The United States of Arugula (32 page)

The one guiding principle that he took with him from his mixed-up school days was something he was told by his advance-placement history
teacher at Richmond Hill High, Jack Estrin. “We were talking about aesthetics,” DeLuca says. “He tried to tell us that beauty and truth are not
subjective
, they’re
ob
jective. All us kids went, ‘No, no! Art is not objective, it’s a matter of opinion, a matter of what you like.’ Estrin said we didn’t know what we were talking about.”

What this peculiar classroom exchange meant in practical terms, DeLuca couldn’t yet fathom. After graduating, he took a stopgap job at a pharmacy, attended classes noncommittally at City College, smoked a lot of marijuana, and found a studio apartment in the basement of a town house on West Twelfth Street in Greenwich Village. In his comings and goings from the building, he became friendly with the gay couple who lived in the floor-through apartment on the second floor, Joel Dean and Jack Ceglic. Dean, a soft-spoken Michigan native thirteen years DeLuca’s senior, was a publishing executive at Simon and Schuster. Ceglic was a fashion illustrator and painter. Raw and uncultured, DeLuca regarded these worldly, contented men with awe, and jumped at the chance to socialize with them.

“I wasn’t a loner, but I felt distanced from society—pathologically distant. And that left me more malleable, amenable, and hungry to find something or someone to connect to,” DeLuca says. “When I first walked into Dean’s apartment, I was thunderstruck. I’d never seen a more beautiful place. They made a complete work of art out of their little apartment. Dean was this bright guy who wrote music and played the piano and had a master’s degree in literature from Columbia. Steady as a rock—just the opposite of me. We got to talking, and I told him what Jack Estrin had told me. Dean was the first person to say to me, ‘That guy knew what he was talking about. Art
is
objective. Beauty
is
objective. Otherwise, you couldn’t agree on who all the great artists were through the ages.’”

Dean’s cultured way of life seemed to be a validation of Estrin’s outlook. “I learned that you could learn to see better, hear better,
taste
better,” says DeLuca. With Ceglic, Dean educated DeLuca in the ways of opera, art, and, most consequentially, good eating. Ceglic, the son of a Brooklyn grocer, was a fine amateur cook and devoted Julia Child fan who, like lots of aspirational
sixties adults, enjoyed taking on the recipes in
Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
“Joel and I liked a certain style of living,” Ceglic says, “and we shopped and ate and did things a certain way. Giorgio seemed to fit right in with what we did.”

As the three men started dining together regularly, DeLuca began to recognize the purity and virtues of the “low-end” things his father imported; pridefully, he’d bring Dean and Ceglic tins of briny Sicilian olives and yard-long soppresattas to slice up for antipasti. Somewhere along the way, the notion developed in DeLuca’s mind to open a cheese shop, selling the kinds of pungent, flavorful imports that he’d tasted at the Washington Market: Italian gorgonzola and taleggio, French chèvre. Why not cheese? Cheese was something about which one could certainly make an objective judgment: it was good or it was bad. The writer Clifton Fadiman once described cheese as “milk’s leap into immortality.” Whatever cheese had inspired Fadiman to write such words, this was the kind of cheese that DeLuca wanted to sell in his shop.

That DeLuca eventually opened his shop on Prince Street, in the neighborhood south of Greenwich Village that had only recently come to be known as SoHo (south of Houston Street), was attributable to Dean and Ceglic. In 1970, the couple moved from the West Twelfth Street town house to a loft on SoHo’s Wooster Street, where Ceglic could keep a studio in his own home. DeLuca, though he continued to live in the Village, became infatuated with his friends’ new neighborhood.

The early seventies were New York City’s shabbiest hour, a time of collapsing infrastructure, hard drugs, high crime rates, and
Kojak
tableaus of needle parks and graffitied subway cars. SoHo was an exception, “one of the few growth communities, one of the bright spots,” DeLuca says. For an aesthete in training like him, the neighborhood was a refuge, a place where, among the stark industrial buildings and clean, bright interior spaces, one could shake off the stink of the city. For a time, SoHo, too, had been a part of New York’s decline, a fading no-man’s-land of printing plants and small factories sliding into insolvency. But like many a struggling urban neighborhood
before it and since, SoHo owed its deliverance from decrepitude to struggling artists. As the industrial businesses closed up in the sixties, the artists trickled in, enthralled by the cheap rents and extraordinary allotments of square footage. By 1970, the year in which it actually became legal to live in SoHo (previously, the area had been zoned strictly for manufacturing and light industry), enough artists had moved in to constitute a full-blown bohemian community.

SoHo’s bohemianism was of a different breed than the shaggy, tie-dyed, let-it-all-hang-out brand that prevailed out West in the same period. “It wasn’t hippies,” says DeLuca. “All the hippies [in New York] had decided that urban life was corrupt, and they needed to move to the ashram and the country life.” In SoHo, the aesthetic was minimalist: urban renewal that began, figuratively and literally, with a clean slate. The artists left their concrete floors uncarpeted, their brick walls exposed, and their lightbulbs unshaded. Their principal meeting place was a cheap restaurant at the corner of Prince and Wooster Streets that a bunch of them had founded as a collective. It was called, simply, in accordance with the neighborhood’s prevailing ethos of utilitarian chic, Food.

In 1973, after an unfulfilling stretch as a substitute teacher in the New York public school system and a happier, briefer stint working at Balducci’s to learn the ropes of retail, DeLuca at last opened his cheese store. It was called, in compliance with SoHo’s minimalist dictates, the Cheese Store. And it afforded DeLuca the chance to put Estrin’s theory into practice: beauty, art, truth, taste—objective, not subjective.

“A lot of this was in reaction to the processed food that America was starting to live on,” DeLuca says. “The Swanson’s TV dinners, the Tang, the fucking WisPride cheddar in a crock—Americans were losing their ability to taste. I wanted to show that some things are
better
than others. Americans are taught just the opposite: ‘Whatever makes you happy. You like Coca-Cola and this guy likes fine Burgundies? You can’t say one is better than the other!’ Can you imagine the absurdity of that? But that’s the underlying philosophy that Americans are brainwashed into.”

It wasn’t a stretch for DeLuca to conflate his role with that of the artists who had repopulated and revived SoHo. He was an unabashed elitist and Europhile, there to provoke and reveal. A small, wiry, handsome man given to wearing Lacoste shirts, he looked like a European sophisticate, but his skittery demeanor and Noo Yawky dropped
r
’s were totally early-period Scorsese. The cheese-buying public had never seen anything like him. “I didn’t want to just play the nice gentle thing,” he says. “I wanted to make ’em lock onto me. I wanted to grab their attention. I would get confrontational about Jarlsberg. People would ask for it, and I would scorn them.
Scathingly
put ’em down. But then, then I would take ’em under my wing and say, ‘C’mere—let me show you the possibilities. Let me show you real Emmenthaler.’”

Sometimes DeLuca took a more positive, proactive approach toward his Cheese Store customers, proffering samples to the uptowners who were starting to visit SoHo as gallery gawkers. “I used to give the blue-haired ladies a taste of the fresh chèvre from France,” he says. “I remember putting olive oil on it and fresh thyme, then giving ’em a taste. Then I’d have some, too, and say ‘Boy, that—that’s like angel cum!’ Just to freak ’em out. Then I’d pretend I didn’t care—and let them come back after me. Which they usually did. I was trying to show people things. An artist shows people things that they can’t see themselves.”

FOUR MILES NORTH
of the scene of DeLuca’s performance-art salesmanship. Eli Zabar was dishing out even rougher treatment to his customers at E.A.T., the fancy-foods shop and café that he opened on Madison Avenue in 1973, the same year as the Cheese Store’s debut. E.A.T. was a fantasy of culinary exquisiteness, stocked with imported specialty foods, breads and pastries from the city bakeries that Zabar had deemed worthy of his vision, and the proprietor’s own prepared dishes and European-style loaves—all combined in one smart-looking shop with stainless-steel shelving and a checkerboard linoleum floor.

Zabar believed his products were the absolute best that Manhattan had
to offer, and if you disagreed, or complained about the eyebrow-raising prices he charged for his croissants and preserves, he would unhesitatingly show you the door, heckling you with profanity as you exited. “In my earlier days, I was imperious,” he says. “My wife tells a story from before we were married, that she came in to ask about my croissants. She was making her own, and she hadn’t been so successful, and she thought maybe I could give her a hint. Instead, apparently, I was very …
not nice
, and threw her out.”

A self-described “product of affluence,” Zabar was the cosseted baby son of the family that owned the Upper West Side’s greatest Jewish-foods emporium, Zabar’s. His father, Louis, had emigrated from the Ukraine in the early twenties and a decade later founded what Eli describes as “what was called an ‘appetizing store’—not a delicatessen. An appetizing store carried a lot of cheeses, lots of kinds of smoked fish. It smelled of coffee and spices and teas. It was all counter service, everyone in white aprons, running around. The clientele was exclusively immigrant Jewish.”

In 1950, when Eli was seven years old, Louis Zabar died, leaving the business in the hands of Eli’s brothers Saul and Stanley, fifteen and eleven years his senior, respectively. (They later took on a third partner, Murray Klein.) Saul and Stanley broadened the mandate of Zabar’s somewhat, roasting their own coffee, offering myriad cold cuts, and carrying soft French cheeses like brie, but Zabar’s remained a Jewish store in idiom.

Eli never quite felt a part of the family operation. He’d gone to a different prep school than his brothers—they’d attended Horace Mann, “where every Jew who had made his fortune sent his children,” while he was sent to Fieldston, which was “more arty, and they expected more poets than accountants”—and he possessed a querulousness and independent streak that precluded him from respecting any authority figure, whether a boss, a teacher, or even an older brother. In the sixties, he worked unhappily as a night manager at Zabar’s, uncertain of his future. The only thing he was sure of was that he didn’t want to go to Vietnam—a fate he deflected by attending Columbia University’s business school and then, when that no longer exempted him from the draft, by becoming a teacher in the New York City
public school system. (DeLuca, though he, too, had been a teacher, got his military service over with before that, enlisting in the Army National Guard.) In these wilderness years, Zabar, like Deborah Madison at her Zen retreat, found escapist relief in the pages of
Gourmet
magazine. Finally, in 1970, he bundled himself off to Europe with a few hundred dollars and a Michelin guide, eager to see what he’d been missing. Oddly enough, Zabar found his inspiration not in Paris or Tuscany but in London, where a fancy-foods shop called Justin De Blanc Provisions caught his eye. “At the counter, they had the prettiest English girls with milkmaid skin,” he says. “They carried smoked salmon and stuff like that, but also a lot of homemade goods. I thought, ‘That’s exactly what I want to do.’”

Upon returning to New York, Zabar took it upon himself to learn how to bake bread, working from cookbooks to perfect his favorite, the fingerwidth French loaf known as ficelle, browned to the cusp of being burned. Zabar found an empty storefront on Madison at East Eightieth Street, due east of his brothers’ shop and in an altogether more refined, snooty New York neighborhood, the Upper East Side. He chose this location, Zabar says, because “I loved the way women looked and smelled on Madison.” Unlike his brothers, he wasn’t aiming for a Jewish audience but for a willing congregation of culinary aesthetes who would gladly pay top dollar for top foods. His anger over the deadening of the American palate rivaled DeLuca’s. As the building contractors readied E.A.T. for its 1973 opening, Zabar papered its windows with a “manifesto” he’d written himself. “It started off by saying, ‘What’s going on here?’” Zabar recalls. “And then it said, ‘Soon there will be no more bakers; there will be no more decent produce; there will be no more whatever. And what I’m gonna do is seek all this out and sell it here.’”

E.A.T. was an audacious leap forward for the gourmet shop, reinterpreting homey staples like fresh bread and chicken salad as prestigious “arti-sanal” goods, and causing sticker shock among customers who nevertheless paid up and came back. “I was charging three dollars for a brownie when other people were charging sixty cents, and it became this easy handle for the
press, ‘the most expensive food per ounce in Manhattan,’” Zabar says. “But it wasn’t just a
brownie
—it was the philosophy, the effort. Because I did it myself, I had a very high value on my own efforts, on my own sense of self.”

It was this proprietary outlook, Zabar says, that compelled him to boot DeLuca from his shop when the downtown cheese merchant paid a visit to E.A.T. early in its run. “I used to have shelves along the wall of the merchandise that I used to import from everywhere—mustards, jams, spices—and DeLuca was looking at the merchandise, writing down where it came from,” Zabar says. “I threw him out—physically. I didn’t want him copying me. He came back with a policeman. The policeman came in and said, ‘This isn’t a dispute that I’m gonna get involved in,’ and he left.”

DeLuca, unsurprisingly, remembers the incident differently. “I came in with a date to sit down, and Zabar thought I was doing espionage,” he says. “He was flattering himself to the max, man! Like I would want to copy him! He was mashing up Schaller & Weber liverwurst, smooshing in currants and pouring in brandy, and calling it some kind of foie gras!”