Secret Ingredients

by David Remnick

  Vichyssoise is only one of several hundred dishes Diat has originated. These include Chicken Gloria Swanson (sautéed chicken cooked in white wine and cream, served with creamed mushrooms and sliced cooked tomatoes, and garnished with rice and truffles); Breast of Guinea Hen Jefferson (guinea hen with ham, creamed tomatoes, beignets of wild rice, and a whiskey sauce); Lobster Albert (stuffed lobster gratiné, with mushrooms and a sauce half American, half bonne femme); Lobster Washington (like Newburg, but cooked with whiskey instead of sherry); Fillet of Sole Lincoln (cooked with oysters, shrimps, and sauce bonne femme); Pears Mary Garden (stewed pears with raspberry ice and raspberry sauce); Pears Geraldine Farrar (ditto with orange ice and apricot sauce); and Coeur Flottant Grace Moore (a vanilla-and-chocolate-mousse concoction). “I named the guinea-hen dish, which includes tomatoes, after Jefferson because around the end of the eighteenth century, when Americans still thought tomatoes were poison, Jefferson, who had eaten them in France, recommended them, and they were then adopted here,” Mr. Diat said. “New desserts I generally named after our lady customers—the way to pay tribute to a lady is to make a special sweet for her. Lobster Albert I named after Albert Keller, the late president of the Ritz. Mr. Keller treated me like a brother. Of the eighty men on my kitchen staff, he knew fifty by name. When we buried him, eleven years ago, I said to myself, ‘We are burying the Ritz.’”

  Mr. Diat, whose father owned a shoe store, owes a great deal more than vichyssoise to his mother and grandmother—such as the correct way to prepare onion soup and potatoes paysanne. At the age of eight, he was getting up early to make soup before starting off to school. From his mother, he learned how to cook tarts, and from his grandmother how to broil chicken over charcoal, slowly. “They are very particular in the country in France,” he said. At fourteen, he was apprenticed to the chef of a pastry shop in Moulins, near Vichy. At eighteen, after tours of duty at the Hotels Bristol and du Rhin, in Paris, he became chef potager at the Paris Ritz. At twenty-one, he became assistant to the head sauce cook of the London Ritz. He has been chef of the Carlton House since the day it opened, October 23, 1910, and of the Ritz since the day it opened, seven and a half weeks later. Until six months ago, when his doctor told him to take it easy, he worked fourteen hours a day, six days a week, and spent seven or eight hours at the hotel on Sunday, his day off. From 1916 to 1929, he lived in New Rochelle, with his wife and daughter, and in that period he used to come in on Sunday morning, return home for lunch, and then make another trip to the city, so that he would be on the job at dinnertime. From 1929 until last January, his home was on Central Park West, and commuting was out, but now he’s back in an apartment in Hartsdale, with his wife. His daughter some years ago married George J. Lawrence, a junior officer of the Bowery Savings Bank. Currently, Mr. Diat gets the 7:27 out of Hartsdale every weekday morning, and arrives at his office about 8:15. He then spends an hour and a half on the telephone, placing orders for supplies with a dozen or more food dealers, and the rest of the morning touring the kitchen, giving his assistants an occasional word of advice or a helping hand, conferring with the banquet manager and the headwaiters, and correcting the proofs of the next day’s menus. Afternoons, he mostly sticks to his desk and writes. He has assembled eighty pages of notes on the Paris, London, and New York Ritzes for a projected article or book; he hasn’t decided which it will be. He has a brother seventeen years his junior, who is chef of the Hotel Plaza-Athénée, in Paris. His older brother, Jules, the one with whom he cooled his mother’s and grandmother’s potato soup, is dead. Jules, who was a teacher, had a son who was active in the French underground and died at Belsen. “My nephew was a very good saucier,” Mr. Diat told us. “He was chef saucier of the French Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. The Boches killed him. He was a lovely fellow.”

  A waiter came in with Mr. Diat’s lunch—lamb, rice, cauliflower, cottage cheese, stewed peaches—and he advised us that his eating habits, apart from tasting new dishes of his invention, are simple and have always been: a roll and a cup of coffee for breakfast; lunch about as we saw it; clear soup, green salad, and compote of fruit for dinner. We rose to go, and he put a hand on our arm. “I am not of the school of Escoffier,” he said, “but of the schools of M. Jules Tissier, of the Bristol, in Paris; of M. Georges Gimon, of the Paris Ritz; and of M. Emile Malley, of the London Ritz. I remember the day I came to America. It was October 8, 1910. There was a nice blue sky. Everything was so nice that I applied for citizenship the first week of November. But today! When we lost Mr. Keller, and then Robert Walton Goelet, we lost the Ritz. I will compare a hotel with a man. A man is in the prime of life, in full vigor, at forty. So is a hotel, or should be. You know, if I am heartbroken today, it is because everything has gone wrong. I explained my grief to the Honorable William Waldorf Astor—he came to my office to see me when he was over here from England and looked into the Astor Estate’s disposition of the Ritz—and he was so upset he almost fell out of his chair. I have been invited to go to the new Carlton House as supervising chef, but I don’t know. I will go away for at least six months, either to California or to France, to forget about the Ritz. I don’t want to be in New York when they break this place up. When Queen Marie of Romania came here for a supper party in the Oval Room, she said, ‘Oh, it is like my palace!’”

  1950

  “What wine goes best with vodka?”

  4 A.M.

  JAMES STEVENSON

  There aren’t too many appealing places to go in Manhattan at four in the morning. The streets are desolate; the few cars that are moving seem secretive, bent on melancholy errands; pedestrians are rare and nervous-looking. Dawn is a long way off. We were driving around the city at that hour last week, stopping at stoplights that didn’t matter, listening to country-and-western on the radio, and rummaging through the familiar trash barrel of our minds, plucking at ratty memories, poking at old wounds inflicted and received, sorting out yearnings, examining the imminence of doom—the usual dog’s breakfast of rumination. It was, in addition, damn cold: you could feel each and every bone in your fingers. We drove through places that we used to like. Washington Market, years ago, would be just ending its day around this hour, still smelling great, with bits of celery and lettuce on the wet cobblestones. (Kaput.) A sign on the World Trade Center (which did the old market in) was lit, proclaiming the view from the 107th floor. Of what, we wondered. The really good thing to see was gone. We went around Battery Park, spotted a fireboat in the darkness (that was nice), and huge new office buildings, such as American Express (not nice), then swung down Fulton Street toward the river and parked.

  The old fish market was full of light. Flames jumped from bonfires in oil drums, cinders flying crazily, into the night sky; there was the rumble of trucks, the shouting of men, the clatter of dollies, the thudding of boxes on the pavement. Bundled-up men in rubber boots moved about, interweaving with the trucks and dollies; nobody bumped into anybody. Nobody seemed angry; everybody seemed to have a role with enough to do but not too much, and time to make a wisecrack or hail a friend. The smell was rich and splendid. The fish, extracted from the sea, had reached the next stage here: packed fin to fin on ice in boxes. The boxes were being put on dollies, wheeled down the grimy pavement, hurled into trucks. In one crowded shed, a colossus of a fish was lying on its personal bed of ice.

  “What’s that?” we asked a stocky man who had a cigar butt between his teeth.

  “Grouper,” he replied, around the butt. “Three hundred pounds.”

  “How did you get it in here?” we asked.

  The man removed the cigar from his mouth and replied, “With a crane.” He was very pleased with his answer.

  Farther down, a man called to us, “I got porgies! I got blues!”

  “Just looking,” we said.

  A huge man in a tattered windbreaker selected a skinny black fish from a box, picked it up, and studied it. Then he put it back and took a billfold from his hip pocket. He opened the billfold and co
unted the money in it.

  At a place with oysters and clams and mussels, we stood and listened to the sound that a big bag of clams makes when it is dropped on the pavement. It is not easy to duplicate (kah-chunk-ka-ch-chunk?), but it is worth listening to.

  A man standing by several enormous, smooth, deep-purple-skinned tuna—decapitated and de-tailed—was periodically shouting “Hey!” in a cheerful voice to nobody in particular. It seemed to be the opening part of a sales pitch, but since nobody was around, he never completed the commercial. But he appeared content.

  Not far away, some small fish had fallen out of a box on a dolly and landed on the ground. Men danced around, crouching, swiftly stabbing the escapees with sharp hooks and flipping them back into the box.

  “You want shad?” asked a man in the shad area, addressing an elderly buyer.

  “Nah,” said the old man. “I got shad yesterday.”

  We went out on the dock behind the market and exchanged a few words with some crewmen who had just about finished unloading the catch—white plastic bags of scallops—from the Felicia, about ninety feet overall, painted orange above the hull, just in from ten days off Long Island. In a long shed on the other side of the dock, a black man stood on an elevated platform surrounded by huge blocks of ice—blocks suitable for building pyramids. There was a machine for grinding the ice, but at the moment it was idle.

  It was still as cold as a tuna on ice, so we went across South Street to a parked truck that sold coffee, and bought a cup. The hot cardboard warmed our fingers superbly, and we walked over to the biggest bonfire we could find. It was in a metal oil drum that had slits and odd-shaped openings around the bottom, so it glowed like a Halloween pumpkin. Three or four men stood around it, throwing on slats of wooden crates and cardboard boxes. The fire roared upward, the flames almost reaching the South Street Viaduct, overhead. A yellow dawn was starting behind the Brooklyn Bridge. We edged toward the warming fire, and hoped the day would not arrive too soon.

  1977

  SLAVE

  ALEX PRUD’HOMME

  When Albert Yeganeh says “Soup is my lifeblood,” he means it. And when he says “I am extremely hard to please,” he means that, too. Working like a demon alchemist in a tiny storefront kitchen at 259-A West Fifty-fifth Street, Mr. Yeganeh creates anywhere from eight to seventeen soups every weekday. His concoctions are so popular that a wait of half an hour at the lunchtime peak is not uncommon, although there are strict rules for conduct in line. But more on that later.

  “I am psychologically kind of a health freak,” Mr. Yeganeh said the other day, in a lisping staccato of Armenian origin. “And I know that soup is the greatest meal in the world. It’s very good for your digestive system. And I use only the best, the freshest ingredients. I am a perfectionist. When I make a clam soup, I use three different kinds of clams. Every other place uses canned clams. I’m called crazy. I am not crazy. People don’t realize why I get so upset. It’s because if the soup is not perfect and I’m still selling it, it’s a torture. It’s my soup, and that’s why I’m so upset. First you clean and then you cook. I don’t believe that 99 percent of the restaurants in New York know how to clean a tomato. I tell my crew to wash the parsley eight times. If they wash it five or six times, I scare them. I tell them they’ll go to jail if there is sand in the parsley. One time, I found a mushroom on the floor, and I fired the guy who left it there.” He spread his arms, and added, “This place is the only one like it in…in…the whole earth! One day, I hope to learn something from the other places, but so far I haven’t. For example, the other day I went to a very fancy restaurant and had borscht. I had to send it back. It was junk. I could see all the chemicals in it. I never use chemicals. Last weekend, I had lobster bisque in Brooklyn, a very well-known place. It was junk. When I make a lobster bisque, I use a whole lobster. You know, I never advertise. I don’t have to. All the big-shot chefs and the kings of the hotels come here to see what I’m doing.”

  As you approach Mr. Yeganeh’s Soup Kitchen International from a distance, the first thing you notice about it is the awning, which proclaims HOMEMADE HOT, COLD, DIET SOUPS. The second thing you notice is an aroma so delicious that it makes you want to take a bite out of the air. The third thing you notice, in front of the kitchen, is an electric signboard that flashes, say, “Today’s Soups…Chicken Vegetable…Mexican Beef Chili…Cream of Watercress…Italian Sausage…Clam Bisque…Beef Barley…Due to Cold Weather…For Most Efficient and Fastest Service the Line Must…Be Kept Moving…Please…Have Your Money…Ready…Pick the Soup of Your Choice…Move to Your Extreme…Left After Ordering.”

  “I am not prejudiced against color or religion,” Mr. Yeganeh told us, and he jabbed an index finger at the flashing sign. “Whoever follows that I treat very well. My regular customers don’t say anything. They are very intelligent and well educated. They know I’m just trying to move the line. The New York cop is very smart—he sees everything but says nothing. But the young girl who wants to stop and tell you how nice you look and hold everyone up—yah!” He made a guillotining motion with his hand. “I tell you, I hate to work with the public. They treat me like a slave. My philosophy is: the customer is always wrong and I’m always right. I raised my prices to try to get rid of some of these people, but it didn’t work.”

  The other day, Mr. Yeganeh was dressed in chefs’ whites with orange smears across his chest, which may have been some of the carrot soup cooking in a huge pot on a little stove in one corner. A three-foot-long handheld mixer from France sat on the sink, looking like an overgrown gardening tool. Mr. Yeganeh spoke to two young helpers in a twisted Armenian-Spanish barrage, then said to us, “I have no overhead, no trained waitresses, and I have the cashier here.” He pointed to himself theatrically. Beside the doorway, a glass case with fresh green celery, red and yellow peppers, and purple eggplant was topped by five big gray soup urns. According to a piece of cardboard taped to the door, you can buy Mr. Yeganeh’s soups in three sizes, costing from four to fifteen dollars. The order of any well-behaved customer is accompanied by little wax-paper packets of bread, fresh vegetables (such as scallions and radishes), fresh fruit (such as cherries or an orange), a chocolate mint, and a plastic spoon. No coffee, tea, or other drinks are served.

  “I get my recipes from books and theories and my own taste,” Mr. Yeganeh said. “At home, I have several hundreds of books. When I do research, I find that I don’t know anything. Like cabbage is a cancer fighter, and some fish is good for your heart but some is bad. Every day, I should have one sweet, one spicy, one cream, one vegetable soup—and they must change, they should always taste a little different.” He added that he wasn’t sure how extensive his repertoire was, but that it probably includes at least eighty soups, among them African peanut butter, Greek moussaka, hamburger, Reuben, BLT, asparagus and caviar, Japanese shrimp miso, chicken chili, Irish corned beef and cabbage, Swiss chocolate, French calf ’s brain, Korean beef ball, Italian shrimp and eggplant Parmesan, buffalo, ham and egg, short rib, Russian beef Stroganoff, turkey cacciatore, and Indian mulligatawny. “The chicken and the seafood are an addiction, and when I have French garlic soup I let people have only one small container each,” he said. “The doctors and nurses love that one.”

  A lunch line of thirty people stretched down the block from Mr. Yeganeh’s doorway. Behind a construction worker was a man in expensive leather, who was in front of a woman in a fur hat. Few people spoke. Most had their money out and their orders ready.

  At the front of the line, a woman in a brown coat couldn’t decide which soup to get and started to complain about the prices.

  “You talk too much, dear,” Mr. Yeganeh said, and motioned to her to move to the left. “Next!”