“What will you be doing here?” asked the nice young woman in personnel whom I went to see after my welcoming lunch with Craig Claiborne and Charlotte Curtis.“What will you be doing here?” asked the nice young woman in personnel whom I went to see after my welcoming lunch with Craig Claiborne and Charlotte Curtis.
“I’ll be handling food,” I replied.
“Well, I’ll put you down as an N2.”
I shrugged. As an elite news staffer, I had been put on the so-called publisher’s payroll, which brought with it special, if largely ceremonial, privileges at the bank down the block, and saved me the indignity of dealing with the weekly paychecks that were the lot of less illustrious news slaves. I was to be paid each month.
When I finally received my first paycheck, it was suspiciously tiny, much less than the salary I’d been offered. I inquired. The nice lady in personnel had taken me at my word. When she’d seen that I was young and I’d said I was to be handling food, she’d made me an N2, an assistant salad handler in the cafeteria. We sorted it out.
In fact, I had inherited a little empire several floors above the Times newsroom. The phrase “splendid isolation” might have been coined to describe the food department. While the newsroom was making history by printing the Pentagon Papers, a leaked official study of the Vietnam War and its failures, I luxuriated in my peaceable kingdom. The most splendid of all its appurtenances was the test kitchen, whose professional-style Garland range, immaculate expanse of butcher block counters and forest of heavy-gauge copper pots came with an English test cook and a Polish maid to clean up after her.
The test cook, Jean Hewitt, was handsome, a diplomate in home economics from London, and quietly furious that I’d gotten the job she thought, with some real justice, she deserved more than I did. My staff also included a secretary, Velma Cannon, a very refined black lady of late middle years devoted to the white southern gentleman who’d previously occupied my desk. Last, but crucial to our ability to respond to the flood of mail that rolled in every day, was the stenographer, Anita Rizzi.
When the phone rang in that office my first day, I reached for the receiver at my elbow, but Anita beat me to it. Part of her job was to be the first responder. And if she was already on the line, Velma picked up the next call. If Velma and Anita were both busy with calls and still another rang, Jean took that one. I was last in this inverted pecking order, answering the phone at my desk only if the other three were already handling our ever-inquisitive readers. No one ever explained this to me. But I soon figured it out and fell in line. And like the others, when I answered a call, I said, “Food news.”
I thought it was funny. Downstairs, where the real reporters were, they covered the news. We “covered” fast-breaking recipes and the policy decisions of chefs.
My irony was misplaced. Even though a great deal of what the Times food editor wrote about was not newsworthy, a crucial part of it, as Claiborne had defined the job, really was food news. My respect for him grew as I read through his old articles in the office files. He had discarded the old food-page model of recipes handed out by food-product companies and restaurant “reviews” redacted from press releases or based on meals eaten on the cuff. Instead, Claiborne had hunted down fresh developments in the food world (a concept he was instrumental in inventing): new chefs and newly arrived ethnic cuisines; and, when the opportunity arose, he did actually cover the news in his field. For example, when Albert Stockli resigned as executive chef at Restaurant Associates in 1965 to open his own restaurant in Connecticut, Craig wrote about it, and the article was an early example of the sanctification of a celebrity chef in the major news media.
It was easy to miss the journalistic core of Claiborne’s work, because he was so careful and clever about folding it into the epicurean format he’d invented for himself. In a given week, he would contribute a food feature, most often about an interesting home cook, to the Thursday women’s page, euphemistically rebranded as “Food, Fashions, Family, Furnishings”—or in Times-speak, the four-F page—and, later on, as Family/Style.
On Friday, he would review restaurants, places he’d visited several times with three or four guests. These reviews were the reverse of impressionistic, filled with expert calls about ingredients and flavors, lapses in authenticity. To make things easier for the reader, he graded each place with from one to four stars. Very few restaurants got the maximum four stars, and the list barely changed from year to year, which was an accurate reflection of the placidity of the tiny world of elite food in New York from 1957 to 1971.
Also on Friday, there were brief recipes. And on Sunday, Craig would collaborate with the in-house photo studio on an illustrated recipe for the back pages of the New York Times Magazine.
This was a job description that fitted Craig to a T but nearly flattened me.
Toward the end of my tenure, I sat on a committee to discuss the future of Family/Style. Soon after, the section was parceled out into separate daily sections, with many journalists working on them. This redesign, which I favored, because it broadened food coverage and presented it more coherently, divided the food editor’s superjob into slots for a principal restaurant critic, for other critics covering budget restaurants, for food reporters and a recipe writer.
I continued to perform all those functions while the redesign went forward. I did it all without training or contacts in the food community, and, worst of all, I had to operate in a depressed economy that hammered the luxury restaurants that were my basic “story.”
A critic in any field needs lively new work to judge. If publishers stopped publishing books, book critics would have to stop writing reviews. This, of course, will never happen, even if and when all books are electronic. But in the New York restaurant world of the early 1970s, new restaurants of consequence rarely opened. Instead, several famous eateries were closing their doors. In my first few months at the Times, the city’s most famous restaurant, Le Pavillon, served its last meal. So did the regal Café Chauveron, with its glittering array of copper pots, where I’d interviewed W. H. Auden for Newsweek in 1968, the winter following his sixtieth birthday. The Colony, an evolved speakeasy with fancy French food for a high-society clientele—pressed ducks and the like—also went out of business.
In journalistic terms, I didn’t have much of a story, but that wasn’t obvious to me or anyone else reading my pieces during my first few weeks at the Times, because I was able to make news all on my own.
Really, I didn’t want to cause a commotion. I didn’t suspect I was going to. Coming from Newsweek, which no one I knew ever read, and whose several million readers almost never raised a peep over anything I wrote, I did not dream that a short article about a Chinese restaurant in suburban New Jersey could spread frenzy throughout the tristate area and beyond.
But it did.
In my defense, I will stipulate that Craig and Charlotte made me do it. At the purée mongole lunch on my first day at the paper, far more important than Craig’s grandstanding about the cafeteria chef’s heavy hand with bay leaf was his offhand announcement that he would be leaving the city for his East Hampton dacha without supplying copy for that week’s Thursday food feature. It was Monday. There was no time to get to know my staff or plan my debut article with my editor.
Craig wished me well, with a smile I can be excused for thinking faintly malicious, and Charlotte sent me off to personnel to become a salad handler and then to walk through an obligatory tour of the Times building for new hires.
What should have been an unchallenging bit of institutional tourism—a swing through the newsroom, a look at the acre of linotype machines that filled an entire floor of 229 West Forty-third Street and the presses in the basement—turned into a distracted, panicked perambulation during which I occasionally interrupted the tour leader’s spiel to transact real business on the fly with the photo department or the Family/Style copy desk. Eventually, I found my way to the food news department, introduced myself to my very curious staff, and gave Jean Hewitt the recipe she would have to test under exigent circumstances, which included shopping for hoisin sauce in Chinatown.
For my first article as food editor, I chose the tryout piece I’d written about a Chinese restaurant tucked into a filling station on Route 1 in New Jersey, five miles north of Princeton. A Kitchen was a thirty-two-seat dining room attached to Sam’s BP Gas Station. There was no Sam in sight, but instead Alex and Anna Shen filled you up with regular for thirty-one cents a gallon and also served “celestial banquets” to clued-in Rutgers and Princeton faculty members.
One of them, the sinologist John Schrecker, had stumbled on the place with his wife, Ellen, and discovered that the Shens served much more than the hamburgers, chop suey and chow mein on their regular menu. They were ambitious and authentic practitioners of “the same northern and Sichuanese dishes that have been appearing in New York City restaurants over the last few years,” I wrote.
John and Ellen had for some time been introducing me to this exciting food as it emerged, elusively and without fanfare, in Chinese restaurants ostensibly devoted to the Cantonese dishes that had, until the late 1960s, been the only form of Chinese cooking available in America. But with the reform of racially restrictive immigration laws, non-Cantonese Chinese had begun trickling into the country, bringing the foods of their native regions with them. This new wave of Chinese immigrants often arrived on student visas from Taiwan, more educated and self-confident than the Cantonese laborers who had preceded them to work on the railways in the nineteenth century. Craig Claiborne had already noticed what was happening.
David Keh was the epitome of this trend. Born in Anhui Province, in eastern China, he had moved with his family to Taiwan after the Chinese revolution. From there, he came to America in 1964 to study at Seton Hall University, in New Jersey. He worked as a waiter at the Four Seas, which was one of the first, if not the first New York restaurant to feature non-Cantonese dishes, notably the spicy foods of Sichuan Province. By the late 1960s, he had opened the first fully Sichuan restaurant in town, Szechuan Taste, near Chatham Square, then at the edge of Chinatown.
The Schreckers, who had discovered Sichuan food in Taipei during a study year there, followed the American career of their favorite Chinese cuisine avidly. In fact, they were eager to hunt down new restaurants run by recent immigrants who cooked authentic Chinese food of any style, instead of the Americanized and adulterated dishes so prevalent in Cantonese Chinatown. So when A Kitchen appeared almost at their doorstep on Route 1, they called me, a pal from their Harvard days, and invited me to join them at an extraordinary banquet.
This was the meal I ended up describing in the tryout piece that eventually ran in the Times on Thursday, May 13, 1971, under the headline “Drivers Who Stop Only for Gas Don’t Know What They’re Missing.” Inset into that article was the announcement of my appointment in italic type:
Mr. Sokolov, who has reviewed books, covered cultural affairs and been a Paris correspondent for Newsweek magazine, takes over this week as food editor from Craig Claiborne. Mr. Claiborne is leaving The Times after more than 13 years to pursue his culinary interests independently.
“A Kitchen,” I wrote, “is not just a kitchen, but, preposterous as it sounds, one of the most authentic and dazzling Chinese restaurants in the New York area.”
My new readers hearkened. Fiercely. In the hope of tasting the Shens’ unchastenedly hot Sichuan bean curd, their handmade dumplings and their genuine “Peking” sweet-and-sour pork, they called (201) 329-6896, called it again and again, and if they were lucky enough and persistent enough to get through and book a table, they crowded into the little dining room on Route 1 in a frenzy of food lust.
Jean tested the Shens’ recipe for eggplant with shrimp, while I watched. With the suspicion I would come to know well over the ensuing months, she told me she thought the recipe called for too much oil—two cups for two medium eggplants—but relented when the dish came together just as I recalled it.
And I was launched.
When word of the crazed response to the piece got back to the Times, I was happy and relieved. Charlotte was relieved and, perhaps, happy. She was hard to read, in her nasal and affectless midwestern way. Most important, A. M. (Abe) Rosenthal, the paper’s despotic executive editor, was happy, too, but he did remark that I might have waited a few weeks before sending up this first-magnitude flare. Maybe it would have been better to start off more quietly, Abe suggested. But at this point in our relationship, he had not decided if I was going to satisfy his only criterion for professional acceptability: Would I be good for the Times?
He still wasn’t sure, for the most part, because he didn’t know much about food. At our first meeting, the day he hired me, he’d said, “I have more trouble figuring out how we should cover food than I do about reporting on SALT.”*
He did, however, confide his relief that “at least you’re not a queer.”
Although we shared an interest in women, Abe and I, at bottom, we were fatally unalike.
He was a tough, up-from-nowhere graduate of City College, no intellectual, a Cold Warrior who’d won a Pulitzer as a Times correspondent in Poland, a natural reporter. I had a fancy literary education, almost zero interest in politics, and a deep suspicion of the basic premises of the Cold War. He spotted me immediately as a dubious prospect. I knew he and I would never understand each other, especially after he told me that my beat was one of the few areas in the paper that made readers feel good about their lives.
Negative critics barely existed at the Times. The conservative art critic Hilton Kramer, then the cultural editor of the paper, was a very articulate, well-informed opponent of far-out trends in the visual arts. John Simon, acerb and mandarin, appeared as a freelance naysayer sometimes in the Sunday paper. But the basic tone of Times criticism was middlebrow and allrightnik. And that was fine with Abe. He wasn’t running the Partisan Review or Dissent. And he would never have hired me if he’d suspected that my ambitions as a food critic would be just as anti-establishment and rhetorically flamboyant as those literary quarterlies.
I knew perfectly well that food news at the New York Times was an inappropriate perch for an intellectual child of the sixties with a scornful view of the New York food scene and an angry reaction to its class-bound standards. Even in the conventional critical departments, the Times had not welcomed critics who threatened received ideas or deployed irony. Instead the Times had fought the bad fight against abstract expressionism in its art columns long past the point where sniffing at Jackson Pollock made the sniffer (and his publisher) look ridiculous. This stultifying atmosphere still prevailed in 1971.
So in the ensuing months, I kept up a show of preserving the Claiborne paradigm. On Thursday, I interviewed glamorous cooks, usually well-heeled housewives with modestly original recipes and entertainment tips for my less glamorous readers. My restaurant reviews seemed to follow the reactive pattern of the past: a new place opened and I judged its dishes (too much bay leaf in the purée mongole), no radical principles on view. And since the Times Magazine had a backlog of many months of Claiborne recipe pages with expensive color art already shot for them, I was regularly forced to lie low in that area, limited to writing blurbs for dishes I’d never tasted.
As late as December 19, 1971, I was still working off these Claiborne pages. On that Sunday, I concocted a blurb for two pheasant recipes. One I had inherited from a Claiborne favorite, the painter Ed Giobbi; the other, which I stuck in, was adapted from Escoffier. By then, I was thoroughly fed up with being Craig’s anonymous ghost for those leftover magazine pages. Giobbi’s braised pheasant was an innocuous enough thing. But in an oblique and childish swipe, I added the “utterly simple” Escoffier pheasant as a contrast to Giobbi’s, which, I wrote, “calls for more ingredients and more seasonings.”
Did anyone, even Ed Giobbi, notice the barb? Years later at an Upper East Side party, Giobbi’s wife, Elinor, cornered me in order to commiserate with me disingenuously about how unsuited I’d been for the Times job.
If I had caused her discomfort with my pheasant blurb, that must have been nothing compared to the embarrassment and fury I’d caused Tricia Nixon, the elder daughter of the president, in my first few days as food editor.
On June 1, a Tuesday when I would have been preparing some routine interview with a cook for my normal Thursday feature, the White House held a press conference to announce its plans for an immense cake for Tricia’s upcoming wedding to Edward Cox. The White House chef, Henry Haller, and its pastry chef, Heinz Bender, had developed a 350-pound, six-foot-tall, six-tiered lemon-flavored pound cake based on a recipe from the bride’s mother. They also handed out a reduced version of the giant wedding cake recipe for home cooks to bake in their own kitchens.
My response was swift and lethal. I saw myself as the nation’s designated palate, and I thought I ought to taste the cake the White House was proposing for the nation’s domestic ovens. The Times would bake the home-cook version of that cake.
I turned the recipe over to Jean Hewitt, and she sprang into action. As she’d predicted after one look at the handout, it didn’t work. The single-layer “cake” erupted from its pan all over her immaculate Garland oven.
I tried a spoonful and retreated to my typewriter. With the mighty web presses waiting to thunder below, I knocked out an account of the debacle. It ran the next morning, next to the Associated Press article about the White House press conference that included the hapless recipe, under the headline “Warning! It May Not Work.”
As if this weren’t a rude enough awakening for the White House, some staffers may have happened to read early editions of the Times in which two accidentally (?) reversed linotype slugs in the Times version of the AP recipe story stated that the cake “will have the initials of the President’s daughter and her bridegroom, Edward Finch white, decorated with blown Cox, and will be iced in sugar orchids, white roses and pink-tinged cherry blossoms.” The error was emended for later editions to the correct text: “… her bridegroom, Edward Finch Cox, and will be iced in white decorated with blown sugar orchids.”†
Few people actually noticed this howler, but my article had a wider impact. It was a cheap shot heard round the world. It certainly knocked the whisk out of Heinz Bender’s hand.
My article came out on a Wednesday. Within minutes, food reporters from all sides were clamoring for quotes from me. I walked into Charlotte’s little glassed-in office to find out what we’d do for the Thursday paper.
“Nothing,” she said. “Today, we let everyone else scramble and make fools of themselves. Tomorrow, we jump back in. We’re playing newspaper.”
It was just as the lady said. On Thursday, June 3, we stepped back and let UPI, the wire service, carry our water. The official news was that Chef Bender, under huge pressure, had agreed to try the handout recipe himself but had refused requests from a horde of newsmen, including me, to watch. Mrs. Nixon’s press secretary, Constance Stuart, was predictably indignant and stood by the recipe, but there was slippage in her defense. She conceded to UPI that the recipe should have called for a mixer instead of a blender. For his part, farther down in the article, Bender revealed that his recipe had neglected to mention the need to affix a brown paper collar around the pan to prevent the batter from overflowing as it baked.
For the same article, in what may have been an attempt to discredit me by eliciting a negative reaction to my article from my more famous predecessor, UPI interviewed Craig Claiborne. The reporter must have read the recipe to him, and then, to my great pleasure, Claiborne opined, “I’ve seen a lot of bizarre recipes, and I must conclude from this one that obviously the White House means whole eggs and not egg whites in the second step of the recipe.” Then the old snake coiled back and let us have it: “But I shouldn’t comment because I haven’t tried the recipe—I haven’t seen it printed because I no longer read newspapers.”
On the third day, it was our turn again:
They tried to fix it up with brown paper collars, with longer heating times and changes of ingredients.
But after a hectic night and day session in Washington, during which both the White House kitchen staff and food writers for Washington newspapers announced a host of new recipes for the scaled-down recipe of Tricia Nixon’s wedding cake, which flopped earlier this week in the test kitchen of The New York Times, the final version issued by the White House failed. Just like its predecessors.
It did not overflow the pan this time, or mess up The Times’s oven. But it did not cook through, after 70 minutes of baking, and it was like porridge at the center.
The article goes on to describe various other fumbles and errors: corrections of mistakes in the recipe that accompanied the first UPI article, the discovery by Jean Hewitt that the quantities specified in both versions of the White House recipe gave improbable quantities for baking powder; this discrepancy would have helped explain why the batter had erupted in our kitchen. But the White House, our article went on to say, stood by its original quantities, while, nonetheless, increasing the height of the brown paper collar from two to three inches.
All these revisions kept Jean Hewitt very busy through Thursday, baking each new version of the cake, as each emended recipe emerged from the harried Washington kitchen. The final White House text, when cooked at the Times, “shook like jelly but tasted like a very soft French lemon soufflé,” I wrote in an article that appeared on Friday, June 4.
“At the other end of The Times’s kitchen,” I continued, “was a very large mixing bowl brimming with nearly 100 egg yolks left from two days of trying to keep up with the evolution of Tricia’s cake.”
This was actually my second chance that spring to skewer the Nixon image in the Times. In late May, I’d been sent down to Austin, Texas, to cover the mammoth barbecue at the inauguration of the Lyndon Baines Johnson presidential library. I was one of at least five Times men and women covering this nonevent. There was a man from the Washington bureau, another from the national desk, the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable and Nan Robertson from women’s news, ostensibly because of the fashion angle—or perhaps just because it was a major social event.
I devoted most of my space to enumerating the huge quantities of finger-lickin’ fixins: eighteen hundred pounds of brisket, fifteen hundred pounds of ribs, a half ton each of ranch beans, potato salad and cole slaw for four thousand guests. One of them was Tricky Dick, whom I’d been taught to loathe at Mother’s knee during the McCarthy era.
Mother had brainwashed me with Nixonophobia. In 1951, she introduced California congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas at a meeting of the Detroit chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women. Douglas had just been defeated by Nixon in an outstandingly ugly senatorial election in California. Nixon’s campaign had smeared her as a Communist. Douglas invented the nickname Tricky Dick for him and smeared his supporters, in turn, as Blackshirts, still a familiar code word then for fascists. Mother practiced her speech hundreds of times at home. Eavesdropping, I memorized it without trying and imbibed its anti-Nixon attitude like an aural vaccine that would last me for life.
In 1953, when I was in Washington for my second year at the National Spelling Bee, I declined to join the other contestants on a tour that included the Capitol, because I’d seen all of the sights the year before and really wanted to hang out at the spelling bee press office in the Willard Hotel. A couple of reporters were whiling away the afternoon there when I walked in.
“Why haven’t you gone with the other kids?” one of them asked me. Vice President Nixon was going to welcome them to the Capitol. Didn’t I know that?
“I’m a Democrat,” I retorted.
At that, the other reporter, an AP man, got up and went straight to the telex machine on the far wall. Down he sat and typed in two paragraphs about the eleven-year-old spelling bee contestant from Detroit who was refusing to meet with the vice president.
“ ‘I’m a Democrat,’ the lad explained.”
Other boys might have enjoyed the sudden national publicity, having their words sent out on the AP wire instants after they’d uttered them. Boys like that went into politics or show business. To me, the excitement was in the process I’d just observed. Oh sure, I got a chuckle out of taking a poke at Nixon. But what I loved much more and with an almost genetic affinity was the amplification of the poke. I’d just witnessed the creation of news, and I was hooked. A hack was born.
Twenty years later in Austin, I was living the life whose flavor I’d faintly sniffed in the Willard. But I hadn’t lost my distaste for Nixon. And there he was, on the Saturday morning of the dedication, in a hideous aqua sharkskin suit, about to receive the LBJ library for the nation, and he was standing ten feet in front of me!
Security at a VIP event in those days was a lot lighter than the routine TSA checks at airports are today. There were no metal detectors, no pat-downs. All I’d needed to get into the library grounds that day was a press credential, which did not have my picture on it. I did not have a state-issued picture ID. Nobody did. So hundreds of reporters had ambled through the gates flashing pieces of paper, and that was that. I hadn’t thought about it until I saw the president on the other side of a rope.
Then came the evil thought: Someone could easily have strolled in here with a pistol. I moved toward the rope. Tall men with little medals in their lapels loomed on all sides. I sidled casually into a gap between two of them, right up against the rope. Anyone could have done that. Nixon walked by, almost close enough to touch. Or shoot.
I worked some anti-Nixon potshots into my otherwise quite neutral piece. Readers learned that President Nixon had not stayed for the meal and had insisted on taking some barbecue with him on Air Force One, to nosh on, but only after his slow-moving entourage had kept the other four thousand guests waiting for lunch, while the pit mistress fumed like wet hickory.
With the end of summer, the opportunities for stunts stopped offering themselves, and the post-Claibornian routine took over my life, like a slow dance to bad music. The slim crop of new restaurants was slim indeed. La Chaumière, a modest French bistro in the Village, received no stars and a stiff, sniffy review.
There didn’t seem much point in filling the Friday restaurant space with shrill warnings against such losers. I couldn’t help hearing in my mind the voice of Newsweek’s cultural editor, Jack Kroll, explaining to me when I was a summer trainee in 1965 why the magazine didn’t run a lot of pans of books by unheralded authors: “You’re basically saying to the poor schmuck reader out there in Indiana: Here’s a book by somebody you’ve never heard of and you know what? It stinks.” So I began revisiting well-known restaurants, and if they didn’t exactly stink, these Old Faithfuls didn’t exactly make you excited about dining in them, or reading a halfhearted positive review reminding you that they existed.
On the same day I pasted La Chaumière, I gave two stars to El Parador, then the city’s acknowledged leader in Mexican cuisine. The great migration of Mexicans to New York was still years off. Mexican ingredients were available only at one specialty store on West Fourteenth Street, Casa Moneo. So if you had been to Mexico or even San Antonio, you knew that El Parador was a provincial, if polite, outpost of real Mexican food. But it was one thing to know that and another to say it in the Times.
Three weeks later, I went to Pearl’s, in midtown, and noted that “standards … have slipped.” More to the point, Pearl’s, I said, was “the perfect Chinese restaurant for people who don’t really like Chinese restaurants,” laying the groundwork for the most sensational reviews and features I would write at the Times. I also observed that Pearl’s, with its prettifying rendition of Cantonese food, was “not part of the revolution in authentic Chinese cooking now in process in this city.”
I did find one old favorite I liked a lot: the formal, vaguely Belgian Quo Vadis, on the Upper East Side. It kept its four stars and got a pat on the shoulder for its filet de sole Dieppoise, an elaborately garnished classic out of the as-yet-unrevised Larousse gastronomique. But Nanni’s, recommended to me for its pasta by a well-heeled gourmet and member of many eating societies, flunked out in the meat part of the menu with an attempt at liver in the Venetian manner: “strips of the kind of gristly liver that have turned generations of children off the meat.”
I ventured into Serendipity, the campy coffee shop and ice cream parlor near Bloomingdale’s, to see how it was accommodating the new vegetarian trend under its Tiffany dome lamps. But what caught my taste buds was Serendipity’s most flamboyant dessert: “the completely unredeemable self-treater will order apricot smush, a ‘cold drink’ in the same sense that Raquel Welch is a ‘young woman.’ It is a bracing bath of apricot essence, voluptuous and excessive.”
You will have gathered that I was not happy with the mediocre gastronomic outback I found myself in, or with the treadmill built by Craig on which I was obliged to disport myself. But there wasn’t much I could do to get the Times to change the basic formula Craig had worked with so successfully.
I did manage to persuade Abe Rosenthal to let me drop the Friday recipe feature and fold its space into the restaurant reviews. But he wouldn’t let me drop the stars. I argued that attaching stars to a review cheapened it. None of the other critics were saddled with stars. Their readers couldn’t just scan a set of graphic symbols before deciding whether to read the actual article.
He did, however, let me add another symbol: a triangle, the equivalent of Michelin’s knife and fork, for ambience. I persuaded him that stars weren’t enough: a place could have wonderful food with bad service and comfortless surroundings or it could be very pretty but have lousy food. It was the second case that I was really thinking about, because it allowed me to pinpoint an attack on that flower-bedizened, gastronomically overrated watering hole of the garment industry, La Grenouille.
Part of my covert plan to overthrow established order in the New York restaurant world was to knock La Grenouille off its plinth. And so I did, from four to two stars. But I also gave it a mingy two triangles for ambience, noting the way waiters called out to one another over the ostentatious flower arrangements amid a general decline in chic. Tables were so crowded together that people were almost sitting in one another’s laps. But the real deficiency was on the plates: canned-tasting peas and a signature first course of clams in white wine I mocked as too humdrum for a top restaurant.
I knew this review would cause shock and awe. Important New Yorkers had a lot invested in their status as regulars at the Frog Pond, as La Grenouille was known in the pages of Women’s Wear Daily. That trade paper responded to me with a special issue defending its favorite luncheonette.
La Grenouille survived my attack and improved over the years, outlasting all its rivals from the 1970s to become a justifiably beloved refuge of old-style elegance, the kind of place where New York’s perspicacious critic Adam Platt took his mother for a nostalgic meal in 2011.
Less sensational but more fundamentally influential was my review of Lutèce; I raised it out of the limbo of three stars to the golden summit of four.
It was clear to anyone with basic experience of great French food in restaurants in France that on merit alone Lutèce stood well above the other high-luxe New York French restaurants. But it was not part of the old-boy network of Le Pavillon clones, the quenelles-mongers who vied for the same high-society clientele.
Lutèce was different. Alone among its rivals, it felt like a real French restaurant, with topflight dishes you might have found in France and an unsnobbish atmosphere that also reminded me of my time in the Newsweek Paris bureau. One of my reasons for taking the Times job had been to give Lutèce its rightful fourth star. I bided my time, following Rosenthal’s advice not to play all my trumps right off the bat. So nearly a year after I became restaurant critic, on January 14, 1972, Lutèce’s two Andrés, Soltner the chef and Surmain the owner, awoke to unexpected but well-deserved fame and fortune.
On the strength of this accolade, Lutèce was launched for the next thirty years as the top restaurant in the United States. The combination of André Soltner’s talent with the authority of the New York Times made this happen. But I was the one who made the connection, and within a year my rebel’s judgment had won over the most grudging acolytes of the old order.
Ironically, the rise of Lutèce, which symbolized the final ascendance of authentic haute cuisine in America, coincided with the beginning of the end of Escoffierian haute cuisine in France and of France’s domination of fine dining in the world at large. I got a glimmer of this future just a few months after the Lutèce review, in Paris just before Easter.
I got off the plane with no thought of discovering anything more than a minor shifting of the way things had been in the glacially advancing world of French cuisine when I’d left the Newsweek bureau in 1967. Nothing I’d read in the food press had prepared me for the upheaval that was finally bringing radical change to French food after the paralysis of the Depression, the tragedy of the war, and twenty-five years of postwar recovery.
This ferment was not, in fact, what you were likely to hear about in Paris, even from most resident gastronomes. I had arranged to have dinner my first night in town with John and Karen Hess, he a Times correspondent and future Times restaurant critic, she a notoriously precise cook and, later, an eminent food historian. John had been called away to cover the latest atrocity in Northern Ireland; so I ate alone with Karen at Chez Denis, an aggressively traditional small restaurant of the most refined sort. It might have been 1960.
I told Karen my plan to eat at a three-star restaurant outside Lyon run by Paul Bocuse, whom I’d heard about in 1967; my bureau chief, Joel Blocker, had proposed him unsuccessfully for what would have been an extremely prescient Newsweek cover story on young French chefs. Since then, Bocuse’s restaurant, named after himself, had risen from two stars to three in the Michelin guide. Even I knew that. Karen Hess, however, evinced no interest whatever in Bocuse or my trip. Despite her obsession with food, she, like most Parisians, had not yet realized she was living in the middle of a moment of historic change in French cuisine.
I did find accurate guidance by reconnecting with Jack Nisberg, an American expat photographer who really did know what was cooking in the French food world. Jack had settled in Paris after World War II, studying photography on the GI Bill. He spoke hysterically ungrammatical but very fluent and vernacular French with a Chicago accent, and he understood the French character like no other American I ever met. I once saw Jack charm a crowd of Parisians packed onto a rush-hour Métro platform into posing for several takes of a picture. He wore florid sports shirts with no tie, which embarrassed Joel Blocker. And he wasn’t a very good photographer. One of the bureau reporters liked to say that Jack took snapshots, not photographs. But he was truly serious about the art of photography. His idol was the American surrealist Man Ray; Jack had a small collection of his prints. And he was very good company.
Jack was happy to go to Bocuse with me, but before we left, he pressed me to book a table at a little place called Le Pot au Feu, in a gritty Paris suburb, Asnières, where another young chef, Michel Guérard, was creating a sensation with radically simplified versions of traditional food.
On the train to Lyon, I picked up a copy of the regional edition of the newsweekly L’Express, which some other passenger had left behind on my seat. It had Bocuse on the cover in his tall white toque. The article hailed him as the chef de file, the leader, of a revolutionary moment in French culinary history. It had all started in another Rhône Valley town, Vienne, in the kitchen of Fernand Point, where Bocuse, Guérard and the brothers Jean and Pierre Troisgros, now flourishing in Roanne, had apprenticed and learned from Point about what looked like plain cooking but turned out to be a deconstruction and rehabilitation of the entire tradition and practice of cooking.
Thus instructed, I dined at Bocuse with Jack. The next morning, I became the very first of dozens of Anglophone journalists to be taken by the great man for a tour of the Lyon markets, where he performed a sort of primordial locavore shopping tour at dawn. Then I went on with him for a midmorning plat du jour at his favorite little hole-in-the-wall, the kind of bar-bistro known locally as a bouchon.
Back in Paris, I sat in the tiny dining area of Le Pot au Feu for a meal of staggering flavors concealed in dishes of deceptive informality. At another lunch, I ate old-fashioned dishes at Alain Senderens’s L’Archestrate. Some of them, like the fourteenth-century eel stew called brouet d’anguille, had been resuscitated from the earliest days of French cooking. Senderens also revived the intricate classic treatment of head cheese, tête de veau en tortue, and invented a subtle treatment of turnips in cider with a puree of celery on the side.
It was a spectacular week for an American gastronome, but for an American food journalist, it was the scoop of a lifetime.
On April 6, the Thursday after Easter, I did my best to describe the new world I’d blundered into, the “genteel revolution” soon to be known as the nouvelle cuisine. Paul Bocuse was the most theatrical of these Young Turks, as a person and in the kitchen. He served me a whole sea bass encased in puff pastry that looked like a scaly fish, with a tomato-tinged béarnaise sauce, what Escoffier called sauce Choron. But it was Michel Guérard’s twenty-seat hole-in-the-wall that served the most forward-looking food.
A slice of foie gras des Landes, fresh foie gras from southwest France prepared in the restaurant, had arrived entirely unadorned, without aspic or truffle or even parsley. But this foie gras was of a smoothness and puissance to stand alone. For those who wanted something more varied as a first course, there was the salade gourmande—deeply green beans mixed with slices of truffle, fresh foie gras, chunks of artichoke bottom and an evanescent vinaigrette dressing.
For a larger version of this menu, click here.
Forty years after I wrote about Paul Bocuse for the New York Times, a picture of the same sea bass (loup) baked inside a fish-shaped pastry crust he served me adorns his restaurant’s “classic” menu. (illustration credit 3.1)
Guérard’s ris de veau Club des Cent presented a sweetbread in one imposing lobe chastely topped with matchstick truffle slices and a clear, light brown sauce.
Some days chicken, some days duck came in a highly reduced sauce made from chicken stock, veal stock and wine vinegar. The light but intense sauces, the minimalist plating, the hyperdramatic focus on a single ingredient, the ironic refurbishing of cliché classics (fricassee, green bean salad)—all the elements of the new cuisine were there at Le Pot au Feu, the future ready to roll out and roar.
Back in New York, my food-alert readers barely stirred at this momentous news. Paris was far away. They would latch onto the nouvelle cuisine only when it came to their doorstep. But that wouldn’t happen for several years. In 1972, in New York, the big news in food wasn’t French; it was Chinese, because a revolution in Chinese food was happening right in New York City.
All of a sudden, it seemed, restaurants serving non-Cantonese food—the food of Sichuan, Fujian, Beijing and Shanghai—were popping up all over Manhattan. Word would spread among the food-alert and lines would form outside the newest hit address. Then the chef would decamp, quality would fall and we’d head for the next voguish installment of exotic dishes we’d never seen in Chinatown. It was almost as if some mad Chinese genius were making up one regional cuisine after another.
I can remember Julia Child puzzling over all the unfamiliar spicy Chinese food she was seeing. “We never had anything like it when we were over there during the war,” she said to me.
She must have been too isolated in the U.S. intelligence community to experience the full range of local food. And like almost every other American after the Communist takeover of China in 1949, she couldn’t travel in mainland China. To her and most other Americans who experienced it, the sudden explosion of “exotic” Chinese eating places in our midst came as a surprise, a mystery, an ethnographic puzzle.
But there was a perfectly good explanation for it: a pivotal change in U.S. immigration law. That was the Hart-Celler Act, otherwise known, when it was known at all to the general public, as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This law revoked a forty-one-year-old immigration law that had strictly limited immigration by quotas that gave preference to applicants from the Western Hemisphere. In particular, the Hart-Celler Act abolished what was known as the principle of “Oriental exclusion,” which had made it virtually impossible for Chinese to obtain U.S. immigrant status.
In the first ten years after Hart-Celler, the number of new immigrants doubled by comparison to the previous decade. Large numbers of them came from Asia and Latin America. And among this new wave of greenhorns were ambitious Chinese who invigorated the restaurant world of New York with regional specialties that made their fortune.
Of course, Hart-Celler did much more than improve the Manhattan restaurant scene. It literally changed the face of America. Arguably, along with Medicare, it was one of the two most important pieces of legislation of the postwar era. Yet few people are aware of it even now. In 1972, in the community of epicures, it hardly ever came up as a factor in the abruptly improved state of our gustatory happiness. We just wanted to know who the latest hot chef from China was.
In the days when a Chinese meal was nothing more than chop suey, chow mein, one from Column A and one from Column B, probably nobody in America ever stopped to think about who the chef behind the food was. But after more or less authentic Chinese food from several regions, notably Beijing and Sichuan, gained a serious following, Chinese chefs emerged as figures of the same importance as French chefs—but the Chinese chefs were much more elusive.
They were the subject of constant speculation by Chinese restaurant buffs. Few of them spoke English, the best had done their training on the Chinese mainland, and they hopped from restaurant to restaurant, leading their fans on a merry chase.
Take Wang Yun Ching of the Peking Restaurant on upper Broadway, who arrived in Manhattan after cooking at the Empress Restaurant in Washington, D.C., and used to give cooking demonstrations on local television. Suddenly, the ambitious new Szechuan Restaurant at Broadway and Ninety-fifth Street plucked him away from the capital and set him up on the Upper West Side.
Word got around. But just when lines began forming at the Szechuan as if it were showing first-run movies, Wang moved a block downtown to its new sister restaurant, the Peking. After a certain lag, the lines moved too, and made his lamb with scallions a word-of-mouth best seller.
With bushy eyebrows and a face that somewhat resembled Chou En-lai’s, Mr. Wang had been a man in motion for most of his career. Born in a small town in Hunan Province, he began his nine-year apprenticeship in nearby Zhengzhou and moved through several other jobs until he reached the summit of his mainland career in the late 1940s at the Shao Yu Tien in Hankow. The restaurant specialized in wedding banquets and birthday or longevity parties.
Lou Hoy Yuen, the chef at Szechuan East (1540 Second Avenue at Eightieth Street), started work even earlier than Wang. He began his apprenticeship at the age of eight. An orphan, he never finished primary school, but practiced his trade at a succession of restaurants in Chengdu, Chongqing, Shanghai, Taiwan and Hong Kong. On a trip to Japan after the war, he met the Chinese painter Ta Chien, a gourmet who hired him as his personal chef and took him to Brazil. In Brazil, he met the shipping magnate C. Y. Tung, who invited him to work at the Four Seas on Maiden Lane in New York.
The Four Seas, now defunct, was, as I’ve already said, one of the earliest New York Chinese restaurants, if not the first, to serve the spicy dishes of Mr. Lou’s native Sichuan Province. It was a haven for celebrities during the sixties—the architect I. M. Pei brought Jacqueline Kennedy; Danny Kaye ate there—and Uncle Lou, as he was known, was in the kitchen from 1963 to 1968. Then, just as Sichuan food began really coming into its own here, Uncle Lou left for Tokyo to escape friction with the staff at the Four Seas.
Meanwhile, David Keh, a waiter at the Four Seas, opened Szechuan Taste near Chatham Square, against the advice of many people who thought New York was not ready for an exclusively Sichuanese restaurant. Keh not only proved them wrong but subsequently had a hand (and a piece of the action) in many of the other Sichuan restaurants that sprang up around Manhattan after 1968, including the Szechuan on upper Broadway, where Wang had once worked. Keh floated uptown, and finally across town to Second Avenue for his biggest gamble of all, a Sichuanese restaurant on the East Side. He opened Szechuan East in 1972 on the site of a French restaurant, from which he inherited several hundred bottles of wine he couldn’t use. And from Japan he brought back his old friend Uncle Lou, to be his chef.
Lou had a room over the restaurant where he napped between three and five in the afternoon, but the rest of the day he was in the kitchen, where he would make hot spicy shrimp or Sichuan beef in a few seconds of final cooking at his large wok. He would purposely temper the amount of oil and hot seasoning in his dishes “for Americans.” But Uncle Lou’s food struck most people as hot. He told me once that complete authenticity in Chinese cooking wasn’t attainable outside China. Among other things, he had in mind one of the canonical eight great dishes of Chinese cuisine: camel hump.
In an ideal world, I would have been able to check that claim, not to mention various other details in the piece I wrote about mobile Chinese chefs. But I was mostly operating in the dark about Chinese gastronomy. The available books were a confusing mixture of intrinsically unreliable émigré recipes and memoirs. There was no Julia Child for the whole range of Chinese food. And even if there had been, the gap in cultural information between the United States of the 1970s and China in the area of food and food customs, not to mention history, was immensely greater than what Julia had needed to bridge a decade before.
My best sources were John and Ellen Schrecker, who themselves were primarily relying on the Sichuanese cook they had brought back from Taipei. By 1976, Ellen and John had published Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook with her.
In 1971, I had the advantage of having eaten Mrs. Chiang’s Sichuanese home cooking at the Schreckers’, which gave me some basis for pontificating about the food at the new crop of restaurants. But with all those other dishes allegedly based on the traditions of Beijing, Shanghai and Fujian, I could rely only on a Westerner’s palate and my experience with Cantonese food in the United States and London. This may not have been an entirely bad basis on which to judge unfamiliar dishes for an audience of newspaper readers with even less of a Chinese background than mine. Call it the blind leading the blind, if you wish, but for a first approximation, my reviews were openhearted descriptions that made sense to many readers. The way a dish at the pioneering Fujian restaurant Foo Joy, at the edge of Chinatown, struck me was likely to be similar to how it would affect readers operating with the same taste criteria and dining background I was deploying.
Anyway, I did what I could, riding a wave of public enthusiasm for this cascade of diverse new Chinese restaurants. I was no longer having to fill my review space on Friday with dutiful inspections of dreary new addresses and old favorites. The Hart-Celler Act had brought me a story. Then Washington played the China card again. In February 1972, President Nixon went to Beijing (it was still Peking in the Times), met with Mao and set in motion the open relations our two countries have today.
It was of special interest to me, of course, that Nixon ate at two Chinese banquets while he was in Beijing. The Times correspondent along for the historic trip, Max Frankel, won a Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches (and later became executive editor of the Times), but he found time to talk to me on the phone from China about the food at those meals, and I tried my best to put dishes I hadn’t seen or tasted (or even heard of, in some cases) into some kind of context.
In the article I cobbled together from that phone call (a thrill in itself at the time), I quoted Max Frankel extensively. Up until I spoke to him, the banquets had been getting a bad press, those reports based mainly on the terse handout menus. But Max had eaten both meals and was emphatic that the dishes were spectacular—and that they were not what you’d see on typical American restaurant menus, because they were classic banquet dishes, made with exotica like sea slug, which was prized for its texture and rarity, or built around elegant conceits: a trio of recipes linked by a common ingredient—in one case, egg white.
Perhaps the most important point Max made should have been obvious: that Chinese cooks in China were aces at preparing the most elaborate and high-toned dishes from their millennial cuisine. At the level of a state banquet, at any rate, imperial gastronomy had survived twenty-five years of Marxism. And Max’s description of the unfamiliar dishes made the implicit point that there was much more to Chinese food than what was on offer at traditional American Chinese restaurants.
This just added to the excitement among American gastronomes for the new wave of Chinese restaurants that were introducing whole cuisines hitherto unknown in our country.
This literal feeding frenzy reached its zenith just three months after Nixon’s China trip, when Hunam opened in midtown Manhattan. Featuring the food of Hunan Province, among other things the birthplace of Mao, Hunam was a truly remarkable place, and not just because it offered New Yorkers a chance to taste a Chinese provincial cuisine never before served in their city. Hunam was also a superb restaurant with a very high standard of execution. There had never been anything quite like it. I was bowled over.
In a four-star review, I did my best to describe Hunam’s remarkable dishes, which seemed to me like grander siblings of similar dishes I knew from the Sichuan repertory. For a first course, I recommended the hot-and-sour fish broth, which reminded me of ordinary hot-and-sour soup but, like so many of the Hunanese dishes, added an extra layer of elegance, in this case from fish stock and fish. The high point of a fine cold platter was raw shrimp in a subtle hot sauce that combined the tastes of Sichuan peppercorns and fresh coriander.
For a main course, one could choose honey ham, which consisted of two kinds of excellent Chinese ham with lotus nuts in a mildly sweet honey sauce. This very subdued and artful combination could be paired with a fiery lamb-and-scallion dish, a cousin of the Beijing dish with the same ingredients and the addition of a sauce as hot as any Sichuanese sauce, but taken one step further by additional seasonings.
Small, amazingly smooth and tender pieces of sea bass came in a hot sauce made with shrimp roe. Preserved duck was steamed on a bed of pork patties. Hot beef strips in yet another kind of hot sauce were served with dark green sprigs of cooked watercress.
If ever a phone actually did ring off the hook, it did so at Hunam on March 26, 1972, and every day thereafter, until the overwhelmed restaurant changed its number. No one had ever seen such a craze for a restaurant—any restaurant, not just a Chinese restaurant featuring food from a place almost none of the customers beating on its door had ever heard of before my review. Not until the Internet made it possible for millions of epicures all over the world to compete for seats at the world’s finest restaurants was the Hunam madness substantially surpassed.
At first, I was delighted with my ability to mobilize crowds of gourmets and to reward a restaurant I truly admired. But I began to have second thoughts. Over the summer, angry letters complained about rude, rushed service, noise, crowding. Some of them also disagreed with me about the quality of the food. Others accused me of taking a bribe from Hunam’s owners.
By November, the crowds were still coming, and Hunam’s most impassioned customers had taken to showing up at four in the afternoon to eat their beef with watercress in peace. But the negative mail was also unrelenting. I decided to go back and see how Hunam was doing after six months of unexpected celebrity.
The food was still remarkable, at least what I was given. By then I was known to the staff. But the service and the setting, crowded with more tables than I remembered from my visits in February, were unfortunate, much degraded under the pressure to move diners in and out as rapidly as possible.
I wrote this in strong terms, but I also stood by my original judgment of the food. Perhaps this was a tactical error, but I could only review the food I was served. I felt compelled not to ignore a controversy I had done so much to foment, yet I now think that I should have simply let it make its way, since it had been so auspiciously launched. A few weeks later, when I went to lunch, I couldn’t get a bill from the waiter, and when I attempted to leave a large tip, I was physically restrained by the manager.
I never went back, but the suspicions about bribery never went away. When the charges surfaced in irresponsible gossip items, Hunam’s owners apparently concluded that they had somehow misunderstood their proper obligation to me. They called my house to say they were in the neighborhood and wanted to stop by. I fled the house, but instructed my wife to accept nothing but food from them. A deputation duly arrived, carrying large bowls and trays of delicacies. But on their way out, one of the party thrust an envelope into Margaret’s hand, saying, “It’s for your children’s education.”
She ran after the visitors, having determined that the envelope contained a pile of hundred-dollar bills. They were on the point of driving off, but she managed to toss the envelope through an open window.
A month later, a UPS truck attempted to deliver two bicycles. It is not easy to refuse delivery of bulky items from a UPS driver who has already dragged them up your stoop, but we did.
In my increasingly chilly meetings with Abe Rosenthal, Hunam never came up, although I learned recently that he had eaten there and not much liked it. Clearly, however, Abe was unhappy with my performance, although he could not explain to me what was going wrong. From my point of view, I was doing fine: covering major trends in food in France and New York, visibly influencing public taste, attracting a faithful, even hysterically faithful audience.
Nevertheless, Rosenthal would not meet my gaze in the elevator. At a meeting with Charlotte Curtis, I asked what was wrong. She essentially dodged the question, saying only that she and Abe thought maybe they had been crowding me and that I would do better if I followed my own instincts and stopped second-guessing what they wanted from me. This was well before the second Hunam piece; I proposed a piece about prison food with a list of other ideas during that meeting.
The prison piece appeared in the news pages over three successive days in June. For it, I ate the main meal of the day with inmates at three facilities, including the state maximum-security prison at Attica just a few months after several men had died there in an uprising that had begun as a food riot. Neither Abe nor Charlotte saw fit to react to the piece. Abe continued to turn away when we passed each other. By the fall, I’d begun to think it was time to look for other work, but I’d gotten used to the perks and prestige of my job, although I had more and more trouble taking it seriously.
One day, I told Charlotte I was considering a feature on zoo food.
“Start with dogs,” she said. “The giraffes can come later.”
I thought for a moment and saw the inevitable. “I guess I’ll have to taste the stuff,” I said. Charlotte smiled.
The next week, I brought my dog, Cleo, a four-year-old Saluki bitch, to work. We had shared a lot over the years, but this was to be our first joint meal. I went to a market near the Times and came back with a broad selection of commercial dog food. By then, my research had convinced me that most of the stuff, the mock stews and other prepared items meant to appeal to the tastes of human buyers—foods on which Americans spent $1.5 billion, four times more than they spent on baby food—were nutritionally unnecessary or worse. The veterinary scientists I interviewed for the piece were unanimous in their belief that ordinary dry dog food—kibble—was all a dog needed except for water.
The problem was that dogs who’d been exposed to human food tended to disdain kibble and wanted to be fed table scraps. Every dog owner already knew this, and most compromised with “wet” food from cans. So there was a destructive nutritional relationship between dogs and their masters and mistresses.
Dr. Albert Jonas, director of the animal care division of the Yale School of Medicine, concurred. His laboratories maintained anywhere from one hundred to two hundred dogs at any given time on dry food. But at home, Dr. Jonas admitted, his Cairn terrier often chomped into a plate of leftovers (“It’s a pet. You know, the children …”). Like many lay dog owners, Dr. Jonas had allowed his dog to taste the poorly balanced but more delicious (for dogs as well as people) delights of human food.
What I decided I could contribute to this dilemma that flummoxed the elite of the veterinary world was the same gustatory judgment I applied to human food in restaurants. In order, therefore, to survey at least part of the vast current market in dog food, Cleo and I both sampled eleven kinds of dog food. Neither of us had eaten for sixteen hours prior to the experiment, but both of us had been previously corrupted by frequent exposure over long periods of time to a wide variety of meats and meat by-products.
Cleo point-blank refused to touch dry food—either Gaines Meal or Purina Dog Chow—although she was served it first. On the other hand, it was a matter of some peril to interrupt her ravenous feasting on the other nine varieties, which ran the gamut from raw ground beef chuck to chicken-flavored Prime to Milk-Bone biscuits to Top Choice chopped burger to liver-flavored Daily All-Breed dog food.
Cleo ate all the non-dry food (and the biscuits) with equal ardor and then took a brief nap. Meanwhile, I tasted very small amounts of the same foods, jotted down my reactions and attempted to rate the products’ taste by assigning each a theoretically possible four stars, for dog food that could possibly be compared to ordinary human food, and so on down to no stars for muck “that would make you retch.” The stars had nothing to do with nutrition.
My enthusiasm nowhere approached Cleo’s, but I did approve the ground chuck and found the Milk-Bone tasty enough to consume two biscuits, the second spread with butter. Those two foods were the only ones to earn as many as three stars. Just below these in my estimation came chicken-flavored Prime, which actually bore a surprising resemblance to sweet Passover cake. There was no disagreement with Cleo about the two dry foods. But Purina Dog Chow was somewhat more palatable than Gaines Meal.
Sometimes an appealing stew odor belied a lack of taste. This was the case with Recipe’s beef-and-egg dinner with vegetables and with Laddie Boy’s chunks made with lamb. Both had a texture “nigh unto that of cold cream.” The foods with the most unpleasant taste were the Top Choice chopped burger and Alpo horse-meat. One that could not be rated was liver-flavored Daily, an inexpensive homogenized food, brown-green in flavor and similar in effect to ipecac. It was not rated because “it was impossible to force the human subject to taste it. The dog, however, did like it.”
Many readers took this article to be a parody of my regular function as food critic. They were not wrong. Some were offended at my disrespect for gastronomic connoisseurship; others got a laugh out of the thing. The article actually made its way into a serious anthology of dog literature, where I joined a pantheon of dog writers that included Rudyard Kipling and Albert Payson Terhune.
This was not a kind of immortality I had been seeking. I was doing my best to see that I emerged from the hurly-burly of the Times food department as an author of books. By the time the dog-food piece appeared, I was under contract with a Times-owned book company, Quadrangle, to produce an anthology of Times recipes eventually called Great Recipes from The New York Times.
Quadrangle had been acquired in part to provide an in-house publisher for books written by Times reporters. The plan was to deter these wage slaves from farming out books based on their work for the paper to outside book publishers. The shock of Craig Claiborne’s having enriched himself via Harper & Row with The New York Times Cookbook had allegedly galvanized the New York Times Company into acquiring Quadrangle. And there was the hope that profits from book publishing would provide cash flow during the next newspaper strike.
I had waited a year before telling Charlotte Curtis that I wanted to assemble a cookbook from the recipes I was bringing to the paper, as well as some treasures gathered by my predecessors in food news that languished in the paste-up ledgers previously mined by Claiborne.
By early 1972, I had been pursued by several publishers, but the amiable Herbert Nagourney of Quadrangle made me an offer it was prudent not to refuse. It was, in fact, a very fine and competitive offer. At about the same time, I signed a contract with Judith Jones, Julia Child’s editor, at Knopf, to write a book about classic French sauces, which was to be called The Saucier’s Apprentice.
The idea had come to me when I was first at the Times. Green, ignorant, I was doing my best not to show it. And then I got invited to go on the TV quiz show To Tell the Truth. The other contestants and I all said we were the new food editor of the New York Times. And after we’d all tried to answer various food questions, the audience voted for the one whose answers had made him sound most authentically like a big-time newspaper food critic.
In the ten days before the show, I read my way through Escoffier’s Guide culinaire and as much of the Larousse gastronomique as I could endure. Somehow I decided to memorize the sauces, which was fairly easy to do because, I noticed, they came in families. There’s a book there, I told myself. I wasn’t asked anything about sauces on the air, although I did manage to get myself unmasked as the real Raymond Sokolov. But I remembered about the mother sauces. When I mentioned the idea to Judith Jones, she, too, thought there was a book there.
My plan was to stay at the Times only until these two books were published, so that I would still be food editor when the time came to promote their sales. But by early 1973, my second anniversary was coming up. When I’d taken the job, I’d promised myself I would stay a maximum of three years, if things went well, and a minimum of two, if they didn’t. I knew I couldn’t wait much longer. Abe was not happy with me, for reasons best known to him. And I was not at all happy with my life as Times food editor. The week-in, week-out routine of reviewing mostly mediocre restaurants and interviewing mostly dreary cooks was becoming unbearable. From the outside, my job looked delightful, but to me it was a serial misery, especially the restaurant part of it.
One frigid evening in February 1973, I knew I had to move on. I had arranged to meet friends at a Vietnamese restaurant near Herald Square in Manhattan. Vietnamese food was still a novelty in New York, and I was looking forward to an interesting meal. But as I approached the restaurant, I heard sirens. Then I saw red, fire-engine red. And hoses. And police barriers. The restaurant was ablaze.
I needed to find my friends, but this was decades before cell phones could have solved my problem. And because of the sheer size of the police and fire department presence, it made no sense to stand there and wait for my friends to appear. I was on the east side of the conflagration. What if they were approaching from the west? We couldn’t have seen each other through the smoky commotion.
The only thing I could do was walk around the very long block to the other side of the fire. And then back again every five or ten minutes, in the freezing cold.
A half hour later, we finally found each other, and fetched up nearby in an excellent new Indian restaurant, which lucked into a Times review only because of the very bad luck of its Vietnamese neighbor.
The next week, I sat with three friends for an hour and a half, waiting for dinner in a dreadful French-Japanese bistro that closed the day after my review appeared. And not long after that, the health department shut down a charming underground Haitian restaurant for attempting to operate without electricity. I had found this candlelit, one-woman enterprise to be a desirable place to sample Haitian cuisine as well as a plucky attempt at making it in New York on the slimmest of budgets. The health department shut the lady down because, without electricity, she couldn’t heat dishwater to a high enough temperature to satisfy the law. But she couldn’t afford electricity without staying in business long enough to earn the money to pay her Con Edison bill. By the time my review appeared, she had disappeared.
I got a call from Ed Klein, the foreign editor of Newsweek. He was about to leave on the first flight to China for U.S. journalists since the Nixon trip. Did I have any advice on where to eat? I suggested he try to visit an agricultural commune. Then he asked me if I was interested in returning to Newsweek’s Paris bureau. He needed to replace the bureau chief.
I said I was very interested. Ed told me he’d arrange it after he got back from China. Unfortunately, he didn’t think to say anything to Newsweek’s chief of correspondents, Rod Gander, who hired someone else to fill the vacancy in Paris while Ed was away. Worse still, word got back to the Times that I’d been job hunting. When Charlotte Curtis confronted me with the rumor, I couldn’t deny it.
A few days later, one of Mr. Rosenthal’s secretaries called, saying he wanted to see me. This was ominous. Normally, he communicated with me in regal memos (“I was not taken with your piece on …”). I went to see Charlotte first. She said Abe hadn’t asked her to join us and she didn’t choose to reveal what was going on, although she clearly had been briefed.
Abe’s younger secretary waved me in: “He’s expecting you.”
There he was, a caricature of all the descriptions you may have read or photographs you may have seen of Abe: small and pudgy, bad skin, shirttails working their way out of his pants, an endearingly failed stab at a preppy look—bow tie and blue oxford-cloth shirt.
His expression was dark, but not scowling. Yet he was clearly troubled. Regret filled the room. Without admitting it, A. M. Rosenthal was taking care of a mistake. That would be me.
“This isn’t working out,” he said.
I waited for an explanation. Instead, he waffled: “Some people like what you do. Others loathe it. We will tell anyone who asks that you resigned for personal reasons. And the severance arrangement will be significantly more generous than the routine formula. I regret this a great deal. I’ve only done this twice before since I became managing editor.”
He came to a halt, expectantly. It was my turn.
“I regret it, too. I was hoping to continue through the end of the year because of the Quadrangle book.”
Abe looked confused. I explained about the anthology of Times recipes and how my departure would compromise the prospects of the book. He made a note to himself. That very afternoon, he called Herb Nagourney, trying, unsuccessfully, to quash the project. There seemed to be nothing more to say. He had canned me, without offering an explanation. I suppose I could have demanded some rationale, but I knew it would be pure waffle that couldn’t be used in a lawsuit.
It turns out Abe assumed that I would do what the other misfortunates he’d fired had done. Determined to stay at the Times, they’d brought in the Newspaper Guild or a lawyer of their own and negotiated a new assignment in some dark corner of the paper. You couldn’t be fired without cause at the New York Times, unless you let it happen.
I let it happen. And, as Rosenthal later told my friend Joseph Lelyveld, a career Times man and eventual executive editor, I was the only person he’d ever fired who had just shrugged and gone home.
* Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, the U.S.-Soviet negotiations begun in 1969 that led to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, and to a never-ratified nuclear-arms-reduction agreement in 1979.
† The linotype process, which was then used to print the Times, created lines of type—“slugs”—from molten metal. The slugs, all of uniform length, were then assembled into columns and locked into forms in a stack that reproduced the original text, but this worked only if the slugs were stacked in the right order. Somehow two slugs in the Times/AP article got stacked in reverse, with this result:
“white, decorated with blown
Cox, and will be iced in”
Instead of the intended:
“Cox, and will be iced in
white, decorated with blown.”