Chardack remembers Jams as “loose, a party, fun. There was a wonderful relationship between the front of the house and the back of the house. Jonathan’s was this great California kitchen with that vibe that we’re all working together.” It was also a more harmoniously coed crew than in many other restaurants. Claudia Fleming, who would go on to fame as Gramercy Tavern’s pastry chef, was the office manager and Gale Gand, who would go on to success with future (then ex) husband Rick Tramanto in Chicago, was in the kitchen.
“He and Melvyn were The Guys,” says Bromberg. “They’d just take over the place. It would be like, ‘Jonathan’s here!’ and everyone would bow and people from other places would come over. He was just huge. You’d sit down, Jonathan would go in the kitchen, or whatever, and we’d just get food, get taken care of.”
Chardack remembers Waxman being up on the newest restaurants, like Italian Sandro Fioriti’s Sandro’s or Zarela Martinez’s Zarela. “Jonathan was good at going to see who was doing what, and bringing his entourage with him. There’s something very hedonistic and wonderful about sitting around and drinking. It was part of his whole thing. It was just an extension of Jams.”
In the late 1980s, a young Mario Batali, then working at the Clift in San Francisco, made a fact-finding trip to New York with his chef Kelly Mills. They dined at Jams, Melrose, Le Bernardin. “Wow, this town is unbelievable,” he thought. “How elegant and how sexy. The restaurants were cool and the chefs looked like they were gods and they were being adored by everyone that walked near them.” There was certainly a cult of personality around Waters, Miller, and Tower out West, but in New York City, “it seemed more grown up.” California restaurants, Batali felt, were “cas. No one was dressed up. There didn’t seem to be any pressure, and in New York you got into a restaurant and everything was palpable. Just walking into the restaurant to try to get something, try to be a part of it: I’ve got to taste it, have a glass of something, have a dish. New York was so much more impressive.” (The only San Francisco restaurant that impressed him in the same way, he says, was Jeremiah Tower’s Stars.)
Waxman was a known quantity when he arrived in New York but was unprepared for the rapid ascent that awaited him there. “I didn’t realize the power of the New York press,” he says. “Of New York being the epicenter of the publishing world.”
Today, Waxman says he didn’t feel that his contribution to Michael’s qualified him for such plaudits “because I still had the sensibility of what French chefs had accomplished, and it took them twenty, thirty years to get where they were.” But Reichl, writing in the Los Angeles Times, recalled an early press confab at Michael’s at which a journalist told Waxman she would make him famous. “He smiled and said deprecatingly, ‘Don’t do me any favors.’ He had every intention of being famous, his tone of voice implied, and he wouldn’t need anyone’s help, thank you.”
In any event, Waxman was becoming famous. “It was almost like a dream,” he says. “It seemed one hundred percent surreal. It happened extremely fast.” (Chef Brendan Walsh, who would draw considerable media attention at the Southwestern restaurant Arizona 206, felt a similar sense of unreality during the same years: “My life was a whirlwind. I’m not going to tell you I handled everything perfectly. I was overwhelmed. It went to my head. I was insecure; I was arrogant; I was everything. There was so much shit going on. . . . Nothing prepared you for that. Did you see the amount of press that I got in a short period of time? I was called the American brat by the French guys. The Southwestern guys didn’t like me; here I was doing creative Southwestern food but that’s their stuff. . . . I became friends with all those guys, but they felt like I was co-opting their stuff because all the media’s here. I became something I didn’t want to be. I was starting to be somebody I didn’t recognize.”)
Though embraced by the city, Waxman also felt a bit alien. When the Los Angeles Times solicited a letter home from L.A. expats living in New York, he wrote that he missed the camaraderie among California chefs and claimed to have toyed with possibly returning to L.A. He also bemoaned the feast-or-famine nature of product in New York at the time, and the demanding clientele: “Californians are so enthusiastic, it got to the point where you’d want to say, ‘Can you be a little more negative?’ New Yorkers are very skeptical. You have to prove yourself. L.A. people respect experimentation. New Yorkers feel, ‘Well, experiment out of town before you bring it here.’”
Mimi Sheraton, who was friends with comedian and bon vivant Alan King, recalls him saying, “I like to see a little cooking for my money,” which for her summed up the New York attitude toward restaurant food.
Waxman, who kept an apartment above Jams, couldn’t resist the lure of the city. He developed a reputation for being a no-show at his own restaurant, often doing a quick tour of the kitchen, then lighting out on the town. “It was maybe three weeks before I met Jonathan,” says Bromberg of his time at Jams. That’s not uncommon today, but in the 1980s, most chefs were in their own kitchens most nights of the week.
“It was always a love/hate with Jonathan,” says Master. “Everybody didn’t want to upset Jonathan because they loved him, respected him, but everybody wanted him to focus.”
“He would do a pass-through,” says Carlin. “He would come down from his apartment in a chef’s coat and he’d do a little lap through the kitchen and then he’d go out, leave in his chef’s coat. And he would meet with Larry [Forgione] and they would hang out.”
Forgione’s An American Place, which opened the year prior, was thriving a stone’s throw from Jams on Lexington Avenue, between 70th and 71st Streets. James Beard, with whom Forgione’s friendship continued, dined there every Thursday night.
“I remember one night that it was completely filled. Sixteen tables were food writers or critics. And the other table was James Beard. We had a table set aside for Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton. Dan Rather had his table. Diane Sawyer had her table. Jackie O had her table.”
Forgione was gaining attention, which he enjoyed, but he says he mostly appreciated it for another reason. “What I was always more excited about was the fact that notoriety was making other young cooks want to follow the same pursuit, that if it wasn’t for maybe the notoriety or the fame that myself and other chefs were getting, maybe there wouldn’t be so many people who were jumping in and pursuing American cooking.”
“REFIRE THREE RED SNAPPERS THAT WERE RAW.”
Meanwhile the good times continued at Jams.
“People were partying, and the staff, too,” says Bromberg. “There was clearly a hell of a lot of money in New York. There were expensive bottles of wine. There were truffles, there was caviar, there was modern art. You could definitely feel the money in New York.
“The eighties at that point, if you had money and you were going out in the city and you were young enough, you were doing something,” says Bromberg. “The staff was doing speed and everything else you can do to stick with the party. It was nuts. It was faster. The whole speed of it was so overwhelming to me, and working eighty, ninety hours a week took me to a whole other place. I used to sleep on bags of rice in the storeroom, between lunch and dinner, and overnight. Just couldn’t get to my apartment and back even though it was eight blocks away.”
Bromberg lost about sixteen pounds at Jams, kept a bottle of Mylanta or Pepto-Bismol in his pocket, nipped it all day long. But that changed: “Jonathan walks in one night with a tall, skinny guy with black hair and a leather jacket. And they’re looking around and he doesn’t really even talk to me. I’m putting out food and we’re in the middle of a slam and he’s walking this guy around and showing him this, that, and the next thing. People are like, ‘Who’s that guy?’” Turns out it was another chef, to whom Waxman had offered the lead position at Jams. As a consolation prize, he offered Bromberg a demotion to sous chef. “I got all pissed off,” says Bromberg. “I told him to go fuck himself, but I got over it. And then I decided maybe that was a good thing. And so this guy comes in and he knows Jo
nathan’s food and I go from being the one in charge to being this odd castoff, except I did all the morning prep, worked lunch, and then set everything up for dinner and then he was going to be the dinner guy.”
One night during dinner service, Bromberg was about to leave, when he heard the expeditor call out, “Refire three red snappers that were raw.”
“The chef was trying to pick up the fish to put it back on the grill and cook them more. And he’s sort of sweating and looking peculiar. And right in the middle of it, his eyes rolled back in his head and he frigging collapsed right at the grill. He was a junkie. Heroin issue. Passes out. Everyone thought he was dead. The dishwasher and I dragged him around the side. EMS came, they did what they did, took him out. I got on the grill, got everything back in order, cooked throughout the night, and then the next morning I came in and told Jonathan I was leaving, he and his junkie buddy could do whatever they wanted.”
“ARE YOU DOING IT WITH MIRRORS?”
In 1984 and ’85, a proliferation of restaurants in New York City with varying degrees of California in their DNA blurred the line between the coasts, making it difficult to quantify the influence California had on the rest of the country.
In 1984, Jerry Kretchmer and partners opened Gotham Bar and Grill. In 1985, a young restaurateur named Danny Meyer launched Union Square Café on 16th Street, with Ali Barker as chef, replacing him in time with Michael Romano. (Meyer made a fact-finding tour of Los Angeles and Bay Area restaurants, which influenced his ideas about hospitality and menu offerings.) And restaurant consultant Clark Wolf collaborated with chef Brendan Walsh, a native New Yorker who had left the East Coast to cook at Jeremiah Tower’s Stars in San Francisco, to launch a Southwestern restaurant, Arizona 206. It was, easily, the most transformative period in New York City dining since 1979.
Kretchmer, who had been Mayor John Lindsay’s sanitation commissioner and once ran for mayor, was a fan of “big restaurants” Café Seiyoken, Joanna, and Capsouto Frères. When plans to build a motion picture studio in Hoboken with partner Jeff Bliss fell through, Kretchmer told him he wanted to build a restaurant. Bliss thought he was nuts—neither of them knew the first thing about the business—but Kretchmer, an instinctual animal, pursued it, began sniffing around for a big space reminiscent of the culinary hangars to which he gravitated as a diner. The first space his broker showed him was a gargantuan loft on East 12th Street that had been a drug rehab center and was currently functioning as an antiques auction house. As much as anything, Kretchmer was drawn to the practical convenience of a garage right across the street. They brought in Richard and Robert Rathe, who ran a New York City–based exhibition production company, as partners.
“We didn’t know anything about the restaurant business,” says Kretchmer. “But I said, ‘I grew up in the Catskills. I’ve been waiting on people for a long time.’ I ran a dining room. I’m a politician. I know how to make people happy.” They considered three restaurant consultants, eventually hiring Barbara Kafka.
Despite the dining public’s growing fascination with chefs, Kretchmer had no interest in focusing on one. “I started out going the other way,” he says. “That was not my interest at all. My idea about this restaurant was a great big cafe, cafeteria, whatever you want. It didn’t have anything to do with fine dining; it had to do with being family comfortable. I had taken my kids to all these restaurants. They were comfortable, but they weren’t so comfortable. And I wanted to get past that. And that’s how come the first Gotham menu had chopped liver on it, had chicken soup on it, matzo balls, a tagine, Jerry’s burger. It had all of that stuff that kids would eat. And the Gotham plates were these big, black, funky plates. And the dessert service was a very beautiful Villeroy & Boch, very modern-looking cup and saucer that contrasted with the dessert plates from the same set. And it was all intended to be sort of joyous and very playful. It wasn’t intended to be serious cuisine because I didn’t know anything about that.”
In addition to creating the menu and hiring a chef, Kafka took Kretchmer to the “it” restaurants of the moment, and introduced him to the chefs and restaurateurs, including Waxman and Master at Jams. “This is what it’ll look like,” she said, waving her arms at the Jams dining room, pointing to menu items. Rasped New Yorker Kretchmer: “It’s too California for me.”
There were stylistic missteps, such as those black plates, which became notorious. Says Danny Abrams, a waiter at Gotham in its first year: “I remember the black plates. There was a really big, pretty room. Maybe it was a little overwrought for the time. I just think that from my experience, it could have been a little bit simpler: the plating of the food, the types of china they used, the style of service. I think it was trying to be actually what it is now, but they didn’t have the personnel to carry it off, certainly not from the front of the house.”
And yet, the restaurant was instantly successful, earning an unheard-of $60,000 in its first month. The Kretchmers took a ten-day trip to France that June, returning to discover the restaurant had descended into slapstick. “It was all about drugs,” says Kretchmer. “Everybody was stoned: front of the house, the chefs. Everybody. The customers. I mean, [my wife] Dorothy and I, we used to go down and chase them out of the bathroom. They’d be doing lines.” He also had to ask people to snuff out their joints in the dining room’s smoking section. Complained one customer: “How can you taste the food if you’re not stoned?”
Things were also loosey-goosey on the dining floor. After dropping a check, Abrams would turn from a table, pirouette à la Michael Jackson, and say “Beat it!” then moonwalk away.
“The front of the house, God, we were just doing crazy stuff every day,” says Abrams. “Everything from running out during service to go make out with the coat-check girl at the Dumpster around the corner, to—I had this gig where if I got along with a customer, I would say, ‘Are you a gambling man?’ and if the guy said yes, I’d say, ‘Okay. This is the deal. I’m going to flip you double or nothing for the tip.’ One night I did it to Jerry’s friend—who loved it, by the way—and Jerry walked over and he was like, ‘Jerry, this kid’s great. He just beat me for thirty-two bucks.’ I think that was my last night at Gotham.
“The ages were very drug fueled,” says Abrams. “In a weird sense it was a very pure time of doing drugs. You know how today it’s all pharmaceuticals and pills? Then, there were three: People were drinking, snorting coke, and smoking dope. And that was it.”
Abrams also recalls pyrotechnics in the kitchen: “Everybody knew to stay away from the kitchen. I think it was a very typical 1980s kitchen with a lot of yelling. That chef was a yeller and a screamer. There was a lot of profanity. You know, ‘Give me that fucking dish right now! What are you doing?’ It probably wasn’t very different than a lot of kitchens at that time, but compared to kitchens today where everything is politically correct and they’re kind of quiet and everybody’s respectful, this was not a respectful kitchen.”
On the other hand, says Abrams, the food was treated with respect: “There was extensive education about the food in the beginning. They were very serious about it. I think [the chef] was very serious and I think Barbara Kafka was very serious. Barbara would come in a lot. And I think there was a big disconnect between the chef making the food and the person who conceived of the food. It seemed to me there was a clash of cultures there. There was a whole chicken served in a bowl on a bed of noodles, and they wanted to serve it medium rare, and it was chicken. So every time our customers would cut into it and they saw it was bloody, they would send it back. And I used to get into huge fights with [the chef]. And I’d go back and say, ‘I need more fire on this chicken.’ And he would say, ‘Nothing is wrong with that chicken. Take it back to the table.’ I would say, ‘But it’s bloody.’ He’s like, ‘That’s the way we’re going to serve it.’ And I said, ‘But they don’t want it.’ And we’d have huge blowouts about this one dish. That’s the only dish that I remember.”
“I used to hang out on the flo
or at the Gotham when we first opened a lot. I was there almost every night,” says Kretchmer. “I worked a lot of tables. I had a huge fight with Arthur Schwartz* on the floor over whether the chicken was cooked properly or not. And so I went downstairs and talked to them in the kitchen and the chef said that’s the way Barbara told him to cook it. It was a little raw at the joints. And he was bat shit. And I went back upstairs and said, ‘Listen. I don’t know anything about this, but that’s what she told me.’ And he then wrote the most scathing review and he attacked me on the radio, said I didn’t belong in the business.”
In a New York minute, the restaurant was struggling. The New York Times awarded it no stars, deeming it “satisfactory.” Kretchmer fired the man charged with executing Kafka’s menu “because . . . the food wasn’t coming up and it was really a mess.” Sous chef Brendan Walsh, a Bronx-born Culinary Institute of America graduate serving as a Gotham sous chef, had already given his notice, but agreed to stay on for two months to train a crew that could keep the kitchen afloat. (He would leave to stage in Auch, France, then head out to San Francisco and Jeremiah Tower’s kitchen at Stars.)
Kretchmer and company made a deal to sell the restaurant to Michael Weinstein, a restaurateur who had begun his career with the Museum Café on the Upper West Side and was becoming known for big-box restaurants. But Waxman asked Kretchmer if he had the stomach to stay in the business a little longer, told him that he knew just the right guy for the job, a saucier at French chef Jacques Maximin’s Tucano restaurant in Midtown: Chardack’s boyfriend, Alfred Portale.
Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll Page 31