Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll

by Andrew Friedman

  Portale was a stoic former jewelry designer from Buffalo, New York, who had discovered cooking when Chardack began showing him cookbooks such as Larousse Gastronomique and the works of Henri-Paul Pellaprat. When some of his design proofs were stolen at a trade show, he took it as an omen, decided to give cooking a chance. The young couple matriculated at The Culinary Institute of America together. The CIA was a party school, and Portale was older and more driven than many of his fellow students, which earned him the nickname “Mr. Perfect.” It was not, he knew, a compliment.

  After graduating the CIA, Portale and Chardack took jobs at Michel Guérard’s prepared-food shop at Bloomingdale’s, staying there a little more than a year. Guérard was often there, as were Michel Troisgros and other French notables. The shop became a stop on the circuit for an emerging group of foodies, such as George Faison and Ariane Daguin, who were starting up their foie gras business, D’Artagnan. Portale says, “James Beard came in. Julia Child. Gael Greene. We used to get visitors up on that eighth-floor kitchen. And one time, I don’t know who he was with, it might have been Troisgros’s son, I’m not sure. The guy came in and talked to the chef for a few minutes and walked out. And he said, ‘That guy in a few months is going to become the new reviewer for the New York Times.’ It was Bryan Miller. Now, that meant nothing to me. I didn’t live in New York, I didn’t read the New York Times, and I wasn’t into restaurants.”

  Portale and Chardack parlayed the gig into stages in France, starting with Troisgros. Before starting work, they leased a car and toured the great restaurants, spending six weeks in Paris alone. They kept a map on their apartment wall, tracking their progress with pushpins. They then spent six months working for Troisgros, and six months at Guérard. One day, in a bit of foreshadowing, Portale experimented with a salad during prep time, leaning the leaves against one another to create height; walking past, Guérard took note, and asked him in French if his father was an architect.

  When Kretchmer met Portale, the chef was decked out in a mauve sweater and mauve corduroy slacks. “If you cook as good as you look, we’ll be all right,” said Kretchmer. Portale wrote some audition menus for the group, and Jeff Bliss visited Tucano to get a bead on the level of the food. A few weeks later, they offered Portale the job. He asked for $75,000. “I told him to go fuck himself,” says Kretchmer. “Well, probably not those words, but I was really harsh about it because I thought it was a big demand from a guy who hadn’t done anything yet. Then three weeks later I called him back and I said, ‘Listen, I’m losing that much a week. You want to come, I’ll give you seventy-five.” The deal made, Kretchmer and company decided to roll the dice with Portale. It all happened so quickly that the closing with Weinstein was still calendared—the Gotham owners no-showed.

  Portale assembled a kitchen team, including a sous chef named Tom Valenti, a young cook from Ithaca, New York, whom he’d met on a flight home from France when, by coincidence, they were both wrapping up their stages.

  “When I came here it took me, I think, four or five weeks to change the menu, to put my menu in place. For those five weeks I never touched the other menu. I just ignored it. And then I completely cleaned up. There was this dish called messy linguini with crayfish. And it came out in this horrible green bowl. And the way they used to do it, it was just this tomato sauce with maybe some shellfish flavor, and spaghetti or linguini. And they would take live crayfish, steam them, and arrange them along the top of the bowl. I guess you were supposed to shell them at the table and eat the pasta. But in this particular case the guy didn’t leave them in long enough so when they put the plate in front of the guest, the crayfish started twitching. This was just before I got here.”

  “It was very slow,” says Valenti of Portale’s early days at Gotham. “We would perfectly roast a duck breast, perfectly render the fat, perfectly let it rest, slice it, and fan it out perfectly, all the while doing fourteen covers. He had an application and an aesthetic that was so defined then that I thought to myself, If this place ever gets busy, we’re fucked.”

  Portale, who had been not only a jewelry designer but also a member of the Japanese Bonsai Society of Greater Buffalo, brought a distinct visual style to his dishes. A seafood salad based on an Italian American staple of his youth was piled pyramid-high; baguette croutons rose out of his tuna tartare like the Twin Towers; fish fillets were halved and stacked. It seemed like a gimmick, but Portale has always maintained that it was employed strictly out of practicality: “I wanted control of the dishes and I had an inexperienced crew. The factors that led to the whole presentation were trying to build consistency. The fact that I was trying to do food that I had done in France for one hundred guests with forty cooks, I was trying to do that with about twelve cooks, doing two hundred guests. So I figured out a way to prep and to cook or precook and reheat and cut out a lot of the human error so that things could be done fast. Rather than trying to cook a big piece of fish, I’d cut it into two thin pieces and then stack them. It was all a really deliberate way to control the consistency and the speed coming out of the kitchen.”

  “It was an illustration on the plate,” says Valenti. “It was like the endive went at two o’clock, the salmon went at six, and the other thing went at ten. The volume drove a decision. Because we went from fourteen to forty to four hundred, we had to come up with something to make it consistent.” (There was slight friction between Portale and Kretchmer, who, though he professes not to be a food authority, has absolute confidence in his street smarts, and that he knows what people like. He wanted Portale to keep a handful of populist dishes from the original menu, but Portale only agreed to a hamburger at lunch.)

  Gotham Bar and Grill bridged the gap between the au courant chef-forward restaurants and the big-box restaurants, which weren’t known for their chefs. Portale remembers Joe Baum and other industry giants visiting the restaurant. “They were astonished at the presentation of the food and how intricate it seemed relative to the size of the restaurant,” says Portale. “They didn’t know how I could do it. They would say, ‘Are you doing it with mirrors?’ Then we went up to three hundred covers. People just didn’t understand it.”

  “Bear in mind, Alfred and I were in France at the same time,” says Valenti. “It was just the way Rick Moonen and Charlie Palmer and Frank Crispo were friends; Michel Rostang, Guy Savoy, and Jean Troisgros were all friends. So there was an exchange of information. It wasn’t so much the cooking technique or the ingredients; it was the application on the plate. We braised endive in Paris and we gratinéed it. Alfred braised endive at the Gotham, sliced it lengthwise, and turned it into a fan. That was the difference.”

  The reviews came fast and furious. “Gael reviewed us first,” says Portale. “It was a dual review: Montrachet, with David Bouley as chef, and me here. And that kicked up the numbers substantially. It went up to like one hundred sixty after Gael’s review and then the New York Times just blew the doors off of this place.” Miller did note in his review that he had been spotted, and he was right: Portale had been making twice-nightly patrols of the dining room, trying to recall what that visitor to the Bloomingdale’s kitchen had looked like. “One day I was walking up to the dining room, and I looked up and I saw a man coming, being sat, and he looked down and I went, ‘That’s him!’ And sure enough, it was. Everybody looked at him, and—what is now commonplace—we looked for the phone numbers he had used to make his reservation. He came in six times. And one time he brought in Pierre Franey and Craig Claiborne. That was the last one. They were in for lunch. They ordered all this stuff.”

  The night the review came out, Portale and his partners engaged in a ritual followed by the entire industry at the time: They went to Times Square to get the paper when it was, literally, hot off the presses. And there it was: three stars.

  “The Bryan review was a humongous milestone because it was eight months or so into my employment here,” says Portale. “It really shocked New York, shocked the industry, and pissed off a lot of p
eople as well because prior to us getting three stars, three stars were strictly reserved for a white tablecloth, tuxedoed waiter, fine-dining, expensive, pretentious, silver-plated experience. And we were pretty casual back then. I inherited the restaurant’s black plates with yellow bread-and-butter plates and green bowls. The flatware was crap. The waiters wore sneakers, khakis, and pink Oxford shirts, no tie. It was very casual. And the whole air of the place was casual, just didn’t fit the prior mold or formula for a three-star restaurant.”

  Before long, journalists had dubbed Portale’s style “tall food.” It helped make him famous, but quickly became an albatross; he felt it overshadowed the classical nature and quality of his growing repertoire, especially when chefs around town and around the country began imitating him. “When it got coined tall food, that’s when it went national. I got calls from all over the country, sometimes two or three a week: ‘I’m writing an article on tall food and everybody says you’re the pioneer.’ Over and over and over again. When it reached that point, that’s when I backed off and said, ‘I don’t want to do it.’ Articles would come out with guys mounting up mashed potatoes and piling carrots on top of that and sticking herb sprigs on the top of that, and I’m like, ‘I don’t want to be associated with this.’ I did not embrace it on any level because I was always quite proud of saying that Gotham was not a trend. It had a sort of a timeless quality about it. And I basically keep the food current. There were a lot of trends in cooking: the minimalist, the deconstructive, the this, the that. And a lot of derivative food. So suddenly I was being connected to this silly trend. There were a lot of chefs who kind of looked down on that notion of tall food. That really bothered me. That’s why I tried to distance myself from that.”

  Danny Meyer, who had just opened his Union Square Café four blocks north of Gotham on West 16th Street, lived above the restaurant: “The first thing I would do every single morning before coming to work would be to study the cartons of empty wine bottles that had been poured the night before to see what they had sold. And inevitably their average wine sales were at least forty percent higher than ours.” He took it as a symbol of the difference in character between his very California restaurant and the Gotham. “Union Square Café was like your favorite old sweater. Gotham was like your nicest dinner jacket.”

  Bill Telepan, a young cook from Sayreville, New Jersey, who came to work for Portale in 1987, hadn’t heard of the restaurant when he took the job, but when Portale told him Charlie Palmer had forwarded his résumé, it was all Telepan needed to hear. Benchmark restaurants were so scarce that Telepan was working at a generic eatery at the South Street Seaport when he was tapped for Gotham: “It wasn’t until I started working in Gotham that I saw what was going on,” says Telepan. “The energy. Just talking to the cooks and where they worked and who they worked for and how important it was. Until I started working at Gotham I didn’t feel the excitement, the energy. They became important, the top, top chefs. And there were only about ten of them when I was working at the time.” Telepan was also struck that the media was beginning to cover not just the food, but the chefs as lifestyle icons: “They were being written about, not just for their cooking, but people gave a shit what shoes they wore.”

  Telepan was struck by the emerging American creativity represented at Gotham, especially a dish of rare tuna with pappardelle, tapenade, and summer savory. “Raw tuna,” says Telepan. “It was probably well known at the time but I was a kid from Jersey, went to the CIA, and all of a sudden at this three-star restaurant in New York that’s banging out three hundred covers and the tuna is raw. It wasn’t even like cooking. You just seared it real quick. It’s this hodgepodge: The sauce was French. The tapenade and the pasta were Italian. It was raw tuna, and I had never seen a fish. To myself, I was like, What the fuck? And then I’m eating it and saying, like, ‘Oh, this is so delicious,’ and saying, ‘How the fuck did he think of this?’”

  Telepan could also feel the excitement of the restaurant, which he says was “the heart of New York cooking at that time. It was busy and it was so intense. After a couple days I felt like everybody was watching what Alfred was doing because of the reviews. We could feel that in the kitchen. And just talking to the guys. Talking to the cooks. It was all Americans at the time, and these guys all worked at great places and they all wanted to be chefs, and it was amazing.”

  “I COULD FEEL IT LIFTING OFF.”

  In June 1985, the Stanford Court Gang reunited, with other chefs, for a blowout Citymeals on Wheels benefit at Rockefeller Center. The fund-raiser—which has been held annually for more than thirty years—featured tasting stations where each chef offered a scaled-down portion of food. For those who worked under the Gang, it was a chance to glimpse the larger world beyond their home city, sparking their own version of the epiphanies that had happened at the Stanford Court.

  Stephanie Lyness, one of Jonathan Waxman’s chefs at Jams and his second restaurant, Bud’s, in New York City, saw the group as a sign of the larger sea change across the country: “The point at which I began to feel that something was going on was at that first Citymeals on Wheels thing in Rockefeller Center in 1985. There it was really clear. It may have been the first sort of big thing like that that I had done. A roaming tasting benefit. There we are, we’re in Rockefeller Center, where you’re in the center of this New York world that is really cool. We had done all our prep. We were probably making Jonathan’s red pepper pancakes with caviar and crème fraîche. So we’d probably done all the prep and brought it over. But then backstage there were all these chefs doing prep work at their stove. It’s like visiting the New York neighborhoods, you could just go from one person to the next. You’d pretty much met everybody by that point, and you’d say hi. [Chez Panisse chef] Paul Bertolli was there. Larry would have been there. Alice would have been there with Paul. Jeremiah was there. Probably all those guys were there. Wolfgang was there. You did have the sense of being in this group of people. I was Jonathan’s chef. So I was in there by virtue of his relationships. So you had the sense of being included. It was like a family. It was this family you were being included into and it was a cool family. And the food was good. And people were excited. People were having fun. . . . I felt like I was in the middle of something that was big,” says Lyness. “I didn’t have the sense of where is this going. But this is big. It was happening now. And it was important. Not important like a treaty to end a world war or anything, but it was lifting off. It was lifting off. I could feel it lifting off.”*

  After the party, the Stanford Court Gang decided they needed a break.

  “The first year, the day after the event we loaded up into a bus and I rented basically this country inn in the Hamptons and we all went out there,” says Forgione. “This was Wolfgang and Barbara. Jeremiah, Jonathan, Alice, Jimmy, Bradley, Jonathan, Melvyn, myself, Mark Miller. Basically the crew from the AIWF.”

  “We were in the bus and we were trying to get out to the Hamptons,” remembers Schmidt. “We were running late. And this garbage truck was blocking traffic in front of the bus. And they were like, nothing is going to happen quick. And Barbara goes, ‘Open the door to the bus.’ And she walked up there, gave them a couple little pointed fingers or something like that. I couldn’t hear her. And everybody was going, ‘Are they going to kill her first and throw her in the dump truck, or are they going to throw her in the dump truck, and then kill her?’ And the garbage truck moved, went off into traffic. And we asked how she did it. And she goes, ‘I’ll never tell my secrets.’”

  In a sign of their burgeoning celebrity, when the all-star crew made it to Long Island, says Schmidt, “The people at the inn said, ‘You guys can have the kitchen. We’re not cooking for you.’ And everybody brought out things that were left over from the event. . . . Let’s say including spouses and things, there were maybe twenty people going out for this day in the country, or two days in the country. I think we started with twenty cases of wine, and I would guess that we were out of wine b
y dinner.”

  As for the food: “Wolf brought foie gras that he had left over,” remembers Forgione. “I brought out buffalo that I had left over. It was a great setup. There was a big wood-fired grill. And it was just drinking wine and putting slabs of foie gras that were two inches thick on a grill, and somebody else grilling bread and making little foie gras sandwiches. It just went on and on.”

  As ever, the stark contrast in personalities was evident, as in Forgione’s enduring memory of Tower: “I thought of him as the sophisticated English gentleman. Here’s Jeremiah dressed to the tee, everything perfect. He’s on a bicycle with one of those little bells that you have to pull with your thumb. And he’s riding down the street going into town with one hand on the handlebar and the other hand up in the air holding a flute of Champagne, ringing his little bell as he goes through town.”

  (If there was a criticism that could be leveled at the group, it was that it was tight, and felt exclusive to other chefs. “I always felt that there was a small sort of powerful group that was hard to penetrate, hard to get asked in,” says Portale, who was indoctrinated into the Citymeals event in its second year. Says Forgione, “I think it was a combination of the people we knew, the people we knew that could execute something like this, people that we knew that would have fun doing it. And yeah, we were all friends. So did it seem cliquey? Absolutely.”)

  Just like that, the chefs were participating in charity events around the country, which doubled as networking occasions. “As soon as I did the New York event and met all those guys, I was invited by Wolfgang first to go out and do something with the Cleveland Clinic, some big charity event that he started with the same cast of characters,” says Portale. “Then the following year, I got asked to go to Los Angeles, where he does the wine and food festival.”

  “Somebody got the harebrained idea that ‘Oh, we’re going to get all these chefs together in a big room and make them raise money for something,’” says Valenti. “That helped accelerate the bonding because Larry and Jonathan and Alfred and Wolfgang would be together doing that and then Lee Hefter, who is for all intents and purposes Wolfgang’s partner at Spago, would show up and he’d say, ‘Well, make sure when you’re in L.A., you look me up.’”