Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll

by Andrew Friedman

  Chefs from Hell charter member Rick Moonen also belonged to an intimate, less well remembered group, the Red Meat Club, that started up around the same time. (Never mind that at both The Water Club and then at Oceana he was known as one of New York’s premier fish chefs.) The club, also centered around lunches, included sommeliers Traci Dutton and John Fisher, legendary bartender Dale DeGroff, and chef David Page.

  “Red Meat Club met the second Tuesday of every month, different steakhouse,” says Moonen. “You were only allowed to order two types of cocktails: a Beefeater martini or a Bloody Mary. Why? Because those are the rules! Because we’re a fucking red meat society and we eat red meat and we mean it. If you ordered it rare, you had to follow it with ‘And I mean rare!’ Those are the rules. ‘I’ll have the ribeye steak rare. And I mean rare.’ And everybody would go, ‘And I mean rare.’ We’d sit around and we’d get drunk on the second Tuesday of every month. At Palm, Palm Too, Ben Benson’s.

  “This was real,” says Moonen. “This wasn’t some phantom twelve-month thing. This was the Red Meat Club, man. There was the Chefs from Hell and the Red Meat Club. Not to be taken lightly.”

  “YOU CAN ONLY DO THAT SO LONG.”

  In 1990, Moonen partnered with two fellow La Côte Basque alums, Charlie Palmer and Frank Crispo, then the chef at Andiamo, to take the emerging society of New York City chefs to the next level, to combine the desire for community with their universal late-night habits at a restaurant called Chefs Cuisiniers Club.

  The idea was hatched, remembers Crispo, on Super Bowl Sunday that January: “We were all looking to go out and there was really nothing to do. We found ourselves at Rusty Staub’s eating frozen Weaver drumsticks, or whatever they used to serve there. And we started saying, ‘Hey, let’s open up a place just for cooks, for where we can hang out.’ I had a friend that knew this Mexican restaurant on 22nd Street that wanted to get out of business. We put the finances together and I did the plumbing and all the stoves and Charlie’s sister, who had worked for Adam Tihany, did the design.”*

  The ability to jump in underscored the differences between chefs who owned their own restaurants, even in partnership with others, and those who didn’t. Palmer didn’t need to ask anybody’s permission, but for Moonen, working for Buzzy O’Keeffe at The Water Club, things were more complicated: “I had to ask permission from Buzzy to be a partner in it. He wasn’t too keen on it.”

  The concept was greeted enthusiastically by the media, a logical next step in the growing fascination with the American chef community. “The only potential problem,” mused the New York Times’s Bryan Miller, “is when hip New York night owls sniff it out, will there be any room for chefs?”

  Situated in a narrow, rectangular space on East 22nd Street, with a long bar that gave way to an intimate dining room, the Chefs Cuisiniers Club (or “the Triple C” as the owners came to refer to it) opened in early fall 1990. On the walls were framed menus from the owners’ heroes such as Georges Blanc, Paul Bocuse, and Alain Chapel and a bulletin board advertising kitchen employment opportunities. There was also a library of cookbooks and food magazines, and in 1992 Palmer commissioned a nine-by-four-and-a-half-foot mural, a Last Supper–ish representation of legends such as Bocuse, Blanc, Chapel, Marie-Antoine Carême, Auguste Escoffier, Alain Ducasse, and contemporaries Wolfgang Puck and Le Cirque impresario Sirio Maccioni.

  Early menu items, turned out by chef Peter Assue, a Palmer protégé, included warm goat cheese over warm potato salad and a tomato-shallot vinaigrette, eggplant and lentil terrine, and braised cod in a broth with oven-dried tomatoes. But the menu changed often, and not always based on Assue’s inspiration. “He’s got three guys telling him what to do,” says Palmer. “And then we’d all go down there and do shit on our own. It was kind of like, ‘What do you feel like eating late at night this week?’ I mean, literally, we’d change the menu that Monday night at the bar, at two in the morning.”

  The trio of chef-owners leveraged their industry clientele to secure great deals and giveaways from vendors. For example, the food was served on a hodgepodge of plates from luxury producers like Wedgwood and Villeroy & Boch who gifted them to the restaurant for exposure: “The idea was we’d get plates from every manufacturer, so there would be a mix and match on the tables. So if you like the plate, you’d turn it over, and say, ‘Who is this by?’ So we’d haggle a little bit and get it for free. Because of all the cigar smoking, we got Partagas to do a party,” says Crispo.

  There were Halloween parties (Crispo dressed as Aunt Jemima), Oktoberfest bashes, Christmas and New Year’s Eve bacchanals. “We never made any money because every time we made some money, we’d throw a party,” says Palmer.* “These were epic parties, I mean, epic. Spilled into the street. People complained about the noise. Police came every time.”

  There were also gag events, like a lamprey eel–eating contest to be judged by Montrachet owner Drew Nieporent (who opened Tribeca Grill in partnership with Robert De Niro the same year Chefs Cuisiniers Club launched) that was promoted with a flyer circulated to restaurants by fetching young females from the Triple C’s front-of-house team. The flyer was real; the event was pure fiction.

  The emerging community of star chefs flocked to the restaurant: David Burke, Larry Forgione, Tom Colicchio, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Daniel Boulud, and chef-couple Bobby Flay and Debra Ponzek, who would go on to marry, and divorce. Like Chefs from Hell, early on Chefs Cuisiniers Club seemed like a boys’ club, all the more so for the cigar smoke that filled the air late in the evening from, among others, Palmer himself, although as Palmer says, “We got the chefs but also got the chicks that like chefs. It was exactly what we hoped it would be.”

  There was one downside to an industry clientele: “We had a ton of house accounts because nobody ever paid for shit,” says Palmer. “Chefs would be like, ‘What are you going to say, No?’ That’s what we did the place for. There’s a lot of deadbeat chefs, you know?”

  The critical reception was mixed. New York magazine’s Gael Greene was swept up in the scene, on the whole enjoyed the food. The New York Times’s Marian Burros, in a one-star takedown, complained that “providing moderately priced food is not a license to hire an untrained staff and inflict them on paying customers.” She also hypothesized that “perhaps when Mr. Palmer and his chef friends arrive after midnight, they are too tired to notice the lapses. Perhaps they get better treatment and more carefully prepared food than the average customer.”

  The Times review still rankles at least one partner: “It was weird,” says Crispo. “She was digging at him for no reason. They singled out Charlie because he had Aureole.”

  Beyond the job listings, Hervé Riou, a Frenchman who moved to New York City in 1988 and ran the kitchen at the Plaza Hotel’s Edwardian Room, remembers another function of the Chefs Cuisiniers Club: to find new hires on the spot. “If you needed a job, you could go there, speak to a chef, do a line of coke, order a burger, and if you were lucky, you would stay until closing and go to work with him that very morning,” says Riou.

  Chefs Cuisiniers Club also began publishing a newsletter, something the Red Meat Club, Boulud, and Danny Meyer were also doing, deepening a connection with customers even as chefs were forging improved relationships with each other. In addition to its newsletter, the Triple C also hosted tastings of everything from Spanish olive oil to Chablis and oysters to a roster of twenty-seven chocolates one summer afternoon. There were also wine dinners at which menus were built around a particular vineyard’s offerings.

  What started well faded quickly. Chefs Cuisiniers Club lost its mojo, and its chef clientele. “It started out just being a hangout,” says Crispo. “But the egos of the chefs involved possibly made the place more of a restaurant.” As the best chefs in town made it their after-hours destination, the owners felt they had to step up the food. “Next thing you know, instead of just doing funky stuff like tripe, we found ourselves having a traditional menu: appetizers, main course, and Richie Leach, Cha
rlie’s pastry chef, would do pastries.”

  Palmer cites another reason for the Triple C slowing to a halt: “I had to stop the party. I was dying. Frank and Rick and I, we were there till, like, two, three in the morning every fricking night, practically. You can only do that so long.”

  The chefs decided to go their separate ways, divvying up what little profit remained, with Palmer holding on to the lease. In the fall of 1994, Palmer partnered with Fernando Saralegui, a veteran of Café Luxembourg and Raoul’s, to recast the space as Alva (after Thomas Alva Edison), a cigar bar and restaurant. When the New York Times asked Saralegui where the chefs would congregate after the Triple C served its last supper, he replied, “Blue Ribbon, where they already have been hanging out for the past two years.”

  “YOU KNOW, I HATE THIS WALL.”

  The desire for community, a place to eat and drink and connect after hours, was finally fulfilled, once and for all and against all odds, by a Sullivan Street restaurant that was a debacle in its first incarnation. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.” Well, Blue Ribbon largely grew from two brothers’ contempt for their own small art, a failed restaurant launched in June 1992, with a name made for calamity: The Crystal Room.

  The Crystal Room was launched by siblings Bruce and Eric Bromberg and partner Philip Hoffman. The Bromberg brothers had been raised across the Hudson River in New Jersey in a food-crazed Jewish American family. Their father, an attorney, bon vivant, and adventurous home cook, exposed them to every imaginable food, and their grandmother was, by the brothers’ estimation, one of the best cooks in her tight-knit conservative Jewish community. The brothers grew up loving food, with a special fascination for the theatrical, like the Japanese steakhouse chain Benihana, where the cooks performed miraculous knife work in harrowingly close proximity to diners. They were also raised to be Francophiles; dad had a house in Venasque, near Avignon in Provence, where a local chef would let the boys visit the kitchen, pour Cognac over his shrimp Provençal to flame it. “We thought it was the coolest shit,” remembers Bruce.

  Born five years apart, both brothers attended Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris. On his return to the States, after working for Jonathan Waxman at Jams, Eric honchoed other kitchens before opening, in 1989, Nick and Eddie, a popular SoHo restaurant fashioned after the timeless aesthetic of New York watering holes—all dark wood and mirrors, with a bar in the front room—that served stripped-down food such as a spinach and bacon salad, roast chicken, and an uncommonly sophisticated burger, counterprogramming to the increasingly complicated plates being turned out by other young Americans around town. Nick and Eddie was an early bastion of what Eric considers “New York food” and would come to be known as “comfort food.” The restaurant also broke with another given in hotspots of the day with a no-reservation policy designed to keep the place accessible to neighborhood diners. When an appealing space opened nearby on Sullivan Street, Nick and Eddie partner Philip Hoffman nabbed it and put together a partnership with Eric, who summoned Bruce to return from France and collaborate with him.

  The brothers’ enthusiasm waned as The Crystal Room evolved, under Hoffman’s direction, into the very antithesis of Nick and Eddie. “As brilliant as Nick and Eddie was, The Crystal Room was as nonbrilliant,” says Bruce. “It was like an exclusive social club. It was just all wrong.”

  Because of its connection to white-hot Nick and Eddie, reservations at The Crystal Room were hard to come by early on, although first-time visitors were aghast at the restaurant’s design. “It was horrible,” says Bruce. “There was a Grecian scene painted on the walls and Byzantine columns.” The room was dimly lit, but “not dim enough.”

  According to Bruce, within four weeks, Hoffman stopped showing up. “He saw the writing on the wall. He knew this was a major disaster.”

  Eric had sunk everything he had into the restaurant, plus money from their father and family friends. Within ten weeks, The Crystal Room had been left for dead by the citizenry. “All of a sudden it was me and my brother and our core team sitting there, and we basically realized we were going out of business,” says Bruce.

  One midnight after service, Eric emerged from the kitchen. “Guys, we’re done,” he said. “We’re not going to open tomorrow. I’ve pretty much lost my shirt. I can’t continue to lose any more of my family’s money. I can’t take purveyors’ food and not pay them for it, which is what we’re doing.”

  The crew, including runner Sean Sant Amour, cook Chris Pollack, and waiter David Brown, some of whom came with Eric from Nick and Eddie and others of whom were new to the team, soaked up the news, then Sant Amour stood up, sauntered over to the wall that separated the lounge from the dining room, and said, “You know, I hate this wall,” and put his foot right through it.

  “About an hour and a half later, that wall was completely gone,” remembers Bruce. “Eric was just sitting there with his bottle of Scotch in the corner, drowning his sorrows, and we were like, ‘Dude, we can rebuild this. We can make good food. It’s a good location. Let’s do it.’ The next day we called my dad and asked him for $25,000.”

  With no real plan, the team began remaking the dining room. “People would come by and ask, ‘What kind of food are you making?’ We’d say, ‘Good food.’ We didn’t have an idea. Up until a couple days before we opened, we hadn’t written a menu. We didn’t know what it was.”

  Before the menu came the name, for which they were desperate. Their father, based on the Sullivan Street location, suggested Gilbert’s on Sullivan, even though there was no Gilbert involved. Thankfully, the brothers resisted. Late one night, hanging out in the space, drinking beers with Nick and Eddie bartender George Gilmore, the brothers began bandying about names.

  “What’s this place mean to you?” asked Gilmore. “What do you want it to be?”

  “I want it to not be French but somehow I want everything we’ve learned and everything we’re about to come through,” said Bruce.

  “What’s the name of that school you guys went to?” asked Gilmore.

  “Le Cordon Bleu.”

  “What’s that translated into English?”

  “Blue Ribbon,” said Bruce.

  And he said, “Well, then you’re done.”

  Recalls Bruce, “And Eric and I looked at him and said, ‘You are right. We are done.’”

  A few nights later, with the space still months from completion, the brothers hosted a party.

  “We were playing roller hockey in the dining room; we all had Rollerblades and we had a goal set up on either side of the restaurant. And we were all drunk, skating around, having a ball,” says Bruce. “And I sketched out Blue Ribbon on the wall. I think I had a couple markers, Sharpies or something like that. Sean, who’s now my partner and manager of all our restaurants, went to college for graphics. He sat down with a piece of paper. He took what I drew on the wall and we were all pretty lit, but he drew this thing. And, literally, what he drew is the logo that’s been there for twenty-five years now.”

  By mid-October, Blue Ribbon was close to opening, but there was still no menu. One day, Eric’s wife, Ellen, became exasperated. “This is ridiculous,” she said to the brothers. “We need to order food. We need to print menus. Will you guys go sit down and write a friggin’ menu?”

  The brothers walked around the corner to Souen, a macrobiotic restaurant at Prince Street and Sixth Avenue, and over bowls of steamed vegetables in miso, with Eric scribbling on a yellow legal pad, improvised the Blue Ribbon menu.

  “What is your favorite thing to eat?” asked Eric.

  “Lobster.”

  “What else?”

  “Fondue. I love fondue.”

  “How about stuff Grandma made? Matzo ball soup’s really cool.”

  “All right. Let’s do matzo ball soup.”

  “What else? What’s festive?”

  “I like paella. Paella’s really cool.”

  It all went on the list, and ultima
tely on the menu. One element of the menu had already been discussed: Les frères Bromberg, based on their memories of Parisian fruits de mer platters, were dead set on having a raw bar and had incorporated it into their design, with a station built right in the window.

  “Everyone told us it was a terrible idea, that nobody was going to accept it,” says Bruce.

  “Sure, there’s an oyster bar in Grand Central but it’s not really a New York thing,” said the naysayers.

  “But it used to be the heart and soul of New York a hundred years ago or whenever it was,” Bruce protested. “I was like, ‘We should bring it back.’ It’s so cool in Paris. Why wouldn’t it be cool here? One of our wine salesmen who was a very high-end salesman for Château and Estate was like, ‘You’re making a mistake. It’s going to turn people off.’ And we were like, ‘Seems friggin’ cool to us. It’s my favorite shit to watch when I’m in Paris walking on the streets at night.’”

  The eclecticism of the menu reminded the brothers of a diner menu, a long document offering a mix of ethnicities and styles. “There’s seventeen soups, there’s these kinds of sandwiches. And kind of anything goes in a diner, right? Kind of anything can be on the menu.”