by Ruth Reichl
Slide the potato cake onto a hot platter, sprinkle with the coarse sea salt and serve immediately.
Serves 4
Note: You can use bacon fat or duck fat, or, if you are very lucky, goose fat for these potatoes as well. You can also gussy them up a bit by adding diced parsley or diced garlic at the very end, as they do at L’Ami Louis in Paris.
Palm’s potatoes were a hard act to follow, and as we ate our way through the steakhouses of the city—through Gallagher’s, where the waiters were extraordinarily kind to children, and Christ Cella, where they were not, through Pietro’s, and Pen and Pencil, and Smith and Wollensky—I watched my son struggle with the memory of his first hash browns. He soon expanded his repertoire to include cottage fries and steak fries and potatoes O’Brien, but none measured up to the masterful hash brown. He went on to sample the potatoes at the Old Homestead, Ruth’s Chris, Ben Benson’s, and Frank’s. But at the end, when we were beginning to wrap up our research, he discovered a whole new class of potato.
It happened at the brand-new Morton’s in midtown, where we watched with rapt attention as a cart laden with raw meat was trundled toward us. Nicky listened intently as the waitress held up one plastic-wrapped piece of meat after another. In her hands each filet, strip steak, and porterhouse became an actor auditioning for an important part in our meal. When she had finished showing off the meat, she allowed the potatoes their shot at stardom.
Nicky was entertained, but Michael and I both found this show so silly that we started looking around the room, trying to find some distraction to keep us from laughing out loud. While Michael stifled his mirth by focusing on the LeRoy Neiman prints, I peered through the expensive gloom at my fellow diners and began to experience a prickly sense of déjà vu.
“Look, Mommy,” said Nicky, tugging at my sleeve, “look at the potatoes. See how big they are!”
The waitress was holding up giant tubers, magnificent spuds of Fal staffian proportions. I’d never seen anything like them. “Those will make good hash browns,” Nicky said confidently. “Can I go into the kitchen and watch them cook?”
“Probably not,” I said without thinking. “The kitchen’s pretty small.”
Michael and Nicky both looked at me quizzically. “How do you know that?” Michael asked. “You said this was your first visit.”
“It is,” I said, puzzled myself. “But it feels so familiar.” And suddenly I had it! “I have been here before—but it was a long, long time ago.”
“Before I was born?” asked Nicky. “That long ago?”
“Yes, sweetie,” I said. “Way before you were born. The last time I was here, I was just about your age.”
Manhattan in the fifties was paved with dim little French restaurants with red velvet walls. They were everywhere. They looked the same, they smelled the same, their menus were interchangeable. They all served coq au vin, filet of sole, and consommé à la something or other. The chefs in these establishments came and went; the waiters came and stayed. You chose your restaurant for the waiter. And my parents chose the Dubonnet for Max, visiting him two or three times a week.
Probably it was an ordinary restaurant, but I remember it as a magical place of endless treats: Max gave me whole glasses filled with maraschino cherries and bowls of chocolate mousse large enough to drown in. Sometimes he showed up with adorable white bunnies that turned out to be made of mashed potatoes, or rare tidbits of tenderloin cut into tiny squares that fit perfectly into my mouth. But the biggest treat of all was when Max took me to the kitchen.
Together we would parade across the crimson carpet, past all the ordinary people doomed to spend their ordinary evening in the dining room, and push through the swinging doors into the warm, bright domain of the cooks.
“Get that brat out of here,” the chef always shouted when he saw me. “You know I hate children.” But as he spoke a sautéed mushroom or a slice of apple was flying toward me, the first of the many little gifts he would bestow upon me before evening’s end.
If it was a slow night he and the sous-chef would tie an apron around my waist and demonstrate the art of making radishes into roses, or turning potatoes into perfect rounds. As Max hovered watchfully in the background they would have omelet races, arguing over who could flip his higher into the air. On busy nights they sat me on the counter, handed me a dishcloth, and had me carefully clean the edge of each plate just before it left the kitchen.
Sometimes my parents lingered after the other guests had gone, and the chef would say, “Let’s play the spice game.” He’d wrap a dishcloth around my eyes and hold one canister after another beneath my nose. “Tarragon,” I’d cry when the dark licorice scent assaulted my senses, and the cooks would cheer. When a dusty smell hit the back of my throat before it hit my nose I knew it was the turmeric they used to color their curries, and when the smell was wild and musty and brown I recognized the juniper berries used in game stews. They held bottles of rum extract (like butterscotch), cooking sherry (nutty, slightly sour), and Worcestershire sauce (sweet, tangy, mysterious) under my nostrils and if I identified them all correctly, they’d thump each other on the back and fête me with lemon cookies.
But what I liked even better were the times Max took me into the private dining room where the waiters went to smoke. We’d sit in that tangle of extra chairs and scarred wooden tables as he and Bruno and Jacques traded stories, reaching back farther and farther into their memories.
The best stories always began “When my father was a waiter . . .” Hearing that, Bruno would light a cigarette, Jacques would sip his wine, and I would cross my legs beneath me and hold my breath.
“When my father was a waiter,” Max said, clearing his throat, “people did not receive remuneration from the restaurant. No, no, my friends, it was not as it is today. Back then people paid for the privilege of collecting tips. And let me tell you, the competition for the grand establishments, for Sherry’s and Delmonico’s and Rector’s, was fierce.
“But those were different days, a time when the word ‘diet’ had not spread its blight across the land to ruin everybody’s appetite. Today your average diner indulges in an appetizer, an entrée, and maybe, just maybe, if he’s feeling flush, a tiny tidbit of dessert. But in those days? Oh yes, my friends, back then people knew how to eat. Why, Diamond Jim would eat four dozen oysters and a gallon of orange juice before he even ordered dinner. And those were manly oysters, six inches from one end to the other, not these puny little creatures that huddle in their modern shells. And Miss Lillie Langtry, why, she would match him oyster for oyster, swig for swig, as if her honor was in it. That was, you understand, just a little snack to wet their whistles, provide them with the fortitude to contemplate the menu. Theirs, my friends, was a table worth waiting on. The eating lasted through the night: whole herds of cattle and braces of birds were demolished before the evening ended. And on good nights my father would come home with silver jingling in his pockets and ducks dangling from his fingertips. Oh yes, my friends, in those days, being a waiter was a wonderful thing.”
“It’s good now too, Max, isn’t it?” I’d ask, slipping my hand anxiously into his. “Think of all the people you make happy!”
And Max would twinkle down at me and say, in his most courtly manner, “Thank you very much. Sometimes I need reminding.” And then, very gently, he would lead me back into the kitchen and through the swinging doors into the dark, hushed, perfumed air of the Dubonnet, where my parents were still sipping wine and talking in the low voices that meant that they were having a very good time.
And on those nights, with my mother smiling and my father looking at her as if she was the best thing in the whole world, I wished that we could live at the Dubonnet, where nobody worried about money, the food was never burnt, and only good things ever happened.
I hadn’t thought about the Dubonnet for many years, but now I could feel the ghost of Max hovering in the room, and I was grateful to Mor ton’s for restoring him to me. And a few days later
I went to Peter Luger and discovered an entirely different doorway to the past.
As the waiter walked across that great barn of a restaurant, the meat aroma grew so intense that I was suddenly back in Jimmy’s shop. The scent of steak was like the sound of a trumpet cutting through the air, so high and clear that it triumphed over every other sense. Then the soft richness was filling my mouth, and it was a taste as old as I was and for a moment I merged with the flavor so that I had disappeared completely. This was a great steak. I had found what I was looking for. I had another piece, and then I was chewing on the bones and picking out the marrow and chasing all the tender little bits that hide between the fat and the bone.
By the time we were done with dinner I was covered in meat juice from head to foot. But I didn’t care: I had discovered that I could go back in time whenever I wanted. All it took was an old-fashioned piece of steak.
Working on the steak roundup piece made me happier than I remembered feeling since we’d moved to New York. But being in the greenies ruined it, and it was a long time until I wrote about another steakhouse. Now and then I took Nicky to the Palm for hash browns, and I sometimes sneaked back to Peter Luger for a taste of the past, but I kept that to myself. It was not until a few years later, when a reporter asked where I spent my own money, that it came to me that Peter Luger deserved a full review. Of course I gave it three stars.
That set off another flap. I may have been unaware that Bryan Miller had considered the restaurant worthy of no more than a single star, but his fans were not. Taking my review as one more sign of my unsuitability, they wrote in to remind my editors of this fact.
I didn’t mind: controversy is good for a critic. Little did I know that my steak problems were not behind me.
One day near the end of my tenure, my boss motioned me into his office. John Montorio’s title was Style Editor, but his style was decidedly un-Timesian. Brash, noisy, and very smart, he was the son of a bricklayer and took up more emotional space than the paper generally allotted its editors. He was funny and gossipy, stormed through the newsroom like a bull in a china shop, and made no bones about the fact that he had come up the hard way. His editorial sense was impeccable, but he seemed to spend a fair amount of time thinking of ways to get promoted. Now he looked me straight in the eye and said, “You’re making my life miserable.”
“How?” I asked, watching him run a hand across his head and wondering, as we all did, whether he was wearing a toupee.
He gave his hair a final tug and said, “Last year I had to go have lunch with one of the paper’s bigger advertisers to explain why, even though you are always writing about steak, you never choose to write about the steak in his restaurants. That’s okay, that’s my job, I don’t mind. But you go five years without a single correction, and then you make a mistake about Sparks. Sparks!”
“Oooh,” I said, beginning to understand.
“That’s not a good place to make a mistake about!” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling a little sick. The greenies are bad; corrections are worse.
“And it wasn’t even about food!” he fumed. “It was about art!”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“Don’t criticize the art if you don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Have you seen the paintings they have hanging in there?” I asked, trying to make John smile. He was not in the mood.
“You could have called them ugly,” he said. “That’s an opinion, and you have a right to it. You could have called them atrocious, or repulsive, or even ludicrous. But you cannot call them ersatz, for Christ’s sake. That is not a judgment. That’s a fact.”
“I know,” I said, “but ersatz is such a great word.”
He groaned.
In a Diner’s Journal article about the newly expanded Sparks, I had written this: “The new restaurant is huge and slightly tacky, so filled with ersatz old things that it looks more like a steakhouse designed by Disney than one in the beating heart of Manhattan.”
The owners were furious. They sent a registered letter assuring us that all the antiques were genuine and could be documented. They said that their Hudson River School paintings had been characterized as one of the better collections. They insisted that all the ugly old cabinets were made by Horner, who was not only one of the greatest American furniture makers of all time, but a New Yorker to boot. They demanded a correction.
They got one. “I’ll do even better,” I promised John. “I like the place. They serve good steak. I’ll write a full review.”
“Fine idea,” he said.
And so, for the first time in my life I set out to review a restaurant with my mind already made up.
Giving Sparks a good review should have been easy. It is, after all, a perennial favorite with New York critics, who are charmed by its meat, its wine list, and its background. Although Sparks is an infant in the venerable pantheon of New York steakhouses, it acquired instant history in 1985 when mob boss Paul Castellano was gunned down right in front. New Yorkers love a Mafia connection, and the restaurant’s reputation was made.
“You’re going to like this place,” I promised Nicky as we opened the door. He was older now, and it took more than hash browns to win his endorsement. “They do this thing with the tablecloths, a sort of magic act where they whip them off without removing the plates.”
“I am going to like that,” he replied confidently.
But by the time we got to the magic plates, Nicky was fast asleep with his head on the table. We had spent forty-five minutes waiting to be seated, jostled by an ever-increasing crowd of growingly disgruntled people. The maître d’, who glared at us when he saw that we had a child in tow, had no sympathy for our distress.
“This is ridiculous,” said Michael after twenty minutes. “Let’s leave.”
“We can’t,” I pointed out. “I’ve got to review this place.”
“But I’m so hungry,” he said morosely. “If we aren’t seated in fifteen minutes I’m going to call and order a pizza. I’ll have it delivered right here.”
“You can’t,” I pleaded, thinking of John. “Please don’t.”
Fortunately our table beat the deadline. Unfortunately the service was terrible, the steaks were worse, and Nicky found the hash browns so sad that they put him to sleep. He woke up in time to taste the tartufo, took one bite, and put his head back down on the table.
“Are you telling me,” said Michael as he carried our sleeping son out the door, “that you’re going to write a good review of an ugly restaurant that doesn’t honor reservations and serves terrible food?”
“This was just a bad night,” I said optimistically. “Every restaurant’s entitled to one. It’s usually much better.”
“Okay,” he said, “we’ll give them another chance.”
But things got worse. One night we were seated next to a group of drunken stockbrokers. Another night I showed up for my confirmed reservation only to find the restaurant closed. At other times the food came undercooked, overcooked, and overdressed. In the end I took a fellow critic along, hoping that he’d be recognized and get a great steak. He was, and he did—but mine was terrible. The two of us sat there, tasting the two steaks side by side, completely flummoxed by the experience.
“You told me that you liked the place!” cried John when he read the review.
“I thought I did,” I said, “but further investigation proved me wrong. You wouldn’t want me to pull my punches, would you?”
“Of course not.” He sighed and let the matter drop.
But a few months later John called me back into his office. “I just had a meeting with the owner of Sparks,” he said.
“Uh-oh.”
“You can say that again. He told me to, and this is a direct quote, ‘order up a positive story and put it on the fucking front of Dining.’”
“You’re kidding!” I said.
“No,” he said, “I’m not. He even had the chutzpah to tell m
e when to do it. He said I should blame it on ‘the old man.’”
“The old man?”
“Yeah, to tell my subordinates that the senior Mr. Sulzberger told me to do it.”
“What did you tell him?”
“After I caught my breath and counted to ten,” said John, “I told him we simply don’t operate like that. And you know what he said? He said, ‘Oh yeah? Don’t be fucking naive.’”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he replied wearily. “But do me a favor, okay? From now on, stay away from steak.”
WHERE STEAK IS BOTH KING AND JESTER
by Ruth Reichl
KURT VONNEGUT JR. does not seem happy. The author has been hanging around the entryway of Sparks with the actor Albert Finney and about 20 other hopeful diners. The maitre d’hotel does not seem in the least concerned that we are squashed into an uncomfortable crowd, and he is brusque with those of us who ask when our tables will be ready. After about 20 minutes, Mr. Vonnegut’s party leaves, and as I watch the men walk through the door, I find myself wondering if there is another restaurant in America where people of such stature would be kept cooling their heels.
In the end, we wait 40 minutes for our reservation, but it is some consolation to know that Sparks does not play favorites.
The problem is that it does not play favorites with the steaks either. I have had terrific steaks at Sparks. I have had mediocre ones, too. Sometimes on the same evening. And although lobster is usually excellent, there have been nights when it was a disaster. Late last year, Sparks expanded into the space next door, once occupied by Arcimboldo, and the kitchen seems to be struggling. Hash browns are not always crisp, meat is often overcooked, and almost everything is oversalted. But there are two things of which you can be absolutely certain when you are finally seated: the service will be cheerful, and the wine list will make up for almost everything else.
