My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants

by Colman Andrews

  Erin quit Saveur in 2003, in part because she was having trouble working with the current publisher, but also because she thought it would be better for our relationship. We continued to have lunch and drinks at Eleven Madison, though—I guess you could say it was where we courted—and even chose it as the place to meet on the icy, windy evening when we agreed that things weren’t working out and we should go our separate ways. A week later, we were back at the restaurant having lunch, and a couple of years after that, we met Eleven Madison’s special events director there to investigate the possibility of getting married in the restaurant.

  IN OCTOBER 2004, Saveur celebrated its tenth anniversary with a special issue featuring a roundtable discussion about how food in America had changed over the ten years of our life thus far. Ten of us—including Dorothy Kalins, Mario Batali, Deborah Madison, Zarela Martínez, Chuck Williams, Rich Melman, Marion Nestle, Mimi Sheraton, Robert Schueller (of Melissa’s Produce), and I—sat down for lunch at Barbuto, Jonathan Waxman’s restaurant, and a couple of hours of vigorous conversation. The anniversary issue itself introduced a slightly redesigned cover and some new departments. It seemed like an appropriate time to freshen up Saveur, to enliven and update it without losing our basic identity.

  Dick had other plans for us, though. When people used to ask me what it was like to work for him, I’d always grimace, but say, “At least he doesn’t touch editorial.” And then he did. He flew up from Florida one day to meet with me privately, one-on-one—remarkable in itself—and to announce that “we’re making some changes in Saveur.” He was moving the positions of managing editor, art director, photo editor, and production manager to the Florida office, he said, and I needed to give the people currently occupying those posts in New York three weeks’ notice. He had also had the magazine redesigned by his most talented art director, a graduate of the Ringling College of Art & Design in Sarasota, who up till then had performed design duties for Sport Diver, another of his publications. I’d get to see the new look shortly, but it wasn’t open to negotiation. I was welcome to stay on, he added, as long as I could work within the new framework.

  I needed the job—I was paying alimony and child support to Paula by this time—so I axed four talented, hardworking colleagues, gritted my teeth, and tried to keep the magazine going on the highest level that I could. The letters and emails that poured in when the first “new” issue hit the stands were heartbreaking: “After all your hard work your new format belittles the quality you so strove to achieve,” wrote one correspondent. Another said, “Please see to it that the subscription to this address is canceled. I can’t bear to watch this magazine be dragged down like this.” More than one correspondent suggested that our new cover resembled that of Better Homes and Gardens (one said Woman’s Day). One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do professionally was to read these comments and know that I couldn’t respond to them, because I agreed with them absolutely and couldn’t say so without losing my job.

  I looked around the office one day, early in 2006, and realized that Saveur wasn’t fun anymore. I felt that our name had been cheapened by the tacky redesign, and by inferior spinoff projects under the Saveur name, over which we had no control (an embarrassing “advertorial” publication called Saveur’s Wine Country; one-shot recipe compilations coedited by, lord help us, Bambi). Our very watchword, “authenticity,” had become commonplace, a marketing cliché. “Why can’t you do an article on twelve authentic chefs?” asked our associate publisher one day.

  That crack staff we’d once had was almost all gone. The ones I hadn’t been forced to fire left either for personal reasons (a new baby, a spousal transfer to another city) or just because they had grown disheartened. There were some talented, if comparatively inexperienced, new people at the editorial desks, and we were still somehow managing to put good words and images on the pages; readers still regularly praised our stories; but the process of producing those stories, at least with the same standards we’d always maintained, had become agonizing, and the results, however good they might sometimes have looked, had grown empty at heart.

  In the spring of 2006, the Swedish publishing giant Bonnier bought a forty-nine percent interest in Saveur’s parent company—the original Saveurs, ironically, was published by the French branch of the Bonnier family—and Dick told me that Jonas Bonnier, the executive vice president of the company, had specifically demanded further reductions in our magazine’s budget. For starters, he was cutting my salary in half. I probably should have left Saveur a couple of years earlier, but now there was no way I could stay on. Late in July, I packed up almost thirteen years’ worth of books, papers, artifacts, and memories and moved out of my office, ready for the next course.

  DANNY MEYER KNEW that Eleven Madison Park was a gem of a restaurant, a unique space with a crack service staff, and at some point he began thinking that the food was too casual, too brasserielike. An establishment as unique and elegant as Eleven Madison, he reasoned, should offer sophisticated fare to match—food as good as that served by the top French restaurants in the city. Shortly before I quit Saveur, he asked Kerry to move over to Hudson Yards, his new catering operation, and, in pursuit of his culinary goal, brought in a Swiss-born chef named Daniel Humm, who had worked at Pont de Brent, Gérard Rabaey’s three-star restaurant in Montreux, and then won accolades as the chef at Campton Place in San Francisco.

  Humm banished such plebeian fare as seafood platters and grilled cheese sandwiches from the menu, and the restaurant became less and less the kind of place you could stop by for a casual lunch. He introduced sea urchin “cappuccino” with cauliflower mousse, peekytoe crab salad, and sea urchin roe; slow-poached egg with brown butter hollandaise, asparagus, Parmesan foam, and a Parmesan tuile; and poached lobster with curried granola to the menu. Frank Bruni gave Humm four stars in The New York Times and declared that his cooking “bridges the classically saucy decadence of the past and the progressive derring-do of a new generation.” The restaurant soared so high that it left Danny’s orbit. In 2011 Humm and his general manager, Will Guidara, who had worked at Spago in Beverly Hills and then run the restaurants at the Museum of Modern Art, bought the place and took it in their own direction.

  There are no à la carte offerings at Eleven Madison these days, only a fifteen-course prix fixe menu at $195 per person. That menu has a New York theme; the diner will enjoy sophisticated reimaginings of a bagel with smoked sturgeon, an egg cream, and a black-and-white cookie (actually served twice, first in savory, then in sweet form), among other things, in addition to such dishes as seared scallops with pear gelée and caviar and roast duck crusted with Sichuan peppercorns and served with sweet cabbage and foie gras. Eleven Madison is now surely one of the half dozen best restaurants in New York City, a place with a lot of stiff competition—which is, frankly, not something that could have been said about it in the old days. But it is the chef’s restaurant, not the customer’s.

  Chapter Sixteen

  COUNTRY CHOICE,

  Nenagh, Ireland (1982– )

  &

  ELBULLI,

  Cala Montjoi (Roses), Spain (1961–2011)

  IN THE FIRST DECADE OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, the two most important restaurants in my life, after Eleven Madison Park, were a modest café and food shop in the Irish agricultural town of Nenagh, in County Tipperary, that served soda bread with farmhouse butter, artisanal cheeses, and beef and Guinness pie, and an avant-garde Catalan temple of gastronomy on an isolated piece of rugged coastline eighty miles northeast of Barcelona, hailed as the best restaurant in the world, where the menu was more likely to offer spherified Parmesan gnocchi and sea anemone with rabbit brains and oysters. Both places made me feel at home and fed me frequently and well, though with particulars so different as to seem from different planets, and both inspired books that, in their turn, consumed me.

  I MADE MY FIRST TRIP to Ireland late in my traveling career, in 2002, to participate in an International Specialty Food Symposiu
m in the town of Kinsale, in County Cork. The symposium, held at a local hotel, was frankly not the most exciting I’d ever been to. I did my part, speaking on the importance of recognizing and nourishing regional food traditions, and participating in panels with the legendary Myrtle Allen of Ballymaloe House and Paul Rankin, the chef who’d brought Northern Ireland its first Michelin star. But when various government ministers and academicians started talking about subsidies and export schemes, I slipped out and found my way to the hotel bar, in which a closed-circuit monitor had helpfully been installed, so that it was possible to have a glass or two and still be apprised of the conference proceedings. Here I fell into conversation with the proprietor of a seafood restaurant near Dublin, and for half an hour or so helped him deplete a bottle of Jameson.

  Then something coming from the TV screen got my attention—an unmistakable change in tenor. My ears perked up. A casually dressed young man with slightly unruly hair, clearly no government minister, had taken the microphone and was orating with great passion about the wondrous simple pleasures of the basic Irish diet—about the richness of the milk, the opulence of the butter, the homey flavors of the fresh-baked bread. Ireland was blessed with some of the finest raw materials in all creation, he proclaimed, and honest Irish home cooking was part of the nation’s cultural heritage. His punch line, widely quoted in the days to follow in the Irish press, was something to the effect of “When we invite visitors here from England or America and give them imported food from a German-owned supermarket, it ought to be considered an act of treason!”

  This was a man I had to meet. When the conference recessed for the afternoon, I found him talking with some cheese producers and went over and introduced myself. His name was Peter Ward, he said, and he owned a little grocery shop and café called Country Choice in the Tipperary town of Nenagh. I asked if I could come visit him on a future trip to Ireland and get to know some of that wonderful Irish food he had enthused about so vividly. He’d be delighted, he said. A few months later, with Christopher in tow, I returned to Ireland to spend time in Nenagh and concoct a story for Saveur. We had a wonderful time with Peter and his wife, Mary, a delightful diminutive blonde with a sunny smile and a no-nonsense core. Country Choice turned out to be a small place on Nenagh’s main street, with a lacquered dark magenta façade bearing the words “Country Choice Delicatessen Coffee Bar P. & M. Ward.” From one end of the storefront hangs a sign reading “Rogha na Tuaithe An Rogha Nádúrtha”—Irish for “Country Choice the Natural Choice” (Peter is an Irish speaker and champion of the language), below a picture of a pig with an expression that suggested he’d be delighted to become your bacon.

  Inside, there was a short glass display case on the left, full of cheeses and cold meats plus a few plucked pheasants and some fresh eggs from a nearby chicken coop, and a long shelf on the right stocked with everything from Irish apple balsamic vinegar and dried seaweed to Italian olive oil and cans of Spanish peppers. Farther back in the shop, past a few baskets full of inexpensive but well-chosen wines, was a scattering of bare tables with a miscellany of chairs. (There were more tables in a small room upstairs.) Behind an L-shaped counter in one corner, a couple of women brewed pots of tea and pulled shots of espresso, heated up homemade scones (served with one of Mary’s preserves or marmalades), sliced wedges of quiche made with various Irish cheeses, and at lunchtime fried hamburgers made with beef from local grass-fed Herefords or ladled up Cashel Blue and broccoli soup and other similarly homey fare.

  We hung out at Country Choice for days, meeting the neighbors (the old man who grew vegetables for Peter in a tiny strip of land in a courtyard across the street; the nun from a few blocks away who’d arrive at the shop every morning in summer with baskets full of greens from the convent garden), learning at Peter’s side how to make three kinds of Irish bread, tasting the preserves Mary had just put up. We drove with Peter out to a farm a few miles from town where a young woman produced exquisite butter every day by hand. We ate dinner at home with the Wards while Peter filled us full of Irish history and lore, and of lamb’s liver in whiskey sauce and heaps of colcannon, the Irish staple of potatoes mashed with butter, cream, and shredded kale.

  Peter told us stories bemusedly (about, for instance, the high-tone woman who wanted to know why he couldn’t ask his farmers to grow all their asparagus to the same length in order to make preparing it easier), disdained various politicians and bureaucrats who he thought were squandering Ireland’s culinary heritage through dim-witted laws or erratically enforced regulations, excoriated the big supermarket chains selling imported meats and produce of inferior quality in competition with the necessarily more expensive locally grown alternatives, and often suddenly remembered yet another Irish product or artisan producer that we simply had to get to know. As we sat there with him, sipping coffee and sometimes wine, nibbling dense bread with rich butter and good cheese or plowing into something heartier, we gradually came to realize that Peter knew almost everyone concerned with food in any part of Ireland—and that little Country Choice, in a town not many people outside Ireland had even heard of, was in a way the focal point of all that was exciting and delicious in Irish food today.

  Our piece appeared the following March as a Saveur cover story. Peter was very pleased. So were we. Christopher has pointed out that when we travel someplace to do an article based around somebody’s shop or restaurant or home, we become part of their lives for two or three days, often almost part of their family—and then, when our work is done, despite the proclamations of eternal friendship that accompany the good-bye hugs, we usually never see them again. But we stayed in touch with Peter and Mary, exchanging letters and emails, and in 2004, with their encouragement, we flew back to Ireland to research another Irish story.

  At first we were going to concentrate on a retired chef named Gerry Galvin, one of the pioneers of modern Irish cooking, who now wrote about food from his home near Galway. He agreed to cook a meal for us in the borrowed catering kitchen above Sheridans, the Galway cheese shop that was considered Ireland’s best. Galvin was a charmer and obviously a natural good cook, and the day went well. Peter had suggested that, as long as we were in Galway, we should drive a short distance to the north to a town called Oughterard, to visit a young small-town butcher, trained in Germany, named James McGeough, who made pig-shaped salami flavored with local heather and cured Connemara lamb shoulders like prosciutto. We took his advice, and liked McGeough and his inventive but somehow very Irish-seeming products, and at some point, driving back to Dublin to meet Peter and Mary for a farewell dinner, Christopher and I decided that what we really ought to do about Ireland wasn’t just another story but a whole special issue of the magazine.

  We made four trips back to the island in the months that followed, driving all over the country, covering thousands of miles up and down and around the Republic and into Northern Ireland. We spent much more time at Country Choice and at home with Peter and Mary, but we also went to Hare Island off the West Cork coast, where a reclusive French-trained Irish chef, who’d once cooked at Taillevent, prepared fixed-price dinners nightly for a handful of diners. We prowled the eerily beautiful glaciated limestone reaches of the Burren in County Clare, and ate immense pink Clare lobsters at a hotel there called Gregans Castle. We visited half a dozen cheese producers and three artisanal salmon smokers, each with a different philosophy of smoke. We ate in country house hotels and small-town pubs, and were invited into private homes not just to dine but to watch how dinner was made. We spent time at the consistently influential and inspiring Ballymaloe House country hotel and restaurant and the nearby Ballymaloe Cookery School. We dined with pleasure at Chapter One, the most Irish of Dublin’s top restaurants, and interviewed its suppliers of beef, fish, vegetables, and cheese.

  Almost everywhere we went—even in the north, so lately riven by sectarian violence—we found good things happening: rural entrepreneurs building little businesses around artisanal food production and distribution; restaura
nts revising their menus to take better advantage of the native bounty, or new ones opening with a sense of Irish-based innovation and adventure; writers delving seriously into the history and culture of Irish food, sometimes finding greater refinement than they had expected or discovering the virtues of the rough foods of their rural ancestors.

  Our special issue, which appeared in March 2006, made quite a splash in Ireland. A major American epicurean magazine had praised the quality of Irish food! Tourism Ireland in New York bought up every copy they could find for distribution. Artisan producers and shopowners in Ireland, who often complain of excessive regulation, took copies along to meetings with Irish government and European Community officials as a way of saying, “Look how important what we’re doing is.” The Irish issue was the last big project Christopher and I did for Saveur.