Last Saturday, Merrill flexed his muscle. True: you could see the veins in his temple bulging, evidence that something interesting was going on within.
Last Saturday, the city of Cleveland celebrated the Five Star Sensation, a spectacular grazing fundraiser sponsored by University Hospitals to benefit its cancer center. Two years ago, in 1986, the first edition of the every-other-year Five Star raised multi-thousands of dollars for the center as did the current one.
Each of the chefs had been up since 8 a.m., Saturday prepping food in the kitchens of host restaurant, Sammy’s. From 8 a.m. until midnight, when the Five Star untwinkled, the chefs punished themselves, cooking their food and serving it.
A reporter from a local TV station asked me what I thought. I told her I thought it was gratifying that so many outstanding chefs and world-class wineries would visit Cleveland to help the city and the hospital celebrate a worthwhile cause. It would do much, I said, to soften the image of a city much-maligned by media saps everywhere. The city, I told myself, was growing up, shedding its clown-town image. The Five Star was an opportunity for Cleveland to glow a little.
At midnight, the Five Star now a memory, several of the chefs and friends decided to unwind. It had been a grueling, stressful, 18-hour workday. They needed to relax. They wanted to relax. “Where might one go to relax in Cleveland?” they wondered.
A group made up of Puck, Waxman, Fearing, Bruell, Vendome, Gervilla, and Patout, agreed to cap the day with dance and drink until dawn or the Cleveland equivalent (2:30 a.m.).
Now changed from grubby and sweat-stained whites to clothes loose and comfortable, the group headed for a recommended disco, Aquilon, the latest flashy hotspot in Cleveland’s Flats—an area that wondrously and incongruously blends the belch and hum of smokestacks and freighters plying the waters of the Cuyahoga River with the blaze and flash of nightclubs and upscale eateries hard by the river’s banks.
In these pages several times I have written of the notoriety of chefs such as Puck and Waxman, noting that were they to show up suddenly as part of the mob outside of Studio 54, they most likely would get the nod over . . .well, how about Sylvester Stallone.
That said and done, it pains me to report that, yes, Cleveland may be shedding its clown-town image, but it still provides an asylum for several highly visible buffoons who, unclownlike, are unspeakably insolent. They think they are the Big Apple. They are not: they are Small Potatoes.
Enter Charles “Tuber” Merrill, owner of Aquilon. Correction: Operations-Driven Aquilon.
Outside, Bruell, Waxman, Puck, et al line up behind others waiting to get in, waiting to get the doorman’s nod. He looks over and beyond us. He sees Puck and Waxman and the rest, but he does not see them. He has no idea who they are. Neither does Charles Merrill, whom the doorman has hastily summoned to review, approve, select, and then wave in customers based on criteria only he understands. He doesn’t know Puck from Col. Sanders. He knows nothing about Five Star. He is caged in Aquilon. He knows nothing of the brutal day put in by the chefs. He doesn’t care. He is Charles Merrill and that is all that matters. There is—correction—one thing that matters. It is uppermost among Merrill’s criteria of rite of passage. Aquilon has a dress code, a commandment handed down by Merrill from atop Mt. Aquilon; and Jonathan Waxman, in jeans and sneakers, has unknowingly dared to challenge it. He is waved off as are the rest of us. Nobody gets in. Nobody.
Merrill has a lot to learn. Perhaps he should take some lessons from Gary Bauer. Bauer runs Club Coconuts, a disco across the river from Aquilon. Bauer not only welcomes the group—he recognizes nearly everyone in it—he waives the cover, bends his dress code, and ushers them into one of the VIP lounges overlooking the dance floor.
Says Vendome, “We should’ve come here in the first place.”
Will Bauer’s hospitality—in the minds of the chefs—offset Merrill’s insolence; will the chefs forgive and forget it? Not likely. The incident at Aquilon will be rehashed (perhaps with relish) as further evidence of a city still trapped in a provincial time-warp, refusing to grow up, still indulging in behavior like that of a kid throwing a tantrum. That this is an imprecise perception is immaterial. That it could happen in New York or Chicago misses the point: the narrow-mindedness of one city is often mistaken for charm in another: an amusing, albeit incompatible, counterpoint to its worldliness.
Merrill’s clowning and affected swagger will be remembered long after the good times and feelings at Coconuts are forgotten. What a shame.
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