Steal the Menu (11 page)

Security at a VIP event in those days was a lot lighter than the routine TSA checks at airports are today. There were no metal detectors, no pat-downs. All I’d needed to get into the library grounds that day was a press credential, which did not have my picture on it. I did not have a state-issued picture ID. Nobody did. So hundreds of reporters had ambled through the gates flashing pieces of paper, and that was that. I hadn’t thought about it until I saw the president on the other side of a rope.

Then came the evil thought: Someone could easily have strolled in here with a pistol. I moved toward the rope. Tall men with little
medals in their lapels loomed on all sides. I sidled casually into a gap between two of them, right up against the rope. Anyone could have done that. Nixon walked by, almost close enough to touch. Or shoot.

I worked some anti-Nixon potshots into my otherwise quite neutral piece. Readers learned that President Nixon had not stayed for the meal and had insisted on taking some barbecue with him on Air Force One, to nosh on, but only after his slow-moving entourage had kept the other four thousand guests waiting for lunch, while the pit mistress fumed like wet hickory.

With the end of summer, the opportunities for stunts stopped offering themselves, and the post-Claibornian routine took over my life, like a slow dance to bad music. The slim crop of new restaurants was slim indeed. La Chaumière, a modest French bistro in the Village, received no stars and a stiff, sniffy review.

There didn’t seem much point in filling the Friday restaurant space with shrill warnings against such losers. I couldn’t help hearing in my mind the voice of
Newsweek
’s cultural editor, Jack Kroll, explaining to me when I was a summer trainee in 1965 why the magazine didn’t run a lot of pans of books by unheralded authors: “You’re basically saying to the poor schmuck reader out there in Indiana: Here’s a book by somebody you’ve never heard of and you know what? It stinks.” So I began revisiting well-known restaurants, and if they didn’t exactly stink, these Old Faithfuls didn’t exactly make you excited about dining in them, or reading a halfhearted positive review reminding you that they existed.

On the same day I pasted La Chaumière, I gave two stars to El Parador, then the city’s acknowledged leader in Mexican cuisine. The great migration of Mexicans to New York was still years off. Mexican ingredients were available only at one specialty store on West Fourteenth Street, Casa Moneo. So if you had been to Mexico or even San Antonio, you knew that El Parador was a provincial, if
polite, outpost of real Mexican food. But it was one thing to know that and another to say it in the
Times
.

Three weeks later, I went to Pearl’s, in midtown, and noted that “standards … have slipped.” More to the point, Pearl’s, I said, was “the perfect Chinese restaurant for people who don’t really like Chinese restaurants,” laying the groundwork for the most sensational reviews and features I would write at the
Times
. I also observed that Pearl’s, with its prettifying rendition of Cantonese food, was “not part of the revolution in authentic Chinese cooking now in process in this city.”

I did find one old favorite I liked a lot: the formal, vaguely Belgian Quo Vadis, on the Upper East Side. It kept its four stars and got a pat on the shoulder for its
filet de sole Dieppoise
, an elaborately garnished classic out of the as-yet-unrevised
Larousse gastronomique
. But Nanni’s, recommended to me for its pasta by a well-heeled gourmet and member of many eating societies, flunked out in the meat part of the menu with an attempt at liver in the Venetian manner: “strips of the kind of gristly liver that have turned generations of children off the meat.”

I ventured into Serendipity, the campy coffee shop and ice cream parlor near Bloomingdale’s, to see how it was accommodating the new vegetarian trend under its Tiffany dome lamps. But what caught my taste buds was Serendipity’s most flamboyant dessert: “the completely unredeemable self-treater will order apricot smush, a ‘cold drink’ in the same sense that Raquel Welch is a ‘young woman.’ It is a bracing bath of apricot essence, voluptuous and excessive.”

You will have gathered that I was not happy with the mediocre gastronomic outback I found myself in, or with the treadmill built by Craig on which I was obliged to disport myself. But there wasn’t much I could do to get the
Times
to change the basic formula Craig had worked with so successfully.

I did manage to persuade Abe Rosenthal to let me drop the Friday recipe feature and fold its space into the restaurant reviews. But he wouldn’t let me drop the stars. I argued that attaching stars to a review cheapened it. None of the other critics were saddled with stars. Their readers couldn’t just scan a set of graphic symbols before deciding whether to read the actual article.

He did, however, let me add another symbol: a triangle, the equivalent of Michelin’s knife and fork, for ambience. I persuaded him that stars weren’t enough: a place could have wonderful food with bad service and comfortless surroundings or it could be very pretty but have lousy food. It was the second case that I was really thinking about, because it allowed me to pinpoint an attack on that flower-bedizened, gastronomically overrated watering hole of the garment industry, La Grenouille.

Part of my covert plan to overthrow established order in the New York restaurant world was to knock La Grenouille off its plinth. And so I did, from four to two stars. But I also gave it a mingy two triangles for ambience, noting the way waiters called out to one another over the ostentatious flower arrangements amid a general decline in chic. Tables were so crowded together that people were almost sitting in one another’s laps. But the real deficiency was on the plates: canned-tasting peas and a signature first course of clams in white wine I mocked as too humdrum for a top restaurant.

I knew this review would cause shock and awe. Important New Yorkers had a lot invested in their status as regulars at the Frog Pond, as La Grenouille was known in the pages of
Women’s Wear Daily
. That trade paper responded to me with a special issue defending its favorite luncheonette.

La Grenouille survived my attack and improved over the years, outlasting all its rivals from the 1970s to become a justifiably
beloved refuge of old-style elegance, the kind of place where
New York
’s perspicacious critic Adam Platt took his mother for a nostalgic meal in 2011.

Less sensational but more fundamentally influential was my review of Lutèce; I raised it out of the limbo of three stars to the golden summit of four.

It was clear to anyone with basic experience of great French food in restaurants in France that on merit alone Lutèce stood well above the other high-luxe New York French restaurants. But it was not part of the old-boy network of Le Pavillon clones, the
quenelles
-mongers who vied for the same high-society clientele.

Lutèce was different. Alone among its rivals, it felt like a real French restaurant, with topflight dishes you might have found in France and an unsnobbish atmosphere that also reminded me of my time in the
Newsweek
Paris bureau. One of my reasons for taking the
Times
job had been to give Lutèce its rightful fourth star. I bided my time, following Rosenthal’s advice not to play all my trumps right off the bat. So nearly a year after I became restaurant critic, on January 14, 1972, Lutèce’s two Andrés, Soltner the chef and Surmain the owner, awoke to unexpected but well-deserved fame and fortune.

On the strength of this accolade, Lutèce was launched for the next thirty years as the top restaurant in the United States. The combination of André Soltner’s talent with the authority of the
New York Times
made this happen. But I was the one who made the connection, and within a year my rebel’s judgment had won over the most grudging acolytes of the old order.

Ironically, the rise of Lutèce, which symbolized the final ascendance of authentic haute cuisine in America, coincided with the beginning of the end of Escoffierian haute cuisine in France and of France’s domination of fine dining in the world at large. I got a
glimmer of this future just a few months after the Lutèce review, in Paris just before Easter.

I got off the plane with no thought of discovering anything more than a minor shifting of the way things had been in the glacially advancing world of French cuisine when I’d left the
Newsweek
bureau in 1967. Nothing I’d read in the food press had prepared me for the upheaval that was finally bringing radical change to French food after the paralysis of the Depression, the tragedy of the war, and twenty-five years of postwar recovery.

This ferment was not, in fact, what you were likely to hear about in Paris, even from most resident gastronomes. I had arranged to have dinner my first night in town with John and Karen Hess, he a
Times
correspondent and future
Times
restaurant critic, she a notoriously precise cook and, later, an eminent food historian. John had been called away to cover the latest atrocity in Northern Ireland; so I ate alone with Karen at Chez Denis, an aggressively traditional small restaurant of the most refined sort. It might have been 1960.

I told Karen my plan to eat at a three-star restaurant outside Lyon run by Paul Bocuse, whom I’d heard about in 1967; my bureau chief, Joel Blocker, had proposed him unsuccessfully for what would have been an extremely prescient
Newsweek
cover story on young French chefs. Since then, Bocuse’s restaurant, named after himself, had risen from two stars to three in the Michelin guide. Even I knew that. Karen Hess, however, evinced no interest whatever in Bocuse or my trip. Despite her obsession with food, she, like most Parisians, had not yet realized she was living in the middle of a moment of historic change in French cuisine.

I did find accurate guidance by reconnecting with Jack Nisberg, an American expat photographer who really did know what was cooking in the French food world. Jack had settled in Paris
after World War II, studying photography on the GI Bill. He spoke hysterically ungrammatical but very fluent and vernacular French with a Chicago accent, and he understood the French character like no other American I ever met. I once saw Jack charm a crowd of Parisians packed onto a rush-hour Métro platform into posing for several takes of a picture. He wore florid sports shirts with no tie, which embarrassed Joel Blocker. And he wasn’t a very good photographer. One of the bureau reporters liked to say that Jack took snapshots, not photographs. But he was truly serious about the art of photography. His idol was the American surrealist Man Ray; Jack had a small collection of his prints. And he was very good company.

Jack was happy to go to Bocuse with me, but before we left, he pressed me to book a table at a little place called Le Pot au Feu, in a gritty Paris suburb, Asnières, where another young chef, Michel Guérard, was creating a sensation with radically simplified versions of traditional food.

On the train to Lyon, I picked up a copy of the regional edition of the newsweekly
L’Express
, which some other passenger had left behind on my seat. It had Bocuse on the cover in his tall white toque. The article hailed him as the
chef de file
, the leader, of a revolutionary moment in French culinary history. It had all started in another Rhône Valley town, Vienne, in the kitchen of Fernand Point, where Bocuse, Guérard and the brothers Jean and Pierre Troisgros, now flourishing in Roanne, had apprenticed and learned from Point about what looked like plain cooking but turned out to be a deconstruction and rehabilitation of the entire tradition and practice of cooking.

Thus instructed, I dined at Bocuse with Jack. The next morning, I became the very first of dozens of Anglophone journalists to be taken by the great man for a tour of the Lyon markets,
where he performed a sort of primordial locavore shopping tour at dawn. Then I went on with him for a midmorning plat du jour at his favorite little hole-in-the-wall, the kind of bar-bistro known locally as a
bouchon
.

Back in Paris, I sat in the tiny dining area of Le Pot au Feu for a meal of staggering flavors concealed in dishes of deceptive informality. At another lunch, I ate old-fashioned dishes at Alain Senderens’s L’Archestrate. Some of them, like the fourteenth-century eel stew called
brouet d’anguille
, had been resuscitated from the earliest days of French cooking. Senderens also revived the intricate classic treatment of head cheese,
tête de veau en tortue
, and invented a subtle treatment of turnips in cider with a puree of celery on the side.

It was a spectacular week for an American gastronome, but for an American food journalist, it was the scoop of a lifetime.

On April 6, the Thursday after Easter, I did my best to describe the new world I’d blundered into, the “genteel revolution” soon to be known as the nouvelle cuisine. Paul Bocuse was the most theatrical of these Young Turks, as a person and in the kitchen. He served me a whole sea bass encased in puff pastry that looked like a scaly fish, with a tomato-tinged béarnaise sauce, what Escoffier called
sauce Choron
. But it was Michel Guérard’s twenty-seat hole-in-the-wall that served the most forward-looking food.

A slice of
foie gras des Landes
, fresh foie gras from southwest France prepared in the restaurant, had arrived entirely unadorned, without aspic or truffle or even parsley. But this foie gras was of a smoothness and puissance to stand alone. For those who wanted something more varied as a first course, there was the
salade gourmande
—deeply green beans mixed with slices of truffle, fresh foie gras, chunks of artichoke bottom and an evanescent vinaigrette dressing.