Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll

by Andrew Friedman

  Sheraton, who describes herself as proudly antihype, saw a weakness in the approach favored by many of the couples. “I was very skeptical of these guys,” she says. “Some more than others. The fact that they were so conspicuously creative, that everything had to be different. And what I didn’t like and what I was always wary of in reviewing was that they wanted to be given credit for their goals, for what I am trying to do—my concept, my philosophy—and to me it’s my dinner. And if it isn’t good, I don’t care what your goal is. So they were often taken aback by a review that said, ‘This doesn’t work.’ And then they would say, ‘Do you know what I’m trying for?’ And I felt, ‘You’re not Picasso, going through a rose period or a blue period at my expense!”

  The Five Couples were also, with the exception of Susan Liederman (a former actress who was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister), it must be said, all Jewish, although it might be something else that set them off from other young cooks in town. “I don’t really think it’s about Jewish as much as I think it’s about class,” says Hoffman. “There was the money and the sophistication to be comfortable in the dining room, to appreciate sitting in the dining room as an aesthetic experience; some people were cooks and some people were into the restaurant business.”

  “I can only speak for myself,” says Karen Pritsker, now Karen Puro. “I think I had an innate understanding of the clientele we had, especially in New York because I grew up [there]. My parents, had they still been married, were in a social situation where they would have come to a restaurant like mine.” Echoes Susan Wine: “All of the French chefs who grew up in the kitchen, they really did have the apprenticeships, the blue-collar background, but they hadn’t been to these restaurants, they didn’t have the diner’s perspective. We had the American perspective: The customer’s always right. We were putting the pieces together from this perspective. That was the one-up that we had on these guys.”

  As if to make Karen Pritsker’s point, Gerry Hayden, a young cook in New York City at this time, visited The Quilted Giraffe in the mid-1980s, when he was working at The River Café in Brooklyn, and recalls: “I was blown away by The Quilted Giraffe because it was the first time as a cook in New York I started looking at the entire experience, not just the food. I started looking at the bathrooms, which were phenomenal, the atmosphere of the restaurant, the waitstaff, the linens, the plates.”

  Loren Michelle, who began cooking at The Quilted Giraffe in the mid-1980s, remembers a key lesson Barry Wine taught her, one that flowed from his experience as a diner: If dishes didn’t arrive at the pass simultaneously and at optimal temperature he’d say, “I’m not serving a table. I’m serving customers. We’re not serving this table. There are people.”

  The Wines assembled a front-of-house team who could bring his vision of a Michelin three-star-level experience to life. Of the Five Couples, the Wines were the superior capitalists, proudly, repeatedly, deliberately driving their check average north of the highest ones in town.

  As the eighties, with all of their excesses, unspooled, the restaurant became synonymous with unbridled luxury, bordering on hedonism. Wine served the beggar’s purses to customers, instructing them to eat them off the plate or platter without their hands, sometimes handcuffing their hands behind their backs to ensure compliance. The restaurant maintained a humidor, which housed Cuban cigars (illegal at the time) and kept a ’77 Rolls-Royce Phantom V idling outside between the neighboring Irish bar and Korean fruit stand to shuttle VIPs to postmeal destinations. Wine recalls the chauffeurs as “characters,” including a Chinese man who packed a gun, and a six-foot-tall woman. In accordance with the Wines’ democratic instincts, rides were offered to every guest, from “Joe Blow to Warren Beatty [to] the Rockefellers.”

  The excess knew no bounds. One cook who trailed there, Arnold Rossman, remembers, “All night long they were waiting for the truffles to come. And the truffles are coming. The truffles are coming. The truffles are coming. And at about ten-thirty, ten-forty-five, all of a sudden there’s this aroma. They’d come in the front door. They’d landed at JFK, they came to Quilted Giraffe first. A woman walks into the kitchen—a woman or a man—walks into the kitchen with this beautiful woven wicker basket with a big handle and a damask linen napkin over the top. The aroma is overwhelming and she pulls the napkin and the thing is filled like this with white truffles. Huge, perfect, gorgeous white truffles. I had never seen anything like that before. And Barry says, ‘Give me a piece of chocolate cake.’ And they had this gorgeous, triple crazy chocolate cake and they put a piece of chocolate cake down and he takes out a truffle slicer, and he slices white truffles over the cake and he takes a bite out of it. And he’s like, ‘What can we do with this?’ I just thought, There’s no fucking way I’m going to work in this place. It was too much for me; it was overload.” But there was no shortage of people willing to be overloaded. Andy Birsh, restaurant critic for Gourmet magazine through much of the 1980s, credits Wine with helping create, or unearth, a new clientele. “Until The Quilted Giraffe there was no such thing as a Quilted Giraffe–type of customer,” which Birsh defines as “an optometrist who was willing to shell out $200 on white truffles—nobody knew such a creature existed.”

  In the kitchen, Wine developed a reputation for playfulness: He had a fondness for puns, such as serving vegetables cut like shoelaces as an accompaniment to sole crepes (get it?), and once created a visual riff on breakfast with a dessert of chocolate “sausage” and poached, sweetened eggs.

  In 1984, at a time when just a handful of restaurants in the city, none headed by an American, held four stars, the New York Times’s Marian Burros—acting critic while the paper searched for a replacement for Sheraton—showered the restaurant with a quartet of them, cementing the restaurant’s place as the pinnacle of fine dining at the time.

  Wine’s palate changed with the times. Instead of serving duck with Armagnac or a cherry sauce, he might pair it with fried plantains and hot peppers; lobster and monkfish might find themselves napped with ginger and scallion. As the restaurant drew top talent, a centrifugal force pulled the kitchen toward greater heights. Not unlike Michael McCarty, Wine took a collaborative approach to running the kitchen and had a knack for showmanship. (Both McCarty and Wine, says Bob Pritsker, “knew how to massage the whole show.”)

  “Everybody was smart,” says David Kinch, today chef of the Michelin three-star restaurant Manresa in Los Gatos, California, who began working at The Quilted Giraffe shortly after the review. “Everybody was a lot smarter than me. I went to culinary school but there was a lot of—Katherine Alford, she’s a UC Berkeley grad. There are a lot of people who had second careers but their careers were academic and they were attracted to cooking. It was almost like a Chez Panisse kind of thing going on. But the food was completely un–Chez Panisse; it was really the ultimate in luxury.”

  “This is what sociologists term genius culture,” says Wayne Nish, who began cooking at The Quilted Giraffe in April 1984. “Where you have an enormous amount of talent that’s attracted to one particular place so there’s an explosion of activity.” He describes a culinary Saturday Night Live scenario: “Everybody’s bouncing ideas off each other. We were trying to outdo each other on a daily basis, whether it was conscious or not. People were vying to get things on the menu. You have this close-knit community at a point in time where there are influences that are shared in common with a bunch of people and a high degree of interest. All of a sudden, there’s a lot of interaction and, boom, you get something new.”

  “You weren’t pantry and sous chef and all this stuff,” says Tom Carlin, who started at The Quilted Giraffe in the mid-1980s. “We were all ‘associate chefs.’ And [Barry] was open to hearing what everyone wanted to do and selecting different ideas. David Kinch and Katherine probably had the most influence. A few others. He created an environment where we could come up with things. I think he was probably one of the first people to start doing the Asian fusion thing. That was really new, his lov
e of Japanese culture and cuisine.” (At the invitation of a sake importer, Wine took a transformative trip to Japan in 1985, saw a connection between kaiseki and nouvelle cuisine tasting menus, and took The Quilted Giraffe in an Asian direction.)

  “I’m not a chef,” Wine told Carlin (according to Carlin). “Picture this as the New York Times and I’m the editor. I’ve got a lot of great writers and I’m going to pick the stories. I’m not writing the stories. I’m not out there doing it, but I know what I want and I try to hire talented people and pick it up.” (After relocating the restaurant to New York City, Wine began employing a formally trained first lieutenant to help realize his ideas; Mark Chayette, a graduate of New York Technical College, was named as chef, along with Wine, in a Food & Wine article profiling rising American toques from around the country in May 1983.)*

  Josh Wesson contrasts Wine’s openness with Len Allison’s fragile ego. “I think that Barry was more secure in his role than Len was, and the dynamic in the kitchen was quite different,” he says.

  “We used to get scared when [Barry] picked up a knife to use it,” says Carlin. “Because he didn’t know how to use a knife. We thought he was going to cut himself or something. Like me and Tom Colicchio [who started at The Quilted Giraffe in 1985], we were really into, like, how fast can you fillet a fish? Or how perfect is your diced shallot? That type of stuff. Barry couldn’t do any of that stuff. But he could do a four-star restaurant.”

  In fact, Wine’s lack of formal training, like Jeremiah Tower’s at Chez Panisse, might have been his greatest strength: “One of the great things about Barry was his kitchen was collaborative,” says Kinch. “He wasn’t a French guy who’s like, ‘This is my way or the highway, fuck you,’ kind of thing. Barry, because he was self-taught, would say things or suggest things. He’d go, ‘Let’s make a béarnaise. Let’s use duck fat.’ Those of us in the kitchen that had been classically trained, we were like, ‘Why do you want to do that? You don’t do it that way.’ He’d be like, ‘Why don’t you do it that way?’ This sounds quaint nowadays but back then, it was a big deal. And we’d be like, ‘Barry, we can’t do it.’ And he’d be like, ‘Just do it. Just do it and see what happens.’ And of course it wouldn’t break. Of course it’d be great. That would be something different. Of course he could think outside the box like that.”

  “His eyes were a little more wide open and could see that there’s different ways of doing these things, and he used that,” says Carlin. That inventiveness extended to the dining room, where, like McCarty and Waters around the same time, Wine attempted to replace the tipping system with a service charge, including the cooks in the pool. “I know he got sued and lost,” says Carlin. “But I liked the concept. No one else had done that. He ran his restaurant like a business. That was new. Things were organized. The food went out on a nine-minute schedule.* ‘Pick up salmon in seven.’ ‘Got it. Salmon in seven.’ Everyone’s writing down. That kind of organized way. I don’t think anyone was doing that.”

  Chris Majer, who cooked at The Quilted Giraffe in the 1980s, recalls the digital watches the cooks used to ensure compliance with the nine-minute timing ritual: “I was watching all these people work on digital watches because every course had to be sequenced in ten-minute streams, plus or minus within a minute at the most, and so the level of service was unlike anything I’d seen before. It was almost militaristic.”

  “There was a rhythm,” says Michelle. “It was almost like a dance in the kitchen where food was in harmony and synchronicity. We basically talked through every technique: ‘Chicken in the pan, searing, flipping, saucing. Veg in the pan. Up in two, up in one.’ We were walking through. So if the food for a table of four was coming up, there was somebody saucing; the expediter was there; there were two or four waiters there. Their hands were on those plates ready to go. . . . That was unbelievable, the communication. I’ve never seen that anywhere else, ever. It’s so chaotic in every other restaurant. There’s a lot of yelling, a lot of blaming. There was none of that.”

  Wine also welcomed team members to make technical improvements that helped the kitchen organism evolve. Kinch recalls that Colicchio came to work at The Quilted Giraffe after a stage in Auch, France: “That’s duck and foie gras territory. And Tom said, ‘We used to cook duck this way.’ And if Tom had said that in any other kitchen, they would have said, ‘Shut the fuck up.’ Barry said, ‘Everybody gather around Tom. Show us how you did the duck.’ And if it turns out it was a better way of cooking duck, Barry would say, ‘Okay, this is how we’re going to do it now. This is great.’ And in fact, it was. And in fact, he did. And we started cooking the way that Tom saw in France. And I was like, ‘What just happened? What just happened?’ I would have been kicked. You’re always taught you learn how to do things and you learn how not to do things, and you keep your mouth shut and then you apply your data points elsewhere. Barry wasn’t like that. And the things that most affect me now from Barry are that sense of collaboration and the sense of trying new things.”

  Colicchio remembers his training earning him resentment: “The ten-minute system, which was really a nine-minute system, was run by the sauté position. That’s the position they gave me. And I had apparently pissed off a lot of people in the kitchen because that was the position everybody wanted. That was the sous chef’s position. And I came in and jumped ahead of everybody. But I could work circles around most people in the kitchen because I had a lot of experience prepping and with the knife. So when a baby lamb came in, everybody kind of looked at it. I was like, ‘Give me it.’”

  In addition to staffing his kitchen exclusively with Americans, Wine also helped break another barrier: “Barry had a lot of women in the kitchen at that time,” says Kinch. “There would be periods of time where fifty percent of the kitchen were women on the line and nobody did that then. That was pretty amazing back then.”

  “When I worked at The Quilted, it was almost like a devout respect Barry had for the women in the kitchen,” says Michelle. “He came in a couple of times a year with earrings for the girls. We had Lipstick Night: Go downstairs, get ready for service, put lipstick on, put your earrings on, and cook. We all kind of got into it because it was like, okay, we’re getting ready to cook. And we were taking charge in the kitchen.”

  The Quilted Giraffe is not without its detractors. Colicchio describes resentment in other chef circles for the Wines’ achievement. “A lot of the guys who worked in the French restaurants were, like, ‘Whatever.’ Because he wasn’t one of them. He got four stars and came out of nowhere to do it but it was the idea that Barry would go to France and rip off some dishes and bring them back, like the beggar’s purses. So people knew where they came from. But the critics didn’t know; the chefs did. Barry got shit for knocking off people’s dishes.”

  Terrance Brennan, a young graduate of Alain Sailhac’s kitchen at Le Cirque who had also cooked for Roger Vergé in France, was hired in 1986 as chef de cuisine. He’d never eaten there but was enticed by the restaurant’s four-star status and stratospheric $65,000 salary.

  “I just came from such a strong French background. Michelin-star restaurants and technique and structure and everyone’s serious. And there, not one person was professionally trained. Noel Comess [one of Wine’s chefs at The Quilted Giraffe] came up through the ranks. Barry wasn’t professionally trained either. Some people got together and they happened to get four stars. And they would do stuff like the fish came filleted already. I just thought it was a quality thing. You can still get great fish filleted but at that time my mind was like, Oh, that’s terrible. They would cut the steak right after they cooked it and all the blood would run out. You know, rest it. Stuff like that that perhaps a professional cook would know about, they would do. I was like a fish out of water. Barry, the way he managed, he had cooks run food up, and he would just come back and play with the food.

  “I remember one time we had an awesome chocolate soufflé. There was a food critic out there and he wanted something and
something else went out, crème brûlée or something like that. I can’t remember exactly but he was telling the food critic, ‘This was this.’ And it wasn’t; it was something else. He was insisting. ‘No, it’s this.’ And he came back and he found out that it wasn’t that. And then he’d come by and put orange confit on caviar or something. I just found that he wasn’t a good chef. Within two weeks I had to sit down and I said, ‘This is not going to work.’ So it was just a brief stint.”

  Rossman remembers of his trail: “The food to me was too bizarre. I remember them serving roasted rack of lamb with mustard ice cream, which I thought was the craziest thing ever. Hot and cold; you don’t do that. You can have a mustard sauce, but you can’t have mustard ice cream.” He also remembers the chef de cuisine and a lead line cook discussing lasagna for staff meal. “He goes, ‘So we need some béchamel, how much do you need?’ And he goes, ‘I don’t know, like two or three cups.’ All right, great. Béchamel: you make a roux, [add] milk. So the guy comes back with a gallon of milk, three cups of flour, two pounds of butter. And I’m looking and I’m going, you’ve got to make two cups. I’m like, these guys have no connection [to classical cooking] because they’re new American cooking. . . . I just thought, that’s weird; it just gave me a weird feeling.”

  And while Marian Burros’s successor, Bryan Miller, upheld the restaurant’s four stars in 1986, Sheraton included the restaurant on her list of America’s most overrated restaurants in a Vanity Fair piece in 1985.

  “Not to take away from it,” says Brennan, offering a glimpse into the resentment many classically trained cooks directed at The Quilted Giraffe, “that’s great that he could do it, be a lawyer, open it up, and be four stars and all of us had to work our asses off and get all this training and get our balls busted and we still don’t achieve that. So more power to him.”