A Writer's Life

by Gay Talese

  Although most of the writers of her acquaintance who frequented her place were not yet known to the general reading public, she seated them at her front-row tables, and sometimes picked up their checks if she knew they were experiencing financial difficulties, and she decorated her restaurant walls with framed photographs of their faces and the covers of their books. The presence of literary writers lent an intellectual aura to Elaine’s that in time attracted some recognized intellectuals, along with leading book reviewers and publishers, playwrights and directors, painters and art patrons, politicians and business tycoons, socialites, gossip columnists, Hollywood actors, and press agents. But no matter how prominent or affluent some of these newcomers happened to be, neither Kaufman nor her waiters—though they were never unnecessarily rude to anyone—permitted pampered movie stars, or renowned louts from the sports world, or mighty moguls from Wall Street, to behave in an imperious or contentious manner while in the restaurant.

  One evening Elaine Kaufman’s headwaiter, a Genoese Italian named Nicola Spagnolo, whom she had worked with at Portofino restaurant in Greenwich Village, was being pestered by a prominent stockbroker who, standing among his seated guests at a round table in the rear of the room—his guests included two high-fashion models and an anchorman from one of the local television channels—kept demanding that Nicola bring over the wine list, or the carte du vin, as he insisted on referring to it.

  “I already told you, we don’t have a carte du vin around here,” Nicola called to him from across the room, having earlier explained that Elaine’s wine selection was too limited to warrant such a list.

  “Oh, I’m sure there’s a carte du vin near the bar,” the man said. “Go over and get it.”

  Nicola turned and walked toward the front of the room. Moments later he returned holding a fifteen-hundred-page copy of the Manhattan telephone directory, and after thumping it down on the table in front of the stockbroker, he announced, “Here’s your carte du vin.” Everyone at the table laughed except the stockbroker. “This is my first and last time in this place,” he said.

  “That’s okay with me,” Nicola replied, anticipating, correctly, that when the broker later paid the bill, there would be no gratuity.

  A few weeks after this, which was during Elaine’s second year in business, a leading art dealer brought in some friends, and as he sat down he asked Nicola for a glass of rosé wine. Without admitting that Elaine Kaufman had not gotten around to stocking her bar with rosé, since no customer had previously requested it, Nicola strolled to the side bar and filled a stemmed goblet almost entirely with white wine, added a little red, stirred it vigorously with a spoon, and then carried it to the art dealer’s table. The latter held up the glass and smelled it. As his companions watched, he slowly began to sip it, closing his eyes momentarily. Nicola stood quietly behind him, not knowing what to expect.

  “Ah, very good, very good,” the man said finally. “What is it?”

  “Balaggola,” Nicola replied, using the first word that had popped into his head. It was a word he had grown up with in Genoa, and it referred to matters of little importance or quality.

  “Ah yes, Balaggola,” the man repeated, with seeming appreciation and recognition, as he took another sip.

  At various times during my lengthy patronage of Elaine’s I have contemplated writing a book about Nicola Spagnolo and Elaine Kaufman and the groups of literary figures and other personalities that interacted with one another there every evening; I believed—during rare moments when I was intoxicated with optimism—that I might be capable of producing a New York version of Ernest Hemingway’s Paris-based A Moveable Feast, or George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. Orwell’s book recounted his travels and travails as a young Englishman who, in addition to other demeaning but enlightening undertakings, earned his livelihood as a worker in a fetid, sweltering kitchen in a Paris hotel, where his colleagues included “fat pink cooks,” “greasy dishwashers,” and such food-smuggling dining room waiters as Boris from Russia and Valenti from Italy. Orwell wrote of Valenti:

  Like most waiters, he carried himself well and knew how to wear his clothes. With his black tail-coat and white tie, fresh face and sleek brown hair, he looked just like an Eton boy; yet he had earned his living since he was twelve, and worked his way up literally from the gutter. Crossing the Italian frontier without a passport, and selling chestnuts from a barrow on the northern boulevards, and being given fifty days’ imprisonment in London for working without a permit, and being made love to by a rich old woman in a hotel, who gave him a diamond ring and afterwards accused him of stealing it, were among his experiences. I used to enjoy talking to him, at slack times when we sat smoking.…

  Orwell described the kitchen in which he worked as “a stifling, low-ceilinged inferno of a cellar, red-lit from the fires, and deafening with oaths and the clanging of pots and pans”; and beyond the double door of the kitchen, Orwell saw the dining room: “There sat the customers in all their splendour—spotless table-cloths, bowls of flowers, mirrors, and gilt cornices and painted cherubim”; and when a waiter walked out of the kitchen into the dining room, Orwell observed:

  a sudden change comes over him. The set of his shoulders alters; all the dirt and hurry and irritation have dropped off in an instant. He glides over the carpet, with a solemn priest-like air. I remember our assistant maître d’hotel … pausing at the dining-room door to address an apprentice who had broken a bottle of wine. Shaking his fist above his head he yelled … “You’re not fit to scrub floors in the brothel your mother came from” … then he entered the dining-room and sailed across it dish in hand, graceful as a swan. Ten seconds later he was bowing reverently to a customer. And you could not help thinking, as you saw him bow and smile, with that benign smile of the trained waiter, that the customer was put to shame by having such an aristocrat to serve him.…

  Until I had read Orwell’s book in the early 1970s—it was first published in the early 1930s—I had never contemplated writing about the restaurant world, but as I gave some thought to it, I convinced myself that I was ideally suited to the task. I had been reared as a restaurantgoer. Menus had been my childhood literature. I could measure out my life with coffee spoons. As a young bachelor in New York, and during my forty-plus years as a married man, I have dined out, on average, four or five times a week. I am alone all day, producing prose with the ease of a patient passing kidney stones, and so at night I prefer to dine out, seeking diversion and usually finding it in any of the half dozen restaurants that I patronize—places where I am able to walk in without a reservation even on heavily booked evenings and receive a smile of recognition and the next available table from the maître d’ (to whom there is no greater aide-mémoire than a twenty-dollar bill).

  Sometimes my wife accompanies me, but just as often she chooses to remain at home. She has manuscripts to read and welcomes the quiet hours alone after her busy days in the office. While she enjoys cooking and will happily put aside her reading whenever the two of us are eating in—compared to the culinary talents of my mother, my wife is a four-star chef—I still respond inharmoniously to home cooking, associating it no doubt with the isolating and dutiful dinners I was forced to endure in my parents’ kitchen above the store, where I was expected to pay attention to what was being said (that is, the shoptalk of my parents) and where the telephone rang incessantly with customers’ calls, and where the meal would conclude with me helping to clear the table and then participating in the washing and drying of the dishes.

  While none of this applies to my marriage, the echo of the shop probably pervades my dinners at home, and occasionally we are interrupted by calls from one of my wife’s authors or business colleagues, and I must admit that whenever my wife seems to be especially cheerful, I am prone to attribute it to good news she received in her office—perhaps that a new book by one of her authors will be reviewed favorably on the front page of next Sunday’s New York Times Book Review.

  While it
is true that my own demeanor is no less influenced by my work, and that my nightly moods are invariably linked to whatever I did or did not do at my desk that day, it is also true that in restaurants I seem to gain some distance from my domestic sense of obligation. I have the option of tuning out, half-listening, drifting about mentally while glancing around at the crowded and noisy dining room, watching almost simultaneously a sporting event being shown on television above the bar, an attractive blonde sitting sideways on a stool, and a fat man sitting at a nearby table with his mouth open, about to devour a piece of fish, a slender slice of flounder; and suddenly I imagine the fish coming to life, jumping off the fork, wiggling along the floor, and being retrieved by a waiter, who carries it in a napkin back to the kitchen, where I have visions of the fish swimming backward in time, a flashback fish floating freely ten days before in the Labrador Sea of northeastern Canada, a fish that is flat-bodied and pancake-size and has two eyes on the same side of its head, a Picasso fish, cruising easily along the muddy bottom of the sea in search of a shrimp until, five minutes before sunrise, it glides into a net, is trapped, is confused, is frightened, but is not alone—hundreds of other Picassoeyed flounder are ensnared there, swirling around, bumping into one another, angling to flip over to their seeing-eye side, hoping to figure out what’s going on—but then they are squeezed together as the big net soars drippingly out of the sea and scrapes along the side of a ship that is piloted by a bearded, brandy-breathed, scrawny, wife-abusing French-Canadian fisherman, who had been illegally trawling in that area all week, and who now, after grabbing fistfuls of wiggling fish out of the net with his gloved hands, hurls them into an ice-filled hold in the stern of his ship, and then starts up his engine for the six-hour journey to the dockside depot of a seafood distributorship in Newfoundland, from which the fish will be flown a day later in refrigerated aluminum containers to JFK airport in New York, where Mafia-affiliated teamsters will receive them and drive them to the Fulton Street market, then deliver them into the hands of wholesale dealers whose vans on the following morning will be double-parked in front of myriad Manhattan restaurants, including Elaine’s, where the fish will be counted and examined by Elaine’s Neapolitan chef, and will be cleaned by her Spanish-speaking scullions, and will be prepared and offered that night as a fresh fish special—flounder meunière almondine, twenty-nine dollars—and this is what was ordered by, and brought to, the fat man I saw sitting in front of me with his mouth agape.

  So many hands, so many people from all over the world, so many middlemen, merchandisers, restaurant managers, chefs, and their helpers are involved in the acquisition, the processing, and the presentation of every piece of fish, every chunk of beef, every lima bean, every carrot and potato that makes its way onto a menu; and the primary concern of a kitchen staff is not only with the cuisine but with the synchronized dispatching of several dozen different appetizers, entrées, and desserts to various tables at the moment when the customers should receive them. “It is not the cooking that is so difficult,” Orwell wrote, but rather “doing everything to time”; and he added, “It is for their punctuality, and not for any superiority in technique, that men cooks are preferred to women.”

  Although he was referring to the 1930s, it seemed to me that little had changed in subsequent decades; a vast majority of the most respected and best-known chefs I was aware of in New York and elsewhere were male. But in addition to the cooking and timing, contemporary chefs are interested in the look of the food, the design of the food, the architecturally interesting way in which food might be placed on a plate—a technique that in the parlance of the practitioners of American nouvelle cuisine is called “plating.”

  Initially inspired by the chefs of Japan and elaborated upon by those in France—which is where many graduates of America’s best cooking schools have traditionally gone to intern in the baptismal dish waters of the Michelin-approved kitchens of Paris and Provence—plating is a means by which chefs can make visual statements, can sculpt and stage their food in ways that can transform plates into miniature theaters in the round, edible art that is intended to appeal at once to the aesthetics and appetites of customers while at the same time (I suspect) indulging the fanciful natures of those chefs whose childhoods were marked by their mothers’ admonitions about playing with their food at the family dinner table.

  Indeed, plating is all about playing with food, toying with it, reshaping it, reimagining it, metamorphosing it, stacking it like building blocks—balancing beef tips and black olives on a brioche that rests atop a circular silver mold filled with sautéed spinach; cantilevering the rib bones of lamb chops across a bird’s nest of couscous and a rice field lined with coolie laborers wearing shiitake mushroom caps; choreographing a water ballet of baby clams within a leek-ribboned watercress soup that resembles a lily pond; presenting a shrimp cocktail in the form of a Spanish galleon, with bows of protruding prongs, masts of bread sticks, and billowing sails shaped by potato chips. And plating is also about advertising the creative chefs’ elevated status in the better restaurants and their power to prevent the captains in the dining room from tampering with their inventiveness as was once routinely done in the days when food left the kitchen in lidded platters to be placed at tableside next to a stack of empty plates on wheeled wagons that were really the captains’ vehicles for displaying their dexterity and surgical skills as spooners and carvers and occasionally as pyrotechnical wizards with steak flambé and crêpes suzette.

  Yes, I love the modern restaurant world, and I respect all restaurants—the good and the not so good—as fundamentally sincere and intrinsically democratic establishments whose kitchens are Ellis Islands of opportunity for thousands of hardworking immigrants who, initially speaking limited English, can nonetheless hone their skills and rise through the ranks to become the next Henri Soulé of Pavillon fame, or the next Sirio Maccioni of Le Cirque, or any of the young proprietors whose names now appear on restaurant marquees, or in the newspaper columns next to the names of those celebrities and socialites whose presence can establish a restaurant as the place to be—until they tire of it, and it tires of their inflated egos and unpaid bar bills. The essence of every restaurant’s ingredients is based on hope, trust, and optimism. There is the hope that people will enjoy what is served. There is the trust that they will later pay for it. And there is the optimism that an investment in restaurants will be rewarding and rewarded, bringing satisfaction not only to the owners, the managers, the chefs, and their clientele but also to all the others involved—the servers and bartenders, the suppliers of food, linen, candles, and music, as well as the sweepers of the after-dinner table crumbs, who may briefly brush against the shoulders of the seated moguls and movie stars and other achievers while hoping that some of the luck and success will rub off.

  7

  WHILE I VIEWED GEORGE ORWELL AS A QUASI-DANTE PORTRAYING a purgatory of pots and pans in his book Down and Out in Paris and London, I saw myself as producing a Decameron of Dining Rooms, feasting on the tales of the customers, the restaurateurs, and their personnel, and somehow blending this material into a cohesive narrative. At first I did not approach Elaine Kaufman or Nicola Spagnolo for interviews, preferring to wait until I had a better idea of what I was doing, but I did begin keeping a restaurant journal in the 1970s, one in which I noted what I had observed and overheard during my nightly visits to Elaine’s and other restaurants, and I continued this practice on and off for the next thirty years. Indeed, it was the restaurant world that I was writing about during the summer of 1999 when I saw the China-USA women’s World Cup soccer match on television. The fifty-four and a half typed pages that I had then completed—and that were stacked on my desk as I took a respite from my work to spend a Saturday afternoon channel-surfing, during which time I happened upon Liu Ying’s sad moment in the Rose Bowl—were pages that I had rewritten many times in the past and were distilled from two hundred other pages that I had written and thrown away.

  Often I involve mys
elf with two or three unrelated subjects at the same time, and I shift from one to another when I become bogged down and believe it wiser to put aside what I am doing and reappraise it at some point in the future. In 1974 I had begun to describe many restaurant scenes and situations that I had witnessed, but they seemed to be too fragmented and diffused. So I moved on to another subject that I had under consideration, and finally in 1979 I saw this one through to the end. It was Thy Neighbor’s Wife—one of four books that I had begun and completed between 1965 and 1999; but during this period I had also started several other books and had finished none of them. My curiosity drives me in different directions, but until I have invested lots of my time—months, years—I have no idea whether a chosen subject will sustain my interest. Sometimes I toss into the trash various drafts of what I have written, while at other times I put them aside, file them away, reread them a year or two later, rewrite and refile them perhaps, or decide that they are not worth saving after all, and so I tear them up and rid myself of them forever.

  Writing is often like driving a truck at night without headlights, losing your way along the road, and spending a decade in a ditch. It had been much simpler when I worked as a journalist. In those youthful days I was ordered by an editor to write a certain story, was permitted a limited time in which to complete it, and, whether or not I was entirely pleased with the results, I was forced to surrender it before the deadline to the editor, who passed it on to the copyreader, after which it went to the printers, and that was the end of it until it appeared in the next edition of the Times. On the following day, the process was repeated.