Insatiable (41 page)

When I confided to Malcolm that I could see myself arriving at Citymeals’ garden party in Rockefeller Center that June on the back of his motorcycle, he agreed to be my date. There he was, posed astride his machine, a gladiator in black tie and a black-and-white helmet, parked at the fire hydrant on my corner. We rode like the wind through midtown Manhattan, with me in periwinkle blue chiffon. I felt a frisson of danger, remembering the trailing scarf that caught in the Bugatti wheels and broke Isadora Duncan’s neck. Malcolm agreed to a pit stop at Le Bernardin, two blocks from Rockefeller Plaza. I dashed inside, helmet intact, as mouths dropped and waiters stared, racing to the powder room so I could undo my hot curlers and arrive on Fifth Avenue with my hairdo more or less salvaged. I’ll remember that triumphant ride forever, but my most vivid image is still Malcolm on the
Capitalist Tool,
picking up fuzz balls. That fall, he launched
Egg
with Hal Rubenstein as editor and died not long after.

Corn Soup with Sautéed Scallops and Bacon

O
n a writing retreat at the cabin of screenwriter Vicki Polon, we put together this fragrant soup.

6 ears corn

4 cups water (reserve water after the corn has cooked)

2 tsp. olive oil for vegetables

2 medium yellow onions, chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 jalapeño pepper, seeded and minced

Juice of half a lime

Clam broth, to taste

2 slices bacon

6 large sea scallops, quartered

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

1 tbsp. chopped cilantro or basil

Cook corn in four cups of water. Remove corn, strain water of corn silk, and reserve cooking water.

Cut kernels from cobs and reserve the corn. Return cobs to cooking water, simmer till water reduces to half. Then remove cobs and reserve water.

Scrape cobs with dull knife to extract all the corn milk and reserve this liquid.

Sauté onions, garlic, and jalapeño in olive oil in nonstick skillet. Don’t let them brown.

Add reserved corn kernels and corn milk to vegetables, then toss and cook on low heat for 2 minutes. Puree half of this mix in a blender or food processor.

Add puree and remaining corn-vegetable mix to reduced corn water. Then add lime juice and clam broth, to taste.

Cook bacon until crisp, drain, and cut into ribbons.

Sauté scallop quarters quickly in bacon fat till slightly browned. Don’t overcook.

Reheat soup. Add scallops and bacon to mixture in the corn water. Season with ground pepper and salt, to taste. Add more lime or clam juice if necessary.

Serve in bowls with minced cilantro or basil sprinkled on top.

Serves 4.

51

A
FTERMATH
: N
O
M
ERE
T
RUFFLE

I
LOVED BEING FORTY-TWO. SURELY IT IS THE BEST AGE FOR A WOMAN. ONE
is fully ripe and much wiser than at twenty-two, or even thirty. I was forty-two for such a long time—thirty-nine felt too Jack Benny and forty seemed rudely transparent—that I forgot how old I really was. When someone asked how long I’d been the restaurant critic at
New York,
I would say, “Oh, forever,” and if they persisted, I’d reply, “At least twenty years.” But then, in 1998, the magazine celebrated its thirtieth anniversary, and as I was singled out for being there at the dawning, I got trapped by the klieg lights. Even surrounded by younger friends, as I often am, it became more difficult to hide in their aura. When my thirty-five-year-old pals suddenly started turning fifty, I couldn’t even be fifty anymore. Forced to consult a mirror when penciling on turquoise eyeliner, I rarely looked very hard. But occasionally I caught a glimpse of my face through eyes that felt young and was surprised to see me. Scary.

I was starting to feel enslaved by too many Monday-morning dawn wake-ups, required by my bad working habits, to deliver a review due at 10:00
AM.
I loved the eating. I loved the thrill of discovery. I didn’t mind the evenings at the mercy of misguided toques or ungifted journeymen all that much. But the increasingly rushed and often arbitrary editing of my copy was making me cranky. I missed the brilliant word wrangling from the days before computers, when an editor would go through a story line by line, forcing me to find a better word or sexier metaphor.

At one point, I’d asked to share the weekly reviewing job with a second. “You mean like Pauline Kael and Penelope Gilliatt at
The New Yorker
?” the editor asked. “Six months on. Six months off.” I hadn’t meant that, but why not? I lived in this vital, vibrant city. Each week, I would tear out pieces of paper announcing exhibits, walking tours, lunch-hour theater, auctions, showroom sales, but I never got to any of them. After eight or nine hours in the office, I rarely had the energy for cocktails, book parties, wine tastings, or screenings before dinner, even the few that I accepted. Surrounded by the feast of New York life, I was sentenced to tuna tartare and foie gras. Work, work, work. Work came first and seemed to preclude play. But with six months off, I could rediscover ballet, go to dinner parties, go shopping for a loft. And I would be free to travel the way Steven and I liked to—settling into an apartment steps from the Deux Magots on boulevard Saint-Germain, or in Hong Kong’s Happy Valley, or surrounded by the street hubbub of old Hanoi for a month or more.

Three months on and three months off was the only way to do it and not lose touch with the drama of New York in its full-blown love affair with food. Steven and I decided to spend that first winter in Italy: two months in Rome in a duplex near the Piazza Navona, a month in Venice in a charming walk-up above a Chinese restaurant. Drugged by the mysterious shift of light in mist and cold winter sun in Venice, Steven forgot he had rusty knees. He spent hours walking to the farthest edge of neighborhoods rarely seen by tourists on a three-day jaunt, capturing moments—Venice in the snow, a thousand cherubs—that would become his most collected photographic work. Mornings, I trailed after him or strolled ahead so he could work as invisibly as possible. Afternoons, I tapped away on the laptop.

Rich friends were jealous. They could afford any trip but not the time we devoted. That summer, we spent July on the Côte Basque, August in the Alpes Maritime above Nice, and September in Paris. Then home again, back in the office, with its fresh piles of accumulated paper—reams of press-agent quackery, Citymeals reports, domestic and financial obligations, and professional journals. I am not going to whine about this idyllic existence except to note that coming home meant stepping off the plane and rushing to the newest restaurant. We never got to the ballet. And the price of the sprawling loft we fancied doubled while we were in India and doubled again during our second winter in Venice. And then we were off for three months in Southeast Asia and Beijing.

Half my life, I couldn’t tap-dance fast enough. I left the house every morning before Steven awakened. The first time we had together all day was in the taxi on the way to dinner. But every three months, I trudged onto a plane behind Steven, heart pounding with the effort of getting away. And even before the stewardess brought the hot mixed nuts, my pulse was beginning to slow. Distance brought languor and constant togetherness. At lunch, we would eat a giant bowl of salad—arugula, puntarelle, wild greens, and cherry tomatoes from the Campo di Fiori market or the Rialto or the Sunday organic market on the boulevard Raspail—usually with great cheese and bread when slimming resolve faded, as it did when Steven walked in with a huge round of olive bread rich as pound cake. We ate silently. I would wade through
New Yorker
s from the past three months or a novel set in the city we were in. Steven would read the
Herald Tribune.
Sometimes our knives would bump over the aged Parmigiano.

For a man who subsisted so many years on Stouffer’s frozen lasagna and cheap steaks, Steven quickly adjusted to my reviewing life. Today he is often more critical than I am. Something must be working because we’ve been together now since 1986 and we’ve negotiated a civilized truce in the inadequate-closet conflict.

The American food world swept into the zeros on a riptide of exuberance. Supermarkets stocked exotica and the organic. Dozens of restaurants opened every week in New York. Uncounted others faded out, some creaking with age, others newly-hatched, their hopes quickly dashed. Across the country, restaurant food got better and better. And worse, too, I’m afraid. Save us from the mindless pretensions of chestnut-leaf baked organic burdock root with air-dried duck and black plum oil, or chocolate-braised bison short ribs with black huckleberries.

Now everyone I knew, indeed, New Yorkers of every tribe and class and bankroll, was a restaurant critic, a chef groupie, a discerning palate, or on the Internet getting the latest bark from Chowhound.com and sending me e-mail reports of the spanking newest Thai hovel on a street somewhere near Yonah Schimmel’s mythic knishes.

If you eat out in almost any major city, you don’t need me to tell you what was on the menu at the dawn of the new millennium. You know about small plates “meant to be shared,” teeny and tangy tastes served in Chinese soup spoons, surprises from the chef in a demitasse cup (often good for a laugh), tuna burgers and foie gras sliders, the sweeping advance of the short rib and the pork cheek, crème brûlée and panna cotta in multiples of exotic flavors, the persistent creep of bitter herbs into sorbets and bonbons. Asparagus
bavarois
with candied asparagus anyone? But then who could have dreamed dermatologists would discover a benign use for botulism or that the romance of a casual fling, a brief affair, or even a one-night stand would evolve into the harsh imagery of the contemporary “hooking up.”

The generation that watched the Food Network while nibbling baby food or supposedly doing homework knows all the players, the stars, the overreaching divas who tripped the iron chefs. From invisibility, varicose veins, and stained whites, chefs have leaped into spiffy custom jackets,
People
’s “Fifty Most Beautiful” roundups, and
Fortune
’s Entertainment 500. What the French mock as foodism has long been an established ism here.

New York was frosty to Alain Ducasse, who arrived in 2000, self-styled missionary of the three-star Michelin faith. Our warm and bumptious city, which has welcomed millions of immigrants—the hungry, the persecuted, outcasts and dreamers, Cuban baseball players, Italian tenors, and Indian novelists on the run—found the high-flying Robochef a tad too confident and condescending. He insulted us with pretentions designed to astonish the bougeoisie, such as sending the waiter with a choice of knives for the pigeon. “How do I know what knife to choose, Alain? You tell me, please.” And then asking us to select a couturier pen from the dozen swathed in a velvet sheath to sign the staggering check. A few days after opening, he vanished, off to launch a restaurant in Tokyo, unwilling even to pretend he was running the kitchen, leaving us with a bill that hit a new high for conspicuous extravagance—at least till Masa settled in the Time Warner mall.

In 1999, I had asked the editor of
New York
to find someone to take my place as the weekly critic. I wanted time to write long features, and I would keep in touch by doing a two-hundred-word “Ask Gael” column every week. The search began. Just before Christmas 2000, I put together my farewell: “Where to Eat in 2001.” “New York’s entrepreneurial marathon to maximize, market, brand, expand, and reinvent the bistro, café, canteen, tapas stand, and chop house is torrential,” I wrote. “So many openings. So many threatened launches to come. In retrospect, the restaurant madness of the eighties seems almost tame. So here it is: mad-cow stampede, saucier’s apprentice run amok, lamb’s tongue vinaigrette, wasabi sorbet, foie gras-stuffed chicken wings. And yes, peanut butter-bacon-and banana means Elvis is in the house.”

It’s 2005. Supposedly, chefs as matinee idols have been so overexposed that nobody cares anymore who they sue or marry, but watching the adoring masses devouring Bobby Flay with longing eyes in the kitchen at Bar American, I rather doubt it. The price of an average unremarkable meal is rising, but that doesn’t seem to discourage the ranks of bonus babies. No way could I have predicted people would pay for something called vitamin water or dumplings made purple by the stamen of a Thai iris. Or that the pastry chef would shower my melting chocolate cake with a glitter of salt and cognoscenti would boldly tote their favorite crystals from distant seas in small snuffboxes. That dinner might start with salmon tartare in a tiny cone and the wine would come from Austria or Connecticut, or that anyone would be all that interested in tuna-coconut-lime cake at the Petrossian café. Actually, I don’t think many were.

Freed from the relentless deadlines of being the weekly critic, I miss taking my friends to dinner every night and having the last word on what’s great and what’s not. But I’m still eating out seven nights a week, often on my own dollar (that was a shock). The first time I asked for a table for two and got a table for two, I panicked. Chefs were running wild. Foie gras with anchovy and cocoa nibs? I was stunned that some critics lapped it up. Taste is subjective, Thomas Keller insists. But I disagree. There are tastes that are gorgeous, heavenly, textures and combinations that sophisticated mouths will love and eager ingenues can learn to savor.

So I’m still eating and celebrating discoveries in New York. No other city in the world is better for eating out. New York’s first star chefs—those that survived cocaine, shabby business advisers, aggressive landlords, overreaching expansion, the inability to be as good as the critics said they were, those in comeback, those who never went away—are graying now, many still on the cookbook circuit, some still wrestling the range. Larry Forgione’s An American Place found a niche at Lord & Taylor and both of his sons followed him into the trade. Brought back to earth by ventures in Napa Valley, Charles Palmer decided he could comfortably track his bi-coastal empire by jet, and he resettled with his wife and brood of boys out West near his Healdsburg inn venture in Sonama County. Jonathan Waxman pleased old Jams fans with a market-minimalism revival at Washington Square, then abruptly retreated to a simpler gig at the wood-burning oven of Barbuto. Alfred Portale, a full partner now, kept Gotham Bar and Grill humming with a polished perfection as he went off to consult at Striped Bass in Philadelphia. David Bouley, as maddeningly secretive and elusive and seductive as always, running hot and cold on his constantly revised corner of TriBeCa, shifted into expansion mode with his new Bouley Bakery and Market—café, food emporium, cooking school, sushi bar. I found him there in late summer 2005, as handsome as ever in granny glasses, flipping burgers behind the counter in Upstairs at Bouley Market. One taste of his ambrosial scallops, caramelized and just barely gelled, with wild mushrooms, coconut juice and ginger, said it all. The transcendent cook is back.

A triumvirate of gifted immigrants from France continued to dazzle—Daniel Boulud, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and Eric Ripert at Le Bernardin. Alas, Jean-Georges’s avid global sprawl has already cast a few cracks in his luster. Daniel had vowed he would never open an annex anywhere he could not pedal to by bike, then joined the carpetbaggers a jet away in Palm Beach and Las Vegas. Eric Ripert has so far not let a handful of consulting stints distract him from passionate and brilliant hands-on direction at Le Bernardin. And the shimmer and shock of Japanese purity embracing Peruvian and Italian flavors dared by Nobu Matsuhisa in TriBeCa seemed undimished as Nobu seeded itself in midtown, though the chef himself perpetually rides the jet stream to global riches. After seven years in limbo, Gray Kunz himself seemed relieved to rediscover his elegant and complex cooking mojo at Café Gray, as did his fans. The all-star team of the Time Warner collection—Gray, Masa, and Thomas Keller at Per Se—was still testing whether their combined wattage could melt our congenital urban aversion to fine dining in a shopping mall.