Great chefs do not. To me, the most consequential chef working in an American kitchen in the past quarter-century was not James Beard, André Soltner, Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, Charlie Trotter, Daniel Boulud, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, David Bouley, Nobu Matsuhisa, or even the late Jean-Louis Palladin, who prepared classic French food in this country better than anybody else. (Julia Child was certainly monumental, but she wasn’t a chef.) Rather, I favor the late Gilbert Le Coze, whom I met in the eighties, when he and his sister, Maguy, opened their French seafood restaurant Le Bernardin in New York. Much of what we know about serving fish in fine restaurants we learned from Le Coze. Had he not arrived, we might still be eating frozen scrod.
Le Coze loved working in America, except for one peculiarity. He would stand by the front door of his restaurant, immaculate in chef ’s whites, greeting customers as they arrived, and they would respond to his welcome by asking, “Where’s the bathroom?” It drove him to distraction. He could not understand why Americans needed to go to the bathroom the moment they arrived at a restaurant, because the French were taught as children to go before they went out.
The fish at a dazzling restaurant like Le Bernardin was irreproachable, but I remember being just as excited by the seafood at Margaret Tayar, little more than a ruin of a bar located behind a beachfront parking lot in Tel Aviv. The experiences I’ve had eating unlikely food in distant spots are among my most vivid memories.
Margaret Tayar, the owner, made a fish burger so profound I cannot help but banish those made with beef to afterthoughts. It was preF O R K I T O V E R
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pared from loup de mer and grilled very rare. She told me all her fish was caught by a man of about seventy who had fished since he was ten but had not learned to swim. Six times he had fallen into the sea and six times the sea had carried him ashore, but ultimately, he told her, it would not.
In the Republic of Djibouti, an African country so hot that food practically cooks itself, I ate a memorable lunch at the commando training center for French Foreign Legion troops. The meal began with a seven-pound lobster harvested by a Schwarzenegger-sized soldier with a terrible scar on his left arm that looked as though it had been inflicted in close combat. He swore it was a burn scar from when he was eighteen months old. Five of us ate the lobster cold, in chunks, dipped in mayonnaise from a jar. The entree was a spicy, gorgeously rich veal stew with tiny macaroni prepared by a native Djiboutian cook who wore a souvenir Philadelphia T-shirt. On that visit, I learned how to construct a homemade mine out of plastique and a dinner plate, making me potentially the most deadly food writer of all time.
I don’t cook, but I never cease thinking about kitchens. To me the home kitchen is a place of sweetness and sentiment, of a mother’s apron scented with onions and powdered with flour. The restaurant kitchen is even more magical. There stands the great chef, wearing his dress whites, as majestic as a naval commander on the quarterdeck of his ship-of-war. As much as I admire kitchens, I spend as little time as possible in them. I have been known to stand in front of my microwave, reheating coffee, wondering why it takes so long.
Once, and only once, have I triumphed in the kitchen. I cooked dinner for Claudette Colbert, Academy Award winner for Best Actress in 1935. I haven’t done much in my life a lot better than that.
She was in her eighties. I was in my forties. I had been sent by a magazine to Perth, Australia, to interview her while she was appearing in a play with Rex Harrison. Colbert did not invite him to dine with us, and I got the impression that however charming Harrison appeared onstage, he was not so appealing after hours.
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Colbert was staying in a hotel suite, and her maid (and cook) was in an adjoining suite equipped with a small kitchen. Each morning Colbert went shopping for groceries, usually fish and vegetables, the two items I prepare the most inadequately when I am forced by circumstances to make food. As we were leaving the market one day, she smiled in her mischievous way—if you’ve seen her films, you know that look—and announced I would be manning the stove that night.
I really dislike standing in front of stoves. I find them uncomfortably hot.
Her maid, thank goodness, had cookbooks, and she watched skeptically as I desperately scoured them, seeking a recipe easy enough for the likes of me. Luckily, I came upon bonne femme, whose literal translation is “good wife” but means “in a simple manner.” I believe the recipe included mushrooms, wine, and butter, three unintimidating ingredients.
We sat side by side in her suite and ate my fish, and she kept telling me how delicious the food was, even if it was not.
I’ll say this about early-twentieth-century movie stars: they sure understood men.
After eating about fifty thousand hot breakfasts, lunches, and dinners (my mother never served a cold meal at home), I stand firm on certain issues. I believe boiled lobster is a great mistake. Remember, I’m from Philadelphia, home of the broiled lobster. It is my belief that boiling is an inferior technique popularized by New England seafood shanties too lazy to cook lobster the correct way.
I believe in American beef, but I’m convinced French chefs cook steak better than Americans. I am certain the finest food book is Larousse Gastronomique,
