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TTT
Interviewee: Mimi Sheraton
Interviewer: Judith Weinraub
Session #2
New York City
Date: July 20, 2009
Q: This is Judith Weinraub. It’s July 20, 2009. I am with Mimi Sheraton in her house in
Greenwich Village, and we are about to do our second interview.
Good afternoon.
Sheraton: Good afternoon.
Q: We agreed that one of the things we’d focus on today, since you have been a
restaurant and food critic for such a long time and at different venues, we’d talk about
how you perceive food and restaurant food to have changed over the years, but let’s just
first, for the record, point out where and generally when you have been a food and
restaurant critic and, for that matter, a food writer, because to me that counts in terms of
your observation.
Sheraton: The first time I was officially that was at Cue magazine, where for the first few
years they had me write under the name of Martha Martin because they didn’t think Mimi
Sheraton was believable. Eventually changed to Mimi Sheraton, and that was roughly
from 1955 through the middle of 1958.
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Q: Hard to imagine Martha Martin as being believable, but maybe in the mid fifties it
was possible. [laughs]
Sheraton: It sounded like Betty Crocker or something, I guess. Then I guess there were a
couple of years’ lapse and I did two years, maybe three, at the Village Voice. I’m not
sure of those dates. From ’70 to ’75, I wrote for New York Magazine, and I did primarily
food pieces, products, markets, reported on caterers, but I did five or six restaurant
critique pieces, rather big ones for them. Then in December of 1975, I went to the New
York Times. In August of ’76 I became officially the restaurant critic and was that until
December 31, 1983.
Q: Could you just talk a little bit about how you got to the Times?
Sheraton: The Times called me after articles they had read at New York Magazine and
asked me to come over for an interview. Joan Whitman, who was then the “Style” editor,
called me at New York Magazine
Q: And presumably you were happy to have that kind of—
Sheraton: I was conflicted. I loved working for New York Magazine. I loved the
brazenness. I loved the brashness. I liked the spirit of New York Magazine very, very
much. And I had heard so many things about the New York Times editing copy and
wanting it a certain way, that I was a little bit overwhelmed, and I thought, “Do I really
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want to do this?” But they were paying much, much more, which is hard to believe the
New York Times paying much, much more than anybody, but they did, over New York
Magazine. And I went, and the rest is history.
Q: So at the time that you went there, how would you generally characterize the kinds of
food that was being served in restaurants at that point? You can start before that if you
want. You can start with what you observed over time.
Sheraton: I don’t think there were too many changes in the beginning when I was at Cue
and Village Voice. They were more or less traditional restaurants—French, Italian,
American, Chinese. Sometimes it was a nightclub restaurant or an all-American
continental restaurant, but they were not innovative dishes. They were much more
classics and people knew what to expect.
I always remember my first three reviews for Cue magazine, because each
restaurant I went to had the same appetizer specialty and they were all under different
names. One was a crêpe maison, one was a crêpe de fruits de mer, and I forgot what the
third was, but they all had three different names for seafood crêpe. So you could see that
that was what people expected in those restaurants, Charles French Restaurant, which no
long exists, on Sixth Avenue, a lot of places like that. And it was much more predictable
what you were going to have.
We were just beginning to see some new products in food markets, because I also
always wrote about products and food and cooking, and of course we had Balducci’s in
Greenwich Village, and they brought in a lot of fruits and vegetables that people had not
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seen in other markets, which are now quite commonplace. That was just the beginning of
that.
By the time I got to New York Magazine, nouvelle cuisine came into being. There
were many more products available. Americans were traveling, products were able to be
shipped much more quickly by air, and I would say the press and television disseminated
knowledge and interest in food that spread across the country. There was Dione Lucas,
there was The Galloping Gourmet. It was beginning to be an event. Then I don’t know
the year of Julia Child, but that I would say began a certain kind of peak.
The other big change was, I would say, in food writing, in what was becoming
acceptable, and I think the biggest difference there was made by Craig Claiborne when he
went to the Times and suddenly took it away from home economists and made it a food
professional’s viewpoint in writing about food, and also negative restaurant criticism,
which, as far as I know, did not exist before then. He did very short little box reviews,
but if a place was not good, he said so, and that was very unheard of.
Gourmet magazine was reviewing restaurants in those days, but it was always,
always a puff piece. In fact, in those early days, if you called the critic for Gourmet, you
were given the advertising department. The critic was attached to the advertising
department. His name escapes me at the moment. Alvin Kerr.
So it was a different kind of approach that the Times permitted Craig to do what
he did. That immediately, I think, gave all of us a view of what we could do and made
other publications interested in that. New York Magazine, I think, always felt they could
do negative reviews. Clay Felker knew that was the way to get attention.
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Q: These would be of fairly well-known places as opposed to little hole-in-the-walls?
Sheraton: Unless they found little hole-in-the-walls, because by that time New York
Magazine, under Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder, had instituted “The Underground
Gourmet,” and that was little far-out places where you could eat. I don’t know if it was
under $2.50 or $5.00 in those days. So those were ethnic and out-of-the-way and small.
Gael Greene did the restaurants, the more formal.
Q: Was “The Underground Gourmet” the first, as you know it, to give prominence to
[unclear]?
Sheraton: The first I know, it began not at New York Magazine, but began at the
magazine section of the Herald Tribune, which was where all the people who started New
York Magazine came from, and Jerome Snyder and Milton Glaser, who were good
friends and both graphic designers and artists, were big New York eaters, and they really
liked those ethnic places, so they had a great time doing that. So it began to be something
with great interest to people.
Then, of course, new restaurants began opening, and I was a consultant from ’58,
for about four years, to Restaurant Associates, and helped create the menu at the original
Four Seasons, and that was an enormous departure. That was not traditional food; that
was innovations on traditional recipes. That was fusion. You might get Cape Cod fried
shrimp with a Japanese wasabi dressing. They just looked all over and took what they
wanted. There was also an enormous emphasis there on freshness and local. They had a
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basket of vegetables that they brought around and showed everybody; you could pick
what you wanted. So that began to start a trend to theme restaurants, which they had
already begun at the Forum of the Twelve Caesars, the Hawaiian Room, and there was a
lot of interest in going out to that kind of eating. It made reviewing probably a little more
difficult because you had to understand more to do it. There were dishes that no one ever
saw before, and reviews were powerful.
Q: You’ve always managed to travel a lot in your jobs, but you had by this time traveled
a good bit, hadn’t you?
Sheraton: Yes.
Q: You were fairly knowledgeable about this.
Sheraton: Yes. First of all, I have since 1953 been going back and forth to Europe,
Mexico, and so on. Then in 1960 I took a four-month trip around the world for a book
called City Portraits, and spent most of the time in the Soviet Union, the Far East, and the
Middle East, areas I had not known and been to, and did a big survey for Restaurant
Associates on food they might draw upon for other restaurant themes. I wrote some
articles for Mademoiselle. I bought folk art—I think we went over this—for Jensen’s,
and took some cooking courses. I spent time in Beirut, in Phnom Penh, in Tokyo, various
places, a few days each with chefs, learning the basics of the cuisine. So by the time I
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came back to New York Magazine, I had already been, by the way, to the Cordon Bleu by
that time for an eight-week course. I didn’t take the whole year.
I knew a lot and I had done a lot. When I started writing for Cue, I must say I
didn’t really know anything more than what I liked, but by that time I had been reading
Gourmet since I was sixteen and thinking how great it would be to be a food critic.
Q: Really?
Sheraton: Yes. I thought, “This is a wonderful life.” I loved eating in restaurants since
childhood. My parents took me to a lot. To me that was the best way to eat. I’m still
absolutely crazy about restaurants at any level. I thought, “My god, to go around and
somebody pays for it or nobody pays for it.” [laughs] I didn’t know how they did it. But
every place I worked for, they paid for it. There were no free meals allowed at any place,
though that’s not true at many publications.
Q: Maybe you want to mention something about that, about that tradition of no free
meals, because I think a lot of people have the misapprehension that restaurants comp
people all the time.
Sheraton: Well, many do in cities outside of New York. Small publications that cannot
afford to do it any other way will let a critic do one visit and be comped. Those critics
always say, “But I’m still independent, and if I don’t like it, I can say so.” I have never
yet seen a negative review from anyone who said that. My view of that is if you can’t
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afford to do it right, don’t do it at all. So no one that I’ve ever worked for has been as
generous as the Times, with the number of times you can go to a place. As far as I knew,
when I was there, there was no limit. Nobody ever said, “Are you crazy?” Three was a
minimum, and I went as many as eight, even maybe ten once when a strike—
Q: That’s amazing.
Sheraton: Yes.
Q: So by the time you got to the Times, the very beginning of the time you got to the
Times, what was the food in restaurants like at that point? Had it changed a little from
your first experience?
Sheraton: It was beginning to. We had the Forum of the Twelve Caesars. By that time
the Four Seasons was eighteen, twenty years old, opened in ’59, and I went in ’73. But
you began to get more stylish Italian restaurants, not the southern. The same in Indian;
north Indian. It was always the north was the cuisine we didn’t know, and that was the
elegant one, the tandoori cooking and so on. And beginning of very beautiful restaurants
where that was more or less the theme. I remember there was one downtown that was
absolutely beautiful. It was all pink and elegant and glowing, and their cuisine was a
little bit stylized and pretty too.
Q: That was Italian?
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Sheraton: No, it was continental. It didn’t have an ethnic theme, that particular one. The
public was still very interested in very ethnic restaurants. I reviewed a lot of the MittelEuropean restaurants around Second and Third Avenue. In the seventies and eighties
those were very, very big. Northern Chinese food, rather than Cantonese, was beginning
to be—Shun Lee Palace and so on. There were many in D.C. by that time. I remember
at one point they had cooks come over and man a restaurant in Washington. There were
always steakhouses. By that time I think La Fonda del Sol may have already been gone;
I’m not sure. But that was another Restaurant Associates theme that was well before its
time.
I did, in the beginning, two restaurants a week in the Friday review, and it was
Friday in the “Weekend” section, not Wednesday in the “Dining” section. I think that
makes a big difference. I had to do two a week in the same review, so I would try—
Q: An enormous amount of work.
Sheraton: Yes. So I would try for a balance. If one were coming out bad, I would want
something in reserve that I could use good. If one was uptown, I would try downtown. If
one were expensive, I would try—if one were Mexican, I would try—I would try so that
the reader, after all, looks at it to find a place to go over a weekend, not to find out where
not to go. So I tried very hard to do that and also to keep a balance in price. Abe
Rosenthal said that I was very, very good about using restaurants that were not always
very expensive. He liked that.
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Q: That was important to him?
Sheraton: And to me. And he would go. He went. He used to look. By Friday he
would say, or Thursday, “What’s coming out? I want to go before it comes out.” He
valued the fact that he could take his whole family to Praha on a Sunday night for
Czechoslovakian goose or duck, and ten dollars a person, and it was really, really good if
you’re not snooty about where you are. So I think we still have ethnic places now.
They’re different, though. They’re not so Mom and Pop. They tend to be young boy
wonder, you know, Momofuko, something like that.
My feeling always, I think different reviewers have different points of view,
which is great because then the public can find the viewpoint they like. I felt my first
responsibility was to the reader and to the reader who was not a regular restaurant-goer,
who had a lot of money and ate out every lunch and dinner. I really had in mind the
couple who come in for an anniversary or a birthday and what’s going to happen to them
on a Saturday night at Le Cirque. But overall, in doing that, there was also plenty for the
upscale aficionados to get out of it. I would think even at another level, something for
professionals to get out, an idea that a restaurateur might find intriguing, even if the place
were not good, the presentation or gimmick that was applicable.
So I don’t know that I deliberately tried for all those three levels, but they were
usually in it, with the bridge and tunnel person as my primary—I tried very hard to
explain ingredients that they wouldn’t understand. I read a lot of reviews now—perhaps
people are supposed to know much more and do know more—where it will say it had a
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ponzu sauce. I wonder how many people I know who go out and know what that is. If
you would say a soy and lime ponzu sauce, at least they have a clue as to whether it’s
tomatoes or cream or, you know. So I tried to do that wherever I could.
I felt my duty to the restaurants was only to be fair, to go enough times so that I
could sample enough things to see it wasn’t just a bad night or maybe they were very
good at grilling and they were terrible at frying. There were many restaurants who were
good at anything except fish; they just didn’t handle it right. So you would say, “If you
go here, it would be better if you didn’t order the fish.”
I think what I wrote—and maybe what every reviewer writes—is what I wanted
to read, that if I were faced with the possibility of going to a restaurant about which I
knew nothing, what would I want to know. I want to know what it looks like, because
I’m a woman and I want to know what to wear. So, something about mood or style,
which you can do in a sentence or two. Elegant, flossy, laid back. There are ways of
doing it. Maybe a little bit about the crowd that goes there. I certainly want to know
about the service. Are they going to be nice? Are they snooty? Is it laid back? And then
I want to know about the food, so in detail, what to eat and what not to eat. That’s why I
spend so much time going and wrote long reviews that were all about food.
I would repeat dishes to see if they’re consistent. I usually did not ask for
anything done in a special way until the last visit, to see if they would be accommodating.
Could I have the peas instead of the spinach with the lamb? It was beginning to be the
time when the chefs were saying no to that. The creative restaurants that were beginning
toward the end of my stint at the Times, like the Quilted Giraffe, for example, they were
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doing Dodin Bouffant. They were beginning to do very innovative things that didn’t
always work and sometimes did.
But I felt I had to have enough of the idea of the food to steer people very, very
plainly, and I developed in the box in the New York Times recommended dishes.
Q: That hadn’t been done before?
Sheraton: That had not been done before. I don’t know if service had been done
separately. I think so. But recommended dishes was very, very popular because people
would tear out that little box and not carry the whole review, and they would go to the
restaurant with the box in hand.
Q: That’s really amazing.
Sheraton: Yes. And they would order from it.
Q: I should say that we’re not going to go into all your years at the Times in enormous
detail because you’ve covered them so well in your memoir, Eating My Words. That
said, there was one thing in Eating My Words about a hot dog contest or something way
before you started reviewing, about judging—maybe I’m misremembering the book, but
judging the taste of a hot dog according to several qualities, whether it was the flavor, the
firmness.
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Sheraton: I think what I wrote about hot dogs in the book, if I remember correctly, was
when I was a kid in Coney Island.
Q: That’s right.
Sheraton: One night a whole bunch of us decided to see if Nathan’s or Feltman’s had the
better hot dog.
Q: But you established criteria that seemed—
Sheraton: Well, it seems to me now, without looking at the book, that I—
Q: Seemed like good criteria.
Sheraton: I like natural casings that are crisp, so they spurt. The spurt is very important,
that they be juicy, smoky, peppery.
Q: But even as a kid then, you had a sense of the importance of different aspects of taste.
Sheraton: Absolutely. Well, because my parents talked a lot about it. This one is better
than that one and so on. Of course, the hot dog thing was kind of a joke, because we
must have each eaten eight hot dogs that night. “No, I don’t remember. Let’s go back.
Oh, I just forgot that.” [laughs] So it got to be a teenagers’ craziness. But it had a germ
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of something in it, because one of the stories I did for the Times on judging pastrami in
New York, pastrami and corn beef, there was a day when I was in a cab with 102
pastrami and corn beef sandwiches collected around the city. So that was maybe
Feltman’s, Nathan’s [unclear].
Q: I remember a piece you did about hamburgers, that when you went to a lot of, I guess,
different Greek delicatessens and various other places and you finished the day—you
couldn’t eat them all.
Sheraton: Right. I put them in my handbag.
Q: You put them in your handbag and then you went to Saks.
Sheraton: Saks Fifth Avenue, and pulled out my wallet to pay, and all these hamburgers
wrapped in napkins.
Q: It was just so funny because as you reported, the salesperson said, “What are these?”
And you said, “These are my hamburgers.” [laughter] Which showed, God knows, you
were responsible to taste everything.
Sheraton: Now, of course, you can’t pick up anything without reading hamburgers. It’s
the current rage. If I read one more word about pizza or hamburgers, I may never eat any
one of them again.
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Q: During the years that you were at the Times, what other changes did you notice on
either menus or in markets?
Sheraton: Not only markets, but one big change—and I don’t know if we talked about
this before; you can stop me if we did—when I first came to the Times, one of the big
rages was home cooking and cooking schools. The Times every day in September, right
after Labor Day, published a list of all the cooking schools in New York. It was just
information they sent in. I said, “Why don’t I critique them next year?” So I went to
about 125, and there were some cooking schools where the teacher was only one lesson
ahead of the class. She was taking another course and teaching. It was such a rage, you
couldn’t get in. Marcella Hazan, Giuliano Bugialli, Lydie Marshall. I mean, they were
all over.
And every one had to have a Cuisinart, which is what Craig credited with the
boom in home cooking. Pasta machines, ice cream makers, sausage stuffers, people had
all of those. It’s when people began being interested in having Garland ranges in their
home. And a Saturday for a young with-it couple would be to prepare a great dinner,
doing everything from scratch, and then having friends over. They made the pasta; they
made the ice cream.
Gradually I saw that fade out as the restaurant rage came in. I began to think of
those other kitchens that people put in as having tumbleweed rolling through them.
[laughter] Nobody was cooking anymore. Now I think we’re in a big era of takeout
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food, maybe combined with some home cooking. I mean, so many restaurants do takeout
now as a way to get some of the business they would otherwise lose.
But it’s the products that were available to us that made the very big difference.
Mushrooms, for example. For many years there were only champignon. You could get
other kinds dry, but fresh. And lettuces, I mean there would be Romaine and iceberg and
Boston. If you were in an Italian neighborhood you could probably get rugula, but that
was not known outside of Italian markets. And all varieties of foods that the public
began to know about and want because they traveled and had them. Because cooks on
television were showing them and the magazines and newspapers were writing about
them, they were not afraid to try them.
Q: And you think that the food markets responded to that.
Sheraton: The specialty food market. The supermarkets didn’t respond for a long time.
Now, of course, they all have a lot of kind of mushrooms, so they’re usually in terrible
condition in the supermarket. They don’t have lettuces in as good condition as the
specialty markets still. And of course, now the emphasis on the green markets and local
and organic is sort of a whole other next step.
Q: I wonder if you remember when—and I think it’s only in supermarkets, but maybe
not—they started weighing down the produce with water. It made it look shiny and
clean, but of course it also made it heavier and not good for the produce as you were
taking it home.
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Sheraton: Right.
Q: Do you have any sense of when that—
Sheraton: I think it happened a long time ago, because I used to write about that. I did a
consumer buying column called “The Educated Shopper” for the Times, where I would
usually deal with one food, usually fruit and vegetables, and how to buy it. Especially
with salad greens or the green things, I would say, “Shake it out before you take it to the
scale.” And they claimed it was a way of keeping things fresh, but of course it wasn’t. It
sometimes ruined them. But I think those kind of cheatings always went on, whether it
was a thumb on a scale, or if you’re buying smoked salmon, do they weigh it with the
paper? Do they subtract the weight of the paper when they put it on the scale? And
many do. I assure you Zabar’s will tell you that they begin at 08 or something and they
do at Citarella, accounting for the weight of the paper on the sliced meats and fish. So
there are all kinds of little obfuscations, and I don’t think that’s new.
Q: When did the markets like Dean & Deluca and the proliferation of cheese stores and
bread stores—
Sheraton: It was while I was at the Times. I would say late seventies, early eighties.
Dean & Deluca was really the first, along with E.A.T. We had cheese stores before that,
but they were places like William Poll, and of course Bloomingdale’s had a super food
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department when I was at New York Magazine. The first story I did that got attention at
New York Magazine was I tasted everything in Bloomingdale’s food department. I tasted
1,196 items and reported. Cheese was a very big thing. The buyer, Bob Gumpert, had
grown up sort of elegantly in New York and he understood all these foods, and that was
the premium food department in those days, on the main floor if you came in on the
Fifty-Ninth Street side.
Q: Why do you think they gave that up?
Sheraton: I think there was too much competition of places that could concentrate more
and do it better, and they were outpriced. Now so many people have that cheese. Also,
this is an important change, and I did write about it in my book. In those days, I would
say before the sixties anyway, a fancy food department consisted mainly of packaged
foods, imported canned soups from England and France, even imported game, cooked. It
was so disgusting, you can’t imagine. Canned peas, canned hearts of palm, that was
fancy food. They didn’t have fresh food departments. The only fresh things they had
was cheese and sometimes delicatessen meats. There was no such thing as a vegetable
department in Macy’s food department nor in Bloomingdale’s food department. They
had cakes, they can candy, but they had no real perishables. And you just looked at lines
of cans. What I did, I tasted everything and Bloomingdale’s sent me the food. It was a
dare from the part of the buyer. They sent me so many cans of jam, I had to take one
bathtub in this house and put all the jars of jam in that tub. Every bookshelf was lined
with cans. There were ninety-two boxes of tea to be brewed. I brewed every one.
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Q: Oh, my lord.
Sheraton: Took eleven months. But you barely see a canned item now in the fancy food.
Maybe jams and some spices or something, but not the soups and the vegetables. Even
prestigious restaurants felt it was okay to serve canned vegetables if they were French—
petit pois. You could not get petit pois in a restaurant in New York in those days that was
not out of a can. When I reviewed 21 [Club] and I said that they had some dish like
squab with petit pois, I said they were canned peas. I used to call and check some of my
facts with the restaurant. I remember Sheldon Tannen saying, “Not canned peas.
They’re petit pois.” So I wrote they were little canned French peas. But that was
considered luxury.
Q: I guess white asparagus, that kind of thing too.
Sheraton: Right.
Q: And that would have been the sixties, seventies?
Sheraton: Fifties, sixties, and then began to fade away. But there were even people in
homes who considered it fancier to serve canned or frozen to guests than fresh, because it
was a new product, it was clean, it was bright, you know. That perception, I think, has
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changed. And of course TV dinners. I don’t remember where they were in the dateline.
I don’t think they were so big by the time I got to the Times.
Q: When do you recall people starting to go to the Greenmarket or other places like that?
There were always stalls in the country.
Sheraton: In the country, but in the city, I would say whenever the Union Square
Greenmarket opened, whatever year that was. Down here certainly you had a slightly
different kind of people who I think would respond to that very quickly, and then they
began to grow up all over. I don’t know the year, but I would say that’s when the
awareness began to grow.
Q: What about shopping down either here in the Italian stores or in Chinatown?
Sheraton: A lot of us did that even in the fifties and sixties. Of course, this neighborhood
had a real Italian market on Bleeker Street, which faded away at the end of the fifties.
The pushcarts went off the street. In the sixties we began to see the little salumerias
close. We used to have a wonderful man on Bleeker Street, Mr. Mandaro, who made his
own mozzarella. He was old and his son didn’t want to do that. It was next to John’s
Pizzeria on Bleeker. And there used to be very good fish markets on that street, but they
were all run by older people whose children wanted bigger things, even if they stayed in
food. I remember that Mr. Mandaro’s son, who didn’t want to make mozzarella all his
life, went to work for one of the big catering firms like—I think it was Canteen
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Corporation of America or something. So it was food-connected, but it was a job where
you wore a suit and you went home and you had weekends in the country, a different
thing entirely.
Q: What about bread?
Sheraton: Bread too, but, of course, now bread is chic, so we have many good bread
bakeries, even though they’re not the old ones. Like Zito no longer exists on Bleeker
Street, but we have plenty of good bread baked at Tomcat and Sullivan and places like
that.
Q: The reason I ask is I was in Washington, but we were out of the country and then I
guess came back in ’77, and it took a couple of years before bread—I mean, when I got
there, there was no decent bread, and then bread took off. It took off because people
responded to it so well. Is that the timeframe that you were—
Sheraton: Yes, I think it probably happened here a little sooner than in Washington, and I
don’t remember dates.
Q: It had Orwasher’s.
Sheraton: Well, Orwasher’s is an old-timer that makes old-time Eastern European breads
and very well, but that again got to be in a neighborhood that you had to go to to get it,
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because unless Orwasher’s is sold wholesale, there was no one baking that kind of bread
down here.
Q: Do you remember what baguettes were like during this period of time? Could you
get them?
Sheraton: Well, they were pretty good down here because there used to be a French
bakery on Sixth Avenue near Eleventh Street that baked bread and you could get that, and
they had sort of baguettes at Zito, which was always down here. There still is an
argument about what is a good one, because not all that are made now are good. I can’t
remember the date when bread became chic.
Q: Did you make bread yourself at any point?
Sheraton: Yes. Sure, to try it and see what it was like. And also someone would come
out with a special pan for making bread with a crust, I would try that. But I never made
bread as the weekly source of bread.
Q: I tried it for a while. I guess it would have been in the late seventies. Then once
bread became available, it just didn’t make sense.
Sheraton: It was always fattening and I was always trying not to eat too much bread. Of
course, once I started critiquing restaurants, I almost never ate at home. I only ate at
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home five times in the year 1983, which is my last full year at the Times. Only five
dinners at home all year. So I didn’t do a lot of heavy cooking. I had just had a whole
new great kitchen put in for the first time in my life, and then became the restaurant critic
of the New York Times and ate out every night. [laughs]
Now, of course, I think what’s happened, and I think it’s a direct result of
nouvelle cuisine and what it started, which was chefs as celebrities, chefs as stars. I think
what it’s come down to now, to a large extent, is chefs cooking for the critics and
cooking to outdo each other. I think the press, in a way, has a lot to answer for. On the
other hand, if you’re a critic, you critique what you’re dealt with. You critique with
what’s going on. I mean, if there are terrible plays on Broadway, the theater critic is just
giving terrible reviews. But I think with something like food, I think the language that
the writers use has sort of settled in the minds of the chefs, and I sometimes think they’re
planning dishes that would make good copy. “We’d better add a something so it will
sound good,” or, “Let’s add fennel pollen,” or, “Let’s add something.”
I do think we’re at a postmodern phase in food, which I have once read—I think it
was Richard Meier describe postmodern architecture as the illiterate application of
symbols, and I think we’re seeing the illiterate application of symbols in food all over the
place. The message of the restaurant to the diner, “I know what’s going on. You’re safe
here. See the fusion. See the Latino tortilla mixed with the Southeast Asian something,”
and sending out this message that they’re with it. And mostly it’s badly done. The real
innovators who start trends like that, like Jean George Vongerichten, for example, they
are really students of it and they do it well and they go back to the original cuisine to do
it, whereas the others just copy the people who have done it.
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Q: You mentioned you think some of this started with nouvelle cuisine. Is that because
the chefs who were cooking it had to, in some way or other, articulate or defend it?
Sheraton: No, I think it’s because they’re new unheard-of creations captured the
imagination of the press. Gault Millau, for example, had a lot to answer for. I think there
were some good results of nouvelle cuisine and some bad ones. I think Gault Millau
fostered it almost unnaturally by giving a higher mark to nouvelle cuisine. I think they
had two colors, and if you got, say, three stars black, that was good, but if you were
nouvelle cuisine, you got three stars in red or whatever the rating. They didn’t give stars;
they gave a numerical rating. But they had a red and a black, and the red, it’s very, very
good but it’s not nouvelle. They so much lauded the nouvelle cuisine chefs that it was
almost had to be, if you really wanted the top, top rating.
Michelin, on the other hand, hung back for a long time, too long, in changing their
views of the ratings, I think. I think they still do. I think Michelin is still mired a little bit
in a certain kind of formality in a restaurant that’s no longer valid from most of the eating
public’s point of view.
André Soltner had said about Paul Bocuse that “His greatest contribution is
making chefs not servants, but stars,” which meant that the profession could attract
different kinds of people, better people, in a sense, more focused, more educated, and to
that extent, I think it was very good. I think the other good aspect, if not overdone, was
throwing away the rules, that you could combine—
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Q: The French rules?
Sheraton: The French rules. You could combine a Japanese item in a French dish. You
could shortcut the process. That I think was good, as long as it was good. If someone
was terrible at it, then it was terrible. There are many chefs who are very good at doing
traditional dishes, who are not good at innovating, but feel they have to. They feel like a
fashion designer who has to come out with a line three or four times a year. They have to
come out with new menu items or they’re not going to get the attention of the press.
Q: Was that part of the fusion?
Sheraton: Yes. I think fusion is a part of that, and fusion, of course, has to do with travel
and it has to do with an aggression in this country. I mean, you know, just as when our
parents, maybe a Jewish person from Austria lived next to a Jewish person from Turkey
and they learned to do some dishes. Now you go to the markets and Latinos and Asians
have so many similar food products because of climate, that they can shop in each other’s
markets and they begin to work them into the cuisines in different ways, which I think is
very good. I mean, seeds blown around the world.
Q: What’s available now, it’s really extraordinary in terms of whether they’re Asian
products, including Korean or very odd things, or Latin American things.
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Sheraton: Or Indian. Look at the Southeast Asian, all those exotic ingredients. You can
get everything here. Now, that, of course, raises another issue that the locavores are
screaming about, and the carbon footprint and should we be able to get this stuff. Is it
right to have everything shipped even from California to New York?
Q: I’d like to know what you think, but I guess my own thought is we have been eating
bananas a very long time. [laughs]
Sheraton: And where will I get a lemon?
Q: Yes, exactly. And oranges.
Sheraton: Right. I mean, even something that I might get locally, not so good. Let’s
take peaches. We get pretty good peaches from Pennsylvania and Jersey, but nothing like
Georgia peaches. And I’m going to buy a Georgia peach whenever I can, as compared to
a Pennsylvania peach, so that means I’m buying peaches that have left a bigger carbon
footprint, and I figure, work it out, find some way to ship it that doesn’t leave a carbon
footprint. I think it’s good to have stuff coming from afar. I think it’s good for human
relations. I think it’s good for being interdependent. I think it’s what makes the world go
‘round. People have been eating food from far-off places forever. I mean, Columbia
discovered America because he was looking for Indian spices. The Romans brought ice
down from the Alps so they could store oysters in summer. So if you see something, you
want it. That, I think, makes progress.
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Q: There is some thought regarding the locavore obsession with buying only locally, that
farmers or the distribution system has to go around to so many places that, in fact, the
carbon footprint may be much broader than we think it is.
Sheraton: Well, all these people in Union Square, they come down four days a week in
big trucks.
Q: That’s a lot of driving.
Sheraton: That’s a lot of driving, and what is that doing to the carbon footprint?
Q: Well, I guess that also raises the question of to what extent chefs, home cooks need to
think about the planet at the same time that they are purchasing, whether we should only
eat sustainable fish or fish that are sustainably raised. I’m just not sure that the consumer
is ready to process all of that.
Sheraton: I don’t think so either. The consumer has a lot to deal with just putting food
on the table and paying for it and satisfying everybody in your family, and getting it
done. I go to many markets to shop for dinner, but I love to go to food markets. That to
me is fun. That’s my exercise, buying food. [laughs] But there are not people like that.
There are people for whom it’s a terrible task, they hate it, they don’t have time for it,
there’s pressure, and they want to go to a supermarket and get it all there and send it
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home or buy from Fresh Direct, which to me is just an unimaginable idea, to buy
something I haven’t picked out, but it comes across the street several days a week.
People in the apartments buy it. They’re too busy. They call an order in, the food is left
with the doorman, and they’re happy.
Q: You know they do have this, at least when I looked at it, this aspect of the Fresh
Direct website, where they’ll give you recipes and tell you exactly what you need to buy.
Sheraton: Right. And they’ll send you cooked food. Fresh Direct delivers prepared
dishes. Then the question of localvore is, what about organic? Not everything at the
Union Greenmarket is organic. It may be local, but not organic. So then what do you do
if you can only get organic strawberries from California? Are you going to buy that or
are you going to buy the local?
Q: It’s a conundrum. It definitely is. When you were at Time, what kinds of pieces were
you writing there?
Sheraton: That was after the New York Times, and I did a lot of reporting on trends. I did
a whole big issue that was a cover story on new American food. That’s when American
chefs were beginning to have the status, Lydia Shire and Barry Wine, and all over the
country there were American chefs who were being lauded. So this was a report on that,
how it came to be, how they were, and so on, because, you know, American chefs didn’t
have status originally. Even at the Four Seasons, Albert Stockli was Swiss, and anyplace
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that wanted to be anything needed a chef with a foreign accent, unless it was a steakhouse
or something like the Coach House, which was always a really fine restaurant with
American chefs and so on.
Q: So new American food also meant new American chefs.
Sheraton: Yes. It meant the New American cuisine, which was a blend and fusion, and
that the chefs were American. I did a special one on women chefs, which was getting
pretty new, but by that time there was Susan Spicer and Lydia Shire and Cindy Pawlson
and so on.
Q: We’re talking, at least for New American, late eighties, early nineties?
Sheraton: Yes. I left the Times in ’83 and immediately went to Time, ’84, and I was
there for five or six years. Then I would report on chains. For example, chain restaurants
that are being planned usually have a pilot restaurant somewhere to test the format, and I
thought it would be fun to go to a bunch of the pilots, so I contacted where I found them
and reported on what was on the drawing board for your dinner. Every once in a while
there was a phenomenon like cinnamon buns suddenly took over in a crazy way, so I did
a story on the cinnamon bun phenomenon.
I did a story on the twenty-fifth birthday of Lutèce, of this restaurant that had
begun, and André and his mother in [unclear]. I did a very interesting story—I think it
was the first one for the Consumer Press—on the taste laboratory at Yale University, with
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Linda Bartoshuk. I went up there for a few days and found out really how they test your
palate. When you say it’s sweet, it may be sweeter for you than it is for me, and so on.
That was an interesting story.
Q: Why don’t you explain what they do there.
Sheraton: It’s very long. It’s in my book. They don’t do it there now anyway. She’s
down in Florida. This is a sensory laboratory that uses the material not for food
companies primarily, but they use it for neurological tests. It is possible, if you have a
constant taste of bitter in your mouth, that some part of your brain is not working
property. So it’s a diagnostic test for other neurological impediments. There was also
sound and sight, but I was in the taste part.
They had a really crazy Rube Goldberg setup of troughs. There were many
aspects, but one was a trough, and you’d have your chin on a ledge and your tongue is
out, and they wash flavor stimulants over the tongue, and you have to identify them and
you have to identify the intensity. Like on a scale of one to ten, ten is the strong, two is
the—then they had a pure recognition test, which was another way, what do you taste.
Then they had a relative test, if you were hearing a noise, seeing a light, and tasting this
taste, would the intensity of the flavor match the intensity of the light and the sound, so
that you had to do that comparative, because there is a theory that all senses decline at the
same rate after the age of fifty, all other things being equal, I mean if you weren’t
nearsighted to begin with or hard of hearing to begin with, and so on. So that doesn’t
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always happen for everybody, so there was a correlation. A lot of them would test to see
if you really knew what you were doing.
Then I went to their convention for this story. They had a convention in Sarasota,
where they had even more discussions of taste and perceptions, and are we the only
animal that seasons food. For example, we are the only animal that would taste again
something we dislike very much on a first taste. Things like that, that I found fascinating.
It was a very, very interesting story. A lot has been written since, but that was the first
time it went to a consumer.
They tested me, as a critic, to see if I was a super taster. A super taster exists in
two tastes, bitter and sweet. Or maybe it was also—no, I think it was bitter and sweet. I
was not a super taster; I was a normal taster, which was a great comfort to me because I
thought if I’m a super taster, nothing I’m saying in my critique—but it really means if
you like bitter broccoli and I say this is too bitter to me, the truth is it may not be as bitter
for you. Your threshold may be much higher for bitterness. So I found that absolutely
intriguing, and I still am in touch with Linda. We still talk about this. I’m going to be
part of their program in Boston next year. She’s now down in Florida. But it was used,
even though they finally did some work with people doing artificial sweeteners and so
on, it was really neurological and it was part of the Yale School of Medicine.
Q: That, of course, was quite different from what these pilot restaurants were trying to
do.
Sheraton: They were just trying a format.
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Q: A format that would sell and that would be broadcast—
Sheraton: Right. And work out the kinks and work out the—
Q: For a fairly wide public.
Sheraton: Right. There was one that was really very inexpensive and quick. Then there
was one that was really almost a white-tablecloth restaurant, with a pretty good menu that
they felt they could do through the State of California, kind of grill. I think it was called
The Grill. And one was by Jay Chiat of Chiat Day, who was working with some graphic
people on one. I don’t know that any of them ever happened. There was really a big mix
of stories that I did for them.
Q: I’m just thinking that the fact that Time magazine had somebody writing about food
on a regular basis is interesting in itself.
Sheraton: They did before me. They had a man named Michael Demarest, who used to
write on other things, but he wrote on food.
Q: I think he was the business editor or something.
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Sheraton: He was something else. Then when I got there, it was very difficult. I hated
being there. I hated the way they edited. I was never happy there for one minute. I just
didn’t like the way they edited. It was very heavily edited, and they had a perception of
what made it a Time story and so on.
Then I also did some pieces that were fun. There were some presidential
nominating conventions, and there was one in Texas. I went down and did a story on
where are you going to eat in Texas, but I did it by interviewing Dallas—the two stars of
Dallas.
Q: The television program. I see.
Sheraton: Yes.
Q: Larry Hagman.
Sheraton: Where does J.R. Ewing eat, and where does Suellen Ewing? I ate with Larry
Hagman and with the woman who played Suellen. We had lunch together, and they were
really funny. So that was a funny story. I did one on L.A. when the Olympics was going
to be there, called “Going for the Pastrami,” and it was where people were going to eat.
So there was some of that. It was a big mix.
Q: I guess caring about the food in places like that or at ballparks, that’s something
that—
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Sheraton: By the way, they sent me to China for a month, Time. That was the best part.
Henry Grunwald had taken a news group to China, and the food was so terrible, he said,
“I want to send Mimi over and find out why the food is so terrible.” So I had my own
interpreter guide through three weeks in China, then I went to Taiwan for a week, just to
compare. It was fabulous. It really was fantastic.
Q: Throughout this period of time, you’d flown around a lot, so you must have watched
the development of airline food.
Sheraton: I watched it so much that for the first issue of the Condé Nast Traveler, which
I was working for by then—that was the same time I was working for Time—Harry
Evans asked me to fly around the world business-class on as many airlines as I could.
Every leg had to have a major meal.
Q: But it was business-class. [laughs]
Sheraton: Right. Because that was the level he thought his readers would be traveling. I
had a Polaroid and I photographed all the meals. It was really hectic. So I had a big look
at airline food, which is now sort of moot because there is no more airline food. I guess
on those foreign transatlantic flights there is, but I haven’t had them in a long time. They
were better than economy, but some of them were still pretty terrible.
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Q: And a lot of that is because the inhibitions of the cooking process—
Sheraton: They always, to my view, did the wrong thing. They tried to do something
they couldn’t do because of the facilities. I remember the first ads for Air France after
World War II referred to “elegant French service and French food such as you are used to
on the great French ocean liners.” Well, that was impossible, but it had the perception
this is very expensive travel. Therefore, it should be very elegant food. And they
couldn’t do it. I always thought a great sandwich and a cup of coffee, there’s no flight so
long, really, that that wouldn’t hold you, although in those days the flights were pretty
long. I think it took twenty-six hours to go from Copenhagen to Japan when I did it over
the polar route that SAS had pioneered.
But I’ve done a lot with institutional food. I did work for a year for NYU
Hospital, which was very—I got a new appreciation of the problems with that. I did a
survey of public school food in New York for the Times. It’s okay to review restaurants,
but this really mass-level eating is, in a way, far more critical and really difficult, really
difficult.
Q: You mean to carry off.
Sheraton: To carry off. The personnel, the unions, the demands, the knowledge, and the
cost. I mean, they spend nothing on school lunches in New York.
Q: During all this time, of course, you were living here in the Village.
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Sheraton: Right.
Q: So you always had access to pretty good markets, given what was out there.
Sheraton: Absolutely. Probably the best in the city, with exception maybe of Zabar’s.
We never had that kind of appetizer store down here. We would go to Russ & Daughters
usually, which was always here and not too far away. We used to have a very good New
York Jewish-style deli on Eighth Street. That moved away; we don’t have that down
here anymore.
Q: When was that?
Sheraton: When I moved into the Village in ’45 until—I don’t know when Davis’s Sea
Fare closed. Maybe the mid sixties. It was on Eighth Street, just when MacDougal
comes into Eighth Street. Sea Fare was there. That’s where the first Seafarer restaurant
was, on that street.
One thing I miss—you know, we’ve had a lot of gains. We have enormous
variety in restaurants, we have more skillful cooks, wider range of quality product, but
we have lost some things. One of the things we’ve lost are simple American-style
seafood restaurants, where you can get a piece of broiled fish or fried fish or steamed fish
or Lobster Newburg, that kind of thing. I don’t know of one in the city and I miss it,
because I used to eat in those kind of restaurants a lot, the Seafarer chain and so on. But
Sheraton - 2 - 37
there was even one down there, the Jane Street Seafood Café. We could go a couple of
times a week and have chowder and fish. The fish has to be something else now, usually
all gussied-up in a way they say simple, but it’s not simple.
Q: You know that part of this project is transcribing memories of James Beard to the
extent that it’s possible, and you did see him down here, shopping or—
Sheraton: First of all, when I went to Seventeen magazine as an assistant in the home
furnishings and food department, I went, I remember, to a press luncheon, because I
wrote about appliances. This was 1949, 1950. Appliances after World War II were just
beginning to come on the market, and at that time he did publicity for a company, Presto
Deep Fryers or something, and because of his appearance, and I guess he had been an
actor and he had already perhaps by that time worked with André Soltner at Lutèce with
the cooking school. I don’t know the exact dates on that, but somebody does. So he was
kind of a front man.
I was invited to a luncheon, it was at the Brittany on Ninth Avenue, the old
Brittany, and in demonstrating the cooking from this whatever machine it was at that
time, I had snails for the first time. I was about twenty-two. [laughs] So I remember that
particularly.
Then I remember he did another one at the Plaza for Presto Dixie Deep Fryer. I’ll
never forget that lunch. It was in fall. I had a table near the demonstration table, and
every single thing in the damn lunch was fried. I was wearing a wool tweed suit, brown.
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I remember the suit. When I came home, I had to send it to the cleaner. I smelled like
Dunkin Donuts.
So I knew Jim Beard as a showman and a great poobah of American cooking, but
he also lived down here.
Q: Let me just ask you, when he demonstrated or whatever he did at these lunches,
presumably he cooked at these lunches—
Sheraton: Yes.
Q: —that was a way of making a living?
Sheraton: Yes, of course. He needed the money.
Q: Was it considered—of course it depended on how much he’d written by then. Was it
considered inappropriate for him to be doing that?
Sheraton: No, no. You knew he was a pitchman, and all you wanted to do was see it
demonstrated, and then you could decide whether you want to write about it, whether you
wanted to order one yourself and test it and say, no, it isn’t, yes, it is. But I mean, he was
obviously a paid pitchman. Somebody had to demonstrate it. So that was not as much of
a problem.
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He lived at some point around Twelfth Street and Sixth Avenue. I’m not sure
which building it was, but for a long time I saw him there, and then eventually I moved to
that area, so I used to see him in what was then the A&P and is now Food Emporium,
Balducci’s on Saturday morning. Craig lived on Thirteenth Street, Craig Claiborne, over
a restaurant, one of the newer-type Chinese, called the Mandarin House, which was,
again, northern cuisine with a garden. John Clancy lived on Sixth Avenue and Eleventh
Street; he was a big cooking school teacher, writer. So everybody was at Balducci’s
Saturday morning. You could say, “What are you buying? What are you buying?” and
so on.
Q: Was that competitive? Friendly?
Sheraton: Yes, it was friendly. Jim, I will say, was very, very snobbish about talking to
people such as me, who did not get into food under his aegis, who made no obeisance to
him as “I owe it all to Jim Beard,” because there were many people who did, Paula Peck
and so on, who had either helped him teach or took his courses. If he didn’t know you, if
you weren’t part of the world—not only him, but plenty of other established people in the
field. “Whoever heard of her? What is she doing?” And they were not nice about it.
Q: Was Craig Claiborne that way? Of course, he was quite—I guess they both were sort
of shy.
Sheraton - 2 - 40
Sheraton: No, I don’t think Craig was that way. I think if what you did was good—I
mean, I never had a really personal conversation with Craig, but I didn’t have the feeling
he was that way. This is incidental to what we’re talking about, he was very unfriendly
to me after a while at the Times and for years did not speak one word to me because he
felt I gave bad reviews to restaurants whose chefs he had had in the kitchen, writing and
lauding, and I was putting down his taste.
Q: People.
Sheraton: Which I wasn’t doing.
Q: He thought it was purposeful.
Sheraton: Yes, and it wasn’t. I believed that when they went to his kitchen, they cooked
magnificently, but when an unknown person, which I managed to be for a few years,
went into their restaurants, it was not marvelous, and that’s what I was writing about. So
he was in a snit over that.
Jim was very catty. Of course, he did a number of things for food that were good.
First of all, he created the profession of a food consultant to restaurants, which I was for a
while too, simultaneously with him at Restaurant Associates. I think he also, because of
his appearance, brought attention to food and good food and good cooking. What I
objected to was the commercialism long after he needed to do that.
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Q: Like what?
Sheraton: Planters Peanut Oil. I don’t know if he was an official spokesman, but he
certainly was a spokesman for Western Lettuce, iceberg lettuce, and every time I would
write something negative about iceberg lettuce, he would talk about “the lettuce snobs” or
something like that.
And I also felt that his cooking classes, when he moved into the house on Twelfth
Street, because I knew him, as I said, Sixth Avenue and Twelfth, but then the first place I
was aware of him cooking was Tenth Street near Greenwich Avenue. There’s a house
that used to be—Sutter’s Bakery on the corner. It’s now a paper party goods store. The
house next to that was Jim Beard’s. Then he moved to Twelfth Street. He taught
cooking on Corning Hot Tops, and I thought that was inexcusable, because that’s a very
inferior way to cook, and Corning obviously gave him the Hot Tops to demonstrate. I
didn’t think that was a good thing to do. He pushed a lot of products that way.
He had a friend—I don’t know if you’ve come across her name. Her married
name was Agnes White, and she was the wife of William A. White, who was one of the
big realtors down here, and she was in the business too. We bought this house through
that agency. She grew up in Portland with Jim, and she got him all the house deals that
he got and did the decoration. She also was the decorator. She would buy antique things
and put them away for a time when she could put them in one of the homes and so on.
She was very good at it. She was very, very close to Jim because she was from Portland,
Oregon. She died, and I don’t think they had any children. William is dead. We used to
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live in her sister-in-law’s house. She’s dead. But I don’t know what there would be on
Agnes White.
Q: I have wondered about the Portland connection, because, first of all, there’s a
different kind of food in the markets there. They seem to be closer to fresh food.
Sheraton: It was closer to fresh food when I was growing up here in New York. There
was only one kind—if you wanted artichokes, you had to buy an artichoke. There were
no frozen artichoke hearts or canned artichoke hearts. There was no food out of season
except lemons and oranges, which came from California. We had artichoke season, we
had asparagus season, we had strawberry season. A lot of the things were better because
they grew better varieties. For example, Elberta peaches, one of the great peaches of all
times, and no longer, as far as I can tell, grown in Georgia. Maybe there’s a boutique
orchard where someone grow Elberta peaches, but I couldn’t find them. So a lot of that
has changed.
Even from New York, if you lived near anything ethnic and if your mother
wanted to cook—of course, that was my father’s business, wholesale food and produce,
so I was aware of what came from where and what was fresh, but he brought home
certain things that you would not have seen in our particular market in the Jewish
neighborhood of Brooklyn. Eggplants, he would bring them home if there were some
eggplants in his place. And I don’t know how, but my mother knew how to cook all
those things.
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Q: So let’s put the Four Seasons in context, then. Obviously that was a seasonal theme.
Sheraton: Absolutely.
Q: So how ordinary or daring was it at that particular time?
Sheraton: It was very daring and very difficult, and it lost a bundle of money trying to be
that.
Q: Tell me what you mean by that.
Sheraton: Well, it was very costly and they couldn’t get enough of the price for what it
really cost them. So much was show, so much was giveaway to make their theme. For
example, cheese. It was very unusual, outside of a French restaurant or maybe certain
Italians, to have cheese for dessert. Americans weren’t going to eat cheese for dessert.
The Four Seasons decided to have a super cheese tray. It cost them $125 a week, which
in 1959, 1960, to throw away the cheese, because people would not buy it.
Q: And it has to be served at a particular moment.
Sheraton: Yes. It goes bad and not all of it could be used in recipes. If you have leftover
Parmesan, okay, you can use it, but what are you going to do with leftover Brie? They
were making a statement. I think now I’m sure restaurants are finding people are not
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ordering cheese. I almost never order cheese in a restaurant. It’s much too expensive.
And Americans like a sweet dessert and they’re not going to order cheese and a dessert,
as they do in France.
Q: And dinner.
Sheraton: Right.
Q: You were part of the planning of the Four Seasons situation, so did it have the same
ethos of “We must do seasonal food”?
Sheraton: Yes. Not only food. The uniforms on the staff, the plantings, the color ink
that their bills went out on that they typed on, everything changed four times a year.
Q: And this was Joe Baum?
Sheraton: Joe Baum.
Q: And his reasoning was what?
Sheraton: That it was going to be the Four Seasons, and they had, as I remember, two
major uniform change, summer and winter, and then spring and fall they changed the
cummerbunds and the ties. Then that was the ink they used for their typing and that was
Sheraton - 2 - 45
everything. And of course the trees in the room, which it looks just terrible now. They
can’t afford to do it, and they’re doing terrible things.
Q: When it opened, the two different rooms, even then was there a chic room and a notso-chic room?
Sheraton: The chic room was the Pool Room. Nobody wanted to sit in the Grill.
Everyone wanted to sit around the sparkling pool.
Q: So the fact that there was a chic room or a chic space in a restaurant, how new was
that?
Sheraton: Not new. I think there was always Siberia. I’m sure that if an unknown
person ever managed to get into the Stork Club, they’d be seated in the bathroom.
[laughs] I don’t think that, and I don’t think status restaurants are new. I think there
were always status—the Colony, Valois. I think we’ve always had that. Maybe not so
much, maybe not so many people were aware of it, but Pavillon, that had to be status. If
you came in unknown, you could be treated like dirt in Pavillon.
Q: Presumably there was less money to go to these places too.
Sheraton: Well, there were always rich people. I mean, they did well. But I think the
expense account lunch brought a lot of new people to these places. I must say,
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Chauveron was perhaps the most egalitarian of the really expensive haute cuisine places.
That was a lovely, jolly place. That was the man who had begun Chambord and then
opened Chauveron years later.
Q: That was very popular, wasn’t it?
Sheraton: Very, very popular, and he opened it for many years down in—what’s the one
in Florida? Bal Harbor?
Q: Bar Harbor’s in Maine.
Sheraton: Yes. The one in Florida, not the one in Maine. Bal Harbor.
Q: Did you ever take any of James Beard’s cooking classes?
Sheraton: No, but I reviewed them.
Q: How did you do that?
Sheraton: I reviewed all the cooking classes. At the Times we were rating cooking
classes. I’d come in and observe the class.
Q: That’s what I meant. I see. What kinds of classes did you observe?
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Sheraton: I did 125.
Q: A hundred and twenty-five. [laughter]
Sheraton: If I had known when I started out how many there were going to be. They
were any kind you could think of. There were, of course, French and Italian and Chinese.
They were general cooking. They were just all kinds of cooking classes, party cooking,
convenience cooking, and I did it for three years, but the problem became that anyone
who got a negative review didn’t want to let me in the next year to re-review it.
Q: So they had, we should say, a number of different people teaching those classes,
depending upon the specialty.
Sheraton: Well, each school was the specialty. There were only a few schools that
taught different kinds of cooking. You either had a Chinese cooking school or a French
or—
Q: I was still back with James Beard, and I think he did have—
Sheraton: He had assistants, but I don’t remember if he had other people at that point
doing the class. I don’t remember that.
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Q: Do you remember how often you went to those classes?
Sheraton: His?
Q: Yes.
Sheraton: I don’t remember being there more than once or twice. If you can ever get it
out of the archives, they’re all in there, but I don’t know what—
Q: You mean what the menus were?
Sheraton: What my reports on all of them were.
Q: I see what you mean.
Sheraton: But I don’t know if online they have archives before—this would have been
around ’76, ’77, and I don’t know if that’s online.
Q: I’m not sure.
Sheraton: And that’s maybe more digging than you want to do.
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Q: Of course, you only went to a few of them, but could you have characterized the
crowd? Was it mixed with people who just wanted to take a course with James Beard
and people—
Sheraton: I would say youngish. Men and women. It was very interesting that men were
going. And at all of the cooking schools, I noticed that the men were much more serious
than the women in certain ways, especially about the tools. I don’t know, because they
were used to carpentry, but they were much more serious about the use of utensils. They
didn’t like things with flowers. They wanted a really good professional knife or a really
good professional sharpener. They were much more businesslike about that.
Q: Tell me what food-related things you’re doing now.
Sheraton: I’m doing a book that’s a huge glossary of some of my favorite foods. That’s
a very big book. I can’t tell you more.
Q: Favorite foods meaning recipes or specific foods?
Sheraton: Foods. I’m working on a piece for The New Yorker. I have a couple of things
due at the New York Times. And I’m working on possibly reissuing in updated form a
couple of my books that have been out of print for a long time. I write a monthly column
for a new online magazine called tabletmag.com.
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Q: I don’t know what—
Sheraton: Tabletmag, which is a function of nextbook.com. Nextbook is a liberal Jewish
cultural website dealing with arts and culture, and their magazine now is called Tablet,
and I’m the food columnist. I do that once a month.
Q: You do whatever you want to do?
Sheraton: I submit ideas and say, “How do you feel about this? How do you feel about
that?” Because in relation to what else they know they have coming down, and I’m
feeling my way. I’m only working on the third one. While it’s of Jewish interest, it
doesn’t have to be only about a Jewish subject. I had one on bread and salt and a little bit
about why and what they mean practically. The second one I did was on the
phenomenon of kosher South Indian vegetarian restaurants who have gone the extra mile
and gotten mashgiach and certification.
Q: That is the extra mile. Wow.
Sheraton: There are about seven in New York. I found five in Texas, two in Seattle, one
in Cincinnati, and I’m sure there’s more that I have not found. I can’t believe there isn’t
one in L.A. and maybe Cleveland or Boston or somewhere in Florida, but I wasn’t able to
find them, and this was enough to—because it wasn’t a review of the restaurants; it was
the phenomenon, how it came to be and how you order in one if you go.
Sheraton - 2 - 51
Q: And in Little India are there any?
Sheraton: I don’t know if they’re kosher in Little India, but there are a lot of them on
Lexington Avenue and Twenty-seventh, Twenty-eighth. I don’t know what you mean by
Little India.
Q: Yes.
Sheraton: Because there’s a Little India down on Sixth Street, but Madras Mahal is the
one I go to, of course not because they’re kosher, but because I love the food. They are
authentically South Indian vegetarian. They don’t do anything Jewish.
Q: So it should, in fact, be kosher, but it would have to have the blessing.
Sheraton: Right. For the really serious people. There are a lot of Jews who knew it and
went, but those who come in with the yarmulke and want to wash their hands before the
brucha—and there’s a special basin for that—they wanted the seal in the window. And
because there is no animal product used, except dairy, they don’t even use eggs because
they’re appealing to Jains who don’t even want to eat eggs. And their cheeses are not set
with rennet, because that’s not allowed either by Indian vegetarians or kosher Jews,
because that’s a meat product. So there are at least seven in New York that do this.
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There’s Madras Mahal; there’s one next to it, Pongol; there’s one around the corner,
Chennai Garden. There’s a very good one out in New Hyde Park.
But the subject was how do you order. If you go to one, what do these funny
things on the menu mean? So it had a glossary. It named the few around the country that
did it, and how it got started and who goes there, yarmulke and saris.
Q: This is on tablet—
Sheraton: Tabletmag.com.
Q: You have interesting and I think quite intelligent theories about why Chinese food has
been popular with Jews. Is there any connection with this Indian thing?
Sheraton: No. There have been kosher Chinese restaurants, but they have been
abominable because they do fake things, which has also happened with Italian. Like you
order prosciutto and you get corned beef, you know. I don’t think that’s funny. [laughs]
Q: No.
Sheraton: There is one very good one, a couple of good ones in New York that don’t do
fake things. Tevere, for example, does very good Italian cooking, but they don’t do what
they can’t do. There’s no cheese, there’s no fake cream product, you know.
Sheraton - 2 - 53
I think the Chinese Jewish thing, I don’t really know the true answer, but I’ve
speculated, as have many people. I know what is not true is that the reason is the Jews
here came to live on the Lower East Side, because my Jewish friends who grew up in
Denmark still eat Chinese food on Sunday night. Jewish friends who grew up in France
eat Chinese food on Sunday. And all Israel eats Chinese food. [laughs]
The food I’m talking about that really got the Jews into it was Cantonese, not so
much the latest Szechwan, Hunan. I think it was cheap, I think it had a lot of soft, mild
flavors that Jews of Ashkenazi background like, soft onions, celery, rice, which was very
big with Ashkenazi Jews. Obviously chicken soup with wonton that looked like
kreplach, and the drink was tea. In case you were sensitive, even if you weren’t totally
kosher, no dairy products in sight, because the Chinese didn’t use them. So even if you
weren’t kosher, you might not be used to having a glass of milk with a hamburger, you
know. As for pork and shrimp, I think they ate it and it was like, “Who asked you?”
[laughter]
Q: What do you make of these Indian kosher restaurants?
Sheraton: That’s different. I think that they’re young Jews who want to eat kosher, but
want to eat something different, and it’s more fashionable. Suddenly they’re having all
these spicy things and these gorgeous breads and stuff, and they like that. They’re tired
of chopped liver or whatever they’ve been eating. That I think is very different, and it’s
kosher. The Chinese places [unclear] kosher.
Sheraton - 2 - 54
Q: Oh, I see what you mean. Yes. And what are you cooking now? What kinds of
things are you cooking?
Sheraton: When I cook mostly at home, it’s really quite simple because we try to make
up for the food we eat in restaurants. Yesterday, for example, I cooked outside in the
garden for our son and daughter-in-law and granddaughter, and I did Middle Eastern. I
did shish kabob, and with the shish kabob I did some tabbouleh and some baba ghannouj,
and I had a little rice pilaf with it. I do a lot of Middle East. I love Middle Eastern
cooking. I spent time in Beirut with a chef and so on.
In the fall and winter I do a lot of Scandinavian and German. I wrote the German
cookbook, so I like that food. I spent a lot of time in Scandinavia. Christmas is always
Danish. New Year’s Day party, when I do it, is always Swedish Danish smorgasbord. I
do French country cooking. I don’t like to do haute cuisine, but I do a daube or a boeuf
bourguignon or those things.
I would say the running thread is Italian, especially when my son was home as a
child, my husband’s Italian, we like it, it’s easy, it’s healthful. Everybody likes it. You
can make it taste good quickly. Then, of course, Eastern European Jewish food, stuffed
cabbage. Passover, I make the gefilte fish and the matzo balls. Rosh Hashanah, I always
make a honey cake. I don’t do anything religiously about it, but only the food.
Q: It’s a very good restaurant, this house. [laughter] Has your husband enjoyed this
wonderful journey?
Sheraton - 2 - 55
Sheraton: Yes. I don’t think I could have done it if he—there’d either have been a
divorce or give up [unclear]. When I was on the Times doing every night, I will say there
were times he was pretty tired of it and got a little bit cranky, and I used to say, “Don’t
go. I’ll go with somebody,” unless his own business had him at a business meeting. And
he traveled quite a bit in those days. Then I would take other people. We were usually
four people anyway, reviewing for the Times. No, he loves food and he’s interested and
likes all kinds. He complains that he always gets to order last because I let the other
people choose. I’ve had my first choice in so many years. [laughs] Or he likes when we
go out for special occasions, for us to order the same thing, and I hate that. I think it’s
such a waste. “Couldn’t we eat the same thing for once?” [laughter] But he likes my
cooking and his father liked it. His father was a very old man who finally lived here at
the Village Nursing Home, and once or twice a week I would make some Italian meat
sauce on fusilli or meatballs, and Dick would take it over to him. He liked that very
much. I love doing Italian cooking, and I have a very good, if you could say, ear for it.
Q: I can’t imagine you in a nursing home, but if you ever get there, I’m sure the food will
be very different. [laughter]
Sheraton: I’ll kill myself before they kill me.
Q: Mimi, thank you so much for this.
Sheraton: You’re welcome.
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[End of interview]