by Unknown
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A L A N R I C H M A N
She gazed at the nectar—let’s assume a wine with no apparent residual sugar qualifies as nectar. Her eyes appeared unfocused, apparently in pleasure. She was looking at this beverage the way a woman is supposed to look at the man treating her to dinner. Still, I was pleased. She said, “The wine reminds me of the gowns of Catherine the Great—
gold with traces of pink.” I rocked backward, staggered by an arche-typal example of earth-twentieth-century winespeak. This woman was truly a gifted wine amateur.
She leaned toward me, and Sharon Stone leaning forward, drawing you into whatever drama is being played out in her mind, is a positive dining experience. “Please, please, more meals, if only we have wine like this,” she gasped. “I have sex stories. I’ll tell you everyone in Hollywood I slept with. Please, more. I’ll be a gourmet tramp.” Alas, I took her at her word.
I told her I wished to be discreet, not prurient. I only wanted to learn the motivation for her affairs, not the intimate details of them. I had been cautious throughout the first hour of our meal, saying nothing about her choices of roles (bad) or men (worse). I posed this question: Why would a woman like her, the most fascinating movie star I’d dined with since cooking for Claudette Colbert in her hotel suite some years ago (nice name-drop, wouldn’t you agree?), consort with the kind of men any sensible woman would shoot on sight?
“What do you mean?” she asked, leaning away, the Roussanne-induced twinkling of vulnerability gone.
“Dweezil Zappa,” I replied, equally cold.
She crossed her arms. “Dweezil,” she said, “was my friend for many years. And then he made enormous pleas to date me, and then I went out with him three times after knowing him for four years. And then he went on television and said he was dating me. I was disappointed by his lack of decorum and integrity, and therefore he is not in my life.”
She stared.
Was I so wrong to have asked? Doesn’t everybody want to know why F O R K I T O V E R
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Sharon Stone is dating Dweezil Zappa? Doesn’t everybody want to know why anybody dates Dweezil Zappa?
“I’d like to point something out to you,” she said.
I waited. It was that or flee.
“You dated the wrong people, too. We both fucked up.” I nodded slightly, conceding the point. Everyone makes mistakes. I attempted a rebuttal. I explained to her that were we to stand side by side, most people would select her as the individual more likely to meet a congenial partner.
“Where do I go to meet people?” she said. “The 7-Eleven? The mall?
A club? I can’t go to those places to meet people. I can’t meet people at work. That’s considered bad taste. And everybody who meets me has a preconceived notion of me. So if it’s not a friend, I start off on the wrong tangent.”
As the courses progressed, we seemed to recover from our little con-tretemps. At least that’s what I thought. I reacted sincerely and sympa-thetically when she described her life as “little, a small life.” I managed to elicit a chuckle when she asked me to explain the physics of a shoot-ing star and I replied, “It’s about friction. You understand friction, don’t you?”
She ate every bite of every dish except the wild-mushroom ravioli, which incorporated calves’ brain as a binder. Like all women, she has an infallible knack for detecting the presence of invisible ingredients capable of triggering culinary apprehensions. She said to me, “Have you ever noticed that at every long dinner, the fifth course, the one before the meat and potatoes, is the icky-poo-poo course.” I could only agree.
She was polite. I was mannerly. The meal ended well. More important, I had come to understand her palate, which is about all a man can hope to understand about a woman. When she departed, handed back over to that bulky, decidedly undroopy gentleman, I felt there was every likelihood that we would dine together again.
I didn’t know when or where it would be, but I prepared for the eventuality by purchasing all the wines she admired. An old friend in the 3 1 8
A L A N R I C H M A N
New York retail wine business coerced two bottles of Beaucastel Rousanne out of the distributor—that amounts to about 3 percent of the entire allocation of this wine to the New York market. Because she had taken pleasure in the 1991 Diamond Creek Cabernet Sauvignon that accompanied our rack of lamb, I obtained a magnum of the 1986 vintage from a shop in Missouri. I also had them throw in a few vintages of Chapoutier’s Ermitage de l’Oree in case she wanted to taste a white Rhône even lusher than the Beaucastel.
These wines, which I have come to call the Sharon Stone Collection, remain untouched. I never saw her again.
I had thought, naïvely, that the Dweezil Zappa query had not been a fatal error. We had moved to a higher conversational plane, talking physics and all that. I had forgotten that women rarely remember what has been eaten but always recall what has been said.
I never spoke to her person again. Her person and the editor-in-chief of GQ magazine, who is not my person, spoke on the telephone. This is his re-creation of that conversation:
“How did it go?” he asked.
Long silence.
“He was asking a lot of questions,” her person finally relied.
“About what?” he asked.
“Dweezil Zappa.”
Shortly afterward, the editor-in-chief called me into his office to get my side of the story. I admitted using the Z word.
To this day, I do not know where I went so wrong. Sure, I asked about Zappa, but he’s hardly the bottom of the barrel where her relationships are concerned. In another interview a few years ago, she happily talked about dating Dwight Yoakam. I find it almost impossible to differenti-ate between those two emaciated musicians, although I suppose Zappa’s unemployable and Yoakam’s unendurable. It’s not as if I had exposed the single blemish in an otherwise model dating life.
I did, in fact, hear from her again. She sent me a charming little note thanking me for “the food, the wine and your odd perspective on my naive dating patterns.”
F O R K I T O V E R
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It’s a shame about women. They always say that dinner isn’t about food, it’s about conversation. I gave her conversation. They claim it isn’t about wine, it’s about relationships. I discussed little but relationships.
My meal with Sharon Stone proved what I’ve always known. No matter how hard a man tries, meals with women don’t work out.
GQ, february 1999
Acknowledgments
Like Costco, I do business in bulk. I have people to thank going back to Mrs. Decker, my fifth-grade teacher at Aronimink Elementary School.
That includes the kids from class 7J2 at Upper Darby Junior High School, even if they were cool enough to get into Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and I was not. When you assemble a collection of stories that covers as wide a topic as these, a lot of people come to mind.
I appreciate the sacrifice of everybody who ever went out to eat with me when I was reviewing a restaurant. I know it wasn’t fun. I am indebted to every chef who ever cooked food I wrote about, because I know they didn’t get into their line of work thinking I was going to walk into their place of business and criticize them. I owe much to photog-raphers, designers, and the guys who work the linotype machines. (Even if these stories don’t go back that far, I do.) Few writers are willing to acknowledge a terrible truth: writing requires editing. Marty Beiser babied most of the stories in this book when he was managing editor of GQ. What I cherish about Marty, in addition to our yearly dinners at Fabio Picchi’s Cibrèo in Florence, is that he always did just enough. Before him, my editor was Eliot Kaplan, and working with them were three copy chiefs who personally toiled over my words. They are Maura Fritz, Nancy Negovetich, and the particularly long-suffering Laura Vitale. I owe her so many dinners I don’t know when I’ll finish paying off.
Everything trickles down, and I am indebted to the editors in chief
who have valued my work, especially Dana Cowin, Barbara Fairchild, Jim Nelson, and Tom Wallace. I add to the list one CEO, Dorothy Cann Hamilton. In quite another category are the editors who have put up 3 2 2
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
with me mostly out of friendship: Pam (The Genius) Kaufman, Mary Ellen Ward, and the incredibly patient Michael Hainey, who is my confidant, therapist, and provider. He owes me so many meals I don’t know when he’ll finish paying off.
Time now to drop a few names. I have been enriched by associations with Oprah Winfrey, Robert M. Parker Jr., Daniel Boulud, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. In this category I also put Eric Ripert, who telephones regularly to tell me I should have a more positive attitude, like a Frenchman.
Providing comfort after calls like his were two Condé Nast assistants who behaved more like my mother: Katherine Kane and Court-ney Kemp. I also leaned on Paul Forrester and Tim Sultan, responsible for thousands of corrections to my copy, and to the legendary Baronness Sheri De Borchgrave, researcher extraordinaire. No woman has ever been better at telling a man he’s wrong.
Always present in my life is Julian Niccolini of the Four Seasons, although in truth I’ve always preferred his partners, Alex von Bidder and Trideep Bose. Though Maguy Le Coze insists I loved her late brother, Gilbert, more than her, I adore the woman who taught me to appreciate sea urchins. Is it possible to thank entire restaurants? The staffs of the Four Seasons and Le Bernardin have always been astoundingly kind. To that category I add Montrachet, plus its wine director, Daniel Johnnes, who will hunt me down if I don’t single him out.
Knowing restaurateurs Drew Nieporent, Costas Spiliadis, Tony May, Gennaro Picone, Tommaso Verdillo, Danny Meyer, Sirio Macchione, Alan Stillman, and the entire DeBenedittis family of Corona have done wonders for my life and my work. In special categories all their own are John Cuneo, for immortalizing me in cartoons, and Nina Griscom, once my television partner. When people remind me of our Food Network show, they always ask about her.
I have friends everywhere, which comes from being a wandering journalist. Glen and Marshall Simpkins in Boston bring peace of mind, while Alison Arnett has been both a colleague in criticism and an unfail-A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
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ing pal. I’ll always be grateful to Bob Phelps, who taught me how to talk about writing, a great gift. In Philly, I’ve been close to Ray Didinger and Maria Gallagher forever, and to Dan and Barbara Rottenberg longer.
My Canadian connections are Mike Boone in Montreal, Bob and Nancy Dunn out west, living proof that you don’t have to see people to remain close. In Los Angeles, Merril Shindler remains my restaurant guru, while Ron and Flori Wormser astonish me with their unselfishness. As a non-fiction writer I try to avoid novelists, but I’ve made an exception for the bard of Cleveland, Michael Jaffe.
Never failing me, no matter how often I forget to call, are Alexis Bespaloff and Cecelia Lewis. Unsurpassed in understanding are Gerri Hirshey and Mark Zwonitzer. Terribly missed is Steve DePietro; I was planning to hang out with him in my old age. Writers are supposed to avoid enduring relationships with public-relations people, but I’ve failed now and then, most profoundly with Margaret Stern, Ruth Hirshey, Karen Murphy, Pam Hunter, Melanie Young, Sally Fischer, and the man who cut the ribbon at Ratner’s, Joe Goldstein.
Just plain best-of-friends, and often showing up in pairs, are Kathy Levy and Michael Pecht; Robyn and Peter Travers; Willie Norkin; Susan Squire; Suzanne Ausnit and John Salak; Victoria and Stephen Worth.
Thank you, Ed and Pat Teague, the perfect in-laws. They even praise my cooking, which shows how great in-laws can be. I’m only a little envious that my sister, Lynn, inherited our mother’s skill at the stove, and that she lavishes her talents on my brother-in-law, Dick Adelman. I have yet to thank my mother and father, Ida and Norman, because I don’t exactly know how to do justice to them. My father didn’t live to see this book, and my mother won’t understand what it is when I show it to her, but my love for them has diminished not a whit. Their nobil-ity in old age taught me as much as their guidance when I was young.
My wine buddies have played a considerable role in my life. I bow to the generosity of Fred Shaw, Robert Groblewski, Glenn Vogt, Alan Belzer, and Jeff Joseph. Although Belzer and Joseph have both traveled long and far with me, even Belzer must admit that nobody surpasses 3 2 4
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
Joseph as the man to have along when you have to eat a lot. His wife, Pat Jones, is nearly the perfect woman, and not only because she must live with her husband’s culinary demands. Larger than life is Carl Doumani. In a category all his own is Park Smith, a magnificent wine collector and a magnificent man. I just wish we didn’t always have to drink Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
Thank you, Amy Cooper, the most understanding woman alive.
There is nobody like you.
I couldn’t do anything without Jenny Ciardullo, who looks after Sophie, our corgi. And I could not have written anything had Sophie not been upstairs with me in the cathode-ray gloom of my office, looking on.
I am indebted to everyone behind this book, starting with Kathy Robbins, my agent; and her deputy, David Halpern, whose soothing calls were of immeasurable help. My thanks to Susan Weinberg, the publisher of HarperCollins; Susan Friedland, my buddy at HarperCollins; and Michael Solomon, for his day-to-day sanity and editorial acumen.
And now we come to David Hirshey, the man behind this book and, perhaps, my career. He was the first person to tell me that I was born to be a food writer. Inasmuch as I was trying to be a news columnist at the time, I didn’t take it well.
Always, Dave was there for me, although he was never with me. My phone would ring and it would be him, calling from Michael’s restaurant in Manhattan, where he’d be having lunch with a bestselling author.
Me, he’d urge to work harder. “Just give me an hour,” he’d say, before demanding revisions that kept me up for a week. Without David Hirshey, this book wouldn’t exist. I might not even exist, at least in my present form. Thank you, Dave. Some things mean even more to me than a meal.
About the Author
A l a n R i c h m a n is a contributing writer for GQ, Condé Nast Traveler, and Bon Appétit, as well as the newly appointed Dean of Food Journalism at the French Culinary Institute. He lives in Westchester County, New York, with his wife, Lettie Teague, a wine columnist and editor, and their two dogs, Sophie and Rudy. The dogs love Alan’s cooking.
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P r a i s e f o r
Fork It Over
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— Newsweek
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— Rocky Mountain News
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— Library Journal
Credits
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Copyright
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