Steal the Menu

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illustration credit col1.1
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“There’s too much bay leaf in this soup,” said Craig Claiborne, after sloshing the tomato-pea
purée mongole
around in his mouth. He and I and Charlotte Curtis, his boss, were having lunch in the cafeteria of the
New York Times
in the spring of 1971. Craig was retiring as food editor of the
Times
after fourteen years in the job. He was a self-made legend, trained as a chef and a reporter, who had transformed the newspaper’s food department from a sleepy recipe mill into a broad and lively forum for glamorous profiles of chefs, reports on the city’s ethnic cooks and reviews of New York restaurants. He thought he could privatize his celebrity and his omnivorous yet rigorous approach to food with a personal newsletter about restaurants and cooking. Charlotte, in a huge gamble, had hired me as his successor.

Curtis was another
Times
legend. A midwestern socialite with hair pulled back tight, she was a newsroom lifer. As women’s news editor, in charge of a big and increasingly important area, she presided over the Family/Style page, where Craig’s articles appeared. In her earlier
Times
career, as a society reporter, Charlotte had
made readers smile with her tart flair for skewering vapid brides in her coverage of big-time weddings.

In an account of a shower for Julie Nixon prior to her marriage to David Eisenhower, Charlotte wrote, “And by afternoon’s end, [Richard Nixon’s younger daughter] was knee-deep in such essentials as sachets made to look like roses, scented candles, bookends and a silver engraving of her wedding invitation.” The article skipped on insouciantly to a dinner-dance at the Waldorf Towers, where President Nixon joined Julie’s young pals during a break from appointing cabinet secretaries. In four impeccably factual words about the presidential drop-in, Charlotte summarized the man himself: “He did not dance.”

Craig, a gentlemanly native of Sunflower, Mississippi, had parlayed a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and a diploma from a Swiss hotel school into the
Times
food job. His shrewd instincts for capitalizing on the new craze for food had transformed a sleepy, creaky woman’s-page service feature into a glamorous star turn. It had also made him rich.

Back in 1960, when Craig had been food editor for only three years and
Times
management hadn’t yet realized they’d spawned a
monstre sacré
in their food department, Craig requested permission to use the
Times
name and its sacrosanct Times logo for a cookbook to be entitled
The New York Times Cookbook
. According to legend, barely concealing a smirk, the paper’s managing editor, Turner Catledge, waved the young man on—to delirious success.

Harper & Row had never stopped selling the book.

How much did Craig owe to the
Times
connection? I inclined to the cynical, if unprovable, view that without that logo and the official-sounding title, the book would not have gone anywhere merely on the strength of the relatively unknown author’s name.
^*

By 1971, however, Craig had made a name for himself, at least among
Times
readers. He believed he could sail on happily without the
Times
and without sweating deadlines for four features every week. He could, he believed, continue his reign as New York’s food czar in independent splendor. I took him to think that some lesser being would man the food-beat treadmill at the paper, reinforcing by his jejune mediocrity the myth of the matchless Craig.

And I was going to be that man.

In Craig’s world, I was indeed a nobody. I’d never taken a cooking class, published a restaurant review or written a recipe. My credentials as a cultural journalist at
Newsweek
, where I was currently working, were honorable; not too long before I’d been on the short list to become the
Times
’ lead book critic. But in the kitchen, I was a cipher. However, the ego of a child prodigy had kept me from seeing that I had no business at this table, in this cafeteria, with Craig Claiborne and Charlotte Curtis.

When Craig commented on the bay leaf in the
purée mongole
, I sneered inwardly. Couldn’t he see how ridiculous it was to play the gourmet with an old-fashioned soup made in a corporate cafeteria kitchen? This was the place the
New Yorker
’s resident gastronome and press critic, A. J. Liebling, had mocked in a jab he once took at newspaper editors:

Did Craig think he’d give me a bad moment with his bay leaf gambit? Actually, I now think he was just surrendering to the reflex of commenting expertly about the food in front of him, just as he had in print for seven hundred Fridays. In any case, I knew that my palate couldn’t have detected a heavy hand with bay leaf in that soup. And from now on I’d be expected to uncover serious chefs’ omissions and commissions, to unmask them with confidence for an audience of demanding
Times
readers. If I had truly understood the meaning of this moment, it would have been that the prospect of all the meals I would consume for the
Times
—and the need to judge them—ought to have made me cut and run.

Instead, I asked Craig if he had any advice for me as a restaurant critic.

“Steal the menu,” he said. “If you ask for it, they might give it to you or they might not. But if they don’t, they’ll be watching you and counting them when they take them away after you’ve ordered. So just put it in your lap, fold it up and slip it in your pocket. You might look like you’re playing with yourself under there, but no waiter is going to bother you about that.”

FORTY TUMULTUOUS YEARS
in the world of food have passed since that lunch at the
Times
. The other day, I thought about the changes that had revolutionized and mostly improved what we can eat now at a bistro in Manhattan across from Lincoln Center called Bar Boulud.