The United States of Arugula (34 page)

But Franey was still too much of a purist to limit himself to thirty minutes. (Like a lot of chefs, he was also made queasy by the word “gourmet” and preferred the title “60-Minute Chef,” but he yielded to Gelb on that matter.) The first “60-Minute Gourmet” column featured a recipe for
crevettes “margarita”
—an invention of Franey’s that called for shrimp to be cooked in a sauce of tequila, shallots, and cream, with avocado slices tossed in at the end—and began with a statement of intent (written by Claiborne) that declared, “With inventiveness and a little planning, there is no reason why a working wife, a bachelor, or a husband who likes to cook cannot prepare an elegant meal in under an hour.”

The
Times
and
New York
magazine were the brand leaders in chic food journalism, steering it away from the mumsy casseroles and layer cakes of
McCall’s
and
Redbook
and into the seductive “lifestyle” format that appealed
to men and women alike. Sheraton, in her memoir,
Eating My Words
, explained the allure of this format, saying, “I remain convinced that there are more people interested in knowing where to buy the best bagel than about the latest act of political or corporate corruption, primarily because they personally can do something about the bagel but feel powerless against the Enrons of the world.” Sheraton had come to the
Times
from
New York
, whose founder, Clay Felker, was the dean of what Gelb admiringly terms “high-class consumerism,” and she was among the first to recognize a sea change in the way the middle class felt about restaurant dining—whereas it had long been regarded as an extravagance, by the mid-seventies, she told the culinary scholar Mitchell Davis, “[people] were beginning to entertain by going out.”

Sheraton was the first
Times
restaurant reviewer since Claiborne to have staying power. After Claiborne had burned out on reviewing in 1972, he was replaced by Raymond Sokolov, a former
Newsweek
reporter, who lasted just two years in the job, though he later distinguished himself as the author of several good food books and as the culinary correspondent for
The Wall Street Journal.
Sokolov was followed as restaurant critic by John L. Hess, the
Times
Paris correspondent, and John Canaday, the paper’s art critic, who served even shorter stints on the restaurant beat than Sokolov. It was a perverse measure of Claiborne’s achievements that, nearly twenty years after he had to pester Jane Nickerson about the legitimacy of his candidacy, as a man, to be the paper’s food editor, now the
Times
management had decided that only men were worthy of the position. Sheraton had campaigned for the job in 1972 and gotten nowhere, prompting her to send a vitriolic letter expressing her umbrage to the paper’s publisher and several of its editors. But by 1976, the
Times
saw the virtue in going with someone who, like Claiborne, knew how to cook and had a track record in food reporting, and the feisty Sheraton assumed the post.

Like Gael Greene, Sheraton believed in reviewing incognito in order to better gauge the experience of the average diner—“It’s not what a chef
can
do, it’s what he
will
do,” she declared. But she wrote with none of Greene’s
Laugh-In
frothiness, nor did she seek out friendships with chefs, as
Claiborne did. Reviewing was serious business, consumer advocacy, and she wasn’t going to mince words or cuddle up to maître d’s. In his memoir,
City Room
, Gelb asserts that “Mimi’s power was such that when she liked a new restaurant, she could put it on the map overnight, but when a restaurant displeased her, the ruthlessness of her review could put it out of business.” Sheraton was also imposing in person. A large woman during her stint at the
Times
,
*
she admits in
Eating My Words
“to having subliminally felt a sense of power that went along with being heavy, as though the more mass I had, the more space I occupied and so controlled.” While some
Times
people faulted Claiborne for being occasionally prickly, they
feared
Sheraton.

Claiborne actually spent two years away from the
Times
in the early seventies, giving up not only his review column in 1972 but his job and benefits. In a pattern that would be repeated by many a name food writer, he grew restive in mid-career and wondered if there wasn’t more to life than his high-profile perch, if there wasn’t some opportunity out there for him to be
in charge
of something. He had also grown frustrated with the
Times
policy against co-bylines and Franey’s consequent anonymity as his unsung collaborator. With these issues in mind, he and Franey rounded up some investors, pumped in considerable sums of their own money, and started up
The Craig Claiborne Journal
, a biweekly newsletter devoted to food news, restaurant reviews, recipes, product testing, and insider scuttlebutt about the food world. A prescient mix of the technique lessons and consumer journalism of
Cook’s Illustrated
and the first-class-cabin luxe-life posturing of
Wine Spectator
and
Cigar Aficionado, The Craig Claiborne Journal
was well-executed but too far ahead of its time. In less than two years, Claiborne and Franey found themselves undersubscribed and deeply in debt.

Gelb had rued the day that Claiborne left and seized the moment to woo back the prodigal food guru. Early in 1974, the
Times
put an ad in the
paper heralding Claiborne’s return, a photograph of the writer peering mischievously over his trademark half-glasses, overlaid with the headline
HE SOMETIMES BITES THE HAND THAT FEEDS HIM.
Claiborne came back on the conditions that he no longer would have to review restaurants; that he could file his stories from his house in East Hampton, sparing him the agita of living in the city; and that Franey would receive byline credit for his work. The
Times
also paid off Claiborne’s and Franey’s debts, making an arrangement for the two men to repay the paper with earnings from their books.

Claiborne relievedly resumed writing for the paper, and Franey flourished in his new, late-in-life role as a public figure. But an incident on the eve of Claiborne’s return foreshadowed the dark turn that his life would take. The day that he and Franey had closed the last issue of
The Craig Claiborne Journal
, they treated their small staff to “a champagne lunch of striped bass with
sauce gribiche
,” preceded by Bloody Marys. After the staff and Franey had filed out of his home, Claiborne, alone, sozzled, and depressed, drove over to Bobby Van’s, a writer’s haunt in the neighboring town of Bridgehampton. There, at the bar, he happened upon Willie Morris, the writer and former boy-wonder editor of
Harper’s
magazine. Morris was a fellow Mississippian, and, even more so than Claiborne, one of New York’s professional literary Southerners.
*
Claiborne settled in for a scotch and soda and some rote suth’n-boy talk—“through William Faulkner for the hundred and eleventh time,” he later recalled—and switched to dry martinis when Morris asked him to stay on at the restaurant for dinner. Swerving and swooping his way home that cold winter night, Claiborne was pulled over by the East Hampton police for drunk driving and thrown into a jail cell. With the one phone call allowed him, he woke up Gelb at 2 a.m., pleading for help.

Gelb found a lawyer for Claiborne and sweet-talked the desk officer into driving the writer home. Claiborne got off with probation and a six-month
suspension of his driver’s license, but his drinking grew ever more pronounced as the years went on—as did his impertinent outbursts of potty talk and fits of embarrassing behavior. During Claiborne’s second go-round at the
Times
, Gelb remembers him making sloppy advances on the decidedly heterosexual novelist Joseph Heller—“And Joe, of course, being a very macho guy, would say, ‘C’mon, c’mon, that’s enough,’” Gelb says—and another incident in which the Gelbs and Claiborne were invited by Turner Catledge’s elegant widow, Abby, to dinner at the starchy Cosmopolitan Club. Claiborne, soused again, broke a lull in the conversation by suddenly blurting out, “When I die and they autopsy my brain, do you know what they’ll find?” After a nervous silence, he answered his own question: “Pubic hair!” Mrs. Catledge was not amused. Claiborne still had plenty of good journalism left in him, but his return to the
Times
marked the beginning of his decline.

WHO BETTER TO ARTICULATE
the ascent of the “lifestyle” ethos than Woody Allen, who in the late seventies was at the peak of his popularity as an adorable icon of upper-middlebrow cosmopolitanism? Tellingly, Allen used Dean & DeLuca as a setting for a scene in
Manhattan
(1979), his most boosterish, seductive, I ♥ NY movie, the one that began with fireworks over Central Park and Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue.
For those who actually shopped at the store, the
Manhattan
scene was a status-conferring event, a validation of their raffish urbanity. At the film’s end, Allen lies in repose on a couch and voices into a tape recorder his list of things that make life worth living, among them “Groucho Marx … Willie Mays … the second movement of the
Jupiter Symphony …
Louis Armstrong’s recording of ‘Potato Head Blues’ …
Sentimental Education
by Flaubert … those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne …” Joan Didion, writing in
The New York Review of Books
, declared this list to be Allen’s “ultimate consumer report,” arguing that “the extent to which it has been quoted approvingly suggests a new class in America, a subworld of people rigid with apprehension that they will die
wearing the wrong sneaker, naming the wrong symphony, preferring
Madame Bovary.”

Didion was being inordinately doomy and apocalyptic, as was her wont, but she correctly deduced that a new class of status- and lifestyleconscious Americans was taking shape, even if no one was yet calling them yuppies or aging boomers or chardonnay-swilling brie-eaters. Dean & DeLuca was a culinary manifestation of this phenomenon: status food and status kitchenwares in an aspirational setting. Allen’s celebratory list might well have been amended to include balsamic vinegar, sun-dried tomatoes, and extra-virgin olive oil, three ingredients that came to symbolize a whole way of life, and that Dean & DeLuca had a huge hand in popularizing.

For all of Joel Dean’s wariness of the “Italian market” pigeonhole, the Italian products that Giorgio DeLuca imported turned out to be the store’s biggest sellers and greatest status-generators in its early days—a preview, in effect, of the ascension in the eighties of Italian food, northern Italian especially. It’s probable that no one played a larger role in making balsamic vinegar ubiquitous than DeLuca, though he wasn’t the first to sell it in America. Chuck Williams, whose success in San Francisco had prompted him to start a Williams-Sonoma mail-order catalog in 1971 and a second store on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills in 1973, was offering small bottles of aged
aceto balsamico
by Fini, a producer in Modena, as early as the mid-seventies. Marcella Hazan claims it was she who prompted Williams to do so. “I asked him, ‘Chuck, why’s everything French in your catalog?’ and he looked at me and said, ‘What is Italy?’ Not the right thing, to tell me that,” she says. “I had a little bottle of real
aceto balsamico
in the kitchen, and I say, ‘Taste it,’ and he starts asking me all these questions. Anyway, a little later, we receive the catalog, and there was
aceto balsamico.”

Williams, for his part, recalls discovering balsamic vinegar entirely on his own, on one of his sorties to Rome in search of new products. In the food hall of a department store, he remembers seeing “these hexagonal bottles that were frosted, with
‘aceto balsamico’
on them. I didn’t know what it was. I’d look at it, and I’d think it looked more like hair tonic than anything
else. I just sort of passed it up for a couple of years, until I asked one of the girls in the department what it was, and she told me that it was very special, how it was made and so forth. We got it in the catalog right away. It became very popular with the upscale group of customers, especially the ladies who wanted to be careful about how they eat and keep their figures. This was perfect, because you didn’t need any oil with it: half of an avocado, and fill the center with balsamic.”

DeLuca, too, was intrigued by the possibilities of pitching balsamic vinegar as a sort of new-wave health food. Using his father’s connections, he was able to import a cheaper, lower-grade balsamic vinegar by Monari Federzoni in 1978, but he was required to buy 150 cases, a massive order; he would have preferred to take just five.

“Dean’s looking at me, like ‘What are you doing with 150 cases of vinegar?’” he says. “And so I called
The New York Times
, and I told ’em, ‘I got balsamic vinegar, it’s considered one of the finest vinegars in the world, and it’s sweet, you don’t need oil with it.’” The
Times
reporter, Ann Barry, dutifully wrote a four-column article about DeLuca’s new featured product in the Living section
(LA DOLCE VINEGAR, RICH AND ROBUST)
and noted that “Its flavor, a mellow harmony of sour and sweet, is so robust that it may be used as a salad dressing in itself-—a bonus for the diet-conscious.”

After the
Times
article came out, Dean & DeLuca was thronged, and DeLuca’s importer wanted to take back some of the Monari Federzoni cases to sell to other commercial customers. “I said, ‘No way, I paid for it,’” DeLuca says. “I had a lock on something. I realized, ‘I’m shopping for all these other guys’—because then, people from other stores started trying to sell what we had.” DeLuca set up his own import and distribution business, serving not only Dean & DeLuca but stores and restaurants throughout the country, as well as other New York–based importing companies. In so doing, he helped broaden the reach not only of balsamic vinegar but of such Italian products as extra-virgin olive oil, the purest, richest, most labor-intensive, and lowest-acidity of olive oils. DeLuca secured an exclusive deal to represent the olive oil operations of Antinori, the Florentine wine estate.
“I was demoing Antinori olive oil in Charlotte, North Carolina,” he says, “and I asked this woman if she’d ever had extra-virgin olive oil on asparagus. She said she didn’t think so—because she didn’t think she’d ever had asparagus. I thought, ‘Oh, my God—this has gotta be a crusade!’”