The Reporter's Kitchen

by Jane Kramer

  A particularly illuminating example is the story of the Mandarin, the San Francisco restaurant presided over by Cecilia Chiang, an elegant and by all reports warmly hospitable woman who had grown up before the war in a fifty-three-room Peking palace, and who eventually made her way to California to serve what the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen famously anointed as “the best Chinese food east of the Pacific.” Established in 1960, it was one of the first upscale Chinese restaurants in America, as well as one of the first to offer authentically Chinese fare to the yang guizi—“white devils” is the common term—who ate there, as opposed to the bland Chinese-American dishes invented and served, at the time, almost anywhere beyond the precincts of the country’s teeming Chinatowns. (In Providence, where I grew up, the Sunday-night takeout menu of our one neighborhood Chinese restaurant consisted entirely of a bag of cold, crispy noodles and a combination carton known as “chow mein-chop suey mixed.”) Freedman’s chapter on the Mandarin is a forty-page lesson in the history of Chinese immigration—from the indentured coolies who laid the tracks for the western end of the Transcontinental Railroad (many of whom were left to die when the work was finished) to the cooks of an ongoing Chinese diaspora who are introducing the wildly various tastes and peoples of “China” to the West. There are now more Chinese restaurants in the country—40,000, Freedman says—than there are McDonald’ses, Burger Kings, and KFCs combined. And yesterday’s no-go Chinatowns have turned into thriving models of an ethnic-eatery tourist trade.

  But in New York, the prize for selling the facts and fictions of ethnic bonhomie used to belong to the Italian restaurant Mamma Leone’s—the extra m Americanizing the word “mama” being one example—which, as the story goes, “opened” in 1906, when Enrico Caruso invited a group of friends to shell out fifty cents a head for a down-home dinner in his friend Luisa Leone’s living room. By the time Mamma Leone’s closed, nearly a century later, it was the city’s largest restaurant, with eleven dining rooms and 1,250 seats, not to mention more strolling accordionists than Manhattanites in sight. There were years when every tour bus entering the city was said to disgorge its passengers for an obligatory meal there, which made it an irresistible photo-op stop for sports celebrities, politicians, and college kids in New York for a weekend. Having once made that stop myself, I can report that the food, while leaden, introduced people who weren’t Italian to the idea of Italian food at a time when the pasta most Americans dipped into was a can of precooked Franco-American spaghetti clinging to a thin coating of sugary tomato sauce.

  Then there is Antoine’s in New Orleans. It is one of the oldest restaurants in America—it dates from 1840—and continues to provide the kind of antebellum menu that Freedman describes and clarifies as Haute Creole cuisine, thus performing what for me is the invaluable service of defining the cultural and culinary differences between Creole and Cajun cooking. As spectacle, it makes upstarts like Mamma Leone’s look like summer stock. I went once with my husband at the end of 1969, and sat with the other tourists in one of the fourteen high-kitsch dining rooms where all the king’s men of Louisiana used to negotiate their deals, eating dishes so oversauced as to lose any particularity of flavor. (Freedman, who includes an appendix of recipes from each of his chosen restaurants, received, from Antoine’s, one for a dish called Oysters Foch, which involves glopping Sauce Colbert—itself a combination of a complicated tomato sauce and a warm Hollandaise, whipped slowly over a double boiler—onto cornmeal-fried oysters perched on foie gras–laden toast.) I ordered the Oysters Rockefeller, a recipe from Antoine’s turn-of-the-nineteenth-century kitchen and still promoted as a closely guarded secret, despite the dozens of versions available online today. The truth is that I remember nothing about those oysters or, in fact, about the rest of the meal, perhaps because later that night I conceived a beautiful daughter, somewhat hurriedly, in the middle of a hotel fire that we then managed to flee with two book manuscripts intact. How could a meal compete with that?

  If you’re looking for true Southern comfort in Ten Restaurants, you might want to forget about Antoine’s and go straight to the chapter on Sylvia’s, the enduring soul-food restaurant on Lenox Avenue, near the Apollo Theatre, which a waitress from South Carolina named Sylvia Pressley Woods and her husband, Herbert, bought for twenty thousand dollars in 1962, transforming a local luncheonette into a celebration of the African-American kitchen that had seen her through a hardscrabble Southern childhood. Woods’s grandfather was hanged for a murder he did not commit; her father died of complications from German gas attacks suffered during the First World War. But her mother and grandmother, raising her on a farm with no elecriticity, no water, and only a mule for transportation, kept the culinary legacy of black America—what we now call Southern food—alive, warm, and sustaining on the kitchen table. (According to Freedman, “routine breakfasts” on the Pressley farm included “biscuits and syrup, grits, okra, tomatoes, and fried fish.”) By the time Woods died five years ago, at the age of eighty-six, black communities North and South knew her as “the queen of soul food,” a title that few who ever entered her restaurant would dispute. I ate at Sylvia’s for the first time a few years after it opened in the early sixties, invited by a boyfriend at a time when Harlem was widely considered a no-go zone for white people of either sex. (“Don’t tell your mother,” my boyfriend, who was black, said when we got on the uptown train.) The menu was plain but irresistible, with fried chicken and smothered chops and candied sweet potatoes and, tucked among the greens and black-eyed peas, platters of macaroni and cheese. What you felt at the time was the hearth, the comfort of a woman in the kitchen—whether in fact or in spirit, or whether it was a Luisa Leone or a Sylvia Woods herself. Since then, Sylvia’s has become a sprawling, landmark restaurant that can seat four hundred and fifty people. And yes, the tour buses stop there now.

  New York, like Paris or London, still sets the style for the rest of its country, which may account for the fact that six of Freedman’s top ten are or were once New York restaurants. Schrafft’s, which began as a candy company in the 1890s, originated in New York and in its heyday, in the mid-fifties, maintained more than fifty locations in and around the city. In many ways, it was the prototype for the better national and regional chains that followed it, ensuring middle-class Americans affordable and dependable quality, along, alas, with the numbing conformity of most American tables—the difference being that Schrafft’s was primarily a place for women to eat. The Schrafft’s I knew best was at 61 Fifth Avenue, a few blocks north of my grandmother’s Greenwich Village apartment, and I got to eat there as a child whenever I visited. It remains, in memory, one of my favorite places—an intensely and intentionally feminine restaurant where you took off your white gloves to lunch on tea sandwiches, iceberg salads, creamed chicken, or more exotically, chicken à la king, unencumbered by brothers or even waiters, or for that matter, by any noisy males demanding attention, and consequently so tidy and appealing in retrospect that, reading about it now, I had to remind myself that this was the Eisenhower fifties, when women were not seated in most New York restaurants without a man to order for them, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of working women in the city were thus consigned to eating their paper-bag sandwiches on park benches or at their desks. Schrafft’s thrived under four generations of Shattucks, its founding family (most significantly, its women), and died, you could say, from feminism, in the late sixties. Freedman tells us that when women started demanding and at long last receiving equal rights as customers in the city’s restaurants, the chain tried to attract men by installing stand-up bars and even advertising the perks of a cocktail hour. No one came.

  Schrafft’s was among the few restaurants in Freedman’s ten to open with an explicit social purpose, and to succeed in serving it. Another, surprisingly, was Howard Johnson’s, the brainchild of the testy and obsessively controlling entrepreneur from Quincy, Massachusetts, who gave it its name, its steep-roofed architecture, its orange and turquoise pain
t, and (for children) its thrillingly predictable menu—as in twenty-eight “personally created” ice-cream flavors, butter-grilled hot dogs, and deep-fried clams—and who in the process became the franchise food king of the American highway, providing millions of traveling families with a guarantee of the same fresh, tasty meals under any of its thousand orange roofs.

  Johnson was not a populist. He began life with the burden of a family debt to pay and ended it a multimillionaire, with a yacht, three big houses, a penthouse on Sutton Place, a table at the Stork Club, and a taste for restaurants like Le Pavillon (although when it came to dessert, he much preferred HoJo’s ice cream, and according to his fourth wife, always kept ten cartons in the freezer.) But he was also in many ways a pioneer. He controlled the franchises he dispensed, supplied everything from their napkins to their food, and retained the right to cancel their contracts at the slightest breach. He saw, before anyone else, that we were now a country of cars, a people on the road, and that nobody else had thought to feed us properly. Like Schrafft’s, Howard Johnson’s was part of my childhood. Whenever and wherever we drove, I waited to spot the iron pole with its hanging logo—Simple Simon the Pieman, and Simon’s drooling dog—signaling the choice I would have to make between peppermint stick with hot fudge and marshmallow sauce in a sundae, or a double-scoop sugar cone with sprinkles. It was done in, Freedman says, by McDonald’s. Not the same thing at all.

  Meanwhile, in the more rarefied pockets of Manhattan, prominent people had already taken up “power lunching”—a term coined some years later by the Esquire editor Lee Eisenberg—in the sleek, modernist splendor of the Grill Room at the Four Seasons restaurant. There, at the penultimate eatery on Freedman’s list, diners picked at simple seasonal American food, high-priced and superbly cooked, while surrounded by the seasonal flora selected by Philip Johnson, who designed the restaurant. Freedman rightly regards the Four Seasons, which opened in 1959, as an aesthetic and entrepreneurial triumph: a combination of the vision of the young Seagrams’s heir Phyllis Lambert, who talked her father, Samuel Bronfman, into commissioning the most beautiful new building in New York for his headquarters; the partnership of the two men she chose to create it, Mies van der Rohe and Johnson, his on-site architect and designer; and the determination of the businessmen—Joe Baum from Restaurant Associates, being the first and most determined—who nurtured its restaurant until a real-estate speculator took over the building and, this year, forced it to move out. But Freedman also knows that “seasonal” does not necessarily mean “local” in a city like New York, and that, for its powerful clientele, the prospect of being seen by similarly powerful people, all of them negotiating lucrative, glamorous deals in hushed tones, was perhaps the truly satisfying part of lunching back to the wall at one of the Grill Room’s coveted banquettes. What the Four Seasons did accomplish was the end of the three-hour, three-martini lunch, the kind followed by a nap at your desk. It is worth noting that by the time the restaurant closed this summer, the power brokers lunching at those banquettes were as toned and trim as a California surfer. They had daily sessions with their trainers, jogged in the park, played squash, and ate plenty of salad greens.

  Which brings us to Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse in Berkeley, the tenth restaurant on Freedman’s list and by now the only one with a particular social mission to have succeeded not only in maintaining but in spreading it to, among other places, the California school system, the White House gardens, and the kitchen of the American Academy in Rome. I often ate there during a stint as a visiting professor at Berkeley, in the early 1990s, and by then it was already an institution, the unassuming, vine-draped shrine of a global culinary creed.

  Chez Panisse opened in 1971, in a quirky, meandering house in Berkeley and, after a few rough years, was filtering not only the taste of France but the taste of Italy, Mexico, and Japan, to name just a few places, through an ur-locavore sensibility soon to be known as California cuisine. (The Momofuku-brand kitchen wizard, David Chang, is said to have called it “one fig on a plate” eating.) It was the first American restaurant to change the way I cooked at home, and given that the cookbooks produced there by Waters and her chefs were filled with dishes begging to be made “in season”—carrot soup with chervil, pasta with snow peas and salmon roe, pear ice cream with pear-caramel sauce—it nurtured my patience in Italy in the summer to wait for the surprises that a vegetable garden brings.

  Reading Paul Freedman about America, stalking myself through the taste of meals at eight of his ten restaurants, each sampled for different reasons at different moments of my life, I began to draw the outlines of a world I shared with other people, people more or less like me, and to wonder what “like me” meant when it came to expectations of inclusion, of common flashpoints of reference, of understanding and participating in the coded language of what we eat and how it is prepared and who is sitting at all those tables around us in what we call a restaurant. I think that’s what Freedman intended us to do.

  I missed, of course, Delmonico’s, which closed years before I was born, and to my regret, I also missed the Mandarin, in San Francisco, where I spent a couple of months in the late sixties, and perhaps because of this, rarely ventured out of Haight-Ashbury, where even the soy sauce came laced with Acapulco Gold. And I wish that Freedman had gone further afield in his travels, told the story of one exemplary Mexican restaurant in, say, Austin or Santa Fe; or of the first great steakhouse in Omaha or Chicago; or of one of the millennial beer-beard-and-baby places across the bridge in Brooklyn that have transformed (and democratized) eating out in this century. But for me, restaurants like Schrafft’s and Howard Johnson’s, with their wide demographic reach and the sense of community, however brief, that they created in the people who enjoyed them, balanced some of the privilege I had to acknowledge, the exceptional accidents and circumstances and associations of an East Coast life that accounted for my evenings at Le Pavillon, and my one power lunch at the Grill Room of the Four Seasons, where I consumed an unseemly amount of lobster salad, steak, and frites while suffering the stares and whispers of the mover-and-shaker regulars, trying desperately but unsuccessfully to place me.

  I’m not sure how either of those restaurants changed America, although they certainly changed New York. In fact, it’s hard to imagine that most Americans had actually ever heard of Le Pavillon or its overweening proprietor, even during his reign of terror among the city’s moneyed classes. Ten Restaurants is a book as much about the contradictions and contrasts in this country as it is about its places to eat. It is designed to keep you up, thinking, and as I did this summer, returning to its rich and often troubling pages.

  PART IV

  Celebrating

  PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

  NOVEMBER 2009

  Some stoves are made for Thanksgiving. My stove in New York is one of them. It has six burners and two ovens, which began to cooperate, more or less, in 2002, after five years of stealing each other’s heat—with the result that the people who love sweet potatoes (my daughter, for one) and the people who can’t manage Thanksgiving without mashed potatoes (my son-in-law) are finally happy, along with the ones who demand Brussels sprouts (my husband) and the ones (I won’t mention them) who ask for string beans. I am the only person at my Thanksgiving dinner who insists on braised red cabbage, but then I am the cook with six burners and two ovens, and I always get it.

  I bought my stove with Thanksgiving in my head. I imagined large birds, basted and browning nicely at 425 degrees in one oven, while apple and pear cakes rose, untroubled, at 350 degrees in the other, and the stock for my bourbon gravy simmered on top, surrounded by pots and pans of everyone’s favorite fixings. There was some discussion at home about the price of my new stove, but I didn’t listen. By my logic, I was saving money, having dropped my long-standing campaign to replace the painted-plywood kitchen shelves with serious maple cabinets. The stove arrived in the fall of 1997 and broke down for the first time a month later, on Thanksgiving Day, leaving sixt
een irritable people eating tuna sandwiches and cranberry sauce at two long laundry tables from the building’s basement that I had squeezed diagonally, end to end, across my dining room, disguised under my mother’s creamy Belgian linens, circa 1930. The emergency repairman appeared in February. With my stove functioning again, I had what would now be called a transformative thought: Thanksgiving but not Thanksgiving. No one would get to vote on the Brussels sprouts or veto the cabbage. No one could say “What? No turkey?” if my cornbread-and-pecan stuffing came spilling out of a couple of juicy capons instead of a turkey that was bound to be stiff by the time it was carved and on a platter. No one could possibly sniff if the sweet potatoes turned out to be butternut squash—so much lighter—cooked in crème fraîche and maple syrup, with a dab of chipotle sauce. No one would be disappointed if the pies and cakes transmogrified into an apple charlotte out of Julia Child, or even a plum pudding, spared that Christmas when the family voted bûche de Noël, albeit with a side of hard sauce.