The United States of Arugula (33 page)

REGARDLESS OF WHO
was the nuttier food evangelist, the fact was that DeLuca and Zabar had both hit on the same big idea: the reeducation of the American palate. Having chosen their shop locations strategically, in areas where they hoped to benefit from heavy foot traffic, they found their expectations surpassed: both stores became destinations in themselves.

In SoHo, the artist-driven model of urban renewal had unfolded according to plan: the artists attracted an in-the-know crowd of bourgeois hipsters; these hipsters attracted moneyed uptown folk who wanted to buy art and reporters who wanted a story; and the newspaper and magazine reports attracted tourists and suburbanite day-trippers sniffing for authentic urban adventure. By 1975, SoHo was, as
The New York Times
announced in a discomfiting attempt at period vernacular, “a neighborhood really on the make. It’s hip, with it, Madison Avenue’s replacement as the in place for a Saturday stroll in new Earth Shoes.”

If you were the sort of upper-middlebrow dabbler who followed the lead of the
Times
Weekend section, your typical SoHo itinerary entailed a gallery hop—from, say, Andre Emmerich to Ileana Sonnabend to OK Harris—followed by a stop at Poster Originals to buy a $15 reproduction of a Rauschenberg or Lichtenstein for the den, followed by a late lunch at a local “artist’s hang” like Food, followed by a visit to the Cheese Store for a little something stinky to take back to Teaneck. It was a form of cultural nourishment, the SoHo dabble, a visit to the cutting edge, a glimpse of the sleek, arty future the eighties promised.

Joel Dean was by this point “bored to death” at Simon and Schuster, he recalled, “and I decided I ought to open a pot-and-pan store in SoHo, ’cause there really wasn’t anything like that around.” But when the large space across from DeLuca’s Cheese Store, at 121 Prince, became available, Dean and DeLuca decided to go into business together and create a new-paradigm food store that would surpass Balducci’s, Zabar’s, E.A.T., and every other nosheteria New York had ever known. For all of Dean’s Midwestern equanimity—“All my aunts and uncles are 300-pounders for the most part, basically farmers in Michigan and Ohio,” he said in an interview before his death in 2004—he matched DeLuca in the fierceness of his food ideals and was not easily pleased. He and Ceglic, together since the 1950s,
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had logged plenty of time in the great specialty food shops of Europe: Fauchon in Paris, Dallmayr in Munich, Fortnum & Mason and the enormous food hall of Harrods in London. While he, Ceglic, and DeLuca were modeling their new store, to a degree, on these places—and, to a lesser extent, on the Harrodsimitative fancy-foods departments of Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s uptown—Dean found even these models wanting. “A lot of what Fauchon sold was mediocre,” he said. “You’d say to yourself, ‘Why is everything in aspic?’ and it was in aspic because that was the only way you could display something for twelve days without its going rotten. And why were all the Fortnum & Mason jams so insipid? Because they just weren’t paying attention.”

One of the new store’s central missions was to revive a notion that had been lost in America’s rush toward assimilation: that, in Dean’s words, “New York was a port, and had always been a port, where everything was available.” There would be imported pots and pans hanging from ceiling-mounted racks, and cheeses liberated from their refrigerated cases so that customers could appreciate them in all their odoriferous glory, and open sacks of coffee near the entrance as a sort of aromatic greeting. Dean handled the business end and the kitchenwares, DeLuca took care of the food and the marketing, and Ceglic created the store’s SoHo-contextual, industrial-chic design, everything in gray and white.
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“And we all tasted everything and became totally engrossed in our tastings,” Dean said. “Because the whole point of our store was editing. We didn’t take whole lines of food, we only took the products we thought were the best, like the Little Scarlet strawberry preserves from Tiptree.”

The store opened in 1977, calling itself Dean & DeLuca. “Giorgio asked, ‘Why is “Dean” first?’” Dean said. “And basically, I told him I didn’t want it to sound like an Italian store, which at that point, everyone expected it to be. And ‘Dean & DeLuca,’ just the name itself, sounded so right.” (Ceglic, though a partner in Dean & DeLuca, graciously opted out of naming privileges, knowing that his surname—pronounced che-GLICK—would baffle customers and mess up the alliteration.)

Just as DeLuca had entrusted his cultural betterment to Dean and Ceglic, so did he and his partners expect their customers to look to them for guidance. “The thing that we established fast was that you could trust us,” Dean said. “What we ate was what we sold, what we sold was what we ate. The store looked like our loft. Basically, it was establishing a lifestyle that involved, in this case, food.”

The weekend crowd embraced the Dean & DeLuca lifestyle so readily that it was sometimes more than the store’s founders could handle. Their original counterman, the expert cheesemonger Steven Jenkins—who claims he was the first to apply the word “artisanal” to cheese—recalls a busy
Saturday in the early years when a few staffers failed to show up, forcing a furious DeLuca to join Jenkins behind the counter. “It was total chaos, and Giorgio was slicing some preservative-free bacon, and he lopped off the tip of his thumb,” Jenkins says. “He started cursing and rushed off to the clinic on Spring Street. Once he was gone, I decided to merchandise the piece of thumb, which still had fingernail on it. I put it on a little piece of marble in the display case with some rosemary and thyme and put up a sign that said ‘Gaetano Crudo’”—
crudo
meaning “raw” in Italian, Gaetano being DeLuca’s middle name. Fortunately, no one asked to taste the product, though Jenkins says a few people inquired as to “what the hell it was.”

“
WHAT DEAN & DELUCA DID
was give the food market a clean artistry that made it very now, very tied into the moment when SoHo was being noticed,” says Florence Fabricant, the
New York Times
food-beat scoopmeister, who wrote about the store nearly from its inception. “Jack Ceglic was responsible for a lot of that, the industrial look. And Giorgio and Joel were really fanatic about ferreting out product. It all tied together. And the other important thing they tapped into was the need for prepared foods.”

Indeed, the time had at last arrived when it was socially and economically acceptable for young professionals—and even harried moms in the suburbs—to take home freshly prepared entrées, along with salads and sides purchased by the pound. In an earlier era, prepared foods were problematic: they seemed too fancy and expensive (as Jean Vergnes found out during his brief experiment with Stop & Shop in the sixties), and, for women, they seemed a cop-out, a betrayal of their domestic duties. But with more women in the professional workforce and more people amenable to the general idea of “gourmet” eating, especially if it had the imprimatur of a prestigious shop like Dean & DeLuca or E.A.T., prepared foods started to take off—Rob Kaufelt, who grew up in the supermarket business and now runs Murray’s, the beloved New York cheese store, calls the rise of prepared foods “the biggest change in the grocery-store business over the last thirty years.”

Dean & DeLuca’s secret weapon in this regard was Felipe Rojas-Lombardi, who helped launch the store with the namesake owners and Ceglic. Peruvian by birth, Rojas-Lombardi had come to Dean & DeLuca by way of the James Beard Cooking School, where he’d risen up through the ranks to become the master’s right-hand man in the kitchen.
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Rojas-Lombardi had also worked as
New York
magazine’s in-house chef, their go-to man for testing recipes. This pedigree proved helpful not only in eliciting constant plugs for the store in Beard’s syndicated column and in
New York
but in the fact that Rojas-Lombardi was a skilled, inventive cook: he roasted chickens tandoori-style, grilled salmon on cedar planks, and went out on a limb with such oddball entrées as elk steak and his notorious rabbit with forty cloves of garlic. “Felipe did some of the first pasta salads that people had ever seen,” says Ceglic. “He did everything with the products we sold, and people cottoned to it.”

“The idea was that if you didn’t know what a sun-dried tomato was, well, here it was, in a pasta salad,” said Dean.

The third point in New York’s prepared-foods triangle, with Dean & DeLuca downtown and E.A.T. serving the Upper East Side, was the Silver Palate, a tiny shop on the Upper West Side, on what was then a drab stretch of Columbus Avenue. The Silver Palate’s genesis lay in a mid-seventies catering company called The Other Woman, a single-person operation run by Sheila Lukins, a young mother of two who cooked out of her apartment on Central Park West. As her company’s name and slogan (“So discreet, so delicious, and I deliver”) suggested, Lukins’s clientele was mostly male: professional
men who wanted their dinner parties catered but not in an inordinately fussy, Edith Whartonian fashion.

Lukins was a self-taught cook, more or less—she had taken a course at the London Cordon Bleu while she and her husband lived there, but “it was the dilettante course,” she says. Her greatest inspiration was not Child and company’s
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
but the more practical, less labor-intensive recipes of Craig Claiborne’s
New York Times
cookbooks and his Sunday pieces for the
Times Magazine.
Lukins’s cooking was eclectic but somehow all of a piece—aspirational comfort food: moussaka, lasagna, rata-touille, stuffed grape leaves, and the quintessential Lukins dish, Chicken Marbella, the quartered bird baked after a long soak in a Mediterranean-style marinade of oil, vinegar, garlic, prunes, olives, and capers.

While running The Other Woman Catering Company, Lukins became acquainted with Julee Rosso, a young professional who worked in the advertising division of Burlington Mills, the textile company. Rosso had attended many events catered by Lukins, and was so impressed that one day, she hit up Lukins with a proposal. “She said, ‘So many
women
are working late now. What if we opened up a shop for them?’” Lukins remembers. The two went into business as the Silver Palate in the summer of 1977, with Lukins as the cook—carting food over from her apartment several times a day to the then kitchenless store—and Rosso as the marketer and front-woman.
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“It was a big deal for two women to go into business together in 1977,” says Lukins, who thinks this angle helped the shop get press coverage almost as fawning and widespread as Dean & DeLuca’s. Zabar was the odd man out where press was concerned. E.A.T. was flourishing, and it offered an even more extensive and dazzling line of prepared foods than the Silver Palate, but the proprietor’s truculence precluded him from ever being a press favorite, a circumstance that only got worse in the eighties, when he let loose on the writer Julie Baumgold, the wife of
New York’s
then editor Edward Kosner,
for trying to return some item she’d purchased. (“I told her to go fuck herself, ‘cause there was nothing wrong with it,” Zabar says.)

“Eli’s a great merchandiser, and his shop was always spectacular, but I don’t think he liked us at all,” says Lukins. “I think he thought we copied him—and we didn’t. I mean, we were one tiny corner of his shop! But we got the publicity and the good reviews.” Within a year of its opening, the Silver Palate was selling its own product line at Saks Fifth Avenue, including such items as winter fruit compote, Damson plums in brandy, and blueberry vinegar.

Four years later,
The Silver Palate Cookbook
was published by Workman and became
the
cookbook of the eighties, not just in Manhattan but throughout the United States. More disciplined and earthbound than
The Moosewood Cookbook
, yet less intimidating and grown-up than the two volumes of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
, Lukins and Rosso’s book was perfect for have-it-all, multitasking baby boomers who wanted to cook well but not all the time. Its introduction recalled the state of affairs that led the two ladies to their decision to open their shop: a new era in which women found themselves juggling “school schedules, business appointments, political activities, art projects, sculpting classes, movie going, exercising, theater, chamber music concerts, tennis, squash, weekends in the country or at the beach, friends, family, fund raisers, books to read, [and] shopping,” and yet were still compelled “to prepare creative, well-balanced meals and the occasional dinner party at home.” The Silver Palate lifestyle offered two solutions: you could use Lukins and Rosso’s recipes, or buy their products and prepared foods.

The very emergence of the word “lifestyle” in the late seventies signaled a progression in America’s food culture. Stylish living wasn’t just for wealthy boulevardiers anymore, but for anyone who considered himself upwardly mobile—and eating, cooking, and food-shopping were about as lifestylish as things got. In 1976, when
The New York Times
expanded from two to four sections a day, introducing a new daily business section and a rotating fourth section devoted to soft news and service journalism, the first two “fourth sections” to appear were Weekend (on Fridays) and the Living
section (on Wednesdays), both of which had a heavy food component. The Weekend section carried the restaurant-review column, which ran longer and held greater weight than it had when Claiborne introduced the column in the early sixties. Whereas Claiborne’s early columns were often roundups, devoting just a blurb or a short paragraph to each restaurant, the new version evaluated no more than two restaurants at a time, with much more intimate, first-person critiques by the
Times’
new reviewer, Mimi Sheraton.

The Living section was even more gastronomically inclined, with shopping news and product evaluations from Florence Fabricant; a wine column by Frank Prial (a metro-desk reporter who happened to be an oenophile); health and nutrition news from Jane Brody; recipes, essays, and travelogues from Claiborne; and a new column by Pierre Franey, bylined at last, called “60-Minute Gourmet.” Arthur Gelb, who was put in charge of the new culture sections by the paper’s executive editor, Abe Rosenthal, had wanted to appeal to time-strapped upwardly mobile home cooks by running a column called “30-Minute Gourmet”; Gelb and his wife, Barbara, had been impressed by Franey’s ability to whip up quick, simple, delicious meals in the Hamptons—flounder in a butter sauce, say, or pork chops with capers—after a long day of fishing.