Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll

by Andrew Friedman

  O’Keeffe prided himself on being a gentleman. He threw parties to which he invited more men than women, but if the men got fresh, he’d banish them: “He’s out!” he says today in imitation of a baseball umpire, jerking a thumb to indicate the door. He resisted drugs, even at parties where crystal sugar bowls brimmed with cocaine, and he wanted his establishments to be drug-free. In everything he did, quality was paramount. Years before brand-name chefs and blog-inflated butchers elevated burgers, O’Keeffe made a study, soliciting wisdom about the optimum fat content, and embarking on a personal odyssey in search of the best bun: “I tested every hamburger roll from Philadelphia to Boston,” he says of that road trip. “Who had the best hamburger roll? It turned out to be Arnold. Just a little sweeter.”

  He was also a dreamer: In the mid-1960s, he hatched a scheme worthy of Bugsy Siegel—to open a restaurant on a barge on the East River, on the unfashionable outskirts of the Fulton Ferry landing on the Brooklyn side, with a panoramic view of New York City, before the Twin Towers, which would be completed in 1973, were added to the landscape. (Appropriately enough, another restaurant visionary, Joe Baum, ran Windows on the World atop the North Tower, with views that stretched to the horizon line.)

  “I always wanted to serve good food, nice surroundings,” O’Keeffe told me over a breakfast interview at The River Café, after he miraculously brought it back from the pounding it took by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. “I only did this because I could have a garden, too. I was into gardens. The city’s pretty harsh. So I figured I’d make an oasis where New Yorkers could escape without having to drive fifty miles.”

  O’Keeffe is a lean man of indeterminate age. (A fellow writer warned me not to ask him his birthday, which is a well-kept secret.) He’s an immaculate, conservative dresser and as exacting about that as he is about everything else; he was actually forty-five minutes late to our interview because, he said, he hadn’t been able to locate just the right cuff links for his ensemble.

  During the years he lobbied the city for permission to build The River Café, he opened other restaurants, including Bowden Square, a nightclub in Southampton, Long Island, which he operated from 1973 to 1978. Drug use was peaking, and he didn’t care what people did in their Ferraris or Lamborghinis or in the potato field across the road, but he did care what they did in his joint. It didn’t take narcotics to put him off: If a party of ten showed up in tuxedos and evening gowns and one member was chewing gum, the entire reservation was canceled on the spot. To this day, The River Café, just minutes from where you can tuck into three-star New York Times meals in shorts and T-shirts, requires that gentlemen wear jackets after 4 p.m. (O’Keeffe had a shot at the space that became Studio 54 in 1977 but turned it down because “I didn’t know that many nice people.”)

  After a decade of persistence, the city relented and granted O’Keeffe permission to build his dream restaurant, but he couldn’t find a bank to back him until a childhood friend, an executive with a New Jersey bank, helped push through a loan. “All you need is somebody with some balls,” says O’Keeffe.

  O’Keeffe had traveled to London and Paris, eaten in their finest restaurants, modeled The River Café on those settings: stone flooring, rattan chairs, flower arrangements, fine china.

  His culinary leanings were almost Californian in their purity, the default being to fete great product: “If I give most young chefs who want to do peaches, say, in August, a peach dessert, the biggest problem we have is finding the perfect peach with just the right sweetness and juiciness. It’s hard to find. Some seasons you don’t get them at all. Ninety-nine chefs out of one hundred will take that fresh peach and poach it. They can’t leave it alone. They must put some magic to it, which I disagree with. And they will make it taste exactly like a canned peach with all their magic. I said, ‘You take it, you slice it, you lay it out like flower petals, a tiny little bit of sugar on top, sprinkles of water, just let it sit there for a little while, develop its own syrup, and you serve it with a very high-quality double cream. You get high-quality heavy cream, shake it halfway between whipping, just pour it on.’ People might say, ‘That’s all it is, a peach?’ Yeah. Try to find a peach. Finding the peach and not messing with it is the real problem.”

  To satisfy his lofty demands for great product, O’Keeffe developed a network of purveyors, including a fisherman in Everglades City, Florida, who periodically shipped him stone crabs on ice via Eastern Air Lines, and another on the Peconic Bay who sent him scallops two or three times a week. He even sourced venison from the Rockefeller estate in Sleepy Hollow, New York, instructing the hunter where to shoot the poor beasts, and how to hang them and for how long before he sent his man to pick them up.

  He hired Rick Stephan, a Culinary Institute of America–trained chef, but by 1979 was on the hunt for a new toque.

  “WHY WAS THIS NOT TAKING PLACE IN AMERICA?”

  Larry Forgione, then going by his more formal name, Lawrence, grew up in a different borough than O’Keeffe, but had been on his own compatible evolutionary path as a chef while O’Keeffe was making his bones as a builder and restaurateur.

  Forgione was born on Long Island, spent his early life in Queens, New York, one of four children in a middle-class family. One set of grandparents was Italian, the other Irish, so family gatherings were a fixture of his childhood. His Italian grandmother had a self-sufficient five-acre farm on eastern Long Island, where Forgione spent every other weekend and extended time in the summers. His Irish grandmother was a devoted home cook, “one of these women that got up at six and went to church, came back, put an apron on, and didn’t take her apron off until she went to bed at night. She just loved cooking,” says Forgione, who was especially fond of her “little dessert buffets,” featuring at least five home-baked pastries, cakes, and pies. (His Irish grandmother had been a farmer who moved to Queens to raise Forgione’s mother; the Italian grandmother was a Brooklyn seamstress who ended up on Long Island in later life. The upshot was that both sides of the family knew good food and good ingredients.) Even as a kid, Forgione understood that he had it better than his friends, with Sunday feasts regardless of which grandmother hosted. His Italian grandmother was good at sneaking in foods like snails and rabbit and not revealing what they were until they were in the kids’ bellies.

  Much as he loved food, it never occurred to Forgione to become a chef. As a child, he considered the priesthood; after graduating high school in 1970, he went to college with plans to become a physical education teacher because teachers were exempt from the draft. When pneumonia put him down for a semester, he killed time working for a cousin’s Brooklyn catering concern. He loved it; when the next semester rolled around, he skipped school and kept the job. He worked at The Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida, took to the professional kitchen setting, learned some classic techniques like ice carving, came back north intent on becoming a chef, and applied to The Culinary Institute of America.

  Two years later, after graduating the CIA, Forgione wanted to get to Europe, mailed a letter to Michel Bourdin, chef of Maxim’s in Paris. By the time the letter got to Bourdin, he had migrated to London’s Connaught Hotel, and offered Forgione a job there for twenty-five pounds a week. Forgione signed on for six months and took a room in the staff dormitory. He ended up staying two and a half years, working his way up to chef de partie, doing time on every station except pastry in the resolutely classicist kitchen.

  In London, Forgione experienced something he’d never witnessed in the United States: the direct link between farming and foraging and restaurant kitchens. “It was the first time I had seen baskets of wild mushrooms showing up at the back door, brought by the foragers. We would get a load of lamb from Kent every, say, Thursday. Fish that was just impeccable. Produce that just was the most perfect things that you could want. The Connaught bought only the best. And it started to make me think: America is so big, has so many different regions and terroirs. We have mountains; we have streams; we have rivers; we have oceans; we have
hot climate, cold climate—why was this not taking place in America? Why were even the best French restaurants in America using canned chanterelles from France? And in my stupidity, naïveté, it was: Don’t chanterelles grow in America?

  “It just started to bother me. Why were they getting such great ingredients and back in America we weren’t getting great ingredients? You were getting a sheet of paper handed to you by your purveyor and if it was on the paper, you could get it; if it wasn’t on the paper, you couldn’t get it. You never made a request because he didn’t have it. You always got cauliflower wrapped in plastic. The food universe was very small in such a huge, magnificent country. So the real thing came to me when there was a shipment of poularde de Bresse* and all the French guys, everybody, were acting like we were about to have a religious experience. The chef cooked it, he sliced it, and gave everybody a piece. I just remember putting it in my mouth and saying, ‘Wow, this tastes like my grandmother’s chickens.’ It tasted like what chicken should taste like. It was at that moment that something popped. . . . From that moment on, when I tasted a strawberry, all of a sudden I could recall the flavor of my grandmother’s strawberries. Or my other grandmother’s sweet peas. It was almost a cosmic thing.”

  When Michel Guérard blew through London to promote his new book Cuisine Minceur, Bourdin set Forgione up with a gig helping the great man. Guérard offered him a job at Eugénie-les-Bains, but it was scuttled due to a government crackdown on foreign workers in Michelin-starred restaurants, a response, according to Forgione, to complaints that there was a shortage of quality jobs for young French cooks because of a new phenomenon—the influx of American and Japanese aspirants willing to work for nothing. So Guérard dispatched Forgione to New York and Régine’s, for which he was a corporate chef.

  In 1977, Forgione reported for duty at Régine’s, a nightclub co-owned by Régine Zylberg (dubbed “Queen of the Night” by the New York Post) and situated in a 20,000-square-foot space in the Delmonico Hotel at 59th Street and Park Avenue. For the young chef, it was a culture shock: “Régine’s was something I had never seen before: It was what I would consider a three-star restaurant up until ten o’clock at night, and then the walls opened and it was this international disco.” There were a Lucite dance floor, neon hearts, and a nonstop parade of bold-faced names: Jack Nicholson, George Hamilton, Mick Jagger, Brooke Shields, future United States president Donald Trump. Andy Warhol mingled about, tape-recording conversations with the in crowd.

  “When celebrities came in, they always snuck them in through the kitchen,” says Forgione. “So we had this constant parade of celebrities coming through: Cheryl Tiegs. All the bad boys of tennis: Björn Borg, John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors. The Mick Jaggers. Everything from musicians to sports figures to movie actors to television stars like Telly Savalas.”

  Forgione cooked food right out of Cuisine Minceur. The book was a sensation, but some customers would complain about portion sizes. “We had problems with the one little stuffed chicken leg. People would complain that it wasn’t an American portion, even though the leg was stuffed with truffles and sweetbreads.”

  At Régine’s, Donna Summer hits—Mmmmmm, love to love you, baby—throbbing the walls, his disappointment over the state of American product boiled over into full-blown frustration. He decided to do something about it, no small feat in a pre-Internet age: “My process of looking for ingredients was to first think about where they would be grown, or could be grown. I knew that my grandmother grew delicious basil and so on. By trying to sort of be local, I would find someplace on Long Island that grew herbs. I’d say, ‘Well, can you grow these herbs?’ And they would grow these herbs. I think the first things I started working on were mushrooms because it really bothered me that we didn’t have mushrooms. And so I would research chanterelles, where would they probably grow in America? What matched that scenario? Morels, same thing. And then, the process—since you couldn’t type in online “morels in America”—you would have to do some research. What I would then do is, say, find out that wild hickory nuts grow in the groves—the biggest part of where they grow is Indiana. So I would actually call a town in Indiana, speak to their Chamber of Commerce, say, ‘Hey, do wild hickory nuts grow in your part of the state?’ And they’d say, ‘No, it doesn’t grow in our part, but you should call such and such.’ And then you’d call them and they’d say, ‘No, but call this person,’ and then you called that person. And then you finally got to somebody who said, ‘Oh, yeah, we have more wild hickory nuts than we know what to do with. You should call John Dolan and talk to him.’ And then next thing you know, we had true American wild persimmons or hickory nuts or true American chestnuts from a little grove of chestnut trees. Morels came from the Pacific Northwest. And then I learned that the people that are interested in mushrooms are what’s called the Mycological Society, so I’d start calling mycological societies and they would put me onto people who they knew went out and did it. It was a process.”*

  This was, no exaggeration, the beginnings of the extravagant sourcing network that’s just a mouse-click away from today’s East Coast chefs, and Forgione says that he spent good chunks of most workdays in this pursuit, but it wasn’t with history or legacy in mind: “At the time, and I think you’ll find this universally amongst all the chefs of that era . . . I just wanted great ingredients for myself. I wasn’t thinking of it as, Oh, this will make me rich and famous. I wanted the best possible ingredients I could get so I could cook the best food that I could make. And I always had an inquisitive mind and I was dogged in my pursuit of things. It kind of sounds corny but it’s that expression that Fernand Point is famous for: ‘You can’t have great food without great ingredients.’ I don’t think any of us were doing it to become famous; it just happened. We were doing things that we believed in, that we loved.”

  Forgione eventually became chef at Régine’s, fashioning his own menus after the master’s guiding principles. When Guérard visited, he was shocked: “He couldn’t believe that we had great fresh herbs . . . ducks that were not the processed American, standardized Long Island duck. That we had some game birds. That we had some incredible vegetables and fruits and so on. He was blown away that this existed in America.” Forgione remained there for close to a year and a half, then, through Lynne Bien, a pastry chef he used for catering gigs, who also supplied The River Café with its superlative pies (as in L.A., house-made desserts were not a given in New York City restaurants), heard from Buzzy O’Keeffe about the prospect of taking over the kitchen at his Brooklyn restaurant.

  They met at O’Keeffe’s Pear Trees restaurant at First Avenue and 49th Street. O’Keeffe shared his aspirations for The River Café, that he wanted it to—says Forgione—“be a world-class restaurant, a very important restaurant. He thought that it was one of the most beautiful restaurants in the world but hadn’t discovered any culinary voice or tradition. . . . I told Buzzy that if he’d leave me alone, ‘I will give you one of the best restaurants in New York within a year.’” O’Keeffe hired him.

  “When I first got there, it was kind of helter-skelter,” says Forgione. “It was the type of kitchen where people would be running over here and putting salad dressing on. It wasn’t where the chefs designed and created everything and served it to you. To quote Craig Claiborne, ‘The River Café is at best continental cuisine, but from a continent that we have not discovered yet.’”

  Forgione wasn’t kidding when he told O’Keeffe he wanted to be left alone: He painted a box on the floor from which he expedited during service. “I didn’t want anybody coming in my box,” says Forgione. “The front of the house couldn’t enter my box. If they wanted to talk to me, they had to talk to me from outside the box.” (Though there’s often a tension between cooks and servers, the “box” was not normal kitchen protocol; Forgione himself laughs sheepishly when reminded of it today.)

  Forgione and O’Keeffe differ about who deserves credit for the American vision that took hold at The River Café and quickly came
to define the restaurant. “Larry is also very fussy,” says O’Keeffe. “When Larry first came, his training was all in French, CIA, and then he went to work in the Connaught Hotel in London. And it was a famous French chef, Michel Whatever-His-Last-Name-Is. I met him a few times. It was all French. We told him we were building an American restaurant. So Larry’s menu was all in French. . . . He’s here practicing for a week . . . and I said, ‘Larry, American. Same thing, just in English. We were trained by the French, great culinary artists, but we’re an American restaurant. We’re going to use the best we can of what’s in America.’”

  “He and I disagree on a number of things that happened in the beginning,” says Forgione. “I can hear the conversations. He must have heard a different conversation. Yes, Buzzy always wanted it to be an American restaurant, but there’s American restaurants that serve prime rib and O’Brien potatoes, and there’s American restaurants that serve some of the best food in America. So it was true that Buzzy—the only thing he knew was American food. He was using this woman that made pies because she made great apple pies and cherry pies and, you know, really old-fashioned American desserts. So, yes, he did want it to be an American restaurant.”