Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll

by Andrew Friedman

  Two of the restaurants gestated outside New York City well before 1979: Dodin-Bouffant, which opened at 405 East 58th Street just weeks before Otto was introduced to the masses, began life in Boston in 1974, a labor of love by Karen and Bob Pritsker, and The Quilted Giraffe debuted in New Paltz, New York, in 1975, strictly as a business venture by the Wines. All of the restaurants had been conceived before Otto was introduced to the world, but they were all of a piece with McPhee’s subject, showcases for a very specific subspecies of American chef when American chef was scarcely a species to begin with. The restaurants also represented some of the first attempts by young Americans to interpret the nouvelle cuisine sensibility in the United States, a reflection of their open-mindedness and of the breakaway barrier to entry: The idea that couples with scant, if any, formal training could even contemplate becoming chefs and restaurateurs in Manhattan would be laughable today, but at the time it was a reasonable enough prospect that several successfully attempted it.

  “It was a very happy time,” says Josh Wesson, who briefly served as sommelier at The Quilted Giraffe, then filled the same role for about three years at Huberts. “There was a group of like-minded individuals who were all doing different things but had a kind of shared vision when it came to experimenting, innovating, playing with different culinary traditions and different techniques, and creating things that were uniquely theirs. The first wave of nouvelle cuisine had broken over the shores of the States, so there were techniques and an appreciation of freshness and lightness, informed as much by Japan as it was France, but the directions that each of those couples took were quite different.”

  Of the restaurants, three proved short-lived and two endured to help define the ensuing decades in New York City dining.

  The first of the short-lived duets was Dodin-Bouffant, the lovechild of Karen (née Cooperman) and Bob Pritsker, who were, respectively, an advertising copywriter and an attorney by trade, though Bob never got around to actually practicing; when they met he was working for Hotel Corporation of America. (Three of these couples’ husbands were law-school grads, and two never practiced, demonstrating both the force of conventional career paths and how strong and sudden was the kitchen’s lure.) Bob was a native of Providence, Rhode Island, who grew up in Pawtucket; Karen was from Westchester County, New York. In Boston, sometime around 1969, he spotted her—a Boston University student at the time—and went right for her. They fell in love, and his enthusiasm for food and cooking swept her away in its undertow. Julia Child was an abstraction to most Americans, but to the Pritskers, she was a very real, local presence. “Julia Child had come back from France and moved to Cambridge and was the doyenne, suddenly, of food,” says Bob. “Right there in Boston, this shithole of a microcosm for food, except for the fish, perhaps.” The Boston food scene in the early 1970s was minuscule: Karen remembers it as Child, cooking instructor Madeleine Kamman, French restaurant Maison Robert, and nothing else. Jack Savenor, Julia Child’s go-to butcher, was a hub for local foodnoscenti—“a bit of the glue,” says Bob—and the Pritskers hung around his shop, networked. “There was a lot of fanaticism at that counter, a lot of intensity,” remembers Bob. “I’d never seen anything like it.”

  Years before Julie and Julia author Julie Powell conquered the Internet doing the same in a blog that led to the book, the Pritskers cooked their way through Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking (volumes one and two), and also leaned heavily on Richard Olney. “I don’t think there were that many books that were written clearly enough for people who weren’t formally trained,” says Karen. They bought their meats from Savenor, their fish from Legal Seafood’s George Berkowitz, and produced so much food in their low-rent Back Bay apartment, prepping on a half-collapsed Ping-Pong table, that they gave most of it away to neighbors.

  And just like that, they were cooks. “It must have been a feeling within some of us that what we were doing in our lives wasn’t particularly satisfying,” says Karen of the zeitgeist. “That we were doing what we were preprogrammed to do. It was way more fun to find something that you loved and go with it as far as it would go.”

  In time, they developed finesse, could whip egg whites to perfection, stopped breaking their béarnaise. When they married at the Regency Hotel in New York City in May 1971, they dictated the menu to the more seasoned hotel chefs. Back in Boston, they began catering parties for “a very old, suburban crowd,” remembers Karen. The husband of a Wellesley couple, frequent clients, was president of two stock exchange companies and offered to back the Pritskers in a restaurant. If they were good enough to attract a benefactor, they figured, they should go into business for themselves. They borrowed $50,000 from Karen’s stepfather, about $50,000 more from a bank, and in 1974 opened Dodin-Bouffant, a prix fixe dinner-only restaurant on Boylston Street. The name nodded to both novelist Marcel Rouff’s La vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, gourmet and a Paris restaurant of the same name.

  Of taking the restaurant plunge, Karen says, “The way I think we saw it was if you’re doing it with your life partner, what a support system you have. You were living in your own little world. I don’t know that it was thought about; it just felt natural to share with your spouse or your partner something you enjoy. The fact that you were doing it for the public was something of an afterthought.”

  Following the French model, Bob marketed each morning, but the similarities ended there; the kitchen team was largely unrefined. “It was pretty haphazard at the beginning,” says Karen. “There was Bob and myself and two other cooks in the kitchen. We placed an ad in probably the Boston Globe and we hired people whose personalities we liked who had done some cooking, but there were no professionals around. It was just sort of fun. Everybody was cooking and talking about food and other things as well.” Because the restaurant was dinner-only, the schedule suited people with other careers, especially photographers and artists.

  The university-rich city echoed the politics of Berkeley, but Bob says that he and Karen weren’t part of protest society, but “we were counterculture as to the frogs in Boston, however few they were, who had French restaurants. Most importantly, there was a guy who owned a restaurant, Maison Robert. Maison Robert moved from a less-important place to the old city hall. And it was such a snobby act and he looked down his nose at these two American kids who started cooking French food, of all heretical things, that we weren’t entitled to even be cooking.”

  The Pritskers, in another commonality amongst many of the couples, learned on the job. Karen says that except for the size of the industrial stove, in Dodin-Bouffant’s first months, they cooked as amateurs—Karen in a T-shirt and clogs. Customers were few and far between: The staff played hearts during service while Karen and Bob used the lulls to master the fundamentals of timing. But there were other unanticipated challenges: They wanted to be more creative, but lacked the technical foundation that expressiveness demands, so were stuck in the classicism rut, especially after a 1976 tour of France that included visits to Alain Chapel and Troisgros. Boston tastemakers weren’t receptive to the prix fixe concept or to the European-style service charge they employed, which in September 1976 prompted local critic David Brudnoy, on his Nightline radio show, to comment that “the food is fine, the people who run it are pigs.” (The Pritskers sued him for defamation.) They were unprepared for the scrutiny, or the criticism, especially Karen, who developed a reputation for haughtiness. (Gael Greene, who is friendly with Karen today, attributed the reputation to misread shyness.) By 1977, the Pritskers were at a crossroads: The restaurant was straining the marriage to the breaking point and they separated; then the media picked up on the separation, dealing them another blow.

  “Everyone knew personal information that was written in the press,” says Karen. “I could never put myself through anything but food scrutiny.”

  “The restaurant didn’t close,” says Bob. “I continued on without her there. . . . We had to separate. We were in deep trouble interpersonally.”

 
Karen retreated to New York City. Eventually, Bob shuttered Dodin-Bouffant, sold it to Moncef Meddeb, who transformed it into the French restaurant L’Espalier. The Pritskers reconciled, decided to try their hand at re-creating Dodin-Bouffant in Manhattan, enlisting an attorney so that they could pounce when the perfect space presented itself. In January 1979, the Pritskers opened Dodin-Bouffant 2.0 in a single-use residential brownstone that they transformed—largely by their own hand over eight months—into a street-level fifty-seat dining room painted pink, white, gray, and blue. The kitchen was subterranean. (While they were in construction, Barry Wine, an attorney turned chef, strolled in, introduced himself, told them he was thinking of relocating his own restaurant, The Quilted Giraffe, from New Paltz to Manhattan.) The Pritskers’ budget blown, the restaurant opened with walls bereft of artwork, freighting the pink tulips that adorned the tables with a tremendous atmospheric burden.

  Establishing what would become a commonality among the Five Couples, the Pritskers had by then broken free of traditional cuisine to cook in their own style. “Once we knew what we were doing in terms of how long it took to sauté a veal kidney, we could play with the concept,” says Karen. “It was a combination of that and the trips we began taking to France. We closed the restaurants in both Boston and New York every July and we spent a month traipsing through France and seeing what other people were doing. Frédy Girardet [at his self-titled restaurant at the Hôtel de Ville in Crissier, Switzerland], Jacques Pic [at the three-Michelin-star Maison Pic in Valence, France]. Interestingly enough, at Taillevent the creativity wasn’t as abundant as it was at Chapel or Crissier, [though] the execution was so perfect. But we also learned a lot about service and what guests expect when they get to a great table.

  “We had changed as cooks and we knew that we wanted to have more fun with the food,” says Karen. “We didn’t want to do classic food anymore although we did do certain classic preparations. We knew that if four people came to dinner, three of them may have had fun with our fun, the fourth might have been more conservative.”

  The Pritskers also incorporated an amuse-bouche,* which Karen believes they were among the first to do in New York City. “We felt it very important because we had seen it in our travels and thought it was a nice way of welcoming.” There was also a less altruistic reason: “We sometimes got backed up in the kitchen so we knew if we had something on the table, that and bread gave you a little breathing space.” Diners on the American side of the Atlantic had some catching up to do: “We served rillettes* a lot. People would be very circumspect about the fat on top so we changed it up.

  “We ran with our intelligence,” says Karen. “I think all those couples who were running restaurants in New York at that time were smart, and curious. And I think our curiosity got most of us to where we eventually wound up.”

  And what did they cook? “I did a sort of a take on steak au poivre, but it was calf’s liver. I also did a vegetable sausage. I know the Waltucks did a seafood sausage and I did a vegetable sausage and nobody had ever done a nonmeat sausage until then. There was a chicken forcemeat that bound it, not much, and anybody who was vegetarian, we never told them and they ate it anyway. Chicken forcemeat, egg white, broccoli, carrots, and peas all blanched carefully, not pureed, very finely minced, put into casings, poached, and then sautéed and served with a beurre noisette and chopped hazelnuts. We also did our own duck pastrami; we used a magret. Took the legs and cured them and hung them in the kitchen in cheesecloth, no temperature control. We monitored them and we used them. We also did gravlax garnished with smoked potatoes and smoked leeks. Mixing what we knew classically with really interesting changes.”

  As in Boston, staffing was catch-as-catch-can: “We had one Czech, who had worked in Europe and had good butchering and charcuterie skills,” says Karen. “We hired a young man who had worked in Long Island whose parents owned an Italian restaurant. He had some kitchen skills, but everybody else we hired, I don’t think any of them had professional experience. Year two of the restaurant, we did start hiring people who had graduated from The Culinary [Institute of America] and had more developed prep skills or sugar skills.” One of the Pritskers’ catches was Mark Chayette, a graduate of Michel Guérard’s kitchens at Les Prés d’Eugénie in France, and Régine’s in New York City. “A very gifted guy,” says Bob. “An unusual guy. A Williams grad. Very cerebral. Great hands. Knives were sharp. Workspace clean. The towel was always in the apron.”

  Bob didn’t bother with French kitchen conventions, and was so unconcerned with appearances that he thought nothing of visiting the dining room in blood-spattered whites, which became an inadvertent sartorial signature. “I didn’t change my apron. I didn’t put on a toque. I’m a Jewish kid. Toque? What does that even mean?”

  New York magazine’s Gael Greene praised the food at Dodin-Bouffant as “original, strikingly personal, even eccentric at times.” She adored the calf’s brain fritters with house-pickled cherries, lamb over arugula with baby beans and root vegetable purees. She found the desserts similarly idiosyncratic, breaking with what Greene described as “French restaurant cliché,” such as ricotta-pepper tart with nutmeg ice cream. In 1980, Greene put Dodin-Bouffant atop her list of favorite French restaurants of the moment. Mimi Sheraton, in an early iteration of what would become a repeating pattern between her reviews and Greene’s, was more measured: She found much of the food excellent, awarded Dodin-Bouffant two stars, but was frankly critical of some dishes, and of what she saw as the restaurant’s pretentions, including the menu, written in French with no translations.

  “The Mimi review irked the hell out of us,” says Karen. “I found it difficult. [Bob] found it unbearable. He railed at every review that wasn’t perfect. There was something obsessive about the way he looked at the press. The night that the New York Times calls you in advance to fact-check, you knew. The fact that Mimi only gave us two stars threw him for a real personal loop.” (Today, Bob says, “It’s an expectation thing, I guess; while she praised the food, she didn’t give it the third star. That happens. It was a long review. I thought it was enthusiastic.”)

  Regardless, Dodin-Bouffant did a solid business, so solid in fact that it was omitted from the 1981 Gault Millau Guide to New York because the critics had one “catastrophic” meal and the restaurant was so solidly booked they were unable to return for a second dinner. “The economy was good. Wall Street was rolling,” says Karen. “A lot of expense-account people coming to dinner. Woody Allen and Mia Farrow. It was the kind of restaurant where you got to see everybody.” Another regular was an increasingly omnipresent Michael McCarty, keeping tabs on the evolution of the food scene on his native coast.

  Dodin-Bouffant, and the marriage, would last less than four years in New York City. But let’s leave the Pritskers in bloom for a moment; the end will come soon enough.

  “I’M SURE IF HE WERE DOING IT NOW HE’D BE INTO SOUS VIDE AND LIQUID NITROGEN.”

  Huberts began life as a Brooklyn dinner party when Len Allison, an English teacher, who along with girlfriend Karen Hubert, a writer, got it in their heads to make a documentary about a clothing store in Brooklyn, New York. The unlikely odyssey to the professional kitchen began in 1977 when, in a sort of culinary Kickstarter campaign, they staged a series of dinner parties in their Cobble Hill home to raise $10,000 to buy a movie camera.

  Two years later, in 1979, the movie hadn’t been made (it never would), but Allison and Hubert—who were regulars at John Novi’s Depuy Canal House*—had taken the plunge into the restaurant business, launched the twelve-table Huberts on Hoyt Street in Boerum Hill, in an 1880s house that had been converted to a tin-ceilinged saloon space (it now houses the popular, though resolutely unvarnished, watering hole Brooklyn Inn). In addition to regular service, the couple hosted a cookbook author series, celebrating new publications by writers such as Edna Lewis and Paula Wolfert. The Times’s Sheraton was an early fan: “There was something very dear about the one in Brooklyn,” she says. “Non
e of the plates matched, different silver, and it was very sweet, more personal in a way.” She also admired Allison’s tendency toward experimentation. “I’m sure if he were doing it now he’d be into sous vide and liquid nitrogen. He had that kind of mind.”

  With time, Allison and Hubert developed their technical skills, and a repertoire of recipes. By July 1981, seeking sufficient clientele to maintain their business, they relocated to larger quarters at 102 East 22nd Street in Manhattan. The space, in what would become a minor design trend, celebrated the street scene outside by omitting curtains in the windows. (The restaurant would move again, to 575 Park Avenue at 63rd Street, in 1989. Patrick Bateman, the antihero of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, dines there in the film version of the book.)

  Allison and Hubert (the couple married in 1984, whereupon she affixed his last name) were unique among the Five Couples, and among most of their contemporaries, in that they did not come at food and cooking from a French vantage point.

  “Where did people get their sensibility from?” says Peter Hoffman, who cooked at Huberts from 1981 through 1985. “They didn’t travel to Europe; they were getting it from intellectuals. We were an early participant in what became New American Cuisine. It was a combination of local ingredients but it was also about native ideas—native cooking. What’s in our tradition? Why are we always looking to Europe? What are the traditions here of great dishes?