by Gael Greene
“Yes, but André Surmain* had a rich wife,” Valenza responded.
Everything on l’écriteau (fancy French for menu) was written in the original Old French. A tightly wound maître d’, speaking without actually opening his lips, made sure we had noticed. Would we have caviar—a gift of détente from Russia—firm and sweet? Lobster and artichoke heart in a nutty vinaigrette? Zephyr de sole catalane? Capon truffled from here to there? Of course it was silly, opéra bouffe, over the top, undeniably ridiculous. But I loved it. Each dish arrived with its own spectacular pièce montée—an architectural folly or sculpture that would have wowed the great master Carême. Escorting the lobster was a fisherman’s wife sculpted in lard and wearing a skirt ruffled all around with lobster-tail petals. A Leaning Tower of Pisa built out of uncooked spaghetti loomed over a dish of pasta. And glorious petits fours were piled in a basket—not wicker, but woven in pastry wrapped round with sugar roses.
Valenza himself was wowed by his creation. He stood tall in black velvet, back arched elegantly, one too-long shirt cuff hanging out. His ingenuousness was actually appealing; the passion for perfection remarkable. “But he must learn not to pronounce foie gras faux gras,” I wrote.
I loved the Palace. There were stumbles, and misunderstandings. But I loved it. Loved the Scottish salmon rolled around crème fraîche. Loved the magnificent cream of mussel soup with threads of saffron and tiny bay scallops bobbing. Swooned over the angel-hair pasta doubly truffled in a chiaroscuro of black and white, the aristocratic côte de boeuf with classic truffled chicken dumplings afloat in its Madeira sauce. Too much. Too much. Too much. Just enough.
William Blake must have dreamed it himself when he wrote, “The road of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom.” The pillars of the food and wine world loved the Palace. Craig and Pierre went there often. James Beard was delighted to be a fixture. I saw Forbes magazine’s favorite critic, Malcolm himself (who trusted his own capitalist palate), as well as wine-society stalwarts. Of course, oiled Arabs were grateful to have their wallets lightened. Six customers earned the house’s eighteen-karat-gold credit card by spending ten thousand dollars. In late 1977, France’s influential food magazine Gault-Millau rated the Palace “the best New York has to offer and without any doubt the finest in the U.S.A.”
By that time, Chef Baills was gone. He had stalked out one night when Valenza dared to upbraid him for starting to make gazpacho from scratch for a restaurant critic in the middle of the dinner service. Michel Fitoussi, a small nervous wraith with supreme confidence, had calmly taken over the kitchen, lashing thin logs of carrot and zucchini with ribbons of scallion, and astounding us all by blowing molten sugar as if it were Murano glass into green apples and stuffing them with white chocolate. (To my regret, a few words from me on white chocolate led from that one cloudy pouf to an avalanche of soapy white chocolate that still persists.)
I spent many paragraphs apologizing for loving the Palace. “Some people buy emeralds. Some people have children. I am good to my mouth,” I wrote. But I understood why it was so easy to hate. And I worried each time the Times judged it harshly, once by a critic who admitted preferring fish well done, and then by a critic who confessed she could not eat pink chicken livers, described cassis as blackberry liqueur, and referred to a vanilla butter cream and crème pâtissière-filled truffle as “a cocoa-dusted ice cream ball.” (It was my good fortune that New York had fussy fact checkers and the Times, apparently, did not.)
Each time the Times reviled it, alloting one star (based, I thought blindly, on value for money), I wrote yet another updated celebration in New York, a call to rally affluent gourmands. “The Palace tells us more than we may care to know about who we are,” I wrote. “I am not Albert Schweitzer or Mother Cabrini. I have yet to meet a single saint in this town sworn to vows of poverty, chastity and cottage cheese. There are men and women, noble and true, dedicated to research or music or evangelism or chasing the bogeyman from traumatized psyches, and many spend their disposable income on horses and houses and Halstons and hatcheck girls.”
Though it never made a profit, and filed for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the Palace was finally undone by Valenza’s angry wife. Enraged that Frank had fallen in love with another woman, she turned him in. How the tabloids loved it: Valenza’s indictment on sixteen counts of assorted fiscal sin made big black headlines. His acquittal on all but one count (later overturned on appeal) was reported in a paragraph on some dull back page. All the actors in this drama went on to whisk and sauce again, but the leaning tower of spaghetti never got another airing.*
But even the Palace seemed like small-time decadence when Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey sat down to dinner at Chez Denis in Paris—dinner for two anywhere in the world was the prize offered by American Express in an auction to raise funds for Channel 13. Headlined on the front page of the Times, the four-thousand-dollar dinner was trounced on as a scandalous act by the Vatican. Oh, how I wished I had thought of it.
Impressionable grape nuts of the seventies, on easy sipping terms with French wines, were eager to know more. What did New Yorkers see in zinfandel? Well, for one thing, they could pronounce it. Now with wine authority Gerald Asher beating the drum, the great California winemakers flew in for the Four Seasons’ first Barrel Tasting in 1976. Soon Chardonnays and cabernets from what wine writer Anthony Dias Blue called “the auteur school of wine-making,” would be whipsawing the French by winning much-publicized competitive blind tastings in Paris.
The French were not discouraged. In May of 1976, Regine opened a flashy mirrored boîte on Park Avenue, with Michel Guérard coaching the kitchen. Purists were aghast at the tackiness of linking great food and disco. But it made sense to me. We could eat Guérard’s astonishing egg (caviar) and egg (scrambled) in an eggshell and dance it off till 4:00 AM. And wasn’t it ecumenical of Regine to put two American kitchen acolytes to work: Larry Forgione, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, and Patrick Clark, just out of NYC Technical College.
An aristocratic expatriate, Marina de Brantes, designed the Coup de Fusil on East Sixty-fourth Street* with the chef Yannick Kam. It was dedicated to the nouvelle gospel. Nouvelle cuisine was wildly contagious. Soon impressionable eaters were caught in a quicksand of purees. Plates got bigger; portions got smaller. What was raw got cooked; what had been cooked was now raw. Vegetables were laid out as if they were precious jewels, a carrot, a brussels sprout, a turnip carved into a baton. Dinner was a still life on a plate.
Fresh-turned pasta was a fetish of the seventies. We early foodies made our own fettuccine at home, but then the first Pasta & Cheese shop opened in 1976 and cloned itself in the neighborhoods. French chefs had looked down their noses at the cooks of Italy for generations, but soon they had all borrowed ravioli. Anything could be stuffed into ravioli—goat cheese, ratatouille, even garlic puree. Sirio Maccioni, passionately Italian at Le Cirque—what he disarmingly called his “French bistro”—got his congregation to eat pasta primavera, except for the calorie counters and X rays who lived on chopped salad.
Restaurant Associates’ exiled wizard Joe Baum’s magnum opus atop the much-reviled World Trade Center, Windows on the World, had the city looking up in the recessionary spring of 1976. I spent two weeks watching Baum worrying the details and was wowed by what he and his architect had wrought on the 107th floor of the north tower. “If money and power and ego and a passion for perfection could create this extraordinary pleasure, this instant landmark . . . money and power and ego could rescue the city from its ashes,” I wrote. It was the most optimistic moment in architecture since the Rockefellers gave us Rockefeller Center at the height of the Depression. To make the point, the magazine’s cover showed just the restaurant, as if suspended in the air, minus the tower beneath. This was another clever idea from New York art director Milton Glaser, who just happened to be the graphics designer of Baum’s dream, as well. Reading my piece now, I do sound a bit gaga. I admit I was gaga. I was thrilled by the astonishing views
and felt a wave of mild acrophobia because the glass wall went down to my feet. Every vista of the city seemed brand-new, a miracle. I wrote, “In the Statue of Liberty lounge, the harbor’s heroic blue sweep makes you feel like the ruler of some extraordinary universe. All the bridges of Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island stretch across the restaurant’s promenade.” Even New Jersey looked benign from up high. Helicopters and clouds floated below.
It was not merely a time of economic pain. The streets were rife with uncontainable crime and there was not enough money to sweep away the grime. But from above, I observed, “Everything to hate and fear is invisible. A fire raging below Washington Square is a dream, silent, almost unreal, though you can see the arc of water licking flame. Default is a silly nightmare. There is no doggy dew. Garbage is an illusion.” A few months later, a Daily News headline would record the president’s indifference: FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.
Joe Baum was everywhere at that first meal. “This is one of my favorite tables,” he said to me. I reacted as if it were a posthypnotic suggestion. We were as far from the prime window seats as could be. Yet, I had to admit the view was remarkable. The interior had been layered so that every table would have a view.
“They didn’t put enough sugared pecans on your strawberry-rhubarb compote,” Baum complained, pounding the table to summon a waiter.
“No, Joe. They did. I ate them.”
He bent down to pick up a cigarette wrapper.
The magazine’s cover line on my story was pretty gaga, too: “The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World.” Amazingly the world (long before SoHo and TriBeCa would beckon) was willing to go all the way downtown even for lunch.
The gentrification of notoriously grungy and dangerous Columbus Avenue began in the mid-1970s, too. Its booze-soaked sidewalks were seized by Yuppies seeking low-rent apartments and by merchants eager to quiche and white wine them. Michael Weinstein wasn’t planning to be a restaurateur till he opened the Museum Café on Columbus and a few critics appreciated his pop menus. (But with success at Saloon and Ernie’s and later America, his company, Ark, would go public and eventually buy Lutèce.) The Silver Palate was scrunched into a closet-size storefront, with catering by Sheila Lukins and Julee Russo. (It would grow into a factory selling relishes, jams, and flavored vinegars, and then an all-time-best-selling cookbook.)
Macy’s Cellar got grander and more global. And the first Greenmarket opened. Not long after, Dean & DeLuca lured us downtown with the market as art gallery on Prince Street. The corner superettes, long mom-and-pop acts, often Jewish, were bought by Koreans, and suddenly we could find fresh flowers for sale twenty-four hours a day.
Flying Foods downtown, wholesaler and broker of exotica, brought in out-of-season greens from other hemispheres, exotic mushrooms all year round, and a rash of radicchio. Back in Detroit, my mom, Saralee, refused to venture beyond iceberg, but the mesclun revolution was making waves across the country and certainly in her supermarket.
The year 1977 brought an MSG scare, and no wonder. With three master chefs in residence in New York City, Chinese food had never been more beautiful or more exciting. At Shun Lee Palace, master T. T. Wang orchestrated supernal hot-and-sour soup and cold appetizers so searingly peppered, some of us broke out in a sweat. As addicted as I was to peanut butter as a child, I now became fixated on Shun Lee’s peanut buttery sesame hacked chicken. Uncle Lu dynamited heads off with torrid stir-fries at Hunam on Second Avenue, a side venture of Wang, with a young Michael Tong as his clever sidekick in the dining room. Uncle Tai perfected slithery caramelized venison and cold peppered rabbit, mysterious and fiery, sweet and silken at David Keh’s blue-painted Uncle Tai’s Hunan Yuan on Third Avenue. Tai’s voluptuous orange beef became the signature of his second, Chef Ho, who went off to open Fortune Garden.
David Keh’s feng shui must have been working in those years. Keh had a sweet, shy charm and a knack for pleasing fussy celebrities, though he often left majordomos to run his dining room while he went out to play. He had arrived in America in 1965, headed for Seton College from China’s remote Anhui province. One hundred dollars borrowed from a San Francisco friend of his father let him cross the country on a ninety-nine-dollar Greyhound deal with a sack of hard-boiled eggs. He found his way that first night to the Chinese Pavilion of the World’s Fair in Queens. There, he cleaned toilets and slept on a bench till he could afford a room.
Waiting tables at Four Seas in Wall Street, he met Lu Hoy Yuen and teamed with that brilliant, natural cook to open Szechuan Taste on Chatham Square. New Yorkers rallied by our magazine’s Underground Gourmet—then Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder—went bananas for that fierce chili heat. Szechuan uptown on Second Avenue made Keh rich and Lu famous, but Lu was lonely and soon disappeared. David Keh’s ambition was to open the Lutèce of Chinese restaurants, he told me. That was what he had in mind for Chung Kuo—Rosenthal china, fresh red roses on every table—in the space that had been Longchamps on Third and Sixty-fifth. Someone pointed out that the name had twenty-eight strokes, an ill-fated number. He changed the logo to David K and his temple of luxury took off in spite of prices unhead of for Chinese food. Later, David would launch the unknown Zarela Martinez in architect Sam Lopata’s brilliantly shadowed Café Marimba below his David K in a move to get the union off his back.
Once midway through appetizers at his Uncle Tai, I noticed three men in long black coats over kitchen whites walk in the front door and march straight to the kitchen, summoned from who knew where to bolster the troops for my dinner. Though Keh could be distracted by mah-jongg, a pretty face, and good times with cronies in Hong Kong and Taiwan, he didn’t miss a trick, certainly not a restaurant critic.
Late in the seventies, New Yorkers who thought tuna came only in cans began to discover sushi. Scattered Westerners joined the Japanese businessmen at the sushi counter in Nippon and Hatsuhana and learned to say “omakase”—“Let the chef decide.” With my friend Joel Grey as my sensai, my first omakase at Takezushi—a “Hallelujah Chorus” of seafood crunch and mystic rice—was a revelation.
Between rounds of excessive feasting, millions went on the Scarsdale diet. Soon it became a book, and it found new life on the best-seller list when its author lost his life, shot by a disheartened lover after she discovered his infidelity. (His bedsheets gave him away, she said. He should have changed the sheets, outraged feminists agreed.)
After fourteen years bumping heads with the city’s bureaucracy, Buzzy O’Keeffe opened the River Café in 1977—a major waterfront victory, lashed to a barge, with a lyrically romantic eye on the Manhattan skyline. Soon it would nurture a line of thoroughbred cooks, Charles Palmer (later at Aureole), David Burke (who would perfect his playful ways at Park Avenue Cafe), and the dessert master Richard Leach. There were critical boos for the food in the first few months, but then chef Larry Forgione arrived with free range from O’Keeffe to buy only the best. Not long after, a poultry farmer, with subsidies from Forgione’s budget, was raising chicken in a revolutionary old-fashioned way. “Free-range” it said on the menu.
Sometime in the summer of 1977, I couldn’t help but notice that Le Cirque’s kitchen was finding its own new identity. No way could I miss the sunny evolution, because I happened to be keeping occasional company with the proud new chef de cuisine, Jean-Louis Todeschini. He loved to eat. He loved to dance after his crew scoured the kitchen at 1:00 AM. But after spending two weeks with him that fall touring France, I worried gossips might question anything I wrote about Le Cirque. Rather than wait for the bitches to chatter, I titled my mostly enthusiastic review “I Love Le Cirque, But Can I Be Trusted?”
The city broke out in a rash of sun-dried tomatoes. Anyone who didn’t jog signed up for aerobic dancing. Some took fitness seriously. The rest of us worked out religiously so we could eat. Die-hard traditionalists in the fancy French restaurants still sauced and carved tableside, but our own nouvellistes arranged plates in the kitchen and sent them out under shiny silver bells—inspiring cl
oche-lifting choreography that provoked oohs and aahs and nervous giggles.
My dear friend Naomi called, always looking out for the welfare of my lovelorn heart, since she knew Andrew, her erotically charged accountant, was still keeping me dangling. Her husband’s cousin had met a recently divorced “perfect man for you.” I invited real estate developer Harley Baldwin to join me for a reviewing lunch that lasted till five o’clock, when we walked home through the park, still talking nonstop. I left him at the Dakota to change for dinner. He was tall, with an athlete’s long muscles and the face of a Gerber baby—pale blond, blue-eyed, pink cheeks. It was clear at once we were soul mates, but after three consecutive evenings of dinner, dancing, a black-tie benefit, and chaste kisses, Harley finally set me straight. He was not the perfect man for me. “I have a lover named Peter” was how he put it. We became pals, constant companions, sometimes the two, often the three of us. I tried everything I knew to straighten him out.
“It’s so much more psychologically mature to be bisexual,” I lectured him. “To be able to respond sexually to either gender.” Though he conceded that in certain crucial sexual acts I was almost as good as a man, he had divorced his adored wife, made a strong commitment to his gay side. I should have met him in high school, he said.
Harley had been named the designated developer of Bridgemarket in the crumbling but gorgeous space under the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge used as a garage by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. His plan called for a Greenmarket, rows and rows of ethnic shops and bakeries from all known countries and any yet to be discovered, and a restaurant or two. The architect’s sketches looked like they’d been drawn by Palladio. His days were spent fencing with the community and the bureaucracy. Evenings, he wooed the great cooks he wanted to move into Bridgemarket. He’d been born in Chicago but had done a few deals in Aspen. He became the Rocky Mountain Sybarite, a character in my reviews.