Insatiable (33 page)

Everyone wanted to be in the restaurant business. “It’s like a dinner party every night,” the Gotham Bar and Grill’s Jerry Kretchmer liked to say. But the Gotham was foundering in 1985, too hot too soon and experiencing trouble in the kitchen. Jonathan Waxman recommended Alfred Portale to the desperate owners. Last seen at Bloomingdale’s Comptoir Gourmand, Portale had cooked under the fiery star chef from Nice, Jacques Maximin, consultant at Tucano in Ricardo Amaral’s upscale disco, Club A, far east on Sixtieth Street. A few months after Portale moved into the kitchen, I was urging readers to marvel with me at the chef’s straightforward, beautifully mounted food. And very soon afterward, the
Times
agreed. The Gotham was seeing three stars, a halo to mark the height of the chef’s seafood salad.

The stakes were awesome now. Where once an amateur could toss flea-market tables and chairs into the basement of a Village brownstone and create a restaurant, now design reigned. These real estate developers, advertising wizards, playboy garmentos were willing to spend a million or two for a dramatic setting that might not last five months. Trompe l’oeil, peach walls, murals, and open kitchens with wood-burning pizza ovens were epidemic. And it had to be noisy. “Noisy is cozy,” an architect, proud of his shattering decibels, assured me. “Noise creates energy.” And no one really missed the glitter of conversation, because mostly people just talked about how many sit-ups they’d done that morning and which California chefs were rumored to be moving to New York any day. Often it was not about eating at all—just San Pellegrino at five dollars a bottle and shared nibbles.

Lemminglike masses ran from one hot new grand café to the next, detouring to queue up patiently to infiltrate the intense trattoria scene. Yuppies do not eat, I reported in June 1985. “They socialize, they network, they graze or troll. Tapas at a bar or a pizza
*
to share make perfect grazing food because [they] give a yup time to check out the crowd and make sure he or she is in the restaurant of the moment.”
Moment
was the operative word. Never had chic been so cruelly fickle.

Architect Sam Lopata had turned an old box factory on a forlorn stretch of West Eighteenth Street into Café Seiyoken, an Art Deco-Japanese-Continental brasserie for 1983. It was hot, it was fun, and the food was not bad at all, I noted in a column headed “O Tempura, O Mores.” Avant-gardists found it an ideal runway to show off oddly wonderful Japanese fashion. Everyone wore black. When Café Seiyoken cooled, all that applied gorgeousness got tossed out to make way for the flying drapes and pillars architect David Rockwell dreamed up for La Colonna. It minted money, then faded, too. There were so many swan dives.
Bon Appétit
magazine got it right: The eighties witnessed the bonfire of the foodies.

Even before the doors swung open for the first time, there were crowds lined up outside America, Positano, and Canastel’s. These vast, intensely torrid watering holes, all huddled near the Flatiron Building, might cool inexplicably overnight. How to keep up? “Look for a lurkage of limos,” I suggested.

The renaissance in American cooking was unquenchable, inspiring a demand for free-range chickens, meatier ducks with silken livers, and exquisite miniature vegetables. It was amazing to realize how strongly the chefs of remote Gascony, a region of France not many Americans reached, influenced what we ate. Duck confit (simmered in fat), foie gras, even their fiery Armagnac infiltrated American menus. Then Ariane Daguin, daughter of the energetic Gascon booster chef-hôtelier André Daguin, set up d’Artagnan wth her partner George Faisan, supplying Hudson Valley foie gras and fresh game of a quality local chefs trusted, yet another factor in the dining revolution. Fresh herbs were now available all year round. It felt like a new winery was born every week. If upscale New Yorkers could not finance a million-dollar apartment, at least they could afford a $150 dinner. Was there ever a greater time to be alive and hungry in New York? Drew Nieporent, familiar from the maître d’ stand at Maxwell’s, had found his way to a dismal block of undiscovered TriBeCa to open Montrachet, with David Bouley in the kitchen. Montrachet had scored three stars in record time. By the time I got there, it looked like a foodie convention. Nieporent and his jacketless black-clad staff had to take the phone off the hook most of the day just to function.

Heating up as a countertrend was the craze for dormitory food—macaroni and cheese, meat loaf, mashed potatoes with lumps, chocolate pudding complete with the skin. A few serious restaurants took notice of calorie counters and diet fads. Beans were big and getting bigger.

Restaurant consultant Barbara Kafka divined red meat as ripe for a revival. She also had the vision midway through the eighties to imagine that some women might stay home with their babies and cook again. Cookbook writer and teacher Paula Wolfert thought home entertaining was poised for a comeback. “We just bought a refectory table,” she told me. “I’m tired of eating out.”

“Dessert used to proceed sex,” I wrote. “Now dessert is sex. Some say the waning of our national obsession with sex fuels this insane preoccupation with food.” (Indeed, Morrisroe had written that “the new indulgences were not one-night stands, but ‘Sinful Chocolate Cake’ and ‘Tipsy Trifle.’”) “Others seem to think the increase in anorexia is a sign the food madness is fading,” I went on. “If so, serious food lovers will be left sharing coq au vin in the dozens of little bistros that have opened this year without limousine fanfare—an alternative that’s not to be sneezed at.”

In 1985, Batons lured Richard Krause to Manhattan from Wolfgang Puck’s Asian Chinoise on Main, and suddenly there was a blizzard of cornmeal replacing bread crumbs, a sea of farm-raised catfish. Tuna seared on the edge but rare in the middle was the rage. Other Puck-prepped stars ushered us into China Grill in CBS’s Black Rock. Bronx cowboy Brendan Walsh branded Arizona 206 with his fantasy of southwestern cooking (surely more splendid than anything authentic). A dentist named Joe Santo and his family expanded their franchise a skip from Bloomingdale’s to include Sign of the Dove, Yellowfingers, and Contrapunto, where American riffs on pasta were the theme.

Struck by Jonathan Waxman’s southwestern moves at Buds on Columbus Avenue, a young cook named Bobby Flay, who’d never been west of New Jersey, reinvented southwestern cooking at Miracle Grill. The Balducci family splintered and Grace landed uptown. Animal activists convinced some tenderhearted New Yorkers to give up veal. Mob boss Paul Castellano was eighty-sixed outside Spark’s Steak House that December. (I hoped it was after dinner.) Though speedsters on wheels were poised to deliver food to our homes and offices as never before, favorite old Shanghai and Szechuan haunts were vanishing as the Hong Kongization of Chinatown made Cantonese prime. The growing community’s ambitions spilled over into Little Italy, revising the calligraphy, even on Mulberry Street.

All the while, evil forces were gathering to terrorize our uninhibited gourmandism. Not just animal activists but also Jane Brody in the
Times,
with her disease of the week, who forced us to recognize cholesterol. The salt bogeyman conspired against us, too. Salt and fat were official enemies now, especially when Craig Claiborne’s doctor took him off salt and he published
Craig Claiborne’s Gourmet Diet. Gourmet
magazine printed a recipe for a meatless Thanksgiving.

Equitable bravely chose a tacky West Side address for its splashy, art-filled new headquarters and gave it cachet by luring Maguy and Gilbert LeCoze from Paris to open an American outpost of their two-star monument to the minimalism of fish, Le Bernardin. In the rotunda bar next door, Equitable installed a 128-foot mural in sunset reds and oranges, commissioned from Sandro Chia, of Siena’s Piazza del Campo in the full throes of its annual Palio, the thundering horse race for which Tony May’s smart, Josef Hoffmannesque restaurant above was named. “You may feel tramped or menaced by Chia’s heroics. Or you may be cheered by what restaurants have come to in the Drop Dead division,” I wrote.

One might become ironic, but it was impossible to be jaded.

42

O
N
M
OUNTAIN
T
IME

I
LIVED MY LIFE IN THE EIGHTIES BETWEEN MEALS. EACH SUMMER WAS A
long parentheses focused on my writing somewhere in the Hamptons—in whatever rented cottage I could afford that year. Americans were infinitely less shocked by explicit sex when my second novel,
Doctor Love,
came out in 1981.

I went on the road to promote
Doctor Love,
leaving a trail of newspaper clippings, boosting it briefly onto the best-seller lists. Then I moved to the beach for the summer for another try at writing Jamey’s story as fiction. Twenty-two publishers had already turned it down. They didn’t seem to like either the Prince of Porn or the Junk-Food Queen. “Nobody cares about your two characters,” my agent told me. Of course I took that personally. I knew some people found it hard to see beyond Jamie Gillis the porn star. Repugnance for porn colored their response to Jamey. As a writer, I had failed to capture the charm that had captivated me, perhaps because I was too angry with him for not letting my Henry Higgins turn him into My Fair Laddie. But had I made the fictional Upper East Side older woman who falls for him shallow and uninteresting, too?

“Most of the editors are women,” my agent pointed out. “I think the book upsets them, that a woman like you could fall for this guy. It’s too threatening.” I was determined to make my protagonists more compelling. After all, if people were fascinated by Hannibal Lecter, why not us?

Waking one Sunday morning in 1981, I was not exactly hungover, but I was ruing a dismal reviewing dinner the night before. I brought myself breakfast in bed on a tray—espresso and a too-generous chunk of my favorite Russian coffee cake from Zabar’s—and the Sunday
Times.
I could not get past one headline:
CITY SCRIMPS TO FEED THE AGED.
There was a photograph of a sad-faced old woman sitting in front of a partitioned plastic tray with food and some Styrofoam cups. It seemed there were 350 homebound elderly New Yorkers who got a hot lunch delivered every weekday, but government funds were inadequate to cover weekends and holidays. If Monday happened to be a holiday, some of these shut-ins—many of whom lived alone—would go without a meal for seventy-two hours. And the woman pictured was disabled, unable to get out of her third-floor walk-up except when her meal-delivery man carried her down on clinic day. She might save a banana or a slice of bread from Friday’s lunch for Saturday. Just $340 per person would buy weekend meals for a year, a social worker was quoted as saying.

My Russian coffee cake sat like a lump in my stomach. It wasn’t right that I lived a life of such delicious excess when aging, ailing people across town were so deprived—on the Upper East Side, no less. I called James Beard, knowing he was a spokesman for Vermont maple syrup and, I’d heard, all sorts of products. He’d seen the same story.

“Let’s fill Christmas baskets for these people,” I said.

“What about weekend meals?”

“Well, we’ll take care of that, too,” I responded without really thinking. It didn’t sound like much money. “Call everyone you can think of and I will, too.” I felt no one I knew could say no to helping the hungry. I started calling food-world pals: restaurant consultant George Lang, Sugar Foods executive Donald Tober, restaurant publicists Ed and Michael Gifford, Roger Yaseen (top gun of the Chaîne des Rôtisseurs—in my articles I referred to him as the “Wall Street voluptuary”). Some of them called their friends, too. Beard enlisted restaurant consultant and cookbook writer Barbara Kafka, who called Joe Baum and went through her Rolodex. We asked everyone to give $340. By Monday morning, our friends had pledged $35,000 and a truckload of Cookin’ Good chickens.

At the NYC Department for the Aging, Commissioner Janet Sainer came on the line. “Friends in the food world have pledged thirty-five thousand dollars and some chickens,” I said. “We want to pay for weekend and holiday meals for these homebound people, but you must promise not a dime will go for office expenses.” I’d heard stories of charity funds that spent more than they raised.

She jumped right on it, gambling that we were not delusional. “No problem,” she said. “We’re a city agency with funds for administrative needs. Your money will go only for meals.”

It turned out there were actually 6,500 homebound elderly New Yorkers getting weekday meal deliveries but nothing at all on weekends and holidays. Our modest funds bought Christmas dinner for thirteen thousand elderly neighbors who would otherwise have gone without. Throughout the city—in Harlem and Chinatown, in Bay Ridge, on Staten Island, on the Upper East Side (where there were thousands of impoverished elderly), voluntary centers opened their doors to cook the meals we’d bought.

I remember how thrilled we were at what we’d managed to do over a weekend. Now restaurateurs vowed to do more. Bloomingdale’s found a Harlem community center to pick up everything left in its bakery at the end of each day. Shun Lee’s owners, Michael Tong and T. T. Wang, initiated a campaign to get Chinese restaurateurs throughout the city to deliver meals to Chinatown community centers. We realized we had to organize. Janet Sainer asked her assistant Marcia Stein to channel our energy and keep us legal. We called ourselves Citymeals-on-Wheels. I reminded Marcia I could not solicit restaurateurs and cautioned her never to tell me who said yes and who declined. We would do a fund-raiser at Club A. We would have an auction of gourmand adventures money could not buy.

In Paris, Yanou Collart rallied the greatest chefs of France, hôteliers, the famous wine and champagne houses. She created priceless gourmand adventures for our first auction at Le Périgord. Our guests, smashed on their own rare bottles of wine, couldn’t resist a market trip with Paul Bocuse, lunch with the Troisgros family, a Sunday at home with Frédy Girardet. I auctioned a manila envelope stuffed with menus and memorabilia from the late Pavillon. It went to Ed Victor, the late Henri Soulé’s lawyer, for eight hundred dollars.
New York
’s editor, Ed Kosner, let me write a column about Citymeals, and checks poured in. “But money cannot buy family,” I wrote. “For some, loneliness is starvation too.” I dreamed that every family, every Cub Scout troop, every grade-school class or PTA—even banks and restaurants, grocery stores and canasta groups—would adopt a neighborhood shut-in. I felt a shiver of delight imagining the old woman lucky enough to be adopted by the employees of Zabar’s.

My adoption fantasy was never realized, although the ranks of volunteers who visit homebound seniors keeps growing. I soon became as obsessed with raising money for Citymeals as I had been with dancing or sex or seared foie gras. It was an incredible rush when I asked for ten thousand dollars and someone said yes.

The 1980s were a strange time, aptly dubbed the “Me Decade” by
New York
. Some of us were dancing on the edge of the bonfire. Some of us were dying. The growing AIDS plague, seemingly confined to gay men and IV-drug users, had not yet terrorized me and my free-loving friends, but we were growing nervous and more careful.

I wrote my reviews. I tried to keep up with the ecstatic flights and shocking tumbles, rushing to be first in print with the newest sizzle before it fizzed out. I usually danced after dinner. Night-world gatekeepers at the Sanctuary, the Roxy, and the Palladium seemed to have my name on the list. My faithful agent sent the revised version of my novel around again. I tried calling it
Hard Candy.
Still no takers. Jamey had long ago lost faith that there would be a book. Now I was beginning to lose mine. It had taken four years to write
Blue Skies,
five years to finish
Doctor Love
. Now I had nothing to show for all the years of living, transcribing, and writing this novel.

I knew I needed to publish another book. Joyce Carol Oates had probably published a dozen novels in the time I’d spent struggling to make my characters appealing. Since I had not surrendered to the computer age yet, it would take a year to redo the Jamey book yet again on my Royal standard. And if anyone bought it, another year would pass before it would be published. Maybe the Prince of Porn and the Junk-Food Queen were hopelessly unsympathetic people, as the rejection letters said. Maybe there was nothing I could do to make a reader care. It was already 1984 and I had no contract. What could I write quickly? That was the summer of thirty-day-wonder books.
Thin Thighs in 30 Days. 30 Days to a Tighter Bottom. Thirty Days to a Flat Abdomen.
I created a proposal for
Better Sex in 30 Days.
The replies were maddening. Everyone wanted to keep a copy of the proposal, but no one wanted to publish my clever treatise.

“I don’t think it’s for us,” one editorial director wrote. “Needless to say, I’ve Xeroxed the material and am keeping it beside my bed.”

“Thanks for sending me Gael Greene’s proposal. It has changed my life,” the president of a small publishing house wrote. “Unfortunately, I’m surrounded by a group made up of feminists . . . and they won’t let me do it.”

“It is with great dismay that I must return the manuscript,” a top executive wrote, promising to collect a five-dollar readership fee from anyone at his office who asked to see the manuscript and a twenty-five-dollar fee for onetime use of a single technique from “anyone actually using any of the suggested techniques to improve their intimate interpersonal relationships.”

So much for a sure thing. Then someone pointed out to my agent that there was already a book called
Thirty Days to Better Sex.
I bought it and wept. It was so thin and serious and unimaginative compared to mine. I spent that summer fussing with the Jamey book again.

A year later, Prentice Hall, deciding its list needed some juice, bought the book. I dropped the thirty-day concept and rearranged my advice from anatomy for beginners to advanced sexual play for keeping a longtime relationship hot. I threw in a recipe for Chocolate Wickedness, designed a page of cards with sexual requests for shy people winning at strip poker to present to the loser, and outlined fantasy scenarios for those of limited imagination. Alas,
Delicious Sex,
a third of it devoted to “fork play” (foreplay at the table), was published just as news headlines were forecasting an imminent breakout of AIDS in heterosexuals. Prentice Hall didn’t want to seem irresponsible by dropping a “recipe book” for joyous sex into the marketplace.
Discretion
was the byword. The full-page ad in the Sunday
Times Book Review
looked very medical, as if it were for mail-order liver pills. It saddens me that
Delicious Sex
never got the workout of the
8-Week Cholesterol Cure.
It was much more fun.

That winter, I read the ads for Hampton rentals with fading enthusiasm. Moving to the beach every summer with the hope of falling in love and writing my novels had reached a dead end. Every summer, there were the same parties, the same cast of characters—some I adored; some were amusing—the same men, along with their new wives or their new ex-wives or their newest playmates. A friend said she would join me and share the rent wherever I went as long as it was in the United States. Where should I go? I needed a place that was not too hot in August and stirringly beautiful, with a little bit of culture, a reasonable source of single men, and disco dancing. Many friends suggested Aspen. It had mountains and men, a famous music festival, and men, and discos and men to dance with.

Once we had moved out of our first rental, a Woody Creek house with bats that swooped into our hair, my friend and I settled into an overpriced hovel on a not-yet-gentrified street, eager to get into an Aspen groove. We had decided the summer was an ideal time to get thin. Every night, we took turns broiling skinless chicken breasts and tossing a salad with just lemon or wine vinegar. Then, cranky and craving sugar, we headed for the bars, where there were, in fact, a wealth of great-looking gray wolves, really fit from mountain life, single guys our age or not that much older. Susan, my roommate, was great at bar talk. I was not. I tried to pretend I was a reporter writing a story on life in Aspen, but it didn’t work. I was at a loss on a bar stool. I would wander home alone. Once, I found the oven still on and a chicken breast turned to charcoal.

One day, the two of us were in town, trying not to think about lunch, when Susan spotted a man she knew from college seated at a table on the deck of a restaurant called the Weinerstube. The two of them chatted. I talked to his friend, a tall, tan, dramatic-looking woman named Darlene. “Have you been hiking yet?” she asked.

Hiking. Oh yes, that was why everyone was clunking around in those high-top boots with tank treads. “Not yet,” I admitted.

Darlene took me hiking up Hunter Creek trail. Susan begged off on the grounds of having bad feet. Up was easy enough even for me, a city creature who had worked out with a trainer every day for a decade. Down was scary, with rubble that moved when you stepped on it. Still, I was thrilled I could do it. I felt like an athlete.

“I have a friend who says he knows you from New York,” Darlene told me the next day. “You went to a party at his loft once with your husband.”