Garlic and Sapphires (16 page)

“Oh no, young man,” said the waiter solemnly. He wagged his finger. “You must never tell. Remember? The recipe goes with you to the grave.”

Nicky looked up. “Cross my heart,” he said.

Palm's potatoes were a hard act to follow, and as we ate our way through the steakhouses of the city—through Gallagher's, where the waiters were extraordinarily kind to children, and Christ Cella, where they were not, through Pietro's, and Pen and Pencil, and Smith and Wollensky—I watched my son struggle with the memory of his first hash browns. He soon expanded his repertoire to include cottage fries and steak fries and potatoes O'Brien, but none measured up to the masterful hash brown. He went on to sample the potatoes at the Old Homestead, Ruth's Chris, Ben Benson's, and Frank's. But at the end, when we were beginning to wrap up our research, he discovered a whole new class of potato.

It happened at the brand-new Morton's in midtown, where we watched with rapt attention as a cart laden with raw meat was trundled toward us. Nicky listened intently as the waitress held up one plastic-wrapped piece of meat after another. In her hands each filet, strip steak, and porterhouse became an actor auditioning for an important part in our meal. When she had finished showing off the meat, she allowed the potatoes their shot at stardom.

Nicky was entertained, but Michael and I both found this show so silly that we started looking around the room, trying to find some distraction to keep us from laughing out loud. While Michael stifled his mirth by focusing on the LeRoy Neiman prints, I peered through the expensive gloom at my fellow diners and began to experience a prickly sense of déjà vu.

“Look, Mommy,” said Nicky, tugging at my sleeve, “look at the potatoes. See how big they are!”

The waitress was holding up giant tubers, magnificent spuds of Fal staffian proportions. I'd never seen anything like them. “Those will make good hash browns,” Nicky said confidently. “Can I go into the kitchen and watch them cook?”

“Probably not,” I said without thinking. “The kitchen's pretty small.”

Michael and Nicky both looked at me quizzically. “How do you know that?” Michael asked. “You said this was your first visit.”

“It
is,
” I said, puzzled myself. “But it feels so familiar.” And suddenly I had it! “I
have
been here before—but it was a long, long time ago.”

“Before I was born?” asked Nicky. “That long ago?”

“Yes, sweetie,” I said. “Way before you were born. The last time I was here, I was just about your age.”

 

 

 

 

 

M
anhattan in the fifties was paved with dim little French restaurants with red velvet walls. They were everywhere. They looked the same, they smelled the same, their menus were interchangeable. They all served coq au vin, filet of sole, and consommé à la something or other. The chefs in these establishments came and went; the waiters came and stayed. You chose your restaurant for the waiter. And my parents chose the Dubonnet for Max, visiting him two or three times a week.

Probably it was an ordinary restaurant, but I remember it as a magical place of endless treats: Max gave me whole glasses filled with maraschino cherries and bowls of chocolate mousse large enough to drown in. Sometimes he showed up with adorable white bunnies that turned out to be made of mashed potatoes, or rare tidbits of tenderloin cut into tiny squares that fit perfectly into my mouth. But the biggest treat of all was when Max took me to the kitchen.

Together we would parade across the crimson carpet, past all the ordinary people doomed to spend their ordinary evening in the dining room, and push through the swinging doors into the warm, bright domain of the cooks.

“Get that brat out of here,” the chef always shouted when he saw me. “You know I hate children.” But as he spoke a sautéed mushroom or a slice of apple was flying toward me, the first of the many little gifts he would bestow upon me before evening's end.

If it was a slow night he and the sous-chef would tie an apron around my waist and demonstrate the art of making radishes into roses, or turning potatoes into perfect rounds. As Max hovered watchfully in the background they would have omelet races, arguing over who could flip his higher into the air. On busy nights they sat me on the counter, handed me a dishcloth, and had me carefully clean the edge of each plate just before it left the kitchen.

Sometimes my parents lingered after the other guests had gone, and the chef would say, “Let's play the spice game.” He'd wrap a dishcloth around my eyes and hold one canister after another beneath my nose. “Tarragon,” I'd cry when the dark licorice scent assaulted my senses, and the cooks would cheer. When a dusty smell hit the back of my throat before it hit my nose I knew it was the turmeric they used to color their curries, and when the smell was wild and musty and brown I recognized the juniper berries used in game stews. They held bottles of rum extract (like butterscotch), cooking sherry (nutty, slightly sour), and Worcestershire sauce (sweet, tangy, mysterious) under my nostrils and if I identified them all correctly, they'd thump each other on the back and fête me with lemon cookies.

But what I liked even better were the times Max took me into the private dining room where the waiters went to smoke. We'd sit in that tangle of extra chairs and scarred wooden tables as he and Bruno and Jacques traded stories, reaching back farther and farther into their memories.

The best stories always began “When my father was a waiter . . .” Hearing that, Bruno would light a cigarette, Jacques would sip his wine, and I would cross my legs beneath me and hold my breath.

“When my father was a waiter,” Max said, clearing his throat, “people did not receive remuneration from the restaurant. No, no, my friends, it was not as it is today. Back then people paid for the privilege of collecting tips. And let me tell you, the competition for the grand establishments, for Sherry's and Delmonico's and Rector's, was fierce.

“But those were different days, a time when the word ‘diet' had not spread its blight across the land to ruin everybody's appetite. Today your average diner indulges in an appetizer, an entrée, and maybe, just maybe, if he's feeling flush, a tiny tidbit of dessert. But in those days? Oh yes, my friends, back then people knew how to eat. Why, Diamond Jim would eat four dozen oysters and a gallon of orange juice before he even ordered dinner. And those were manly oysters, six inches from one end to the other, not these puny little creatures that huddle in their modern shells. And Miss Lillie Langtry, why, she would match him oyster for oyster, swig for swig, as if her honor was in it. That was, you understand, just a little snack to wet their whistles, provide them with the fortitude to contemplate the menu. Theirs, my friends, was a table worth waiting on. The eating lasted through the night: whole herds of cattle and braces of birds were demolished before the evening ended. And on good nights my father would come home with silver jingling in his pockets and ducks dangling from his fingertips. Oh yes, my friends, in those days, being a waiter was a wonderful thing.”

“It's good now too, Max, isn't it?” I'd ask, slipping my hand anxiously into his. “Think of all the people you make happy!”

And Max would twinkle down at me and say, in his most courtly manner, “Thank you very much. Sometimes I need reminding.” And then, very gently, he would lead me back into the kitchen and through the swinging doors into the dark, hushed, perfumed air of the Dubonnet, where my parents were still sipping wine and talking in the low voices that meant that they were having a very good time.

And on those nights, with my mother smiling and my father looking at her as if she was the best thing in the whole world, I wished that we could live at the Dubonnet, where nobody worried about money, the food was never burnt, and only good things ever happened.

 

 

 

 

 

I
hadn't thought about the Dubonnet for many years, but now I could feel the ghost of Max hovering in the room, and I was grateful to Mor ton's for restoring him to me. And a few days later I went to Peter Luger and discovered an entirely different doorway to the past.

As the waiter walked across that great barn of a restaurant, the meat aroma grew so intense that I was suddenly back in Jimmy's shop. The scent of steak was like the sound of a trumpet cutting through the air, so high and clear that it triumphed over every other sense. Then the soft richness was filling my mouth, and it was a taste as old as I was and for a moment I merged with the flavor so that I had disappeared completely.
This
was a great steak. I had found what I was looking for. I had another piece, and then I was chewing on the bones and picking out the marrow and chasing all the tender little bits that hide between the fat and the bone.

By the time we were done with dinner I was covered in meat juice from head to foot. But I didn't care: I had discovered that I could go back in time whenever I wanted. All it took was an old-fashioned piece of steak.

W
orking on the steak roundup piece made me happier than I remembered feeling since we'd moved to New York. But being in the greenies ruined it, and it was a long time until I wrote about another steakhouse. Now and then I took Nicky to the Palm for hash browns, and I sometimes sneaked back to Peter Luger for a taste of the past, but I kept that to myself. It was not until a few years later, when a reporter asked where I spent my own money, that it came to me that Peter Luger deserved a full review. Of course I gave it three stars.

That set off another flap. I may have been unaware that Bryan Miller had considered the restaurant worthy of no more than a single star, but his fans were not. Taking my review as one more sign of my unsuitability, they wrote in to remind my editors of this fact.

I didn't mind: controversy is good for a critic. Little did I know that my steak problems were not behind me.

 

 

 

 

 

O
ne day near the end of my tenure, my boss motioned me into his office. John Montorio's title was Style Editor, but his style was decidedly un-
Times
ian
.
Brash, noisy, and very smart, he was the son of a bricklayer and took up more emotional space than the paper generally allotted its editors. He was funny and gossipy, stormed through the newsroom like a bull in a china shop, and made no bones about the fact that he had come up the hard way. His editorial sense was impeccable, but he seemed to spend a fair amount of time thinking of ways to get promoted. Now he looked me straight in the eye and said, “You're making my life miserable.”