Garlic and Sapphires

by Ruth Reichl

  Rereading the review, I saw what had happened: Ruth did not write the review. Brenda did.

  Dinner with Chairman Punch

  Everybody at the paper had an Abe story.

  My friend Janet Maslin, the chief film critic, told me one about the time a star reporter decided to quit. He spent weeks agonizing about how he was going to tell the boss. He even had nightmares about it. Finally he took a deep breath and marched straight into Abe Rosenthal’s office.

  To his surprise, the executive editor was very nice. Abe looked sad. Abe wished him well. Abe even told him he would be missed. The reporter was very relieved, and he walked to the door with a spring in his step. But just as he put his hand on the doorknob, Abe called out, “Do you remember Jim, the guy who left the paper last year?”

  “Sure,” the man answered, “I remember him.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  “No,” the reporter answered, “I can’t remember.”

  “Exactly!” pounced Abe. And as the door closed, a wicked smile spread across his face.

  Abe, they told me, was ruthless. Abe loved power. Abe was mean. He moved his men around the world like pawns on a chessboard, caring not one whit about their own desires. People assured me, on an almost daily basis, that I was very, very lucky I hadn’t been at the paper in the days of Abe Rosenthal.

  I couldn’t help feeling that they were all protesting just a little too much. I sensed an undercurrent of envy running through these stories. They hated him, but they were proud of him too. And they were proud of the paper he and Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger had produced.

  Now the next generation of Sulzberger had taken over the family paper. The outside world had named him “Pinch” but around the newsroom Punch’s son was generally known as “Young Arthur.” The new publisher was just a little too touchy-feely for the old guard, and Max Frankel, the retiring editor, didn’t have a mean bone in his body.

  And things were about to get worse. Joe Lelyveld was taking over at the paper, and Joe, as everyone knew, was a truly decent guy. Far too decent, my colleagues assured me, to be a great editor.

  My own Abe encounter ran true to form. I first met him at one of the retirement cocktail parties given to outgoing editors as a consolation prize. These were held in the only glamorous room in the dusty old building.

  To get there you took an elevator to the top floor. It spit you out into one of the grim corridors that welcomed reporters every morning. This one, however, was different from the others; it made you run a gauntlet of portraits, all the people who had won Pulitzers for the paper. Who the hell do you think you are, they seemed to shout at you, sauntering down our hall? I always found myself moving faster and faster, desperate to reach the small flight of stairs at the end. By the time I got there I was running, and then I shot up, making my escape.

  It was a masterful piece of stagecraft, intended to strip you of arrogance. When you finally burst into the room at the top, your sense of self had been diminished. The room itself finished the job.

  It was a luxurious two-story atrium made of glass, a smug perch in the center of Manhattan. From up here the glittering midtown lights seemed no more than a piece of jewelry designed to decorate the paper. Waiters circulated with little round trays, proffering delicate hors d’oeuvres and wine in crystal goblets. It made you feel like an insignificant but privileged participant in whatever was going on at the pinnacle of power. Each time I was invited up there I felt lucky, like Jean Arthur in a Preston Sturges film, certain that a mink coat was about to come floating from the sky and land on my head.

  Abe lost no time in taking care of that.

  “Oh,” he said when we were introduced. He took two steps back and picked up my hand as if it were a four-day-old fish. “The restaurant critic.” He said the words as if they tasted bad, as if he wanted to spit them out quickly and fill his mouth with something tastier. He did not relinquish my hand, just held it as if he were fending me off while he considered his next words.

  From all the stories I had imagined a giant, and I was surprised to discover that he was a small man with a perpetually peeved air. With his glasses, his sharp, beaky nose, and his wispy hair, he looked exactly like a contentious owl. I thought of the Pogo comic character, the one who utters absurd malapropisms. Abe’s words, however, were clipped and concise.

  “Hiring Bryan Miller is one of the things I am most proud of,” he said, biting off the syllables. “He was very good.” And then the great Abe Rosenthal turned away, searching out his next victim.

  “Bryan took him to dinner all the time,” said Carol when I related the conversation the next day. “He had no choice. But you got lucky; Max had no desire to be your dinner guest.” She tapped the elegant lace-up oxfords she always wore and added, “Believe me, you would have known it if he had.” Her phone rang, but before she picked it up to say “The Living Section” in her clear, cool voice, she made one more pronouncement: “Now that Joe’s the editor, you’re safe. Food is definitely not his thing.”

  I considered Joe and thought she was probably right. He was a wisp of a man, with the gray pallor of an ascetic and the anxious abstraction of an intellectual. The only outward clue that he had been anointed steward of America’s finest news-gathering organization was a slight stoop in the shoulders and a heaviness of step, physical signs that this slight, sandy-haired man now felt burdened by the weight of the world. Abe had gotten taller with the job, standing up straight as he reveled in the power. Joe, the rabbi’s son, seemed to shrink beneath the weight of his huge and terrible responsibility.

  So I was surprised to pick up the phone one morning and hear, “Please hold for the executive editor.” Joe wanted to have lunch with me after all. It was the first of the many surprises Joe had up his sleeve. The secretary said that she would make the reservation, and I wondered where we’d go: Joe was obviously not interested in lunch at Lutèce.

  Joe was late, and I stood in the lobby, chatting with the guards while I waited. They were eating lunch, enormous submarine sandwiches that seemed too big for mere mortals, purchased from some place on Ninth Avenue. Nevertheless, by the time Joe rushed up with an apologetic smile the sandwiches were gone.

  “I have a meeting in an hour,” he said. “Would you mind if we just get a bite somewhere nearby?”

  He took me to one of the hotels that were starting to open in Times Square—the vanguard, we were told, of an army of gorgeous new buildings that were about to invade the neighborhood. They were supposed to rout out sleaze and bring new life to this sad and used-up patch of Manhattan, but it was hard to imagine that Times Square would really have a renaissance. The first few hotels were anything but promising.

  The table was tiny, the food forgettable, and I discovered that Joe had no small talk at all. As the conversation dragged we both looked around uneasily, longing for escape. During the excruciating silences I fished for something to say. He didn’t seem to have any questions for me, so I tried throwing a few at him. “Yes,” he said. “No,” he said. I have never met a more uncomfortable conversationalist, and in desperation I resorted to asking about his days as a foreign correspondent.

  Joe had been in Hong Kong, Johannesburg, New Delhi. He had won a Pulitzer for his book on South Africa, Move Your Shadow, but that was not what he wanted to talk about. He wanted to discuss the food in India and Hong Kong, and he did it with real enthusiasm. He was so animated that I understood how much he had loved all those foreign places. Suddenly the lunch was flying by, and I no longer had the sense that he would go back to the office and put a check mark by my name. “Let’s have lunch again soon,” he said when we parted. “Do you think you can find a good Chinese restaurant within walking distance?”

  “Probably not,” I said. He looked so crestfallen that I quickly asked, “How do you feel about Korean food?”

  “I’d like to go to a Korean restaurant,” he said with a sweet smile that made it clear he was telling the truth.

  Please ho
ld for the executive editor.” It was a few days later. After the usual pleasantries—what a nice lunch it had been and so forth—Joe got to the point. “I have just learned,” he said, “that the chairman has never been to Flushing. Can you imagine?”

  “Shocking,” I said.

  “I was talking about how much it’s changed, how very Chinese it’s become,” Joe continued. “I started telling him how much it reminded me of Hong Kong and he said he’d like to see it. So I want you to find the best Chinese restaurant out there and set up a banquet for us.”

  “Gladly,” I said, trying to sound upbeat, efficient.

  “Who’s the chairman?” I asked Carol.

  “The big guy,” she said. “Punch Sulzberger. He’s not the publisher anymore, but he’s still Mr. Chairman at this company.”

  “Joe says he’s never been to Flushing,” I said.

  “That’s impossible!” she replied. She thought about it for a second and then reversed her decision. “I guess it’s not. But why would you care?”

  “Joe wants to organize a tour. And he wants it to end with a fabulous Chinese banquet. That’s where I come in. You know anyplace out there? I’ve been to great Korean restaurants in Flushing, but every Chinese place I’ve tried has been terrible.”

  “Me too,” she said. “But if it reminds him so much of Hong Kong, you ought to call the Hong Kong Tourist Board. They might have some ideas.”

  They did. My contact told me about a new seafood palace that had just opened. She said that once you got inside the door, you felt as if you were in Hong Kong. They’d held their own banquet there the week before, and been extremely impressed.

  “She said that at lunchtime they serve all the trendy new dim sum they’re now making in Hong Kong,” I told Carol. “Come with me?” Carol, who loved the Number 7 train, never had to be asked twice.

  We climbed into the bowels of the Times Square station, going deeper and deeper beneath the surface of the city, below all the other subway lines until it felt as if we had reached the center of the earth. It got quieter as we descended through the dank, filthy layers of the station, and as we slithered through the final strata I began to wonder whether we would ever again see the light of day. Then the train came wheezing into the station and the doors slid open in such a sinister invitation that I hesitated at the threshold.

  It was an ancient train, the walls covered with interlocking graffiti, the seats torn, the floors pocked with grime. Half the lightbulbs were out and it was so dim that it was hard to see the other passengers. We sat down, balancing on the edges of our seats, trying to make ourselves as small as we could. The doors slid closed.

  We traveled east, from one ghostly stop to the next. Each time the doors slid open, pale, silent people boarded the train. No one ever seemed to get off, and I felt my breathing get shallower and shallower. I started to worry that I was going to have a panic attack. And then, suddenly, the train was climbing, climbing, up into the light and we were bursting through the surface and the train was flooded with sunlight and everyone was smiling. I began to breathe again as I gazed at the city sprawled beneath us, looking clean and beautiful. The river had become a silver thread, sparkling off in the distance. Manhattan, sleek and elegant, winked from the far side of the water.

  Now the train whistled through the streets of Queens, turning us into voyeurs as we stared at the dioramas in the uncurtained windows. A breakfast table flashed past, a coffee cup overturning in slow motion on the table. Then an unmade bed, an old woman in a wheelchair gazing blankly at the blue screen of a television while a young woman in a quilted housecoat vacuumed around her. Below us the colors of the children playing ball changed as we passed through staid pub-filled Irish neighborhoods and raucous Jamaican ones where the sidewalks became a riot of violent hues and the throbbing sound of metal drums wafted up to the train. And then we were in India, and the aroma of cardamom, cumin, ginger, and turmeric was so powerful that we had to resist the urge to jump off the subway and follow our noses to a restaurant. The scent changed again, and by the time we got to Flushing Main Street, the end of the line, the air was filled with garlic and soy sauce. We got off and clambered down the stairs, ravenous now.

  It was as dense and intense as Hong Kong—little grocery stores and bakeries and restaurants crowded together in a dizzying mass. Men stood on corners spooning clouds of homemade tofu out of big silver pots and frying fragrant turnip cakes on jerry-rigged griddles balanced on cardboard boxes. Billows of anise and five-spice announced that women were cooking red-cooked oxtails on one side of the street while the competition on the other side dished up bowls of fish balls and steaming tripe. Frogs escaped from the straw baskets that held them, hopping down the streets, dodging men wheeling whole roasted pigs and racks of ducks.

  After the boisterous streets, KB Garden Restaurant seemed as cold and quiet as an icebox. Shiny philodendrons, still wrapped in congratulatory red ribbons, stood at attention in the front of the room. Tanks hugged every wall, fish swimming in frantic circles as they waited to become dinner. Peering through the throng of waiting customers, we could see that the restaurant was a vast, high-ceilinged hall, so large that the other side of the room might have been in a different state.

  Dozens of women trolled the room, swooshing down the aisles with laden carts, stopping to hold out baskets of dumplings—har gow and siu mai and some I’d never seen before—and plates of vegetables, roasted meats, pastries.

  A hostess in a slim silk dress handed us a number and we waited our turn, growing hungrier and hungrier as the minutes passed. “Dim sum with two people is so embarrassing,” said Carol. “You end up ordering more than you can eat, just for the variety, and then everyone looks at you as if you were a great big pig.”

  The young woman in front of us turned to look at her and I experienced a quick moment of embarrassment; engulfed in the sing-song sound of Cantonese, we had been talking the way tourists do, as if nobody could understand what we were saying. “It is uncomfortable to be alone when eating dim sum,” she said. Her face was Chinese and very beautiful, her accent clipped and very British. “The moment I walked through that door I wished I had not come. “ She tossed a strand of long black hair over one shoulder and smoothed her suit. Was it Chanel or just a knock-off? I couldn’t tell, but I understood that she felt as out of place as we did.

  “Would you join us?” I was taking a chance.

  “I would not be de trop?”

  “No, please, you would be doing us a favor. We’re eager to try as much as possible.”

  “You are certain?” she asked, her face softening. Her name was Diana, she was from Hong Kong, and she was doing graduate work at N.Y.U. “Sometimes I so much miss being at home. I am filled with a longing to hear familiar sounds, smell familiar smells, be among faces that are not white,” she said. “So I come to Flushing. But once here I realize that I am as foreign here as I am in Manhattan, and I understand that the idea was not good. This bears no resemblance to home; the people are poor, their accents unfamiliar.”

  “And the food?” I asked.

  She smiled. “Yes,” she said. “The food. That is not unfamiliar. That is why I come.”

  The hostess led us to a table and I began turning this way and that, searching out the good carts. Meanwhile Diana sat like a statue, calmly raising one manicured hand. “We will now order tea,” she said, issuing instructions to the waiter in rapid Chinese.

  “If you do not order tea,” she said, “they bring you the cheapest swill they can buy. It is dreadful stuff, nothing you would want to drink. But even if you do not care about the quality of the tea, by demanding the best you make the establishment understand that you know what is good and are willing to pay for it. And then you get a better meal.”

  “What did you order?” I asked.

  “Iron Goddess of Mercy,” she said. “It is always my preference. It comes from the Wuyi Mountains in Fujian. The mountains there are very steep and in the old days monkeys were traine
d to climb up and pick the leaves. It is a lovely story, but the tea is even lovelier and extremely fragrant.”

  The tea was strong and very dark with a taste that reminded me of whiskey, of olives, of cold winter nights. “I asked the man to bring us some duck webs in oyster sauce as well; they are very good here and I will be devastated if they run out. And I also ordered some big dishes. You must not leave without tasting the shrimp.”

  She pointed an elegantly manicured fingernail toward a tank on the wall; the waiter was dipping a net into the water. He came up with a tangle of shrimp angrily waving their feelers at the intruder. He dumped them unceremoniously onto a tray and a waitress rushed off to weigh them. Two minutes later he was setting a plate of rosy shrimp, steaming slightly in their shells, onto our table. Their feelers were still.

  “You simply pull off the shells and dip them in this sauce,” said Diana, removing her rings as if she were rolling up her sleeves. With one rapid motion she slipped the shrimp from its carapace, dipped it into the soy and scallion sauce, and put it into her mouth. Her small white teeth closed around it. “Excellent,” she said. “This reminds me of home.”

  The shrimp were plump and sweet, with a soft delicacy that was not like any shrimp I’ve ever tasted. For a moment I imagined that we were actually in Hong Kong . . . and then I was back, eating another shrimp, and another, the shells piling up into a small mound on my plate.

  Great platters of green snow pea shoots were set on the table, and a whole sole, simply steamed in ginger. Diana was stopping carts filled with clams in black bean sauce, and tiny spareribs coated in rice flour. We ate bowls of ginger-laden congee, the thick porridge hot enough to cook the slivers of raw fish served on the side. The duck webs were all texture, gelatinous and so soft that the bones dropped from them when you put them in your mouth and all you tasted was mushrooms, soy sauce, ginger, anise, and wine reverberating down to your toes. At the end we had little dot hearts—the deep yellow tarts made of lard and filled with sweetened egg yolks—that are one of life’s primal pleasures. And then, finally, those crisp little sesame balls that melt into such sensuous chewiness it seems like a trick.