Insatiable (40 page)

“Do you think you could go back to sleep for a while?” I asked. My niece, her face streaked with tears, looked at me as if I were out of my mind. I was not crying. That surprised me, too. But I was grateful death had come quickly. I thought of all the pain, her terror, the terrible indignities. She had been peaceful, pale but pink-cheeked, as she lay there the night before. A few days earlier, she had frightened her caretaker by saying she saw people at the window.

“Don’t you see those three people?” my mother had asked. “They’re waiting for us. They’re waiting to take us away.” I felt comforted thinking my mother believed she was just going away and would see Margie again. I thought about family reunions in a heaven I don’t believe in, wondering how old everyone would be. And I fell asleep. Two hours later, I woke and we called 911.

At noon, men from the funeral home wheeled her body away through the hall outside my room. I saw them pass. There was a woman sitting at my portable typewriter, finishing the restaurant review that was due by fax at
New York
that very minute. I am not sure I know that woman.

49

K
ISS
K
ISS
B
EFORE
D
INNER

I
T’S BREAD AND CIRCUSES AS THE ENTIRE EASTERN SEABOARD PILES INTO
Keith McNally’s faux French Balthazar Brasserie and bakery on the frumpy heel of Spring Street.” That was the lead-in for my review that May in 1997. Keith McNally was claiming his crown, or his crown of thorns (as he might have seen it in his dark psyche), as the restaurateur for the nineties. “Any success to me is postponed failure,” he once remarked with his characteristic doomsday glower. “Once you know this, you can begin to enjoy things,” Keith told
New York
’s Beth Landman in a profile that captured the somber brother back from Paris and London a year earlier, on the eve of launching Pravda, with its ersatz-aged Eastern European speakeasy look. “Keith, the dour one who looks as if he didn’t sleep last night. Next to Brian’s hail fellow eager-to-please, he seems painfully shy, perpetually embarrassed,” the profile went on.

Home from self-exile and filmmaking abroad, Keith had gauged Manhattan nightlife and conceived Pravda, with a soft golden glow, hammer and sickle patterns embedded into the tile floor, and languid Slavic waitresses, who delivered caviar and infused vodkas in laboratory tubes. Who could have guessed that was just what the nomadic night owls needed? Even after charting decades of the town’s flighty migrations, particularly the chic squalls descending wherever the McNally brothers beckoned, I was amazed to see how quickly Pravda—not that easy to spot under a furniture store on Lafayette—ignited.

Keith, like Brian, had a way of settling off the beaten path and turning it into easy street. Balthazar on the lonely, untraveled edge of SoHo. Pastis on desolate Gansevoort, long before clubs and couturier chic started chasing cows out of the Meatpacking District. Lucky Strike had opened in 1989 with an affectation of indifference: No name beckoned outside. Just a yellow nicotine aura in the evening drear of SoHo and a small decal on the Grand Street door. A feeding frenzy quickly evolved. It was noisy, smoky, young—striplings with lots of hair, myopia behind dark-rimmed specs, thrift-shop duds. The “look like you fell off a truck” style was hot. “Anyone over 30 looks old,” I wrote. “Is the name a hypnotic? Most everyone is smoking. They haven’t been alive long enough to feel mortal.”

Bag-lady rags and washwoman topknots went with the calculated seediness—walls that look yellowed by a century of exhalation, pressed tin, the menu lettered in gold on a moldering mirror, tables of patched-together wine-crate ends, hints of the applied wrecking-yard chic we would go nuts about later.

“Eli [Zabar] was here earlier,” McNally told our table. “He’s taught me about baking bread. But ours is not as crusty or as brown as it should be. The ovens aren’t hot enough.”

By the time we got to Balthazar, the crusty country bread looked positively Poilâne. Artful water stains splotched the walls for the look of aging by a million smoldering Gauloise. And Keith’s golden glow of clever lighting that works like a cosmetic had been perfected.

“It’s hard to believe Keith McNally didn’t dig up a corner of Montparnasse and ship it directly to Spring Street, bringing a jolt of life to a moribund block and swiftly extending SoHo eastward. Voilà,” I marveled. Balthazar was an incurable Francophile’s nostalgia: the scarred mirrors (tilted for optimum tittle-tattling), the scuffed tile floor, the vintage wooden bar with its pewter top and custom-carved caryatids, the crusty dark rounds of bread incised with a giant
B,
the fruity scent of yeast in the adjacent bakery with its romantic painted ceiling from Burgundy. Lobsters, giant shrimp, and oysters spilled over the raw bar.

“Aggggh,” cried Le Bernardin’s Maguy LeCoze with a characteristic wiggle of excitement. “I am in France.” Balthazar’s one-week-old kitchen struggled to keep up with the frenzy of table turns, but the food, with a duo of Daniel veterans—Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson bossing the range—was already better than what you could eat in most Paris brasseries. The crush was barbaric. And Keith, clearing a table himself, looked rumpled and bleary-eyed.

I recorded the players: art-world and Seventh Avenue swashbucklers, media grandees, and the restless, ragtag, night-smart kibitzers. The air fairly crackled with insecurities. Rotating in and out of the power seats, certain trendetti seemed to be in virtual residence. Bob Colacello and Ross Bleckner suffered worshipful table hoppers while waiting for Bianca. Susan Sontag was but a bolster away. Ian Schrager and his wife, Rita, with Peter Morton and Elizabeth Salzman, ignored the stares. Restaurateurs’ pet Steven Greenberg (you could be a pet, too, if you drank Petrus and paid in cash). Anna Wintour. Amy Spindler. Gotham Bar and Grill’s Alfred Portale. Jean-Georges Vongerichten with Kerry Simon, the chef he had signed to take Vong global. Dean and DeLuca at separate tables. Calvin and Kelly in opposite corners, too. Calvin stopped by to greet her. The room drew a breath. What theater.

I admit all this
Sturm
and slapstick meant nothing beside famine and disease and the world’s perpetual mayhem, but it certainly worked like caffeine for me. How could I complain that my work meant missing theater and dinner parties when so often I got to watch such compelling soap opera? Gossip was a ubiquitous preoccupation, the narcotic of the nineties. I often saw it live the night before.

Keith finished out the century conjuring Pastis, a blue-collar hangout with artfully rusted tin ceilings and greasy finger smudges on the walls, that same golden nimbus, wine by the carafe poured into small tumblers, homey crocks of onion soup sealed with Gruyère, and fabulous frites standing up in a paper-lined tin scoop. The place looked like someone had dusted off a slatternly old bar and hash house in the grunge of the undeveloped meatpacking zone. “Long live Les Halles on Little West 12th Street,” I wrote. “As if Manolo Blahnik stilettos and pony skin totes had not already corrupted the warehouse iconography of this remote district.” Again, as at Lucky Strike, there was a snootily elastic “no reservation” policy. All animals were equal, except that some animals were more equal than others. That’s why you would wait, toes curling with anger, while Calvin was seated. As much as I needed to be unrecognized to do my best reconnaissance, I couldn’t help but be thrilled to be rushed by the seething supplicants to a table, as if I were a royal or a rap star.

By the time the meat market became riddled with luxury—four-hundred-dollar panties and nine-hundred-dollar Jimmy Choo stilettos, Keith could be found opening Schiller’s Liquor Bar, distinctly not French, with his usual instant antique stage set and a wine list divided into Cheap, Decent, and Good. It straddled a corner in the next remote microquadrant of the Lower East Side poised for the mad lemming rush.

Perhaps being a worrier has its rewards. Most of the restaurants Keith McNally has had a hand in are still around: Odeon, Cafe Luxembourg, the esoteric Pravda, and, yes, even Lucky Strike. I’ve not been there myself for twenty years, nor have I heard anyone mention it. But I looked in a recent Zagat, shocked and rather pleased to find it. Is there a crowd smoking on the sidewalk now? Even the lady from Kalamazoo could probably score a table.

50

E
ATING
H
UMBLE
P
IE

T
RADING DOWN WAS THE MANTRA OF THE NINETIES. DOWNTOWN—FROM
the Flatiron teens and the Village on down—with its cheaper rents, a lingering aura of clubs come and gone, and reveries of Wooster Street migrations, was the place to be. A one-block street no one had ever heard of was all Alison Becker could afford when she wrapped the room in blue velvet and opened Alison on Dominick. There, Tom Valenti buffed his rustic touch with lamb shank on a garlicky pile of white beans, favas, and Swiss chard. There was no stinting in Terrance Brennan’s sensuous complexity in the twenty-one-dollar dinner at Prix Fixe. “The kinder and gentler feedery has dimmed the glitz, shaved the tab, unstarched the hauteur,” I wrote in February 1990. “Welcome to the morning after.”

Underappreciated at Rakel, Thomas Keller had already taken his froths and the mushroom cappuccino acquired in a stint abroad at Alain Chapel and gone west. I partly blame myself. Perhaps my basic rave had been pocked with too many whining cavils to lure gourmands to remote Varick Street. The greater the chefs were, the more I wanted to rescue them from their flubs and overreaches. I never doubted that I knew when they strayed. Hadn’t I developed my taste buds at the tables of the masters? I knew the unctuous silk of a great sweetbread, the buttery fragility of
pâté brisée,
and how gossamer the ultimate puff pastry could be. I didn’t give them an inch of slack. Well, maybe I was a bit full of myself.

It was a time for master chefs to exploit Asian flavors. Gray Kunz’s Asian palate and Girardet lineage had won fans to Adrienne at the Peninsula Hotel, but he couldn’t resist moving to a one-million-dollar makeover at the St. Regis, where his four-star fusion at Lespinasse would distract us from the banal faux French decor. Alsatian-born and classically trained Jean-Georges was already in love with tamarind, galangal (a gingerlike root), and the citric combavas leaf from his days in Bangkok, Singapore, and Hong Kong when he landed in New York at Lafayette. He’d left to stage something really grand on his own, but given recession woes, a modest bistro like JoJo, with its telephone booth-size kitchen, seemed a smart first move. Jean-Georges did the desserts himself in a small closet behind a love seat.

Television discovered chefs. Publishers bankrolled chef-driven cookbooks. Did anyone actually cook from them? The Internet was a minefield of recipes. Cod was the big fish. Garlic, soothed into cream, crisped into chips, blitzed into
aioli,
was the food ingredient of the year,
Food Arts
reported.

“When times are mean and you can’t pay your mortgage, a good meal is a luxury you can afford,” I wrote in May 1991. The Hudson River Club celebrated local products and helped us find the Battery. I sent readers to Serendipity for the Tuesday blue plate special—a hulking chunk of caramelized meat loaf with buttery mashed potatoes and a big red-white-and-blue sundae topped with an American flag.

Tiny greens were getting tinier. Sprouts sprouted everywhere. Nothing but sashimi grade tuna would do. Scallops were likely to be diver-harvested or even alive and still in the shell. Boutique farmers cropped up to supply demanding chefs. Desserts were more important, more beautiful, more complex, more architectural. At some point, panna cotta became the new tiramisú.

With Tom Collichio at the stove, plush and tranquil Mondrian could show the most pampered French chauvinist what American chefs were up to. Cherubs, menacing bats in a Miss Havisham setting by architect David Rockwell, and fruity chillers like the Harvey Cave Hanger and the Volcanic Bat Bite made Bar Bat standing room only (filled with nobody we knew or wanted to know). Chiam introduced a cultural mishmash with a sorbet intermezzo between hacked chicken and Chinese roast duck. Wolfgang Puck’s pan-Asian Chinois on Main inspired China Grill in what had been the Ground Floor (focus of my first ever restaurant review) at the CBS building.

Planet Hollywood’s Fifty-seventh Street opening had traffic paralyzed. Even Esther Williams was there. Hard Rock Cafe veteran Robert Earl walked me to the dress Judy wore in
The Wizard of Oz,
now housed in a glass vitrine. “We paid two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for that,” he confided. The stars arrived, preceded not by trumpets but by frantic bruisers hyperventilating into cellular telephones—the smaller the star, the bigger the entourage.

Bobby Flay, a rough-cut, restless redheaded teenager who just sort of fell into the business, left Miracle Grill to expand his peppery persuasion at Mesa Grill on a strip of newly gentrified Fifth Avenue.

“I don’t want it to be too Thai,” Jean-Georges said, launching Vong, an East-West collision in a David Rockwell Thai fantasy that drew the town’s whole toot and scramble in its first few minutes. “I just want people to leave with a mouth full of spices and pleasure.”

A posse of piranhas from the press vied with Dr. Kissinger, Barbara Walters, Woody and Soon-Yi, Wolfgang Puck and Barbara Lazaroff, and socialite Nan Kempner for tables at the long-delayed Daniel. Anna Murdoch didn’t mind a two o’clock lunch at one of the better tables. Yes, already there were better tables. Limoges custom-design china had misspelled it Bulud on the bottom of the plate. I looked. “It would be less expensive to change his name than to redo the plates,” I wrote.

On a scale of how many new ideas per square foot, Alan Stillman’s new Park Avenue Cafe with chef David Burke’s countless whimsies won the solid gold whisk with mizumi-leaf clusters. Especially cute was the laminated ticket that came with the swordfish chop he had his fishmonger sculpt from a giant collarbone. It was numbered like the pressed duck at the Tour d’Argent.

Built as a safe house for the chronically chic (jet-set division), Baraonda seemed to inspire exhibitionism. I’d never have guessed the crowds would still be trooping in ten years later, still dancing on the tables. But then,
baraonda
means “crazy fun.” Banana Café with Matthew Kenny was so hot, it couldn’t possibly cool down, but, of course, it did. The Chinatown we felt we owned twenty years earlier had become inscrutable, a miniature Hong Kong, with tanks of live fish everywhere, bazaars of affordable fakery, and neon shopping malls with escalators rising to twelve-hundred-seat restaurants, where my guests and I were the only non-Chinese eating dim sum for lunch.

Many empires were seeded. Many grew. The Bromberg brothers found a mojo at Blue Ribbon. Pino Luongo’s empire surged and ebbed (remember Mad 61 at Barneys?). For some mouths, Mortimer’s was the center of the earth. Or Le Cirque. Or the Grill at the Four Seasons. Limousines with darkened windows ventured to a remote TriBeCa for the beatified food of David Bouley. Surely the woman knitting between courses had to be a regular, since the rest of us went crazy during the painfully long in-between.

By 1994, the economy was sizzling again. People were spending money. Christian Delouvrier in the kitchen of the fiercely stylized Les Célébrités had whipped himself into a creative frenzy. “The sweet smell of excess,” I called it. Steak wars were back. Jet-streaking chefs out peddling their books and whisking away on the telly were becoming the new rock stars. Bobby Flay went to Spain for two weeks of research and opened Bolo, where his own deeply flavored take on Spanish food struck me as better than the real thing. Doug Rodriguez came north from Miami to thrill us with his pan-Am games at Patria.

Asian fusion got more playful, as in hot fudge dim sum at JUdson Grill and Gary Robins’s chili-detonated mango sundae with coconut ice cream, macadamia praline, tamarind, and lime at Aja. Early in his Gotham charge, Alfred Portale watched his seafood salad just grow and grow, like Pinocchio’s nose. In his briefcase, Portale carried a tape measure, “the same way some people carry a pocketknife.” All over town, chefs started to build towers, too. Pastry chef Richard Leach unleashed became the Michael Graves of sugar with his neomoderne columns, undulating chocolate walls, and pecan brittle pediments.

“In tuna belly circles, the landfall in Manhattan of Nobu Matsuhisa was hailed as if it were the Second Coming, if not the First. The wisdom of the chef’s wit, honed on a path from Japan to Alaska, to Peru and Argentina, had lured the crème de la crème and the skim milk of Hollywood to his cramped temple of vinyl on La Cienaga,” I wrote. Now, in league with Robert De Niro and Drew Nieporent, Nobu got a cobalt blue horizon behind gauze and winter twigs, a copper-leaf ceiling, real birches with fake branches, tall sushi bar stools with chopstick feet, and a curving wall of black river stones—David Rockwell’s most lyrical design yet.

Danny Meyer was setting a new style of service at Gramercy Tavern. “Redefining luxury dining in New York” was how Ruth Reichl put it in the Sunday
Times
in December 1994. Wayne Nish was finding his niche at the luxurious March. La Goulue was packed wall to wall. Steven Hanson’s Park Avenue Cafe drew the leggy noctambulists.

Almost twenty years after it had first opened, Windows on the World reopened with a $25 million redo, having recovered from the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. With typical Joe Baum exuberance, the new bar was called the Greatest Bar in the World. Theme restaurants had their day: Along with Hard Rock there was the Harley-Davidson Café, Motown, and the Official All-Star Café. Drag queen waiters (even in a ruffled pinafore, the server’s Adam’s apple was a dead giveaway) lured the curious to Lucky Cheng’s. No one was all that shocked at the appeal of the S&M café La Nouvelle Justine in 1997, where clients had a choice of having their boots licked by a slave or being humiliated by a whip-flicking dominatrix.

A wunderkind named Rocco DiSpirito at Union Pacific (we’d discovered him at Dava) had gourmands buzzing about his brilliant Taylor Bay scallops in the shell with sea urchin and mustard oil. Less talented chefs struggled to make news. Foie gras with lemongrass was a desperate cry. Blue Water Grill, Circo, Harry Cirpriani, Butterfield 81, Naples, the Crab House, Cascabel, Granville, the Monkey Bar, the Cub Room, Arizona 206, Redeye Grill, the Screening Room, Angelo & Maxie’s, Quilty’s, Ping’s, Churrascaria Plataforma: “Why are all those guys running around with skewers?” Eli Zabar’s Across the Street, Drover’s Tap Room, Clementine, Fred’s Beauty, the Park. Dozens arrived every month in Manhattan alone. Some closed before I got there to say good-bye. Others survived the heat waves that cooled and found an audience in the neighborhood. A few just never cooled down.

Malcolm Forbes was often his own restaurant critic, publishing his picks and pans in
Forbes.
He was an early Citymeals supporter, too. At lunch one day in the
Forbes
formal dining room, Malcolm invited me to join him, two of his sons, and a small covey of motorcycle aficionados on his private jet, the
Capitalist Tool,
for a Forbes Friendship Tour of Spain. Malcolm’s genius for mixing marketing and his expensive hobbies was legendary. His hot-air balloon team would meet us in Spain with a giant balloon in the shape of Christopher Columbus’s ship, the
Santa Maria.
With the Barcelona Olympics not far off,
New York
’s editor, Ed Kosner, agreed that a guide to eating in Spain would be timely.

The sleek gold-and-green
Tool
took off from Teterboro, a gift motorcycle for the King of Spain stashed in the hold, stewards smoothly refilling the luncheon buffet, and Malcolm bending down to pick fuzz balls from the freshly laid carpet. Assured that all his guests were eating too much, he went off to nap in his king-size bed.

Once we landed in Spain, we learned the routine. At 6:00
AM
that first morning in Seville, the current lifted the
Santa Maria
up, up, up. Steven and I jumped into the chasers’ van as it tried to follow the ship’s path on the ground to help when it descended. Early-morning Sevillians seemed delighted by the clipper ship floating overhead. Suddenly, the balloon slowed, hovering over Seville’s revered bullring.

“The city refused us permission to land there,” someone said. Never mind. The balloon was clearly descending. We raced to the ring. The gate was locked. All of us ran in different directions, looking for someone with the key. A passerby directed me to the apartment of the live-in concierge. I rang the bell, and knocked.

“I am Mrs. Malcolm Forbes,” I said in my approximation of Spanish. “I must be inside the bullring when my husband lands.” Madame led the way. We ran after, the chasers leaping down the stairs to the floor of the ring, where the balloon was already collapsing. It had been a very tight fit in the tiny jewel of a stadium. Steven was the only photographer there. His photos would appear that evening and the next morning in the Spanish papers and later in
Forbes.
As Malcolm strode from the ring like a conquerer, an official charged in, snapped his feet together, and presented him with a certificate: Seville’s official permission to land in the bullring.

That night, Forbes entertained the king and Seville society at dinner. All the men were in black tie with dazzling formal shirts except for Malcolm, King Juan Carlos, and Steven—they wore business shirts with bow ties. Noblesse oblige.