That was mere background noise, though. The Wines were on top of the world, and made the audacious decision to close the restaurant on Saturday and Sunday nights.
“The reason for it was that Barry didn’t want amateur diners,” says Nish. “The bridge-and-tunnel crowd* were too difficult to deal with. And as a matter of fact, our cooking was so precise that Monday through Thursday we’d pull a rack of lamb [out of the oven] at 117, 118 degrees; on Fridays, we’d pull it at 120. It was too rare the other way. We had to make some adjustments on Friday night.”
Wine’s calculation was that since the restaurant was always fully booked, they’d make as much on a weeknight as they might on a Saturday. “The place was a machine,” says Nish. “We did one hundred fifteen covers every night. Like clockwork. The highest American Express average in the country. It was a money machine. I know he had topped $3 million in sales. He was doing pretty good.”
“YOU GUYS SHOULD OPEN A RESTAURANT.”
If the Wines offered the Midtown equivalent of a French three-star restaurant, David and Karen Waltuck, with their SoHo jewel box Chanterelle, created a uniquely downtown translation.
David Waltuck grew up the son of two New York City social workers in a middle-class Jewish family on a steady diet of American and Middle European home cooking.
The Waltucks occasionally splurged on a Broadway show, treating their children to dinner beforehand. The meals were French, not the rarefied air of Lutèce, though he had been there, but one of the unheralded restaurants that dotted the West Forties and did a steady business feeding theatergoers. He was swept away by the elegance and the food. “By the time we ordered dinner,” David wrote in the Chanterelle cookbook we coauthored, “I had the sensation that I was no longer in New York City, but in some otherworldly place devoted entirely to the comfort and contentment of its guests.”
Those bistros and their cuisine, especially the sauces, seduced the boy. Before long, David was consumed with food, became a voracious reader of culinary tomes. He started baking, quickly shifted to savory, began taking himself through a progression of exercises not unlike a cooking school curriculum, making stocks, mayonnaise, and other basic preparations. He began amassing equipment; his experiments grew more ambitious. Before long he was making fish mousse, terrines, confit, cassoulet, then combining them into meals. In time, he found his way to Richard Olney’s Simple French Food and French Menu Cookbook, which became guiding lights.
Waltuck had studied marine biology at City College, graduating in spring 1975, then swiftly course corrected and matriculated at The Culinary Institute of America. His relationship to the CIA epitomizes much about the Five Couples: Most of them had no formal training, and Waltuck himself ended up leaving the CIA prematurely; the school bored him. He was caught up in Gault and Millau’s reports of the derring-do of nouvelle cuisine and had already begun discovering his voice. Here’s a small matter: He didn’t care for celery, found its flavor “peculiar,” and so began leaving it out of his mirepoix at home, despite the teachings of his instructors. While training at the school, he worked as the brunch cook at The Empire Diner, a trendy Art Deco restaurant that combined coffee shop grub with creative cooking.*
Bronx boy Waltuck was plunged into a new, predominantly gay world: “It was an eclectic group of people . . . and the chef was this guy named Sophronus Mundy. He had no restaurant experience as far as I could tell. He was a private chef. He was Aaron Copland’s chef or had been. The people that owned it had owned this place on the Upper West Side called Ruskay’s. I’m pretty sure most of those people are dead now. This was pre-AIDS so I’m sure a lot of them died in that epidemic. They were opening this thing that was supposed to be kind of a diner but also a somewhat ambitious restaurant in the sense that they had diner-ish food, but then every night, there was supposed to be a four- or five-course prix fixe menu that would change every day. And nobody was really in charge because Sophronus was in over his head, he used to go out to all the gay bars at night and I would come in in the morning and he wouldn’t be there and the food would start arriving. So I was thrust into this place where I had to kind of figure it out without a whole lot of support. And that was fun. I was doing stuff that I had no business doing in terms of designing the menu.” This was doubly true because Waltuck was learning kitchen basics as he was creating those menus: “All of a sudden soft-shell crabs were there and I had to ask somebody, ‘How do you clean soft-shell crabs?’”
Though Waltuck grew up in a place and time where “gay was just like an insult that you called somebody,” he adjusted quickly to the Empire scene, thought Mundy was “a great guy. He had like two personalities and he would go to his favorite bar . . . and he would roll in at like four or five o’clock in the afternoon the next day.”
In the summer of 1977, Waltuck—a shy string bean—began dating Karen Brown, a brassy free spirit capped by a Sally Bowles hairdo who worked in an East Side women’s boutique. They were polar opposites, in just about every way: Karen was more well traveled than David, having spent extended time in Europe and South America, and was also fearlessly extroverted. They fell in love between meals at Café des Artistes, La Côte Basque, and Lutèce.
Waltuck dropped out of the CIA, went to work for Charles Chevillot at La Petite Ferme, a rustic French bistro on the Upper East Side. But he was bored there, too, wanted to start rule-breaking. He and Karen, who had by then begun entertaining ideas of perhaps opening a restaurant with him, visited France, dined at Taillevent in Paris; Karen was especially inspired by Fernand Point’s widow, Mado Point, and by Maguy Le Coze at the original Le Bernardin in Paris.
Back in the United States, the Waltucks began hosting dinner parties in their studio apartment on East 77th Street. David cooked dishes such as lobster navarin in a cream sauce, squab mousse fortified with Cognac, soft-shell crabs with sorrel, lobster with apple and cider, and rack of lamb with whole cloves of garlic and garlic jus. He also devised a seafood sausage, inspired by reading of Taillevent’s boudin des fruits de mer in a piece by Gael Greene. There was real value in not having an Internet: As a creative exercise, Waltuck often challenged himself to create dishes based on the names he’d see in print. The apartment essentially became a pop-up: Karen would procure flowers and shop for wines at 67 Wine & Spirits on Columbus Avenue.
As it happened for so many of the Five Couples, guests began to echo a shared refrain: “You guys should open a restaurant.”
The Waltucks decided to give it a go, inspired in part by the Wines and Allison and Hubert. They hashed out a budget of $35,000 (which would prove far too low), and went to work seeking a space, settling on a shuttered bodega in SoHo, at the time an urban wasteland. They were there for budgetary reasons (the rent was just $850 per month) but the neighborhood, where artists lived legally in city-subsidized lofts or illegally in industrial buildings, brought out the rebel in them. Waltuck continued to essay dishes with abandon, while Karen staffed up her dining room with a cast of characters who could not have worked in Midtown restaurants: dancers, photographers, and other creatives, many boasting facial hair that would have been a deal breaker north of SoHo and the Village. She also hired women when there was scarcely a woman on any dining floor in town; at one point, a troupe of four dancers who lived together around the corner worked as servers.
A number of aesthetic decisions were groundbreaking. Bill Katz, a designer of stage sets, came up with the name Chanterelle (leaving off a Le or La was itself considered audacious), and the Waltucks elected to write their menu, which Karen rendered by hand in a script that imitated Mado Point’s, in English, something that even The Quilted Giraffe didn’t do in its earliest New York City incarnation. Katz also, as Allison and Hubert did before him, left the restaurant’s windows unobstructed—diners were one with the undeveloped environs that retained their nineteenth-century facades and cast-iron accents.
The Waltucks hit a speed bump when they realized they were going to fall $30,000 short of what they’d need to open.
In a moment that could have happened only in the 1970s in New York City, they were sitting in their job site late one evening when Susan and Louis Meisel, owners of a nearby art gallery, came by on roller skates, en route home from the Roxy nightclub. An impromptu conversation followed and the Meisels arranged a dinner for investors in the restaurant space, securing the remaining funding.
Chanterelle opened in November 1979 with ten tables and no liquor license. The Waltucks didn’t want art on the walls to distract from the food and their company. Katz came through again with the idea of featuring artwork on menu covers, which became a signature of the restaurant as a who’s who of artists from Ross Bleckner to John Cage to Francesco Clemente to Eric Fischl donated artwork, usually in exchange for a dinner. The restaurant also had no dress code, at a time when Midtown dining palaces would have loaned gentlemen a sport coat if they arrived in shirtsleeves.
The effect, wrote Waltuck, was “our idiosyncratic take on a three-star French restaurant, such as could only exist below Houston Street in 1970s New York.” The restaurant became a magnet for the slow-growing community of foragers and purveyors, including a young couple from New Jersey proffering mushrooms and George Faison, who was just launching the foie gras business D’Artagnan with partner Ariane Daguin.
Within a month, Greene had penned a review in New York magazine titled “The Daring Young Man on Grand Street.” Though she found the restaurant to be a work in progress, her enthusiastic appraisal declared, “David Waltuck is not yet as brilliant as he intends to be. But when he is good, Chanterelle is astonishing.” It was an apt study in the contrast between Greene—a cheerleader for the new—and proudly clinical Sheraton, who essentially panned the restaurant in an early review.
“Mimi was about what’s on the plate and how good is this dish,” says Peter Hoffman. “Gael was into the theater and the experience and the cooking as an expression—the plate as an expression of the whole dining experience.”
Chanterelle continued to develop over the years, eventually earning four stars from Bryan Miller in 1987; it moved to a new home, on Harrison Street, in Tribeca, in January 1989, where it remained in business until 2009. Of the restaurants started by the Five Couples, the two that survived the longest rose the highest.
“YOU’RE THROWN INTO A POT OF BOILING LIQUID.”
In an era when cooks and chefs improvised their careers, often in isolation, with no professional community outside of their immediate workplace, this cast of characters knew each other, with varying degrees of intimacy. “I got to know Barry Wine very well and I got to know Pritsker very well, and all these guys who all turned out were lawyers, they had the same stories,” says Liederman. “They kind of just organically fell into it. They wanted to cook. They thought they wanted to run restaurants. None of us knew what was involved in running restaurants until we started to run a restaurant.”
Even those who weren’t friends frequented each other’s restaurants, seeing in the others kindred spirits, though not all of them felt a kinship with the group: “I did [feel a part of something], but not in a huge way,” says Karen Puro. “We were aware that we were in the forefront of change that was taking place in New York, and in the U.S. In Boston we’d felt pretty much alone.” (Puro was also keenly aware of Chez Panisse having been featured in a Harper’s Bazaar article about, per Puro, “two women who were making it in the culinary world.”)
The business also deepened some of the relationships, while straining others. The Waltucks are still together today, as are the Liedermans. The Pritskers broke up for good in 1982.
“It’s very hard to work with somebody twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and find that you have enough left to have an interpersonal relationship,” says Puro. “Bob and I used to beat each other up a lot verbally in the kitchen. It’s just a hard life. We didn’t always see things the same way. Bob was very bottom-line oriented, and I hadn’t really grown up enough to realize you own your own business for a profit. We used to argue over how many covers we’d do a night. I’d say we can’t do more than sixty a night, let’s say, because the shit’s going to hit the fan, and then what. And he’d say, ‘Look, we have four loins of veal sitting in the fridge.’ Couples in the best of situations don’t have to see eye to eye; when you’re working together with someone, you really have to toe the line the same way and we didn’t.”
Of running a restaurant with his partner, Bob Pritsker says, “You’re thrown into a pot of boiling liquid; swimming together in it is not for everyone. Swimming alone in it isn’t for everyone. And it’s a forum for differences. There’s so many things to disagree on suddenly.”
The friction showed in the dining room. “I was very friendly with Bob and Karen until they were getting divorced,” says Liederman. “That became uncomfortable. The last time we went to that restaurant, we walked in and Bob sent us a bottle of wine and Karen came to the table and took it off.” (He and Bob did remain friendly enough that after Dodin-Bouffant closed, Bob helped out in the Manhattan Market kitchen during a staffing shortage.)
Things boiled over in summer 1982: The Pritskers separated in June and closed the restaurant for the month of July. Pressured by friends and fans, they reopened in the fall with a schedule designed to keep the peace: They hired a maître d’ to take over some of Karen’s front-of-house responsibilities, Karen prepped all day, then Bob showed up and honchoed the kitchen at night. “We did that for three months and it wasn’t viable and we were in the process of getting a divorce,” says Puro. “And the press picked it up again, they’d have to, at that point. I was over the marriage so I didn’t take it personally.”
Puro went on to work for restaurant consultant Barbara Kafka’s Star Spangled Foods, then became pastry chef at Tavern on the Green. Bob went all in on the bachelor life. “I was suddenly a liberated New Yorker, and I acted like one with women. That was fun,” he says. “I burned both ends. I worked twelve hours a day but I found women everywhere, often in my dining room. I don’t know that chefs were in their great moment at that time, but if you were in your basement kitchen and some lady or two ladies were at a table and one was delicious-looking, as the chef thanking them for coming and hoping that they enjoyed everything, that was not the last sentence. That was not the last question, you know? There’s an awful lot of stuff that could happen.”
The Wines, too, had a tempestuous relationship. “Barry and Susan were often at one another’s throats,” says Josh Wesson. “If you worked on the floor you were stuck in the middle. Her role there was running the front of the house but Barry also did some of that. She never went into the kitchen but he came out and would butt heads with her.”
Of the dynamic, Susan Wine says, “We were married for twenty-nine years. If we hadn’t been in business together, living three shifts a day, we’d still be married. We burned it out.” She also says that it was only on their day off that she could reflect on or enjoy their success. “When we were out of the restaurant, or out in New York City, or rebuilt our country house and had people out there, then there was a certain amount of basking. But never when we were in it.”
Until 2009, when Chanterelle abruptly shuttered just shy of the restaurant’s thirtieth birthday, David Waltuck used to crack that of the Five Couples, he and Karen were the only ones that were still in business and still together. The marriage endures, as does the Liedermans’, the last gasps of that enchanted moment when a couple could cobble together a restaurant from pluck, passion, and a few dollars, hone their craft for paying customers in the public eye until, suddenly, improbably, they had all of New York City eating out of the palms of their hands.
3
On the Waterfront
“My dear fellow, who will let you?”
“That’s not the point. The point is who will stop me?”
—Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
HOW, AND WHY, BUZZY O’KEEFFE, AGAINST ALL ODDS, BUILT A RESTAURANT ON THE BROOKLYN SIDE OF NEW YORK CITY’S EAST RIVER, AND—JUST AS IMPROBABLY—DISCOV
ERED A SUCCESSION OF GREAT AMERICAN CHEFS (LARRY FORGIONE, CHARLIE PALMER, DAVID BURKE), CONTINUING TO THRIVE AS THEY GRADUATED TO MANHATTAN
Buzzy O’Keeffe was a fussy (his word) kid with a passion for quality that informed everything he did. How fussy? Well, most of his friends made slingshots from any old Y-shaped branch and a bicycle tire. Buzzy fashioned his from maple, stained and lacquered it, fit it with a length of medical tubing, sheathed it in a leather pouch. He decorated his boyhood bedroom. He built himself a dock, one that could withstand any storm, kept a boat there, varnished it to perfection.
“I was always into getting the best,” he says.
In 1977, O’Keeffe—who had owned several hospitality businesses by then—completed his crowning achievement, a glittering European-style restaurant that floated on a barge just off the fringe of Brooklyn Heights, with a peerless panoramic view of Manhattan. The restaurant became a runway for three of the defining American chefs of the 1980s—Larry Forgione, Charlie Palmer, and David Burke—who succeeded each other, in that order, each setting forth his own distinct style of contemporary American food. All three attracted significant media coverage, then alighted to successful careers as chef-owners in the Promised Land of Manhattan, across the East River. The chefs became household names; O’Keeffe did not. But don’t be confused: The story of The River Café is ultimately Buzzy O’Keeffe’s story, and the chefs—while unmistakably talented—owed their big breaks to his good taste and keen palate, and to his unquenchable thirst for perfection.
“FINDING THE PEACH AND NOT MESSING WITH IT IS THE REAL PROBLEM.”
O’Keeffe was born in the northeast Bronx, an Irish American kid in an immigrant-rich community. Don’t ask him where the nickname Buzzy comes from—it was conferred on him as an infant; he didn’t know his real name was Michael until grammar school.
His family didn’t have much money but O’Keeffe recalls a comfortable childhood. His mother kept a garden that he admired, and they could afford an occasional restaurant meal. He found the hospitality business early: At sixteen, he worked at Schrafft’s on Fifth Avenue, one in a chain of candy shops and lunch counters, where his mother had been a waitress. By the time he was halfway through Fordham University, he had eaten at La Caravelle and La Grenouille—his favorites—and at The Four Seasons and the other dominant restaurants of the day. He loved their physical beauty, especially the murals at La Caravelle, painted by Versailles native Jean Pages, whose brushstrokes also graced the walls at Le Manoir and Le Cygne, among many others. O’Keeffe served in the United States Army, then took a job as a sales rep for a California-based food products company for which he was willing to fly coach, stay in cheap hotels, rent a Chevy instead of a Cadillac as long as they would foot his bill in the finest restaurants. His supervisor got the better end of the deal because outside New York City, O’Keeffe couldn’t find destinations that met his high standards, usually settling for a steakhouse.
Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll Page 18