My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants

by Colman Andrews

  IN 2000 THE SAVEUR OFFICES moved up to the corner of Park Avenue and Twenty-Third Street and, I soon figured out, into the culinary orbit of Danny Meyer. When I first met Danny, I didn’t know anything about him, other than that he was a slender young fellow with a well-cut suit and a smile that looked more genuine than was often the case among practitioners of his métier. I found out later that he was brought up in St. Louis, where his father ran a travel business; worked summers as a guide for his father in Rome, and studied international politics there; graduated from Trinity College in Hartford with a political science degree and worked on the Illinois congressman John Anderson’s failed independent presidential campaign in 1980; studied cooking in France; took his first food service job in 1984, as assistant manager at the now-vanished Pesca in Manhattan; liked the business and opened Union Square Cafe the following year.

  The rest I learned gradually. To help Union Square Cafe stand out, Danny tried to parse the customer experience and trained his staff to offer the best possible service, in every sense—a refinement that was often forgotten in the vigorous Manhattan restaurant scene of the era, alternately cynically commercial and obstreperously creative. His efforts helped Union Square to flourish, and in 1994 he opened a second restaurant, Gramercy Tavern, nearby, in partnership with Tom Colicchio. I loved the place. Before he became a TV celebrity and built a restaurant empire, Colicchio was merely a terrific chef, his food confident, technically perfect, full of big flavors, and I particularly appreciated the fact that you could have fare like this in a restaurant that had a lived-in, almost rustic feeling to it.

  In 1998 Danny opened two more restaurants, sharing the ground floor of an art deco skyscraper across the street from Madison Square Park. The original plan had been to install just one large restaurant in the 22,000-square-foot space, but it was bisected by a load-bearing wall, so Danny would have ended up with two dining rooms connected by a door. That didn’t make sense to him, so instead he created two separate places: a stunningly beautiful modern American one in the larger portion of the space, and what was almost certainly the country’s first serious Indian fusion restaurant on the other side of the wall. The Indian restaurant, with the talented Indian-born Floyd Cardoz in the kitchen, was called Tabla. The showplace was Eleven Madison Park.

  The designers, Bentel & Bentel, had a lot to work with: The ceilings were twenty-five feet high, the walls and floors were pristine marble, and one whole side of the dining room was inset with broad, twenty-foot-high paned windows looking out onto the park. Bentel & Bentel raised the bar area and half the dining room slightly to improve sight lines and transected the lower portion of the space with a long two-sided banquette. Handrails and trim were made of nickel bronze, commonly used for accents in the deco era but rare today (the metal was imported from Australia). Room dividers were lustrous blond English sycamore inset with geometric tracery and pale green images of leaves. In three places around the room, immense black-and-white oils by the artist Stephen Hannock depicted scenes of Madison Square Park, based on photographs from the early twentieth century. All this added up to a brilliant job of evoking the past without descending into caricatured nostalgia. It was also purely and unmistakably a New York restaurant, full of energy and majesty and a subtle conjuration of the glamour of an earlier era. I thought it was a vivid expression of the style and spirit of the city as much as, though in a different way than, the legendary Four Seasons was. There was a kind of Gothamite grandeur to both.

  FOR MY FIRST FEW YEARS AT SAVEUR, I remained blissfully ignorant of larger management and financial issues at the magazine, mostly because Dorothy shielded me (and Christopher) from such concerns so that, she later told us, we could concentrate on our work. I began learning more about the internal workings of the company when Chris Meigher instituted monthly department head meetings, in which I was included. These were basically state-of-the-business sessions, with progress reports from the publishers and circulation people. To my initial surprise, the news was rarely good, and the editorial side was continually asked to cut costs, reduce staff, and keep manuscript and photography fees low (they were already substandard). I used to be quite vocal in my opposition to cost-cutting attempts, pointing out that we were already putting out a champagne product on a beer budget, and that saving money in the short term could undermine our value over time. After one of the meetings, at which I had directed my ire directly at Chris, I ended up at the urinal next to him in the men’s room. “Are you going to piss on me, too?” he asked.

  The situation had degenerated seriously by 1999. Chris and Doug were fighting. Our investors were unhappy. Saveur and Garden Design hadn’t started making money yet, and a society magazine cum real estate throwaway Chris had bought, called Quest, was apparently draining capital from the company. So was Doug’s pet project, a doomed web portal he called (not very imaginatively) Europe Online, which ended up costing Meigher Communications a large write-down. In January 2000, Chris and Doug sold Saveur and Garden Design to a Florida-based publisher of water sports and game fishing magazines. The sale was a good thing: The company was pretty much dead by that time anyway, and if Chris and Doug hadn’t found a buyer, the magazines would have disappeared. But it was also, we found out soon enough, a bad thing—sort of like being rescued from a sinking ocean liner, then discovering that you’re on a lifeboat manned by cannibals.

  For some time, it was business as usual. Our new owner and his wife—I’ll call them Dick and Bambi—took an apartment in New York and tried to develop a social life in the city. But while Bambi flourished in the downtown party scene, Dick seemed ill at ease, intimidated, suspicious of New York and the way people lived there. There was speculation that Dick had bought Saveur in the first place as a plaything for Bambi—who had been to culinary school (and who asked me, wide-eyed and with no sense of irony, the first time I met her, “Are you a foodie?”)—and she would periodically show up at our office looking for something to do, staying for a day or a week or occasionally a month until she got bored.

  Dick was a weird bird, with a slightly nasal, slightly whiny voice and a clammy handshake, and an almost pathological aversion to confrontation. He seemed incapable of expressing himself in a group without the aid of PowerPoint, and was a micromanager who never seemed to be reachable when some micromatter needed to be managed. And he couldn’t keep a publisher: We had six in the first five years of Dick’s ownership.

  It became apparent pretty quickly that Dick didn’t have the slightest idea what made Saveur work, or what made it special. He wanted it to run like his other magazines. He thought we were “arrogant” because we cared so much about accuracy, good grammar, and production values. (“Nobody cares if there are mistakes in the magazine,” he once said. “Everybody makes mistakes.”) He also thought guidelines governing the interface of editorial material and advertising were for suckers. I told him once that I thought he was like a guy who had built a chain of successful coffee shops in Florida and then, for some reason, bought Daniel or Jean-Georges in New York City, expecting it to work the same way. I pictured him, I said, casting a jaundiced eye on his new holding and saying, “My chefs in Florida don’t wander around the dining room”; “My chefs in Florida don’t run food costs that high”; “My chefs in Florida don’t change the menu every day.” . . .

  Dorothy saw where things were going and left in 2002 to take a job as executive editor of Newsweek. Christopher followed Dorothy out the door a month or so later, taking a short-lived post at Rodale Press, then going off to freelance as a photographer, shooting books for what seemed like every famous chef in America and continuing to work on stories for us. (Today, she and Melissa Hamilton, who had run the Saveur test kitchen for some years, create and publish the wonderful Canal House series of periodical cookbooks.)

  Dorothy’s good advice to me when she left was that I should just keep doing what I was doing for as long as I could. We had a solid editorial team—I always said I would have put them up against any editorial
staff in the country—and we kept trying to put out the best magazine possible. Sometimes the obstacles we faced were almost comical. One day Dick called a meeting of the magazine’s top editorial, sales, marketing, and circulation people. When I walked into the conference room, there was Bambi, sitting up straight, with a notepad in front of her and her eyes sparkling expectantly, as if it were her first day of secretarial school. I had no idea what she was doing there. As it turned out, her main contribution to the proceedings came when we were discussing an upcoming article—one of our trademark authoritative pieces, narrow and deep, on the subject of octopus, by the respected Greek-American writer Diane Kochilas. “Are the recipes just going to be for octopus?” she asked. That was the idea, I said. “Well . . . ,” she asked, “what if you added some recipes for things people eat with octopus?”

  I don’t think like this—really—but that day I went back to my office, sat down at my desk, and said to myself, Ferran Adrià keeps my Catalan cookbook in the kitchen at elBulli, Alice Waters came all the way to Budapest a few months ago to help me celebrate my birthday, I just got a note from Michel Guérard apologizing for not having been able to spend more time with me on my recent visit to Eugénie-les-Bains, and that contraption propped up on the cabinet is a wood-frame chitarra for making pasta that Marcella Hazan went to some trouble to order for me as a gift—and I have to listen to Bambi telling me how to edit an article?

  AS THINGS WERE GOING DOWNHILL at Saveur, first under Chris and Doug and then with Dick in charge, I started having trouble at home, too. Paula had turned forty in 1996, and was beginning to question what she’d done with her life, where she’d ended up, where she was going. My long absences—not just all my travel around the country and to Europe but the simple fact that, as Paula pointed out, I went to work every morning in a different state—had again taken their toll, and what must have once seemed like the pleasures of being married to a guy who went to restaurants for a living and talked about food and wine all the time had turned into annoyances. When Maddy and Isabelle both got old enough to spend much of the day in school, Paula had started working out at a nearby health club and found kindred spirits there, people whose idea of a good time was a twenty-mile bike ride, not a four-hour meal. She got a job selling memberships at the club and began teaching Spinning classes and yoga there, and the club, and its habitués, became the focus of her days.

  We had a rough couple of years and talked about separating, but kept putting it off. Finally, in June 1999, the day after the girls had gotten out of school for the summer, we sat them down before lunch—they had been promised a trip to McDonald’s—and told them that I would not be living with them anymore. There were a few moments of silence. Then Isabelle asked her mother, in what I remember as a very small voice, “Will Daddy ever come live with us again?” “Nobody can predict the future,” Paula answered, “but probably not.” There was another pause. Then Isabelle asked, “Can we still go to McDonald’s?” I thought that was about the saddest thing I’d ever heard.

  THE NEW SAVEUR OFFICES were only two blocks from Eleven Madison Park. I’d been back a few times by then, and the gorgeous interior and good food had pretty much erased any memories of my disastrous first meal there. The chef was a tall, soft-spoken, Pennsylvania-born Irish-American named Kerry Heffernan, who’d cooked under David Bouley and, at Mondrian, under Tom Colicchio. Kerry was a solid technician who seemed equally at home making grilled sandwiches of chicken, bacon, and Saint-André cheese or English pea flan with morels or lobster with lemongrass velouté. The service was vintage Danny Meyer, which is to say intelligent and efficient, and the interior settled a kind of calm on me, transporting me into a world far from my daily concerns.

  Eleven Madison became my canteen, my after-work hangout, my preferred venue for business lunches. I made almost everybody come to me there. I’ll buy lunch, or drinks, I’d say, but I’d like to go to Eleven Madison. Nobody ever turned me down. Sometimes I’d have a serious meal at the place, maybe roasted root vegetables with a truffled chèvre parfait or twice-baked fingerling potatoes with truffles, followed by roasted capon or some beautifully presented, very fresh fish of some kind. (Kerry was an avid fisherman who knew his seafood.) Other times I’d have what I called my “diet lunch”—half a dozen oysters followed by Kerry’s oxtail and foie gras terrine. The restaurant’s plateau de fruits de mer was one of the most spectacular in the city, sparkling fresh and full of variety, and the oysters in particular were always superb. One day I took Johnny Apple, who had written some pieces for Saveur, to lunch at Eleven Madison. There were Martha’s Vineyard oysters that day, and we ordered a dozen to share. They were so good that we ordered a second dozen. And then a third. I don’t remember what we had as main courses.

  It is a measure of how much at home I felt at Eleven Madison that when I looked around the office on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, and realized that there were still ten or twelve of the editorial staff at their desks—whether they couldn’t get home or just didn’t have anybody to go home to, I didn’t know—I spontaneously invited them to lunch with me at the restaurant. There were only a handful of people sitting at scattered tables, talking in hushed tones, and an appropriately dark mood suffused the interior. Richard Coraine, one of Danny’s partners, welcomed us. I explained that we’d been working, and needed some comfort before figuring out what to do next. He brought us food, he brought us pricey wines on the house—Château Rayas, Château Lafite Rothschild—and he brought us updates. We all talked, nervously at first, more confidently as the wine took hold; we relaxed; as a staff, we had always been reasonably close, but I thought we somehow drew still closer together over our well-laden table. After lunch, we all went our own ways, by no means immunized against the day’s horrible events, but somehow at least a little bit restored. That’s the kind of place Eleven Madison had become for me.

  WITHIN THE FIRST SIX MONTHS Dick owned Saveur and Garden Design, every single member of the sales and marketing staff for both magazines, publishers included, had either quit or been fired. He quickly restaffed, mostly with junior people who would work for a lot less money than the experienced crew he had inherited, and a sea of new faces appeared around the place. One of these was a young woman named Erin Walker, many years my junior. She’d been hired as the publisher’s assistant, and then almost immediately, with no sales experience, was thrust into a job selling the magazine’s wine and spirits advertising.

  I didn’t notice her at first, and then I did. She was petite but buxom, with gray-green eyes and hair that she seemed to change in style and color every six weeks or so. She walked around as if she knew a bunch of secrets. There was something mysterious and alluring about her—something sexy in what may or may not have been an unwitting way. Since 1998, estranged from Paula even though we still shared a house, I’d had an on-again, off-again long-distance relationship with a strawberry-blond PR woman from Texas named Pam, great fun and a good excuse for me to spend time in a state that I’d always found particularly appealing for many reasons (food, music, landscapes, people)—but now I started flirting casually with Erin, too.

  When my Texan and I broke up for the last time, I started wondering if I should ask Erin out. I’d bought tickets to see an Austin-based honky-tonk band called the Derailers, intending to take my friend Carolynn, a sometime Saveur contributor, but she went out of town at the last minute. I’d learned by then that Erin liked music, country and otherwise, and sent her an email offering her the tickets. Or, I added, if you just want to go see the band and don’t have anyone else to go with, we could just go together. She chose option B. The Derailers were terrific. Erin later told me that when I got up to go to the men’s room, one of the people we were sharing a table with said, “I think it’s so nice that your dad takes you out to hear music.” A few months after our first evening out, we had become a couple, though we made sure that nobody at the office knew.

  Erin and I both had expense accounts, and we started using them frequentl
y to take each other out to lunch. At least once a week, and sometimes more, we’d have that lunch at Eleven Madison Park. Though it was only two blocks from our office, it simply wasn’t the kind of place Dick and his people would dream of going. It was too expensive, and too urbane. On only one occasion did we ever encounter somebody related to Saveur there—not an actual employee but an old-school magazine consultant widely known as Old Walrus-Butt, whom Dick considered his mentor—and we feigned a serious business strategy conversation until he left.

  The restaurant was our escape. Whatever the stresses or frustrations of our jobs, they were always temporarily alleviated by the warm calm of the place, and the pampering we inevitably enjoyed there. Even Kerry played the game: Chefs who know or recognize me commonly send out extra dishes when I’m sitting in their restaurants, and surprisingly often these are contrary to the spirit of the dishes I’ve chosen myself, or repeat ingredients that I’ve already ordered enough of (if I’ve asked for the grilled asparagus, I probably don’t need the asparagus soup, too); their largesse is inevitably presented with the announcement that “the chef wanted you to try this.” (I always think, but never say, “But what about what I want?”) If Kerry had something he thought Erin and I might enjoy, on the other hand, he’d send a waiter out to ask whether we were in a hurry that day or settled in for a leisurely lunch. If the former, he’d just let us eat what we’d ordered; if the latter, he’d send out a small portion of some new dish or something based on an ingredient that had just come in, just enough for us to try and always chosen to work in harmony with the rest of our meals. We appreciated his thoughtfulness far more than we appreciated some other chef’s extra offering of sautéed foie gras or wild mushroom risotto.