by Gael Greene
It was Jim Beard—congenitally bicoastal and beloved on both—who introduced me to the goddesses. I first tasted Alice’s food at dinner with Jim and my friend Harley Baldwin in the café above Chez Panisse. I had arrived in San Francisco fresh from worshiping the exquisite finesse and refined complexity of Frédy Girardet in Crissier, outside Lausanne, and Michel Guérard in his remote fiefdom in southwestern France. Frankly, I wasn’t expecting much.
“Shall we just cook for you?” Alice asked, relaxed and confident, bubbling with affection for Jim. (Jim brought out a lot of bubbling in his female acolytes and protégés.)
I remember thinking, Okay, show me. And to my astonishment, she did. There was something radically daring in the simplicity of every perfect vegetable, the pristine leaves of baby greens that had not yet hit kitchens in New York, the clarity of an oddly shaped tomato. Until that moment, heirloom meant a hideous vase you dare not send to the thrift shop because it had been your grandmother’s. If there were zealots reviving forgotten species of tomato or twenty strains of heirloom potatoes on the East Coast, I was not yet aware of it.
“I have only three scallops left,” Alice said. “They’re very special.”
We each had a scallop still in its shell—unheard of back east at that moment—slicked with a bit of butter, a drop of lemon, a turn of the pepper mill. It was like eating something just born, hatched a moment before in the sea just for us.
Alas, I definitely came too late to my first audience with the aging and ailing M. F. K. Fisher. One afternoon in the mid-1970s, I walked into the dining room at the Stanford Court in San Francisco and spied James Beard, a huge smiling Buddha in a blue denim mandarin jacket, impossible to miss. I ran over to give him a hug. He was lunching with an elderly woman draped in brown, her face rather dour and unexpressive. I looked at her and nodded.
“You don’t know my friend Mary Frances?” He seemed surprised. “Mary Frances Fisher.”
It took a few seconds before it sank in and I realized this swollen, clearly unwell creature was the famed, beloved, unsurpassed writer of food and love, the sexy siren (as food historian Betty Fussell describes her) . . . M. F. K. Fisher.
“This is Gael Greene,” Jim said. “She is the very enthusiastic restaurant critic of New York magazine.” (Jim had a way of saying something positive about me that could also be negative when you thought about it later.)
That day at the Stanford Court, I imagined I could see M.F.K.’s young beauty from her portrait on so many book jackets, although it was almost lost in the doughy puff of her medication-distorted face.
“I’m having trouble with my New York magazine subscription,” she said.
I bit my tongue and smiled. “Well, if you send me the sticker from your last magazine, I’ll get that fixed for you the minute I get back to New York.”
It was in Jim’s beginner class that I met Jane Freiman, a fine-arts major then in publishing, who would leverage these classes, a passion for food, and sheer chutzpah to become a cookery teacher and cookbook writer when she found herself unemployed in Chicago due to marriage.
Together, Jane and I were formidable. How else to explain where I found the chutzpah to invite James Beard for dinner? The two of us fussed and debated the menu, elaborating and revising, testing and refining. Jim seemed comfortable enough sipping champagne on the cushioned window seat in the back room of my apartment. I’d set up the foldaway aluminum table and draped it in dark blue corduroy cloth to the floor—regal backdrop for service plates and candlesticks from my collection of pewter. We brewed pumpkin soup so I could use my antique pewter tureen and ladle. It took two tries, but I mastered lush ricotta and spinach gnocchi from Naomi Barry’s Tuscan cookbook. The leg of lamb that followed—generously pierced with slivered garlic cloves—was exquisitely rare, perfect with a ’66 Mouton Rothschild from the cellar riches Don had generously left behind in Woodstock.
The climax was my version of Paula Peck’s deeply dark chocolate velvet under drifts of sour cream folded into whipped cream for an approximation of crème fraîche, and meltingly buttery Viennese cookies. Jane’s lush bittersweet chocolate truffles arrived with coffee and cognac.
Jim sipped and looked thoughtful. I guess we all felt some comment was called for.
“This is the richest dinner I’ve ever eaten,” Jim said. All I heard was the superlative. And I glowed with pride. Next day, I chewed over the ambiguity of his statement. I finally decided not to brood about it.
29
SPLENDOR IN THE FOIE GRAS
EARLY AMERICAN SYBARITES AND EMBRYONIC GOURMANDS WERE RUNNING loose abroad now in the seventies as the larder at home grew more sophisticated and uptight tradition began to evolve. No one had ever thought of cheesecake as sinfully wicked till I urged them to try Miss Grimble’s über-chocolate Grimbletorte. A band of feminists liberated McSorley’s men-only bar. The Whole Foodier Than Thou folk ate tofu and sprouts. It was 1971. A man named Carl Sontheimer wanted a small venture to occupy his time in retirement, so he began importing a French machine called the Robot-Coupe. Marketed as the Cuisinart, it was soon chopping up New York. The bloated bellies of starving babies in Biafra nightly on television haunted our growing appetite for excess. There was a five-year waiting list to get into James Beard’s cooking classes. Carrot strips became crudités. I tapped into the trends, documenting and fanning the flames.
McDonald’s finally invaded Manhattan and Nixon chopsticked in China. Détente encouraged China to open its own Chinese Pavilion on the East Side. New York analyzed the home kitchen as an erogenous zone. Truly serious epicurians carried small silver pepper mills in pocket or purse. At least I did. General Mills introduced Tuna Helper in 1972.
Bloomingdale’s made parties after hours in department stores imperative with a five-course sit-down pheasant dinner for thirteen hundred on its one hundredth birthday. Some people left town rather than admit they hadn’t been invited. Though worried that expansion would clean up its appealing clutter, Zabar’s let itself sprawl all the way down Broadway to the corner of Eightieth, but even so, it seemed more cluttered than ever. Balducci’s, in the Village, grew and met the challenge with radicchio.
Determined not to die on his feet, a slave to the kitchen in Lyon, Paul Bocuse recruited his chums from their salad days in Vienne, chez Point, to form La Bande de Cuisine in 1972, a marketing arm for themselves and their products. They were up to something, these Young Turks. “La cuisine du marché”—cooking inspired by the market—was Bocuse’s banner. Gault and Millau, France’s sassy duo of restaurant rating, gave it a name: nouvelle cuisine. The life of the fussy mouth would never be the same.
In New York, the growing ranks of sincere and sometimes near-demented foodies took cooking lessons. We were making our own hot-and-sour soup, and poulet au vinaigre and our own chocolate truffles, ahead of the crowd. I remember hanging sweet marinated spareribs from S hooks in my oven to roast Chinese-style and spending hours scouring away the baked-on mess. The seventies were a time for spinach salad, César Chávez and the grape boycott, cornichons, raspberry vinegar, a rainbow of peppercorns, and goat cheese—crumbed, grilled, sautéed, au naturel, even in ice cream. Hardly anyone wanted a whiskey sour anymore. We drank kir; a splash of cassis made bar plonk sexy. The Shun Lee folks opened Hunam (as it was mispelled), where we choked and sneezed on the incendiary peppers of Mao’s birthplace, and prepped for Thai, Cajun, and Tex-Mex to come. Americans discovered frozen yogurt and haricots verts. No one would ever take an ungainly overgrown string bean seriously again.
Olive oil was French, and conspicuous consumers wanted to have walnut oil, too, rarer and more expensive. Without Soulé, Le Pavillon had lost its soul, and its consortium of owners closed it forever in October 1972, making way for the Women’s Bank, with not even a small plaque to commemorate the mythic quenelles de brochet. The canny Riese brothers—Irving and Murray—gobbled up fast food-chain franchises but made their fortune in real estate by signing leases for hot midtown corners, preferably
for ninety-nine years. Tony May (later to lift the town’s Italian restaurants out of a sea of red with Palio and San Domenico) staged an “Italian Fortnight” at the old Rainbow Room, importing chefs from his homeland, and for two weeks there was great regional cucina in our town—the first carpaccio, homemade ravioli, chocolate tartufo.
Paul Bocuse flew in like a movie star, trucking pigs’ bladders for a dinner at the Four Seasons to promote his Beaujolais. I knew he didn’t speak English, so I spent mornings for two weeks before he arrived trading kitchen talk with a French teacher in order to write the story. Paul draped me in his signature apron and instructed me to peel the truffles. Cutting away even the thinnest stubble of a costly black truffle was a luxury only he could afford. But what did I know? Forever after when I tasted an unpeeled truffle in a dish, I rapped the chef.
France’s foie gras-mongers knew who buttered their bread, and they popped into town at the drop of a truffle to woo the affluent and the influential. (Lucky me.) France’s celebrated master pâtissier Gaston Lenôtre opened a bakery/café around the corner from Bloomingdale’s in 1974, proposing to cater all of New York’s celebrations. That flirtation didn’t last very long. But New Yorkers would never again confuse sherbet with sorbet.
Eli Zabar left his kinfolk on the Upper West Side and crossed town to open E.A.T., catering to hungers we never dreamed could be quite that expensive.
Sirio Maccioni triumphantly sneaked fresh porcini home from Tuscany, carrying them through customs in his briefcase, for the opening of Le Cirque on East Sixty-fifth Street in March of 1974. The landlord, William Zeckendorf, we heard, had offered the space rent-free to the defunct Colony’s suave ringmaster and chef, Jean Vergnes, counting on Sirio’s society and show business flock to lend cachet to Zeckendorf’s new Mayfair Regent Hotel. Winos with a nose for a bargain as well as for pinot noir were swift to discover that Zeckendorf’s own cellar of treasured old Burgundies had landed on Le Cirque’s wine list at affordable prices. But for me, critiquing the instantly fashionable new spot, chicken gismonda and creamy stuffed crepes in the retro Colony style were hopelessly dowdy. It would take a year before Le Cirque’s kitchen found its own identity and society’s bouffant-coiffed blondes blooming on the front-row banquette would make Sirio a legend.
It seemed to me that Paul Kovi and Tom Margittai, dedicated Hungarians from the early heyday of Restaurant Associates, might have been born to save the Four Seasons. With the city in a financial doldrum, they opened the Bar Room at the top of the stairs in 1975. It had its own discounted grill menu and itsy doodads, amuse-bouches by any other name (crafted by the small hands of Japanese women, they told us), for expense-account lunchers to nibble with white wine. The three-martini lunch seemed to be on the wagon. Everyone drank white wine. Are you old enough to remember gravlax, the dernier cri in marinated salmon? The Bar Room, now the Grill, had its core of regulars claiming every table. Esquire would call it “the Power Lunch.” Regulars would call—not to reserve, but only if they couldn’t come.
Fairway opened. It was all about fruit and vegetables then and not yet a provocation to Zabar’s. The Quilted Giraffe was in out-of-town tryouts in New Paltz.
Michel Guérard flew in and even the city’s tabloids started to sputter in French: Guérard’s diet cooking, “Cuisine Minceur” (1975), was the headline of the day. On his own after the rejiggering of Restaurant Associates, über-Hungarian George Lang invented a new profession—restaurant consultant—and put his stamp on four hundred hotels and restaurants around the world from Manilla to Thessalonica, or so he boasted. But dusting away the cobwebs and restoring the playful nudes on the walls at the Café des Artistes was his gift to the city. Warner LeRoy, of the Hollywood clan and creator of Maxwell’s Plum, now gave us Christmas all year round by resuscitating the crumbled Tavern on the Green with his own phantasmagorical vision.
Defections from the house of Elaine that had begun with the opening of Nicola’s in 1975 soon led to Parma and Elio’s, then Petaluma and on into the next generation—Vico, Sette Mezzo, Vico Uptown, Lusardi’s, Due, Triangolo, Luke’s, Primola, Girasole, Campagnola, Azzurro, Brio—uptown’s Little Italy.
The pasta persuasion was child’s play. Slightly more sophisticated than the spaghetti and meatballs of a middle-class childhood, it was good for weekdays in the neighborhood. But matriculating gourmands were ready for new tasting diversions, sophisticated tangles of flavor, ever so slightly scary new textures, serious wines, and, every once in a while, a sensuous dining ceremony worth an outrageous price.
30
SWIMMING IN BORDEAUX
IT’S A MIRACLE ANYONE’S LIVER SURVIVED THE MANY SEDUCTIVE POURINGS that blotted out our afternoons in the seventies when France’s winemakers found affluent New Yorkers so ripe for temptation. The grandiloquent grape-juice peddlers flew into town to woo retailers and indoctrinate the growing bubble of wine journalists. And we were ripe to swallow imported wisdom.
Eric Rothschild, the new generation running Château Lafite Rothschild, was young and beautiful and single when we first met in Paris. One thing led to another, as it often did in the sybaritic seventies. Now he’d come to New York to show off a dozen vintages of his family’s great Bordeaux to a froth of wine press and trade at Seagram’s, his distributor. Eric had a business dinner but agreed to meet my friends and me at a club in midtown where men and women—naked except for a few bundles of grapes attached strategically—lolled on nets suspended from the ceiling. My friends had expected a Rothschild to be stiff and uptight, but Eric just laughed at the silliness of it all. We had a drink at the bar and then I spirited him off to dance at Xenon.
The next evening, Eric was expected at a dinner of the Commanderie de Bordeaux, hoity-toitiest of a hoity-toity lot of men-only wine societies. “They won’t let me come because I’m a woman,” I complained to Eric. “It’s a disgrace. Make them come into the twentieth century, Eric,” I begged. “There are so many women winemakers and wine writers now. If you insist that I come, no one will be able to object.” Eric, as always a diplomat, was not a candidate to commit cultural terrorism.
“Those dinners are so stuffy and boring,” he insisted. “You’d hate it.”
“I hate more that they don’t invite women.”
“I’ll just go to their dinner for a course or two and then I’ll come to you,” he said.
“You’ll only see me if I’m not out doing something better,” I replied petulantly.
It was after 11:00 PM when my bell rang. I walked to the door in a sheer black nightgown.
Eric bounded up the one flight of steps to where I stood, a bottle of Lafite in each hand, his Commanderie de Bordeaux medal bouncing on a ribbon around his neck, and kissed me. Kissed my mouth, my ear, and my neck. He followed me to my balcony bedroom. He was a charming, graceful lover, exactly as I remembered from Paris. He lingered for an aristocratic few minutes, murmuring pillow talk, then scrambled back into his tuxedo, tucking the tie into a pocket and reaching for his medal. I walked him to the door, naked in the light of the street lamp.
“I think I deserve that ribbon,” I said.
He laughed, then solemnly placed the ribbon around my neck, where the medal fell between my breasts. He kissed me lightly on each cheek.
That’s how I finally got my ribbon from the stubbornly chauvinist Commanderie de Bordeaux.
31
HOW THEY ATE IN POMPEII
FOR THOSE OF US BY STOMACH POSSESSED, THE GREAT GLORY OF THE SEVENTIES arrived in April 1975, with a fifty-dollar prix fixe, wines priced for an emperor, cognacs so rare that a sip could cost forty dollars. The Palace, an apogee of arrogance and excess, was dreamed up by Frank Valenza, a onetime actor we knew from his ads begging to seduce us with Bloody Mary soup and Lemon Melting Moments at his pop restaurant success, Proof of the Pudding. “Morally the Palace is an outrage,” I wrote in a review called “How They Ate in Pompeii Before the Lava Flowed.” “If only my mouth were not so numbed with joy.” The Palace arrived with a case o
f terminal decadence. It was hardly the moment to launch the most expensive restaurant in town. The Dow Jones was so low, its chin pinched its toes. Breakfast was bitter, eaten with the specter of swollen Mauritanian bellies haunting the news. New York City had teetered on the edge . . . a fat rotten apple. It was a time to buy gold, talk poor, postpone the new sable. A gossipy cabal of French restaurateurs sneered. Bronx-born, a failed actor, Valenza would never pull it off, they predicted.
From the Melting Moments promoter, I had expected superficial pomp. But doubts evaporated as I took in the gentle understatement: no doorman, inside a beige temperance, pastel flowered carpet, graceful love seats. The splendid details: ivory rosebuds with petals edged in coral, silver candlesticks . . . incandescent lighting capable of sweeping away decades of too-vivid living. The shock of the kitchen’s brilliance took me by surprise.
Early on, chef Claude Baills already seemed a fitful wunderkind, even though the dining room was still a prep school for a cadre of rotating rookies. I watched a waiter confiscate a glass of Lafite Rothschild left behind by departing moguls and walk off sipping it. After a few nights when no one came, Valenza was finally forced to give up the conceit of an unlisted phone number. He never could stop talking about how much he spent . . . what each luxury cost. The faceted crystal stemware (not ideal for wine but voluptuous in the hand). Gold-rimmed china. Splendid porcelain dessert and coffee service with scattered forgot-me-nots. A silver trolley that cost slightly more than a Cadillac. The royal table set for eight, canopied and tasseled like a four-poster bed as yet unclaimed by any king.
One night, we were only sixteen mouths to feed. “Yi yi yi yi, nights like this,” Frank moaned.
A sympathetic gourmand tried to comfort him. “It took Lutèce years to start making money.”