One of the best tactics for the restaurants promoting themselves in the eighties was their role as fund-raisers and providers of high-profile press coverage for national and local charities. Our first AIDS research fund-raiser and the 1983 American Institute of Wine & Food “American Festival” dinner had proven that a lot of money could be made by giving the rich an amusing time while they ate and the press watched. A cover story in a 1987 San Francisco’s Focus magazine explored this increasingly big business through the prism of an event called “AID & Comfort.” A thousand people paid $250 apiece to attend. According to the article, Alice Waters charmed her way through the crowd, “lending her glamour, her name, her star appeal. Back in the kitchen, as Jeremiah Tower was quietly putting the finishing touches on one of the evening’s culinary triumphs—tuna carpaccio—one of the local restaurant mavens cracked, ‘That’s the way it’s always been, Alice out front, getting all the glory, and Jeremiah in the background, cooking great food.’”
But most of us felt it was about teamwork, with enough publicity to go around for everyone. We all made out splendidly from the new charitable bashes. In addition to the Meals-on-Wheels extravaganzas, there were various other AIDS fund-raisers, Open Hand, Share Our Strength, and more. My personal road show was Elaine Whitelaw’s March of Dimes or, as the Washington Post called it in 1988, “The Munch of Dimes.”
The Stars team learned a precious lesson on our first extended road show.
When we arrived at the site of an event in Maui, we found the Austrian chef in a severe depression, sitting alone in his glass-walled office high above the empty kitchen, chewing the end of a three-foot raw kielbasa coiled in his lap. The first bad moment was when I realized he had no idea who we were and why we were there. The second was when the promised team of six cooks never appeared. The third was when the equipment ordered weeks before was a no-show. We got to work. After staying up all night cutting five cases each of red, gold, and yellow bell peppers into very fine slices by myself, I swore on my bleeding hands that I would not be dependent on any chef or restaurant not controlled by us ever again.
I doubled the number of staff on the road show team and insisted they be put up in the same hotels as me. When this was viewed as “demanding,” I had a momentary lapse of resolve. But after landing in New York in the middle of an ice storm that delayed our arrival several hours, the limos gone, and arriving at the Hotel Pierre to find our donated reservations nonexistent, I decided a different future was starting that night. These were pre– cell phone days and, as we stood in the Pierre lobby with our mountain of luggage, equipment, and supplies, the person behind the front desk masquerading as a man finally agreed to let me use his phone. I called the manager of my favorite hotel, the Plaza Athénée, and explained I needed four rooms and my usual green suite—this on a Friday night in the beginning of New York’s holiday season.
“Really?” Gasp and a long pause. “You’d better come right over.”
Once I was in my suite and the staff bedded down, I wondered how I would explain this expense to a judge. The trip was just before the last arbitration with the Moons. As I sank into the Irish linen sheets and watched the snow falling outside the greenhouse on my penthouse terrace, I didn’t care. I vowed we would now pay for everything, and to hell with the ever-evanescent donations and freebies.
Some of the disasters, of course, were of my own making. I thought it would be cold for one October Meals-on-Wheels in Los Angeles under a tent in the parking lot of Wolfgang Puck’s original Spago, so I decided to do suckling pig with a white truffle sauce (one dramatic food and one expensive) to show us off and grab press attention. As one of the longer lines gathered in front of our Stars sign, I realized the first gasps were of not pleasure but disgust. Most of the guests were Jewish. Some asked, how could I have been so stupid? Even my usually loyal staff were shaken at my naive miscalculation. The turkey-necked and pearl-throated squawks from some of the older matrons in orange Capri pants finally unnerved us all, so we left early to get back to the Westwood Marquis. Over the first Ladoucette Pouilly-Fumé, we discussed our next road show. I promised that we’d serve “safe” food, and that the only drama would come from the props. “You will notice,” I said, “that none of the chefs is doing anything to decorate their booths. That’s our way to glory.”
The next Citymeals-on-Wheels was a year later at Rockefeller Center. This time we were ready, arriving well in advance to get a prime location on the rink across from the steps down to the fountain. I had noticed at past events that no one could see the food once the sun had gone down, so that was my focus, and we had our travel pack (lights, tools, electrical equipment, French tablecloths, first aid kit) with everything we’d need to be independent of the local support staff.
On this June night at Rockefeller Center we set up a ziggurat of ice behind our well-lighted front table (also ice) for a huge shellfish bar. I lit the ice from behind, using the same colors as in the huge golden-figured fountain beside us, and when the guests arrived at the top of the stairs, they saw first the fountain and then us. It helped that we were spit-roasting a whole head-on tuna over an eight-foot-long mesquite-charcoal grill, something no one, including us, had seen before. When the cameras for the TV show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous arrived, the fish caught the camera. With that publicity, the five thousand mid-eighties dollars it cost us to do the event would have been cheap at ten times the price.
A Ruth Reichl story in the Los Angeles Times about a Meals-on-Wheels on the terrace of L.A.’s Pacific Design Center, aka “the Blue Whale,” was called “Chefs as the Star Ingredients.” The lead photo shows me arriving with my crew and hauling my private rolling “Travel Pac” full of some of the tools we would need. Wrote Ruth, “They roll into town like rock stars, roadies in their wake. They stay in the best hotels, are wined and dined in the finest restaurants, and when show time finally comes they are interviewed, photographed, and besieged by autograph hunters. They are ‘The Celebrity Chefs.’” She went on, “Chefs used to send a check, a recipe, or a dish to charity. Now they send themselves with such regularity that some of them have regular road crews.” One of the guests said she came more for the show than for the food. “I just wanted to come and look. I guess you could call me a food groupie. But isn’t he handsome?” Another fan passed up our tuna. “I’ve never heard of him,” she sniffed, and went searching for whoever was being filmed by Entertainment Tonight.
A RUSSIAN GENERAL
I was already a victim of the travel bug, but all this touring and cooking had such an invigorating effect on the staff and the tourist business at Stars that I rarely turned down an invitation to any exotic or educational spot. And I thought up a few on my own when morale was sluggish. Several times I took deserving staff to Paris or London for the weekend, most memorably for the famous breakfast at Paris’s Crillon hotel. The hotel alone cost seven thousand dollars, but it was worth every penny, inspiring changes at Stars that became trademarks. The traditional European seafood service stands, the round paper covers imprinted with a star logo that covered the butters on the table, the little copper pots for sauces and soups.
But as much as the road-show promotions brought new press and new customers, any restaurant has to look after its locals and regulars if it is to survive. So I installed brass name plates at the regulars’ tables and on the bar, giving them a recognition for which others would soon fiercely compete. Eager wannabes were soon smuggling in screwdrivers to remove a plate or two to make room for their own. I formed a “Brassplate Society” and held annual lunches for the original members, whose deaths were anxiously anticipated by those who wanted in. Everyone knew my list was the only thing at Stars that could not be influenced by money, power, or politics. I loved the fact that there were local shopkeepers and lower-level bureaucrats drinking my champagne and Cognac while rich socialites looked on wondering how such a mixed crew got to be such stars in Stars.
But this showy democracy did not cause as much ruckus as the three-day event in the summer of 1989 we held to welcome the Kirov Ballet to San Francisco. Jeannette Etheridge of the famous Tosca Cafe, and her mother, Armen Baliantz, who had been Nureyev’s all-forgiving mother figure since he first landed in the United States, suggested we do it.
This was before perestroika. The dancers were still surrounded and contained by KGB and my job was to get them out on the town. First there was a party at my brand-new Stars offshoot, Speedo 690. I had been warned that the dancers were coming by bus and, always hungry, would want to eat right away. So I created a buffet that featured a stack of twenty wooden farmers’ market boxes of ripe peaches, melons, grapes, figs, and apricots. The hundred people arrived at the door with military precision. The young dancers gasped at the sight of the food, while we gasped at their beauty.
They all sat down, but then nothing happened. It was totally quiet. I went over to the male star, Andris Liepa, a twenty-one-year-old of world-challenging magnificence, and asked what was up. He pulled my ear down to his mouth and whispered, “KGB.” The head honcho was a porkpie-hatted Brezhnev look-alike who introduced himself through an interpreter as the minister of the interior of the Soviet Union. With that kind of authoritarian rank in attendance I knew I was in trouble. So I called Armen, who rushed over. The hulking senior men had resisted any of my frozen vodka tactics to jump-start the party, but a few moments after Armen had ensconced herself at their table I heard the old guys shout a toast in Russian, knock back their vodkas, and yell for food. Instantly the ninety dancers and Kirov staff plunged into the food.
I asked Armen what she had done to get the old geezers off their cheap-suited behinds. “You see this pin I am wearing?” she asked. “Well, it’s a Soviet army medal. The minister asked me how I had got it. I told him I had to fuck a general.” The roaring laughter of the generals had been the noise that launched the party.
I was bowled over by the natural style and the elegance of the young Russians, who came from a society described as “impoverished.” Each table made a fruit centerpiece of a plate stacked on upturned glasses, a spontaneous table decoration that would have done Maxim’s proud. Just so they could eat the fruit with their eyes before devouring it. The magnificent star pulled me onto his lap and told me he’d seen a peach or apricot or any fruit like this maybe twice in his life. Dodging the KGB, I managed to steal him and five of the dancers for a spin in my new BMW.
The car phone grabbed their attention, so each called his boy or girlfriend in Leningrad or Moscow. Except the star. He gave me his hotel room key, a palliative for some heatedly disapproving local press accusing me of loving “Rooskies.” They weren’t far wrong.