I wrote my editor at Bantam a long letter explaining the problem, confessing that I had been premature in announcing the existence of viable contemporary Spanish cooking, and asked her to let me do something entirely different. That something was a book I’d had in the back of my mind for some time, a Catalan Cuisine–style treatment of the cooking of Liguria and its culinary cognate, the region of Nice. Not very happily, I thought, my editor agreed and rewrote the contract. “I’m going to have to start all over again,” I told Paula. “I’m going to be gone a lot.” Okay, she said, without a lot of enthusiasm. For the next two years, as other work—and finances—permitted, I’d go off to Nice or Genoa, prowl pretty little seaside towns, head up into the backcountry (the arrière-pays or the entroterra, depending on which country I was in), visit wineries and olive oil producers, and just generally immerse myself in the culture of the Italian Riviera and its Niçois counterpart.
In the fall of 1990, after our first daughter, Madeleine, was born, my friend and editorial mentor and boss at Met Home, Dorothy Kalins, sent me a fax, responding to the itinerary I’d forwarded to her for an upcoming trip of mine. “It seems to the casual observer,” she wrote “that you have a certain propensity for movement . . . eating and running. . . . Why, aside from a vacance en famille, you are never any one place more than a single night at a time. Do you not see a certain capriciousness, a Peter-Pan-penchant-for-the-peripatetic, that seems at the very least unseemly for a père de famille such as your own self?” She certainly had a point.
IN 1993 MET HOME changed hands, and Dorothy resigned. She spent a few months considering her possibilities, as they say, while I started trying to develop new freelance markets. Then one day in the fall of the year, Dorothy called me at my office in Santa Monica and said, “I’ve found us a magazine!” She’d met a couple of media entrepreneurs who had formed a partnership to buy and retool existing publications and develop new ones. The high-profile member of the pair was S. Christopher Meigher III (known jocularly by some of his former colleagues as Chris Three-Sticks), a diminutive, nattily attired, perpetually tanned twenty-four-year veteran of Time Inc. A. Douglas Peabody, his partner, had been an investor in Hippocrates and Health magazines and was a supposedly new-media-savvy member of the AOL board of directors.
The partnership’s first acquisition was Garden Design, the Washington, D.C.–based organ of the American Society of Landscape Architects, which they planned to remake into an upscale garden-centered lifestyle magazine. Their second wasn’t exactly an acquisition, but they licensed the name of, and made an agreement to reuse content from, a successful French food magazine called Saveurs, envisioning an elegantly turned-out American equivalent, to be called Saveur, singular.
In January 1994 I flew to Manhattan for an extended stay. While the hot young graphic designer Michael Grossman (late of Entertainment Weekly) crafted the look of Saveur, Dorothy and I sat with our friend Christopher Hirsheimer, who had been the Met Home food editor, in a conference room on Park Avenue and just made the damn thing up. Christopher was a marvel, tall and blond, smart and kind, born in California, raised in Australia and Hawaii, connected by personal history to Iowa, now domiciled in Pennsylvania with her big, quiet antiques dealer husband, Jim. She’d been a caterer and a restaurant owner and a cook, and had tested and written all the recipes for Met Home, becoming, like me, something of an honorary staff member.
By the time we started talking about Saveur, Dorothy, Christopher, and I had known one another for at least ten years. We had worked together, gone out to countless meals together, traveled together, and cooked together, mostly at Dorothy’s apartment on East Fifty-Sixth Street or at the house she rented every summer for many years on Three Mile Harbor in East Hampton. We had different styles in the kitchen: Dorothy was meticulous and well organized and often seemed to be pursuing some platonic culinary ideal; I was on the rough-and-tumble, intuitive side, trying things that worked well about half the time; Christopher would let us scuffle, and then just quietly set about making little masterpieces with a “This old thing?” modesty. (One of her pet phrases, and not just about cooking, was “I know how to do this,” and damned if she almost always didn’t.)
As we sat endlessly in that conference room and talked, we realized that none of us, as much as we loved food, regularly read any of the existing food magazines; they just didn’t seem to have any relevance to the way we thought and felt about the subject, or the way we cooked and ate. And it quickly became apparent that, however varied some of our culinary philosophies might seem, we agreed on the important things, on what our new magazine should and shouldn’t do and why: We would not be trend spotters or lionize celebrity chefs but would cover restaurants only when they had some real significance, some larger meaning; we would assess wines and food products, but we would not assign numerical ratings to them; we would not offer readers yet another “new products” page full of jams and flavored olive oils and spatulas; and we would not publish, as I liked to say, “twenty-five recipes for quick-and-easy, low-fat, low-cal, boneless, skinless Tuscan chicken breast.”
Instead, we talked a lot about the notion of food in context, about the stories behind food and the people who made it and the places in which it was made. We talked about how, in an increasingly complicated and fragmented world, traditional cooking could help people reconnect with their roots, with their families, with their world. And we talked about authenticity. Our standing reference point was “low-fat cassoulet,” a recipe for which had recently appeared in The New York Times. You can make a dish of beans and turkey sausage cooked with olive oil instead of duck fat, I said, and if you’re a good cook, you can probably make it taste okay. But don’t call it cassoulet. If everybody publishes recipes for low-fat cassoulet—or for Tex-Mex cassoulet, fusion cassoulet, quick-and-easy, low-fat, low-cal, boneless, skinless Tuscan chicken breast cassoulet, whatever—then at some point real cassoulet is going to get forgotten. And that would be a shame not just because real cassoulet is a wonderful dish but also because it’s a tradition, a cultural icon, a complex construction whose every element has historical and social implications. Let’s give people the recipe for authentic cassoulet, we decided, full of sausage and duck confit and fat, as close to what you’d have in Toulouse or Carcassonne or Castelnaudary as possible. Let’s give people the real thing.
THE FIRST ISSUEOF SAVEUR, dated Summer 1994, came out in April, and people seemed to love it. I wrote a feature story about Santa Barbara County wines and, under a pseudonym, a piece on Belgian beer for the issue. Much of the rest of the material in that and the following issues was supposed to be repurposed from Saveurs. We figured out pretty quickly, though, that our Gallic counterpart actually had very little to offer for our purposes. We translated and rewrote a few features, and in the early days bought rights to some of the photography, but, well, frankly their standards were not up to ours. Our name aside, we were soon completely independent of Saveurs, and creating a whole new kind of food magazine.
At first I worked from a distance, in my Santa Monica office, flying back to New York as often as I could, especially during closes. Inevitably, though, there came a day when Dorothy said, “I want you to start helping to manage the staff, which means you have to move east.” I was hesitant. Although I’d spent a lot of time in New York, had probably as many friends there as I did in California, and knew the city fairly well, I hadn’t lived outside my native state since brief stays in Atlanta and Cambridge thirty years before. On the other hand, the opportunity to edit a magazine we all knew was going to be significant, and to collect a regular and generous salary, was impossible to resist. Paula, who had lived in Manhattan for ten years before we met, getting a degree in acting from Juilliard, was all for it, too.
A few days before the end of the year, then, we packed up our condo (we’d decided to keep it and rent it out, just in case), and a moving van came and took away our California lives. The four of us—our second daughter, Isabelle, had been born in 1993—we
nt to stay in a hotel in Marina del Rey while the truck began its transcontinental trip. Besides Chasen’s, where I’d wanted to go one last time for a Christmas meal, I’d also wanted to have one more dinner at Rebecca’s. This wasn’t just because I was pretty sure it would be a long time before I had any decent Mexican food again, but also because I realized that the restaurant had come to symbolize a lot of what I loved about Venice and Santa Monica—the pretty girls, sure, but also the beach, the art, the easygoing social intercourse, the color and spice. In the end, we didn’t have the time or, really, the money for either place.
On December 30, with Paula’s cat cowering in a carrier under the seat, we flew to an icy New York City, then drove straight up to Connecticut to a hotel in Stamford, where we spent three nights waiting for our things to arrive. A few days into 1995, we moved into a two-story rental house in Old Greenwich with a fireplace, a semifinished basement, and a big, sloping backyard, which I later learned exploded into blossom in the spring.
WITH THE WEST BEACH and Rebecca’s thriving, Bruce went on to open DC-3 at the Santa Monica Airport (christened after the legendary workhorse plane of the same name, some examples of which were produced in Santa Monica), with a bar-and-grill menu and an interior designed by the artist Chuck Arnoldi, and then Broadway Deli, in partnership with the great French chef Michel Richard. As these and other projects took more and more of his time, and he realized that he wanted to cook more upscale food, Bruce decided to sell the West Beach. In 1996 it was taken over by James Evans, former general manager at the nearby 72 Market Street, and renamed James’ Beach. Rebecca’s lasted two more years, then Evans made an offer on it, too. The remarkable interior was mostly demolished, and the place was converted into a bistro and sushi bar called Canal Club.
Chapter Fifteen
ELEVEN MADISON PARK,
New York City (1998– )
WHEN ELEVEN MADISON PARK OPENED, IN 1998, at the southern end of Madison Avenue in Manhattan, I was working daily at the Saveur office in SoHo, not quite two miles to the south, and going straight to Grand Central Terminal after work every evening to take the train back to Connecticut. The restaurant was too far from Saveur to make it practical for lunch, and I almost never stayed in the city for dinner, so for the first year and a half or so of its existence, I remained ignorant of its charms.
When I did finally manage to get there, for dinner one night, my experience was something of a disaster, though not through any fault of the restaurant’s. Dorothy had been to the place several times and become a great fan, and she contrived one evening to invite Emeril Lagasse and his wife to dinner at Eleven Madison with Christopher and myself, in the hopes of convincing him to contribute to the magazine. I’m sure we had a lovely meal that evening, perfectly served, but for whatever reasons, I was in a particularly gabby mood and monopolized the conversation, apparently alienating Emeril, with the result that we never heard from him again and Dorothy didn’t speak to me for days. It was an inauspicious introduction to a restaurant that was to become such an important part of my life for the next half dozen years.
PAULA AND I SETTLED into our new lives on the East Coast. I became a commuter, with something I’d never really had before: a rigid daily routine. I’d wake up around five-thirty in the morning (the cat made sure of that), make coffee, and then descend into the basement, where I had set up my computer, and work for an hour and a half or so trying to finish my book about the cooking of Liguria and Nice, which I’d titled Flavors of the Riviera. The basement was damp and cold, with a big hole in one wall leading into the dirt-banked crawl space under the house, but there was no other place in the house where I could write without disturbing the family, or being disturbed by them. Reemerging upstairs, I’d quickly shower and dress, make breakfast and school lunches for the girls, say good-bye to everybody, and walk about a quarter of a mile to the Old Greenwich train station, where I’d catch the eight-eighteen to Grand Central.
At the office, I’d work all day, usually buying lunch from the halal cart on the sidewalk outside the office, then head back up to Grand Central and get on the six-thirty-seven back to Connecticut. I’d arrive home around eight, bathe the girls and put them to bed—Paula, worn out from caring for the kids all day, would by this time already be in bed, watching TV—and then make myself dinner, often just a can of soup. Then I’d go back down to the basement and work for another couple of hours. I’d get to sleep around eleven-thirty and then, as Jackson Browne once said, “Get up and do it again, amen.”
I finally finished Flavors of the Riviera, and for a few months at least got a little more sleep. Things got better financially in 1996, when a well-known cookbook editor hired me to work on the new edition of The Joy of Cooking. The original Joy, written by a St. Louis housewife named Irma Rombauer, was full of personality and style. So were the numerous subsequent editions, in which Rombauer’s daughter, Marion Becker, at first collaborated with her mother and then took over from her. This new Joy, though it would bear the byline of Marion’s son, Ethan, was to be the work of literally scores of notable food writers, and it was to be not the vaguely folksy dictionary of home cooking that earlier editions had been but a veritable encyclopedia of recipes and techniques, comprehensive and international.
Just because it was to be comprehensive, I didn’t think it had to be soulless. Working with photocopies of all the previous editions of Joy, I tutored myself in the Rombauer-Becker style, alternately chatty, authoritative, and witty, and always accessible. As one dauntingly long chapter after another for the new edition came my way, supplied by an A-list of well-known food writers (some of whom actually knew how to use the English language and some of whom hadn’t a clue), I tried to shape the text in a way that would showcase their expertise but at the same time capture some of the feeling of the older volumes—and that would, above all, read with a certain consistency from one page to the next. I also rewrote headnotes, added or corrected historical information, and fine-tuned recipe instructions for clarity. Every word turned in by the large roster of contributors went through my computer. Each time I’d turn in my edit on a chapter, I’d add detailed notes and queries for the cookbook editor (“Do fajitas really belong in the sandwich chapter?” “On the subject of Foie Gras, here I would argue that we really should tell people how to devein it, and should give a recipe for terrine of foie gras.” “I removed teff as a separate entry—I sort of worry about people who know too much about teff, unless they’re Ethiopian—and placed it under millet, because though it is not botanically related, it is often grouped with millets in reference books.”)
Ethan Becker seemed to like what I was doing and on two occasions, in appreciation of my work on specific chapters, had cases of expensive wine shipped to me. The cookbook editor’s reactions, on the other hand, were unpredictable. She’d send me encouraging notes of the “I couldn’t do this without you” variety one day and terse, scolding screeds about computer formats or excessive annotations the next. At one point, she informed me, rather belatedly, that she didn’t want any “recycled old Joy material” after all, and the editors she hired subsequently (one of whom apparently got paid twice what I did) stripped out any intimation of “voice.” I soldiered on, slogging through hundreds of thousands of words, practically falling asleep over some sections (six small-print pages on making a wedding cake?). For more than a year, I spent almost every morning and every night on Joy, and all day on the weekends, too. I didn’t go to the beach the entire summer of 1997; I barely saw the sunlight. I barely saw Paula or the girls. But I finally finished the project, and the money I earned got us out of debt. Ultimately, when I saw what all the work I’d put into the project had become, I asked that my name be removed from the book’s lengthy list of credits. Kim Severson, in The New York Times, later called it “the New Coke of cookbooks.” I just thought it was a book in which the cooking far overshadowed the joy.
SAVEUR, MEANWHILE, HAD BECOME a hot property. Adweek called it “perhaps the ultimate food
magazine.” Readers loved it. People discovered us quickly, the right kinds of people, people who understood what we were trying to do and liked the way we did it. I was out and about on Saveur’s behalf a lot, being interviewed, giving talks or chairing seminars, teaching cooking classes, and everywhere I went, people practically genuflected at mention of the magazine’s name.
One of the best things about working at Saveur was that, with Dorothy at the helm, I could still sneak away and travel and come back with good, big stories. And since I was now in effect my own editor, I could give myself almost any assignments I wanted. I wrote articles on Haute-Provence and Margaret River, on Swiss wine and Islay whisky. I wrote about La Boqueria in Barcelona and about Claude and the restaurants we used to frequent in Paris. I wrote about cooking meat with the bone in, and cast-iron pans, and the glories of melted cheese (for which I won my first James Beard honor, the M. F. K. Fisher Award for “distinguished writing,” no less).
Christopher had emerged as a first-rate photographer—she created what was to become a much-imitated style of food photography, naturalistic and sensual, and turned into what I called the magazine’s visual conscience—and she and I became a team, flying off all over the place at short notice and bringing back stories. She was the perfect partner: She shot fast and smart and, quite beyond her photographic skills, knew food inside out; we’d spend hours in the car or over meals talking about what we’d just experienced, analyzing and synthesizing, which made my job as a writer all that much easier.
Our best trips were the long ones, for special sections. For one on California, our mutual native territory, Christopher and I drove the length of the state, literally from border to border (and down a few miles into Mexico), eating, interviewing, shooting, and talking. For a multipart celebration of Venice (the one in Italy), Dorothy joined Christopher and me, and we spent weeks, in various configurations, in that mythic city, even renting an apartment briefly at one point so that we could cook food straight from the markets. For a special issue on Burgundy, we traveled around that region for weeks, starting with an elegant lunch at the Hostellerie des Clos in Chablis, including escargots with confit garlic and pike perch with Chablis butter, and finishing with a remarkable meal cooked for us by the great chef Marc Meneau at the home of his friend Gérard Oberlé: tourte de groin de porc (a tall, round construction of golden brown puff pastry enclosing alternating layers of smooth, waxy potato and sweet, moist shards of meat from the snout of a well-fed Burgundian pig) and a real coq au vin, made with a real rooster, Oberlé assured us, “one that has crowed and screwed and had children and grandchildren!” “So much of what we eat in America is just arranging food on plates,” Dorothy observed at one point, “but food like this is cooking.” Paula, meanwhile, was at home with Maddy and Isabelle.
My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants Page 25
