Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll

by Andrew Friedman

  McPhee’s story was titled “Brigade de Cuisine,” an arch nod to the fact that there was no brigade; Otto worked alone. “There is no way to get qualified help,” lamented subject to biographer. “You’d have to import kids from Switzerland.” (The article boasts many such markers of the culinary times, such as Otto’s observation that “when you can buy bean curd and eggroll wrappers in a supermarket in a town like this there’s some sort of quiet revolution going on.”) Decades before the term food porn would come into vogue, before series such as The Mind of a Chef would dissect generations yet unborn, “Brigade de Cuisine” trafficked in what might be termed chef porn: McPhee relates Otto’s every step and sentiment, leaving nothing but his name to the imagination. The lingering journalistic lens produces a gauzy, slo-mo literary effect—he devotes an entire paragraph to a day in the life of Otto’s kitchen towel and five columns to a Manhattan shopping expedition, laced with Otto’s ruminations on everything from ingredients (chorizo, lobster, sea urchins) to the most rudimentary of equipment (whisks). Readers found themselves parked in Otto’s restaurant galley as he crafted new dishes, observing him in his home, where he packed school lunches for his children. They were even introduced to his customers, a utopian and eclectic lot that included a bridge toll collector, a plumber, a state senator (from another state), and an international tennis star, left tantalizingly unnamed.

  McPhee also reported that “the center of attention, and the subject of a good deal of table talk, is the unseen man in the kitchen.” The customers present as groupies as they relate, in rapt terms, their admiration of him and his skills, in language usually reserved for artists and musicians. As if that weren’t enough, Otto—in the piece that catapulted him to a sort of postmodern fame—expresses his distrust of the limelight: “He prefers being a person to being a personality,” writes McPhee. “His wish to be acknowledged is exceeded by his wish not to be celebrated, and he could savor recognition only if he could have it without publicity.” So per McPhee, he deserved attention commensurate with the kings of nouvelle cuisine, but was too modest to covet it. He was, in other words, perfect.

  The issue landed like a hand grenade. Otto—in part because of his anonymity, in part because of McPhee’s rhapsodic appraisal—was an overnight sensation and a one-man generational demarcation line, received differently by two very different populations. The larger, more entrenched, more vociferous of them—the culinary establishment—wasn’t nearly as taken by Otto as the author was. No sooner had the piece hit newsstands than it was, in New Yorker parlance, the talk of the town. In hindsight, it was perfectly engineered to be that: McPhee opened with a bang, putting his best-meals-of-my-life claim in the first paragraphs, and compounded the mystique by not divulging the restaurant’s location, only teasing that it was “more than five miles and less than a hundred from the triangle formed by La Grenouille, Lutèce, and Le Cygne,” three of the most celebrated French restaurants of the day.

  Some muckety-mucks granted the unknown toque the benefit of the doubt—“His range is fabulous and his ideas are awfully good, too,” said Joe Baum—but most industry honchos and media bigs treated him as a curiosity, possibly even a fraud. The New Yorker’s editor William Shawn had inadvertently softened “Brigade de Cuisine” up for attack, when in an unprecedented break with the magazine’s policy, he allowed McPhee to perform his own fact-checking in order to preserve Otto’s identity. Nonetheless, the magazine’s offices were inundated by calls seeking the truth behind Otto, spurring an internal guessing game. Some industrious staffers, long before the conveniences of Google, researched the woodland critters name-dropped in the story, hoping to discover that one of them thrived in a particular locality.

  The fact-checking anomaly sparked accusations that Otto was pure fiction, or a composite of multiple chefs, but the author’s sterling reputation denied those any oxygen.

  Still, there was no shortage of criticism. Four Seasons co-owner Tom Margittai balked that Otto wasn’t “in the restaurant business really. He’s an eccentric doing his own thing.” One observer, former Culinary Institute of America president Jacob Rosenthal, suggested the piece was a gambit by The New Yorker to make up for lost ground in the restaurant-coverage war with New York magazine, where critic Gael Greene, an early proponent of nouvelle cuisine, whose sensual reviews and articles (she also wrote erotica) were tailor-made for the emerging times, was making waves.

  Reporting at the time only hinted at the anti-French sentiment woven into “Brigade de Cuisine” and whether Francophilia might therefore have motivated the article’s detractors. As if Otto’s not being French and McPhee’s claiming that his food lapped France’s best weren’t bad enough, in the piece Otto refers to the most celebrated New York City French restaurants derisively as “frog ponds”; bristles at the snobbery of the captains in their dining rooms; reveals that he once found ice crystals in his meat at the well-respected La Caravelle. There’s also no question that, whether intentional or not, McPhee’s claim that his meals at Otto’s were superior to those he’d enjoyed in the nouvelle cuisine temples of Les Baux and Lyon casually called into question the palates and knowledge of the city’s reigning tastemakers. Then there was the handful of words buried in the piece in which Otto, dining with McPhee at Lutèce (the absolute pinnacle of French food in New York, if not the country, at the time), deduces that the turbot they are eating must have been purchased . . . wait for it . . . frozen. (“Why should the story be taken seriously?” asked Raymond Sokolov, former food editor of the New York Times. “Why should we accept McPhee’s reaction to food and an unknown, unnamed chef criticizing the fish at Lutèce?”)

  Mimi Sheraton, the New York Times restaurant critic from 1975 through 1983, believes that effrontery might have provoked some of the attacks on Otto: “I think that’s partly true and especially in the food world,” she says. “Food writers loved Lutèce. I don’t think it bothered me any more than the fact that he was taken around to all kinds of restaurants and critiqued them [to McPhee during the writing of the piece]. I minded that whole part of it. Something about that rankled me. Craig [Claiborne] and Frank [Prial, the Times wine critic] and I all thought it was bullshit. Craig, of course, on the part of Lutèce, because he was even closer to André [Soltner] than I was. They didn’t think it sounded that good.” (The gentlemanly Soltner declined to criticize Otto but chafed at the notion that he served frozen fish. The Lord of Lutèce fired off a mailgram to The New Yorker, offering to produce ten years’ worth of ichthyologic receipts and demanding an apology.)

  After a week of Otto mania, the establishment smackdown came from Prial and Sheraton herself, who’d had no plans to cover him until the paper’s managing editor, Al Siegal, sent them individual notes that read, “I hope you guys are looking for this [guy].”

  “Oh shit,” Sheraton recalls thinking. “Let’s find him. And in three days we did.”

  The writers dispatched a stringer to out Otto, and they ID’d him as Alan Lieb of The Bull Head Inn in Shohola, Pennsylvania, and prior to that, through November 1978, of The Red Fox Inn in Milford, Pennsylvania. The clever sleuth poked around political circles, leading to a Pike County Republican pol who happened to be president of the bank that gave Lieb and wife Anna Rozmarja, nicknamed Ronnie, their mortgage. Sheraton, Prial, and Prial’s wife made a pilgrimage to The Bull Head Inn. Sheraton was unimpressed. (She still is. As I sat with her in the living room of her Greenwich Village house nearly four decades later, she scrunched up her face and said, “The food was really bad. I still remember a something filled with something that was all wet bread. I have in my mind a vision of a lump of wet bread.”) On February 26, 1979, just two weeks after the Otto feeding frenzy began, Sheraton detailed the trio’s disappointment in a piece headlined “Dinner at the Elusive Otto’s: The Disappointing Details.” What’s striking is how personal the takedown seems as Sheraton turns Lieb’s own words, as quoted in “Brigade de Cuisine,” against him: In McPhee’s piece, Lieb rails against canned foods; She
raton describes the artichokes he serves as having “pale yellow . . . bottoms of the type usually canned.” She also echoes the Lutèce slight: “The block shape of the duck and the precision of the straight cut through the breast bone hinted that the duck might have been purchased frozen.” (Ironically, given the fact-checking scandal attached to “Brigade de Cuisine,” the Times verifier let one detail slip: Lieb’s first name is printed as “Allen” when it was in fact spelled “Alan.”) “While it is true that one cannot make a definitive evaluation of any restaurant on the basis of a single meal,” Sheraton concluded, “it is equally true that there is a minimal level of quality below which a great and experienced cook cannot sink even on his worst day.” This criticism would sting today; at a time when the New York Times’s power was absolute, it was devastating.

  “I have a little roadhouse in which I try to cook fairly good food,” Lieb said that March. “That review was like dropping a hydrogen bomb on a small island.”

  Adding to the melodrama, McPhee was tipped off to the impending unmasking and phoned Sheraton at home around midnight the very evening she dined at The Bull Head Inn to entreat her not to out the chef. When Sheraton returned the call around four the next morning, things got heated: “I said, ‘You know how hot a topic food is, you know how hot a topic restaurants are, do you think you could write that in The New Yorker with all the signposts? It was like a scavenger hunt.’” Then she informed him the point was moot: Unbeknownst to McPhee, an initial appraisal had been phoned into the Times by Prial from a roadside phone booth and was in that morning’s paper. (Sheraton’s longer piece ran two days later.) The ensuing crossfire was worthy of a Quentin Tarantino shoot-out as many of Sheraton’s fellow writers publicly criticized her decision. Around the same time, Village Voice photographer Fred McDarrah sold a picture of her to Newsweek—depriving her of her anonymity—which she believes might have been retaliation for her exposé. As New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams used to sign off: “Only in New York, kids.”

  “I guess the press can’t stand a vacuum,” concluded Lieb. “This time the vacuum was me.”

  “YOU DON’T HAVE TO BREAK INTO THAT TRIANGLE.”

  Chefs and the journalists who cover them live in surprisingly different worlds. For all the offense “Brigade de Cuisine” caused, to a subset of young Americans considering a life of chefdom, Otto was an instant folk hero and North Star. The same temerity that offended the establishment bolstered them, showed them what was possible, and—perhaps because Otto’s true identity was initially unknown—allowed them to imagine themselves tracing his footsteps. They no doubt also related to his off-the-grid anonymity, since none of them would have been sought out to opine in the flurry of Otto stories. They were the rebels waiting to spring on the public.

  David Liederman, who with his wife, Susan, would open Manhattan Market the same year the piece ran, and would go on to strike gold with his business David’s Cookies, calls it “probably the best food article I ever read in my life. It was seminal to the food movement in the United States.” (Like many who came up at this disconnected time, when Liederman speaks of “the United States,” he means his corner of it, just as when some refer to the California food revolution, they omit contemporaneous goings-on across the rest of the country.)

  “Everybody wanted to be Otto,” says Liederman. “Everybody wanted to cook like Otto, have the repertoire of Otto. This is when there were not a lot of people cooking. Otto was self-taught. He was a genius cook, according to John McPhee. He had impeccable technique. He totally freestyled, which at the time was totally new. This guy had total freedom to cook whatever he wanted to cook with no rules. He was an absolute artist.”

  “It was everything that I was dreaming of,” says Peter Hoffman, who was then cooking at La Colombe d’Or, a Provençal bistro, owned by George and Helen Studley, in New York City, and would go on to open the SoHo mainstay Savoy. “Here was a guy who was writing a daily menu, working off of what was available to him, improvisationally, living out in the country. His wife was the pastry chef. It was a beautiful fortune and I completely loved it.”

  “It was like, you don’t have to break into that triangle,” says Hoffman, referring to the trio of French restaurants name-dropped in the article. Hoffman so related to Lieb that when Sheraton unmasked him, “I was like, I’m going. I went with my girlfriend at the time. And we spent the weekend out there. I was there to make a pilgrimage. I wanted to see the trout pond in the back and I wanted to walk the grounds.”

  Hoffman’s Bull Head Inn experience counterbalanced Sheraton’s. It was, he says, “very good, not perfect. It was still incredibly exciting and creative and well executed. It was a menu that wasn’t trying to be traditionally French at that point in any way.” Thirty-eight years later, Hoffman still remembers the meal starting with a risotto ball with molten cheese in the center and thinking, They [aren’t] going to have that at Lutèce.

  Not all young American cooks loved Otto: Bob Pritsker, who with his wife, Karen, would open Dodin-Bouffant in New York City, also in 1979, found it all very suspect: “The production by two people of food which seemed intricate, and smoked in the house and ground in the house and shopped for inefficiently at Grand Union. It’s not real. You don’t conduct a restaurant that way and hope to come out the other end whole, financially or mentally,” he says. Nonetheless, when Google coughed up a phone number for Pritsker and I cold-called him for an interview for this book, he chuckled, then asked me if I’d ever read McPhee’s piece, a printout of which was spread before me on my desk. It seems I had caught Pritsker precisely at a moment when he was remembering it, nearly four decades after the fact. Alan Lieb has long since faded from the spotlight, but for those he touched, Otto still looms large.

  American food, as I saw it, was as much about who was in my kitchen as anything else. We’d start with a southern dish, fried chicken or pan-blackened fish, which Able would perfect. Wasabe would take it over, adding a daikon or seaweed salad. Valentine would add a package of rice wrapped in banana. . . . Together we made an amalgam that was as American as shoofly pie.

  —Karen Hubert Allison, How I Gave My Heart to the Restaurant Business (a novel)

  “YOU WERE LIVING IN YOUR OWN LITTLE WORLD.”

  In a quirk of timing on par with the Jane Fonda–Michael Douglas nuclear cautionary film The China Syndrome being released, coincidentally, in March 1979, just two weeks prior to the Three Mile Island accident, “Brigade de Cuisine” reflected and predicted a very particular species of chef evolving throughout the Northeast around this time. Before 1979 drew to a close, five American couples would open restaurants in the Otto and Anne—or Alan and Anna—mode. Only they would do it right in New York City. They were, in order of opening in New York: Bob and Karen Pritsker’s Dodin-Bouffant, Len Allison and Karen Hubert’s Huberts, Barry and Susan Wine’s The Quilted Giraffe, David and Susan Liederman’s Manhattan Market, and David and Karen Waltuck’s Chanterelle. (It was also the year that another couple, Tim and Nina Zagat, who had met working in Paris, started a New York restaurant survey among friends that would lead, three years later, to the first of their slender burgundy-hued publications that would be updated annually, and then appear in other cities and eventually online. And another couple, Brit Keith McNally, who would go on to build a restaurant empire founded on Balthazar and other classics, and Lynn Wagenknecht, whom he would marry, then divorce, opened the stylish bistro The Odeon in Tribeca the following year in tandem with McNally’s brother, Brian. The restaurant launched the career of one of the few prominent African American chefs of the 1980s, Patrick Clark, a cook’s son from Brooklyn who had trained under Michel Guérard and fashioned a menu that fused French finesse and American must-haves like burgers in a retro, casual setting trumpeted by a neon sign that became an iconic image of the 1980s.)

  The restaurants were far from clones but had much in common, especially considering the paucity of American chefs at the time and the relatively small number of stand
out restaurants—most of them French—in New York City. All were operated by couples who were also owners; most of the couples had, at most, limited formal training, and learned or sharpened their cooking and hospitality chops on the job; and they favored or aspired to a nouvelle style over traditional French cuisine. (Yet another couple, Sally and John Darr, opened La Tulipe in the West Village that same year with a gender reversal—Sally was the chef and John, who left academia for the restaurant, the multitasking partner—but the restaurant served classic cuisine. Nevertheless, by the time she got around to reviewing La Tulipe in 1980, New York magazine’s restaurant critic Gael Greene, connecting Sally Darr to the trend, fretted that she might have been “another victim of The Otto Syndrome.”)