Steal the Menu

by Raymond Sokolov

  Could this kind of unaffected hospitality survive the onslaught of adult gourmets in diamonds and limos? Jean-Pierre Haeberlin was justifiably worried. He said (and Newsweek quoted him):

  We want to keep our simple country spirit, but from now on everything will have to be more expensive. We’ll need more help, a wider cheese selection, nothing but the choicest fruit. The higher prices will keep away some of our local clientele. To make up for that, we’ll have to draw many more tourists and that means we’ll be dealing with a more modish crowd. Between you and me, I don’t think we’re ready for the third star yet.

  It was also a moment of challenge and change for me. Despite this minor triumph in Alsace, and a more significant professional success with an interview I extracted from Orson Welles when his Shakespearean film Chimes at Midnight opened in America, my career as a Paris correspondent had not flourished. I brooded over that with the typical paranoia of someone working at the periphery of a large organization. Was I being stifled by a hostile bureau chief who felt I had been foisted on him by his bosses in New York? I thought so. And when Jack Kroll, the senior editor in charge of cultural coverage, invited me to return to New York and work for him in the “back of the book,” where I had flourished as a trainee two years earlier, I did not hesitate to accept his offer.

  Margaret was too far along in her second pregnancy to fly, so she and I and little Michael booked passage on the France. The meals were grand. I remember one breakfast with retrospective astonishment: course after course, including an omelet with asparagus tips peeking coyly out from one end and kidneys roasted in their own fat. Mostly, we slept between meals. A Frenchman we met on board attributed this doziness to the gentle undulation of the ship. “Le tangage,” he said. “Ça endort.” (The ship’s pitching puts you to sleep.)

  I blamed the duck at lunch.

  After five halcyon days on a sunny, placid North Atlantic, we landed at the docks on the West Side of Manhattan on my twenty-sixth birthday, August 1, 1967, unsure if I’d made the right decision.

  I knew that if I had stayed on much longer in France, I would likely have made my life there. My spoken French was taking over my English as the language in which I found it easier to express myself. So much of my brief adult life had occurred in French. There were already subjects I had first learned about in the language. We had made friends. Michael was becoming a French child.

  When I’d made the decision to leave Paris, it had seemed clear that if we did not return home then, we would likely find ourselves increasingly confirmed as expatriates. This vision had a certain appeal for me. I had worked hard to adjust to Paris and was proud when the very senior French reporter Michel Gordey told me that summer that I had made a good “début.” But it wasn’t enough. For a grandchild of refugees, “expatriate” was just a fancy word for “immigrant.” And however fluent and idiomatic my French became, it would always be a second language for me. There would always be words whose genders I’d be unsure about, cultural references I wouldn’t get, anti-American remarks I’d feel obliged to object to even if I basically agreed with them. Worst of all, my child would be a native speaker—in fact, a native in all respects except his place of birth. And I would be the slightly awkward foreign parent, subtly out of place.

  Yet we felt just as dépaysé in those first few weeks in New York. Homeless, with a birth just weeks away and a confusing and ill-defined new assignment at Newsweek, I was as anxious about my life as ever. The apartment we found was a charmless box in an ugly newish building. Its windows looked out on the building behind. Through them, we could see a couple our age conducting their lives just a few yards away.

  One of our first nights in this place, my parents came to dinner. Midway through the soup, Mother gasped and pointed to the window. Our neighbors were demonstrating the missionary position. They kept it up through our main course, interrupting their revels from time to time to sweep the floor and comb their large mutt.

  Dinner out in Manhattan was much less exhilarating. We had been right to suspect the worst of the restaurant scene there. The bistros, a sorry gaggle of tired, hackneyed little dumps clustered near the theater district, served depressing retreads of clichés such as canard à l’orange or coq au vin. After trying one or two, we headed for the top, La Caravelle, which turned out to be a stylish oasis for high-society diners. Town & Country magazine had recently published a map of the restaurant’s seating plan, complete with the names of chic patrons at their favorite locations in the room. We expected to be seated in the inner clutch of undesirable tables known as Siberia. We did not expect to find the menu as uninspiring as it was. Worst of all, we did not feel as though we were in a French restaurant of the sort you’d find in France, even though the menu’s first language was French, as was the language spoken by the waiters.

  Among the hors d’oeuvres at Caravelle (as at most of the other high-end French restaurants in town) were those pike dumplings known as quenelles de brochet, elegant specialties of Lyon virtually ubiquitous in the New York culinary stratosphere. There was a simple explanation for the curious local passion for quenelles. Behind them, and the menus at almost all the top French restaurants, lay the remarkable success of one man, Henri Soulé. He had created the restaurant in the French pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair and then re-created it as a permanent restaurant in 1941, Le Pavillon, having acquired special immigrant status for himself and his staff as war refugees. Quenelles were a Pavillon trademark.

  They also became a trademark of the various spin-offs and clones of Le Pavillon that sprang up in the ensuing decades. Soulé’s snobbery was a defining part of what passed for haute cuisine in New York. He whored after big money and big names and sent those he considered nobodies to his back room. The already alienated ordinary gastronome could not help but see a tinge of anti-Semitism in Soulé’s most celebrated mistreatment of a customer, his vendetta against Harry Cohn, who was the landlord of Le Pavillon but couldn’t get a good table there.

  The sole exception to the Soulé spirit in fancy French restaurants in New York in 1967 was a classy but not frosty restaurant in the garden of an East Side town house called Lutèce. The chef, André Soltner, had been a rising star in Paris when the French-American perfume heir and bon viveur André Surmain hired him to come to America and open a great restaurant. Lutèce, in my opinion at the time, was the only authentic French kitchen of high quality in the city. It was also not fragrant with disdain for its customers. The reason for this, according to Soltner’s main competitor, Roger Fessaguet, the chef at Caravelle, was that nobodies were the only clientele Lutèce could attract. Fessaguet told me in an interview in 1973 that there were only two serious French restaurants in New York, his and Lutèce: “We get high society and Soltner gets everybody else.”

  This was a major exaggeration by that date, but it was certainly the case as late as 1971, when I met a man, Jewish but apparently not too happy about it, who confided to me that it was hard to take André Surmain seriously because he had changed his name from Sussman. There was also the problem of André Soltner’s accent. It wasn’t “really” French. He was Alsatian and sounded vaguely German when speaking English.

  André and Simone Soltner with staff, 1981. This was Lutèce at its zenith, the nation’s best restaurant and the last fully French establishment to occupy that position. (illustration credit 1.5)

  The other food I did come to love in those days in New York was a special kind of Chinese food, the spicy cuisine of Sichuan Province. There were no Sichuan restaurants as such yet, but Sichuan dishes had begun appearing at the Four Seas, located not in Chinatown but on a dark corner at the edge of the financial district on Maiden Lane.

  The Four Seas restaurant was the project of a Chinese-Brazilian shipping magnate named C. Y. Tung. He was a fan of Sichuan cuisine and saw to it that a handful of typical Sichuan dishes appeared on the otherwise northern Chinese menu of the Four Seas. I was taken there by friends from graduate school, the sinologist John Schrecker and
his wife, Ellen, who had eaten the real thing in Taiwan and eventually brought back with them a cook born in Sichuan.

  All of this—the tyranny of Soulé’s snobbish mediocrity, Soltner’s scorned superiority, the occult rise of Sichuan cooking—struck me as good material for an article, and I wangled an assignment at New York magazine. The piece got as far as galley proofs before it was spiked because of a revolt by the magazine’s permanent food staff, which included Gael Greene, a bodacious Detroiter from my old neighborhood, and her “underground gourmet” colleagues, the graphic designers Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder. New York’s legendary editor Clay Felker exhibited no shame in telling me this, and he then went on to question my expense account as excessive. I was indignant. Whether he relented on the expenses, I do not recall. But it was clear—I was told directly by a New York managing editor—that, because of my prickliness, Felker had blacklisted me.

  I had already been published as a food writer in 1965, in Newsweek, with a review of a cookbook, in which I included an account of a meal I’d cooked from its recipes. The Connoisseur’s Cookbook, by Robert Carrier, was a compendium of food served at the American expat’s trendy London restaurant, Carrier’s. The review was signed. It was my debut in the food field, and the only published credit as a food writer I could show, when my life took, as they say, a dramatic turn.

  I’d spent most of my time during that period reviewing books for Newsweek. They tended to be serious books, novels by Philip Roth, exposés of the State Department. I also wrote cover stories about important writers: Ross Macdonald, Norman Mailer. I had a nice life.

  Then one morning in the spring of 1971, another Newsweek cultural writer, Alex Keneas, came into my office with an idea so preposterous that I didn’t even bother to reject it. I immediately forgot what he’d said.

  What he said was: “Craig Claiborne is retiring as food editor of the New York Times. You should apply for the job.”

  Alex knew this because he had once worked as an editor on the society-obituary desk at the Times and he was still in touch with old friends at the paper—and he was aware of my obsession with food. As far as I was concerned, however, I had no claim on the most important job in American food journalism. I was, in today’s terms, a foodie, but not a food professional. Certainly, I couldn’t have gotten the Times to listen to me on my own, even if I had wanted to be a food critic.

  But Paul Zimmerman could. Paul was Newsweek’s film critic, and, in an earlier phase, he had once interviewed Charlotte Curtis. The two of them, neighbors in Greenwich Village, had ended up as friends. Alex told Paul about his suggestion to me. Paul, whose dining experiences in Europe the previous summer I had helped plan, believed I would be an excellent replacement for Claiborne. He called up the redoubtable Curtis, who was under serious pressure from Claiborne to find his replacement so that he could get on with launching an independent newsletter.

  One morning in the winter of 1971, Zimmerman came into my office and said, “I’ve been talking to Charlotte Curtis about you and the Times food job. She’d like to take you to lunch. Here’s her number.”

  I called it. Why not? (Fateful words.) Why wouldn’t I want to be taken to lunch by the acerbic and powerful Miss Curtis?

  We met at La Côte Basque, Henri Soulé’s second Manhattan restaurant, a gift for his mistress, Henriette Spalter, known in the restaurant trade as Madame Pipi, because, I was told, she had started out as the ladies’ room attendant at Le Pavillon.

  True to form, for a Soulé restaurant, the best seats at La Côte Basque were those near the street door. Charlotte and I sat at the table closest to the entrance, practically in the coat-check room.

  The subject of food never came up. But Leonard Lyons did. He was cruising the dining room, pad in hand, gleaning tidbits for his syndicated New York Post gossip column, “The Lyons Den.” We dodged his questions. A few minutes later, a bottle of white wine arrived, the gift of a turbaned Romanian dowager at a table a few feet away, who wanted to know who the young man with Charlotte Curtis was. We dodged her question, too. Farther down the wall of banquettes, I espied two luminaries well known to me who I hoped wouldn’t espy me. They were Kermit Lansner, the editor of Newsweek, and Katharine Graham, chair of the Washington Post Company, which owned Newsweek.

  Charlotte dropped me back at Newsweek in a cab that couldn’t have taken more than three minutes to cover the ten blocks downtown from La Côte Basque. It was time enough, however, for her to get to the point: “You could probably have this job if you want it,” she said. “But since you’ve never written about food or restaurants, you’ll have to do some tryout pieces. We’ll pay you for them, of course, and cover your expenses. The whole thing will be completely confidential. Are you interested?”

  “Why not?” I replied.

  Where was the harm? Why wouldn’t I want to eat out on the Times and get paid for my trouble, which amounted to writing three short pieces that couldn’t be spiked because they weren’t supposed to be printed? It all seemed like some surreal lark. I assumed the Times would never hire me.

  I told my wife exactly that. And my colleague Charles Michener also told me exactly that. His Yale friend Bill Rice, who had professional food training and lots of food clips, was clearly a better candidate.

  But we were both wrong.

  A few weeks after the Côte Basque lunch, after I’d handed in two restaurant pieces and an interview with Piper Laurie, then the wife of Newsweek’s movie critic Joe Morgenstern, about her baking skills, Charlotte Curtis called me at home. I was in the Forty-second Street library checking citations for a book I’d translated from French to be called Imperialism Now. It was an updating of Lenin’s 1917 tract Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism written by a French economist of Maoist tendencies called Pierre Jalée. His previous book had been The Pillage of the Third World.

  I had spent hundreds of hours at this task for a pittance, acquiring a transient competence in French financial lingo, including the French equivalents for “mutual fund” (fonds communs de placement) and “carbon black” (le carbon black). My publisher was a Nigerian, and his firm was called Third Press. I’d met him at a party and agreed to translate the Jalée book so that I could tell my lefty friends from Harvard, who accused me of selling out to the capitalist press, that I worked for Newsweek to support my Maoist activities.

  This is not what I told Curtis. When I called her back, she wanted to know why I was in the library. I made something up.

  “Congratulations,” she said.

  Pause.

  “You are going to take the job, aren’t you?”

  “Why not?”

  * See Robert Alan Goldberg, Back to the Soil: The Jewish Farmers of Clarion, Utah, and Their World (University of Utah Press, 1986), pp. 67–68.

  Two

  The Ungastronomical Me

  In the month I insisted on taking off before starting work at the Times, I spent much of each day worrying about what lay ahead. I knew I was about to take a blind leap. My wife wouldn’t let me forget that. She knew that I was radically, hopelessly unqualified for the job, because she was an excellent cook, and she knew me to be an enthusiastic novice, at best. If I really did go to the Times, the world would assume, or expect, that I was an expert, self-taught perhaps, but with years at the stove behind me. There’d be no way I could fake that, not for long. If people came to our house for dinner, did I expect Margaret to pretend I’d made the dinner she’d actually prepared?

  I’m a journalist, I countered—an observer, not a participant. Does anyone care if Clive Barnes can dance? As the Times ballet critic, his pirouettes were verbal.

  Yes, she snapped back, but he’d spent his life studying pirouettes and arabesques. He was an informed observer. I was hardly his equivalent in food.

  In fact, my fears were largely unfounded. After an initial bit of hazing from a couple of TV reporters, I settled into the job and discovered that both Times readers and even food professionals were eager for a fresh voice.
Also, I had a test cook to make sure that the recipes published under my name actually worked.

  The New Yorker salutes me with a cartoon that preserves my anonymity. (illustration credit 2.1)

  Forty years later, I’ve been able to look back on my first thirty years of life and pick out strands and seams that connect with the person who jumped out into the public food arena in 1973 and stayed there from then on. But the embryonic gastronome I’ve been able to unearth with hindsight is a character no one back then could have predicted would remain anything but an intellectual with a side interest in food.

  At a retirement brunch for an editor at the New York Times Book Review just after my appointment as food editor had been announced, Pauline Kael, the New Yorker’s movie critic, looked up from her bagel as I came into the room. “Since when did you become a food queen?” she asked.

  If you had told me then that I would spend the rest of my life writing and reporting on food in major publications and in many books, I would have laughed at you. The real me was the guy checking citations in the library for his translation of Imperialism Now. I was the serious professional reviewer of books for Newsweek and the New York Times Book Review. The even more fundamental me was the Harvard and Oxford classics scholar, the polyglot, polymath culture maven, a journalist and man of letters, literally, a spelling champ.

  My first-grade teacher, a charmless martinet named Smart, was the first to notice my gift. I had figured out how to read on the first day of school. It just hit me that the letters, which I’d already memorized at home, were clusters of sounds that made up words. But I quickly saw further that this was not always perfectly the case. Some letters were “silent.” Some combined in completely unphonetic groups, groups that themselves were not always pronounced in the same way. But unlike most beginning readers, I saw right away that the exceptions themselves usually formed patterns.