“New American Cuisine was both about recipes and about source,” says Hoffman. “So we began buying direct from producers and being involved with the [Union Square] Greenmarket at Huberts.”
As with many of the Five Couples, technique wasn’t the Allisons’ strong suit, or priority. “They didn’t know from technique,” says Hoffman. “So we all brought to it what [we] brought, and where [we] had been, so that’s part of the trajectory.”
Allison and Hubert’s food was even more idiosyncratic than the Pritskers’: In their first year in Manhattan, there was a starter of smoked salmon pâté flavored with dill and aquavit. There was chicken soufflé with morels; turkey potpie; bourbon-braised pork loin with prunes and assorted purees; sautéed fillet of beef with mushrooms, scallions, and crème fraîche. There were also daily specials, including a rotating selection of fish stuffed with fish mousse. (In her two-star New York Times review, Sheraton—who remains an ardent fan—chided that “the most consistent culinary flaw is a tendency to sweetness where it doesn’t belong.”)
Of the kitchen’s intellectual bent, Wesson, sommelier there from 1983 through 1986, says: “It was always a therapy session with spatulas and tongs. There was a lot of introspection, a lot of analysis, a lot of looking back and looking forward, a lot of putting things in context. This is how everybody talked about everything in those days. . . . I think that’s because Karen and Len were particularly self-aware. All of these restaurants are defined by their couples. And it’s not just their professional experience that defined the way that the restaurants felt if you were working, but it was the whole gestalt of the place.
“The glove was pulled inside out at Huberts,” says Wesson. “They still wanted to create a great dining experience and do things that were worth doing and different from what other people were doing, but they didn’t approach it from the very top tier of existing restaurants. They were kind of doing it from the ground up.” The couple also built on the program that was a fixture of the Brooklyn iteration, welcoming chefs and cookbook authors.
Len Allison’s personality was, according to Wesson, “The Dawn of the Dead. There were different sides of the brain. Karen was very right hemisphere, emotional, soft, extraordinarily kind, almost poetically kind. Len was much more uptight and controlling. And I think he was both enamored of and threatened by people who were more skilled than him.”
Wesson raises an important point: In a theme that would repeat itself in various restaurants around the United States throughout the 1980s, many of the chef visionaries were dependent on more technically proficient subordinates to realize their ambitions. According to Wesson, Allison wasn’t at peace with that reality: “He was self-trained. And when he would get in the kitchen with someone who was formally trained, had better skills than him, he would learn, of course, but depending upon who that person was, he could be intimidated by them. And sometimes the concrete expression of that tension made for a difficult environment in the kitchen.”
“Len, I thought, was driven to the point where maybe something at a moment in time wouldn’t be so pleasant,” says Bob Pritsker. “But, God, to know him socially was a joy. I enjoyed him. He was bright, giving.” Says Sheraton: “Len was sort of a luftmensch, but she was so darling and simple. They went very well together.”
Allison’s personality quirks aside, Wesson recalls Huberts positively. The couple, he says, shared “a love supreme,” and also gave him a wide berth in devising his own wine list, which paralleled the open-minded attitude toward food. “It was an exciting time to be a somm, because there weren’t very many people who were doing that. So it was a tight little group of folks who would commune with one another in the service of finding deliciousness. There was excitement coming from all over the place. The wine world was expanding the way the food world was. If you followed along you were able to transcend the traditional hierarchies of French fine dining and French wine lists and boldly go where nobody had gone before.”
Huberts closed in 1991. The Allisons tried another restaurant, Onda, in SoHo that same year, but it was gone by 1992. Len Allison taught at The Culinary Institute of America for three years, then the couple moved to Maui, where he took up Chinese medicine and acupuncture. Both Allisons are deceased; Karen died in 1997, at age forty-nine, from breast cancer; Len died several years later.
“I WAS IN LOVE.”
The second lawyer of the group, David Liederman—a quick-witted and confident nonconformist—was struck by lightning as a young man. Born in New York City, raised in Princeton, New Jersey, Liederman was first turned on to food by Julia Child, but was by no means a sophisticate. In 1969, touring France at age twenty, he and a girlfriend visited La Maison Troisgros, the Roanne restaurant run by brothers Jean and Pierre.
“As soon as I walked in the door, I said, ‘What the fuck is this?’” recalls Liederman. “They were serving food that was so far beyond my wheelhouse I didn’t begin to understand it.” When his girlfriend, who spoke some French, saw foie gras on the menu, she exclaimed, “I’m not eating anybody’s liver!”
“That’s how unsophisticated we were,” says Liederman.
“I remember the first day. They invented something called La Grande Dessert. And I remember watching this dessert working its way around the dining room, because when we got there, we were kind of the last people in line. And these two gigantic trays of pastries and ice creams and berries and everything you can imagine that I wanted to eat would come. And they put it down on the table and then the waiter would ask the guest, ‘What would you want?’ I watched everybody take a little bit of this and a little bit of this. One or two things, no more. When the guy came to me, I said, ‘I’ll take a little bit of everything.’ You know, the thing was still full. He cleared the table, opened up the wings in the table, and he served me almost thirty little plates of dessert. I was in love.”
The brothers, as they were apt to do, invited Liederman to return the next day for lunch on them. By the time he left, “I made it my mission somehow, some way, to get back in that place and work there.”
Back in the States, Liederman attended cooking school with an eye toward the food business, not necessarily cooking, but just to learn. Whenever he could, he returned to Roanne and Troisgros, hung around for a few days, spent time in the kitchen. He won his bet with Jean Troisgros that if he could beat him in tennis, he could work there—an unprecedented proposition for an American. On completing law school and taking the bar exam, he flew to France in 1975. Troisgros scarcely remembered the wager but put him to work doing perfunctory tasks. Liederman’s big break came in August, when half the staff went on vacation, just as the country was flooded with American tourists. Liederman leaned into the work, became indispensable, experienced what he calls the “three-star high” of working, sleeping, and participating in soccer games against rival restaurants such as Alain Chapel.
Liederman didn’t want to go into the restaurant business, because he witnessed often the spectacle of Jean Troisgros in agony at the end of a service. But fate had its way with him. After a stock-reduction enterprise, Saucier, failed—“Twenty-five years ahead of its time,” says Liederman—he decided to go into the cookie business. In order to secure a production space at 1016 Second Avenue near 59th Street, he took the space next door. He enlisted the help of Bobby Shapiro, who with stockbroker Giancarlo Uzielli owned Hoexter’s Market restaurant, and launched Manhattan Market in September 1979.
Manhattan Market, a gray-walled space decorated with black-and-white photographs and adorned with chandeliers rescued from a Philadelphia train station, served what Sheraton, in a one-star review in the New York Times, termed aggressively nouvelle cuisine: salmon mousse with snow peas, vegetable terrine and chicken with cold tomato sauce, chicken breasts with lemon-lime glaze, calf’s liver with a sherry vinegar sauce. As the nouvellians were doing in France, Liederman made room for pasta on his menu, such as fettuccine amatriciana. There were pear mousse, lemon-almond tart, and a selection of David’s Coo
kies for dessert.
As the Pritskers and Allison and Hubert had done before them, Liederman had gone full Otto, creating his own, distinct oeuvre. As much, if not more, businessman as chef, he was also among the first of his generation to expand beyond the kitchen: In addition to his cookie business, he coauthored a cookbook, Cooking the Nouvelle Cuisine in America, written in collaboration with Michèle Urvater and published by Workman in 1979. For anybody seeking insight into this woefully misunderstood movement, especially on this side of the Atlantic, it’s indispensable. He and Urvater add their own three amendments to the infamous Gault-Millau ten commandments: the emergence of the chef into the public eye; a focus on plating over platter service; and the fetishizing of vegetables as a thoughtful garnish, which recalls Ken Frank’s Gene Wilder–inspired epiphany around the same time. He also coauthored Running Through Walls (about starting a business) with Alex Taylor III in 1989, and David’s Delicious Weight-Loss Program with Joan Schwartz in 1990. Additionally, he sold his cookie empire to Fairfield Gourmet Food Corp in 1996.*
In 1985, the Liedermans, fans of L’Ami Louis in Paris, recast Manhattan Market as Chez Louis, an homage of sorts to the original, finishing the walls a lacquered red and specializing in roast chicken. The restaurant endured until 1991, then was briefly resurrected near Rockefeller Center in 1999.
“AN OPTOMETRIST WHO WAS WILLING TO SHELL OUT $200 ON WHITE TRUFFLES—NOBODY KNEW SUCH A CREATURE EXISTED.”
Of the two restaurants in this pack that survived for decades, one tells a tale of uptown opulence, the other of downtown artistry. The Quilted Giraffe came first to Manhattan: Barry Wine’s conversion from attorney to chef was more swift and unpredictable than either Pritsker’s or Liederman’s. A Detroit, Michigan, native who had practiced law in Milwaukee, then New York City, he and wife Susan, a Barnard College grad, paralegal, and hobbyist baker, relocated to the Ulster County village of New Paltz, about eighty miles from Manhattan, in 1970. Taking the ground floor of their home for his office, Barry hung out a shingle and became a self-described country lawyer, with a decidedly seventies caseload: “Most of my practice was wills and criminal work for the students arrested for marijuana,” he said.
The Wines bought three Victorian houses on Academy Street, converted them to shops, including an art gallery and toy store (specializing in children’s quilts) run by Susan. One was slated to become a restaurant, financed by a group of dentists backing a Culinary Institute of America instructor. When they got cold feet, Barry—having invested about $10,000 in the buildout and obtained a coveted New York State liquor license—decided to proceed with the project himself, seeing an opportunity in the “ladies who lunch” who would no doubt be in need of sustenance after patronizing the Wines’ other businesses. A press release promoted The Quilted Giraffe as “French country” dining, promised a violin duet playing “everything from show tunes to Vivaldi!”
Wine had come to know and love good food as a law student in Wisconsin, where a summer in the employ of a Milwaukee attorney and bon vivant meant field trips to Chicago’s best restaurants. He and Susan had also taken full advantage of the culinary riches of New York City, shopping at the Upper West Side gourmet emporium Zabar’s, supping at Lutèce and other French restaurants.
The Quilted Giraffe, which opened in June 1975, with a boyfriend-girlfriend team running the kitchen, didn’t live up to the Wines’ standards: “On opening night, nobody remembered to wash the spinach,” Barry says. “The terrine was still in the refrigerator and you just opened the refrigerator door, took a slice, and put the terrine back. Nobody knew it should be warmer.”
Nonetheless, The Quilted Giraffe lurched forward. In February 1976, Brian Van der Horst reviewed the restaurant in the Village Voice. He found the décor “godawful quaint” but rhapsodized over the food, awarding it four Vs. (In a harbinger of Wine’s future chefdom, he had made the blueberry ice cream mentioned in the review, something he still points out today.)
Most people can’t pinpoint the exact day and time they became a chef, but Barry Wine can. By December 1976, another CIA grad, Robert Johnson, was running the kitchen. On New Year’s Eve Day, he phoned to report that his car had died en route back from a ski jaunt. Wine and his brother-in-law, an orthodontist, went into damage-control mode.
Says Wine, “Believe it or not—it seems absurd today to think we did it—we sat at a table and said, ‘How are we going to serve these people?’ There were only fifty people coming for dinner, [maybe] seventy-five. And there were other people working in the kitchen. And we figured out the system that became the Quilted Giraffe system and what I think made The Quilted Giraffe what it was. And that is: Everything was supposed to get cooked in less than ten minutes, and if you counted backwards and you knew there’s a clock on the wall, and said you wanted to serve the main course at ten after eight, which is ten minutes after they cleared the apps, you just said, ‘Scallops take four minutes. Let’s wait until six minutes after eight to throw the scallops in the pan and they’ll be done.’”
Wine survived his trial by fire, realized it wasn’t rocket science, and thought he might like to become the chef. “I decided I could do a better job,” he says, even though, he admits, “I didn’t know the first thing about cooking.”
Shifting gears, the Wines modeled their new life on mom-and-pop French convention: Susan baked and managed the reservation book and dining room; Barry oversaw a crew of CIA grads and took a three-week night course himself. The Wines made weekly pilgrimages to New York City to shop for food and flowers, sometimes crashing in town and taking in a fancy French dinner.
The Quilted Giraffe was a Sisyphean labor of love: “Today it’s very easy to open a restaurant,” says Barry, contrasting the deep bench of front- and back-of-house talent and management-worthy veterans currently available to restaurateurs with the scarcity that confronted his generation. The Wines made a fact-finding trip to France, hit a number of Michelin three-star restaurants, and Barry, a dreamer and opportunity-seeking missile, saw one in the regard of nouvelle cuisine’s front men. “The first chefs who came in the dining room, that was a new thing,” he says. “And I saw the appeal of that.” They returned from France freshly charged to take the restaurant to another level.
More reviews followed. In July 1977, Gael Greene trekked to New Paltz, essayed a love letter in New York magazine, dubbing the restaurant a “celebration of amateurs,” though warning that “amateur passion often lurches into silliness”—in particular, she was turned off by giraffes everywhere, from swizzle sticks to a four-foot-tall inflatable one in the restroom, and some culinary overreaches such as duckling with bananas, banana brandy, and light caramelized banana sauce.
The Quilted Giraffe, already popular with upstaters, developed a Manhattan following. The Wines visited France, returning with new ideas—some of them outright lifts, which in the politics of the kitchen is closer to cinema’s homage than literature’s plagiarism. A signature offering, his beggar’s purses—crepes filled with crème fraîche and caviar—were borrowed from Les Jardins de la Vieille Fontaine in Maisons-Laffitte, a Parisian suburb. Eventually, inevitably perhaps, they couldn’t resist bringing their regional hit to Manhattan. They took over a space formerly inhabited by The Bonanza diner at 955 Second Avenue, between 50th and 51st Streets, and deepened their Gallic model (and the one followed by André and Simone Soltner at Lutèce), living above the restaurant. The Quilted Giraffe opened there in June 1979. By now, the Wines had two children, Winifred and Thatcher, and a dog, Eloise, and the family piled into the car on weekends after the last service, driving upstate to their old home, now a weekend retreat.
Over the ensuing years, the Wines grew The Quilted Giraffe into one of the city’s powerhouse dining destinations. One of their secret advantages, shared by several members of the Five Couples, was that they had routinely experienced the pinnacle of food and service, both in the United States and abroad. Many aspiring American cooks came from working-class families, had never dined in t
hose restaurants; the Five Couples were people of relative means, seasoned diners who might have been less proficient than formally trained cooks but had taste memories and a highly developed sense of hospitality that informed their efforts. Not only did they have the funds, or the ability to raise them, to open their own restaurants, but they were well traveled enough to have a vision of what the experience of eating there should be.
Of these trips, which all of the Five Couples save Allison and Hubert took, Hoffman—who briefly worked at The Quilted Giraffe before switching to Huberts—says, “They went and ate, and so they were there as an intense crash-course education on what fine dining looks like, of which food was an element. And they came back and said, ‘Here’s how we’re going to do wine service,’ or ‘Here’s a dish we want to work on.’ They were on par, those two ideas, whereas other people were just in the kitchen doing their work.”
Says Barry Wine: “It was people like Bobby Pritsker and David Liederman who would go to Europe on these monthlong tours. And you might even run into them on the same Michelin three-star route. That’s what we did. We took the Michelin three-star route. My perception—the view of American cooking began with nouvelle cuisine, of all things. It showed us all that you didn’t have to follow the rules. If those guys weren’t following the rules, if Michel Guérard was making leg of lamb baked in hay and it was in his cookbook, we could have leg of lamb baked in corn husks from New Paltz cooked on a Weber grill on the front lawn of the restaurant.”
“It looks different,” says Sheraton of nouvelle cuisine. “The presentation, the plate arrangement, was something that was different about nouvelle cuisine, and that’s something that kicked off a lot of the thinking of these American chefs like Pritsker and Wine. ‘Oh, if the French can do it, we can do it.’ People took a whole new look at how food can be presented, more personal and freer.”
Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll Page 16