Insatiable (22 page)

29

S
PLENDOR IN THE
F
OIE
G
RAS

E
ARLY AMERICAN SYBARITES AND EMBRYONIC GOURMANDS WERE RUNNING
loose abroad now in the seventies as the larder at home grew more sophisticated and uptight tradition began to evolve. No one had ever thought of cheesecake as sinfully wicked till I urged them to try Miss Grimble’s über-chocolate Grimbletorte. A band of feminists liberated McSorley’s men-only bar. The Whole Foodier Than Thou folk ate tofu and sprouts. It was 1971. A man named Carl Sontheimer wanted a small venture to occupy his time in retirement, so he began importing a French machine called the Robot-Coupe. Marketed as the Cuisinart, it was soon chopping up New York. The bloated bellies of starving babies in Biafra nightly on television haunted our growing appetite for excess. There was a five-year waiting list to get into James Beard’s cooking classes. Carrot strips became crudités. I tapped into the trends, documenting and fanning the flames.

McDonald’s finally invaded Manhattan and Nixon chopsticked in China. Détente encouraged China to open its own Chinese Pavilion on the East Side.
New York
analyzed the home kitchen as an erogenous zone. Truly serious epicurians carried small silver pepper mills in pocket or purse. At least I did. General Mills introduced Tuna Helper in 1972.

Bloomingdale’s made parties after hours in department stores imperative with a five-course sit-down pheasant dinner for thirteen hundred on its one hundredth birthday. Some people left town rather than admit they hadn’t been invited. Though worried that expansion would clean up its appealing clutter, Zabar’s let itself sprawl all the way down Broadway to the corner of Eightieth, but even so, it seemed more cluttered than ever. Balducci’s, in the Village, grew and met the challenge with radicchio.

Determined not to die on his feet, a slave to the kitchen in Lyon, Paul Bocuse recruited his chums from their salad days in Vienne, chez Point, to form La Bande de Cuisine in 1972, a marketing arm for themselves and their products. They were up to something, these Young Turks.
“La cuisine du marché”
—cooking inspired by the market—was Bocuse’s banner. Gault and Millau, France’s sassy duo of restaurant rating, gave it a name: nouvelle cuisine. The life of the fussy mouth would never be the same.

In New York, the growing ranks of sincere and sometimes near-demented foodies took cooking lessons. We were making our own hot-and-sour soup, and
poulet au vinaigre
and our own chocolate truffles, ahead of the crowd. I remember hanging sweet marinated spareribs from S hooks in my oven to roast Chinese-style and spending hours scouring away the baked-on mess. The seventies were a time for spinach salad, César Chávez and the grape boycott, cornichons, raspberry vinegar, a rainbow of peppercorns, and goat cheese—crumbed, grilled, sautéed, au naturel, even in ice cream. Hardly anyone wanted a whiskey sour anymore. We drank kir; a splash of cassis made bar plonk sexy. The Shun Lee folks opened Hunam (as it was mispelled), where we choked and sneezed on the incendiary peppers of Mao’s birthplace, and prepped for Thai, Cajun, and Tex-Mex to come. Americans discovered frozen yogurt and haricots verts. No one would ever take an ungainly overgrown string bean seriously again.

Olive oil was French, and conspicuous consumers wanted to have walnut oil, too, rarer and more expensive. Without Soulé, Le Pavillon had lost its soul, and its consortium of owners closed it forever in October 1972, making way for the Women’s Bank, with not even a small plaque to commemorate the mythic
quenelles de brochet.
The canny Riese brothers—Irving and Murray—gobbled up fast food-chain franchises but made their fortune in real estate by signing leases for hot midtown corners, preferably for ninety-nine years. Tony May (later to lift the town’s Italian restaurants out of a sea of red with Palio and San Domenico) staged an “Italian Fortnight” at the old Rainbow Room, importing chefs from his homeland, and for two weeks there was great regional
cucina
in our town—the first carpaccio, homemade ravioli, chocolate tartufo.

Paul Bocuse flew in like a movie star, trucking pigs’ bladders for a dinner at the Four Seasons to promote his Beaujolais. I knew he didn’t speak English, so I spent mornings for two weeks before he arrived trading kitchen talk with a French teacher in order to write the story. Paul draped me in his signature apron and instructed me to peel the truffles. Cutting away even the thinnest stubble of a costly black truffle was a luxury only he could afford. But what did I know? Forever after when I tasted an unpeeled truffle in a dish, I rapped the chef.

France’s foie gras-mongers knew who buttered their bread, and they popped into town at the drop of a truffle to woo the affluent and the influential. (Lucky me.) France’s celebrated master pâtissier Gaston Lenôtre opened a bakery/café around the corner from Bloomingdale’s in 1974, proposing to cater all of New York’s celebrations. That flirtation didn’t last very long. But New Yorkers would never again confuse sherbet with sorbet.

Eli Zabar left his kinfolk on the Upper West Side and crossed town to open E.A.T., catering to hungers we never dreamed could be quite that expensive.

Sirio Maccioni triumphantly sneaked fresh porcini home from Tuscany, carrying them through customs in his briefcase, for the opening of Le Cirque on East Sixty-fifth Street in March of 1974. The landlord, William Zeckendorf, we heard, had offered the space rent-free to the defunct Colony’s suave ringmaster and chef, Jean Vergnes, counting on Sirio’s society and show business flock to lend cachet to Zeckendorf’s new Mayfair Regent Hotel. Winos with a nose for a bargain as well as for pinot noir were swift to discover that Zeckendorf’s own cellar of treasured old Burgundies had landed on Le Cirque’s wine list at affordable prices. But for me, critiquing the instantly fashionable new spot, chicken gismonda and creamy stuffed crepes in the retro Colony style were hopelessly dowdy. It would take a year before Le Cirque’s kitchen found its own identity and society’s bouffant-coiffed blondes blooming on the front-row banquette would make Sirio a legend.

It seemed to me that Paul Kovi and Tom Margittai, dedicated Hungarians from the early heyday of Restaurant Associates, might have been born to save the Four Seasons. With the city in a financial doldrum, they opened the Bar Room at the top of the stairs in 1975. It had its own discounted grill menu and itsy doodads,
amuse-bouches
by any other name (crafted by the small hands of Japanese women, they told us), for expense-account lunchers to nibble with white wine. The three-martini lunch seemed to be on the wagon. Everyone drank white wine. Are you old enough to remember gravlax, the dernier cri in marinated salmon? The Bar Room, now the Grill, had its core of regulars claiming every table.
Esquire
would call it “the Power Lunch.” Regulars would call—not to reserve, but only if they couldn’t come.

Fairway opened. It was all about fruit and vegetables then and not yet a provocation to Zabar’s. The Quilted Giraffe was in out-of-town tryouts in New Paltz.

Michel Guérard flew in and even the city’s tabloids started to sputter in French: Guérard’s diet cooking, “Cuisine Minceur” (1975), was the headline of the day. On his own after the rejiggering of Restaurant Associates, über-Hungarian George Lang invented a new profession—restaurant consultant—and put his stamp on four hundred hotels and restaurants around the world from Manilla to Thessalonica, or so he boasted. But dusting away the cobwebs and restoring the playful nudes on the walls at the Café des Artistes was his gift to the city. Warner LeRoy, of the Hollywood clan and creator of Maxwell’s Plum, now gave us Christmas all year round by resuscitating the crumbled Tavern on the Green with his own phantasmagorical vision.

Defections from the house of Elaine that had begun with the opening of Nicola’s in 1975 soon led to Parma and Elio’s, then Petaluma and on into the next generation—Vico, Sette Mezzo, Vico Uptown, Lusardi’s, Due, Triangolo, Luke’s, Primola, Girasole, Campagnola, Azzurro, Brio—uptown’s Little Italy.

The pasta persuasion was child’s play. Slightly more sophisticated than the spaghetti and meatballs of a middle-class childhood, it was good for weekdays in the neighborhood. But matriculating gourmands were ready for new tasting diversions, sophisticated tangles of flavor, ever so slightly scary new textures, serious wines, and, every once in a while, a sensuous dining ceremony worth an outrageous price.

30

S
WIMMING IN
B
ORDEAUX

I
T’S A MIRACLE ANYONE’S LIVER SURVIVED THE MANY SEDUCTIVE POURINGS
that blotted out our afternoons in the seventies when France’s winemakers found affluent New Yorkers so ripe for temptation. The grandiloquent grape-juice peddlers flew into town to woo retailers and indoctrinate the growing bubble of wine journalists. And we were ripe to swallow imported wisdom.

Eric Rothschild, the new generation running Château Lafite Rothschild, was young and beautiful and single when we first met in Paris. One thing led to another, as it often did in the sybaritic seventies. Now he’d come to New York to show off a dozen vintages of his family’s great Bordeaux to a froth of wine press and trade at Seagram’s, his distributor. Eric had a business dinner but agreed to meet my friends and me at a club in midtown where men and women—naked except for a few bundles of grapes attached strategically—lolled on nets suspended from the ceiling. My friends had expected a Rothschild to be stiff and uptight, but Eric just laughed at the silliness of it all. We had a drink at the bar and then I spirited him off to dance at Xenon.

The next evening, Eric was expected at a dinner of the Commanderie de Bordeaux, hoity-toitiest of a hoity-toity lot of men-only wine societies. “They won’t let me come because I’m a woman,” I complained to Eric. “It’s a disgrace. Make them come into the twentieth century, Eric,” I begged. “There are so many women winemakers and wine writers now. If
you
insist that I come, no one will be able to object.” Eric, as always a diplomat, was not a candidate to commit cultural terrorism.

“Those dinners are so stuffy and boring,” he insisted. “You’d hate it.”

“I hate more that they don’t invite women.”

“I’ll just go to their dinner for a course or two and then I’ll come to you,” he said.

“You’ll only see me if I’m not out doing something better,” I replied petulantly.

It was after 11:00
PM
when my bell rang. I walked to the door in a sheer black nightgown.

Eric bounded up the one flight of steps to where I stood, a bottle of Lafite in each hand, his Commanderie de Bordeaux medal bouncing on a ribbon around his neck, and kissed me. Kissed my mouth, my ear, and my neck. He followed me to my balcony bedroom. He was a charming, graceful lover, exactly as I remembered from Paris. He lingered for an aristocratic few minutes, murmuring pillow talk, then scrambled back into his tuxedo, tucking the tie into a pocket and reaching for his medal. I walked him to the door, naked in the light of the street lamp.

“I think I deserve that ribbon,” I said.

He laughed, then solemnly placed the ribbon around my neck, where the medal fell between my breasts. He kissed me lightly on each cheek.

That’s how I finally got my ribbon from the stubbornly chauvinist Commanderie de Bordeaux.

31

H
OW
T
HEY
A
TE IN
P
OMPEII

F
OR THOSE OF US BY STOMACH POSSESSED, THE GREAT GLORY OF THE SEVENTIES
arrived in April 1975, with a fifty-dollar prix fixe, wines priced for an emperor, cognacs so rare that a sip could cost forty dollars. The Palace, an apogee of arrogance and excess, was dreamed up by Frank Valenza, a onetime actor we knew from his ads begging to seduce us with Bloody Mary soup and Lemon Melting Moments at his pop restaurant success, Proof of the Pudding. “Morally the Palace is an outrage,” I wrote in a review called “How They Ate in Pompeii Before the Lava Flowed.” “If only my mouth were not so numbed with joy.” The Palace arrived with a case of terminal decadence. It was hardly the moment to launch the most expensive restaurant in town. The Dow Jones was so low, its chin pinched its toes. Breakfast was bitter, eaten with the specter of swollen Mauritanian bellies haunting the news. New York City had teetered on the edge . . . a fat rotten apple. It was a time to buy gold, talk poor, postpone the new sable. A gossipy cabal of French restaurateurs sneered. Bronx-born, a failed actor, Valenza would never pull it off, they predicted.

From the Melting Moments promoter, I had expected superficial pomp. But doubts evaporated as I took in the gentle understatement: no doorman, inside a beige temperance, pastel flowered carpet, graceful love seats. The splendid details: ivory rosebuds with petals edged in coral, silver candlesticks . . . incandescent lighting capable of sweeping away decades of too-vivid living. The shock of the kitchen’s brilliance took me by surprise.

Early on, chef Claude Baills already seemed a fitful wunderkind, even though the dining room was still a prep school for a cadre of rotating rookies. I watched a waiter confiscate a glass of Lafite Rothschild left behind by departing moguls and walk off sipping it. After a few nights when no one came, Valenza was finally forced to give up the conceit of an unlisted phone number. He never could stop talking about how much he spent . . . what each luxury cost. The faceted crystal stemware (not ideal for wine but voluptuous in the hand). Gold-rimmed china. Splendid porcelain dessert and coffee service with scattered forgot-me-nots. A silver trolley that cost slightly more than a Cadillac. The royal table set for eight, canopied and tasseled like a four-poster bed as yet unclaimed by any king.

One night, we were only sixteen mouths to feed. “Yi yi yi yi, nights like this,” Frank moaned.

A sympathetic gourmand tried to comfort him. “It took Lutèce years to start making money.”

“Yes, but André Surmain
*
had a rich wife,” Valenza responded.

Everything on
l’écriteau
(fancy French for menu) was written in the original Old French. A tightly wound maître d’, speaking without actually opening his lips, made sure we had noticed. Would we have caviar—a gift of détente from Russia—firm and sweet? Lobster and artichoke heart in a nutty vinaigrette?
Zephyr de sole catalane
? Capon truffled from here to there? Of course it was silly,
opéra bouffe,
over the top, undeniably ridiculous. But I loved it. Each dish arrived with its own spectacular pièce montée—an architectural folly or sculpture that would have wowed the great master Carême. Escorting the lobster was a fisherman’s wife sculpted in lard and wearing a skirt ruffled all around with lobster-tail petals. A Leaning Tower of Pisa built out of uncooked spaghetti loomed over a dish of pasta. And glorious petits fours were piled in a basket—not wicker, but woven in pastry wrapped round with sugar roses.

Valenza himself was wowed by his creation. He stood tall in black velvet, back arched elegantly, one too-long shirt cuff hanging out. His ingenuousness was actually appealing; the passion for perfection remarkable. “But he must learn not to pronounce foie gras faux gras,” I wrote.

I loved the Palace. There were stumbles, and misunderstandings. But I loved it. Loved the Scottish salmon rolled around crème fraîche. Loved the magnificent cream of mussel soup with threads of saffron and tiny bay scallops bobbing. Swooned over the angel-hair pasta doubly truffled in a chiaroscuro of black and white, the aristocratic
côte de boeuf
with classic truffled chicken dumplings afloat in its Madeira sauce. Too much. Too much. Too much. Just enough.

William Blake must have dreamed it himself when he wrote, “The road of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom.” The pillars of the food and wine world loved the Palace. Craig and Pierre went there often. James Beard was delighted to be a fixture. I saw
Forbes
magazine’s favorite critic, Malcolm himself (who trusted his own capitalist palate), as well as wine-society stalwarts. Of course, oiled Arabs were grateful to have their wallets lightened. Six customers earned the house’s eighteen-karat-gold credit card by spending ten thousand dollars. In late 1977, France’s influential food magazine
Gault-Millau
rated the Palace “the best New York has to offer and without any doubt the finest in the U.S.A.”

By that time, Chef Baills was gone. He had stalked out one night when Valenza dared to upbraid him for starting to make gazpacho from scratch for a restaurant critic in the middle of the dinner service. Michel Fitoussi, a small nervous wraith with supreme confidence, had calmly taken over the kitchen, lashing thin logs of carrot and zucchini with ribbons of scallion, and astounding us all by blowing molten sugar as if it were Murano glass into green apples and stuffing them with white chocolate. (To my regret, a few words from me on white chocolate led from that one cloudy pouf to an avalanche of soapy white chocolate that still persists.)

I spent many paragraphs apologizing for loving the Palace. “Some people buy emeralds. Some people have children. I am good to my mouth,” I wrote. But I understood why it was so easy to hate. And I worried each time the
Times
judged it harshly, once by a critic who admitted preferring fish well done, and then by a critic who confessed she could not eat pink chicken livers, described cassis as blackberry liqueur, and referred to a vanilla butter cream and crème pâtissière-filled truffle as “a cocoa-dusted ice cream ball.” (It was my good fortune that
New York
had fussy fact checkers and the
Times
, apparently, did not.)

Each time the
Times
reviled it, alloting one star (based, I thought blindly, on value for money), I wrote yet another updated celebration in
New York,
a call to rally affluent gourmands. “The Palace tells us more than we may care to know about who we are,” I wrote. “I am not Albert Schweitzer or Mother Cabrini. I have yet to meet a single saint in this town sworn to vows of poverty, chastity and cottage cheese. There are men and women, noble and true, dedicated to research or music or evangelism or chasing the bogeyman from traumatized psyches, and many spend their disposable income on horses and houses and Halstons and hatcheck girls.”

Though it never made a profit, and filed for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the Palace was finally undone by Valenza’s angry wife. Enraged that Frank had fallen in love with another woman, she turned him in. How the tabloids loved it: Valenza’s indictment on sixteen counts of assorted fiscal sin made big black headlines. His acquittal on all but one count (later overturned on appeal) was reported in a paragraph on some dull back page. All the actors in this drama went on to whisk and sauce again, but the leaning tower of spaghetti never got another airing.
*

But even the Palace seemed like small-time decadence when Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey sat down to dinner at Chez Denis in Paris—dinner for two anywhere in the world was the prize offered by American Express in an auction to raise funds for Channel 13. Headlined on the front page of the
Times,
the four-thousand-dollar dinner was trounced on as a scandalous act by the Vatican. Oh, how I wished I had thought of it.

Impressionable grape nuts of the seventies, on easy sipping terms with French wines, were eager to know more. What did New Yorkers see in zinfandel? Well, for one thing, they could pronounce it. Now with wine authority Gerald Asher beating the drum, the great California winemakers flew in for the Four Seasons’ first Barrel Tasting in 1976. Soon Chardonnays and cabernets from what wine writer Anthony Dias Blue called “the auteur school of wine-making,” would be whipsawing the French by winning much-publicized competitive blind tastings in Paris.

The French were not discouraged. In May of 1976, Regine opened a flashy mirrored boîte on Park Avenue, with Michel Guérard coaching the kitchen. Purists were aghast at the tackiness of linking great food and disco. But it made sense to me. We could eat Guérard’s astonishing egg (caviar) and egg (scrambled) in an eggshell and dance it off till 4:00
AM.
And wasn’t it ecumenical of Regine to put two American kitchen acolytes to work: Larry Forgione, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, and Patrick Clark, just out of NYC Technical College.

An aristocratic expatriate, Marina de Brantes, designed the Coup de Fusil on East Sixty-fourth Street
*
with the chef Yannick Kam. It was dedicated to the nouvelle gospel. Nouvelle cuisine was wildly contagious. Soon impressionable eaters were caught in a quicksand of purees. Plates got bigger; portions got smaller. What was raw got cooked; what had been cooked was now raw. Vegetables were laid out as if they were precious jewels, a carrot, a brussels sprout, a turnip carved into a baton. Dinner was a still life on a plate.

Fresh-turned pasta was a fetish of the seventies. We early foodies made our own fettuccine at home, but then the first Pasta & Cheese shop opened in 1976 and cloned itself in the neighborhoods. French chefs had looked down their noses at the cooks of Italy for generations, but soon they had all borrowed ravioli. Anything could be stuffed into ravioli—goat cheese, ratatouille, even garlic puree. Sirio Maccioni, passionately Italian at Le Cirque—what he disarmingly called his “French bistro”—got his congregation to eat pasta primavera, except for the calorie counters and X rays who lived on chopped salad.

Restaurant Associates’ exiled wizard Joe Baum’s magnum opus atop the much-reviled World Trade Center, Windows on the World, had the city looking up in the recessionary spring of 1976. I spent two weeks watching Baum worrying the details and was wowed by what he and his architect had wrought on the 107th floor of the north tower. “If money and power and ego and a passion for perfection could create this extraordinary pleasure, this instant landmark . . . money and power and ego could rescue the city from its ashes,” I wrote. It was the most optimistic moment in architecture since the Rockefellers gave us Rockefeller Center at the height of the Depression. To make the point, the magazine’s cover showed just the restaurant, as if suspended in the air, minus the tower beneath. This was another clever idea from
New York
art director Milton Glaser, who just happened to be the graphics designer of Baum’s dream, as well. Reading my piece now, I do sound a bit gaga. I admit I was gaga. I was thrilled by the astonishing views and felt a wave of mild acrophobia because the glass wall went down to my feet. Every vista of the city seemed brand-new, a miracle. I wrote, “In the Statue of Liberty lounge, the harbor’s heroic blue sweep makes you feel like the ruler of some extraordinary universe. All the bridges of Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island stretch across the restaurant’s promenade.” Even New Jersey looked benign from up high. Helicopters and clouds floated below.

It was not merely a time of economic pain. The streets were rife with uncontainable crime and there was not enough money to sweep away the grime. But from above, I observed, “Everything to hate and fear is invisible. A fire raging below Washington Square is a dream, silent, almost unreal, though you can see the arc of water licking flame. Default is a silly nightmare. There is no doggy dew. Garbage is an illusion.” A few months later, a
Daily News
headline would record the president’s indifference:
FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.

Joe Baum was everywhere at that first meal. “This is one of my favorite tables,” he said to me. I reacted as if it were a posthypnotic suggestion. We were as far from the prime window seats as could be. Yet, I had to admit the view was remarkable. The interior had been layered so that every table would have a view.

“They didn’t put enough sugared pecans on your strawberry-rhubarb compote,” Baum complained, pounding the table to summon a waiter.

“No, Joe. They did. I ate them.”

He bent down to pick up a cigarette wrapper.

The magazine’s cover line on my story was pretty gaga, too: “The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World.” Amazingly the world (long before SoHo and TriBeCa would beckon) was willing to go all the way downtown even for lunch.

The gentrification of notoriously grungy and dangerous Columbus Avenue began in the mid-1970s, too. Its booze-soaked sidewalks were seized by Yuppies seeking low-rent apartments and by merchants eager to quiche and white wine them. Michael Weinstein wasn’t planning to be a restaurateur till he opened the Museum Café on Columbus and a few critics appreciated his pop menus. (But with success at Saloon and Ernie’s and later America, his company, Ark, would go public and eventually buy Lutèce.) The Silver Palate was scrunched into a closet-size storefront, with catering by Sheila Lukins and Julee Russo. (It would grow into a factory selling relishes, jams, and flavored vinegars, and then an all-time-best-selling cookbook.)