That night, I found myself sitting, with my Bulgarian hosts, at a place called Boiansko Hanche, a touristic tavern in the village of Boiana, just outside Sofia, and eating shopska salata (cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, and fresh white cheese) with pitka (moist round bread, to be dipped into a mixture of salt, pepper, and coriander), sirene gyuveche (cheese baked with tomatoes and peppers and topped with a fried egg, which I of course avoided), and kavarma—which, I jotted down in my notebook, was “an intricate folksong of hot peppers, pork, onions, mushrooms, garlic, and cheese.” Quail with Armagnac and shopska salata in the same day? I felt very cosmopolitan.
I later returned to Brussels on assignment for the Los Angeles Times, and spent what I think was the most grueling eating week of my life there. The Belgian tourism people had assigned me a guide whose brief was apparently to wine and dine me with abandon and make sure I got a taste of the range of restaurants Brussels and the surrounding countryside had to offer. That meant two big meals a day. Two big Belgian meals a day. (There is a story that Victor Hugo was once dining in a Brussels café when a man at the next table looked over and remarked, “You must be French to be eating so much bread”—to which Hugo replied, “You must be Belgian to be eating so much of everything.”) At the Villa Lorraine, which several years earlier had become the first-ever Michelin three-star restaurant outside France, we drank champagne en carafe and assorted Burgundies while we tucked into two kinds of foie gras—duck, faintly perfumed with ginger, and goose with truffles and a gelée of malvoisie wine—followed by oysters in champagne sauce, sole with miniature mussels, and noisettes of venison with a muscat grape feuilleté and a purée of celery and chestnuts. At Comme Chez Soi, another three-star place, we had lightly smoked, thinly sliced cow’s udder with asparagus, mousses of wood pigeon and ham, crayfish in a veal demi-glace, and pheasant with braised endive, mushrooms, and celery root. Everything was just wonderful—hearty, obviously, but intensely flavorful and finished with real finesse. Even dinner at En Plein Ciel, the rooftop restaurant at the Brussels Hilton, was impressive—thin-sliced sweetbreads glazed in orange juice with onion confit and mâche and wild roast duck with shredded brussels sprout and potato cakes.
On expeditions outside the city, we lunched at Edgard & Madeleine, a little roadside place overlooking the rolling farmlands of the Hainaut, on trout en escabeche, simply roasted woodcock, and Chimay cheese. At Le Sanglier des Ardennes in the tiny village of Durbuy, we feasted on Ardennes ham with whole-wheat sourdough bread cut from huge round loaves, subtle woodcock mousse, grilled river perch in cress sauce, and saddle of hare in cream sauce. I wish I could report that when I got back to Los Angeles I gave up food entirely for a couple of weeks, but of course, as grueling as my Belgian experience had been, it seemed to have stimulated my appetite, and I started planning almost at once for my next gastronomic foray.
IN 1982 KAREN WENT HOME to California to be near her parents, her Roman adventure—and thus, to a large extent, mine—over. We saw each other from time to time (she’d moved to San Diego), and kept up with the other’s progress. I went back to Rome a couple of times for brief visits, on one occasion returning to Piccolo Mondo, where I ate pretty much as I had in the seventies. A decade passed, and then most of another one. Karen got remarried. My first wife and I split up, and I got remarried, too. In late 1994 I moved to New York to edit a new food magazine that I’d help to found, Saveur.
One day in 1999, as I was in the process of developing some Italian story ideas for the magazine, it occurred to me that I could probably write a pretty good article about Roman cooking by returning to the city and revisiting all the old places—or as many of them as still existed—contrasting my experiences then and now. I had started mapping out my trip when I got a crazy, impractical, Roman sort of idea: What if I not only revisited my old haunts but could somehow revisit them with Karen and Gianfranco? Of course, this was absurd on the face of it: Karen’s husband was an easygoing and generous sort, but he was hardly likely to approve of his wife traipsing off to Rome with a couple of men from her past; Gianfranco, though he was still selling Ferraris in Rome, had gotten married, too, to a quiet Ukrainian woman he’d met on a business trip to Moscow. But Karen and Gianfranco had kept in occasional touch over the years, and . . . Well, I thought it might be worth a couple of phone calls.
Remarkably, Karen and Gianfranco both loved the idea, and Karen could make the time for it; even more remarkably, both spouses gave their dispensation (as did mine). The next thing I knew, the three of us were sitting down to lunch at Sabatini again, for the first time in twenty-five years, addressing a tableful of food: roasted peppers, prosciutto di Parma, mushrooms preserved in oil, carciofi alla giudia, clams in marinara sauce, red mullet baked in parchment. . . . We may have been older, but we were still hungry.
Over the next week’s time, we went back to La Buca di Ripetta, delighted to find that though it had new owners, some of the old waiters and cooks were still there and the menu was little changed; to Ambasciata d’Abruzzo, where the same big basket of sausages came out the moment we sat down; to Casale, where the antipasto table was as big as ever and the lamb tasted just like it used to. And of course, we went to Piccolo Mondo. This turned out to be a sad mistake. Tommaso Camponeschi’s son Benito had been running the restaurant, but he died in 1997 and his four children took over. They added a pizza oven and dumbed down the menu. Guido had retired fifteen years earlier, and the new waiters had none of his warmth and generosity. We were seated in a dingy back room and ate food that was merely okay. Some of the photographs from the Dolce Vita era had survived, but they were now neatly aligned on the walls behind Plexiglas shields. The place was almost empty.
Karen, Gianfranco, and I left in a gloomy mood that lasted until dinner that night, which turned out to be a delightful meal at another relic of Rome’s glamour days, Taverna Flavia. This was reportedly Liz Taylor’s favorite Roman restaurant, and has always held a special place in my ravenous heart because it’s the first place I ever tasted white truffles. These were shaved into a tangle of lattughella (mâche), celery, ovoli (Amanita caesarea, one of the most delicate and delicious of wild mushrooms), and scales of Gruyère, a dish called Insalata Veruschka, in honor of that stunning, lanky German-born model-turned-artist. Of course I had to have it again on this visit, and though the frisson of discovery was lacking, it was still pretty good. So were the big platter of delicious fried things (whole little long-stem purple artichokes, stuffed zucchini flowers, polenta croquettes, olives crusted in ground veal) and the small lamb chops called scottadito, finger burners, because you’re supposed to eat them with your hands. Unlike Piccolo Mondo, the place was buzzing. We even saw some local celebrities: members of the Roman soccer team, A.S. Roma.
Over dinner we agreed, with melancholy, that Piccolo Mondo was finished, at least for us. Now, though, we’re not so sure. In 2005, three of Benito Camponeschi’s children decamped, leaving his son Roberto in charge. The following year, Roberto completely refurbished the place. The kitchen was remodeled, the dining room brightened up, and a false ceiling that had been installed along the way was removed, revealing the original brick ceiling from 1954. The menu has been modernized—in the seventies, we never could have imagined finding artichoke flan with pecorino cream, ricotta gnocchi with lamb ragout, or sliced beef salad with arugula in balsamic dressing here—but there is a section of Roman specialties, including spaghetti alla carbonara, bucatini all’amatriciana, and saltimbocca. Many of the raw materials come from around the Camponeschis’ rural hometown. Roberto, people say, is charming. Karen plans a trip to Rome with her husband, and wants to try the place again. So, I guess, do I.
Chapter Ten
PORTS,
West Hollywood (1972–1992)
FOR SLIGHTLY MORE THAN SEVEN YEARS, FROM THE day it opened in early 1972 until I got married for the first time, in April 1979, and moved out of the neighborhood, my social, romantic, gastronomic, and, well, alcoholic life revolved around an unassuming i
f eventually legendary restaurant and bar called Ports, a few blocks from my apartment on Fountain Avenue. Ports was my hangout, my second home, my great good place. I went there almost every night, either to spend the evening or before or after going someplace else. I ate there, anything from casual snacks to huge dinners, and drank mind-numbing quantities of wine and liquor perched on one of the barstools or installed in one of the plain, marginally comfortable booths. I ran up huge tabs, and ended up prowling the floor as an evening manager off and on for a year or so to work off part of the debt. I cooked banquets there a few times when the proprietors were gone. I acquired scores of friends and girlfriends there.
Ports, which was owned by an eccentric couple named Jock and Micaela Livingston, looked a little like one of the so-called brown bars of Amsterdam (where the proprietors had briefly lived), maybe crossed with one of those multicultural bistro-dives you used to happen upon in the East Village. The floors were bare concrete, the tables were covered with green oilcloth, and the walls were faced with cheap wood veneer. Some of the regulars had their names on small brass plaques nailed up over their regular perches. (I had two at my favorite corner table in the small front room: one with my name and one, at my request, reading “Pseud’s Corner,” after a column of pretentious press clippings in the British satirical magazine Private Eye, of which I was a devotee.) The menu at Ports was all over the culinary map: Moroccan eggplant salad, Chinese chicken salad, “Greek pie” made with watercress and feta cheese, cold curried chicken consommé, chicken livers in marsala sauce, stuffed game hen with plum sauce, choucroute garnie, couscous every Thursday. My favorite Ports dish was albóndigas en chipotle—parsley-flecked meatballs of finely ground beef in a thick, spicy, smoky, luminescent brown chile sauce, topped with a thick blanket of well-browned melted cheese. I would usually eat the cheese off the top first, seasoned with bits of sauce and meat clinging to it, and then send the dish back to the kitchen for another layer.
The night my father died, I’d gone to visit him at his apartment—my mother had died a year earlier—and found him in a bad way. I drove him to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, where he expired after an hour or so, with that chilling “death rattle” you hear about. I signed some papers, then headed straight for Ports, where I had the albóndigas, which I sent back twice that time for extra cheese, and drank two bottles of Rioja. I couldn’t think of what else to do.
The clientele at Ports was even more diverse than the menu. The restaurant drew artists, writers, actors, directors and producers, photographers, and musicians, but also bankers, tailors, architects, shopkeepers, and every sort of hanger-on and ne’er-do-well. There was a core group of men and women sprawled around the bar almost every evening who didn’t quite do anything but were always talking about what they were about to do; I called them “les perdus de Ports.” There were also often unexpected visitors. When you walked into Ports, a habitué once noted, you were always running into somebody you had last seen in Marrakech.
Celebrities great and small came to the place. Sometimes we’d peer through the smoky light and notice Warren Beatty having a quiet supper in the front room with Julie Christie, or Robert Redford in a booth at the back, talking deals with a couple of fellows in jeans jackets. In the late seventies and early eighties, Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios was located across the street, and he would preside over big wine-laden tables at lunchtime with an ever-changing cast of associates. Dave Garroway, the affable, jazz-loving host of the original Today show, used to come in sometimes, and I bought him dinner one night—in return, I told him, for all the pleasure I used to get out of the jazz performers he had booked on the show. A snarky sometime Yalie and NYU film school graduate with Hollywood aspirations named Oliver Stone would be there in the evening on occasion, holding court and insulting the waiters (the journalist Maureen Orth once told me that he had pursued her one evening at Ports, and that she might have been interested if he hadn’t been wearing a red patent leather belt). Tom Waits liked the place, and the Eagles often came in, separately. Tom Wolfe stopped by whenever he was in town. One night I walked into Ports and saw sitting, separately, at four adjacent tables, by coincidence, Claes Oldenburg, Michelangelo Antonioni, Milton Glaser, and Rip Torn. It was that kind of place.
There was music at Ports, both recorded and live. A wonderfully bizarre jukebox blared out everything from bebop and Italian pop to Argentinian tangos and Finnish polkas; one particularly strange disk, which Jock had probably found at a garage sale somewhere, was of a men’s chorus singing a lusty shanty about “rowing to Madagascar”—in German. When he was in a particularly surly mood, Jock loved to play it over and over, no doubt alienating at least some of the clientele. The independent filmmaker Henry Jaglom, who came to Ports almost nightly, seemed particularly offended by it. I didn’t like him, so I used to put it on whenever he walked in. I believe he threatened me with violence one evening in response.
There was also a battered old upright piano just inside the door. For some time the underrated jazz pianist Freddie Redd—who had written and performed the music for the famous Jack Gelber play The Connection—played it every evening for tips and dinner, sometimes letting me stand behind him and sing “Lush Life” or “Blame It on My Youth.” One night the left-wing songwriter Earl Robinson, author of “Joe Hill” and the Paul Robeson classic “Ballad for Americans” (which had the curious distinction of having been used as a theme song by both the Republican and the Communist party national conventions in 1940), somehow found his way into Ports and sat down at the piano and started playing—at least until Jock, who had no idea who he was and probably wouldn’t have cared if he did, told him to shut up and leave.
Jock was an imposing presence, big and bearded, with a deep voice and a manner that could go from avuncular to menacing in an instant. He could be impressively theatrical when he wanted to be, which wasn’t surprising: He’d cowritten and starred in an experimental film called Zero in the Universe (with a score by the avant-garde jazz trumpeter Don Cherry), and won a distinguished performer Obie in the 1959–1960 season for his portrayal of the General in the American debut of Genet’s play The Balcony, off Broadway. He later had a memorable cameo as Alexander Woollcott in the Julie Andrews vehicle Star!, and continued to turn up in small but usually meaty roles in all kinds of movies made by friends and habitués of Ports.
Jock was widely traveled and well read; he spoke fluent, often impolite Spanish and used to bid me good night in Serbo-Croatian. At his best, he was great company, charming, erudite, obscure. But he had demons, which he tried constantly and unsuccessfully to drink away. Over the years that I knew him, his charm became more and more ephemeral, his erudition ever vaguer. He would end many evenings at Ports sitting almost comatose at a back booth, rising occasionally to lurch across the floor in search of another drink—sometimes, with no warning, erupting into an outraged roar. He was always acutely aware, through his haze, of any hint of condescension or disrespect to him, or of any stylistically inappropriate (in Ports terms) behavior, and he was quite capable of tossing even regular customers out with a contemptuous bellow. (If you mattered to him, you’d get a sheepish call the next day, not exactly apologizing but asking, “Was I all right last night?”) A number of us, at various times, made sure that he got home safely and that the restaurant got locked up after Micaela had departed with a look of resigned despair.
I once asked the Hollywood photographer David Strick—a well-liked Ports regular whose father, the director Joseph Strick, had neglected to cast Livingston in his film version of The Balcony—whether he had any photographs of the restaurant in the old days. “I remember taking almost no pictures at Ports,” Strick told me, “maybe because the first time I did, Jock went berserk and tried to choke me. . . . Maybe he sensed my genetic link to the plateauing of his acting career. Anyway, after that encounter, I tended to confine myself to repartee.”
PORTS HAD ITS ORIGINS in another restaurant, the Studio Grill, three blocks west
along Santa Monica Boulevard. The Grill was opened in 1970 by Jock and his friend Ardison Phillips, an artist. Neither had any previous restaurant experience, but they’d been neighbors in Hollywood and used to cook for large groups extemporaneously, and they thought they could make a go of a modest bistro serving the kind of food they liked to prepare and eat themselves. They made a sort of Odd Couple. Ardison was punctilious and chipper, and liked to wear ascots. Jock was more nonchalant and sometimes sulky, and used to greet guests at the restaurant garbed in a long white lab coat, which made him seem at once authoritative and vaguely sinister.
The Grill had an appealingly casual, bohemian feeling to it, and it quickly gained a local following. Lois Dwan summed the place up pretty well in the Los Angeles Times when she called it “Greenwich Village in Hollywood” and hailed its “fearless menu that ranges from caviar aspic to zarzuela.” The Grill was only a few blocks from my apartment on Fountain Avenue, and I thought the place looked interesting from the outside, so stopped in one night shortly after it opened. I was intrigued by the large lab-coated man who seemed to be in charge, and I liked the eclectic menu—I think I probably had the roasted red peppers with anchovies followed by that zarzuela, a seafood stew that Jock had learned to make in Spain. I soon became a regular, and started getting to know Jock, often over two or three shared bottles of good Rioja after dinner.
My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants Page 15