In an ideal world, I would have been able to check that claim, not to mention various other details in the piece I wrote about mobile Chinese chefs. But I was mostly operating in the dark about Chinese gastronomy. The available books were a confusing mixture of intrinsically unreliable émigré recipes and memoirs. There was no Julia Child for the whole range of Chinese food. And even if there had been, the gap in cultural information between the United States of the 1970s and China in the area of food and food customs, not to mention history, was immensely greater than what Julia had needed to bridge a decade before.
My best sources were John and Ellen Schrecker, who themselves were primarily relying on the Sichuanese cook they had brought back from Taipei. By 1976, Ellen and John had published Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook with her.
In 1971, I had the advantage of having eaten Mrs. Chiang’s Sichuanese home cooking at the Schreckers’, which gave me some basis for pontificating about the food at the new crop of restaurants. But with all those other dishes allegedly based on the traditions of Beijing, Shanghai and Fujian, I could rely only on a Westerner’s palate and my experience with Cantonese food in the United States and London. This may not have been an entirely bad basis on which to judge unfamiliar dishes for an audience of newspaper readers with even less of a Chinese background than mine. Call it the blind leading the blind, if you wish, but for a first approximation, my reviews were openhearted descriptions that made sense to many readers. The way a dish at the pioneering Fujian restaurant Foo Joy, at the edge of Chinatown, struck me was likely to be similar to how it would affect readers operating with the same taste criteria and dining background I was deploying.
Anyway, I did what I could, riding a wave of public enthusiasm for this cascade of diverse new Chinese restaurants. I was no longer having to fill my review space on Friday with dutiful inspections of dreary new addresses and old favorites. The Hart-Celler Act had brought me a story. Then Washington played the China card again. In February 1972, President Nixon went to Beijing (it was still Peking in the Times), met with Mao and set in motion the open relations our two countries have today.
It was of special interest to me, of course, that Nixon ate at two Chinese banquets while he was in Beijing. The Times correspondent along for the historic trip, Max Frankel, won a Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches (and later became executive editor of the Times), but he found time to talk to me on the phone from China about the food at those meals, and I tried my best to put dishes I hadn’t seen or tasted (or even heard of, in some cases) into some kind of context.
In the article I cobbled together from that phone call (a thrill in itself at the time), I quoted Max Frankel extensively. Up until I spoke to him, the banquets had been getting a bad press, those reports based mainly on the terse handout menus. But Max had eaten both meals and was emphatic that the dishes were spectacular—and that they were not what you’d see on typical American restaurant menus, because they were classic banquet dishes, made with exotica like sea slug, which was prized for its texture and rarity, or built around elegant conceits: a trio of recipes linked by a common ingredient—in one case, egg white.
Perhaps the most important point Max made should have been obvious: that Chinese cooks in China were aces at preparing the most elaborate and high-toned dishes from their millennial cuisine. At the level of a state banquet, at any rate, imperial gastronomy had survived twenty-five years of Marxism. And Max’s description of the unfamiliar dishes made the implicit point that there was much more to Chinese food than what was on offer at traditional American Chinese restaurants.
This just added to the excitement among American gastronomes for the new wave of Chinese restaurants that were introducing whole cuisines hitherto unknown in our country.
This literal feeding frenzy reached its zenith just three months after Nixon’s China trip, when Hunam opened in midtown Manhattan. Featuring the food of Hunan Province, among other things the birthplace of Mao, Hunam was a truly remarkable place, and not just because it offered New Yorkers a chance to taste a Chinese provincial cuisine never before served in their city. Hunam was also a superb restaurant with a very high standard of execution. There had never been anything quite like it. I was bowled over.
In a four-star review, I did my best to describe Hunam’s remarkable dishes, which seemed to me like grander siblings of similar dishes I knew from the Sichuan repertory. For a first course, I recommended the hot-and-sour fish broth, which reminded me of ordinary hot-and-sour soup but, like so many of the Hunanese dishes, added an extra layer of elegance, in this case from fish stock and fish. The high point of a fine cold platter was raw shrimp in a subtle hot sauce that combined the tastes of Sichuan peppercorns and fresh coriander.
For a main course, one could choose honey ham, which consisted of two kinds of excellent Chinese ham with lotus nuts in a mildly sweet honey sauce. This very subdued and artful combination could be paired with a fiery lamb-and-scallion dish, a cousin of the Beijing dish with the same ingredients and the addition of a sauce as hot as any Sichuanese sauce, but taken one step further by additional seasonings.
Small, amazingly smooth and tender pieces of sea bass came in a hot sauce made with shrimp roe. Preserved duck was steamed on a bed of pork patties. Hot beef strips in yet another kind of hot sauce were served with dark green sprigs of cooked watercress.
If ever a phone actually did ring off the hook, it did so at Hunam on March 26, 1972, and every day thereafter, until the overwhelmed restaurant changed its number. No one had ever seen such a craze for a restaurant—any restaurant, not just a Chinese restaurant featuring food from a place almost none of the customers beating on its door had ever heard of before my review. Not until the Internet made it possible for millions of epicures all over the world to compete for seats at the world’s finest restaurants was the Hunam madness substantially surpassed.
At first, I was delighted with my ability to mobilize crowds of gourmets and to reward a restaurant I truly admired. But I began to have second thoughts. Over the summer, angry letters complained about rude, rushed service, noise, crowding. Some of them also disagreed with me about the quality of the food. Others accused me of taking a bribe from Hunam’s owners.
By November, the crowds were still coming, and Hunam’s most impassioned customers had taken to showing up at four in the afternoon to eat their beef with watercress in peace. But the negative mail was also unrelenting. I decided to go back and see how Hunam was doing after six months of unexpected celebrity.
The food was still remarkable, at least what I was given. By then I was known to the staff. But the service and the setting, crowded with more tables than I remembered from my visits in February, were unfortunate, much degraded under the pressure to move diners in and out as rapidly as possible.
I wrote this in strong terms, but I also stood by my original judgment of the food. Perhaps this was a tactical error, but I could only review the food I was served. I felt compelled not to ignore a controversy I had done so much to foment, yet I now think that I should have simply let it make its way, since it had been so auspiciously launched. A few weeks later, when I went to lunch, I couldn’t get a bill from the waiter, and when I attempted to leave a large tip, I was physically restrained by the manager.
I never went back, but the suspicions about bribery never went away. When the charges surfaced in irresponsible gossip items, Hunam’s owners apparently concluded that they had somehow misunderstood their proper obligation to me. They called my house to say they were in the neighborhood and wanted to stop by. I fled the house, but instructed my wife to accept nothing but food from them. A deputation duly arrived, carrying large bowls and trays of delicacies. But on their way out, one of the party thrust an envelope into Margaret’s hand, saying, “It’s for your children’s education.”
She ran after the visitors, having determined that the envelope contained a pile of hundred-dollar bills. They were on the point of driving off, but she managed to toss the envelope through
an open window.
A month later, a UPS truck attempted to deliver two bicycles. It is not easy to refuse delivery of bulky items from a UPS driver who has already dragged them up your stoop, but we did.
In my increasingly chilly meetings with Abe Rosenthal, Hunam never came up, although I learned recently that he had eaten there and not much liked it. Clearly, however, Abe was unhappy with my performance, although he could not explain to me what was going wrong. From my point of view, I was doing fine: covering major trends in food in France and New York, visibly influencing public taste, attracting a faithful, even hysterically faithful audience.
Nevertheless, Rosenthal would not meet my gaze in the elevator. At a meeting with Charlotte Curtis, I asked what was wrong. She essentially dodged the question, saying only that she and Abe thought maybe they had been crowding me and that I would do better if I followed my own instincts and stopped second-guessing what they wanted from me. This was well before the second Hunam piece; I proposed a piece about prison food with a list of other ideas during that meeting.
The prison piece appeared in the news pages over three successive days in June. For it, I ate the main meal of the day with inmates at three facilities, including the state maximum-security prison at Attica just a few months after several men had died there in an uprising that had begun as a food riot. Neither Abe nor Charlotte saw fit to react to the piece. Abe continued to turn away when we passed each other. By the fall, I’d begun to think it was time to look for other work, but I’d gotten used to the perks and prestige of my job, although I had more and more trouble taking it seriously.
One day, I told Charlotte I was considering a feature on zoo food.
“Start with dogs,” she said. “The giraffes can come later.”
I thought for a moment and saw the inevitable. “I guess I’ll have to taste the stuff,” I said. Charlotte smiled.
The next week, I brought my dog, Cleo, a four-year-old Saluki bitch, to work. We had shared a lot over the years, but this was to be our first joint meal. I went to a market near the Times and came back with a broad selection of commercial dog food. By then, my research had convinced me that most of the stuff, the mock stews and other prepared items meant to appeal to the tastes of human buyers—foods on which Americans spent $1.5 billion, four times more than they spent on baby food—were nutritionally unnecessary or worse. The veterinary scientists I interviewed for the piece were unanimous in their belief that ordinary dry dog food—kibble—was all a dog needed except for water.
The problem was that dogs who’d been exposed to human food tended to disdain kibble and wanted to be fed table scraps. Every dog owner already knew this, and most compromised with “wet” food from cans. So there was a destructive nutritional relationship between dogs and their masters and mistresses.
Dr. Albert Jonas, director of the animal care division of the Yale School of Medicine, concurred. His laboratories maintained anywhere from one hundred to two hundred dogs at any given time on dry food. But at home, Dr. Jonas admitted, his Cairn terrier often chomped into a plate of leftovers (“It’s a pet. You know, the children …”). Like many lay dog owners, Dr. Jonas had allowed his dog to taste the poorly balanced but more delicious (for dogs as well as people) delights of human food.
What I decided I could contribute to this dilemma that flummoxed the elite of the veterinary world was the same gustatory judgment I applied to human food in restaurants. In order, therefore, to survey at least part of the vast current market in dog food, Cleo and I both sampled eleven kinds of dog food. Neither of us had eaten for sixteen hours prior to the experiment, but both of us had been previously corrupted by frequent exposure over long periods of time to a wide variety of meats and meat by-products.
Cleo point-blank refused to touch dry food—either Gaines Meal or Purina Dog Chow—although she was served it first. On the other hand, it was a matter of some peril to interrupt her ravenous feasting on the other nine varieties, which ran the gamut from raw ground beef chuck to chicken-flavored Prime to Milk-Bone biscuits to Top Choice chopped burger to liver-flavored Daily All-Breed dog food.
Cleo ate all the non-dry food (and the biscuits) with equal ardor and then took a brief nap. Meanwhile, I tasted very small amounts of the same foods, jotted down my reactions and attempted to rate the products’ taste by assigning each a theoretically possible four stars, for dog food that could possibly be compared to ordinary human food, and so on down to no stars for muck “that would make you retch.” The stars had nothing to do with nutrition.
My enthusiasm nowhere approached Cleo’s, but I did approve the ground chuck and found the Milk-Bone tasty enough to consume two biscuits, the second spread with butter. Those two foods were the only ones to earn as many as three stars. Just below these in my estimation came chicken-flavored Prime, which actually bore a surprising resemblance to sweet Passover cake. There was no disagreement with Cleo about the two dry foods. But Purina Dog Chow was somewhat more palatable than Gaines Meal.
Sometimes an appealing stew odor belied a lack of taste. This was the case with Recipe’s beef-and-egg dinner with vegetables and with Laddie Boy’s chunks made with lamb. Both had a texture “nigh unto that of cold cream.” The foods with the most unpleasant taste were the Top Choice chopped burger and Alpo horse-meat. One that could not be rated was liver-flavored Daily, an inexpensive homogenized food, brown-green in flavor and similar in effect to ipecac. It was not rated because “it was impossible to force the human subject to taste it. The dog, however, did like it.”
Many readers took this article to be a parody of my regular function as food critic. They were not wrong. Some were offended at my disrespect for gastronomic connoisseurship; others got a laugh out of the thing. The article actually made its way into a serious anthology of dog literature, where I joined a pantheon of dog writers that included Rudyard Kipling and Albert Payson Terhune.
This was not a kind of immortality I had been seeking. I was doing my best to see that I emerged from the hurly-burly of the Times food department as an author of books. By the time the dog-food piece appeared, I was under contract with a Times-owned book company, Quadrangle, to produce an anthology of Times recipes eventually called Great Recipes from The New York Times.
Quadrangle had been acquired in part to provide an in-house publisher for books written by Times reporters. The plan was to deter these wage slaves from farming out books based on their work for the paper to outside book publishers. The shock of Craig Claiborne’s having enriched himself via Harper & Row with The New York Times Cookbook had allegedly galvanized the New York Times Company into acquiring Quadrangle. And there was the hope that profits from book publishing would provide cash flow during the next newspaper strike.
I had waited a year before telling Charlotte Curtis that I wanted to assemble a cookbook from the recipes I was bringing to the paper, as well as some treasures gathered by my predecessors in food news that languished in the paste-up ledgers previously mined by Claiborne.
By early 1972, I had been pursued by several publishers, but the amiable Herbert Nagourney of Quadrangle made me an offer it was prudent not to refuse. It was, in fact, a very fine and competitive offer. At about the same time, I signed a contract with Judith Jones, Julia Child’s editor, at Knopf, to write a book about classic French sauces, which was to be called The Saucier’s Apprentice.
The idea had come to me when I was first at the Times. Green, ignorant, I was doing my best not to show it. And then I got invited to go on the TV quiz show To Tell the Truth. The other contestants and I all said we were the new food editor of the New York Times. And after we’d all tried to answer various food questions, the audience voted for the one whose answers had made him sound most authentically like a big-time newspaper food critic.
In the ten days before the show, I read my way through Escoffier’s Guide culinaire and as much of the Larousse gastronomique as I could endure. Somehow I decided to memorize the sauces, which was fairly easy to do because, I
noticed, they came in families. There’s a book there, I told myself. I wasn’t asked anything about sauces on the air, although I did manage to get myself unmasked as the real Raymond Sokolov. But I remembered about the mother sauces. When I mentioned the idea to Judith Jones, she, too, thought there was a book there.
My plan was to stay at the Times only until these two books were published, so that I would still be food editor when the time came to promote their sales. But by early 1973, my second anniversary was coming up. When I’d taken the job, I’d promised myself I would stay a maximum of three years, if things went well, and a minimum of two, if they didn’t. I knew I couldn’t wait much longer. Abe was not happy with me, for reasons best known to him. And I was not at all happy with my life as Times food editor. The week-in, week-out routine of reviewing mostly mediocre restaurants and interviewing mostly dreary cooks was becoming unbearable. From the outside, my job looked delightful, but to me it was a serial misery, especially the restaurant part of it.
One frigid evening in February 1973, I knew I had to move on. I had arranged to meet friends at a Vietnamese restaurant near Herald Square in Manhattan. Vietnamese food was still a novelty in New York, and I was looking forward to an interesting meal. But as I approached the restaurant, I heard sirens. Then I saw red, fire-engine red. And hoses. And police barriers. The restaurant was ablaze.
I needed to find my friends, but this was decades before cell phones could have solved my problem. And because of the sheer size of the police and fire department presence, it made no sense to stand there and wait for my friends to appear. I was on the east side of the conflagration. What if they were approaching from the west? We couldn’t have seen each other through the smoky commotion.
The only thing I could do was walk around the very long block to the other side of the fire. And then back again every five or ten minutes, in the freezing cold.
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