Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies (8 page)
Read Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies Online
Authors: Michael Dane
Let’s look at the
doughnut (if you have a doughnut handy, go ahead, and grab it while you read
the rest of this). First off, it’s round. There’s the circle of life, right
there.
Some doughnuts have
holes in the middle, just like some people’s lives. Some are filled with
sweetness, again, just like some lives.
Not that I’m much of a
flag-waver, but the doughnut is also Americana to me. Sure, Europe has its
pastries, and some of them are even deep-fried. I’d hate to get angry letters
from Dutch people because I neglected their
olykoeken
, but
c’mon—it literally means ‘oily cakes.’
And yes, I know that
the French word ‘beignet’ essentially means ‘fried dough,’ and that the Italian
‘zeppole’ is from an Arabic word for ‘fried dough,’ but these cultures have
other food traditions which made them famous.
But the first reference
to the word ‘doughnut’ is in an essay by an American, Washington Irving, so
there. America was
built
on fried dough.
When I see a doughnut
shop, I don’t want to see the words ‘reinvent,’ ‘conceptualize, or
‘deconstruct.’ Likewise, the phrase ‘flavor
profile
.’ I want to see words like ‘hot,’ ‘fresh,’ and
‘filled.’ Maybe the phrase ‘free refills.’
The most profound food
memory I have is of a doughnut shop (one ‘p,’ no ‘e’) in a part of L.A. called
Westwood, a couple blocks from my
almos
t mater
,
UCLA.
Stan’s Doughnuts opened
in 1965, and between 1978 and 1982, I must have eaten several hundred of Stan’s
signature Peanut Butter Pockets. Sometimes I’d go crazy and have the Peanut
Butter Pocket
with Banana
(these were my wild college years,
after all).
When I decided to write
about Stan’s, I wanted people to see what the joint looks like, so I called the
number I found online, to ask for permission to use a couple of the pictures I
found online. At this point, I didn’t even know if there was a real Stan.
I wanted there to be a
Stan. There is something comforting (that word again!) about a business whose
name consists entirely of the owner’s name and what he sells. There’s
accountability.
“Who’s responsible for
these doughnuts?” “Oh, that’s Stan. I’ll get him for you.” If I could find this
mythical ‘Stan,’ I would know that a real person stood behind a real product,
and you don’t see that often these days.
I would always rather take my car
to ‘
Jim’s
Auto Repair’ than someplace called ‘Autopia,’ and I’d trust
the calamari at a place called ‘
Giuseppi’s
Seafood’ over, say, some
place called the ‘Shrimp Shack.’ If you’re willing to put your name on the
sign, I’m willing to do business with you.
So
I was delighted to discover that there is, in fact, a real Stan. Not only is
Stan
real
,
he’s at the shop when I call.
After
a perfunctory introduction
(“I’m a humor writer and I’d like to talk with
you for something I’m writing”
), he tells me I can use the pictures. “A
hundred percent—no problem!” Then he added one of those phrases you can only
get away with if you’ve really lived, saying “It’s a round world.”
He
seemed
so
accommodating, I decided to push my luck, and I asked him if I
could call him back with a few questions. I didn’t take any journalism classes
in college, but I had a feeling this guy might have a few stories to tell, so
we set up a phone interview.
I called on the day
before he turned eighty-two, as it turned out, but as soon as we started
recording, I knew he had at least ten times as many stories as he’d had
birthdays.
You need to know that
Stan opened “Stan’s” in a part of L.A. that was known for college students and
movie glitz (studios have for years premiered important films at the theaters
in Westwood Village).
It was also a time when
psychedelia was just starting to seep into pop culture, and pop culture was
getting a lot less ‘white bread’—1965 gave us hits by the Mindbenders and the
Strangeloves, but it also gave us James Brown.
There was a lot of
heady stuff going on, and a man less sure of his vision might have given in to
the temptation to be trendy, but not Stan Berman. He opened a doughnut shop.
I asked him how he got
started in the doughnut biz, and he told the story of approaching the owner of
a well-known grocery store in L.A. (Gelson’s) about putting his doughnuts in
there. Gelson’s, of course, now has a bakery, but they don’t have a Stan’s . .
.
approached Bernie Gelson, and (he) said he couldn’t give us three parking
spaces to build the doughnut shop, because those three parking spaces would
produce so much income. . .”
He was born in 1929 in
Philadelphia; his father and grandfather both were bakers, but Stan also
studied accounting. He was drafted into the Marine Corps in ’51, and
it or not. . . I wound up being a baker in the Marine Corps, which never really
happened–usually a baker became a machine-gunner, or whatever else…
I wanted to know the
strangest request he’d ever gotten from a regular customer, and here’s where
Stan was way ahead of the curve…
this was forty-some years ago, this happened. Somebody came in, and said they
loved peanut butter, and (asked) if I could make a doughnut with peanut butter.
And
so I said, “I never heard of such a thing.” So she went to the market and
bought me a jar of peanut butter.
We
played around with it, first, like a jelly doughnut
(which
he explained meant frying it, THEN filling it)
,
and it just didn’t have it. So I decided to try and seal that . . . to make a
pocket, put the peanut butter in, and
then
fry it.”
This ‘weird’ idea
became Stan’s most famous creation, which for years he has called a ‘Reese’s
Peanut Butter Pocket.’
Here was my chance to
earn my reporter’s stripes–my Woodward-Bernstein moment. Playing it a bit coyly,
I said I was “a little confused about the ‘Reese’s’ part–you’re not connected
to the company that
makes
Reese’s, are you?
are you kidding? That’s the reason I
did
that! I was hoping some day
they would come here, and tell me they’re suing me, and that I should stop using
their name–and they never did!”
Stan also revealed
that, for a while, he called his creation
Al’s
Peanut
Butter Pocket. Apparently this ‘Al’ would park his limo in front of the place,
sit at the counter, eat half a dozen, and take half a dozen to go.
A few days later, Al
was back and placed the same order…
was a New York character, and through this doughnut we became friends.
Eventually I found out who it was, and after about a year, I decided to change
the name to ‘Al’s.’”
“The
guy’s name was Al Goldstein. He had his headquarters in New York, but he came
here to see all the porno people.”
Not surprisingly, I
didn’t have a follow-up question ready.
I
hadn’t expected to learn that Stan was friends with the publisher of
Screw
magazine. Then I got it! Fried dough has the power to bring people together! Preppie
or a pornographer, Stan didn’t judge.
‘The Reese’s thing’
wasn’t Stan’s only brush with trademark issues. The building he took over in
’65 had been an Orange Julius, but though he had the five grand for the
building, he didn’t have the twenty-five grand to renew the franchise.
Undaunted (and I can’t
imagine Stan
ever
being ‘daunted’), he simply changed
it to an Orange
Jubilee.
had a food chemist friend, and we took the Orange Julius powder, and we
reproduced it. We put a hat on the little figurine they use, and we dressed him
up a little, and I think instead of a sword, we made it, like, a broom, or
whatever. . .
We’re
getting ready to open, that day, and these two giants walk through my doors,
they just can fit and they’re like seven-foot doors. . .
They’re
wearing beautiful suits, dressed to kill, and they say,
‘You’re infringing
on Orange Julius, and we’re here to tell you to close. Period.’’
”
Naturally,
Stan’s
came through it fine. Apparently his neighbor two doors down was a lawyer who
happened to be president of the company which happened to
own
Orange
Julius.
The two ‘giants’ came
back the next day and said that Stan could stay open. Now
that’s
American ingenuity! Who knew there was this much intrigue and subterfuge in the
pastry industry?
We know about Stan’s
business acumen. I wanted to know if he ever had an idea for a type of doughnut
that flopped. He thought for only a second or two and then declared,
I tried something with kiwi. I tried kiwi. It never worked. Never, never
worked.”
Shifting gears (in case
the kiwi incident was still a touchy subject), I asked him what it was like in
the late sixties, with his shop adjacent to a major university as protests were
beginning to explode.
His answer had a
special kind of wisdom to it, and, I believe, a twinge of sadness:
was amazing. The turmoil was here, and except for a few happenings, most of it
was before the advent of the gun. Everything happened when these kids
discovered the gun, in the eighties.”
In
the sixties, seventies—they didn’t know about a gun. And so, whenever there was
a problem, there was a fistfight, somebody got hit with a stick. . . but no
guns. You didn’t hear of a shooting at a riot.”
Being in an area with
several first-run movie theaters, Stan has seen plenty of celebs, and the great
thing is he doesn’t come across overly star-struck, but he’s not jaded either.
In fact, he told me a sweet story about Gilda Radner…
was a junk-food eater . . . you don’t know this . . . she would come in with
her husband, a guy named Gene Wilder
.
T
hey came in about
five or ten days before she passed, and I would give her a doughnut, and Gene
would just . . . sit against the wall, drink a cup of coffee, and watch her.”
Early
in the interview, I asked him if he was happy he didn’t become an accountant.
He said, “Life has been a bowl of cherries, kiddo,” and I bought every word.
Even ‘kiddo.’ Because I think Stan is the real deal.