by Gael Greene
It was the era of the grand café, of everyone wanting to get into the feeding game, of big budgets and drop-dead design, of American chefs cooking American. Joanna’s, a late-night brasserie on East Eighteenth Street, signaled that the vast, soaring, slightly roguish grand café was about to trump the town. I spotted Mayor Ed Koch in the hodgepodge of darlings from every niche our town celebrates assembled there, among the polyestered sycophants devouring the scene and an unfocused American menu. Sure enough, a lot of ambitious entrepreneurs with venture capital went stalking for warehouses, garages, abandoned factories. The Flatiron District was prime.
Just when we’d stopped being amused by the nouvelle cuisine, food snobs began to rediscover Americana. Paul Prudhomme’s blackened redfish led imitators to blacken everything. And soon every zip code would have its Cajun canteen—Memphis, Cajun, Gulf Coast. Abe de la Houssaye and his wife, Alene, decked out Texarkana at 64 West 10th Street like a western saloon, with a rotisserie turning out the hot and smoky feasts of the Gulf Coast and Southwest. We flocked there for spicy crayfish stews, delicate fried catfish, pungent barbecues, and homemade catsup.
At Vanessa on Bleecker, Anne Rosenzweig calf’s liver was an American classic with caramelized onions and bacon bits. Warner LeRoy’s circus fantasy of stained glass and animals at Maxwell’s Plum was amusing, but we loved him more for the house’s lavish ways with black bean chile and the marvelous pecan pie. Some critics made fun of Larry Forgione for cluttering his River Café menu with a geography of credentials, but it was a forgivable quirk in his bold campaign to single out the newly rich harvest of buying American. Homey American desserts—cobblers, brown Betty, shortcake—fried Ipswich clams with fat little bellies and Portland hot slaw, and Chesapeake Bay crab cakes were revisited when Forgione opened his An American Place in 1983. Rosenzweig was also off on her own with Ken Aretsky to open the jewel-like Arcadia, with its bucolic mural wrapping the small room and a seasonally changing menu. Soon Rosenzweig’s lobster club sandwich would be the talk of the lunch scene (inspiring the couturier sandwiches everywhere). I loved the flattering filtered daylight of Alan Stillman’s Manhattan Ocean Club, along with his collection of Picasso ceramics in illuminated niches, Kumamoto oysters from the Pacific, perfect crab cakes, and Hawaiian wahoo (a new fish in town) served with another new arrival, grilled pineapple. Restaurant Associates marked its own rebirth and the rebirth of Rockefeller Center by spending a reported $22 million to create the Sea Grill and the American Festival Café.
A onetime Wall Street broker turned caterer, Martha Stewart, was hustling a book called Entertaining. As the fount of increasingly in-demand, rigorously drilled American chefs, the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park felt driven to vamp its Escoffier Room into the American Bounty Restaurant in 1982. By 1985, there would be a waiting list of jobs for every graduate.
Not that the French and Italians didn’t fight back. At Le Cirque, Sirio resurrected crème brûlée, inspired by a crema catalana he’d fallen for in Spain. Like the tiramisú brought from Venice by the chefs at Castellano, it soon would be tweaked and twisted and, more often than not, fatally compromised. Roman film producer Dino de Laurentiis got into the food business on Columbus Avenue with DDL Foodshow (though not for long). Roger Vergé, the charming three-star chef of Le Moulin de Mougins on the Côte d’Azur, lent his sunny menu to the Polo Lounge at the Westbury Hotel in 1983. Bloomingdale’s, in its endlessly creative golden era, gave Michel Guérard a kitchen for carryout, calling it Comptoir Gourmand. There, Guérard’s right-hand man from Eugénie-les-Bains worked alongside a onetime jewelry designer named Alfred Portale and Troisgros scion Michel, creating classic charcuterie, while the enterprising food department offered 100,000-year-old prepollution ice from the North Pole at seven dollars a pound. At Il Cantinori, an art-world hangout, Pino Luongo prepped for his own eventual moguldom at Le Madri and Coco Pazzo. Olive oil, we learned, had to be Italian. We had to have it, even though some of us rarely cooked anymore, now that boutique carryout shops bloomed in every neighborhood.
In China, with a coven of food-world adventurers, I asked our scoutmaster, David Keh, why no one in New York did pork in the variety we’d tasted. “You can’t just sell pork,” he protested. “It’s the Jewish people who support the Chinese restaurants.” Give them noodles, too, we suggested. He called it Pig Heaven (delivery was dubbed Pig-Out) and quickly drew his celebrity pets to the wondrously silly space with yellow vinyl and dancing pigs by designer Sam Lopata. Keh, glamorous in his mink and Rolls-Royce, had become a legend by the eighties. He recruited a quartet of graces from Taipei to tend the woks in the shiny black-lacquered sophistication of Auntie Yuan, another Lopata drama: matte black banquettes and pin spots casting pools of light on a giant clutch of white orchids, the luxurious details of Wedgwood, mock ivory flatware, and real linen. Two could share a tasting dinner of lobster or peking duck with serious wines, even a Château d’Yquem by the glass with the sorbet. To escape union demands, he downsized David K’s, his proud flagship restaurant, and gave Zarela Martinez her big break at Café Marimba. I thought its thrilling poetry of light and shadow was Sam Lopata’s most gorgeous design.
Macy’s and Zabar’s staged a take-no-prisoner’s caviar price war as well-heeled gourmands lined up before New Year’s Eve to score sturgeon eggs at rock-bottom prices. To keep up with merger play, one had to check out the Power Breakfast scene at the Regency. Sensing the time was ripe for decadence and mink-covered banquettes in Manhattan, the Petrossian brothers imported their caviar and wild smoked salmon concept from Paris and discovered the American brunch tradition. They gave us foie gras on French toast.
In the first wave of immigration from the organically fixated California scene, where Alice Waters had found her mojo in market cooking, Jonathan Waxman landed on East Seventy-ninth Street in 1984, calculatedly cool. With the forever-boyish wine seller from Britain, Melvyn Master, he opened Jams (for Jonathan and Melvyn), producing food as pristine and minimalist as the duplex space, all white, with splashes of color in borrowed art on the walls. At a moment when sauce was catnip in our time, Waxman talked of throwing a perfect piece of fish on a plate, and burying the chicken under a hill of sublime fries. “Let great ingredients speak for themselves,” he said, setting off a mass infanticide of baby vegetables and an upscale run on french fries. He had mesquite on his grill, of course, and sent forth many a California salad—warm game and greens, sweetbreads with wild mushrooms on endive. Lobster was served with a crunch of tossed salad and homemade potato chips. Salad and mesquite, fuel for the eighties. Mesquite now blackened the skies. Cilantro sprouted like wild grass.
In upstate New York, a transplant from Israel started raising a new breed of duck, supposedly torturing them benignly (was that possible?) by using light and music to wake them up so they’d eat and fatten their livers. Now we had American foie gras.
Paul Levy’s Offical Foodie Handbook (Motto: Be Modern, Worship Food) may have been British, but it captured the transatlantic silliness of it all, defining a foodie as “all palate, with a vestigial person attached.”
Restaurant madness had New York in a frenzy. “Never before have so many people spent so much money on eating out . . . and everybody is talking about food,” Patricia Morrisroe wrote in a New York cover story (November 26, 1984). The line to get into Mezzaluna stretched down Third Avenue, she noted. That Florentine import, cleverly stuffed into a small Upper East Side storefront, had barely room for anyone over size two at the teensy tables and certainly no room for a coat check. Society darlings blithely threw their Fendi minks into the cellar and sipped peach-blushed champagne Bellinis, pretending it was amusant to wait forty-five minutes to sit with knees touching knees at a postage stamp-size table and linger over two ounces of carpaccio or a plate-size pizza. The waiters were dashing young Italians who flirted. Soon there would not be many Upper East Side blocks without a copycat cantina. Italian spots multiplied: Prima Donna, Ecco, Trastevere 83, Erminia, Orso, Paola’s, La Sirena, Georgine Ca
rmella. Pesto and sun-dried tomatoes became staples. Everyone sipped so much white wine, there was a grape crisis. Clever marketeers quickly invented white zinfandel. I blush to remember it.
Many New Yorkers ate out morning, noon, and night. We were so many two-career couples with money to burn, I wrote in June 1985. We were newly single, anxiously returning to the perpetually adolescent dating scene. After an hour on the Nautilus or two hours with Jane Fonda’s workout, we had little time to thaw, much less cook. And we were Yuppies, well traveled, curious, self-indulgent, postponing children or entrusting them to the au pair we didn’t report to the IRS. And, of course, no one wanted to wear a tie anymore. The fusty grand French restaurants seemed irrelevent. Hushed eating in a temple was giving way to grazing in a raucous gym.
Everyone wanted to be in the restaurant business. “It’s like a dinner party every night,” the Gotham Bar and Grill’s Jerry Kretchmer liked to say. But the Gotham was foundering in 1985, too hot too soon and experiencing trouble in the kitchen. Jonathan Waxman recommended Alfred Portale to the desperate owners. Last seen at Bloomingdale’s Comptoir Gourmand, Portale had cooked under the fiery star chef from Nice, Jacques Maximin, consultant at Tucano in Ricardo Amaral’s upscale disco, Club A, far east on Sixtieth Street. A few months after Portale moved into the kitchen, I was urging readers to marvel with me at the chef’s straightforward, beautifully mounted food. And very soon afterward, the Times agreed. The Gotham was seeing three stars, a halo to mark the height of the chef’s seafood salad.
The stakes were awesome now. Where once an amateur could toss flea-market tables and chairs into the basement of a Village brownstone and create a restaurant, now design reigned. These real estate developers, advertising wizards, playboy garmentos were willing to spend a million or two for a dramatic setting that might not last five months. Trompe l’oeil, peach walls, murals, and open kitchens with wood-burning pizza ovens were epidemic. And it had to be noisy. “Noisy is cozy,” an architect, proud of his shattering decibels, assured me. “Noise creates energy.” And no one really missed the glitter of conversation, because mostly people just talked about how many sit-ups they’d done that morning and which California chefs were rumored to be moving to New York any day. Often it was not about eating at all—just San Pellegrino at five dollars a bottle and shared nibbles.
Lemminglike masses ran from one hot new grand café to the next, detouring to queue up patiently to infiltrate the intense trattoria scene. Yuppies do not eat, I reported in June 1985. “They socialize, they network, they graze or troll. Tapas at a bar or a pizza* to share make perfect grazing food because [they] give a yup time to check out the crowd and make sure he or she is in the restaurant of the moment.” Moment was the operative word. Never had chic been so cruelly fickle.
Architect Sam Lopata had turned an old box factory on a forlorn stretch of West Eighteenth Street into Café Seiyoken, an Art Deco-Japanese-Continental brasserie for 1983. It was hot, it was fun, and the food was not bad at all, I noted in a column headed “O Tempura, O Mores.” Avant-gardists found it an ideal runway to show off oddly wonderful Japanese fashion. Everyone wore black. When Café Seiyoken cooled, all that applied gorgeousness got tossed out to make way for the flying drapes and pillars architect David Rockwell dreamed up for La Colonna. It minted money, then faded, too. There were so many swan dives. Bon Appétit magazine got it right: The eighties witnessed the bonfire of the foodies.
Even before the doors swung open for the first time, there were crowds lined up outside America, Positano, and Canastel’s. These vast, intensely torrid watering holes, all huddled near the Flatiron Building, might cool inexplicably overnight. How to keep up? “Look for a lurkage of limos,” I suggested.
The renaissance in American cooking was unquenchable, inspiring a demand for free-range chickens, meatier ducks with silken livers, and exquisite miniature vegetables. It was amazing to realize how strongly the chefs of remote Gascony, a region of France not many Americans reached, influenced what we ate. Duck confit (simmered in fat), foie gras, even their fiery Armagnac infiltrated American menus. Then Ariane Daguin, daughter of the energetic Gascon booster chef-hôtelier André Daguin, set up d’Artagnan wth her partner George Faisan, supplying Hudson Valley foie gras and fresh game of a quality local chefs trusted, yet another factor in the dining revolution. Fresh herbs were now available all year round. It felt like a new winery was born every week. If upscale New Yorkers could not finance a million-dollar apartment, at least they could afford a $150 dinner. Was there ever a greater time to be alive and hungry in New York? Drew Nieporent, familiar from the maître d’ stand at Maxwell’s, had found his way to a dismal block of undiscovered TriBeCa to open Montrachet, with David Bouley in the kitchen. Montrachet had scored three stars in record time. By the time I got there, it looked like a foodie convention. Nieporent and his jacketless black-clad staff had to take the phone off the hook most of the day just to function.
Heating up as a countertrend was the craze for dormitory food—macaroni and cheese, meat loaf, mashed potatoes with lumps, chocolate pudding complete with the skin. A few serious restaurants took notice of calorie counters and diet fads. Beans were big and getting bigger.
Restaurant consultant Barbara Kafka divined red meat as ripe for a revival. She also had the vision midway through the eighties to imagine that some women might stay home with their babies and cook again. Cookbook writer and teacher Paula Wolfert thought home entertaining was poised for a comeback. “We just bought a refectory table,” she told me. “I’m tired of eating out.”
“Dessert used to proceed sex,” I wrote. “Now dessert is sex. Some say the waning of our national obsession with sex fuels this insane preoccupation with food.” (Indeed, Morrisroe had written that “the new indulgences were not one-night stands, but ‘Sinful Chocolate Cake’ and ‘Tipsy Trifle.’”) “Others seem to think the increase in anorexia is a sign the food madness is fading,” I went on. “If so, serious food lovers will be left sharing coq au vin in the dozens of little bistros that have opened this year without limousine fanfare—an alternative that’s not to be sneezed at.”
In 1985, Batons lured Richard Krause to Manhattan from Wolfgang Puck’s Asian Chinoise on Main, and suddenly there was a blizzard of cornmeal replacing bread crumbs, a sea of farm-raised catfish. Tuna seared on the edge but rare in the middle was the rage. Other Puck-prepped stars ushered us into China Grill in CBS’s Black Rock. Bronx cowboy Brendan Walsh branded Arizona 206 with his fantasy of southwestern cooking (surely more splendid than anything authentic). A dentist named Joe Santo and his family expanded their franchise a skip from Bloomingdale’s to include Sign of the Dove, Yellowfingers, and Contrapunto, where American riffs on pasta were the theme.
Struck by Jonathan Waxman’s southwestern moves at Buds on Columbus Avenue, a young cook named Bobby Flay, who’d never been west of New Jersey, reinvented southwestern cooking at Miracle Grill. The Balducci family splintered and Grace landed uptown. Animal activists convinced some tenderhearted New Yorkers to give up veal. Mob boss Paul Castellano was eighty-sixed outside Spark’s Steak House that December. (I hoped it was after dinner.) Though speedsters on wheels were poised to deliver food to our homes and offices as never before, favorite old Shanghai and Szechuan haunts were vanishing as the Hong Kongization of Chinatown made Cantonese prime. The growing community’s ambitions spilled over into Little Italy, revising the calligraphy, even on Mulberry Street.
All the while, evil forces were gathering to terrorize our uninhibited gourmandism. Not just animal activists but also Jane Brody in the Times, with her disease of the week, who forced us to recognize cholesterol. The salt bogeyman conspired against us, too. Salt and fat were official enemies now, especially when Craig Claiborne’s doctor took him off salt and he published Craig Claiborne’s Gourmet Diet. Gourmet magazine printed a recipe for a meatless Thanksgiving.
Equitable bravely chose a tacky West Side address for its splashy, art-filled new headquarters and gave it cachet by
luring Maguy and Gilbert LeCoze from Paris to open an American outpost of their two-star monument to the minimalism of fish, Le Bernardin. In the rotunda bar next door, Equitable installed a 128-foot mural in sunset reds and oranges, commissioned from Sandro Chia, of Siena’s Piazza del Campo in the full throes of its annual Palio, the thundering horse race for which Tony May’s smart, Josef Hoffmannesque restaurant above was named. “You may feel tramped or menaced by Chia’s heroics. Or you may be cheered by what restaurants have come to in the Drop Dead division,” I wrote.
