Three weeks later, I went to Pearl’s, in midtown, and noted that “standards … have slipped.” More to the point, Pearl’s, I said, was “the perfect Chinese restaurant for people who don’t really like Chinese restaurants,” laying the groundwork for the most sensational reviews and features I would write at the Times. I also observed that Pearl’s, with its prettifying rendition of Cantonese food, was “not part of the revolution in authentic Chinese cooking now in process in this city.”
I did find one old favorite I liked a lot: the formal, vaguely Belgian Quo Vadis, on the Upper East Side. It kept its four stars and got a pat on the shoulder for its filet de sole Dieppoise, an elaborately garnished classic out of the as-yet-unrevised Larousse gastronomique. But Nanni’s, recommended to me for its pasta by a well-heeled gourmet and member of many eating societies, flunked out in the meat part of the menu with an attempt at liver in the Venetian manner: “strips of the kind of gristly liver that have turned generations of children off the meat.”
I ventured into Serendipity, the campy coffee shop and ice cream parlor near Bloomingdale’s, to see how it was accommodating the new vegetarian trend under its Tiffany dome lamps. But what caught my taste buds was Serendipity’s most flamboyant dessert: “the completely unredeemable self-treater will order apricot smush, a ‘cold drink’ in the same sense that Raquel Welch is a ‘young woman.’ It is a bracing bath of apricot essence, voluptuous and excessive.”
You will have gathered that I was not happy with the mediocre gastronomic outback I found myself in, or with the treadmill built by Craig on which I was obliged to disport myself. But there wasn’t much I could do to get the Times to change the basic formula Craig had worked with so successfully.
I did manage to persuade Abe Rosenthal to let me drop the Friday recipe feature and fold its space into the restaurant reviews. But he wouldn’t let me drop the stars. I argued that attaching stars to a review cheapened it. None of the other critics were saddled with stars. Their readers couldn’t just scan a set of graphic symbols before deciding whether to read the actual article.
He did, however, let me add another symbol: a triangle, the equivalent of Michelin’s knife and fork, for ambience. I persuaded him that stars weren’t enough: a place could have wonderful food with bad service and comfortless surroundings or it could be very pretty but have lousy food. It was the second case that I was really thinking about, because it allowed me to pinpoint an attack on that flower-bedizened, gastronomically overrated watering hole of the garment industry, La Grenouille.
Part of my covert plan to overthrow established order in the New York restaurant world was to knock La Grenouille off its plinth. And so I did, from four to two stars. But I also gave it a mingy two triangles for ambience, noting the way waiters called out to one another over the ostentatious flower arrangements amid a general decline in chic. Tables were so crowded together that people were almost sitting in one another’s laps. But the real deficiency was on the plates: canned-tasting peas and a signature first course of clams in white wine I mocked as too humdrum for a top restaurant.
I knew this review would cause shock and awe. Important New Yorkers had a lot invested in their status as regulars at the Frog Pond, as La Grenouille was known in the pages of Women’s Wear Daily. That trade paper responded to me with a special issue defending its favorite luncheonette.
La Grenouille survived my attack and improved over the years, outlasting all its rivals from the 1970s to become a justifiably beloved refuge of old-style elegance, the kind of place where New York’s perspicacious critic Adam Platt took his mother for a nostalgic meal in 2011.
Less sensational but more fundamentally influential was my review of Lutèce; I raised it out of the limbo of three stars to the golden summit of four.
It was clear to anyone with basic experience of great French food in restaurants in France that on merit alone Lutèce stood well above the other high-luxe New York French restaurants. But it was not part of the old-boy network of Le Pavillon clones, the quenelles-mongers who vied for the same high-society clientele.
Lutèce was different. Alone among its rivals, it felt like a real French restaurant, with topflight dishes you might have found in France and an unsnobbish atmosphere that also reminded me of my time in the Newsweek Paris bureau. One of my reasons for taking the Times job had been to give Lutèce its rightful fourth star. I bided my time, following Rosenthal’s advice not to play all my trumps right off the bat. So nearly a year after I became restaurant critic, on January 14, 1972, Lutèce’s two Andrés, Soltner the chef and Surmain the owner, awoke to unexpected but well-deserved fame and fortune.
On the strength of this accolade, Lutèce was launched for the next thirty years as the top restaurant in the United States. The combination of André Soltner’s talent with the authority of the New York Times made this happen. But I was the one who made the connection, and within a year my rebel’s judgment had won over the most grudging acolytes of the old order.
Ironically, the rise of Lutèce, which symbolized the final ascendance of authentic haute cuisine in America, coincided with the beginning of the end of Escoffierian haute cuisine in France and of France’s domination of fine dining in the world at large. I got a glimmer of this future just a few months after the Lutèce review, in Paris just before Easter.
I got off the plane with no thought of discovering anything more than a minor shifting of the way things had been in the glacially advancing world of French cuisine when I’d left the Newsweek bureau in 1967. Nothing I’d read in the food press had prepared me for the upheaval that was finally bringing radical change to French food after the paralysis of the Depression, the tragedy of the war, and twenty-five years of postwar recovery.
This ferment was not, in fact, what you were likely to hear about in Paris, even from most resident gastronomes. I had arranged to have dinner my first night in town with John and Karen Hess, he a Times correspondent and future Times restaurant critic, she a notoriously precise cook and, later, an eminent food historian. John had been called away to cover the latest atrocity in Northern Ireland; so I ate alone with Karen at Chez Denis, an aggressively traditional small restaurant of the most refined sort. It might have been 1960.
I told Karen my plan to eat at a three-star restaurant outside Lyon run by Paul Bocuse, whom I’d heard about in 1967; my bureau chief, Joel Blocker, had proposed him unsuccessfully for what would have been an extremely prescient Newsweek cover story on young French chefs. Since then, Bocuse’s restaurant, named after himself, had risen from two stars to three in the Michelin guide. Even I knew that. Karen Hess, however, evinced no interest whatever in Bocuse or my trip. Despite her obsession with food, she, like most Parisians, had not yet realized she was living in the middle of a moment of historic change in French cuisine.
I did find accurate guidance by reconnecting with Jack Nisberg, an American expat photographer who really did know what was cooking in the French food world. Jack had settled in Paris after World War II, studying photography on the GI Bill. He spoke hysterically ungrammatical but very fluent and vernacular French with a Chicago accent, and he understood the French character like no other American I ever met. I once saw Jack charm a crowd of Parisians packed onto a rush-hour Métro platform into posing for several takes of a picture. He wore florid sports shirts with no tie, which embarrassed Joel Blocker. And he wasn’t a very good photographer. One of the bureau reporters liked to say that Jack took snapshots, not photographs. But he was truly serious about the art of photography. His idol was the American surrealist Man Ray; Jack had a small collection of his prints. And he was very good company.
Jack was happy to go to Bocuse with me, but before we left, he pressed me to book a table at a little place called Le Pot au Feu, in a gritty Paris suburb, Asnières, where another young chef, Michel Guérard, was creating a sensation with radically simplified versions of traditional food.
On the train to Lyon, I picked up a copy of the regional edition of the newsweek
ly L’Express, which some other passenger had left behind on my seat. It had Bocuse on the cover in his tall white toque. The article hailed him as the chef de file, the leader, of a revolutionary moment in French culinary history. It had all started in another Rhône Valley town, Vienne, in the kitchen of Fernand Point, where Bocuse, Guérard and the brothers Jean and Pierre Troisgros, now flourishing in Roanne, had apprenticed and learned from Point about what looked like plain cooking but turned out to be a deconstruction and rehabilitation of the entire tradition and practice of cooking.
Thus instructed, I dined at Bocuse with Jack. The next morning, I became the very first of dozens of Anglophone journalists to be taken by the great man for a tour of the Lyon markets, where he performed a sort of primordial locavore shopping tour at dawn. Then I went on with him for a midmorning plat du jour at his favorite little hole-in-the-wall, the kind of bar-bistro known locally as a bouchon.
Back in Paris, I sat in the tiny dining area of Le Pot au Feu for a meal of staggering flavors concealed in dishes of deceptive informality. At another lunch, I ate old-fashioned dishes at Alain Senderens’s L’Archestrate. Some of them, like the fourteenth-century eel stew called brouet d’anguille, had been resuscitated from the earliest days of French cooking. Senderens also revived the intricate classic treatment of head cheese, tête de veau en tortue, and invented a subtle treatment of turnips in cider with a puree of celery on the side.
It was a spectacular week for an American gastronome, but for an American food journalist, it was the scoop of a lifetime.
On April 6, the Thursday after Easter, I did my best to describe the new world I’d blundered into, the “genteel revolution” soon to be known as the nouvelle cuisine. Paul Bocuse was the most theatrical of these Young Turks, as a person and in the kitchen. He served me a whole sea bass encased in puff pastry that looked like a scaly fish, with a tomato-tinged béarnaise sauce, what Escoffier called sauce Choron. But it was Michel Guérard’s twenty-seat hole-in-the-wall that served the most forward-looking food.
A slice of foie gras des Landes, fresh foie gras from southwest France prepared in the restaurant, had arrived entirely unadorned, without aspic or truffle or even parsley. But this foie gras was of a smoothness and puissance to stand alone. For those who wanted something more varied as a first course, there was the salade gourmande—deeply green beans mixed with slices of truffle, fresh foie gras, chunks of artichoke bottom and an evanescent vinaigrette dressing.
For a larger version of this menu, click here.
Forty years after I wrote about Paul Bocuse for the New York Times, a picture of the same sea bass (loup) baked inside a fish-shaped pastry crust he served me adorns his restaurant’s “classic” menu. (illustration credit 3.1)
Guérard’s ris de veau Club des Cent presented a sweetbread in one imposing lobe chastely topped with matchstick truffle slices and a clear, light brown sauce.
Some days chicken, some days duck came in a highly reduced sauce made from chicken stock, veal stock and wine vinegar. The light but intense sauces, the minimalist plating, the hyperdramatic focus on a single ingredient, the ironic refurbishing of cliché classics (fricassee, green bean salad)—all the elements of the new cuisine were there at Le Pot au Feu, the future ready to roll out and roar.
Back in New York, my food-alert readers barely stirred at this momentous news. Paris was far away. They would latch onto the nouvelle cuisine only when it came to their doorstep. But that wouldn’t happen for several years. In 1972, in New York, the big news in food wasn’t French; it was Chinese, because a revolution in Chinese food was happening right in New York City.
All of a sudden, it seemed, restaurants serving non-Cantonese food—the food of Sichuan, Fujian, Beijing and Shanghai—were popping up all over Manhattan. Word would spread among the food-alert and lines would form outside the newest hit address. Then the chef would decamp, quality would fall and we’d head for the next voguish installment of exotic dishes we’d never seen in Chinatown. It was almost as if some mad Chinese genius were making up one regional cuisine after another.
I can remember Julia Child puzzling over all the unfamiliar spicy Chinese food she was seeing. “We never had anything like it when we were over there during the war,” she said to me.
She must have been too isolated in the U.S. intelligence community to experience the full range of local food. And like almost every other American after the Communist takeover of China in 1949, she couldn’t travel in mainland China. To her and most other Americans who experienced it, the sudden explosion of “exotic” Chinese eating places in our midst came as a surprise, a mystery, an ethnographic puzzle.
But there was a perfectly good explanation for it: a pivotal change in U.S. immigration law. That was the Hart-Celler Act, otherwise known, when it was known at all to the general public, as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This law revoked a forty-one-year-old immigration law that had strictly limited immigration by quotas that gave preference to applicants from the Western Hemisphere. In particular, the Hart-Celler Act abolished what was known as the principle of “Oriental exclusion,” which had made it virtually impossible for Chinese to obtain U.S. immigrant status.
In the first ten years after Hart-Celler, the number of new immigrants doubled by comparison to the previous decade. Large numbers of them came from Asia and Latin America. And among this new wave of greenhorns were ambitious Chinese who invigorated the restaurant world of New York with regional specialties that made their fortune.
Of course, Hart-Celler did much more than improve the Manhattan restaurant scene. It literally changed the face of America. Arguably, along with Medicare, it was one of the two most important pieces of legislation of the postwar era. Yet few people are aware of it even now. In 1972, in the community of epicures, it hardly ever came up as a factor in the abruptly improved state of our gustatory happiness. We just wanted to know who the latest hot chef from China was.
In the days when a Chinese meal was nothing more than chop suey, chow mein, one from Column A and one from Column B, probably nobody in America ever stopped to think about who the chef behind the food was. But after more or less authentic Chinese food from several regions, notably Beijing and Sichuan, gained a serious following, Chinese chefs emerged as figures of the same importance as French chefs—but the Chinese chefs were much more elusive.
They were the subject of constant speculation by Chinese restaurant buffs. Few of them spoke English, the best had done their training on the Chinese mainland, and they hopped from restaurant to restaurant, leading their fans on a merry chase.
Take Wang Yun Ching of the Peking Restaurant on upper Broadway, who arrived in Manhattan after cooking at the Empress Restaurant in Washington, D.C., and used to give cooking demonstrations on local television. Suddenly, the ambitious new Szechuan Restaurant at Broadway and Ninety-fifth Street plucked him away from the capital and set him up on the Upper West Side.
Word got around. But just when lines began forming at the Szechuan as if it were showing first-run movies, Wang moved a block downtown to its new sister restaurant, the Peking. After a certain lag, the lines moved too, and made his lamb with scallions a word-of-mouth best seller.
With bushy eyebrows and a face that somewhat resembled Chou En-lai’s, Mr. Wang had been a man in motion for most of his career. Born in a small town in Hunan Province, he began his nine-year apprenticeship in nearby Zhengzhou and moved through several other jobs until he reached the summit of his mainland career in the late 1940s at the Shao Yu Tien in Hankow. The restaurant specialized in wedding banquets and birthday or longevity parties.
Lou Hoy Yuen, the chef at Szechuan East (1540 Second Avenue at Eightieth Street), started work even earlier than Wang. He began his apprenticeship at the age of eight. An orphan, he never finished primary school, but practiced his trade at a succession of restaurants in Chengdu, Chongqing, Shanghai, Taiwan and Hong Kong. On a trip to Japan after the war, he met the Chinese painter Ta Chien, a gourmet who hired
him as his personal chef and took him to Brazil. In Brazil, he met the shipping magnate C. Y. Tung, who invited him to work at the Four Seas on Maiden Lane in New York.
The Four Seas, now defunct, was, as I’ve already said, one of the earliest New York Chinese restaurants, if not the first, to serve the spicy dishes of Mr. Lou’s native Sichuan Province. It was a haven for celebrities during the sixties—the architect I. M. Pei brought Jacqueline Kennedy; Danny Kaye ate there—and Uncle Lou, as he was known, was in the kitchen from 1963 to 1968. Then, just as Sichuan food began really coming into its own here, Uncle Lou left for Tokyo to escape friction with the staff at the Four Seas.
Meanwhile, David Keh, a waiter at the Four Seas, opened Szechuan Taste near Chatham Square, against the advice of many people who thought New York was not ready for an exclusively Sichuanese restaurant. Keh not only proved them wrong but subsequently had a hand (and a piece of the action) in many of the other Sichuan restaurants that sprang up around Manhattan after 1968, including the Szechuan on upper Broadway, where Wang had once worked. Keh floated uptown, and finally across town to Second Avenue for his biggest gamble of all, a Sichuanese restaurant on the East Side. He opened Szechuan East in 1972 on the site of a French restaurant, from which he inherited several hundred bottles of wine he couldn’t use. And from Japan he brought back his old friend Uncle Lou, to be his chef.
Lou had a room over the restaurant where he napped between three and five in the afternoon, but the rest of the day he was in the kitchen, where he would make hot spicy shrimp or Sichuan beef in a few seconds of final cooking at his large wok. He would purposely temper the amount of oil and hot seasoning in his dishes “for Americans.” But Uncle Lou’s food struck most people as hot. He told me once that complete authenticity in Chinese cooking wasn’t attainable outside China. Among other things, he had in mind one of the canonical eight great dishes of Chinese cuisine: camel hump.
Steal the Menu Page 8