Have Blade Will Travel: The adventures of a traveling chef (21 page)

But all good things run their course, and Baum’s disregard for overhead costs created thin profit margins.  By 1970, RA stock dipped below $2 per share.  At that point RA merged with Waldorf Systems, a company that ran a chain of lunch rooms, but their style did not suit Baum, and he declined to continue, preferring to go off on his own. 

Baum teamed up with Arthur Emil, and continued to develop restaurants, including 22 operations at the World Trade Center, among them, the celebrated
Windows on the World
.  His other projects included restaurants in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Hallmark Cards Crown Center in Kansas City, and Place Bonaventure in Montréal.  In 1986, he opened his own restaurant in New York City,
Aurora
, which remained in operation until 1991.  In 1987, after a two-year, $25-million renovation backed by David Rockefeller, Baum reopened
The Rainbow Room
in New York's Rockefeller Center.  He also redesigned Windows on the World in 1996. 

In 1974, RA acquired the New Jersey steakhouse chain, Charlie Brown’s, and in 1976 RA became the official caterer for the U.S. Open Tennis championships, holding that contract for the next twenty years.  In 1984 RA acquired the California-based Acapulco Mexican Restaurants chain, although the company went through a number of extreme ups-and-downs over the next fifteen years.  In 1998, they were acquired by The Compass Group USA, the $2.3 billion North American division of Compass Group PLC, the world's largest contract caterer.  Compass paid $87.5 million for RA and another $50 million for the Acapulco chain. 

Joe Baum’s legacy includes many small, but important innovations that are taken for granted today, including servers replacing full ash-trays by cupping them with an empty one – although this practice is unnecessary today, thanks to the outlawing of smoking in dining establishments and other public buildings.  Baum is also credited for making American cuisine respectable at a time when a restaurant had to be French to be considered elegant.  And of course many of his restaurant creations are still mentioned to this day.

There is however, one practice that Baum introduced, which is one of the worse characteristics of table service in American restaurants and which has become thoroughly ubiquitous, from small Tex-Mex burrito shops to bistro chains to fine-dining emporiums.  It begins with a food server introducing him/herself to a restaurant guest, as in “Hi, my name is ________, and I’ll be your food server tonight.”  This inappropriate intrusion has opened the door to a never-ending barrage of further inquiries, including the obsequious: “Is everything okay?”

I’ll swear on a stack of Sauce Bibles that I am not a food snob in any way, shape or form, but I am emphatic about having absolutely no interest in bonding with, or otherwise interacting with a restaurant food server.  This is nothing personal, but I do not need to know the name of the server, where he/she grew up, his/her birth date, nor do I wish my conversation of the moment to be repeatedly interrupted with a never-ending torrent of inquiries.  I have paid my dues as a busboy, food server and barman, and I know 1- how to maintain a professional distance from my customers, and 2- how to discern visually, in five-seconds or less, exactly what is needed at any given table at any given moment.  Unfortunately, Joe Baum thought otherwise, and believed that friendliness translated into professional service.  In fact nothing could be further from the truth.

Only Europeans who operate restaurants in the United States understand the professional distance that is essential to skillful and proficient table service, and thus train their servers not to cross that boundary.  The same applies to most restaurants throughout the civilized world, where service staff receive quality training in the proper methods of serving food and beverages to restaurant-dining clientele.  In fact, in all my travels in Western Europe, never once has a food server ever come up and introduced him/herself by name, nor have any of them ever asked me what I thought of the food and service, à la “Is everything okay?”  Yet food servers in America, who typically take such jobs while they figure out what they really want to do with their lives, are rarely properly trained, and typically have no idea of what is involved in professional service.  All parties suffer as a result – both dining customers and the untrained servers themselves.  In Europe, becoming a food server is very respectable career choice, and the training is taken very seriously. (Joe Baum passed away at his Sutton Place home on October 5, 1998 after a long battle with cancer.)

At Mrs. Barbour’s urging, I began typing up van Erp’s recipes, although due to van Erp’s lack of interest and the fact that I would soon move out to the west coast, it never came to fruition.  It would have been a fabulous book and a priceless recipe collection.  Of course you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him write his memoirs.

In 1976, Joe Baum invited van Erp to take the Executive Chef position at his soon-to-be-opened
Windows on the World
at the top of The World Trade Center in lower Manhattan – and it might well have been one of the great achievements in a long life of gastronomic accomplishments.  But van Erp was tired, and frankly, who could blame him.  He was 55 years-of-age, had lost his gall bladder, and sported an over-extended gut that demanded several shots of Dewar’s in the evening after guests had gone home.  I was only 25 years of age then, but I remember thinking, “Gee, I never want to get like that.”

On July 4th 1976, the nation celebrated its Bicentennial, which included the “tall ships” event in New York City.  This was a once-in-a-life time event, with sailing contingencies from fifty countries around the world – including three sailboats from Holland that had made the trans-Atlantic trip just for the celebration.  I was aware that it had been 378 years since the Dutch had first visited the island of Manhattan, where in 1598 they set up a trading post, later naming the area New Amsterdam.  Still, I was impressed that they were ambitious enough to sail all the way from the Netherlands for our national party.

Van Erp contacted the Dutch embassy in New York, then chartered a bus to bring the group of Dutch sailors up to the club.  Our Dutch guests arrived on the afternoon of Sunday, July 4th, and it was obvious that they were positively thrilled to have been invited.  In addition, the Club was nestled amidst 2400 very rural acres, and the main house was as charming it was pastoral.  We stood around the swimming pool sipping beers from the keg of Heineken beer, and at 5:00 PM he put out a spectacular buffet, featuring foods that one would find on a typical July 4th American-style buffet table: Roast Prime Rib, Corn-on-the-Cob, Baked-stuffed Potatoes, Baked Beans, a large tossed green salad, Corn Bread, Apple Pie and Blueberry Crumble.  It was extraordinary.

But the highlight of the entire evening took place just before our guests boarded the bus to return to New York.  The entire group of Dutch visitors stood up and sang the most beautiful rendition of God Bless America I have ever heard in my entire life.  And I can report that there wasn’t a dry eye in the entire place – at least not among the hosts.

One of Peter van Erp’s closest friends during this time was Luc Brondel, who had been my Chef-Instructor at the Institute in Classical Cuisine.  Brondel was another of the greats of that era, and I considered my time with him an exceptional learning experience.  Brondel was also burned-out, mostly due to a very intense artistic persona, who never found creative satisfaction in his work as a chef.  Brondel handed out a sheet of his terse poetry to his students, and it was not too difficult to hear the voice of the tortured soul of an artist in between the lines.  I remember witnessing Brondel’s white-toqued head tip back during class, as he stood in front of a reach-in refrigerator.  Later on, after he had stepped away, I looked into that reach-in, and found an open bottle of red wine, with a glass at the ready.  Like I said, he was a tortured soul.

During my time with van Erp, we occasionally stopped at Brondel’s home in the late afternoon, where we sipped wine with him and his young wife, while commiserating about the state of gastronomy and other significant worldly matters.  After a few rounds, Brondel indubitably became teary-eyed, reminiscing about the old days, and clearly exhibiting the symptoms of a frustrated artist whose creative fire had been pent up for years.  And once again, I thought to myself, “Gee, I never want to get like that.”

Of course no one wants to emulate the negative qualities of their mentors.  Yet how much control over these influences do we ultimately have?  It is said that as hard as we try, we can never evolve very far from the imprint that our parents leave upon us, whether that imprint was given passively or proactively.  I would like to think that Luc Brondel might well have been able to break away from the culinary trade and gone to art school, where he might have been able to channel his powerful creativity in a more satisfying way.  But the fact is, he never did – for whatever reason – and as a result, in the end he wore out his liver, dying prematurely and more or less unmemorably.

As for Peter van Erp, ever laden with a penchant for self-destruction, he had developed the very bad habit of carrying out some of the more expensive ingredients he used in his Escoffier kitchen at the Institute – caviar, smoked salmon, cheese, truffle, and so on – and serving them at the Rod and Gun Club.  Eventually someone saw that his classroom food-cost figures were not adding up, and one day a school administrator asked to see his briefcase as he departed for the day – and that was the end of his career at the CIA.  I heard that he had moved down to Brooklyn, and was teaching at a Community College there.  I attempted to track him down, but I was unsuccessful, unfortunately, and never crossed paths with him again.

There’s little justice in the world of man, as rock-and-roller Billy Joel sang in 1977, “Only the good die young…”  Yet the culinary trade and the food service industry marches ever onward, forever demanding dedicated culinarians to carry the mantle onward.  Of course styles have changed radically since the early 1970s when I completed my training – but has the quality of chefs diminished as well?  Perhaps, though from my experience, I would say that the proportion of culinary students who possess the character and temperament required for success in the world of both commercial and private kitchens is roughly the same as it has always been.  And that proportion has always been very minimal.  The chef’s life is simply not a place for the timid, the tentative or the faint of heart.

In any case, among all the chefs I have every worked with, few will ever match the gastronomic experience or culinary accomplishments of Peter van Erp and Luc Brondel.   And though they are both gone now, their legacies remain alive among a handful of dedicated apprentices – some of whom have attained success, and others who have moved on to less stressful careers.  It is just the way it is. 

As they say in French, c’est la vie, c’est la guerre.

Chapter 10

Into the Trenches in Baghdad-by-the-Bay

San Francisco is a magical hamlet, and my own arrival in that enchanting town could not have been more auspicious – late on the morning of October 31st, known among Christians as All Saint’s Day, among closet thespians as Halloween, and among pagans as the Festival of Samhain (“summer’s end”).  I prefer the later version, owing to the fact that I have pagan tendencies, quite possibly linked to a past life in a 9 th-century Euro-pagan realm.  This I deem a positive quality, contrary to popular negative connotations attached to Paganism, for in fact ancient pagan tribes were deeply spiritual and their cultures based on a very natural connection with the physical world. 

San Francisco also appeals to those of a hedonistic bent, which all chefs have in some degree.  As ancient Greek philosopher Democritus (460-370 BC) put it, “contentment and cheerfulness are the supreme goals of life.”

In any case, it hardly mattered what one called it, because Halloween is the most appropriate holiday for San Francisco – for there is no wilder, unfettered, and passionate pagan congregation in all of North America – with the sole exception of the Big Easy – New Orleans – but who wants to deal with all that heat and humidity!? As Rudyard Kipling once wrote, “San Francisco is a mad city – inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people.”

I drove directly to my sister’s apartment home, from which she took me out for a walk in Land’s End – a stunningly gorgeous park overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and the perfect spot for an introduction to the city. 

As for work, San Francisco in 1976 was a veritable chef’s plum – ripe, succulent and just waiting to be plucked.  In other words, a young budding chef such as I, full of the proverbial piss and vinegar, as well as a culinary fire, was in major demand and I could virtually pick the place I chose to work.

My first stop was the Chef’s Professional Agency, run by the significantly eccentric Maxine Lockley.  Maxine held court in her office, Monday through Friday, where chefs and cooks of all shapes and sizes would congregate while Maxine flirted, preened, worked the phone, and sent people off on various assignments.  It seems extraordinary that the agency is still in operation today, run by the late Maxine’s equally eccentric daughter, Jo-Lynne “the apple-do th-not-fall-far-from-the-tree” Lockley.  Jo Lynne had been married with children in Zurich, Switzerland, when she was suddenly overwhelmed by an attack of MLCS – Mid-Life Crisis Syndrome.  She packed her bags, bid her family and the Euro-life goodbye, and flew back to her hometown to take over mom’s business.

Maxine’s husband was the very debonair, very charming John Lockley (1913-2009), a successful tax attorney and arbitrator, whom I always wondered why he had married such a bony, odd-ball of a woman.  But I am hardly a fellow to point a finger at another man’s family – for I knew him to be a very classy gentleman, and thus had little reason to criticize his lifestyle. 

On top of John Lockley’s inimitable charm, was a terrifying tale of Wild West drama that nearly cost the man his life.  In 1960, the husband of a client in a domestic abuse case became enraged, and fired a handgun that hit Lockley in the left side of his neck, ripping open his jugular vein.