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1990s Archive

Observations: The Man Who Went to Dinner

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Many New Yorkers of my generation—at least those with any pretension to gastronomic savvy—had cut their teeth on French food at Café Brittany, on Ninth Avenue, during the Eisenhower administration. Its menu was pretty much a clone of those at perhaps two dozen other bistros in the neighborhood, many of them patronized by French sailors ashore. Neither the caliber of its food nor the modesty of its prices were distinguishable from those of such places as Tout-VaBien, Café des Sports, A la Fourchette, Pierre au Tunnel, Les Pyrénées, and René Pujol (most still in business today), but it was possible to have a more satisfying meal at any of them than at many of the bastions of elevated gourmandise.

As far as I and other cognoscenti were concerned, the brightest star in the French bourgeois galaxy was Le Champlain, not far from Rockefeller Center. Despite an unusually large seating capacity for a midtown restaurant and a triple turnover of tables at lunch, Le Champlain closed in the late 1960s. It had been flat-out the city’s best restaurant of its kind, with a menu as inclusive as a Sears Roebuck catalogue. If memory serves, a four-course lunch might have commenced with half a smoked trout or a brace of pieds de porc grillés. Either of these or any of scores of other meal-size hors d’oeuvres might have been followed by, say, a superb civet de lapin, a pair of plump sausages nestled beside a geological displacement of potatoes mousseline, a philanthropic largesse of frogs’ legs Provençale, or coq au vin of a mellowness approached only by an authentic Rembrandt portrait. With a sublimely garlicky salad, dessert, and coffee included, the tab came to a buck and a quarter.

Various as Manhattan’s restaurants then were, the relatively few top-drawer establishments were far outnumbered by reliable but less exalted eating houses. Consequently, I tried to cover one stronghold in the grand luxe category each month, with a couple of deserving but more modest candidates on the under-card. (The deputation being, then as now, three reviews per issue.) Thus, for example, one installment, in the early ’80s, was headed up by Le Cirque, temporarily closed for relocation but still a crown jewel in the city’s diadem, and rounded out with Trastevere and Texarkana—respectively, a boisterous, elbow—in-your-neighbor’s-soup dispensary of Roman-Jewish cookery and a Greenwich Village source (one of the first and best) of Cajun and Creole food.

As the letters I received soon made clear, a good part of my readership was made up of purely vicarious visitors to the Big Apple and its restaurants, a surprising number of them snowbound in northwestern Canada. They depended on written accounts for a taste of the high life in the Big City, and my reports consequently became less concerned with the practicalities of dining out and more with the gestalt of the restaurant scene. Menu itemization and evaluation of specific dishes increasingly were laced with anecdotal material and table conversation.

The times, they were a-changing. In the early seventies, most of the city’s Scandinavian restaurants had been done in by the insupportable costs of operating with traditional openhandedness. A few years earlier, such magnificences as Gripsholm, Küngsholm, Stockholm, Scandia, and Copenhagen were flourishing enterprises, but now only Copenhagen was left—and visibly moribund. Regrettably, my own plundering of its smorgasbord probably hastened Scandia’s demise. The restaurant, in the Piccadilly Hotel on West 45th Street, was a short stroll from my office, and the price of a complete smorgasbord lunch was a paltry $3.95. By my reckoning, anyone with a reasonably healthy appetite could have bankrupted the place in an hour or so, by zeroing in on a trio of loss leaders and ignoring any options that might have given the house a slim shot at breaking even. A half pound of caviar (lumpfish roe, to be sure, but, hey, who was complaining?), two or three heaping plates of jumbo shrimp, and four or five split chicken lobsters usually produced a pleasant sufficiency, leaving just enough hollowness in the midsection to accommodate the dessert and coffee included in the prix fixe.

Demographic shifts also were affecting the town’s restaurants and continued to do so throughout the seventies and early eighties. The Yorkville section of the Upper East Side, long a source of Mitteleuropean cookery and limitless Gemütlichkeit, was being staked out by a massive influx of protoyuppies as the original German, Czech, Polish, and Hungarian settlers decamped for the suburbs. Another massive influx—of Japanese businessmen—was teaching ordinary Americans to gullet down raw fish with gannet-like aplomb. Neapolitan food (for generations of non-Italians, this meant Italian food in its entirety) rapidly was becoming déclassé as accessible jet travel acquainted mainstream Americans with the culinary artistry of various northern Italian regions. The traditional stranglehold of Cantonese cuisine, tailored to presumed American tastes, was being seriously challenged by upstart younger restaurateurs and their Hunanese and Sichuan menus.

By the time my tenure ended, in 1986, French nouvelle cuisine—which had been gathering steam since the late ’70s—was about to claim its fifteen minutes of fame. Southwestern American, Thai, Pacific Rim, fusion, and all the rest were also waiting in the wings. The nation’s chefs, who’d previously labored in anonymity, were on the threshold of stardom.

By today’s relentlessly “creative” standards, my gig on the scene may seem quaint. But it was great fun while it lasted.

Jay Jacobs’ latest book is The Eaten Word: The Language of Food, The Food in Our Language, published last year by Birch Lane Press.

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