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New York retail wine business coerced two bottles of Beaucastel Rousanne out of the distributor—that amounts to about 3 percent of the entire allocation of this wine to the New York market. Because she had taken pleasure in the 1991 Diamond Creek Cabernet Sauvignon that accompanied our rack of lamb, I obtained a magnum of the 1986 vintage from a shop in Missouri. I also had them throw in a few vintages of Chapoutier’s Ermitage de l’Oree in case she wanted to taste a white Rhône even lusher than the Beaucastel.
These wines, which I have come to call the Sharon Stone Collection, remain untouched. I never saw her again.
I had thought, naïvely, that the Dweezil Zappa query had not been a fatal error. We had moved to a higher conversational plane, talking physics and all that. I had forgotten that women rarely remember what has been eaten but always recall what has been said.
I never spoke to her person again. Her person and the editor-in-chief of GQ magazine, who is not my person, spoke on the telephone. This is his re-creation of that conversation:
“How did it go?” he asked.
Long silence.
“He was asking a lot of questions,” her person finally relied.
“About what?” he asked.
“Dweezil Zappa.”
Shortly afterward, the editor-in-chief called me into his office to get my side of the story. I admitted using the Z word.
To this day, I do not know where I went so wrong. Sure, I asked about Zappa, but he’s hardly the bottom of the barrel where her relationships are concerned. In another interview a few years ago, she happily talked about dating Dwight Yoakam. I find it almost impossible to differenti-ate between those two emaciated musicians, although I suppose Zappa’s unemployable and Yoakam’s unendurable. It’s not as if I had exposed the single blemish in an otherwise model dating life.
I did, in fact, hear from her again. She sent me a charming little note thanking me for “the food, the wine and your odd perspective on my naive dating patterns.”
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It’s a shame about women. They always say that dinner isn’t about food, it’s about conversation. I gave her conversation. They claim it isn’t about wine, it’s about relationships. I discussed little but relationships.
My meal with Sharon Stone proved what I’ve always known. No matter how hard a man tries, meals with women don’t work out.
GQ, february 1999
Acknowledgments
Like Costco, I do business in bulk. I have people to thank going back to Mrs. Decker, my fifth-grade teacher at Aronimink Elementary School.
That includes the kids from class 7J2 at Upper Darby Junior High School, even if they were cool enough to get into Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and I was not. When you assemble a collection of stories that covers as wide a topic as these, a lot of people come to mind.
I appreciate the sacrifice of everybody who ever went out to eat with me when I was reviewing a restaurant. I know it wasn’t fun. I am indebted to every chef who ever cooked food I wrote about, because I know they didn’t get into their line of work thinking I was going to walk into their place of business and criticize them. I owe much to photog-raphers, designers, and the guys who work the linotype machines. (Even if these stories don’t go back that far, I do.) Few writers are willing to acknowledge a terrible truth: writing requires editing. Marty Beiser babied most of the stories in this book when he was managing editor of GQ. What I cherish about Marty, in addition to our yearly dinners at Fabio Picchi’s Cibrèo in Florence, is that he always did just enough. Before him, my editor was Eliot Kaplan, and working with them were three copy chiefs who personally toiled over my words. They are Maura Fritz, Nancy Negovetich, and the particularly long-suffering Laura Vitale. I owe her so many dinners I don’t know when I’ll finish paying off.
Everything trickles down, and I am indebted to the editors in chief who have valued my work, especially Dana Cowin, Barbara Fairchild, Jim Nelson, and Tom Wallace. I add to the list one CEO, Dorothy Cann Hamilton. In quite another category are the editors who have put up 3 2 2
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with me mostly out of friendship: Pam (The Genius) Kaufman, Mary Ellen Ward, and the incredibly patient Michael Hainey, who is my confidant, therapist, and provider. He owes me so many meals I don’t know when he’ll finish paying off.
Time now to drop a few names. I have been enriched by associations with Oprah Winfrey, Robert M. Parker Jr., Daniel Boulud, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. In this category I also put Eric Ripert, who telephones regularly to tell me I should have a more positive attitude, like a Frenchman.
Providing comfort after calls like his were two Condé Nast assistants who behaved more like my mother: Katherine Kane and Court-ney Kemp. I also leaned on Paul Forrester and Tim Sultan, responsible for thousands of corrections to my copy, and to the legendary Baronness Sheri De Borchgrave, researcher extraordinaire. No woman has ever been better at telling a man he’s wrong.
Always present in my life is Julian Niccolini of the Four Seasons, although in truth I’ve always preferred his partners, Alex von Bidder and Trideep Bose. Though Maguy Le Coze insists I loved her late brother, Gilbert, more than her, I adore the woman who taught me to appreciate sea urchins. Is it possible to thank entire restaurants? The staffs of the Four Seasons and Le Bernardin have always been astoundingly kind. To that category I add Montrachet, plus its wine director, Daniel Johnnes,
