Eating - Jason Epstein [44]
Roy’s favorite tuna salad may not have strained the resources of the “21” kitchen, but at the far more ambitious Le Cirque, where Roy was also a favorite customer, a can of tuna must have been kept on its elegant shelf awaiting him, or perhaps the chef ruined a fine piece of fresh tuna by dicing and poaching it, mixing it with mayonnaise, some celery, and onion, and running it for a few seconds through the food processor. I never cooked for Roy, but had I done so I would have opened a ten-ounce jar of Italian tuna, processed it quickly with a spoonful of mayonnaise, some onion, celery, and sherry vinegar and served it with a few capers and a trimmed romaine heart dressed in black pepper and olive oil.
JACKIE O AT LUTÈCE
When I joined Random House in 1958, the offices were in the old Villard Mansion, the last such nineteenth-century palace left standing on Madison Avenue, in midtown, and now part of the Palace Hotel. My office was a former bedroom on the second floor with a balcony overlooking the courtyard. The place was charming, with creaking parquet floors and worn carpets, where authors might drop in for a chat unannounced or end a drunken night on one’s office couch. At first there was more than enough space for our small staff. But as the book business expanded and came to rely increasingly on best-sellers, rather than publishers’ accumulated backlists, requiring firms to risk ever more capital to acquire the rights to potentially popular properties, the smaller firms had no choice but to merge with the larger ones. Random House, having acquired Pantheon and then Knopf, had outgrown its old building, and moved with its acquisitions into a glass box on Third Avenue at Fiftieth Street, a few steps west of Lutèce, New York’s perennially best-in-class French restaurant until its great chef, André Soltner, retired in 1994.
André was from Alsace, and his superb cuisine, service, and ambience reflected his origins. The décor was appropriately luxe but understated for a three-star restaurant: the long garden room, under its barrel-vaulted glass ceiling with its banks of flowers, was springlike throughout the year. The formal rooms on the second floor were in the correct Parisian high style. But the cuisine—celestial home cooking—owed more to André’s Alsatian childhood than to Paris. Lutèce was, of course, expensive, and I dined there at Random’s expense only on the most important occasions. One such time was the publication day of Elaine Pagels’s now classic Gnostic Gospels, still in print after thirty years. To celebrate, I ordered a Corton-Charlemagne, shipped by Louis Latour. I forget the year, but the wine was an unforgettable Chardonnay, like one’s first La Tâche of a great year, or the great Conte deVogüé Bonnes-Mares of 1970 that I drank one night at the Connaught in London. What I noticed first was Elaine’s look of shocked surprise. Then I tasted the wine and understood what had happened. Wine experts use the word “complex,” but the actual experience was a melody, a fleeting musical phrase that rose and fell and rose again and slowly drifted away.
One day Jackie Onassis called me to ask if she could take me to lunch at Lutèce. We met a week or so later, on a fine early-spring day. My friend Pete Hamill, who had once taken Jackie out, said it was like “taking King Kong to the beach.” Jackie was one of those personages whom you do not accompany to a museum lest the visitors forget to look at the pictures. She didn’t flaunt her celebrity but accepted it in good humor as the price to pay for being herself. We took a table upstairs, in one of the small rooms, and ordered shad roe, the first of the season. She asked if there was a job for her at Random