Insatiable (32 page)

“Centuries from now Venusian archaeologists digging in the rubble of Manhattan will find shards of old Cuisinarts and rusted truffle tins and the melted, twisted hulks of electric pasta machines—relics of a civilization that prattled endlessly about what to feed its stomach . . . and how . . . and where . . .” I wrote in a March 1980 issue of
New York,
confessing that I envied my most food-obsessed playmates because they got to eat in their favorite restaurants again and again and again, while the Insatiable Critic was doomed by profession to move on relentlessly in search of new wunderkinder. “If I were free to go anywhere I pleased tonight, I would choose . . .” And then I described eight wonderful dinners.
*
It was another of many roundups of bests and favorites I would persuade the editors I must do to justify yet another delicious spree at Lutèce or the Four Seasons on the magazine’s dollar.

Just six months after my first review, Dodin-Bouffant had become the most exciting French restaurant in town. “Every day they play with cuisinary fireworks,” I wrote. “And once in a while they get burned. But cooking is like love. Great adventure is worth any risk. Sometimes you just have to leap off the cliff not knowing if there’s a feather bed or a rocky gorge below.” Of course, I was writing more about my own life—that love was always worth the risk—than I was about the Pritskers in the years when I could not seem to make a sensible romantic commitment. I was writing of my philosophy at a time when the men I chose were more dessert than sustenance. When the one sure joy and the only certainties in my life were work and dinner.

The irony of my metaphor for the Pritskers became apparent a year later when rave reviews and the clamor for tables were not enough to distract them from the unhappiness of their marriage. They separated again and Dodin-Bouffant closed the next summer. Friends begged them to try at least working together. It reopened in the fall—he in the kitchen, she in the dining room, each keeping different hours. But there was too much anger and pain. He offered to buy or sell. She did not want to buy. She had fallen in love and planned to move to California. He says now that she would never agree to a selling price that made sense for him. On August 10, 1982, Dodin-Bouffant closed forever.

David Waltuck studied marine biology “just long enough” to know it wasn’t what he wanted to do. He had always cooked. Six months wandering Europe, eating, exploring the markets, brought him to La Pyramide in Vienne. For him, as for me many years earlier, it was a career epiphany. Back in New York with no experience at all, he got a job as a cook at the Empire Diner, then did a year at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park and became night
saucier
at Tavern on the Green. A second year at the CIA was “too stultifying,” so he quit, got a job as sous-chef at La Petite Ferme in the Village. All winter, in long johns, he and his wife, Karen (an émigrée from the fashion world), hunted for affordable space. They sold shares to raise the $110,000 it took to transform the funky bodega and
cuchifritos
stand on Grand Street and open the doors of Chanterelle, with just David and a dishwasher alone in the kitchen.

It was like a mirage, a stage set . . . a teasing dream. Black streets so desolate at night, threatening and littered against the shadowy cast-iron facades on the outer edge of early SoHo. Suddenly, there was a cube of light: a tall storefront, magnetically aglow: Chanterelle. Inside, I found a studied elegance—soaring columns and wooden wainscoting, a blizzard of white linen against gray carpet, a great fan of exaggerated flowers, birds-of-paradise, so stately that they seemed wondrously silly.

Karen—a stylish Sally Bowles with her zany trill, a big smile, arched brows, dark hair in a modish boy cut—hung your coat in an armoire and danced you to a table. There, deliberately casual waiters in white shirts and long white aprons demonstrated proper French manners and American agreeableness.

The high French style of the Waltucks’ dream was impressive, especially in this no-man’s-land: big balloon glasses, sweet butter in a ramekin, the astonishingly superior bread, so rich and chewy—from Hoboken, I learned, at a time before great bread became an obsession in New York restaurants. The menu was dated for the week, with its drawing by the artist Marisol, both à la carte and a thirty-five-dollar eight-course prix fixe. Among the offerings: a fricassée of seafood in sea urchin cream, a delicate layered pastry of oysters, salmis of duck with scalloped turnips, perfect greens, exquisite cheese from Dean & DeLuca—vacherin, Pont l’Eveque, crottin de Chavignol, and a froth of fresh goat. Tart grapefruit sorbet cleared dizzied senses, followed by a tray of goodies: crisp palmier cookies, candied grapefruit peel, chocolate truffles, bitter and dark.

By the time I made my third visit, a fussy avant-garde of affluent food-obsessed citizens had found Chanterelle. David Waltuck could afford a sous-chef. But he was only twenty-four years old, really still learning. He continued to experiment as he went along, and his work was uneven. Two weeks earlier, he had tasted a vegetable sausage at the Pritskers’ Dodin-Bouffant and it had inspired his own oyster sausage with a sublime watercress cream. He could turn out a lobster
navarin
in a haunting sauce perfumed with cream and then send out a wine sauce reduced to an unpleasant aftertaste or serve a gritty frozen slab of something called hazelnut ice cream.

The Waltucks were disappointed by the litany of flaws I listed in that first review—“The Daring Young Man on Grand Street”— that was so close to a rave. “David Waltuck is not yet as brilliant as he intends to be, but when he is good, Chanterelle, in SoHo, is astonishing,” the opening line read.

At that moment, unqualified praise for Chanterelle would have brought savvy eaters down to SoHo with impossible expectations. It was safer for the Waltucks (and my reputation) if readers came expecting less than perfection. Many were likely to be less demanding than I. There was always the chance they might be dazzled. And ultimately, they were. First there were three stars, and then four.

I’m not sure what the moral is or even where the wisdom lies in the story of “Cuisines from Three Marriages.” But Chanterelle survives and thrives twenty-five years later, and so, it seems, does the Waltuck marriage. I wrote this chapter to see if there was a lesson here for me, but I have not found it.

41

B
ONFIRE OF THE
F
OODIES

I
T WAS JANUARY 1980. THE LID HAD BLOWN OFF MOUNT SAINT HELENS IN
Washington. China sent its first Olympic team to the winter games in New York. Gold soared to $802 an ounce. New York’s kitchen all-stars were warming up, too, obsessed with game, legally farmed or outright booty, inspired by new ingredients from adventurous farmers and food brokers. “Now comes winter to celebrate the cuisine of astonishment,” I wrote in “Great Chefs, Inspired Feasts” that January. “Wild pheasants appear, an unexplained miracle. Remarkable venison, wild ducks, five perfect squabs. Don’t ask where they came from. Fresh chanterelles are being flown in from Oregon,” I marveled. “Someone has bootleg raw foie gras.” Suddenly, we would discover the
lotte
had a liver. Chanterelle had persuaded its Cape Cod scallop supplier to bring in
lotte
liver. At the Palace, chef Michel Fitoussi’s mousselike lobes of
lotte
liver floated in a piquant sea with slivers of snow peas for crunch. Snow peas were the pea of choice now. Radicchio, crunchy and costly red lettuce from Italy, colored aristocratic salads. Perfectionist chefs paid five dollars a pound for twig-thin French string beans.

In the eighties, certain hoity-toity snobs liked to say they had never been south of Fifty-seventh Street. For some, Saks Fifth Avenue was the Maginot Line. But budgets pinched by financial hard times in the late seventies had inspired pioneers to explore desolate corners ripe for revision. Raoul, Chanterelle, and Greene Street were the pioneers in SoHo and now in TriBeCa, wherever that was—the cabdriver would find it, we hoped. We ventured downtown to J. S. Vandam and Capsuto Frères. Giant red neon letters spelling out Odeon became a beacon for the eclectic chic in 1980. During the transit strike, it seems, the McNally brothers—Brian and Keith (veterans of Cafe Un Deux Trois, One Fifth, and Mr. Chow)—and Keith’s wife-to-be, Lynn Wagenknecht, happened to walk by an old luncheonette on a nowhere block way west. They could afford it, especially if they kept the tacky metal chairs, the homely banquettes, the Takacheck machine. With Regine’s alumnus Patrick Clark at the stove, the Odeon’s draw would be good food and laid-back attitude—Frank and Ella and confit of duck. Bachelor rogues of showbiz, fashion’s precious babies of every sexual persuasion, suburban squares, punksters with tufts of apricot hair, refugees from Elaine’s, and John Belushi, Richard Gere, Milos Forman, David Bowie, Warren Beatty, and Mary Tyler Moore, blissfully unnudged by a crowd determined not to betray the pulse throb of the thrill, all showed up. We were getting a taste of the McNally magnetism. By August, Odeon would be the hottest contender for bistro of the year.

W
chronicled leveraged buyouts, Le Cirque hair, and glitz, glitz, glitz. The Reagans were poised to move Hollywood into the White House. The Carters’ almost endearing just plain folksism was finished. What a perfect time it must have seemed for Jean-Jacques Rachou, restless in the confines of his tiny and wildly successful Lavandou, to sink his savings into restoring the frumpy La Côte Basque. In the fourteen years since his death, Henri Soulé’s beloved “playpen for the poor,” run by his persnickety longtime companion, Mme. Henriette, had faded. And so had she. Bernard Lamotte, painter of the sunny murals radiant with light that gave Soulé’s pampered ménage the illusion of dining alfresco at the port of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, dropped by that March to pay his respects. As the new carpet was being tacked into place, the artist, intoxicated by the renewal, ran out for tubes of color and, using a plate as a palette, began to brush new figures into his murals, people and mules, chimney smoke and swirling wind. He summoned Rachou to see. On a building where Lamotte had long ago lettered “Restaurant Côte Basque—Henri Soulé,” it now read “Jean Jacques Rachou.” “I was not planning to do it,” he confessed to Rachou. “A hand was guiding my hand.” Côte Basque did become Rachou’s arena, free of the old snobbery, with its brand-new state-of-the-art kitchen and the giant plates of the nouvelle cuisine style, just like Michel Guérard’s. Rachou always was a weekend painter. Now using beurre blanc and glace de viand as his media, he sketched astonishing flowers and feathers in the sauce. Very more is more, as I wrote. A parade of young American chefs would rotate through that kitchen, acquiring a Gallic discipline that the next generation of chefs might never know.

It was the era of the grand café, of everyone wanting to get into the feeding game, of big budgets and drop-dead design, of American chefs cooking American. Joanna’s, a late-night brasserie on East Eighteenth Street, signaled that the vast, soaring, slightly roguish grand café was about to trump the town. I spotted Mayor Ed Koch in the hodgepodge of darlings from every niche our town celebrates assembled there, among the polyestered sycophants devouring the scene and an unfocused American menu. Sure enough, a lot of ambitious entrepreneurs with venture capital went stalking for warehouses, garages, abandoned factories. The Flatiron District was prime.

Just when we’d stopped being amused by the nouvelle cuisine, food snobs began to rediscover Americana. Paul Prudhomme’s blackened redfish led imitators to blacken everything. And soon every zip code would have its Cajun canteen—Memphis, Cajun, Gulf Coast. Abe de la Houssaye and his wife, Alene, decked out Texarkana at 64 West 10th Street like a western saloon, with a rotisserie turning out the hot and smoky feasts of the Gulf Coast and Southwest. We flocked there for spicy crayfish stews, delicate fried catfish, pungent barbecues, and homemade catsup.

At Vanessa on Bleecker, Anne Rosenzweig calf’s liver was an American classic with caramelized onions and bacon bits. Warner LeRoy’s circus fantasy of stained glass and animals at Maxwell’s Plum was amusing, but we loved him more for the house’s lavish ways with black bean chile and the marvelous pecan pie. Some critics made fun of Larry Forgione for cluttering his River Café menu with a geography of credentials, but it was a forgivable quirk in his bold campaign to single out the newly rich harvest of buying American. Homey American desserts—cobblers, brown Betty, shortcake—fried Ipswich clams with fat little bellies and Portland hot slaw, and Chesapeake Bay crab cakes were revisited when Forgione opened his An American Place in 1983. Rosenzweig was also off on her own with Ken Aretsky to open the jewel-like Arcadia, with its bucolic mural wrapping the small room and a seasonally changing menu. Soon Rosenzweig’s lobster club sandwich would be the talk of the lunch scene (inspiring the couturier sandwiches everywhere). I loved the flattering filtered daylight of Alan Stillman’s Manhattan Ocean Club, along with his collection of Picasso ceramics in illuminated niches, Kumamoto oysters from the Pacific, perfect crab cakes, and Hawaiian wahoo (a new fish in town) served with another new arrival, grilled pineapple. Restaurant Associates marked its own rebirth and the rebirth of Rockefeller Center by spending a reported $22 million to create the Sea Grill and the American Festival Café.

A onetime Wall Street broker turned caterer, Martha Stewart, was hustling a book called
Entertaining
. As the fount of increasingly in-demand, rigorously drilled American chefs, the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park felt driven to vamp its Escoffier Room into the American Bounty Restaurant in 1982. By 1985, there would be a waiting list of jobs for every graduate.

Not that the French and Italians didn’t fight back. At Le Cirque, Sirio resurrected crème brûlée, inspired by a crema catalana he’d fallen for in Spain. Like the tiramisú brought from Venice by the chefs at Castellano, it soon would be tweaked and twisted and, more often than not, fatally compromised. Roman film producer Dino de Laurentiis got into the food business on Columbus Avenue with DDL Foodshow (though not for long). Roger Vergé, the charming three-star chef of Le Moulin de Mougins on the Côte d’Azur, lent his sunny menu to the Polo Lounge at the Westbury Hotel in 1983. Bloomingdale’s, in its endlessly creative golden era, gave Michel Guérard a kitchen for carryout, calling it Comptoir Gourmand. There, Guérard’s right-hand man from Eugénie-les-Bains worked alongside a onetime jewelry designer named Alfred Portale and Troisgros scion Michel, creating classic charcuterie, while the enterprising food department offered 100,000-year-old prepollution ice from the North Pole at seven dollars a pound. At Il Cantinori, an art-world hangout, Pino Luongo prepped for his own eventual moguldom at Le Madri and Coco Pazzo. Olive oil, we learned, had to be Italian. We had to have it, even though some of us rarely cooked anymore, now that boutique carryout shops bloomed in every neighborhood.

In China, with a coven of food-world adventurers, I asked our scoutmaster, David Keh, why no one in New York did pork in the variety we’d tasted. “You can’t just sell pork,” he protested. “It’s the Jewish people who support the Chinese restaurants.” Give them noodles, too, we suggested. He called it Pig Heaven (delivery was dubbed Pig-Out) and quickly drew his celebrity pets to the wondrously silly space with yellow vinyl and dancing pigs by designer Sam Lopata. Keh, glamorous in his mink and Rolls-Royce, had become a legend by the eighties. He recruited a quartet of graces from Taipei to tend the woks in the shiny black-lacquered sophistication of Auntie Yuan, another Lopata drama: matte black banquettes and pin spots casting pools of light on a giant clutch of white orchids, the luxurious details of Wedgwood, mock ivory flatware, and real linen. Two could share a tasting dinner of lobster or peking duck with serious wines, even a Château d’Yquem by the glass with the sorbet. To escape union demands, he downsized David K’s, his proud flagship restaurant, and gave Zarela Martinez her big break at Café Marimba. I thought its thrilling poetry of light and shadow was Sam Lopata’s most gorgeous design.

Macy’s and Zabar’s staged a take-no-prisoner’s caviar price war as well-heeled gourmands lined up before New Year’s Eve to score sturgeon eggs at rock-bottom prices. To keep up with merger play, one had to check out the Power Breakfast scene at the Regency. Sensing the time was ripe for decadence and mink-covered banquettes in Manhattan, the Petrossian brothers imported their caviar and wild smoked salmon concept from Paris and discovered the American brunch tradition. They gave us foie gras on French toast.

In the first wave of immigration from the organically fixated California scene, where Alice Waters had found her mojo in market cooking, Jonathan Waxman landed on East Seventy-ninth Street in 1984, calculatedly cool. With the forever-boyish wine seller from Britain, Melvyn Master, he opened Jams (for Jonathan and Melvyn), producing food as pristine and minimalist as the duplex space, all white, with splashes of color in borrowed art on the walls. At a moment when sauce was catnip in our time, Waxman talked of throwing a perfect piece of fish on a plate, and burying the chicken under a hill of sublime fries. “Let great ingredients speak for themselves,” he said, setting off a mass infanticide of baby vegetables and an upscale run on french fries. He had mesquite on his grill, of course, and sent forth many a California salad—warm game and greens, sweetbreads with wild mushrooms on endive. Lobster was served with a crunch of tossed salad and homemade potato chips. Salad and mesquite, fuel for the eighties. Mesquite now blackened the skies. Cilantro sprouted like wild grass.

In upstate New York, a transplant from Israel started raising a new breed of duck, supposedly torturing them benignly (was that possible?) by using light and music to wake them up so they’d eat and fatten their livers. Now we had American foie gras.

Paul Levy’s
Offical Foodie Handbook
(Motto: Be Modern, Worship Food) may have been British, but it captured the transatlantic silliness of it all, defining a foodie as “all palate, with a vestigial person attached.”

Restaurant madness had New York in a frenzy. “Never before have so many people spent so much money on eating out . . . and everybody is talking about food,” Patricia Morrisroe wrote in a
New York
cover story (November 26, 1984). The line to get into Mezzaluna stretched down Third Avenue, she noted. That Florentine import, cleverly stuffed into a small Upper East Side storefront, had barely room for anyone over size two at the teensy tables and certainly no room for a coat check. Society darlings blithely threw their Fendi minks into the cellar and sipped peach-blushed champagne Bellinis, pretending it was
amusant
to wait forty-five minutes to sit with knees touching knees at a postage stamp-size table and linger over two ounces of carpaccio or a plate-size pizza. The waiters were dashing young Italians who flirted. Soon there would not be many Upper East Side blocks without a copycat cantina. Italian spots multiplied: Prima Donna, Ecco, Trastevere 83, Erminia, Orso, Paola’s, La Sirena, Georgine Carmella. Pesto and sun-dried tomatoes became staples. Everyone sipped so much white wine, there was a grape crisis. Clever marketeers quickly invented white zinfandel. I blush to remember it.

Many New Yorkers ate out morning, noon, and night. We were so many two-career couples with money to burn, I wrote in June 1985. We were newly single, anxiously returning to the perpetually adolescent dating scene. After an hour on the Nautilus or two hours with Jane Fonda’s workout, we had little time to thaw, much less cook. And we were Yuppies, well traveled, curious, self-indulgent, postponing children or entrusting them to the au pair we didn’t report to the IRS. And, of course, no one wanted to wear a tie anymore. The fusty grand French restaurants seemed irrelevent. Hushed eating in a temple was giving way to grazing in a raucous gym.