes me grateful that I know my way around a toolbox.
Speaking of Daddy: He has started phoning me, every few weeks. We speak very briefly. Mostly he just tells me what is happening with Hunter and Troy and Mama. In a nutshell, Troy is doing great (he’s engaged), Hunter is doing fine (he’s in “real estate development,” whatever that means), and Mama is being Mama as always. Apparently she has become even more involved with Lacy Lovehart’s Save Our Sons campaign. I told Daddy that I really didn’t want to hear about any of that, and he was actually pretty respectful and switched topics, telling me instead about the Mississippi mud cake that Mama made for his birthday. “Lot of candles on that cake,” Daddy joked, and I pretended to laugh, but it made me sad. Daddy offered to fly me home for Thanksgiving, but I told him I couldn’t get off work. That was a lie, Meemaw, a flat-out lie. Gus is closing the café for a week over the Thanksgiving holiday, and he’ll shut down for two weeks over Christmas. It’s crazy the schedule he keeps. He says he has a “gypsy” soul and can’t be tied down for too long. I told him I could run the place while he went away, but he said no, he believes the café needs a rest just like the rest of us, that “the fields should lie fallow.” He and Randy are going to Morocco over Christmas and suggested I come along. Honestly I think they just want me to carry their luggage. They’re both really old, though both quite spry. Maybe it was dumb, but I turned him down. Thought I’d just stay in the city over the holidays.
Back to my apartment. It’s a fifth-floor walk-up on East 58th between First and Second, right by the entrance to the Queensboro Bridge. The apartment faces the street, meaning traffic roars past my window day and night, which is one of the reasons why the rent is so cheap. That and the landlord hasn’t done anything to improve the place in twenty years. Utilities are included in the rent, but the landlord is stingy as Scrooge when it comes to heating the place. (I have never felt as cold in my life as I have this winter.) The first really cold night I spent here my breath condensed into white chilly puffs, even though I was inside, but then I had the bright idea to cook something, and of course that warmed everything right up.
Because that’s the thing about this place, the bizarre, wonderful, weird thing: It has a fabulous kitchen, which is, frankly, unheard of for a studio apartment in a run-down old building. In the building’s better days, back in the 50s, a family was renting the two-bedroom apartment adjacent to my little studio. According to Gus, the woman living in the two-bedroom started giving cooking lessons out of her own kitchen and this aggravated her husband, who hated coming home from work with a bunch of strange ladies crowding his home, sipping cocktails and making idle chatter. But his wife was a really good cook and a really good teacher and did not want to give up the gig. So as a compromise they rented the neighboring apartment—my studio—and made it into her “cooking school.” Now from what I gather, the cooking school was nothing more than a chance for Upper East Side ladies to giggle and gossip while a meal was prepared in front of them. And then they would eat their crepes or their chicken Kiev or whatever and go home dru
nk and happy. Gus jokes that what those ladies learned besides the lubricating nature of alcohol he will never know, but the end result is that I have a six-burner Wolf oven in my tiny studio.
Also bizarre is why the woman left the stove when she moved out and why the landlord allowed her to do so, as it makes the apartment all stove, that plus a wooden counter long enough to fit a twin mattress on top of. (Which I swear I considered doing when I first moved in!) But I resisted the urge to sleep in the kitchen, instead using the thin twin mattress already in the sleeping loft, reached by a ladder. Other than that, there’s a doll-sized bathroom whose sink has separate faucets for hot and cold—meaning it’s a real pain to wash my face—and a shower so tiny I have to squeeze to fit in it.
Were she at all inclined to visit, I believe that Mama would be proud that the kitchen is the absolute center of the apartment. The kitchen was certainly the center of our Decatur home. And just as Mama did—probably still does—I cook pretty much every meal I eat, unless I eat at the café. I don’t mind cooking all my meals, but even if I did, there’s really not another option. I’m not as broke as I was when I first moved to the city, but each month my bank balance gets awfully close to zero. Not that I don’t treat myself to a Papaya King hotdog sometimes, or maybe a falafel sandwich from a street vendor. And occasionally Gus will take me somewhere nice to “develop my palate,” but that’s rare. Though I can’t afford anything sold at them, I do love wandering through the fancy gourmet markets, especially the one at Bloomingdale’s. That place is so amazing, Meemaw. You have never seen so much good stuff in one place. I looked for Schrafft’s when I first got here—wanting to eat a butterscotch sundae like the one you told me about—but I think they’ve all shut down. Mostly I shop at this really cheap grocery store I found in Spanish Harlem. They sell cheap cuts of meat—oxtail, trotters, and pigs’ ears—as well as all varieties of offal. (I always think of you, Meemaw, when eating livers, think of you eating them every Sunday after church at The Colonnade.) I like to poke around the Asian markets, too, bringing home gingerroot, lemongrass, fish sauce, dehydrated shrimp, wonton wrappers, dozens of different chilies, and soft little candies wrapped in rice paper that dissolves in your mouth. As a special treat I go to the green market in Union Square on the weekends—which is a farmer’s market smack-dab in the middle of downtown. Even though I really can’t afford the produce, I’ll often splurge anyway, arriving home with one or two perfect things—carrots the color of rubies with bright springy tops, or a little bag of fingerling potatoes, their skins delicate and golden.
A Place at the Table: A Novel Page 12