Gold said he thought that the space had once been occupied by Alex Donut, one of three places in town to get Thai food in the late seventies. “I probably wouldn’t think it was good now, but that was a thousand Thai meals ago,” he said. “I thought it was amusing to eat all the little green nachos in a jar of vinegar, too.”
Korean sashimi came to the table—big hunks of white tuna, with the taste and texture of chilled butter; fresh-killed halibut—along with pickled mackerel eggs and sea squirts. The squirts glistened orange and tasted of brine. “These things are essentially taking over the fricking sea,” Gold said. “The taste is strong, iodine-y, but not unpleasant—but some people are totally grossed out by them.” The bluefin on the table went untouched. “It’s the equivalent of going on the Serengeti and eating the lion,” Gold said. “My brother hates this argument, but I don’t like it because it’s boring. Things that are at the top of the food chain are boring. They all taste the same.”
Then the proprietor, suppressing a smile, produced the main event, a plate of slippery gray tentacles, squirming anxiously. “It’ll try to climb up the chopstick,” Gold said, dousing a tentacle in sesame oil to loosen the grip of its suckers. “I don’t actually know that much about octopus physiology. Most people say that the octopus is dead, and just twitching, but I don’t know. It looks pretty alive to me.”
Gold bit into the octopus. “I thought I was completely full from lunch, but this is invigorating food,” he said. More courses came—broiled eel and broths and a greasy red kimchi pancake and, finally, crab claws covered in a sticky glaze, lustrous as a ceramic sculpture by Jeff Koons.
He was a tad disappointed about missing the unsettling experience of eating live shrimp. “It freaks me out,” he told me. “You’re picking up an animal whose carapace has been stripped off by the chef. Its eyeballs are going back and forth on its eyesticks and it’s madly trying to swim away. Prawns don’t have a great deal of intelligence but they know when they’re going to die. You’re killing something with your teeth, and whatever the pleasure of that—and the flavor, I’ve got to admit, is incredibly, hedonistically sweet—it feels wrong. You’re not supposed to kill things with your teeth.”
Two
GRUB
The roots of extreme foodie-ism extend back to the beginning of the American gourmet industry, when squishy and swank were often one and the same. The business, which, in 2012, represented 10 percent of retail food sales and was worth nearly $86 billion, was built by a handful of largely forgotten European refugees on the backs of a menagerie of creatures most people in this country would gag to see on a plate of food.
At first, the specialty-food trade was based on comforting people with the familiar. During World War II, as thousands of Jews fled Europe for the United States, Jewish importers, most of them working from offices on Hudson and Varick Streets in lower Manhattan, supplied other émigrés with items from home. Only when the salesmen began to penetrate the uptown carriage-trade shops and department stores newly devoting floor space to imported food in spiffy packaging, did the stuff become known as “specialty.” Mario Foah, who arrived from Naples in 1939, at the age of eighteen, got his start peddling panettone, a product from the north of Italy that was exotic to the southern Italians he was trying to sell to. Later, he diversified to cookies and candy. “It was strictly a Christmas business,” Foah, who is ninety-three, told me. “The rest of the year we managed by starving and eating samples from our suppliers.” Business was conducted in cash; according to one old story I heard, dealers kept their money in secret compartments in their shoes.
Storytelling and salesmanship were inseparable, and an aura of personal sophistication proved useful. Ted Koryn was the quintessential New York food pitchman: small and suave, hilariously funny, fluent in four languages and conversant in a handful of others. He was born in Amsterdam to a wealthy family; only French was spoken in his grandmother’s dining room, and when his mother went out at night a maid had to stay up till she returned to help her undress. Left alone there during the war—his mother and stepfather had gone “on holiday” to the United States just before the Nazis invaded—he hid out on a boat with two friends, and slept in the boathouse at night. In 1942, his stepfather’s uncle was able to trade his art collection for exit visas, and Koryn rejoined his family in New York. There he signed on to a Dutch attachment to the Air Force and was trained in aerial photography at Yale.
After the war, Koryn started a food business, selling mainly French products no one had ever heard of before, like Pommery mustard, Lu Biscuits, and Evian water (which never took off for him). His first wife, Miriam Metzger, was the daughter of Joe Metzger, who co-founded Dannon yogurt in the Bronx. (The company, which began as Danone in Spain and got its original yogurt cultures from the Pasteur Institute, struggled to connect with U.S. consumers until Miriam’s brother, Juan, suggested putting fruit in the bottom of the cup.) Koryn rode around Manhattan in a chauffeured limousine, and socialized constantly with an eclectic group of friends, from the cartoonist Will Eisner to the truffle-selling Urbanis and Xaviera Hollander, a former call girl who wrote The Happy Hooker. If he wanted someone to play poker with, he sent the car.
Koryn traveled extensively throughout Europe, always shopping for products to import. It was a good time to get deals: European manufacturers, their domestic economies destroyed, were willing to front product for the chance to enter a potentially vast American market. Purveyors played the edges. “If it was illegal or not one hundred percent, even the better,” Tim Metzger, Koryn’s nephew, told me. “They loved to press the rules.” Bob Lape, a food journalist who started “The Eyewitness Gourmet” segment on WABC-TV in 1970, met Koryn in the middle of a blizzard, when he persuaded him to come visit his factory. Koryn was one of two men Lape called “the hungry ones.” The other was Murray Klein, the legendary manager and part owner of the New York specialty store Zabar’s, where Koryn sold white truffles and beluga caviar.
In the 1950s, opening a can of mushroom soup and pouring it over a casserole was a culinary event. “They were putting crap in Jell-O and calling it an aspic,” John Roberts, a veteran of the food business, says. “Change was not valued. Food was not an adventure.” Mario Foah told me, “If you said to the man on the street, ‘I’d like to introduce you to gourmet foods,’ he’d say, ‘Spell it!’” In 1952, Foah, Koryn, and several others decided to form a monthly lunch club that could function as a trade association, lobbying in Washington against tariffs on European products and other issues affecting them. They called themselves the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade, or NASFT.
In 1955, the association put on its first event, the National Fancy Food and Confection Show, at the Sheraton-Astor Hotel in Manhattan. The war had sent a generation of Americans abroad, and the idea was to re-create foreign eating experiences: French mustard, Swiss chocolates, German sausages. The association’s president put a note in the brochure, celebrating the inauguration of a marketplace for novel foodstuffs. “This being our first effort, there may be much to criticize and we beg your indulgence for any shortcomings or omissions,” he wrote.
One of the omitted would not indulge the oversight. Max Ries, a savvy Chicago-based purveyor, who had been barred from exhibiting—he posed a threat, most likely—ran a limousine from the Sheraton-Astor to another hotel nearby, where he had set up a show of only his products. After a few years, the New Yorkers relented and gave him a booth, which became a major attraction. To his first show, Ries brought an aerosol can filled with liquid cheese spread and a gift basket that cost $300, about $2,500 today. It included a barrel-based table, four chairs, and sixty imported delicacies. Ries came away with sixty-five orders. The next year, he displayed a brightly painted Sicilian cart with an umbrella, loaded with treats. Beautiful models passed out samples. “A lot of people didn’t like him,” Foah told me. “But I admired him. He made people talk about the industry.”
A few mont
hs after Ries’s show debut, Fortune named his company the country’s largest importer, estimating its business at $6,500,000 a year, and overall specialty-food sales as high as $200 million, double what they had been in the show’s first year. Commercial jetliners were making international travel, and therefore international eating, increasingly accessible. Suburbanites had money, time, and space to entertain; they needed something provocative and delicious to impress their guests at cocktail parties. Curiosity and snobbism, the piece concluded, were leading the way to “a greater sophistication of American taste.” The Los Angeles Times reported on a “gourmet cult which reaches now from lavish Park Avenue apartments to the grass-roots split-level homes of the Middle West.” The country was in the midst of a “great delicacy boom.”
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Ries, an outsider and a self-reinventor, helped create a taste for the freaky in a society devoted to beefsteak, glamorizing the seemingly repulsive and making it into a symbol of elegance. After a lucrative career as a textile manufacturer in Germany, he arrived in Chicago in 1939 and started selling imported European cheeses out of the back of a station wagon on Route 41, store by store. Soon he employed a brigade of German-Jewish refugees to go on the road for him. They drove all day and for dinner ate canned peaches and ice cream. Within a few years, Ries had diversified: an early price list shows Norwegian goat cheese, Bahamian mustard, chow mein noodles, Cuban rock lobster, and Hawaiian Punch.
Ries was dashing; slim and refined, he wore handmade suits and twirled—never chewed—his cigars. In order to make his company sound more “American,” he called it Reese Finer Foods. He developed new foods—baby corn, blue-cheese salad dressing, shelf-stable croutons—and sold them alongside other then-exotic fare like water chestnuts. When a shipment of artichokes arrived in rusty, dented cans, Ries packed them in glass with vinaigrette, and called them marinated artichokes. He couldn’t boil water, according to his son, but he had a flair for presentation. Reese Finer Foods helped introduce teriyaki sauce to the United States by attaching a Japanese yen coin to every bottle sold (“Gives you a yen for Oriental food”); their barbecue sauce came with a whisk attached. In 1958, the Los Angeles Evening Herald Express announced, “Something wonderful has happened and no longer do you need ever again to get garlic on your finger tips!” Reese had invented roll-on garlic oil.
While other importers looked mainly to Europe, Ries sought unfamiliar snacks in Asia and Latin America. He brought tinned sparrows and French-fried grasshoppers from Japan, and ants from Bogotá. The Illinois candy-maker he hired to cover the ants with chocolate is said to have called Ries in a panic when the 500-pound shipment arrived; workers were threatening to quit the line. Once a year, Ries and his employees went to Asia to look for products and ideas. Reese sold tinned lion, tiger, elephant, and whale; pickled rooster combs, espresso, Lindt chocolate; Canadian muskrat, reindeer steaks from Lapland, and diamondbacks from Ross Allen, a snake-wrestling celebrity herpetologist with a ranch in Florida.
Ancient Romans sold the meat of exotic, imported panthers, hippos, lions, and giraffes killed in death matches at the circus; Reese did the modern equivalent, tinning creatures culled from zoos. “The zoos would furnish lists of animals they had to dispose of,” an employee later told a newspaper reporter. “Reese would buy a carcass at a high price and give it, frozen, to a cannery for processing.” When Ries went to a stock show in Chicago and noticed that no one was bidding on the bison—not then considered food—he bought the whole lot for forty cents a pound, and canned the meat with wine. “He took great food that nobody knew they wanted and got them to buy it,” Stewart Reich, Ries’s great-nephew, told me. “Max—I don’t want to say he churned it out, but he had a supply line and discovered the soft part of the market and exploited it.” At a “Fashion Show of Foods” Ries put on in Milwaukee in the mid-fifties, he said, “Eating habits are in the mind.”
As early as 1965, Ries predicted the foodie movement, and its turn toward the more inclusive, inventive cuisines of Latin America and Asia. “More people today can afford more of the so-called ‘exotic’ foods which previously were available only to persons of great wealth,” he said. “With this increased affluence has also come a new spirit of adventure about eating.” His evidence that the babyish palate of America was maturing was that people had begun to take their baked potatoes with sour cream instead of sweet butter.
“They were Marco Polo type of guys,” Reich says. “They were definitely in the entertainment business.” One year Reese had overstock of its Spooky Foods gift set—chocolate-covered ants, bees, grasshoppers, and caterpillars—so it hired Bela Lugosi to appear in his Dracula costume with the product, which promptly sold out. Alienation was part of the appeal. Reich, who still works in the food business, considered Ries a mentor and an example; the month that Jaws opened in theaters Reich hawked shark-meat pâté wearing a scuba suit and took out an advertisement that read, “This is your chance to bite back.”
One of Ries’s most valued employees was Morris Kushner, a former writer on Groucho Marx’s This Is Your Life, who started as a West Coast representative and rose to company president. He lived in the guest quarters of a sprawling mansion in Encino and was married to Naudjia de Morozova, a thin, flamboyant woman who dressed in fur, claimed to be a Russian countess, and ate little besides chocolate. Kushner, who wore checked suits, a tweed trilby, and a moustache, was from Nebraska. His pedigree in food was long: his uncle was a grocer in Lincoln, and Kushner apprenticed with him in his youth. After the war, he worked for a wholesaler in Los Angeles that supplied Hollywood with chutney, caviar, and foie gras. In a book on the industry, he boasted of having been one of the first to bring smoked oysters from Japan to the United States, as part of General MacArthur’s plan to revive the Japanese economy by appealing to American hostesses.
“I set out to design our private label and felt that I needed something other than merely the words ‘Smoked Oysters,’” Kushner wrote. The one other similar product available at the time was a crabapple smoked oyster from the Pacific Northwest. “I searched through Japanese literature and history books. . . . From Madame Butterfly and the Cherry Blossom Festival, I assumed that Japan had an abundance of cherry trees, so I labeled our product ‘Cherrywood Smoked Oysters.’” When he later met with the president of the Smoked Oyster Association in Hiroshima, he learned that the Japanese had been flummoxed by his first order, and had gone out in search of precious cherrywood to authenticate the label’s claim. “Needless to say, that was the only time cherrywood was ever used in that manner, and subsequent orders were smoked with the cheaper kindling scrap wood.” But, he concluded proudly, “cherrywood smoked” became the industry standard. “I relate this little tale to illustrate how a product can be upgraded in the eyes of the beholder with a little label imagery.”
The successful food seller was part carnival barker, part con man. If an item wasn’t moving, Kushner’s advice was to mark it up: a $75 jar of truffles is more intriguing than the same jar for $45. Another rule of thumb: “The food broker must never lie to a buyer, or better yet, never get caught lying.” In the mid-forties, when most specialty-foods dealers were trying to keep their products out of supermarkets for fear that mass marketing and availability would destroy their mystique (and their profit margins), he persuaded a Southern California grocery store to designate a gourmet section. They called the improvised area—a plywood shelf resting on large, foil-wrapped juice cans—“the importation center,” because most of the items came from abroad. By 1970, the Safeway in Washington, D.C., stocked nearly five thousand gourmet items, among them staples of the Reese line like rattlesnake, kangaroo, and Bengal tiger meat. They may not have been a large part of the business, but they served a purpose: “shelf-warmers” tended to start selling faster when placed near such attention-grabbing exotics.
In 1968, Craig Claiborne, the food editor of The New York Times, wrote with amusement about Reese’s elephant meat, which “
the foremost food authority in Florida” was planning to serve in an omelet at her husband’s restaurant in Miami. (Her source: Bloomie’s.) The following year, the federal Endangered Species Conservation Act was passed, significantly expanding the prohibitions against selling certain animals, and Reese’s swashbuckling period came to an abrupt end. In 1973, Congress signed the Endangered Species Act, a broader law that is still in place. That year, after tins of Reese’s smoked whale meat were discovered for sale in the Gourmet Foods Shop at Macy’s in New York, investigators confiscated a large supply from a Reese warehouse in the Bronx, fined the company, and made it promise not to sell any more endangered species in the state.
As the market changed, Kushner tried to live down his association with the “gimmicky” foods that had set Reese apart from its competitors. Kushner saw food both as a mark of status and as a democratizer, a powerful social vehicle for the eighties striver. “Tonight you can eat as well as Rockefeller,” he’d say. In 1982, he told The New York Times, “When people can’t afford mink coats, Cadillacs, or beautiful homes, they reward themselves with good cheeses they can afford. It’s accessible luxury.” By then, specialty foods had moved out of the “gourmet ghetto” and onto the supermarket’s main shelves—the Grey Poupon alongside the ballpark mustard—and America had changed because of it. There were limits—Kushner didn’t think balut would ever “go down”—but people had accepted previously spurned exotics like raw oysters, rabbit, and mussels. Kushner took to greeting visitors to the food show by saying, “Welcome to Wonderland, where today’s specialties become tomorrow’s staples!”
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Anything That Moves Page 4
