Concurrent with his change of venue was an evolution in Forgione’s vision for his own cuisine, which he decided to take in an American direction, in part because he was jingoistic, but there was another reason: “You listen to so much shit from everybody when you’re in Europe about how Americans don’t know anything about food, they don’t know how to cook, that American cuisine is hot dogs and hamburgers and haute American cuisine is steaks and lobsters. And as I started to research it and read about it, it was just so full of incredible ingredients, things that you didn’t hear about anymore. It was a cuisine of great home cooking. But so are a lot of other regional cuisines. So I always felt that I could take something as simple as mashed potatoes and make great mashed potatoes and they would be fine on a menu at a three-star restaurant, a high-caliber, serious restaurant. That it was okay to do that. That really was the backbone of what was going on with myself and Buzzy. . . . I think that it really solidified The River Café as one of the great restaurants.”
As part of his mission, Forgione wanted to develop a relationship with James Beard. “I thought that if I was going to get involved with American cuisine and take this position that I think American food and American cuisine can be world class, I should know the person who I feel is the most important figure in American cooking.” Mutual friend Stephen Spector, co-owner of the Japanese-inflected nouvelle cuisine restaurant Le Plaisir, where chef Masa Kobayashi ran the kitchen, suggested that Forgione simply ring up the icon, pointing the chef to the white pages.
“There it was: James Beard, West 12th Street. So I called him up. He actually answered the phone. I told him a little bit about what I was doing. I don’t know if he got these calls all the time, so what I started to do was, as I was getting in ingredients, I would make this little basket and then have the driver deliver it to him. I’d send him a basket of morels or I’d send him some wild hickory nuts—just different foodstuffs that I know that he hadn’t seen in a while, with a note: ‘Wonderful morels from northern Michigan. Have fun with them.’” Eventually he picked up the phone and called me and said, ‘I’d like to come over and have dinner.’”
Forgione was so blinded by Beard that he doesn’t remember who joined him the night he first came to The River Café. He sent out significantly more food than was promised by the prix fixe four-course menu. “I had happened to just get a shipment of illegal bear meat in from a Native American tribe in northern Michigan,” says Forgione. “Native Americans in northern Michigan up in the Upper Peninsula, they were allowed to trap and hunt freely but they just want the pelts and the skins and so on; they didn’t really want the meat. So my [future] partner at American Spoon Foods before we had American Spoon Foods* was a wild-foods forager and he would get the meat from the Native Americans and send it to me. So I happened to have some bear meat. I cooked it up, and he just went crazy because he hadn’t had bear meat in God knows how long. The River Café became the first restaurant to serve buffalo in New York since buffalo became extinct. I think he enjoyed tasting things that he hadn’t tasted in a long time, and that excited him.
“He seemed to have a good time. We talked a little bit. He left. He said, ‘Let’s talk again.’ And one thing led to another and we started talking all the time on the phone and in person. Instead of sending the driver over with the little basket, I’d go over with the little basket and we just developed this great relationship. . . . Jim was bigger than life. He had fun in everything that he did. ‘Is that fun?’ was a common statement of his. Or he’d taste something and go, ‘That’s fun. This is really delicious. It’s so much fun.’ He equated happiness with fun and he got so much happiness and joy, particularly, out of food. I was so excited to have the opportunity to meet him, and then connect with him and then have this ongoing relationship with him until he passed away, that I feel very fortunate.
“I used to sit with him at his townhouse in Greenwich Village and we would just pull down books and read them and talk about recipes. He also had an incredible memory: Say you were talking about an antique apple; he could say, ‘Oh, I remember having that at such and such restaurant back in 1955; that was just so incredible.’ It was like he could taste it as he was talking about it.”
Forgione continued to expand his network, buoyed by the restaurant’s brisk business and buying power, which enabled him to make greater commitments to farmers and producers than he could at Régine’s. He also began serving chickens from Paul Kaiser, a farmer who raised them in a cageless environment. In one of their periodic meetings, searching for a succinct way to explain them on the menu, he and O’Keeffe came up with a designation that became legendary: free-range chickens.
Helen Chardack, a young cook from Buffalo, New York, who had spent time at Chez Panisse, then returned to New York City, came to work for Forgione, found him a “big, generous, gentle man. This is not the chef who’s walking around yelling at everybody. This was a man who knew what he was interested in, knew the kind of food he wanted to make.” Having spent time in California, she was especially impressed by his sourcing: “When you walked into the little office there, there were reams of papers of who was making what, where the mushrooms were going to come from. I kept thinking, Oh my God. This is gold. If I could somehow get all of these purveyors, this is where it’s at.”
Eleven months after Forgione took the helm at River Café, Gault and Millau’s New York guide came out, naming The River Café one of the best five restaurants in town. It was the only American restaurant on the roster. “I’m not sure if I felt shocked since I was so completely overjoyed—mission accomplished kind of thing. It was hard to believe that I was accepting an award standing next to André Soltner, who was the biggest chef in New York, the king of kings in New York.”
Forgione began meeting other members of his generation who were making their names around the country: Jonathan Waxman, then cheffing at Michael’s in Santa Monica, popped in for brunch with fellow Chez Panisse alum Mark Miller. Alice Waters, on Beard's recommendation, appeared for dinner one night. Waters and the New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme had bonded in 1979, at a Food & Wine magazine first-anniversary event at Tavern on the Green, at which Prudhomme stole the show, and he and his army of cooks bailed Waters and her sous chef Jean-Pierre Moullé out, helping them cook and plate a lamb dish. Waters, Forgione, and Prudhomme developed an ongoing telephone support group. Ed Fertig, a Culinary Institute of America extern at The River Café in the early 1980s, remembers Forgione gathering the troops around, speaking to them of contemporaries such as Waters, whom he himself was learning about for the first time.
Just as Forgione had had an epiphany in London, Fertig was awestruck by the foodstuffs delivered daily to Forgione’s door: “I saw things I had no idea about as far as product. When guys would show up, like Paul Kaiser with the chickens. I was like, Wow, you mean he just drove up here like at five thirty this morning and brought us chickens? It was surprising to me. I worked with the butcher for a while. I was the guy eviscerating these things and breaking them down at seven in the morning; they were still warm.”
If nouvelle Americana doesn’t seem like the foodstuff of hip New Yorkers, Forgione didn’t think it was either. “The River Café under any of the chefs was still a highly tourist restaurant,” he says. “Our main clientele was people not from New York City. And I don’t mean that it was a tourist attraction, but in a certain sense it was a tourist attraction. Where else could you sit and look at New York, this beaming, glistening New York, the lights of downtown, at the time the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty off to the left. It was a postcard.”
Forgione felt that he had helped put the restaurant on the map, though he admits that was “only in my ego; nobody else’s.” Nonetheless, he wanted to be made a partner. O’Keeffe’s reply: “How much is that worth? . . . It’s like giving somebody a couple million dollars, you know? I don’t know how you’d calculate it,” says O’Keeffe.
“Maybe you have to go on your own,” O’Keeffe told him.
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This, to borrow a phrase from O’Keeffe, took balls. The fate that befell Patrick Terrail at Ma Maison in its post-Puck period typified the emerging industry dynamic. Restaurants closely associated with, or dependent on, one chef rarely maintained the same level of prominence after the chef departed; those that survived risked being engulfed by a fog of anticlimax.
The moment presaged what would become a recurring theme at The River Café, as chefs inevitably wanted to become owners.
“I would always be happy to see them succeed,” says O’Keeffe. “Some owners got mad when the people left. I said, ‘I’m providing the stage. This is like Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center. You dance and then people see you and you’re finished.’”
After Chef Kobayashi decamped Le Plaisir for California, owners Stephen Spector and Peter Josten didn’t need the money and didn’t want the headaches of maintaining the restaurant. They came into The River Café one night and told Forgione to fork over half his life savings and he could have the restaurant. A deal was struck, and Forgione began planning his next restaurant with a name suggested by Beard himself, An American Place.
“IT WAS THE WILD, WILD WEST.”
The River Café sputtered along for months with one of Forgione’s sous chefs stewarding the kitchen, until O’Keeffe was put onto a new prospect: Charlie Palmer, then going by his more formal given name, Charles, chef of Westchester County’s Waccabuc Country Club, where he’d been recruited by members seeking something more refined than the typical continental fare.
Palmer, a broad-shouldered, Hemingway-esque former high school football player from the dairy community of Smyrna, New York, had first discovered cooking thanks to a neighbor who was also his school’s home economics teacher. From a young age, purely out of necessity, Palmer found himself at her house, making pies and such, “because we were hungry, not because we had any interest in cooking. Back in that day, the guys took shop, did woodwork and machinery and stuff like that, and the girls took home ec and they learned how to keep a household,” says Palmer. “So she came to me with this idea: ‘Hey, take this class. You’re just going to cook. You don’t have to do any sewing. And think of the possibilities: It’s you and twenty-six girls. Not a bad thing for a high school football player. And you get to eat everything you make. So you can bring in all the stuff that you hunt and we’ll cook it. We’ll learn how to cook it together in class. We’ll bring in rabbit, bring in venison.’”
The classes led Palmer to a job at the Colgate Inn, just for money, really, but the teacher convinced him to consider The Culinary Institute of America, driving him there for his interview. After the CIA, Palmer worked at La Côte Basque in Midtown Manhattan, then for Georges Blanc in Vonnas, France, an hour north of Lyon. The enterprising Blanc, whose reach extended beyond his eponymous restaurant, opened Palmer’s eyes to the possibilities of his chosen profession. “Seeing a guy that was literally running a hotel restaurant, owned other businesses in the little town, kind of owned a town, in a sense. I was really impressed with that whole thing.”
Palmer, who started at the country club in 1982, followed the goings-on in the New York City restaurant scene, and identified with Forgione’s River Café MO. Because he was given free rein in his new position, “I thought this is a chance for me to experiment with kind of incorporating this Americanization of French cuisine and make my own style.”
After a year and a half, Palmer missed New York City too much to stay away. He had met O’Keeffe through Marc Sarrazin, of DeBragga & Spitler, a meat purveyor, who told him to expect a call from the restaurateur about the River Café job. The call never came, but Palmer pursued O’Keeffe. Months of thwarted meet-ups and interviews followed—a canceled dinner at The Quilted Giraffe, a planned dinner at which Palmer found himself dining alone with O’Keeffe’s girlfriend. “It was to the point where I thought this guy’s crazy,” says Palmer. “This is not going to happen. It’s not intentional with Buzzy. Knowing him as well as I do now, it’s very hard for him to make a decision. It’s very hard for him to move on from something. I love Buzzy. I would say I’m probably one of his closer friends-slash-chefs over the years, but he’s a different animal, man. But I think he always struck me as, like, an interesting guy and obviously successful guy. I always thought it was just a genius move to put a restaurant at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge looking at New York. I always thought that takes real foresight, especially at that point when he first did it because it was literally the ghetto over there.”
Palmer persisted, arranged a face-to-face meet-up, told O’Keeffe to give him a shot and fire him after four months if he wasn’t happy. O’Keeffe agreed. When Palmer showed up to work two weeks later, nobody in the kitchen knew he’d been hired. It was, says Palmer, “very rough.” The chef, who still hadn’t negotiated his own salary, fired four cooks in the first three weeks, brought on his own trusted lieutenants, some from as far away as Westchester County, promising them he’d work out a good situation. “We basically turned over the whole kitchen in the first four months,” says Palmer. “There were three guys that stuck with us out of the whole crew. It was not a good scene. And there was a lot of animosity. I don’t know how it all started, but I suspect it was a lot of communication breakdown. And it was dysfunctional. But here was a restaurant with people coming in every night so it had to work.”
The saving grace was Palmer’s quick rapport with maître d’ Rodney Garbato and his front-of-house team. “Some of those people really embraced me because they had not had that relationship with Larry. When I showed them some respect and said, ‘Look, we’re going to make this place better than it’s ever been,’ they bought into it.” When Palmer broke out the turpentine and had the box erased from the kitchen floor, it was taken as a symbol of solidarity. Palmer carried the lesson into his future endeavors: “It doesn’t take long when you’re a chef and you become a restaurateur to realize that your money is made out there,” he says.
Under Palmer, the River Café kitchen underwent a constitutional transformation, morphing into one of the most macho upscale backs of house of 1980s New York City.
“I always hired these young, smart-ass kids from New Jersey or Long Island because they always had the best attitudes,” says Palmer. “They could take a lot of shit. They could work hard. They were good, young, smart kids. I just filled the kitchen with these guys.”
“It was the Wild, Wild West,” says Palmer. “And we had that reputation, too.” He’s not kidding: The crew became known as hardworking, hard-drinking, rambunctious.
“I wouldn’t call it a serious kitchen in the sense that you don’t look at the guy next to you,” says Palmer. “It was more: Let’s work on things together and throw ideas back and forth. It was an incubator. There was an idea a day that made it onto the menu. There was no stopping that process. I think everybody had the feeling that we could do anything. We just had to put our marks to it. I didn’t feel at that point that we had any boundaries. You know, in French cooking there’s the classical recipe. You follow the recipe. You respect it. And there we had this good understanding of cooking but we didn’t have any boundaries. There wasn’t anything that said you couldn’t combine this ingredient with that ingredient.
“It was a time where—maybe to a fault—almost every plate had [to have] two different cooking methods. It was rare beef with fully braised something-or-other. Or lamb or veal, that kind of thing. We’d hear about something, read about something. We’d bring in monkfish liver. We’d make monkfish liver pâté—cure it. We were curing sausages. We were doing all that stuff way back then.”
A young cook named David Burke, referred to Charlie Palmer by chef Waldy Malouf of Bedford, New York’s La Crémaillère, where Burke had been a sous chef, came to The River Café as a sous chef in 1985, on the same day Gerry Hayden, a student at the CIA, began an externship there. Burke and Hayden were fast friends, trash-talking each other’s place of origin: Hayden from Long Island versus Jersey boy Burke.
Hayden was a bi
t swept up in the image of Palmer as a coach: “I never saw Charlie in anything but his whites,” he says. “He came to work in his whites, and he left in his whites. He was all business. And he loved the fact that women loved to see men in a chef’s jacket.” He found Palmer’s lifestyle aspirational. “He was all of twenty-seven, and he was living in Brooklyn Heights on Hicks Street in this fabo apartment with Roederer Cristal and great art hanging on the walls.”
The days of the career grunt, just there for the paycheck, were starting to phase out. Every cook in the kitchen, it seemed, wanted to be a chef, creating an addictive relationship to cooking.
“I swear, all we did is get up in the morning, get coffee, go to work, leave that night, go to bed, get up,” says Hayden.
“From the day I went in there, every day was amazing,” says Neil Murphy, a self-described “knucklehead” and fine-dining know-nothing when he was hired. “Every day I learned dozens and dozens of things about cooking, about myself, about other people, about equipment. The food was amazing. The camaraderie that we had over time was amazing. If I wasn’t with that group of guys, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today because we were so into our craft and so into cooking that it just took over our lives. It was more important than our girlfriends or our wives. It was more important than getting stoned. It was more important than drinking, although that was a priority as well. I never experienced that really in life that much. Nothing was as intense as that.”
Murphy credits Burke as a catalyst at The River Café: “As fun as it was working for Charlie, Dave Burke was really the guy who brought it all together,” he says. “He was the guy who would go out and talk about food, talk about different things that we could do. He always had an active imagination. It was fascinating to hear somebody talk about food this way. Then we’d come in the next day and try some of these things and we were actually able to get them on the plate.”
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