Insatiable (7 page)

We left for the long drive home. I felt flushed and manic. My heart was racing. I was high on soufflé and champagne in Baccarat crystal and my glimpse into this rarefied world. Only later did I learn that Craig had spent the next few hours in the emergency room. My profile ran in
Look
that August, just weeks before Clay Felker summoned me.

10

T
HE
I
NSATIABLE
C
RITIC

T
HE GROUND FLOOR IS ABOVE ALL APPROPRIATELY GRAND,” I WROTE IN A
piece called “Paley’s Preserve,” my first review in the infant
New York,
November 11, 1968. “It is slick, rich, calculated, spare, intimidating. It is Contemporary Wasp. You would hate to break open a roll for fear it would scatter unprogrammed crumbs. It is understatedly snob. There is no Bronx phone directory. Manhattan, of course. Brooklyn, yes. Even Queens. But no Bronx. You sense this slight to the Bronx is no accident. Nothing here is accident. Armies of interior designers have measured, computed, engineered. Even the sugar bowl is part of the statement. Granite plays against rosewood. . . . Shiny black matchbooks wear stark portraits by Irving Penn of nuts and clams. The quarter-round molding that borders the powder room carpet is gold . . . but not just plain gold . . . Florentine gold.

“The Ground Floor is a perfect room to end an affair in. The tables are far enough apart to announce the break in a firm voice, and the ambiance is stern enough to discourage sloppy emotionalism. Not many Beautiful People get this far west before curtain time. There is no one o’clock flutter of Dr. Laszlo’s ‘girls.’
*
Even Babe Paley (the boss’s goddess wife) is less than prudently faithful. But Leonard Lyons
*
moves through the grill, antennae clicking off the celebrities du jour—actor Donald Pleasance, a famous author drinking breakfast, Barbara Walters, Johnny Carson, Jock Whitney. And good grief! Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman, tieless, unjacketed, grizzled grey locks to his shoulder, Ben Franklin specs . . . the oldest hippie in the world.”

As a coda, I ended my dissection of the Ground Floor with a nod to CBS boss Paley’s more folksy canteen, a regal let-them-eat-franks gesture, the snack bar in Paley Park on Fifty-third just east of Fifth, “an unequivocal triumph since they turned the waterfall on. . . . Here you can start the affair you will end at the Ground Floor,” I wrote, “over franks and Coke, root beer or Fresca served in lettuce green paper cups. Ambiance: urban stunted nature with an assist from neighboring incinerators and traffic fumes. But a joy nevertheless.”

That was my debut, complete with the addictive ellipses, the verbal “ahem” copy editors decided to tolerate. The various attempts by CBS and William Paley to warm up the calculated cool at the Ground Floor belatedly might not have seemed all that important in the context of war and assassination and social upheaval spotlighted up front in
New York
. But the magazine had already connected with committed media watchers and powermongers, raising political antennae all the way to the White House. Now they would notice that
New York
had a restaurant critic. Some food-world professionals were dubious, even bitchy, asking where Clay had dug me up. But he seemed pleased. It was his idea to dub the column “The Insatiable Critic.” I wasn’t sure that I liked the rubric at first. Insatiable? I was not insatiable. Was he suggesting I might be a nymphomaniac? I knew I was sufficiently satiable for polite company. Finally, I decided the title was ambiguous and provocative without being specifically damning. And Don just laughed.

Plum Rum Conserve

I
put up this conserve as a Christmas gift for friends.

1 1/2 cups white raisins

1 1/4 cups currants

2/3 cup rum (preferably dark rum)

3 medium seedless oranges

6 cups sugar

3 lbs. cherry or prune plums

Steep raisins and currants in rum for several hours, turning occasionally.

Peel oranges, removing the white membrane, and dice pulp.

Boil orange rind until tender. Remove all the white part from the rind and then julienne the zest into one-inch slivers. Sprinkle with 1/2 cup of the sugar.

Pit and dice the cherries or plums. Combine with rum-steeped fruit, orange pulp, and the rest of the sugar. Cover this mixture and the orange rind, and let both sit overnight in the refrigerator.

Combine the fruit mixture and the orange rind the next day in a heavy saucepan and bring to a boil. Cook 30 minutes or until thickened, stirring frequently.

Pour into 6-oz. jars that have been sterilized by submerging in boiling water. Stir to release air bubbles. If you have no patience for paraffin, store in the fridge and tell your lucky friends to refrigerate your gift at once.

Makes 10 to 12 jars.

11

P
LANTING
T
HE
S
EEDS OF
S
ENSUALITY

I
WAS A DECADE AHEAD OF AMERICA’S SENSUALITY EXPLOSION IN THE
fifties and leaped into the foodie vanguard in the sixties. I didn’t know much, but I already knew Vienne was not Vienna, and there were six flavors of mustard from Fauchon aging in my fridge, when everyone else stocked feeble ballpark yellow. I would not have predicted that in a few years great armies of New Yorkers would be trotting off to France carrying
New York,
determined to order the dishes I loved in Lyon and Mougins, or that the young and affluent New Yorker would soon be as obsessed with cooking and great dining as I. Nor did I foresee that by the eighties, half of them would want to own restaurants and everyone would be trying to outdo Jane Fonda at high-impact aerobics. I am not a futurist. I almost never recognize a trend until it starts annoying me—like confectioner’s sugar on the cuff of my best silk shirt from the pastry chef’s compulsive sprinkling. (I am especially vexed when the totally clueless powder the paper doily
under
the ice-cream-sundae dish.)

In just a few years, with New Yorkers in the vanguard, Americans would move on from tuna melts and well-done prime rib to quiche lorraine,
tarte tatin,
and sole Véronique. It would take only a few years more to advance from croque monsieur to mousse of pigeon,
sole ballotine en brioche,
and
noisette de chevreuil grand veneur
with, of course, quixotic counterculture brown rice deviations and tofu breaks. And then quickly in the sybaritic seventies, the nouvelle cuisine would unleash duck with raspberry vinegar, an ocean of beurre blanc, haricots verts lashed together with scallion ribbon. And out in California, an Austrian import, Wolfgang Puck, would lead us to new frontiers with heart-shaped smoked salmon-crème fraîche pizza. And Alice Waters would discover the rapture of a fresh baby string bean.

Yes, the ease of travel—new cheap transatlantic flights—took us to France, and Julia Child translated French food for dummies here. But the mouth revolution could never have happened quite so quickly or with such passionate gusto except for sex.

The sexual revolution had begun, untethering Americans from prim constraints. Even those not necessarily inspired to indulge in free-range sexual high jinks could not help becoming more aware of their senses and their bodies and the quality, if not the quantity, of their orgasms, thanks to film, fashion, disco dancing, and the feminine mystique.

Russ Meyer’s abundantly breasted beauties found an audience at the drive-in. Sexual candor from Ken Russell and Roman Polanski, and in films like
The Damned
and
The Night Porter,
was available at the nearest cinema art house. Adventurers in porno chic would file two by two into Manhattan’s Majestic Theater to see
Deep Throat
. As boring as it was with its endless in and out, certainly it offered new angles of masterly fellatio for budding sensualists in 1972.
Behind the Green Door, Inside Marilyn Chambers, The Devil in Miss Jones, The Opening of Misty Beethoven
explored the sexuality of women, with varying degrees of male chauvinism or moral rectitude, but they did seem to confirm that women were sexual, too.

The Feminine Mystique
and the women’s movement were not just about jobs and equal pay. They encouraged the cry for equal orgasms. Make that better and more orgasms. Maybe I would split the check with my date, or grab the door and open it myself. That meant I could sit on top and find my G-spot even if he couldn’t. The best-selling
Sensuous Woman
with her aerated whipped cream and the endlessly quoted
Total Woman
greeting her guy naked at the door and swathed in plastic wrap might not have been universal role models, but we knew they were out there. You might decide, Yes, I will try whipped cream, or think, No, I’ll have my foreplay pure.

Fashion peeled away layers in the sixties. Girdles went, along with little white gloves. Bras went, too. Men’s hair got longer and skirts got short. Hot pants, rear cleavage-baring minis, Rudi Gernreich’s breast-baring monokini, sheer, see-through, clinging jersey, skintight tank tops. Dancing, the flaunting of movement, and the anything-goes nightlife of the seventies. All just another kick in the ass to gentility.

Sniffing, tasting, touching, skin, fingertips—the Me Generation was absorbed in itself. First the twist and later disco with its throbbing heartbeat and transporting rush added to the body worship and self-awareness. Marijuana for those who inhaled intensified the senses. LSD took the senses to another dimension. When Grace Slick sang the refrain to “White Rabbit,” “Feed your head,” didn’t it follow that rum raisin ice cream or chocolate truffles could be my drugs of choice?

Francesco Scavullo’s photograph of the bare-breasted Contessa Cristina Paolozzi in
Harper’s Bazaar
became infamous. And
Vogue
dared Helmut Newton’s sadomasochistic, Sapphic, Peeping Tom intimations, “without which the story of fashion couldn’t be told,” the
New York Times
observed recently. Tina and Michael Chow in a bondage pose. Lisa Taylor with her legs spread wide, eyeing a topless model in American
Vogue
, “epoch-defining,” as the
Times
put it. Offended readers canceled their subscriptions, but, too late, they’d seen it, and for the rest of us, a frisson of sexual danger lingered in the expanding awareness of what sex could be. The naked but airbrushed girl next door in
Playboy
and the vixen exposing her prettily manicured bush and pink-petal pussy in
Penthouse
provided shock therapy, even a challenge.

With a constant media barrage and swinging sex clubs just down the street, even prudes and late bloomers couldn’t help but get in touch with their senses (or, at the least, be appalled by the idea of it). As I often observed when interviewers questioned the metaphors of ecstasy I used in my reviews: “The same sense that registers pleasure at the table measures the delights in bed: the eye, the nose, the mouth, the skin, the ear that records a whimper of joy or a crunch of a superior pomme frite.” Budding sybarites were getting my drift. A little high-risk adventure in food did not demand a major rebellion. Moving from smoked salmon to gravlax to tuna sushi did not demand leaping off an erotic cliff.

But in 1968, the sexual and gender upheaval was far ahead of what was about to evolve at the table. There were no American star chefs in 1968. The chef of New York’s standout American restaurant, the Four Seasons, was Swiss. Nobody knew the names of the black chefs who turned out the refined striped bass in its saintly broth and the celebrated chicken potpie at the Coach House on Waverly Place. Parsley was the fresh herb of winter. There were no free-range chickens, no such botanical as a baby vegetable (except small peas in cans). Vinegars did not come in thirty-three flavors. Olive oil didn’t need to be chaste. No one cared, because most of us gourmands and everyone French cooked in butter. No one had ever heard of tiramisú or zinfandel. Salsa had not yet triumphed. There were no Thai restaurants, no Vietnamese. Mexico was underdeveloped, pretty much the exclusive turf of El Parador and Casa Moneo, an early emporium on Fourteenth Street for south-of-the-border ingredients. In the great restaurants—and they were usually French—fish was striped bass, salmon, or sole (real sole from Dover or flounder blithely billed as sole), and possibly trout. Dessert was not crème brûlée, it was crème caramel, chocolate mousse, and, my favorite, vanilla ice cream with candied chestnuts scooped from the jar.

There was sherbet everywhere, but the only sorbet was chef André Soltner’s powerful cassis sorbet at Lutèce, where a sculpture of a schooner in fried bread sailed in on the tray that delivered your
tourte régence
($4.95). And Lutèce’s irascible creator, André Surmain, in a bluff sartorial mix of tattersall, houndstooth, and Hush Puppies, could rip up a check and eject some hapless peasant in a blink.

At the Four Seasons, the staff still changed the upholstery and the foliage and the waiter’s cummerbunds to herald the season—green in spring, pink in summer. But Joseph Baum, the greatest creative restaurant genius of the century, would soon be rudely dismissed by Restaurant Associates (even tossed out of his Park Avenue apartment, a company perk) because his genius wasn’t registering on the bottom line. Baum’s most dazzlingly original works—the Forum of the Twelve Caesars (centurion-helmet ice buckets, Romulus and Remus espresso spoons), La Fonda del Sol (splendid folk-art collection and design by Alexander Girard), the Tower Suite (where each table was tended by a butler, maid, and footman), and Zum Zum (upscale counter with dauntingly authentic sausages)—wowed the critics and set new standards in design and graphics, but most did not compute in a Chock full o’Nuts world and soon disappeared.

Soulé was gone, having dropped dead of a heart attack in the ladies’ room of La Côte Basque during a fatal conniption on the phone over union demands. I imagined him carefree and cardiologist-free in heaven, savoring tripe stew. His heirs, two generations of expatriate Frenchmen and Soulé’s own mistress, Madame Henriette at La Côte Basque, carried on the tradition of arrogance, ambience, and aspic learned at the Academie de Pavillon in restaurants and haughty bistros with red velour banquettes across town. Everyone had assumed Madame Henriette, the silent cashier of Le Pavillon, was Madame Soulé. But, in fact, she was the mistress. Far away in France, an actual Madame Soulé existed to inherit all and Madame Henriette bought La Côte Basque from the estate, quickly becoming grander than grand.

Of course I was intimidated.

Craig Claiborne had a degree from the Hotel School of Lausanne, his tuition financed by the GI bill. All I had was my hunger and a few cooking lessons from Dione Lucas. “So you are the little housewife who is writing about restaurants now for
New York
magazine,” I was greeted by Roy Andres de Groot, then
Esquire
’s gifted chronicler of fine dining. We’d met in the greenroom before a radio interview we were sharing in those early months of my reviewing. It was my first radio show and I was so stung by the “little housewife” barb that I let him roll right over me. De Groot was blind, a master of vivid, visual description, and the object of speculation because of the young girls he hired to escort him around and whisper pertinent information in his ear. “I see you’re wearing hot pants today,” he greeted me at another encounter. (I won’t apologize for the hot pants. It was one of those rare moments since miniskirts when fashion smiled at me and my aerobicized thighs. I wasn’t going to waste a fleeting second of it.)

A modicum of menu French and the satisfaction of knowing that, no matter the abuse or insult, I would have the last word were the only weapons I carried into the daunting exploration of La Caravelle, La Grenouille, and the Soulé-less Côte Basque. There, the prix fixe lunch was $7.95 and the lacquered blond ladies iconized by
Women’s Wear Daily
were miffed to be charged fifty cents extra for coffee.

In the beginning, I focused on the sociology and psychology of Manhattan table games. With
WWD
as my crib sheet, I could actually recognize a lot of the players in situ and I knew who begat whom, what manucurist had married well, and where Daddy Onassis and Jackie had supped. I hoped my reviews would amuse readers who didn’t give a fig about great food or couldn’t afford to dine upscale. As I plumbed the mores of the native upper crust, eating crow and humble pie myself, I offered fellow naïfs advice to help them brave the frostier latitudes. I was initially respectful of my betters—most of these European chefs had been cooking since they were twelve or fourteen, an age when I was content to pig out on macaroni and cheese. I hesitated to criticize anyone’s food for a while, but then one day, my taste buds curled in a cringe. Thank you, Dione, Craig, Julia, Alain Chapel, and the babes in the kitchen at La Pyramide. My head was full of taste memories. I knew what was amiss when it was amiss. Would I dare tell André Soltner his frozen praline soufflé was grainy and a bit weary? It was and I did. From then on, I aimed my fork and let them have it.