Geni Swing Guitars

Cbs Neck

Dinner Begins at Forty

Dinner Begins at Forty

Time flies when you’re eating I guess. Suddenly when I’d lost count, New York magazine turned 40 years old and this is my 40th year as a restaurant critic. I seem to be the only survivor still on the staff from that year of launch, still reviewing restaurants after four decades. Am I stubborn or just hungry? Well, one does have to eat and even when I am off duty -- a quick burger at Fairway Café or a pizza at Celeste -- am I ever truly off-duty? All those critical antennae unfold when I walk into a restaurant. Click. Smells like butter. Click. No smile at the maitre d’ stand. Click. Who turned out the lights? Where is my headlamp? Is that music or static from a radio upstairs?

I remember when I was 40. It was definitely more fun being 40 than it is being a critic for 40 years Of course I lied about my age for so long, I don’t remember what was going on when I actually hit 40, only that New Yorkers were starting to fall in love with eating out – the magazine had a major role in suggesting that restaurants were power fields, theater and alcoves of seduction. Very young men were thrilled to join me for dinner and then boogie on Regine’s pulsating heart shaped floor till 2 or 3 in the morning. If you weren’t there it might be difficult to imagine the ecstatic years between the pill and the plague. Especially if sex and dancing happened to be your drugs and you could remember it all the next morning, As an early bloomer, I wouldn’t say life began at 40, but it certainly peaked…I wish the same for my colleagues at New York, great adventure and continued triumphs.

It’s true I decided I didn’t want to be the weekly critic at New York magazine several years ago. I didn’t want to spend every Monday morning of my life writing and rewriting and trying to defend my positions to editors who weren’t there at the dawn of our town’s cuisinary revelations.

But time passed and the short weekly column I still write wasn’t enough. I missed having the last word…I missed having the first word. And since I am eating out every night anyway, I thought I’d dip my forchette into a blog which grew into this on-line journal of confessions, gossip, recipes, travel memoir and hot addresses.

Growing up in a Velveeta cocoon in Detroit, Michigan, I never meant to be a restaurant critic. I didn’t hang out in a cozy kitchen like many of my peers, collecting sense memories etched with aromas of apple pie just out of the oven or peach jam simmering on the stove. Not much simmered. My mom, the loving auburn-haired Saralee mostly opened cans and jars or defrosted. So there was no childhood food dream or even a whisper of any sort of cooking fantasy when I arrived in New York as a lowly general assignment reporter ($105 a week) at the old New York Post.

If you came of age on Mr. Murdoch’s leering headlines, you may not even know there once was a bold, politically correct, fiercely liberal New York Post. I exposed bigotry on West End Avenue when Harry Belafonte tried to move in and conspiracies in Selma, Alabama. The Post covered the race beat before anyone. Al Aronowitz wrote a ten part series on the Beats and many chapters on the early days of Bob Dylan. Dylan looked a lot like Cate Blanchett when I joined him and Al for a coffee in the Village after work one afternoon.

Those were

Soon the hat will be more famous than the face. Photo: Dan Wynn

the glory days of publisher Dorothy Schiff, editor Jimmy Wechsler and the great columnists: Murray Kempton, Max Lerner. I would love to read a Murray Kempton column on the Post of today. His prose was uniquely lush and voluptuous, like a ripe Elberta peach or a hot fudge sundae. Occasionally I would try to sneak a Byzantine phrase into my own writing.

There in the city room, early one morning I met a slight, dark-haired new arrival on the desk. I was drawn to his sad brown eyes and appealing aquiline face. Don worked the night desk. I sat on the rim of rewrite by day. I was just one in a parade of first dates he wooed on a banquette at the Little Old Mansion, one of the era’s intimate small restaurants run by cranky old Southern belles. I’d never tasted anything as complex and transporting as her lobster with saffron rice and black walnuts. Soon Don and I were a folie á deux of rollicking foodies. And like any other early foodie (obsessed before foodie became an actual recognized Oxford Dictionary word), I lived by the Friday reviews in the New York Times of the great god Craig Claiborne.

Then came the fateful call in autumn of 1968. It was Clay Felker asking me to be the restaurant critic of his brand new New York magazine. It’s launch, designed by Milton Glaser, with print stars like Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Peter Maas and Barbara Goldsmith had the media world – which felt like all of New York -- buzzing.

Me a restaurant critic? I was freelancing at the time for Ladies Home Journal, McCall’s and Cosmopolitan. I wrote whatever they asked: The Secrets of the World’s Great Beauties. How America Lives. How Not to Get Dumped by Your Husband on his Way Up. Nothing foodie. I needed to sell restaurant stories so I could charge all our eating to some company’s expense account. And I had written a countdown to the re-opening of La Côte Basque for Felker when New York was the Sunday magazine of the late, lamented Herald Tribune, "Papa Soulé Loves You.”

I cooked. I took cooking classes. I’d tried to reproduce the gossamer pike quenelles I’d tasted at the Pavillon and the Café Chauveron’s ethereal mussels in Chablis and cream. DHF and I had made a pilgrimage to the mythic Chez Point on our belated honeymoon: We had emerged from an epiphany at the Restaurant de la Pyramide in Vienne, south of Lyon, smashed out on bliss and butter and vintage Hermitage, passionate converts to the truffled life. This struck me as a feeble credential against Claiborne’s stint on the G.I. Bill at the hotel school in Lausanne or his reign at the Times. What could Clay be thinking?

“What will you tell people are my credentials?” I asked.

“Aren’t you a food person,” he said.

“Well, I’ve eaten around.” I explained to Felker I could not possibly afford to write for the miserly $300 fee he was offering all writers – yes, even the stars – until the magazine broke even.

“But people are begging to be the restaurant critic of New York,” he said with an exasperated air, “So they can charge all their meals to us.”

There were flashing lights and a shock went through my body. What a concept. Quickly, before anything I had said could change his mind, I said “yes.” I got him to agree we would follow all of Craig’s rules: I would be anonymous, do a minimum of three meals and we would always pay.

“Yes,” he said. “And yes.”

I got a credit card using a borrowed name from American Express and then set about stewing over what I would write…what institution or brave new venture I would embrace or skewer first.

It was a convulsive moment in American. Fall, 1968. I stood in front of my closet trying to decide whether I would wear my fake polyester Yves St. Laurent pant suit from Ohrbach’s or the navy and white faux Givenchy. And two miles north of where I brooded Columbia University was paralyzed by student protests. Martin Luther King was dead. Bobby Kennedy was dead. The Democratic convention in Chicago had filled the television screen with scenes of uninmaginable violence. And yet here I was totally focused on the sociology and anthropology of New York dining, on Babe Paley’s neck and whether Sirio would give Onassis or Sinatra that prime table at the faded Colony.

I decided it would not be circumspect to rip into one of Craig’s favorites as my first act. So I didn’t move on La Caravelle or John Fairchild’s daily canteen, La Grenouille. I knew from reading Fairchild’s juicy Eye column in Women’s Wear Daily that CBS chairman William Paley had been obsessing about every detail of the design of the new restaurant in the lobby of the company’s sober new tower, the charcoal brown monolith known as Black Rock, “Paley’s Preserve,” my review of The Ground Floor, appeared November 11, 1968.

“The CBS Building is brown is beautiful is a sober monument to taste in the Manhattan grid of chrome, compromise and architecture by committee. Eero Saarinen drew it but the details became a family affair. CBS president Frank Stanton and board chairman William Paley fussed over glass tints and elevator buttons. When it came to the family kitchen, it was clear form the start, one could not install a Chock Full O’Nuts in the nave of the cathedral.

“Thus The Ground Floor is, above all, appropriately grand. It is slick, rich, calculated, spare, intimidating. It is Contemporary Wasp. You would hate to break open a roll for fear it would scatter unprogrammed crumbs. It is understatedly snob,,.The Ground Floor is a perfect room to end an affair in….”

I had found my voice. Click here to read more…

***

If you're feeling nostalgic, click on Vintage Articles in the navigator above to see early New York reviews: The Ground Floor, La Côte Basque: Quintessential Soulé Food, The Mafia Guide to Dining Out, La Caravelle: Insult á la Carte, Brooklyn, Come Hungry and more.

***

About the Author

travel & food writer

William Conrad - CBS: On the Air $14.99 William Conrad - CBS: On the Air - Photo

Thelonious Monk - CBS $42.99 Thelonious Monk - CBS - T-Shirt

NFL on CBS $116.3 NFL on CBS, National Football League, CBS, CBS Sports, Monday night National Football League games prior to 1970, AFLNFL merger, The NFL Today, NFL on Westwood One, Thanksgiving Classic, NFL on Fox, 1994 NFL season, 1995 NFL season, 1996 NFL season, 1997 NFL season, NFL on television, NFL on CBS music, List of NFL on CBS announcers Author: Miller, Frederic P./ Vandome, Agnes F./ McBrewster, John Binding Type: Paperback Number of Pages: 166 Publication Date: 2009/10/14 Language: English Dimensions: 5.98 x 9.01 x 0.38 inches

CBS Watch! $7.99 CBS Watch! Magazine - Your eye on entertainment - delivers exclusive entertainment and lifestyle content to readers who love pop culture and CBS. Watch! looks at America's favorite TV shows, movies, fashion, travel, sports, news, food, music and more.

CBS Radio $95.59 CBS Radio Inc., formerly known as Infinity Broadcasting Corporation, is one of the largest owners and operators of radio stations in the United States, fourth behind main rival Clear Channel Communications (which owns many of the radio stations previously owned by former CBS parent Viacom before 1997), Cumulus Media and Citadel Broadcasting. The corporation owns around 140 radio stations across the country. In 2002 its sales were 3.7bn, an increase of just over 1 on the previous year. It is currently part of the CBS Corporation, which also owns CBS Television and the CBS Radio Network, and jointly owns the CW television network. Infinity had operated independently of CBS until the departure of chief executive Mel Karmazin in 2004. Until late 2004, the stations websites were not allowed to stream their programs online. WCBSAM was the first station in the CBS able to stream their content over the internet, shortly followed by other news and talk stations. Company officials originally thought that there was no profit to be made from streaming. Author: Miller, Frederic P./ Vandome, Agnes F./ McBrewster, John Binding Type: Paperback Number of Pages: 144 Publication Date: 2010/04/29 Language: English Dimensions: 5.98 x 9.01 x 0.33 inches

Secret Affair - CBS Sessions 1977-1978 $8.99 Secret Affair - CBS Sessions 1977-1978

CBS Storybreak $68.51 High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles CBS Storybreak is a Saturday morning anthology television series that originally aired on the CBS network during the 1985 season. Hosted by Captain Kangaroos Bob Keeshan (and in its 1993 return by The Cosby Shows Malcolm JamalWarner), the episodes are halfhour animated adaptations of some of the most beloved childrens books published at the time of airing, including How to Eat Fried Worms. Other episodes included Dragons Blood and Rathas Creature. Unique for an American television series, the series featured open captions captioned by The Caption Center for the hearing impaired during its 1993 reairing, instead of the usual closed captioning. Author: Miller, Frederic P./ Vandome, Agnes F./ McBrewster, John Binding Type: Paperback Number of Pages: 80 Publication Date: 2010/08/12 Language: English Dimensions: 6.00 x 9.02 x 0.19 inches

Mats with CBS Eye in Front of Entrance to CBS' Television City $79.99 Ed Clark Mats with CBS Eye in Front of Entrance to CBS' Television City - Premium Photographic Print

CBS Soaps in Depth $38.99 CBS Soaps In Depth Magazine is the only magazine that gives readers the detailed scoop behind all of their favorite CBS soaps! Every issue of CBS Soaps In Depth has up-to-the-minute news, exciting sneak previews, and photo-filled features for "The Young and the Restless," "The Bold and the Beautiful," "As the World Turns," and "Guiding Light"!

Soaps In Depth Cbs $22.97 Soaps in Depth (CBS) is a great find for those who are either dedicated to only one soap, or who are loyal to the soaps on a particular channel (CBS). In depth coverage of only the CBS soapsSoaps In Depth Cbs is part of the TV and Celebrity family of magazines. It is generally sold to individuals and businesses and quite often can be found in a reception room or waiting room of a company or a professional office like a dentist, doctor, health club, gym, or beauty and hair salon. A full year magazine subscription to Soaps In Depth Cbs includes issues delivered right to your mailbox.

CBS Studios International $78.07 Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. CBS Studios International is the leading supplier of programming to the international television marketplace, licensing to over 200 markets and more than 30 languages across multiple media platforms. CBS Studios International also exports a diverse lineup of formats for local production around the world and participates in international channel ventures. The division distributes content from CBS Television Studios, CBS Television Distribution, Showtime, CBS News, CBS Films and a library of more than 70,000 hours of programming. CBS Paramount International Television was formed in 2004 as a result of a merger between two television companies, CBS Broadcast International and Paramount International Television. In May 2009, CPITV was renamed to CBS Studios International. Author: Mainyu, Eldon A. Binding Type: Paperback Number of Pages: 96 Publication Date: 2011/08/18 Language: English Dimensions: 9.02 x 5.98 x 0.23 inches

Ex-Cbs President Fred Friendly $79.99 Ex-Cbs President Fred Friendly - Premium Photographic Print

CBS News Correspondent Eric Sevareid $79.99 CBS News Correspondent Eric Sevareid - Premium Photographic Print

Ex CBS Pres. Fred Friendly $79.99 Alfred Eisenstaedt Ex CBS Pres. Fred Friendly - Premium Photographic Print

Maxell / CBS-G COOL BEANS / 190251 $21.66 Maxell - CBS-G COOL BEANS - 190251

Maxell / CBS-P COOL BEANS / 190253 $21.66 Maxell - CBS-P COOL BEANS - 190253

Maxell / CBS-B COOL BEANS / 190252 $21.66 Maxell - CBS-B COOL BEANS - 190252

Maxell / CBS-S COOL BEANS / 190256 $21.66 Maxell - CBS-S COOL BEANS - 190256

Maxell / CBS-R COOL BEANS / 190254 $21.66 Maxell - CBS-R COOL BEANS - 190254

Maxell / CBS-BL COOL BEANS / 190257 $21.66 Maxell - CBS-BL COOL BEANS - 190257

How Cool Is Cool - The Complete Cbs Recordings $8.99 How Cool Is Cool - The Complete Cbs Recordings

Cbs Fuse Bar $129.95 CBS fuse bar is an extremely helpful reference tool to assist artists with attaining on-target colors for all dichroic fusing. After having been available to teachers and distributors for years, this essential tool is now available to the general public. Features 22 premium and standard CBS colors fused four ways, side-by-side Dichroic on black Dichroic on clear Dichroic with a clear cap Dichroic straight up More Features and Benefits or the Dichroic CBS Fuse Bar An excellent reference guide for all 22 CBS solid colors Every CBS dichroic color fused into one tool Each individual strip labeled with its dichroic color on the back Fuse Bar measures approximately 15 x 1-3/4 Each individual dichroic piece measures 1/2 x 1-3/4 Hold up to the light to view the transmission colors

The CBS Late Movie $68.51 High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles The CBS Late Movie was a CBS television series (later known as CBS Late Night) from the 1970s and 1980s, that ran in most American television markets from 11:30 p.m. until 2:30 a.m. or later, on weeknights. A single announcer (in the early years, CBS staff announcer Norm Stevens) voiced the introduction and commercial bumpers for each program, but there was no host per se, or closing credits besides those of the nights presentation. (The bumpers announcing the stars of the movie notably rotated names, two or three at a time, so more of the players would be mentioned.) Author: Miller, Frederic P./ Vandome, Agnes F./ McBrewster, John Binding Type: Paperback Number of Pages: 92 Publication Date: 2010/08/12 Language: English Dimensions: 5.98 x 9.01 x 0.22 inches

Cbs White House Correspondent Robert Pierpoint $79.99 Cbs White House Correspondent Robert Pierpoint - Premium Photographic Print

Dorothy Lamour as a Cbs Radio Songstress, 1934 $19.99 Dorothy Lamour as a Cbs Radio Songstress, 1934 - Premium Poster

CBS Radio Mystery Theater $68.51 High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles CBS Radio Mystery Theater was an ambitious and sustained attempt during the 1970s to revive the type of audio drama familiar to listeners of oldtime radio. The series was created by Himan Brown, a radio legend due to his work on Inner Sanctum Mysteries, The Adventures of Nero Wolfe and other shows dating back to the 1930s. On CBS affiliates, the series began its long run January 6, 1974. The final episode was broadcast on December 31, 1982. The format was similar to that of classic old time radio shows such as The Mysterious Traveler and The Whistler, in that the episodes were introduced by a host (E. G. Marshall) who provided pithy wisdom throughout. Unlike the hosts of earlier programs, Marshall is fully mortal, merely someone whose heightened insight and erudition plunge the listener into the world of the macabre. Author: Miller, Frederic P./ Vandome, Agnes F./ McBrewster, John Binding Type: Paperback Number of Pages: 88 Publication Date: 2010/07/03 Language: English Dimensions: 5.98 x 9.01 x 0.21 inches

View of the Dionne Quintuplets Singing a Song for CBS Radio $79.99 Hansel Mieth View of the Dionne Quintuplets Singing a Song for CBS Radio - Premium Photographic Print

Comedian Red Skelton on CBS TV Special Program $79.99 Frank Scherschel Comedian Red Skelton on CBS TV Special Program - Premium Photographic Print

Maxell CBS-G COOL BEANS DIGITAL EAR BUDS-GREEN 190251 $17.16 Maxell CBS-G COOL BEANS DIGITAL EAR BUDS-GREEN 190251

Odessey And Oracle (The CBS Years 1967-1969) & The R.I.P. Album (2CD) $12.49 Odessey And Oracle (The CBS Years 1967-1969) & The R.I.P. Album (2CD)

Cbs Dichroic 1mm Stringers On Clear - 96 Coe $21.95 CBS Dichroic and Uroboros Glass Studios present unique dichroic stringers that are superb for fusing, flameworking and bead making projects. Assortments include ten stringers featuring a random selection of high quality CBS solid color coating. Stringers measure 1mm x 18 long. 96 COE.

Cbs Dichroic 1mm Stringers On Black - 96 Coe $21.95 CBS Dichroic and Uroboros Glass Studios come together to create unique dichroic stringers, perfect for fusing and bead making projects. Assortments include ten stringers featuring a random selection of high quality CBS solid color coatings. Stringers measure 1mm x 18 long. 96 COE.

Cbs Slogans : List of Cbs Slogans, Get Ready $8.02 No Synopsis Available