June 1989: The Berns Legacy at “21”

Jerry Berns, never without his cup of coffee

April 10, 1989: Into a conference room at the Plaza Hotel, New York, reporters gather. Down the hall, help scurry to ready a reception. Adjacent to that space, preparations go on for a dinner to honor Jerry Berns (above), vice president and secretary, The “21” Club. To those of us who know “21,” Jerry is its personification. 

Berns has been with “21” for 50 years. For the past 18 of those 50 he has spent a lot of time on the board of the Culinary Institute of America. It is the C.I.A. that is hosting the event. It is $500 a plate. Proceeds will support the Willa and Ernie Royal Scholarship Fund for Minority Students.

In the conference room, half an hour before the reception, following brief introductions and tributes from Jeff Berlind and Walter Conti, Berns talks about himself and “21.” He is 82 and he looks like he’ll go on forever. We can only hope. I mention to Conti that Berns is probably the only person in all of foodservice who never made or had any enemies. “He is loved,” says Conti. “You cannot find anyone who thinks otherwise.”


Berns with wife, Suzanne, at the racetrack in Toronto during
the annual Travel-Holiday Awards Reunion there, circa 1987.  

Berns talks about his past, about getting into the business, about how embarrassed he is by all of the attention he’s receiving tonight. “Others deserve the accolades more than I do,” he tells me. His voice is unmistakably Berns. If you ever had met him and had enjoyed the pleasure of his company and, later, were you to stumble across a radio interview with him you would know immediately who it was. It is that kind of voice.

He was in Cincinnati, working for the Enquirer as a drama and film critic, when the call came in 1938 from Jack Kriendler and Jerry’s brother, Charlie, to join them at “21.” He’d been with the Enquirer for nine years, had enjoyed his work there immensely, “so I wasn’t really sure whether I should make the move to New York,” he says. “I asked my three-year-old daughter what I should do and she told me even though she liked free movie passes a lot, she liked free milk a lot more.”

Berns is reminiscing, lacing his thoughts with just the right amount of nostalgia. Nothing cornball; no rambling, either. “I care about this business, about people in this business,” he says. “When I joined ‘21,’ everyone I came in contact with helped me and cared for me. I decided to give back some of what I got.”

A lot of people still in the business are indebted to Berns for caring. A lot of people still in the business wouldn’t still be in the business if it weren’t for Berns caring. It is Berns’ enthusiasm for his work, his caring for people in the business that, he says, has sustained him over the years.

He rejects the title of “Gatekeeper,” even though that, in fact, is who he is and what he does: the person who greets the titled, the notable, the classy and stylish for whom tables are not reserved, but set aside.  “The label is pretentious,” he says. Yet he understands its function, the idea of it. The idea of it underscores how and what Berns feels about “21” and why he cares.

“The popularity of ‘21’ is a result of the way we receive and treat our guests,” he says. “The person visiting ‘21’ must be treated as if the place were built for the sole purpose of handling that person and his party. Titled or not, regular or first-time guest, he is handheld by management and by captains from the moment he enters until he departs, at which time he is bowed out, not unctuously, but ceremoniously. He is bid farewell with the politeness and cordiality he would be accorded on leaving the home of a friend.” 

Things at “21” are not quite like that anymore; and because of that one senses that Berns’ enthusiasm for the joint isn’t quite so great as it was two, three years ago, before the sale in 1985 to financier Marshall Cogan.

I tell Berns I don’t like what has happened to “21.” I don’t think he does, either. “It’s not the same,” he admitted to me a while back, an appraisal sadly noncommittal. I could tell he wasn’t happy with what happened.

Top L-R: Jerry Berns, Terry Dinan
Bottom L-R:  Bruce Snyder, Sheldon Tannen

Aliens hijacked it. Ken Aretsky, Alain Sailhac, and Anne Rosenzweig to name just three: celebrity culinarians before there was anyone who earned or deserved that sobriquet. They thought “21” outdated; thought it needed a facelift, countless tucks and folds: plastic surgery when all it needed was a paint job. So, they stripped it of its style and replaced it with a superficially slick, squeaky clean conversion that repositioned it smack dab in the middle of everything else trendy in New York which is what they set out to do in the first place when all it needed, as noted, was a paint job. “21” used to be different, the only one of its kind anywhere; now it’s like every other fancy-pants restaurant in the city. Take your pick. Gatekeeper or no, anyone can walk into “21.” It has lost its cachet. Today, it’s cool. It was never that. 

“21” used to be intimidating, for the love of God. It dripped with mystery, with mystique. You just didn’t walk off the street and onto the sidewalk and, from there, down those steps and into “21.” You prepared yourself to go there, even if you were a regular. You thought about going there and you remembered, unlike other great restaurants in the city, “21” had a strict dress code; and, if you were a man, choosing a necktie was part of the ritual, part of getting ready to go there. Without one, you couldn’t get in. If you were a woman and wore slacks you had to wait until the late 1960’s before you were allowed to wear them at “21,” unless you were Katharine Hepburn who “21” admitted wearing them sometime in the ’30’s. You could not muscle your way into “21,” unless you were Groucho Marx who, tieless, muscled. Today, the rules have changed. Still, decorum prevails: jackets for men, but, curiously, no dress code for women. There is, however, this: jeans and sneakers are taboo. They are not only that, they are at “21,” beyond contestation, dreadful and unthinkable. 

There was “ceremony,” some sense of solemnity, of anticipation to enter “21.” And, if you had never been there and knew nothing of what might happen once you walked in, you were as nervous as the Billy Goat Gruff about to encounter the troll. You primed yourself as if you were about to meet the Queen of England or have an audience with the Pope, for Christ’s sake.

You inspected your tie or your slacks, checked your fly or the buttons of your blouse, your hair or your perfume. Maybe, to settle your nerves, you downed a drink or two at home or in your hotel room. That’s what it was like going to “21” for the first time.

Woe be unto you if you didn’t think you had to be prepared. And, should you decide, once having been there, that you’d like to return, you tried to remember what it was like going there the first time. You tried to remember what people said when they met you, what you remembered saying when you met them. Did they seem to like you; seem not to like you; didn’t care one way or another? Horrors: did they stare when you walked into the room or when you got up, halfway through dinner, to powder your nose or take a leak? Did you even dare to do that; and, if you did, did you know where to go or, hopelessly lost because you didn’t want anyone to know you didn’t know where to go, did you, finally, give up and ask someone or sheepishly—having second thoughts (the rest room, after all, can wait)—return to your seat?

Were you “handheld by management and by captains from the moment you entered until you departed; bid farewell with the politeness and cordiality you would be accorded on leaving the home of a friend?” 

If your remembering was unclear and because of that were unsure of the reception you might encounter when you returned, then maybe you ought to think twice about going back. It was that sort of thing. It took some time before you got used to it. On the other hand, if you so much as thought this idea of ceremony was high-falutin and so chose to ignore it or poke fun of it, you found out soon enough, if you decided to return, that the restaurant had noted your boorishness and had taken measures, prepared to contain it. Need we explain?

The food was decent or it wasn’t. That’s not what mattered. What mattered was, once inside, you felt good about yourself. You were in “21” and all that that implied: wall-to-wall writers, Prohibition, secret wine vaults. You could dine upstairs if you didn’t care where you ate (“It has all the ambiance of an English formal dining room,” Berns told me.), but downstairs with its red-checkered tablecloths and corporate logos and toys dangling from the ceiling, was where—admit it—you really wanted to be, to see and be seen because, you told yourself, you were cool or wanted to be cool. You wanted to be one with all of the other guys and dolls rubbing elbows with the ghosts of Earl Wilson, Ed Sullivan, Louella Parsons and Damon Runyan; O’Hara, Steinbeck, and Saroyan.

Now, the food is . . .well, what is it? It’s chic and American and pretty; and pains are taken to plate it perfectly. Well, that’s a shame. “21” was never pretty food or even classical food or derivations or deviations thereof. It sure as hell wasn’t French. It was chicken hash and pricey hamburgers long before pricey hamburgers and that was it. Matter of fact, if you are of a mind to trace the evolution of American cuisine, you can do no worse than to start with “21.” Long before the debate surfaced about what was or wasn’t American cuisine, “21” was.

Burgers and hash remain on the menu, refined and updated, a testimonial to what “21” once was, but it’s not the same anymore. You don’t go to “21” to go there anymore, you go there to eat. And Chef Alain Sailhac, formerly chef de cuisine, Le Cirque, makes damn sure you know that’s what you are to do when you go to “21.” The Le Cirque connection should tell you something.

The traditional values of a restaurant are its truths and the embodiment of these truths in its management. Once you tamper with, violate or disregard these truths or swap them for ersatz truths, a part of the restaurant dies. Up until recently, “21” was an old shoe of a joint and nobody really cared how worn it was. It was the only one of its kind anywhere. Now, it’s a Gucci of a restaurant, its effects upstaging its style. Its intimidation no longer stems from its ambiance or its cachet, but from its strut which, say old-timers, confuses and irritates.

I’m eavesdropping at “21’s” bar shortly after its “restoration.” Two gentlemen, both wearing neckties, stand at the bar (still no barstools at one of the great bars of New York) and talk about the new look. “Before all of this,” says one gent to the other, “I can remember walking into the restaurant and being welcomed by Jerry or someone else; now, I feel like I have to ask if it’s OK to come in.”

In a way, it’s good that we mark the genius and energy of Jerry Berns this year, rather than a few years down the pike. Berns is “21” and will always remain so. But, several years from now, with the memory of what constituted the soul of “21” dimming, the celebration wouldn’t mean so much.

Footnote: Jerry Berns died December 21, 2006. He was 99. (“He is 82 and he looks like he’ll go on forever. We can only hope.”) My story about Jerry and his work at “21” ran in the May 1976 Restaurant Hospitality. Apropos the reference to American cuisine, Jerry had this to say “The menu is fairly simple. We have so much repeat business that if we offered a complex menu dripping with exotic sauces and dishes, our regulars wouldn’t be able to tolerate the richness of the food. Most of the people we serve are diners with very simple tastes.”

 

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September 1997: Joe Pierce: 1918-1997

Joe Pierce died three months ago. On a Sunday in July, my wife, Jeanne (she had known Joe for as long as I had), and I drove to Elmira Heights, N.Y. to say goodbye to Joe. He was our friend for so many years, it seemed forever.

There was a memorial service Sunday at Grace Episcopal Church on Church Street in Elmira. The church was packed. Among a lot of other things the minister said about Joe, he recalled dining with his fiancée at Joe’s restaurant, Pierce’s 1894 Restaurant, and “how Joe came to the table and welcomed us and asked if there was anything he could do.” After the service, I asked the minister about Joe. He said that if there was one word you should use to describe Joe, it would be “generous.” He pointed to a stained glass window. “Years ago Joe donated that,” he said. The minister had more examples of his memories of Joe. Here are some of mine.

Joe at Wuthering. He shared with me everything 
he did to shape his restaurant into one of the best.  

Joe and I were with each other lots of times over the years: at Travel/Holiday magazine reunions, special events at the restaurant (the annual Wine Barrel Dinner was a favorite), or just for the hell of it to talk about the business of foodservice and his friends in the business and to learn what it takes to run a family restaurant in Elmira Heights, N.Y., not yet preyed upon by the invasion of restaurant chain predators that supposedly offer food and services as good as Joe’s (more about that momentarily); the frustrations and challenges; the hirings and firings; the wine lists and menus constantly under scrutiny, then adjusted to respect the whims and requests of a picky clientele; the rewards and disappointments. There was the wine room, in and of itself a fitting metaphor of the restaurant’s classiness.

Joe told me so much over the years that whenever I went out on stories or to speak somewhere to students or restaurateurs, in the back of my mind and between the lines of speeches and interviews, Joe Pierce lingered, his thoughts intertwined among the twists and turns my speeches or interviews took.

He shared with me everything that he and wife, Lee and son, Joe and daughter-in-law, Deb did to shape the restaurant into one of the best anywhere. In that sharing, I grew as a journalist writing about the restaurant business and I came to understand better what energy one has to ignite and burn to makes things work.

We fought friendly fights, fueled with fine wines or a scotch or two and the cigarettes we bummed from each other that killed him.

Years ago, I warned him about the 600-pound gorilla that is the midscale restaurant chain and how it would lumber into his community with scaled-down versions of its first-tier-city behemoths and snatch business away from Pierce’s 1894 because there were people all over (not just Elmira) who didn’t know the difference between good and bad food and were perfectly content to enjoy whatever wherever eating bad food. He wouldn’t hear of it.

Joe said, “They have no idea what they’re cooking and their customers have no idea what they’re eating.”

There is still the Wine Barrel Dinner at Pierce’s that he and Joe, Jr. conceived 17 years ago to honor, recognize, and promote the wines of the Finger Lakes. It always sold out. Joe invited me to the first.

The first of the annual wine dinners at Pierce’s. “You think any other restaurant in the country could have pulled this off?”

We sat together, two of 130, swirling and sniffing, tasting young and old wines—25 in all, all handpicked by son, Joe—that matched perfectly each course of the nine-course banquet; and then, ducking into the kitchen between courses for a smoke.

Joe looked at me and said, “You think any other restaurant in the country could have pulled this off? Huh? Tell me: any other joint? I can’t tell you how proud I am of my people.”

A scaled-down version of a first-tier-city behemoth opened up in a mall nearby. Joe said, “Lee and I went to the mall to check out this place called Ruby Tuesday. An employee told us to sit over there and wait. No, I’m sorry, that’s wrong. His tone was ‘sit there or else.’ I looked at Lee and said, ‘What the hell are we doing here?’ so we left.”

At Pierce’s 1894, there is a great bar with esoteric beers on draft and wines by the glass too numerous to count and cheese and crackers and if you have to wait for a table you don’t mind doing that at all.

Joe said, “I don’t know what to do about him. I try to tell him what to do and how to do it and I know Lee’s not going to like this, but I’ve got to fire him.” He was talking about his son-in-law.

The next day, late in the morning, Jeanne and I drive up the dirt road to Wuthering, the Pierce’s farm, where, in a clearing above the farm house, Joe is buried. The minister reads from Scripture and lines from poems that daughters Lida and Willa have asked him to read. An honor guard fires a 21-gun salute and the hills around the farm echo and echo with the sounds of their shots. There is “Taps,” a most mournful call. A bagpiper plays “Amazing Grace.” From a passed wicker basket, we take rose petals that we release and watch as they flutter to his grave. 

As Jeanne and I walk down the hillside from the house, a gentleman who has dined at Pierce’s so many times he has lost count, comes up to us and says, “I went to the restaurant last night after the service and sat at the bar and waited for Joe to show up.”

We drive down the dirt road away from Wuthering. I look in the rear view mirror and see the farm through the dust that swirls in the wake of the car.
 
Footnote: Three years before Joe died, I wrote about him, his family and their restaurant, one of the best places in the world to enjoy food and drink. It’s called, “The Pierces of Pierce’s.” It’s included in this collection

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February 1995: Stuart Levin

All of us lost track of him a few years back. He was incommunicado, confined to a wheelchair, suffering the hurts and pains of MS and the indignities of family that forgot about him. He had shut up.

He had an inkling that something was happening, that something was amiss, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was. A couple of years before he shut up, he called to let me know that the loss of balance he was suffering now and again was due neither to an inner-ear infection nor a stroke, but something more serious. Months later, he told me of MS and the wheelchair. He said he was coping with it, understanding it, facing up to it. He said his wife left him. “She knocked me over and out of the wheelchair and left me there helpless.”

For a while after that, he taught classes on foodservice at a local high school; for a while, from his apartment on Central Park West, NYC, he would go next door to eat at Café des Artistes where he was welcomed and accommodated. He told me confidentially he even made up with des Artistes owner, George Lang with whom, over the years, he had serious differences about what a restaurant should be, the differences fueled by ego and arrogance that both had in abundance. And then he shut up. No one knew what happened to him. No one could find him. He refused to answer his phone. Or, ashamed (unlikely), didn’t want to.

Last year the Culinary Institute of America tossed a fund-raiser to honor NYC’s defunct Le Pavillon.  

Lots of people who worked at the restaurant were at the C.I.A. to reminisce about the good old days. They all gathered at the Danny Kaye Theater and as Ferdinand Metz, the C.I.A.’s president, cooked Le Pavillon specialties, they told stories about Le Pavillon. Pierre Franey, who was for a while Pavillon’s chef, told a story; Craig Claiborne told a story; a chef and a cook and a bartender and a waiter told stories. I sat there and listened to the stories and wondered why no one had anything to say about Stuart Levin who bought Le Pavillon from Henri Soulé in 1968 and closed it in 1972.

An hour or so before the restaurant celebration began, I sat with Metz drinking coffee in his office. I asked him if Stuart was going to be here. He said his office tried to contact him, but to no avail. I said I think we should try one more time. Metz tried, but Stuart did not answer. He had shut up.

At the Danny Kaye Theater, I had in my briefcase a copy of a cover story I wrote about Stuart. I had brought it with me because I wanted to read a passage from it—to honor Le Pavillon and, if Stuart couldn’t attend, to give him a voice in the celebration. I thought it the right thing to do, but because I wasn’t on the program, I didn’t do it. I should have. Here it is:

“My experiences at Pavillon were monumental,” said Stuart. “I gave of myself to the staff. I never fooled them. I never discussed a dish with the chef unless I knew more about it than he did. Joe Baum taught me that. He also taught me, because of his relationship with Albert Stockli, how important it is to develop and hold a close and warm relationship with your chef.

“I went to the kitchen and had lunch there at the family table. Dinner, too. I ate what they ate. I didn’t like many things, but I learned. They spoke French. I couldn’t. So I went to Berlitz and learned. They sat down with me and broke bread with me and listened to what I had to say. And they never put me down. They treated me like a gentleman because I treated them like gentlemen, and it was the most marvelous four years I can remember.”

I don’t know what the hell happened to Stuart. I do know who the hell he was.

He was a dear friend. Every time I went to New York, I’d make a point to call him ahead of time. If he had the time, we’d spend some together. If I needed help with a panel, a focus group—anything —I could always count on him. He gave eloquently and candidly of himself and his memories. He was outspoken and controversial. He dealt absolutely with absolutes; and you could, if you wished, contradict him, but you had better be ready to defend yourself clearly and precisely.

“I hate cant,” he told me. “I hate bullshit and hypocrisy.”

“The business grabs him, holds him,” I wrote in that cover story in 1980. “Not desperately. Passionately. There is no pulling Levin back from foodservice. It has massaged his libido, seduced him. He is in love with restaurateuring. He lusts after all of it. The perfect partner. The restaurant as mistress. The affair has been going on for 30 years. His ardor has not dimmed.

“Levin relishes success, moves effortlessly with it, glides easily through it, lets it slosh all over him. He wears it well. He is cresting always: like a skilled surfer forever riding the perfect wave he will do so, he assures me, until he wipes out.”

Stuart died Monday, December 19, 1994.

Afterthoughts: One Cover Story Leads to Another

The cover story on Stuart Levin, mentioned in this essay, was published January 1980. Within days of getting his copy, Stuart called me to tell me he liked it. He said he “liked it a lot.” Not long after that, a letter from Stuart, dated January 17, 1980, crossed my desk. “I have been written about in every sort of media that one can imagine, both negatively and complimentary,” wrote Stuart. “Never before has anyone ever captured the Stuart Levin that you did in the article. I really do not know the words that can truly express my deep appreciation for the manner in which you wrote the story.”

The same time the story on Stuart ran, Patrick Terrail called me. He was the owner of Ma Maison. Among Hollywood’s elite, it was considered the most popular and, according to critics, the best restaurant in all of Los Angeles (you could get an argument from gourmands who thought Chasen’s better). Wolfgang Puck was Ma Maison’s chef (see May 1996 Wolfgang Puck. Brand Names: Accept no Substitutes). Patrick called me because he had read the story on Stuart, liked it, and wanted, of all things, equal time. He and Stuart had worked side by side with other soon-to-be foodservice greats at Restaurant Associates, creators of some of the finest restaurants ever to grace the boroughs of New York (see September 1984 Margittai and Kovi: The Four Seasons Restaurant). They were good friends.

“What does it take to get a story about Ma Maison in Restaurant Hospitality?” Patrick asked. I was flabbergasted. I thought he was kidding. You see, Ma Maison was such a popular hangout, such a draw for upper-crusted big shots, hotshots, movie stars and moguls and the rest of L.A.’s dining-out cognoscenti, it needed neither publicity, p.r., advertising, the media fawning over it, nor a phone number. Well, it had one: unlisted. Ma Maison was where everyone who copped an Oscar, gold statue in fist, would descend following the awards.

For years, I had wanted to do a story about Ma Maison, to interview Puck and L.A.’s l’enfant terrible, Patrick Terrail, but knowing of Terrail’s “gag” order (i.e., the unlisted phone number), had no idea how to go about it: go through channels (which ones?); call the restaurant (hello, operator: I’d like the number for Ma Maison on Melrose Blvd.); call Terrail or Puck (“I’m sorry, who did you say you were?”); jump through hoops (whose and where?); know someone (who, where, and when)? Frustrated, my only option was to forget about it. Not this time.
 
The cover story on Ma Maison ran January 1981, one year after the one on Stuart. Lois Dwan, restaurant critic of the L.A. Times, who was to become one of Terrail’s best friends (she told him what to do to improve Ma Maison soon after it opened), told Patrick my cover story was one of the best ever written about him and his restaurant.