Joe Baum, right, with Alan Lewis, left, and
Kevin Zraly at a wine-tasting, Windows on the World, NYC. Joe Baum: “A restaurant takes the simple act of eating and transforms it into a civilized ritual involving hospitality and imagination and satisfaction and graciousness and warmth. A restaurant elevates a human need to a subtle and sophisticated pleasure."
|
Restaurant Associates,
the company from which Tom Margittai and Paul Kovi in 1973 bought
The Four Seasons Restaurant, served as
a proving and training ground for several future foodservice luminaries to include
the aforementioned two as well as Joe
Baum,
Stuart Levin, Alan Lewis,
Irena Chalmers,
James Beard, Barbara Kafka, George Lang, and Patrick Terrail to
name but a few, every one of them, upon leaving RA, creating, then taking ownership
of, works of extraordinary consequence. Like so:
Former RA president, Joe Baum, left in 1970 (he had been
with RA since 1955) and with labor-intensive assistance—occasionally
challenging (an innocuous example* at the end of this
Afterthought)—from associate
Michael Whiteman; interior designer, Warren
Platner; wine savant,
Kevin Zraly;
graphic designer
, Milton Glaser;
deputy Alan Lewis; speechwriter and confidant, Irena Chalmers
; menu architects Barbara Kafka
and
James Beard (both of whom bequeathed future menu fine-tunings to
Whiteman’s wife,
Rozanne Gold),
created Windows on the World restaurant atop one of the twin towers of the
World Trade Center in New York. Restaurant critic,
Gael Greene, reviewing it in
New York magazine one month after it opened, April 19, 1976, called it “the
most spectacular restaurant in the world.” Later, with $25 million from David
Rockefeller, Baum restored and reinvented
The Rainbow Room and then with an assertiveness classically characteristic of
him rechristened it Rainbow
! (
that exclamation point, assertively
Baum’s).
In our May 1979 cover story (below), “Joe Baum: First Person
Singular,” I wrote that Joe was without equal in the world of hospitality: a
force of influence, authority and principle that brooked neither con nor
conciliation. I called him “A masterpiece, a work of art.” I imagined him
immortal and said as much: “Baum is always one step ahead of himself forever
stretching his legs into midnight, a tick beyond whatever time tells you; and
you are certain that he will, in this way, cheat death.” That, of course, never
happened: Joe died in the Fall of 1998 and everyone in the business who knew Joe
mourned.
I came to regard Joe as one of only a handful of geniuses
(as opposed to the thousands of whiz-kid street-smart operators) in the
business and I told him so. “I would no more use that word to describe myself,”
he said, “than I would call what we do ‘art.’ Just because a project is
difficult [he was referring to Windows on the World], complex, and demanding,
and that in the solving of it I apply sets of standards I have developed from
my own experiences, or that I approach it differently from a variety of angles,
that does not make me a genius . . . I don’t know what genius means. The
pleasure is in the doing.”
As in—you think?—“the doing” of restaurants?
“Something like that,” he said. “A restaurant takes a basic
drive—the simple act of eating—and transforms it into a civilized ritual
involving hospitality and imagination and satisfaction and graciousness and
warmth. A restaurant elevates a human need to a subtle and sophisticated pleasure.” (Later in this Afterthought,
Barbara Kafka’s remarks about restaurants and why they matter are strikingly similar to
Joe’s.)
George Lang left to found The George Lang Corp. (GLC), under
whose LLC he would consult on and design a number of restaurants, foremost
among them, Café des Artistes, which, in his finest hour, days, and months and with
lots of help from Lang Corp. associates and a little help from his friends, he lovingly
resurrected, reinvigorated, rejuvenated and then opened in 1976 making of it
one of the sexiest and romantic restaurants in all of New York.
“If the restaurant fails, what is to come of
the clout and credibility of the corporation?. . . .[The decision appears] to
be wildly and dangerously self-indulgent,” associates told George.
“No so,” said George. “Everything we do is different
because there is never a situation that duplicates what we’ve done someplace
else.”
Among the many
restaurants his company designed for many clients, it was the only restaurant
that was his and his alone. “It is my restaurant,” he told his associates who
didn’t think it was a good idea to talk like that. “Nonsense,” said
Lang, not bothering, in defense, to articulate the differences between a
personal or a client-based undertaking because he didn’t think there were any. But
to silence critics and skeptics and to put to rest any fears GLC associates might
have of the future of the company, he said this: “We tailor-make, personalize,
and form-fit every restaurant to fit precisely the needs of a particular
market.”
 |
Lang with Gael Greene, restaurant
critic, March 1976. They shared a
fondness for each other dampened
occasionally by her indifference to
his irritation of her restaurant reviews.
|
(Lang closed des Artistes, late summer, 2008. It had been
open, under its then incarnation, for nearly 33 years. New owners wasted no
time taking it over and spending mega dollars renovating it. It reopened, April
2011, as
Leopard des Artistes. Most
critics will tell you it’s pretty darn good.)
Stuart Levin left to buy Le Pavillon and later, after reading
every day the obituaries in the
NY Times
and finding out that his regulars were dropping off like flies, shuttered
Pavillon and opened Top of the Park restaurant atop the Gulf and Western Building
(for more on Stuart, see
February 1995:
Stuart Levin).
So that Patrick Terrail might distance himself from East Coast
know-it-all foodies who, upon meeting him, inevitably and with smart-ass nosiness,
would ask him if he were related to Claude Terrail (he was: Claude was his
uncle), owner,
La Tour d’Argent
(Paris), he declared his independence from them and their nosiness by running
away. He left New York because he had to escape what he felt was a stifling
foodservice environment that would pinch his growth and, worse, wouldn’t allow
him to emerge his own man, an entrepreneur free from bonds to and kinship with
Uncle Claude. Patrick ran as far away from New York City as he could and still
remain in the continental U.S. He stopped when he got to Los Angeles where he
opened Ma Maison and soon after opening hired
Wolfgang Puck to cook in it (see
May 1996 Wolfgang Puck. Brand Names: Accept No Substitutes).
If you read my Introduction you already know what I think of
Irena Chalmers. I could go on and on about how wonderful she is, but I’d rather
you Google her. There you’ll find lots of people talking about her
wonderfulness; or go to
www.foodjobsbook.com
for a review of her latest book, “Food Jobs.” Matter of fact, once on that website, click on “Reviews”
where you’ll find a number of gushing appreciations of Irena and her books.
RA consultants Barbara Kafka and James Beard left RA, she to
write cookbooks, conduct cooking demos, consult on restaurant design and menus,
and open restaurants; he to
write
cookbooks, talk cooking, cook cooking, and do damn near whatever it was he
wanted, foodservice wise, so long as it did not devalue a foodservice authority
like no other that would ultimately earn him the title, “Father of American
Gastronomy.” Speaking of which, at the opening in 1982 of the
American Bounty restaurant at the
Culinary Institute of America where
Beard was the honorary guest,
Restaurant
Hospitality asked him, apropos of the moment, for a definition of American
cuisine. Said Beard, “American cuisine, in the re-creation of regional cuisines
(commendable as that may be), is not so impressive as innovation and creativity
with available product.” That was it. We said his answer was “non-committal . .
. uncluttered, an opinion as good as anyone else’s. [At the time] the idea of
American cuisine is so nebulous, not even Beard can get a fix on it.”
In an interview in 1981 with Kafka, I asked her to share
with me her thoughts about restaurants and why they mattered. Her answer? Much
like Joe Baum’s (see above): “A restaurant—the way people eat—is a function of
our lives. There is no artifact, restaurants included, that doesn’t have a
sociological, an anthropological, an intellectual rationale, no matter how
mundane or sophisticated. You cannot design a restaurant, be it fast food or
haute cuisine, and isolate it from the human experience.”
And what of Alan Lewis? Well, he left RA about the same time
Joe Baum did, following him to Windows on the World. In addition to having “the
most spectacular restaurant in the world,” Windows had a Club and Baum made
Lewis its Director. In addition, he was Baum’s go-to accomplice and sounding-board,
a formidable no-bullshit associate who, as Joe’s proxy and in his absence,
brought to informal one-on-one brainstormings Baum-like credibility and insight.
At more formal gatherings, he was required—because Joe required it—to attend
weekly Windows meetings where Joe would talk endlessly and profoundly—sometimes
nostalgically—about what was right and what was wrong with everything: service,
food, lighting, décor, menu. Everything. Invariably, because there was little
Joe might say that Lewis already didn’t know, he would doze off. Once Joe
adjourned the meeting, someone would walk up to where Alan was seated and wake
him up. It was at one of the meetings when, meeting adjourned, someone tried to
wake him up, but couldn’t. Alan Lewis was dead.
Finally, a friend of mine, a former Restaurant Associates
employee who toiled inside its inner sanctum, insists there never would have
been a
Le Cirque, a
Parallax, a
Nobu, a
Union Square Cafe
or any of the celebrity-styled restaurants, ad nauseum and infinitum, in Las Vegas, or
any of the multi-hundred themed, trendy, and mostly half-baked midscale
restaurant chains—both regional and national—had it not been for the
restaurants hatched, risked, motif-branded, nurtured, defined, refined,
marketed and managed by RA.
 |
| photosiber |
*It was at one of the tastings at Windows that Joe, no sooner
had he arrived, asked what was wrong with the consommé (right). Someone reminded him
that since he had not yet tasted the consommé, how could anything be wrong with it.
“There is always something wrong with the consommé,” he said.
