My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants

by Colman Andrews

  After Thelma died, in 1970, Tony kept her house in Beverly Hills and spent some months a year there. Sometimes he’d invite me to small dinner parties, and we’d sit in huge leather chairs afterward and smoke the best available Dominican or Honduran cigars. (As a foreign citizen, he would have been allowed to bring Cubans into the country, but, he once explained to me, he felt enough like an American that he thought he should abide by the country’s laws, whatever his citizenship.) It was Tony who showed me how to light a good cigar, taking my time, slowly rotating it, using several matches, never inhaling the smoke from the sulfurous match tips, but letting the flame reach out toward the tip of the tobacco, tentatively at first, then with greater ardor as the cigar grew warm; he also helped me perfect the art of letting a long ash grow, never flicking it off, until it dropped naturally into the ashtray. One thing I did not emulate, however, was Tony’s disconcerting way of clipping his cigars: He kept the nail on one little finger long and sharpened for that purpose.

  We’d eat meals out sometimes in Los Angeles, too. He liked the Café Swiss, which was only a few blocks from his mother’s house, though he preferred the indoor dining room to the patio. He loved Scandia, for the food but possibly even more so for the wine list. It wasn’t one of his regular haunts, but for some reason, one day we had lunch at Musso & Frank’s in Hollywood, sitting in a booth near a window looking out onto Hollywood Boulevard and ordering squab with peas and Beaulieu Vineyard Private Reserve cabernet. When our waiter asked if he should let the bottle he had just opened stand on the table to “breathe,” Tony replied, “It’s my theory that the wine will ‘breathe’ considerably more freely if it’s poured into the glass”—and then, when the waiter had departed, added, “And of course more freely still if we start pouring it down our throats” (which we did).

  Tony was bemused by American waiters and waitresses. He liked to tell the story of the time he’d ordered a cognac at El Padrino, the casual dining room at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and been brought a Grand Marnier instead. When he called the error to the attention of the waitress, she replied, “Wow, Mr. Furness, you can really tell the difference between cognac and Grand Marnier?” “Yes,” Tony replied. “And I can even tell the difference between garlic and ice cream.”

  In the eighties Tony sold the Beverly Hills house and moved back to London, and then to Rome and finally Montreux as a tax exile. He no longer came to Los Angeles, he wasn’t a very diligent correspondent, and we lost touch. The last time I saw him was one evening in what must have been late 1995, when I encountered him, most unexpectedly, sitting at a table in the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis in Manhattan. He didn’t seem very happy to see me, or perhaps he wasn’t very well, and after a few attempted pleasantries, I said good night and departed. Tony died in 1996, of complications from the diabetes that had plagued him for decades. In its obituary of him, The Times in London noted that he “refused to conform to rules not of his own making.”

  I RESIGNED FROM COAST in 1975, after the publisher pulled the cover image my art director and I had decided on and substituted one he thought was more “newsy”—a classic betrayal of the editor-publisher relationship. In the next few years, I managed to surive, barely, with freelance assignments. At first, I wrote mostly about music, but gradually, as the rock-and-roll business became increasingly corporate and the L.A. jazz scene seemed to be waning, I turned my attentions more and more toward food and wine.

  People ask me all the time how I “got into” food writing, and I never know quite what to say. Sometimes I think I should sit down for a couple of hours one afternoon and write myself an origin myth. The truth is that it just happened. It started, of course, with restaurants. Because they’d always been so much a part of my life, I naturally thought I knew something about them. I talked my way into my first restaurant review in 1970, when I was twenty-five. I wrote, on a whim, to Silas Spitzer, the food and restaurant editor of Holiday, a large-format, upscale travel magazine. He also oversaw the restaurant award section that appeared annually in the magazine, assembling the listings with the assistance of an informal crew of “anonymous eaters,” as he called them. These were volunteers, scattered all over America, who filed reviews of restaurants that he had determined to be of interest. They were unpaid, but reimbursed for the price of a single representative meal for two at the establishments to which they’d been assigned. This sounded like a pretty good deal to me, and I thought I might be qualified to join Spitzer’s squad. He apparently thought so, too, because he promptly replied to my letter, asked for some sample reviews, and then assigned me to write a report on Dan Tana’s in West Hollywood, an old-style Italian place that was (and still is) a show business favorite.

  I went off for dinner, then wrote and rewrote my assessment of it, and rewrote it again, until I thought I’d gotten it right. Then I mailed it to Spitzer, confident that I’d taken my first step toward a glamorous and well-fed life as a restaurant critic. Unfortunately, the day after I sent him the review, I got a letter from Spitzer that had crossed mine in the mail, announcing that Holiday had been sold and that the awards, at least in their old form, were being discontinued. My career reviewing restaurants was over before it began.

  After this false start, I had to wait another year to officially become a published critic. In October 1971 an editor for the new LA Flyer—a short-lived regional supplement to Rolling Stone—hired me to review my old haunt Musso’s, then as now “the oldest restaurant in Hollywood.” I did so, and went on to write four more reviews for the Flyer before it folded. After the Flyer’s demise, having tasted blood (or at least fettuccine Alfredo and pâté maison on somebody else’s dime), I created for myself what I hoped would be a more enduring critic’s post: At the time, the reigning underground newspaper in the city was the L.A. Free Press, but several of its editors had walked out over a dispute with the publisher and started their own paper, The Staff. I knew the man in charge of The Staff, and convinced him to let me write a weekly restaurant review for him. I was paid thirty-five dollars per critique, with no expenses reimbursed, but you could still get a pretty good dinner for two for thirty-five bucks in L.A. in those days, so that seemed like a fair deal.

  Instead of reviewing under my own name, I decided to invent a character called Mr. Food, a larger-than-life gourmand and world traveler with a penchant for Victorian elocutions and food-related puns and homonyms (“Mr. Food wanted to take it on the lamb”; “It made Mr. Food quail”). It was all very silly, and a lot of fun. (For the record, my Mr. Food made his debut in print three years before a onetime butcher named Art Ginsburg started doing local television shows under that name.)

  I’m not sure how seriously the local restaurant community took Mr. Food’s reviews, but they did catch the eye of Lois Dwan of the Los Angeles Times. Dwan was easily the most important and influential restaurant critic in town in those days, and in 1975, when she was going on vacation for a couple of weeks, she asked if I’d temporarily take over writing the featured review in the Sunday Calendar section of the paper. Would I! For a young, aspiring restaurant reviewer, this was the big show. I went on to have a long, peculiar, and ultimately unsatisfying relationship with the Times, but I consider having taken over Lois’s column for a few weeks, more than thirty-five years ago, to have been the real beginning of my food-writing career.

  I did other writing, too, having nothing to do with food—mostly profiles of celebrities. One of my best customers was the Radio Times, the weekly BBC program log cum entertainment magazine. The English writer Sally Beauman, who’d done a few pieces for me at Coast, had gone to work as an editor for the magazine, and she assigned me to write about a wonderful assortment of famous and accomplished people. I coaxed a reluctant François Truffaut to talk about his early films instead of the BBC special he was supposed to be promoting; I watched Jane Fonda switch on her talking-to-journalists persona in a hotel room in Colorado when she was shooting Comes a Horseman and then switch it off again like a light; I followed Marta Fe
uchtwanger, the ninety-two-year-old widow of the German anti-Nazi writer Lion Feuchtwanger, around her big house in Pacific Palisades while she pointed out mementos to me (“Maybe you’ve heard of the Dreyfus case?” she asked as she pointed to a framed copy of the front page of the Parisian newspaper L’Aurore from January 13, 1898, devoted to Émile Zola’s famous defense of Dreyfus, under a huge black headline reading “J’Accuse.”) One of my less pleasant interviews was with Leonard Nimoy, who bristled when I mentioned his autobiography I Am Not Spock (“I resent it when people who haven’t read the book think they know what the title means,” he said, just a little bit ingenuously, I thought) and then fairly stunned me by refusing to talk about Star Trek—as if there were any other reason anyone would care what he had to say.

  That experience was more than made up for when I got an assignment to interview Jeanne Moreau, who had just finished her first film as director, Lumière. At the time, Moreau was married to the director William Friedkin and living in Bel Air, and she invited me to do the interview at her home. Like any normal artsy fellow of my generation, I was madly in love with Moreau and, of course, nervous as hell to be in her presence. She turned out to be warm, accessible, charming, and professional, and I got a good story. After the interview, Moreau walked me to my car, asking along the way if I wrote only for newspapers and magazines. I replied that I did, but added that most of what I wrote about was food and wine. Her face lit up, and she said, “You know, I am a very good cook. Gault et Millau have written that the best table in Paris, it is Jeanne Moreau’s. If you would like, you can come again, for dinner, and we will talk this time only about gastronomy. I am leaving town Tuesday for two weeks, but call my husband’s secretary after that and we will arrange it.” I promised that I would and added that I would bring some good California wines to accompany her cuisine. A few weeks later, I called Friedkin’s office and explained Moreau’s invitation. I was told that someone would call me back, but they never did. This was quite possibly the most disappointing missed connection of my professional life.

  I FIRST STARTED TO BELIEVE that I might actually know a little bit about wine—that I was really learning things at the Café Swiss and not just taxing my internal organs—in 1978, when I was invited to judge wines at the Los Angeles County Fair. This turned out to be a grueling exercise. Judging was conducted in the heat of summer at the county fairgrounds in Pomona. Several score of us—wine writers, winemakers, wine sellers of various kinds—sat four to a table in a cavernous room, with endless rows of glasses lined up in front of us. Pourers circulated, filling the glasses about a third of the way up, in succession, out of bottles swathed in brown paper bags. In two long sessions, morning and afternoon, we’d taste literally hundreds of wines a day over a two-day period.

  Over the three or four years that I participated in the judging, I’d taste with Roy, a mainstay at the event, but also, in various combinations, with such knowledgeable folk as the Sacramento grocer Darrell Corti (known in wine and food circles as the Professor for the breadth and depth of his wine and food knowledge) and blue-chip winemakers like Dick Arrowood, Mike Richmond, and Dimitri Tchelistcheff (son of the legendary André). We were instructed to make our own notes and to score the wines, and then discuss the scores among ourselves so that each table could arrive at a consensus. Through this process, I discovered, to my great surprise and pleasure, that my perceptions of the wines were usually not that different from those of my vastly more experienced professional colleagues. Sampling so many wines and assessing them with some degree of intelligence and consistency demanded a lot of concentration; it was both mentally and physically tiring, and I remember later trying to make the case to someone that, jokes aside, this kind of tasting really was almost a sport, demanding not just sensory evaluation but a kind of physical coordination and a measure of real strength.

  I was able to further verify my abilities as a taster a few years later when my friend Tim Johnston—today the proprietor of Juveniles, a sympa wine bar and mini–wine shop in Paris—got me invited to participate in the Saint-Bacchus in southeastern France. The Saint-Bacchus (who but the French would canonize the Roman god of wine?) is an annual competitive tasting of the wines of France’s Roussillon region. The format was not unlike that of the L.A. County Fair, in that tasters gathered in small groups, made their own judgments, and then compared notes. But instead of being stuck for two days in a large hall in Pomona, at the Saint-Bacchus we sat for an hour and a half in an upstairs room at the Station Viti-Vinicole du Comité Interprofessionnel des Vins Doux Naturels, with windows open to the countryside, on a breezy, vine-covered hilltop in the village of Tresserre, a few miles from the Spanish border. And instead of making detailed notes and applying numerical scores to the wines, my fellow tasters and I were charged with simply deciding which wine in our judging category we liked best—not necessarily which one was best in some abstract, platonic sense, but which one pleased us the most; which one gave us, in the words of our hosts, un coup du coeur.

  I loved the informality of the tasting and the collegial atmosphere at the Saint-Bacchus. (“If Bordeaux or Chablis tried to do a competitive judging this way,” Tim Johnston remarked one day, “there’d be people out with knives and guns.”) I also loved the lunch after the tasting, downstairs, outside, under the Station’s porticoes—typically Collioure anchovies and grilled red peppers, assorted roasted vegetables, a platter of mixed fish and shellfish (rouget in vine leaves, mackerel, and squid, all grilled over vine cuttings), and Roquefort (always superlative in this part of France, for some reason). And I loved the fact that my coeur was nearly always coupé by the same wine the other fellows had liked.

  THE CAFÉ SWISS CLOSED IN 1985. Rodeo Drive had by then become a shopping mall for the one percent (and the one-percent wannabes), and glittering palaces of upscale retail commerce had forced out most of the locally owned shops and more modest merchants. Café Swiss lasted as long as it did because the Hugs owned the building, so were able to resist encroaching developers. Finally, though, someone made an offer for the property so outlandish that it was impossible to refuse. Laura Hug invited some of the regulars to show up after she’d closed the doors for the last time and partially demolish the patio walls with sledgehammers. Then she announced that she planned to reopen in another Beverly Hills location, with the same menu and the same staff, in as little as four months’ time. For whatever reasons, that never happened. The lot on which the restaurant stood for thirty-five years is now the site of a two-story building with thirty-five-thousand square feet of retail space.

  After Café Swiss closed, the Saturday lunch group moved on to a succession of other places, none of them permanent. I’d show up occasionally, but by the end of the eighties, I was married for the second time, with a baby, and I pretty much stopped going altogether. Even Roy seemed to be enjoying it less. “The Saturday group seems more frenetic every time,” he wrote in a note accompanying some wine articles he sent me. “It’s just not possible to make reasonable notes on all the wines. I take more time to have lunch with two wines and one brandy.” I still met Roy for lunch or dinner every once in a while, and he remained as smart about wine as ever, and as acerbic in his comments. A few days before I moved to the East Coast in the final week of 1994, I had dinner with him at a French restaurant in the San Fernando Valley. Though we exchanged letters after that, and he wrote a few short items for Saveur, that was the last time I saw him. He died in 1998 at the age of seventy-nine. It was rumored that, like André Simon, one of the old wine writers he’d read in his early days as a wine lover, he only had one bottle left in his cellar when he left the planet. “Must have miscounted,” I can imagine him grumbling.

  Chapter Nine

  PICCOLO MONDO,

  Rome (1954– )

  FROM AN ENTRY IN MY JOURNAL, DATED OCTOBER 25, 1978:

  Leaving St. Peter’s I took a cab to the Via Veneto, and walked a few blocks to Piccolo Mondo for lunch. I asked for a table with the waiter Guido, on the
chance that he’d remember me, and he did, and very well. He embraced me, asked how long it had been, how Karen was, etc. I had a wonderful meal, attentively and affectionately served, with the usual Roman songs in the background (though not by the usual singer-guitarist: he’d died recently of cancer, Guido told me, adding, “La vita non è giusta”). I started with the little mozzarella “eggs” and crudités and pizza bread that are brought automatically; then funghi porcini, roasted and then sautéed with bits of garlic that were almost caramelized, then abbacchio al forno (the sweet charred flesh of Roman lamb!), then cheese, then banana ice cream with Strega, then coffee and sambuca, and all the while the very good house red wine (of which I drank nearly two bottles). I felt surprisingly fit after the meal, maybe because I felt so recklessly contented while eating and drinking it. I felt as if I were really in Rome, and on my own terms this time.

  Throughout the sixties and early seventies, I was very much what they used to call a “film nut,” and one of my favorite directors was Federico Fellini. It was he who gave me my first conscious look at Rome, through his 1960 classic La Dolce Vita, which starred Marcello Mastroianni as a promiscuous, disaffected tabloid journalist navigating his way through the city’s caffè society and the midcentury Italian celebrity whirl. It was through this film, more than through any other source, that I was first seduced by Rome, or rather by a romantic notion of the city. I loved the whole idea of the Roman “sweet life”—of glittering, smoky caffès on the Via Veneto, of fast cars and overnight affairs, of sophisticated, sleazy parties thrown in medieval castles or sleek apartment suites by aristocrats of questionable moral character. Of course, the Dolce Vita era was over by the time I first got to Rome, but I always felt as if I got a small taste of the spirit of those times through the restaurant called Piccolo Mondo.