Insatiable (8 page)

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B
ITE
: A N
EW
Y
ORK
R
ESTAURANT
S
TRATEGY

F
OR HALF A CENTURY THE COLONY WAS AN APOGEE OF GLAMOUR,” I
could write and the fact checkers could confirm. That was history. “It was an international sanctuary for disadvantaged royals and fabulous pretenders, for the newly rich, and the lately rich, and for nibbling little ladies in flowered hats who parked their corgis and Pekes in the ladies’ room. There, Clara knew which boxer had to have chocolate ice cream and which pup must have nothing but chicken gismonda.” By the time I got to the Colony, it was “like eating lunch at Forest Lawn except that here most of the flowers are plastic,” I reported in a 1971 review called “Colony Waxworks.”

True, the young and dashing Sirio Maccioni could be seen bowing and kissing the air an inch above the knuckles of Mrs. Astor and Babe Paley, and keeping Sinatra and Onassis from slugging it out over the prime table each claimed to own at the Colony. But I was shocked to see the apogee of glamour scarred by a captain picking his nose, a waiter nibbling toast, the owner cleaning between his teeth with a matchbook. So
Last Year at Marienbad.
As for the one-dollar charge on the check for “B&B et Céleris,” I fumed that there was no celery in sight, which averaged out to fifteen cents per bread stick or melba round. Sirio would never quite forgive me for what he feels hastened the Colony’s last gasp.

Clay Felker saw service as
New York
’s strongest mission. So, soon I was writing “How to Melt the Glacial Sommelier.” Order a half bottle of Château d’Yquem with dessert. Be justifiably indignant if the cellar only has it in the full bottle. In “How Not to Be Humiliated in Snob Restaurants,” I urged the genetically insecure to: 1. Write a best-seller. 2. Get named corespondent in a fancy divorce case. 3. Change your first name to Prince. 4. Let the reservationist think you are taking Happy Rockefeller to lunch. 5. Greet the maître d’ by name (so that he is thrown off balance struggling to remember yours). 6. Demand a table in “that little back room where you put the tourists.” (Since you’re going to get it anyway.)

The response to
New York
in those early years was staggering. We had only a few hundred thousand readers, but they were the most outspoken and influential readers in town. My piece in
Ladies’ Home Journal
on “How the World’s Great Beauties Stay Beautiful” (good genes and plastic surgery) brought me a huge fee, but no one I knew actually read it. Everyone in media was reading
New York
.

Inspired by Tom Wolfe’s prose bravura in “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” which shook up
Esquire
readers, I began writing in my own voice, too, with all the pauses, the verbal acrobatics, and the tics and parentheses. It wasn’t Wolfe, nor an attempt to imitate Tom, but it would never have happened without him. “I love your writing in
New York,
” said Helen Gurley Brown, for whom I’d written dozens of articles. “Why don’t you write that way for
Cosmo
?” The answer was that no magazine would have let me, till I found my voice in
New York
.

Dinner was a masochist’s dream and my nightmare at La Grenouille. Frankly, the service at the table nearest the kitchen in what
Women’s Wear
called “the Catsup Room” was sorely lacking. Cramped and crowded, virtually without aisles, thus “no room to sauce or flame or carve.” The rolling cart could not roll that far. For more than a decade, I would get dumped at that same table, as if the unapologetic owner, Charles Masson, would rather keep me in my place than butter me up in hopes of a better review. “You don’t have to be a full-blown masochist to love New York, but it helps,” I wrote. The delphic
Women’s Wear
had written: “With a sense of the superb, one can deliberately seek out the darkest corner in the room and make others seek you out . . . . one can turn the Catsup Room from a liability into an asset.” I settled on my asset, but all pretense of thriving in back-room exile faded when my companion decided to wrestle the arm of the waiter rushing little doilyed dishes of adorable cookies to pets in the front room. “You better bring this table cookies, too,” she cried. The waiter pretended not to hear. It was clearly forbidden: a cookie status test to let you know your pitiful rank among the chosen.

Being tall and blond like the iconic wild-woman model of the day, Verushka—with a blond fall, I could almost mimic the hair—I decided to try my best Verushka imitation. I strode boldly through La Caravelle’s narrow status alley, heading toward a table in Outer Mongolia as if it didn’t matter. Of course it mattered. Waiters rarely wandered that far into the icy climes. Wave a finger for help and the stone-faced proprietor, Robert Meyzen, smartly trained at Le Pavillon, would look right through you. “I don’t care if you call three weeks ahead,” Meyzen snapped. “When I can have [society stalwarts] Mrs. Lytle Hull and Mrs. Burden, why should I take Mrs. Nobody from Kalamazoo?”

I rated bottled waters blind and found New York water the tastiest. With leads from crime reporters, I put together a “Mafia Guide to Dining Out.” “Little Augie Pisano was shot to death with Gian Marino’s recipe for clam sauce in his pocket. Grazie a Dio. Little Augie departed still garlicky and glowing from his last supper.” In “Brooklyn, Come Hungry,” I rated haunts that belonged to my husband’s childhood: Peter Luger, Gage & Tollner’s, Lundy’s, Bonaparte, Monte’s: “Eating in Brooklyn restoreth the soul. You
can
go home again, no matter how homogenized your diction, no matter how alienated your spirit. Lundy’s chowder . . . fried clams at Nathan’s. . . . Shatzkin’s many splendored knishes. Nostalgia anesthetizes all critical judgment. What counts most is LOTS. Twenty years ago Portnoy’s mother held a knife at his throat to get him to eat. Tonight, back in Brooklyn for dinner, she can’t get him to stop.”

I documented “The Graying of ‘21.’” “If there is a greening of America, it has yet to send one tiny verdant tendril through the asphalt of West 52nd Street at the ‘21’ Club, the establishment speakeasy that Jack and Charlie built, stolid in middle age, a shade past its prime, but still a magnet of power. The rites of belonging survive,” I reported. “A friend of ‘21’ is greeted by name . . . kissed (if the gender is appropriate), serenaded on birthdays by the remnants of what was once the glorious Chuck Wagon Glee Club. If he is an ailing General Sarnoff,
*
a menu will be improvised from his diet chart and dispatched to the hospital twice daily. If he is Governor Rockefeller, he will be alerted when the first oyster crabs of the season arrive.

“For the stranger, however ‘21’ can be a dreary disappointment, a bore . . . and expensive. The demanding palate is sadly neglected. . . . Still, thanks to the arid recession of summer 1970, the tables are spottily populated and it is not impossible to claim one unless you are smashed, or suspiciously hirsute or too blatantly not-our-kind-of-people. Guardian-of-the-Gate Chuck Anderson may be stern if you arrive with your brother-in-law the Ox in his white socks and buffalo sandals.

“Upstairs is the dining room favored by Onassis, (Air Force ace) Eddie Rickenbacker and the unshakeably secure. But we are marked for Siberia, a tiny alcove in the rear, just a bit south of the Arctic. I begin to get a sense of belonging,” but, alas, “to some untouchable caste.

“Here the salmon ringletted ex-flappers don’t even shed their ennsy mink shrugs to eat. Four stolid businessmen are sipping milk with their boiled beef. And at the next table a fresh-faced drum majorette is asking her elderly companion, ‘What is anarchy anyway?’

“‘Gael, we’re in the wrong room,’ cries my status-savvy escort, used to dining with Ava Gardner or Michael Caine in tow.

“‘Well, what is Kahlúa?’ Miss Apple Cobbler of 1967 is asking.

“‘Oh God, Gael, did you hear that . . . what are we doing here?’”

Many bruised New Yorkers relished taking their vengeance through me for neglect and indifference and the ghostly cookies that failed to find their tables in the town’s haughtier canteens. I got letters cheering me on; letters begging to join me at lunch; letters from regulars at the houses of snub, offering to take me back to the places that had iced me, where, with proper credentials, I would see how wonderful they could be. Of course I accepted. I needed to witness a ray of charm and grace, to give my tales of woe even greater weight.

La Caravelle’s steely Robert Meyzen couldn’t find a fair-enough hors d’oeuvre on the rolling cart for me the day I lunched with lock and safe mogul John Diebold, a regular at the corner banquette. So the dark-browed Meyzen brought them all, treading on tippytoes, his mouth stretched in a simpering smile. Who would have thought he could actually crack that granite face?

I knew the couturier Jacques Tiffeau only as seen through
Women’s Wear
’s “Eye,” but I phoned him anyway, and he was game to let me share his prime banquette at La Grenouille. “Enter Jacques,” I wrote. “Seconds before he reaches the table, the waiter stations his aperitif, martini on the rocks in a Baccarat balloon goblet. The mini baguettes are swept away and toasted ovals appear. He orders Petrus, and a mollet (soft-boiled egg) in the middle of his cheese souffle. The patron, Charles Masson, is summoned to hear the specifications.

“‘You look so well, Jacques,’ says a frozen-in-silicone blonde two banquettes away.

“‘Who is that?’ I ask.

“‘Hmmm . . . what’s her name, a rich lady . . . I don’t give a shit who they are. Hello. Hello. Hello.’ He speeds an ax-murderer’s smile across the room to the industry’s dowager Queen of Flack, Eleanor Lambert. ‘Oh you are in luck. Here comes what’s her name . . . that rich old lady . . . Woodward, Woolworth. That shaky one. Oh, today you have the cream of the cream. You see that old movie star . . . now she does the Compoz commercials. And well, look who is sitting with John Fairchild. Monsieur Cardin and Madame Alphand.
*
Don’t you think she looks like a manicurist? And that one over there . . . she must be some whore in the garment business. I never remember the names. I don’t give a shit who is here. When I finish, I put on my shadows’—he pats his dark aviator goggles—‘and I run. I come here like it is my little pension.’ He drops his fork. ‘The souffle is too cooked. Where is my mollet?’

“I gulp. I have just eaten it.”

Publicist Mimi Strong gets me invited to join Millie Considine (mate to Hearst columnist Bob) at the George Jean Nathan table to the left of the bar at “21.” Millie arrives and is greeted with a white carnation. Credentials discovered, Mimi and I are also immediately carnationed, too. “That’s why the babes all come here,” says Millie, nodding toward the men three deep at the bar drinking lunch. “This is the room that counts,” says Millie. “Back there they put the semidreck . . . not the dreck-on-dreck, but people from nowhere who’ve earned their tables.”

She insists I ask for chipped beef in a baked potato. “It’s the dish to have.” Apparently, the aging moguls at “21” like to revisit the deprivation of their boarding schools.

“Once I asked a captain, ‘How can you charge five dollars for that?’ says Millie. ‘It’s thirty cents’ worth of chipped beef, ten cents for a baked potato, and ten cents worth of cream sauce. Half a buck at the most.’

“‘That’s true,’ he said, ‘but you get to eat it at “Twenty-one.”’”

As those early
New York
covers show, Clay Felker was fascinated with the city’s power grid. His star writers charted and analyzed the giants of finance, government, media, crime, real estate, the arts. He sicced his stable of masterly reporters on sociological trends that grew into books, movies, catchwords that would forever define the period.
THE ME DECADE. THE POWER BROKERS. BLACK POWER CHIC. PASSAGES.
Writer Julie Baumgold was immortalized in four poses, sitting on the throne in one of Milton Glaser’s dazzling covers for her article that made chopped liver of the Jewish Princess. Clay reveled in the tumult a splashy cover and a pungent piece created where his power pals lunched. Back in the office later, he was quick with compliments. “Everyone is talking about your piece,” he would say. “They love it.”

It was Clay’s idea that I do a feature called “How to Beat the Menu Rap.” Could the reader on a budget be happy eating soup for lunch and little else at the town’s snootiest and most expensive restaurants? I did my best, ordering just the $3.75 cheese soufflé with a salad at Quo Vadis and the $3.25 omelette at “21,” but I found that the bread and butter charges and the humiliation tended to dilute any small triumph.

What was important to me and obviously to Clay was that the magazine’s business staff was not permitted to communicate with me. I never suspected that Longchamps, an important restaurant advertiser, had twice canceled their contract after damning reviews I’d written. The ad staff had apparently spent two years wooing them back after the first hostile retreat, only to have my carping notice of Longchamp’s Gauguin Lounge atop the Huntington Hartford Museum appear that very week. I found out years later when a copy of a speech Clay had delivered to the Advertising Council landed on my desk.