Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll

by Andrew Friedman

  Blue Ribbon would have other things in common with a diner: While they wouldn’t be open twenty-four hours, it was part and parcel of the brothers’ vision that they would seat customers until 4 a.m., with the kitchen welcoming orders until then (desserts even later), and that after the democratic example of Nick and Eddie, they would not take reservations.

  “It’s changed a little bit but it hasn’t changed in about twenty-five years,” says Bruce.

  “JUST SEND US ONE OF EVERYTHING.”

  Blue Ribbon opened on November 3, 1992. “We had forty-five seats. We still have forty-five seats. We’d do a turn and a half to two turns. It was really exciting and good. But nobody would come in after midnight. We would sit there for four and a half, five hours, and we’d do sometimes zero, mostly zero, but every once in a while somebody would show up. And it slowly started to happen, but very slowly.”

  “It” was that Blue Ribbon slowly became a draw for cooks and chefs. One of the first was a young, unknown Mario Batali, recently arrived from cooking in San Francisco, honchoing the kitchen around the corner at Rocco on Thompson Street (the current home of Carbone at the time of this writing), and living above Rocco in the same building. “I was there the day it opened,” says Batali, nicknamed Molto in those days. “They had a sign in the window that said oysters and then the neon sign for Sierra Nevada Pale Ale on draft. I’m like, ‘Of course I’m coming in here.’”

  “He was our buddy who stumbled by one day and was like, ‘Holy shit. I’ll have some oysters,’” says Bruce. “He was in New York six months or something. And I’ll never forget. We were closed on Mondays. We took the whole team to Rocco’s. And fifteen of us sat upstairs and Mario made us dinner. We did friggin’ everything together.”

  One tipping point in the restaurant’s success occurred just a few months in, the night Montrachet owner Drew Nieporent stuck his head in. Bruce remembers that the bearded, excitable impresario opened the door and exclaimed, “Holy shit! I heard about this. Are you really doing this?” Nieporent, says Bruce, studied the menu for a few minutes and said, “I’ll be back. I’ll be back.” (Nieporent especially remembers the first impression made by the oysters: “They had this guy opening oysters. It was perfection. In terms of food, oysters happen to be one of the gifts, and they put the guy in the window.”)

  And come back he did, always with an important chef or industry figure in tow.

  “I don’t want to say Drew single-handedly made us, but he did an amazing thing for us, started coming back with Roger Vergé, [original Tribeca Grill chef] Don Pintabona and the team. Then he called Bobby Flay and told Bobby to come.” (Pintabona remembers seeing Batali and future partners Joe and Lidia Bastianich sitting at a round table in the front of Blue Ribbon having one of their first-ever meetings.)

  Nieporent pretty much loved everything about Blue Ribbon. “You go in there and it’s this menu of favorites. Nobody back then had the cojones to put matzo ball soup with fried chicken with a pu pu platter. And it was good. And they were so humble, the brothers and Eric’s wife. I would get on the phone with Gael Greene and say, ‘Have you been to this place?’ Because in those days, word of mouth was key.” (“Can the childhood comfort foods of the fifties nurture us through the traumas of the nineties?” posed Greene in her April 1993 New York magazine review. “Yes, says the crowd at Blue Ribbon, where the flames of the once nearly extinct pu pu platter cast a soothing glow and the menu flits from suburban rec room to Cordon Bleu . . . a jumble of every adolescent and yuppish craving.”)

  There was one slight bump, when Nieporent’s enthusiasm butted up against the restaurant’s utopian mind-set: Because he was partners in the San Francisco restaurant Rubicon with Robin Williams, then at the height of his Hollywood success, the actor-comedian used to phone Nieporent when he hit Manhattan, asking where he should dine, and for Nieporent to make the requisite reservations.

  “This one time [he] called me at the last minute on a Saturday night,” remembers Nieporent. “It was impossible, then I thought, Blue Ribbon! They don’t take reservations!” He called and spoke to a manager who told him, in accordance with the restaurant’s democratic policy, “He might have to wait a little bit.”

  “I said, ‘Listen to me, you either want to take Robin Williams or you don’t.’”

  After some cogitating the restaurant team came to a solution: They would sit a fake party at Williams’s table, then swap Williams and friends in when they arrived.

  “He might have to wait a little bit,” said the manager. “We’ll put him at the bar.”

  “No!” shouted Nieporent. “He’s a recovering alcoholic. You can’t put him at the bar.”

  “Anyway,” says Nieporent today, “I don’t know how that all got worked out, but I know that Robin Williams went to Blue Ribbon that night.”

  Nieporent also figured in an early, formative night when another of the brothers’ idealist policies, the 4 a.m. mandate, was put to the test. It was the weekend prior to Martin Luther King Day, 1993. There was a blizzard that Sunday and with the restaurant closed on Monday anyway, Bruce didn’t see the point in keeping the doors open and the staff around.

  “It was three in the morning. Nobody had been in the restaurant since 10:45 p.m.,” says Bruce. “It was miserable.”

  “Should we just close?” he suggested to Eric and Ellen.

  “No,” said Eric. “We’ve got to stay open. We’ve never closed. It’s part of what we do.”

  But Bruce coaxed consent from his partners. Downstairs, he fashioned a handwritten sign to let visitors know they’d be back after the holiday. As he was about to affix it to the door, a fleet of taxis pulled up in the slush outside.

  “Twenty people get out of the taxis and they walk up to the door,” remembers Bruce. “It’s Charlie Trotter and his whole team, who had just done some James Beard event. He had a huge crew in the city. I’m literally there with tape to put this sign up, and I’m like, ‘No, we’re open. Come right in.’”

  “I don’t need to see a menu,” Trotter told him. “We’ve heard from Drew that we’ve got to come here. Just send us one of everything.”

  Batali, who himself showed up later that night, remembers it well. It was the first time he’d ever been in the same room with the already legendary chef from Chicago. “He had one of everything on the menu and I thought that was so extravagant.”

  “THERE WAS SOMETHING ANIMALISTIC ABOUT IT.”

  That’s how Blue Ribbon began to take its place as the late-night New York City chef hangout through the 1990s.

  Frank Castronovo, a native New Yorker who today co-owns Prime Meats and Frankies 457 Spuntino, was cooking at Jean Claude just up Sullivan Street from Blue Ribbon at the time and would occasionally join Batali there after service. “At one in the morning I’d roll down the street and walk in,” says Castronovo. “I was there when they first, first, first opened. And you know, Mario started coming with me in the beginning. Scott Bryan would meet up over there. I think that I was definitely there for the birth of the late-night dining scene for chefs at Blue Ribbon. That happened on that block at that time. It would go all night, man. Two, three, four a.m. As late as you wanted it to. And in those days you had Eric, Bruce, and Ellen in the room, so you had all the principals. And the energy.

  “It was weird because I was there in the very, very beginning when the first couple of hangs happened, and then I didn’t partake. Three weeks later, four weeks later, a month or two later, you realized there was already a thing starting to happen. It’s growing. You go back for another hang three or four weeks later, it’s like, wow, there’s like twenty chefs hanging out now. Then you go there five months later and it’s like, everybody’s onto it now.”

  “It was assumed that everybody would be there,” says Alan Harding, who was the chef of Nosmo King, a nonsmoking restaurant in Tribeca, at the time. “If you had just gotten paid and you wanted to drop some scrilla, you would go there. Otherwise, it was Chinatown, but Chinatown was you and yo
ur sous chef or a cook. It wasn’t like, ‘Let’s all meet up and go to Wo Hop.’ That was hardly ever done. It would have required too much organization.”

  According to Batali, by about two in the morning the place was wall to wall with industry: “It was amazing how we all knew each other and we all hung out, and that was at least twice a week we would all be there, maybe at different tables, maybe all at one table. I’d take my whole staff down there every now and then.”

  Daniel Boulud remembers it the same way, saying that when he entered the restaurant, he would high-five his way to the back of the room—slapping hands with David Burke, Charlie Palmer, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and any other luminaries between the front door and his table.

  Says Tom Colicchio, who preferred Tribeca’s Odeon to Blue Ribbon but observed the success story from a slight remove: “I think also chefs got tired of going out and just drinking. We wanted something to eat so we started going down there.”

  In addition to the universal craving for food and drink at ungodly hours, the restaurant fulfilled the need for commiseration with people who understood the rigors of the job. “It was Mario and Bobby and I, two nights a week, three nights a week up until two or three in the morning, eating and drinking,” remembers Tom Valenti. “We talked about food. We talked about technique. We would bitch and moan and talk about the stove that broke down and the walk-in that didn’t work.”

  Says Boulud, who would go on to host the Hulu show After Hours with Daniel, inspired in part by late-night grub and gabfests with fellow chefs: “The importance was that we were sharing the same passion. We were sharing the same sacrifice. We were sharing the same problems. We were sharing the same ambition. I think we are a breed apart and we believed that we could sit down around the table and have conversations with each other.”

  “There was something about Blue Ribbon that resonated with everyone. They could come to Blue Ribbon and revel, totally blow off steam,” recalls Bruce. “There are some really funny nights that stand out: Daniel Boulud had a pretty entertaining party one night with a bunch of his staff and they all got completely lit. I’ll never forget him coming out of the bathroom with [wine director] Daniel Johnnes, wrapped from head to toe in toilet paper, hysterically friggin’ laughing and running around the restaurant.”

  Another unique aspect of Blue Ribbon was the elimination of the barrier between front of house and kitchen: “Some chefs would bring me this and that and cook it,” says Bruce. “They’d come down in the kitchen with a bottle of Jäger and shots and fiddlehead ferns and put them on the cutting board. Mario would bring a lot of shit, like live eels. We’d just have fun. ‘Hey, look what I have in the restaurant tonight.’”

  Recalls Batali: “I hung out in the kitchen sometimes because they were my buds and they were busy so I’d just go down there and bring something with me and we’d just hang out for an hour and a half down in the kitchen drinking beer. I remember once it was cotechino, which is a pork sausage. We glazed it and we all sat down in the kitchen and we ate it. It was a different time.”

  “Every single night there was not a table in the restaurant that wasn’t the Daniel Boulud crew, the Gotham crew, the Mesa crew, the David Burke crew, Mario and all his buddies,” remembers Bruce.

  If no such place exists today, blame the advent of cellular and smartphones, enabling friends and cliques to text each other and customize their plans and rendezvous points to suit their own tastes and shifting moods. In the early 1990s, when one’s only hope of connecting with a colleague was to catch him or her on a kitchen phone, it was a far easier enterprise to simply head down to Blue Ribbon, knowing that was where you’d encounter anybody who was looking to extend their evening.

  As for why Blue Ribbon connected in a way that no other restaurant did, “It was the simplicity,” says Batali. “The cooky-ness of it without it being cheffy. These were chefs but they were making fried chicken and they were making paella and they were making a hot dog. It was just the most magnificent place because you could go in on any mood, you could have gourmet, you could have bone marrow—that was the revolutionary bone marrow, the bone marrow with oxtail marmalade that made bone marrow. It was fucking awesome. And it was so cheffy that you could bring your chef friends from out of town and go to a restaurant at one in the morning and they were like, ‘Fuck! This is New York.’

  “And everyone in that room was aware that something was happening in New York and they were part of it,” adds Batali. “It was exciting. And I don’t think anybody thought they had to beat anybody or outduel anybody. They all knew that if the rising tide came, all of our boats would go up.”

  Frank Crispo, one of the triumvirate behind Chefs Cuisiniers Club, pays the Brombergs the ultimate compliment: “You know who did a better job than us—and I say this wholeheartedly—the guys from Blue Ribbon. They just slowly let it build and build. They had that grassroots foundation. Ours, although it came in honest, seemed more deliberate.”

  “Chefs Cuisiniers almost accomplished this,” says Nieporent. “For a while it was a great idea, but Blue Ribbon caught us off guard. We didn’t necessarily know these people but the day we went in there we knew these people. Their brand of hospitality made you feel welcome.”

  “That’s part of why I think Blue Ribbon resonated whereas Chefs and Cuisiniers kind of didn’t,” says Bruce. “Chefs and Cuisiniers was formal. It was trying to be a cool restaurant for chefs. And ultimately, not that the food wasn’t great, but it wasn’t that ‘Let’s just let it all loose’ environment. It was a little too precious, ultimately. We weren’t trying to be cool. It was like, leave it all behind you. I would say to my brother, ‘There must be some little space-dust dispenser at the front door of Blue Ribbon because everyone’s in this euphoric mood.’ Everyone is totally comfortable in that environment. We weren’t pretentious. Nobody really knew who we were. Yeah, Eric had a very successful good restaurant, but we all just connected. We were all going through the same stuff. We were all working our asses off. And trust me, we didn’t partake in the party, but we were part of it, too. There was something animalistic about it. Mario would be shucking oysters and pouring himself beers. It was our friggin’ hang. And it was un-friggin-believably fun.

  “Little did we all know where it would all lead.”

  “IT TOOK ME BY SURPRISE.”

  Where it would all lead was to the next era in the evolution of the American chef, to an age of unprecedented celebrity.

  Says Bruce: “I’ve got to say, what was really great about it—and don’t take this in the wrong way—but Bobby wasn’t Bobby, Mario wasn’t Mario. . . . We were all just cooks.”

  There had, of course, already been an uptick in celebrity. A then-anonymous Anthony Bourdain occasionally dropped into Blue Ribbon with buddy and fellow chef Scott Bryan, but wasn’t part of the scene, didn’t get asked to join any of the power tables. Years earlier, thanks largely to newspaper coverage, he had discerned an unmistakable sea change in how chefs were perceived. “The civilians started wanting to fuck the chef,” says Bourdain. “That was a first. That was new. Just by virtue of the fact that you cooked. Just the way people talked about chefs was different. Suddenly they were sexy. No one ever said that before. We were dirty, smelled bad, and were bad, generally the last person in the world you wanted to be in a relationship with.”

  The solidifying of the chef’s place in the culture meant more opportunities, and recognition. In 1988, Food & Wine magazine introduced its Best New Chefs program, identifying ten rising-star toques from around the country. The inaugural class demonstrated the expanding geography of American chefs and the erasure of the line between American and European. Among the inductees were Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller from New York City; Rick Bayless, who had introduced his take on Mexican cuisine at Frontera Grill in Chicago, Illinois; Gordon Hamersley of Boston, a Ma Maison alum who had cooked under Lydia Shire and launched his own Hamersley’s Bistro; and Johanne Killeen of Al Forno in Providence, Rhode Island.
r />   Writing a cookbook became an appealing and attainable rite of passage for many American chefs, some of whom—having completed their traditional education before switching gears to enter the kitchen—were able to pen their own text rather than enlisting collaborators. Norman Van Aken, the Florida chef and one of the acknowledged fathers of New World Cuisine, marrying French technique with the ingredients he discovered in his adopted home of Key West, Florida, says of his debut book, Feast of Sunlight, published in 1988: “I would never have thought about writing a book had I not been asked to write it. I would never have had that gumption. A person came from New York, had my food, loved the food, and asked me if I’d write a book.”

  There were also the first baby steps toward the intellectualization of the craft and the new creativity being attached to it. Though few and far between, early precursors to the rampant conferences that are a defining component of the current era were staged. Recalls Van Aken: “There was this new group called the Society for [American Cuisine] that I think was coming out of Louisville, and they created events around the country. The first one that I went to was in ’86 in Charleston and that was the first time with my own eyes I began to see. . . . Oh, God, there were just some people that really rocked me. Seeing [Commander’s Palace owner] Ella Brennan and going, ‘My God, that’s Ella Brennan.’”

  The following year, Van Aken was invited to speak at the organization’s conference in New Orleans, where he delivered a speech credited with putting the word fusion, borrowed from music, to cuisines that mingled myriad cultural influences.

  “We were on the plane,” says Van Aken. “I think we must have flown from Key West to Miami, Miami to Dallas, and then Dallas to Santa Fe. When we stopped in Dallas, we were on a smaller commuter plane and I remember just pushing myself back in my chair because I realized the person who was sitting in front of me was Dean Fearing and he was talking to Robert Del Grande. And I was next to [my wife], and I was like, ‘Jesus, that’s Dean Fearing.’ And he had a book out. I knew about him from the press. And I must have known that he had a book out, the Mansion on Turtle Creek book. And I knew we were going to go see a lot of people in Santa Fe.”