Insatiable (34 page)

She introduced him at the bar that night. Steven Richter. I didn’t remember the party or the face, but he looked good—tan, with a hippie mustache and a fabulous smile, the top of his brown hair lightened by the sun. He seemed very Western in an old tweed jacket and baggy worn jeans, drinking Mexican beer from a bottle held low at the crotch between swigs. I figured that was western, an old mining town thing. Darlene invited him to hike with us the next day.

Steven wore frayed cutoffs and had great legs. He taught me a few downhill tricks. You needed to lean back so you would fall on your ass and not on your knees. Funny how we both expected I would fall.

I invited him to dinner that evening. I can’t imagine what I was thinking, but I served him a skinless breast of chicken. At least it wasn’t carbonized. In his honor, we dressed the salad and opened a bottle of red wine. That helped. I discovered he was a Bronx-born cowboy, very smart. He didn’t say much, but when he spoke, his comments were pointed and witty.

He spent the night. Next morning, he was still there. He liked my coffee. I thawed a bagel from the freezer. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry. Eventually, he went off to his job at the Aspen Art Museum.

I was wowed. How lucky can you be? He was not a foreigner I would have to adjust to. He was a homeboy. We shared big-city paranoia and a love of pizza. In New York, men are always leaving. Sometimes they have to get home to their wives or their dogs, or to their special pillows for their asthma, or because they can’t wear the same shirt two days in a row. Once, I dallied with a guy who had to go home to walk his parrot. Another date had claustrophobia in anything smaller than a king-size bed. Another’s mother would be upset if she called and he did not answer. Steven Richter was not in a hurry to leave. And he returned for dinner the next night. I was ready with a big sirloin, a baked potato, and garlic bread. I think he went home seven or eight days later to do the laundry. I went along. By that time, we were an item.

He lived down valley, in affordable Basalt, as many Aspen workers do. His zucchini had taken over the vegetable garden in his absence. I said I could do all kinds of things with zucchini—pancakes, frittata, crisps, grated zucchini cakes. We were an odd couple, and I think that was part of the attraction. I was decidedly, incurably an indoors person. Steven had become a mountain man in the twenty-five years he’d been in Aspen. He’d gone there to ski, worked as a busboy at the Red Onion, then as a bartender, and spent two summers fighting fires in Alaska. He would go back to New York just to make enough money as a graphics designer to spend the winter skiing. Finally, he had settled in Aspen, working as a carpenter and contractor, remodeling old Victorian houses. He specialized in kitchens. Ah, Fate. By the time we met, he was working at the Aspen Art Museum, designing and installing shows. I thought it was not too late to get a little outdoorsy myself. Soon it was my feet in those lace-up tank-treads boots. At one point, I even signed up for cross-country ski lessons—I thought strength from years of aerobics would make up for lack of grace and balance. The instructor was discouraging. “I’ve never seen anyone less flexible,” he said. (I’ll admit I’d heard this before, though not in an Achilles-tendon context.)

Steven was surprised to hear I’d never gone camping. “It’s not because I don’t want to go camping,” I said. “It’s just that people seem to think I’m not the type.” He borrowed a four-wheel-drive truck so we could climb right up the pass to Lincoln Gulch, his favorite camping site. He pulled off the trail near a hidden knoll beside a stream and began to unload the tent, a roll-up mattress, down pillows, patchwork quilts, and a bottle of red wine. He handed me potatoes to peel and slice, while he built the fire to grill our steaks in a huge black iron skillet. It grew dark and the smell of potatoes frying in butter was dizzying. There were more stars than sky above—millions of stars, a few of them streaking across the sky. Undearneath my jeans and sweater, I wore a red satin teddy.

I began to commute back and forth to Aspen as often as I could, arriving with enough eating research to write four or five columns for
New York.
His friends turned out at the Explore bookstore for an autograph signing of
Delicious Sex
and bought copies by the half dozen.

I noticed Steven had not read the copy I autographed for him. When I mentioned this, he said, “I don’t have to. I live with the original.”

I could not decide if that line revealed something wonderful about me or something unknowable about him. But I forgot to worry about it as I headed back to New York table games.

Juliette’s Grandma’s Fruit Crumble

I
n summer, I use blueberries, plums, or nectarines; peaches are okay, too, except you have to peel them. In the fall, I use tart apples like Granny Smiths, unpeeled and sliced thin. I sometimes mix the apples with half a cup of slivered dried apricots. This is the low-fat version. Needless to say, it’s better with butter.

3 pints blueberries or 5 cups sliced plums, nectarines, or Granny Smith apples

1/2 cup sugar (plus 4 tbsp. more if the plums are very sour)

3 tbsp. freshly squeezed orange juice

1 tbsp. quick-cooking tapioca

3/4 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup brown sugar

1 tbsp. canola oil

1/2 cup uncooked oatmeal or Grape-Nuts

Low-fat cooking spray

Preheat oven to 350° F.

Spray an 8-by-8-inch glass baking dish with cooking spray. Wash berries or fruit. Slice if you’re using nectarines, plums, or apples (1/3-inch slices for nectarines and plums, thinner for apples).

Put fruit in a bowl, add sugar, 1 tablespoon of the orange juice, and tapioca, then mix it up well with a wooden spoon. Spoon into baking dish.

Mix flour and brown sugar by hand in another bowl or in the food processor. Add the canola oil and 2 tablespoons of orange juice and mix again with the wooden spoon or pulse in the food processor till it makes lumps. Stir in oatmeal or Grape-Nuts. Spoon this topping over the fruit, covering it as much as you can. Bake in oven for 25 to 30 minutes, till fruit feels soft to your fork and the top is golden brown. If fruit cooks before the top colors, brown under broiler. Let cool.

Serves 8 to 10.

T
his dish can be garnished with a sweet yogurt cream or you can pass the cream in a separate dish at the table.

Sweet yogurt cream:

2/3 cup no-fat plain yogurt

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 tsp. vanilla

2 tsp. dark rum

Stir brown sugar, vanilla, and rum into yogurt and pour into a pretty pitcher or a small bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and let it sit in the fridge at least 20 minutes to dissolve any sugar bumps. Stir again before serving.

43

D
INING ON THE
L
IP OF THE
V
OLCANO

D
ISPATCHED TO RUN LAFAYETTE IN THE DRAKE HOTEL TWO YEARS EARLIER
, Jean-Georges Vongerichten did his master Louis Outhier’s fancy French bidding. But he knew something was wrong. By the time he’d thrown out the bone-rich stocks and finished playing with the menu, its divisions into “perfumed oils,” “vegetable extracts,” “bouillons” and “les vinaigrettes” was a call to revolution. Wild herb and morel salads covered with hot mushroom broth and the New Jersey tomato tart served with clear tomato water were flavor revelations, freeing chefs across the country to copy and improvise. “Startlingly gifted,”
Times
critic Brian Miller wrote (April 22, 1988) in awarding Vongerichten four stars at the age of thirty.

The old “21” had plastic surgery and (as sometimes happens) emerged with a frozen smile. Not everyone appreciated Anne Rosenzweig’s revised “21” burger with its herbose green ooze and the reformulated chicken hash. “When old customers complain about the hash, I tell them we decided to put some chicken in it,” she said. Still, we were grateful that a fiercely aggressive businessman named Marshall Cogan was willing to spend thirty million or more to keep the landmark saloon alive. He’d lured Ken Aretsky and Rosenzweig from Arcadia to juice up the crowd. There was a decade of legend to live up to. Taking note of the prices, Groucho Marx once ordered a lima bean, then sent it back to be peeled. Le Cirque’s most recent ex, Alain Sailhac, seemed surprised to find himself running the “21” kitchen. “What do you think is American food?” he kept asking. And how did Rosenzweig run a kitchen run by Sailhac? “With great respect,” she said, biting her lip. “I bought him James Beard’s book
American Cookery.
‘Just so you’ll know what a Lady Baltimore cake is,’ I told him.” Union pickets protesting the job loss paraded outside.

At that first lunch, I knew something dramatic was happening when I saw Eli Zabar’s wonderously chewy onion-etched baguette in the bread dish. The saloon, with its hanging toys, was properly peppered with certifiable stars. Mary Martin was Peter Pan in pink, seated two derrieres to my right.

“Does snapping my fingers disturb you?” she asked my companion.

“Nothing you do could disturb me,” he replied. Lingering to say good-bye, speaking of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Martin exited, kissing most everyone in sight. It was exactly the New York theater that made prices moot, especially for the “21” crowd. I only worried that the old-timers would be unsettled by the food actually being good, at times even brilliant.

Rents were soaring. Liquor sales had slowed. Expense-account meals were now only 50 percent deductible. There was a surge in what industry overseers called “substantial” restaurants filing for Chapter 11, the
Times
reported. Burnout was epidemic. “About 75 per cent of restaurants close or change hands within five years of opening,” the
Times
quoted a representative of the State Restaurant Association as saying. That was July. Then came Black Monday. On October 19, 1987, the Dow dropped 508 points. A glut of hotels were in the works. Christian Lacroix arrived in town a week after the crash with clothes—his fifteen-thousand-dollar poufs—of “a luxury and defiance” that hadn’t been seen,
New York
magazine’s Julie Baumgold wrote, “since eighteenth-century French aristocrats rattled in carts over cobblestones on their way to the guillotine.” The cover line read “Crash Chic.” Food-world entrepreneurs got caught mid-step, too. The Reagan years were over. Now it had to be bistro, intimate, neighborhood. Small seemed cozy; laid-back was reassuring. A trio of Frenchmen at Park Bistro carved out a small empire of informal spots on Lower Park Avenue, opening Les Halles, a bistro-cum-butcher shop.

Red meat was in and out and in again. Pork, touting itself as “the other white meat,” enjoyed an amazing renaissance. We were lured downtown by Provence, Barocco, Arqua. The potato was back, mashed, smashed, fried in ribbons, matchsticks, shoestrings. Snapple put iced tea in a bottle.

We worked one-on-one with our trainers, vacationed at spas, discovered AA, put the
8-Week Cholesterol Cure
on the best-seller list, and caused a run on oat bran. Fruits and vegetables had designer labels. Barbara Kafka’s
Microwave Gourmet
(1987) made us take another look at a tool serious foodniks sneered at.

Joe Baum signed on to make the old Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center look newly Art Deco again, spiffier than the first time around, with silver lamé-skirted tables and cigarette girls in Broadway costumes selling teddy bears. Twenty million dollars? Twenty-five? “We don’t know yet,” Baum admitted. Like a great born-again beauty reliving a glamorous youth at the age of fifty-three, Rainbow had been rescued from dowdy neglect by the century’s master restaurant creator. By raising the floor, architect Hugh Hardy had engineered a stunning new skyscape. Everyone who knew and loved Joe Baum was thrilled he had found a landlord who could afford him. “In the Renaissance, the popes hired Michelangelo,” observed labor lawyer Ted Kheel. “Today the Rockefellers have Joe Baum. And this is his masterwork.” An opening night gala, just before Christmas in 1987, drew the high and the mighty and a few ringers. Leona Helmsley wore a white strapless gown and gazed up into the face of her Harry as if he were her prom date. Eager young people who had never danced together before, possibly hearing an unamplified live band for the first time, improvised the mambo and merengue.

Success played the tramp on the night crawlers’ circuit, never faithful for long to the hot spot of the week. I made the rounds downtown in the rainy spring of 1988. Caffe Roma, torrid for one season, was shuttered. Il Palazzo, having obliterated Café Seiyoken, was nearly deserted. The action had cooled at America. Joanna’s was abandoned and forlorn. The savvy had pretty much written off Studio 54. Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager had left the Palladium behind. Savants of the night snubbed Nell’s, where wistful whippersnappers leaped out of prom-night limousines to bounce off the velvet ropes. Canastel’s, the radiator of Park Avenue South, with Marc Packer’s following of mannequins and the guys who paid their bills, still steamed along. Mezzogiorno, in SoHo, and Karen Jean’s dollhouse, Bistro du Nord, were jumping.

Café Iguana looked as if it had been slapped together with scissors and paste—fake wisteria, tinseled stars, a couple of stuffed iguanas. The warehouse stretched endlessly, full of promise, and still there wasn’t room to pack everyone in. And it was not about the food, though after a few margaritas (these were actually made with tequila), the sleaziest enchilada seemed wonderful. Mama Iguana herself, as the endlessly affectionate Joyce Steins liked to call herself, slithered through the crowd, using a linebacker to clear the way, kissing, reaching out, stepping into the hugs of her loyal brood. It was a place to feel loved and wanted even if you had to wait an hour outside in the rain.

I didn’t need a thermometer to get the drift at Canal Bar. There was already a hint of divine smugness in the air. Everyone was wearing black, minis and turtles and tribal kimonos, granny shoes and bootees, bikini tops and elastic bands. It was that era when Brian McNally—after Odeon and Indochine—could do no wrong. A decade earlier, Bianca Jagger would have celebrated her birthday at Studio 54. This year, her bash drew even Sly Stallone to Canal Bar.

McNally could take a tacky joint on the edge of nowhere, splatter a bit of paint about, and open. No need even to hang the name outside. Canal Bar—nowhere near Canal Street, to be provocatively perverse—was as improvisational as the wait crew.

Keith Haring, Tina Chow, and Lauren Hutton dropped in to celebrate Julian Schnabel’s Whitney retrospective. You could spot architect Philip Johnson, designer Carolina Herrera, or restaurateur Ken Aretsky (almost nightly) in the see-and-be-seen booth of honor. “I don’t understand it quite,” McNally would say in his disarming way. “I’m astonished people come.”

Eric Goode got his badge for spookiness as a partner at Area, with its bizarre dioramas. So no one was surprised that a pair of stuffed Dobermans guarded the fake Miró and coats got checked in the vault of a lounge and disco called M.K. in what once had been a bank. There was usually a modest match at the pool table in the library, with its high school lab cases of dusty skulls and bones. The decorous posed while chatting on the pink velvet-canopied bed. “You have time to explore, practicing scream suppression, waiting 90 minutes for your 10:30 reservation,” I observed. “Soon you, yes, Mouseburger you, will be inches away from Mick Jagger, Fred Hughes, Steve Rubell, the nocturnal rogues of the literary brat pack—Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis. Count on getting in to M.K. summer weekends,” I suggested, “when anyone with a shred of dignity who doesn’t have a house in the Hamptons will stay home pretending he does.”

The door torture at Au Bar on East Fifty-eighth Street, located in a basement tarted up with books bought by the yard to look vaguely English library, made me defensive. “Amazing that a nation so indifferent to bondage could be so hungry for humiliation,” I wrote. “What is a doorman anyway? Just someone who isn’t smart enough to get a real job. Are you going to grovel? Why, he’s spent more time on the street than the trash trucks.” I watched families torn apart by the doorman’s waiting list. Two would get the nod. The rest, dashed by rejection, waved good-bye. The elected two hesitated, dazed by the horror of the moment . . . and then they entered. After all, they were the chosen.

And for what? The place was empty. Even so, we were led to the worst table in the house without a murmur. Night chroniclers thought Howard Stein was smart to escape Xenon when disco mania succumbed to restaurant madness. And he’d made a fortune across the street at Prima Donna till it tumbled into Chapter 11. Now this. “He must know our secret terrors,” I wrote. “Our unspeakable desires.”

It had taken forever and a year after his abrupt departure from Montrachet for David Bouley, his brothers, and a kitchen crew with nothing else to do to fashion the graceful vaulted ceiling arches and the distinctly Provençal facade of Bouley, a mirage of France in a quirky corner of TriBeCa. Nothing but Limoges and handmade linens would do for David. It was no trick at all to get drunk waiting for a table and drunker still waiting for dinner that fall of 1988. It felt as if the budding diva was out there at the range doing it all himself, reluctant to surrender your terrine to a hapless waiter. By the time you’d mopped up a silver tray of pistachio
tuiles,
blueberry
financières,
and truffles, lemon tartlets might arrive, still warm from the oven. You’d aged a few months and gained a pound, and now you had to find a taxi in the midnight gloom.

Given his nimbus of fame from triumph at the River Café, Charles Palmer’s debut at Aureole in an expensively redone duplex at 34 East 61st Street in 1988 was closely watched. Quite frankly, I didn’t get the charm of swans, turtles, frogs, and one baleful cow staring right at me in plaster relief on the wall. But Palmer’s satiny sea scallops sandwiched in crunchy potato crusts on a puddle of citrus-scented olive oil was a dish for the century. And the flying buttresses of architectural desserts by Richard Leach would have made Howard Roark jealous. Certainly they inspired looming architecture in sugar from pastry wizards across town.

In 1988, Ian Schrager proved you didn’t need spacious bedrooms to launch a hotel à la mode by hiring Philippe Starck to design the Royalton. Lounge lizards soon claimed all of Starck’s futuristic pastel velvet chaises and settees and then the furniture had to be trussed up in ill-fitting protective white sailcloth muumuus. Exempted from camouflage were the chartreuse banquettes of the lobby restaurant “44,” where the last chef of the late, lamented Maxwell’s, Geoffrey Zakarian, was running the range. One Friday night, I noticed that everyone at dinner looked like a rock star. I felt redundant.

As the rising stars of American cooking got all the press, ossified French monuments struggled to stay relevant. But Italian feederies just kept on spawning—from the ultimate in truffled opulence, San Domenico, to Pino Luongo’s celebration of mother’s cooking, Le Madri, where we swooned over the truffle oil-scented cheese-stuffed foccacio in May 1989. Sette Mezzo charmed uptown’s masters of the universe. The Sindonis and their cousins, the Lattanzi clan, blossomed on the Upper East Side and then everywhere, even going kosher.

Sonny Bono was elected mayor of Palm Springs. Bertolucci’s
The Last Emperor
swept the Oscars. Harvard scored a patent for a genetically altered mouse. If our shoulder pads got any wider, we could never get into the ark two by two. Food-world seers charted East meets West, dubbing it “Pacific Rim” cooking (later it would be Asian fusion and ultimately global confusion). Carmine’s family-style platters were cheap. The ballet world found a hangout—Punsch—and then cruelly abandoned it.

Prepared-food sections in supermarkets continued to grow. No one was about to give up sushi, fajitas, or gravlax; we were just more likely to take them home as we cut back on eating out. Restaurants in New York had always come and gone. But now shocking losses mounted. In the darkness of the stumbling economy, you could actually book a table for lunch at Le Bernardin, even dinner at Lutèce, without calling more than a few hours ahead. Terrance Brennan was in the kitchen of Prix Fixe, preparing marvelous gourmand dinners for just twenty-one dollars. But all those bankruptcies led to cheap leases that enabled established restaurateurs to spawn. It was, and is, the New York religion. Where someone else has failed, I will survive.