by Gael Greene
The hungry nomads who’d loved them in their adolescence upstate followed. And new friends proved loyal. Barry, wide-eyed and usually smiling, remained sweetly obsessed, a perfectionist with a passion for quality, the urge to experiment, and the gene for high risk. He delighted in circling the room, introducing guests to a two-foot rod of Japanese radish.
“It’s so hairy,” women squealed.
“It tastes like potato,” Barry would announce proudly.
He would not let a customer eat an entrée garnished the same way twice. And no table ever received the same vegetable twice in the same night. He would be out back, juggling thirteen possibilities, driving the sous-chef crazy. He did shoestrings of vegetables long as spaghetti . . . was he the first? One day, I stopped by and found him experimenting with mustard ice cream to go with the brain salad.
“Must you?” I said.
“Only if it’s wonderful,” he promised.
Decades later, when maniacally creative chefs had made mustard ice cream seem no more bizarre than rum raisin, Wine reminded me.
“But it was awful, Barry,” I said. “It’s still awful.”
“Awful? What do you mean? Really. It was delicious.”
The Wines were a succès fou in any language. They were so successful, they could afford to close both Saturday and Sunday and drive to New Paltz for the weekend in their navy blue Rolls. Susan, trim and tiny and pretty, was famous for being cranky and snapping at any customer who complained of real or imagined abuse. Even now, Barry marvels at her almost supernatural knack for booking tables with a minimum of customer overlap. The restaurant was small and they were turning away hundreds of supplicants every day. There was no bar for customers to wait in, and the vestibule was minuscule. When Bill Paley came in, he needed to be seated without undue delay. “Tables were never empty for more than sixty seconds,” Wine recalls.
A parade of gifted chefs moved through the kitchen of the Quilted Giraffe and its later sophisticated high-tech steel and black lacquer sibling, the Casual Quilted Giraffe, in what is now the lobby and retail bazaar of the Sony Building on Madison Avenue at Fifty-fifth Street. Noel Comess (who went off to found TomCat Bakery) ran the range when the Quilted Giraffe won its four stars from the Times. At that point, there wasn’t a cutesy giraffe in sight except for the giraffe swizzle stick in your cocktail glass. Barry Wine’s beluga caviar and crème fraîche-stuffed beggar’s purses (a borrowing from France that became his signature) carried a twenty-dollar surcharge. Heavy monogrammed silver, expensive china, and goblets with twisted stems spelled opulence.
Giraffe alumni Tom Collichio (Mondrian, Gramercy Tavern, Craft), Troy Dupuy (Lespinasse-Washington, La Caravelle), and Wayne Nish (March) speak of Barry with fondness and admiration for his innovation and passion. “I learned everything I know about running a luxury restaurant from Barry,” says Wayne Nish. “As for creativity, he would come up with ideas. Not everything was brilliant. Gefilte fish with blueberries did not amuse the critics. We would cook Mexican for six months, or Japanese for six months. I did things you just couldn’t do then, like mixing olive oil with soy and sesame—it came from an idea I had.”
In the mid-eighties, a sake dealer invited Barry to see Japan, and he fell under its spell. His food at the Casual Quilted Giraffe (which soon became the only Giraffe when business could not support two) became more and more Japanese—small dribbles and dots of food arranged asymmetrically on exquisite imported hand-thrown ceramics. Barry wore a Japanese chef’s coat and practiced calligraphy. He perfected his iconic tuna wasabi pizza (still offered in homage to him at the Mercer Kitchen). Not all his Japanese fusion scored. “That was the same week we did mashed potato sushi rolls,” he later confessed. “Ehhh.” He made a face. “Who needed it?”
When Sony—coveting the Giraffe space on the street for retail use—made the Wines an offer they couldn’t resist, they took the money and, much to the surprise of many, including me, did not go off to open a still grander Giraffe. Instead, they split and went off in search of themselves. So much for cuisine from one marriage.
“How innocently it begins,” I once wrote. “He does exotic omelets. She is celebrated for her blueberry pie. He moves on to meltingly tender veal shanks in polenta. She turns out a shimmering salmon in aspic and does all her own pasta—by hand.
“‘You two are so good you ought to open a restaurant,’ their friends say. Thank heaven, most of us resist the temptation. And thank Julia Child and her butcher, Bob and Karen Pritsker did not,” I wrote in the fall of 1979. “The fruit of their ambition and their passionate gastromania is Dodin-Bouffant, a cloister of highly personal and creative culinary wizardry on East 58th Street.”
Like the Wines, the Pritskers had prepped their act out of town. That was in Boston. Born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, he had a law degree but never practiced. She came from Westchester, daughter of a Broadway impresario, and worked in advertising. They taught themselves to cook from books. Cooking was a hobby.
“Then one day, we went to Julia Child’s butcher,” Bob told me. “There was a lot of fanaticism at that counter, a lot of intensity. I’d never seen anything like it.” Stlll calling it a hobby, they began to cater dinners for the Newton/Wellesley crowd. Then having listened to the wily snake and tasted the forbidden apple, they opened Dodin-Bouffant, dedicated to the awesome perfection pursued by the gourmand hero of The Passionate Epicure (the book whose pot-au-feu I had used to challenge the chef of the S.S. France). Bob went to market every day. From noon to midnight, they cooked together.
In the summer of 1976, they drove through France, fueling imagination (on the same route I followed, though we never met), falling out of Alain Chapel’s stunned by sublime excess, mesmerized by the bravura of Troisgros. Home again, the Pritskers fired the maître d’ and installed Karen in the dining room, but then something shook up the business plan. There was a separation. “If the restaurant hadn’t destroyed the marriage, the marriage would have destroyed the restaurant,” Boston magazine commented. Feeling cruelly exposed, Karen wanted out.
The Pritskers reconciled, then sold the Boston place and moved to New York, planning to import New England oysters. But that restaurant virus still raged. It took a year to find the narrow Eastside town house east of First Avenue, seven scarring months of renovation. Dodin-Bouffant finally opened in mid-January 1979. Stalkers of cuisinary bulletins, first to sniff the rumors of greatness, were quick to trip down the icy stairs to the stylish vestiary with a door open to the kitchen, where Bob might look up from a casserole with his ingenuous smile. And then they were led upstairs to a striking, unusual den of cool. Pale blue banquettes, a chill of chromed chairs, sedately papered walls quite bare, an arched tulip or two reflected in an oval mirror. The voluptuous display of Karen’s desserts was the only relief from pale blue and beige, leaving the spotlight for gently illuminated faces and the exquisite food.
Boston’s Dodin-Bouffant was textbook classic—boringly classic, some critics complained. Now there was never a boring moment. Nouvelle cuisine and their own confidence had liberated the Pritskers. What they did was original, strikingly personal, even eccentric at times: Lotte in a fragile batter with scallion. Calf’s brain fritters with cherries Karen pickled herself. Or brains poached in a peppery bouillon that was reduced, enhanced with mustard and cream, then garnished with a crunch of carrot. Lamb salad, rose pink and tender, served still warm on arugula in a subtle vinaigrette, beside a tiny hill of baby beans, and purees of celery root and, at first unrecognizable, radish. I savored and delighted in the mystery and the rush of discovery. Every day, the menu changed. Expensive for the time, of course, I noted (one hundred dollars for two with wine).
Karen’s desserts were a happy vacation from New York’s French restaurant cliché. They were mood-elevators for neophiliacs: Pineapple-lime soufflé, smartly tart. The still thrilling kiwi and orange in sabayon. Ricotta pepper tart with nutmeg ice cream. And a stunning bread and butter pudding with caramelized apricots and a spla
sh of crème anglaise. (I don’t believe anyone, except Le Cirque, did bread and butter pudding, certainly not so elegantly embellished, but soon everyone would.)
Some people found Karen haughty. It was true she could be a bit stern, tightly coiled. As stern as her pale, unmade-up oval face, as tightly coiled as her dark hair. I thought it was shyness or a certain discomfort that provoked a defensive irony in her delivery that could seem arrogant. Caught off guard, relaxed, at play, she was a charmer. And Bob, so amiable, jokey, and adorable in his spattered whites—I thought he looked like a street urchin—had a tyrannical temper when crossed. Dishwashers rarely lasted more than two weeks. “All this is to say they are not Barbie and Ken playing restaurant,” I wrote. “As the menu notes, ‘Being Dodin-Bouffant is not easy.’”
“Centuries from now Venusian archaeologists digging in the rubble of Manhattan will find shards of old Cuisinarts and rusted truffle tins and the melted, twisted hulks of electric pasta machines—relics of a civilization that prattled endlessly about what to feed its stomach . . . and how . . . and where . . .” I wrote in a March 1980 issue of New York, confessing that I envied my most food-obsessed playmates because they got to eat in their favorite restaurants again and again and again, while the Insatiable Critic was doomed by profession to move on relentlessly in search of new wunderkinder. “If I were free to go anywhere I pleased tonight, I would choose . . .” And then I described eight wonderful dinners.* It was another of many roundups of bests and favorites I would persuade the editors I must do to justify yet another delicious spree at Lutèce or the Four Seasons on the magazine’s dollar.
Just six months after my first review, Dodin-Bouffant had become the most exciting French restaurant in town. “Every day they play with cuisinary fireworks,” I wrote. “And once in a while they get burned. But cooking is like love. Great adventure is worth any risk. Sometimes you just have to leap off the cliff not knowing if there’s a feather bed or a rocky gorge below.” Of course, I was writing more about my own life—that love was always worth the risk—than I was about the Pritskers in the years when I could not seem to make a sensible romantic commitment. I was writing of my philosophy at a time when the men I chose were more dessert than sustenance. When the one sure joy and the only certainties in my life were work and dinner.
The irony of my metaphor for the Pritskers became apparent a year later when rave reviews and the clamor for tables were not enough to distract them from the unhappiness of their marriage. They separated again and Dodin-Bouffant closed the next summer. Friends begged them to try at least working together. It reopened in the fall—he in the kitchen, she in the dining room, each keeping different hours. But there was too much anger and pain. He offered to buy or sell. She did not want to buy. She had fallen in love and planned to move to California. He says now that she would never agree to a selling price that made sense for him. On August 10, 1982, Dodin-Bouffant closed forever.
David Waltuck studied marine biology “just long enough” to know it wasn’t what he wanted to do. He had always cooked. Six months wandering Europe, eating, exploring the markets, brought him to La Pyramide in Vienne. For him, as for me many years earlier, it was a career epiphany. Back in New York with no experience at all, he got a job as a cook at the Empire Diner, then did a year at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park and became night saucier at Tavern on the Green. A second year at the CIA was “too stultifying,” so he quit, got a job as sous-chef at La Petite Ferme in the Village. All winter, in long johns, he and his wife, Karen (an émigrée from the fashion world), hunted for affordable space. They sold shares to raise the $110,000 it took to transform the funky bodega and cuchifritos stand on Grand Street and open the doors of Chanterelle, with just David and a dishwasher alone in the kitchen.
It was like a mirage, a stage set . . . a teasing dream. Black streets so desolate at night, threatening and littered against the shadowy cast-iron facades on the outer edge of early SoHo. Suddenly, there was a cube of light: a tall storefront, magnetically aglow: Chanterelle. Inside, I found a studied elegance—soaring columns and wooden wainscoting, a blizzard of white linen against gray carpet, a great fan of exaggerated flowers, birds-of-paradise, so stately that they seemed wondrously silly.
Karen—a stylish Sally Bowles with her zany trill, a big smile, arched brows, dark hair in a modish boy cut—hung your coat in an armoire and danced you to a table. There, deliberately casual waiters in white shirts and long white aprons demonstrated proper French manners and American agreeableness.
The high French style of the Waltucks’ dream was impressive, especially in this no-man’s-land: big balloon glasses, sweet butter in a ramekin, the astonishingly superior bread, so rich and chewy—from Hoboken, I learned, at a time before great bread became an obsession in New York restaurants. The menu was dated for the week, with its drawing by the artist Marisol, both à la carte and a thirty-five-dollar eight-course prix fixe. Among the offerings: a fricassée of seafood in sea urchin cream, a delicate layered pastry of oysters, salmis of duck with scalloped turnips, perfect greens, exquisite cheese from Dean & DeLuca—vacherin, Pont l’Eveque, crottin de Chavignol, and a froth of fresh goat. Tart grapefruit sorbet cleared dizzied senses, followed by a tray of goodies: crisp palmier cookies, candied grapefruit peel, chocolate truffles, bitter and dark.
By the time I made my third visit, a fussy avant-garde of affluent food-obsessed citizens had found Chanterelle. David Waltuck could afford a sous-chef. But he was only twenty-four years old, really still learning. He continued to experiment as he went along, and his work was uneven. Two weeks earlier, he had tasted a vegetable sausage at the Pritskers’ Dodin-Bouffant and it had inspired his own oyster sausage with a sublime watercress cream. He could turn out a lobster navarin in a haunting sauce perfumed with cream and then send out a wine sauce reduced to an unpleasant aftertaste or serve a gritty frozen slab of something called hazelnut ice cream.
The Waltucks were disappointed by the litany of flaws I listed in that first review—“The Daring Young Man on Grand Street”— that was so close to a rave. “David Waltuck is not yet as brilliant as he intends to be, but when he is good, Chanterelle, in SoHo, is astonishing,” the opening line read.
At that moment, unqualified praise for Chanterelle would have brought savvy eaters down to SoHo with impossible expectations. It was safer for the Waltucks (and my reputation) if readers came expecting less than perfection. Many were likely to be less demanding than I. There was always the chance they might be dazzled. And ultimately, they were. First there were three stars, and then four.
I’m not sure what the moral is or even where the wisdom lies in the story of “Cuisines from Three Marriages.” But Chanterelle survives and thrives twenty-five years later, and so, it seems, does the Waltuck marriage. I wrote this chapter to see if there was a lesson here for me, but I have not found it.
41
BONFIRE OF THE FOODIES
IT WAS JANUARY 1980. THE LID HAD BLOWN OFF MOUNT SAINT HELENS IN Washington. China sent its first Olympic team to the winter games in New York. Gold soared to $802 an ounce. New York’s kitchen all-stars were warming up, too, obsessed with game, legally farmed or outright booty, inspired by new ingredients from adventurous farmers and food brokers. “Now comes winter to celebrate the cuisine of astonishment,” I wrote in “Great Chefs, Inspired Feasts” that January. “Wild pheasants appear, an unexplained miracle. Remarkable venison, wild ducks, five perfect squabs. Don’t ask where they came from. Fresh chanterelles are being flown in from Oregon,” I marveled. “Someone has bootleg raw foie gras.” Suddenly, we would discover the lotte had a liver. Chanterelle had persuaded its Cape Cod scallop supplier to bring in lotte liver. At the Palace, chef Michel Fitoussi’s mousselike lobes of lotte liver floated in a piquant sea with slivers of snow peas for crunch. Snow peas were the pea of choice now. Radicchio, crunchy and costly red lettuce from Italy, colored aristocratic salads. Perfectionist chefs paid five dollars a pound for twig-thin French string
beans.
In the eighties, certain hoity-toity snobs liked to say they had never been south of Fifty-seventh Street. For some, Saks Fifth Avenue was the Maginot Line. But budgets pinched by financial hard times in the late seventies had inspired pioneers to explore desolate corners ripe for revision. Raoul, Chanterelle, and Greene Street were the pioneers in SoHo and now in TriBeCa, wherever that was—the cabdriver would find it, we hoped. We ventured downtown to J. S. Vandam and Capsuto Frères. Giant red neon letters spelling out Odeon became a beacon for the eclectic chic in 1980. During the transit strike, it seems, the McNally brothers—Brian and Keith (veterans of Cafe Un Deux Trois, One Fifth, and Mr. Chow)—and Keith’s wife-to-be, Lynn Wagenknecht, happened to walk by an old luncheonette on a nowhere block way west. They could afford it, especially if they kept the tacky metal chairs, the homely banquettes, the Takacheck machine. With Regine’s alumnus Patrick Clark at the stove, the Odeon’s draw would be good food and laid-back attitude—Frank and Ella and confit of duck. Bachelor rogues of showbiz, fashion’s precious babies of every sexual persuasion, suburban squares, punksters with tufts of apricot hair, refugees from Elaine’s, and John Belushi, Richard Gere, Milos Forman, David Bowie, Warren Beatty, and Mary Tyler Moore, blissfully unnudged by a crowd determined not to betray the pulse throb of the thrill, all showed up. We were getting a taste of the McNally magnetism. By August, Odeon would be the hottest contender for bistro of the year.
W chronicled leveraged buyouts, Le Cirque hair, and glitz, glitz, glitz. The Reagans were poised to move Hollywood into the White House. The Carters’ almost endearing just plain folksism was finished. What a perfect time it must have seemed for Jean-Jacques Rachou, restless in the confines of his tiny and wildly successful Lavandou, to sink his savings into restoring the frumpy La Côte Basque. In the fourteen years since his death, Henri Soulé’s beloved “playpen for the poor,” run by his persnickety longtime companion, Mme. Henriette, had faded. And so had she. Bernard Lamotte, painter of the sunny murals radiant with light that gave Soulé’s pampered ménage the illusion of dining alfresco at the port of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, dropped by that March to pay his respects. As the new carpet was being tacked into place, the artist, intoxicated by the renewal, ran out for tubes of color and, using a plate as a palette, began to brush new figures into his murals, people and mules, chimney smoke and swirling wind. He summoned Rachou to see. On a building where Lamotte had long ago lettered “Restaurant Côte Basque—Henri Soulé,” it now read “Jean Jacques Rachou.” “I was not planning to do it,” he confessed to Rachou. “A hand was guiding my hand.” Côte Basque did become Rachou’s arena, free of the old snobbery, with its brand-new state-of-the-art kitchen and the giant plates of the nouvelle cuisine style, just like Michel Guérard’s. Rachou always was a weekend painter. Now using beurre blanc and glace de viand as his media, he sketched astonishing flowers and feathers in the sauce. Very more is more, as I wrote. A parade of young American chefs would rotate through that kitchen, acquiring a Gallic discipline that the next generation of chefs might never know.