Insatiable (31 page)

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C
UISINES
F
ROM
T
HREE
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ARRIAGES

T
OOLING ALONG THE BICARBONATE BLACKTOP, CRISSCROSSING THIS LAND
of mythic bounty, once meant (and still often does mean) risking gastrointestinal insult and betrayal even in an item as casual as a grilled cheese sandwich. So it was quite a joy in the summer of 1977 to find a restaurant as ambitious as the Quilted Giraffe in a near-bucolic corner of Ulster County.

Nestled into a Victorian clapboard house on a quiet path in New Paltz, about ninety miles north of Manhattan, the Quilted Giraffe was, I wrote in “A Celebration of Amateurs,” “vivid testimony that amateur in its sense of ‘loving’ can infuse the mere act of nutrition with sensory adventure.” Neither Barry nor Susan Wine was a trained cook. Neither spoke much French. Midwesterners both, he was a Wall Street lawyer who loved to cook; she enjoyed baking. In a not unusual sixties dropout mode, they had escaped Manhattan. He would be a country lawyer. She would open a gallery and a shop selling children’s clothes. The restaurant was an afterthought, a lunchtime mecca, “like the big shopping centers do” to keep customers from straying too far. The baby shop explained the gibberish of giraffes. They came in patchwork on the window shades, frolicked across banquettes, hung in quilted portraits, and made irresistible plastic swizzle sticks. (Am I giving away too much if I confess I still have one in my collection of swizzle sticks?) It was a shock and a giggle to find a giant inflated giraffe nested in the bathtub in the ladies’ room.

Like most of the self-taught American cooks of that time, Alice Waters among them, the Wines tried to be French. I remember ordering
canard aux navets
and being disappointed when the lusciously roasted duck arrived surrounded with olives instead of turnips. “There must be a mistake,” I told the waiter.

He summoned the tall redheaded Irish headwaiter, whom he described as “our house expert in French.” The headwaiter smiled indulgently and assured us that olives were correct.

When I insisted that
navets
meant turnips, not olives, he turned on his heel and disappeared, returning with a butter-stained volume of Julia Child’s
Mastering the Art of French Cooking,
riffling the pages till he found the recipe. “Ohhhh . . . I guess you’re right.”

But beyond the occasional mistranslation, and early culinary gaffes like duck with bananas, the Quilted Giraffe was remarkable for its sensitive lighting, fresh daisies, giant goblets, the sophistication of its wine list, Chopin by a pianist—live—upstairs, and deft service by graceful young men who took obvious pride in the venture.

After each serious rave, Barry and Susan Wine became more ambitious, finally giving up lunch to concentrate on dinner. After a few courses down the road at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, Barry decided he could do as well as any chef. And his passion ratcheted up the ambition. There were Susan’s crusty baguettes hot from the oven, a kidney-studded sweetbread terrine, a lemon-ice intermezzo, a classic veal Oscar, and fresh arugula in the salad. You could follow your New Paltz kir (cassis and white wine) aperitif with the Menu Gourmand (twenty dollars) or Le Menu Nouvelle Cuisine (twenty-one dollars) or what may have been the first tasting menu in America—Le Grand Menu Servi en Petites Portions (thirty dollars), a “degustation chosen by the chef,” with a
grand assortiment of desserts,
including a soufflé at just $7.50 extra.

Given all those
grand
s, and an inspirational two weeks in Paris, the Wines were clearly primed to take on New York. They rented a building on Second Avenue, not at all daunted by the fact that it was just around the corner from Lutèce. (“We knew we had to live over the store,” Susan Wine said. “This is not a job; it’s a lifestyle.”) In that, of course, they were clamoring up the stairwell after the lead of André and Simone Soltner, who lived above Lutèce. A narrow Greek luncheonette was transformed into cozy elegance, all pink and spicy, an embrace of booths, dark wood, inlaid mirrors, café au lait ultrasuede (ah, seventies luxe). On Memorial Day in 1979, they locked the doors in New Paltz, shipped the convection oven south, and one week later opened the citified Quilted Giraffe.

The hungry nomads who’d loved them in their adolescence upstate followed. And new friends proved loyal. Barry, wide-eyed and usually smiling, remained sweetly obsessed, a perfectionist with a passion for quality, the urge to experiment, and the gene for high risk. He delighted in circling the room, introducing guests to a two-foot rod of Japanese radish.

“It’s so hairy,” women squealed.

“It tastes like potato,” Barry would announce proudly.

He would not let a customer eat an entrée garnished the same way twice. And no table ever received the same vegetable twice in the same night. He would be out back, juggling thirteen possibilities, driving the sous-chef crazy. He did shoestrings of vegetables long as spaghetti . . . was he the first? One day, I stopped by and found him experimenting with mustard ice cream to go with the brain salad.

“Must you?” I said.

“Only if it’s wonderful,” he promised.

Decades later, when maniacally creative chefs had made mustard ice cream seem no more bizarre than rum raisin, Wine reminded me.

“But it was awful, Barry,” I said. “It’s still awful.”

“Awful? What do you mean? Really. It was delicious.”

The Wines were a succès fou in any language. They were so successful, they could afford to close both Saturday and Sunday and drive to New Paltz for the weekend in their navy blue Rolls. Susan, trim and tiny and pretty, was famous for being cranky and snapping at any customer who complained of real or imagined abuse. Even now, Barry marvels at her almost supernatural knack for booking tables with a minimum of customer overlap. The restaurant was small and they were turning away hundreds of supplicants every day. There was no bar for customers to wait in, and the vestibule was minuscule. When Bill Paley came in, he needed to be seated without undue delay. “Tables were never empty for more than sixty seconds,” Wine recalls.

A parade of gifted chefs moved through the kitchen of the Quilted Giraffe and its later sophisticated high-tech steel and black lacquer sibling, the Casual Quilted Giraffe, in what is now the lobby and retail bazaar of the Sony Building on Madison Avenue at Fifty-fifth Street. Noel Comess (who went off to found TomCat Bakery) ran the range when the Quilted Giraffe won its four stars from the
Times.
At that point, there wasn’t a cutesy giraffe in sight except for the giraffe swizzle stick in your cocktail glass. Barry Wine’s beluga caviar and crème fraîche-stuffed beggar’s purses (a borrowing from France that became his signature) carried a twenty-dollar surcharge. Heavy monogrammed silver, expensive china, and goblets with twisted stems spelled opulence.

Giraffe alumni Tom Collichio (Mondrian, Gramercy Tavern, Craft), Troy Dupuy (Lespinasse-Washington, La Caravelle), and Wayne Nish (March) speak of Barry with fondness and admiration for his innovation and passion. “I learned everything I know about running a luxury restaurant from Barry,” says Wayne Nish. “As for creativity, he would come up with ideas. Not everything was brilliant. Gefilte fish with blueberries did not amuse the critics. We would cook Mexican for six months, or Japanese for six months. I did things you just couldn’t do then, like mixing olive oil with soy and sesame—it came from an idea I had.”

In the mid-eighties, a sake dealer invited Barry to see Japan, and he fell under its spell. His food at the Casual Quilted Giraffe (which soon became the only Giraffe when business could not support two) became more and more Japanese—small dribbles and dots of food arranged asymmetrically on exquisite imported hand-thrown ceramics. Barry wore a Japanese chef’s coat and practiced calligraphy. He perfected his iconic tuna wasabi pizza (still offered in homage to him at the Mercer Kitchen). Not all his Japanese fusion scored. “That was the same week we did mashed potato sushi rolls,” he later confessed. “Ehhh.” He made a face. “Who needed it?”

When Sony—coveting the Giraffe space on the street for retail use—made the Wines an offer they couldn’t resist, they took the money and, much to the surprise of many, including me, did not go off to open a still grander Giraffe. Instead, they split and went off in search of themselves. So much for cuisine from one marriage.

“How innocently it begins,” I once wrote. “He does exotic omelets. She is celebrated for her blueberry pie. He moves on to meltingly tender veal shanks in polenta. She turns out a shimmering salmon in aspic and does all her own pasta—by hand.

“‘You two are so good you ought to open a restaurant,’ their friends say. Thank heaven, most of us resist the temptation. And thank Julia Child and her butcher, Bob and Karen Pritsker did not,” I wrote in the fall of 1979. “The fruit of their ambition and their passionate gastromania is Dodin-Bouffant, a cloister of highly personal and creative culinary wizardry on East 58th Street.”

Like the Wines, the Pritskers had prepped their act out of town. That was in Boston. Born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, he had a law degree but never practiced. She came from Westchester, daughter of a Broadway impresario, and worked in advertising. They taught themselves to cook from books. Cooking was a hobby.

“Then one day, we went to Julia Child’s butcher,” Bob told me. “There was a lot of fanaticism at that counter, a lot of intensity. I’d never seen anything like it.” Stlll calling it a hobby, they began to cater dinners for the Newton/Wellesley crowd. Then having listened to the wily snake and tasted the forbidden apple, they opened Dodin-Bouffant, dedicated to the awesome perfection pursued by the gourmand hero of
The Passionate Epicure
(the book whose pot-au-feu I had used to challenge the chef of the S.S.
France
). Bob went to market every day. From noon to midnight, they cooked together.

In the summer of 1976, they drove through France, fueling imagination (on the same route I followed, though we never met), falling out of Alain Chapel’s stunned by sublime excess, mesmerized by the bravura of Troisgros. Home again, the Pritskers fired the maître d’ and installed Karen in the dining room, but then something shook up the business plan. There was a separation. “If the restaurant hadn’t destroyed the marriage, the marriage would have destroyed the restaurant,”
Boston
magazine commented. Feeling cruelly exposed, Karen wanted out.

The Pritskers reconciled, then sold the Boston place and moved to New York, planning to import New England oysters. But that restaurant virus still raged. It took a year to find the narrow Eastside town house east of First Avenue, seven scarring months of renovation. Dodin-Bouffant finally opened in mid-January 1979. Stalkers of cuisinary bulletins, first to sniff the rumors of greatness, were quick to trip down the icy stairs to the stylish vestiary with a door open to the kitchen, where Bob might look up from a casserole with his ingenuous smile. And then they were led upstairs to a striking, unusual den of cool. Pale blue banquettes, a chill of chromed chairs, sedately papered walls quite bare, an arched tulip or two reflected in an oval mirror. The voluptuous display of Karen’s desserts was the only relief from pale blue and beige, leaving the spotlight for gently illuminated faces and the exquisite food.

Boston’s Dodin-Bouffant was textbook classic—boringly classic, some critics complained. Now there was never a boring moment. Nouvelle cuisine and their own confidence had liberated the Pritskers. What they did was original, strikingly personal, even eccentric at times:
Lotte
in a fragile batter with scallion. Calf’s brain fritters with cherries Karen pickled herself. Or brains poached in a peppery bouillon that was reduced, enhanced with mustard and cream, then garnished with a crunch of carrot. Lamb salad, rose pink and tender, served still warm on arugula in a subtle vinaigrette, beside a tiny hill of baby beans, and purees of celery root and, at first unrecognizable, radish. I savored and delighted in the mystery and the rush of discovery. Every day, the menu changed. Expensive for the time, of course, I noted (one hundred dollars for two with wine).

Karen’s desserts were a happy vacation from New York’s French restaurant cliché. They were mood-elevators for neophiliacs: Pineapple-lime soufflé, smartly tart. The still thrilling kiwi and orange in sabayon. Ricotta pepper tart with nutmeg ice cream. And a stunning bread and butter pudding with caramelized apricots and a splash of crème anglaise. (I don’t believe anyone, except Le Cirque, did bread and butter pudding, certainly not so elegantly embellished, but soon everyone would.)

Some people found Karen haughty. It was true she could be a bit stern, tightly coiled. As stern as her pale, unmade-up oval face, as tightly coiled as her dark hair. I thought it was shyness or a certain discomfort that provoked a defensive irony in her delivery that could seem arrogant. Caught off guard, relaxed, at play, she was a charmer. And Bob, so amiable, jokey, and adorable in his spattered whites—I thought he looked like a street urchin—had a tyrannical temper when crossed. Dishwashers rarely lasted more than two weeks. “All this is to say they are not Barbie and Ken playing restaurant,” I wrote. “As the menu notes, ‘Being Dodin-Bouffant is not easy.’”