Secret Ingredients Read online

  The West Side school of beefsteak devotees frequents the Terminal Hotel, a for-gentlemen-only establishment at Eleventh Avenue and Twenty-third Street. Its chef is Bob Ellis, an aged, truculent Negro, whose opinion of all other beefsteak chefs is low. Of them he says, “What they call a beefsteak ain’t no beefsteak; it’s just a goddam mess.” Mr. Ellis is also a talented clambake and green-turtle chef and used to make trips as far west as Chicago to supervise one meal. His most unusual accomplishment, however, is the ability to speak Japanese. He once worked on freighters that went to the Orient, and he sometimes reminds people who hang out around the belly-shaped Terminal bar that he has a wonderful command of the Japanese language. When someone is skeptical and says, “Well, let’s hear some,” he always says haughtily, “What in hell would be the use of talking Jap to you? You wouldn’t comprehend a word I was saying.”

  Among the groups of rough-and-ready gourmands for whom Mr. Ellis is official chef are the I.D.K. (“I Don’t Know”) Bowling Club, a hoary outfit from Chelsea, and the Old Hoboken Turtle Club. This club was founded in 1796, and Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr were charter members; now it is an exclusive association of West Side and Jersey butchers, brewers, saloonkeepers, boss stevedores, and businessmen. Most of the members are elderly. Mr. Ellis has cooked for them since 1879. In 1929 they gave him a badge with a green turtle and a diamond on it and made him a Brother Turtle. The Turtles and the I.D.K.’s and many similar West Side organizations always hold their beefsteaks in the Terminal cellar, which is called the Hollings Beefsteak Keller after John Hollings, a former owner of the hotel, who sold out in disgust and moved to Weehawken when Prohibition was voted in. He used to store his coal in the cellar. Mr. Ellis refuses to call it a Keller; he calls it “my dungeon.”

  “In the old days all steak cellars were called dungeons,” he told me. “To me they’re still dungeons.”

  The dungeon has a steel door on which is printed the initials O.I.C.U.R.M.T. That is a good sample of beefsteak humor. Also on the door is a sign: WHEN YOU ENTER THIS KELLER YOU FIND A GOOD FELLER. The dungeon has a cement floor, over which sawdust has been scattered. The ceiling is low. On the trellised walls are yellowed beefsteak photographs ranging from an 1898 view of the M. E. Blankmeyer Clam Bake Club to a picture of a beefsteak thrown in 1932 by the New York Post Office Holy Name Society. Over the light switch is a warning: HANDS OFF THE THIRD RAIL. In one corner is a piano and a platform for a German band. The dungeon will hold 125 persons. “When a hundred and twenty-five big, heavy men get full of beer, it does seem a little crowded in here,” Mr. Ellis said. Beer crates and barrels were once used, but now people sit on slat-backed chairs and eat off small, individual tables. Down a subterranean hall from the dungeon is the ancient brick oven, over which Mr. Ellis presides with great dignity.

  “I’m not one of these hit-or-miss beefsteak chefs,” he said. “I grill my steaks on hickory embers. The efflorescence of seasoned hardwood is in the steak when you eat it. My beefsteaks are genuine old-fashioned. I’ll give you the official lineup. First we lay out celery, radishes, olives, and scallions. Then we lay out the crabmeat cocktails. Some people say that’s not old-fashioned. I’m eighty-three years old and I ought to know what’s old-fashioned. Then we lay out some skewered kidney shells. Lamb or pig—what’s the difference?

  “Then comes the resistance—cuts of seasoned loin of beef on hot toast with butter gravy. Sure, I use toast. None of this day-old-bread stuff for me. I know what I’m doing. Then we lay out some baked Idahoes. I let them have paper forks for the crabmeat and the Idahoes; everything else should be attended to with fingers. A man who don’t like to eat with his fingers hasn’t got any business at a beefsteak. Then we lay out the broiled duplex lamb chops. All during the beefsteak we are laying out pitchers of refreshment. By that I mean beer.”

  Mr. Ellis lives in the Bronx. Whenever Herman Von Twistern, the proprietor of the Terminal, books a beefsteak, he gets Mr. Ellis on the telephone and gives him the date. Usually he also telephones Charles V. Havican, a portly ex–vaudeville actor, who calls himself “the Senator from Hoboken.” He took the title during Prohibition, when everything connected with Hoboken was considered funny. Mr. Havican is a celebrated beefsteak entertainer. Most often he sits down with the guests and impersonates a windy, drunken senator. He also tells dialect stories and gives recitations on such topics as “The High Cost of Meat Is What’s the Matter with the World, My Friends” and “The Traffic Problem Is Bad.”

  “If I am not previously known to the people at a beefsteak, I sometimes impersonate a dumb waiter,” Mr. Havican told me, listing his accomplishments. “I spill beer on people, bump into them, step on them, and hit them with my elbows. All the time I look dumb. It is a very funny act to a person with a keen sense of humor. Once a cranky old guy could not understand the humor of it. He wouldn’t let me explain. He just kicked me, and I had to spend three weeks in the hospital.”

  1939

  “Fusilli, you crazy bastard! How are you?”

  THE FINEST BUTTER AND LOTS OF TIME

  JOSEPH WECHSBERG

  When I went to France this summer, after an absence of more than a year, I was pleased to find that, for the first time since the end of the war, my Parisian friends had stopped griping about the black market and rationing and were again discussing, passionately and at great length, the heady mysteries of la grande cuisine, which, next to women, has always been their favorite topic of conversation in times of content. Once more, with the air of brokers divulging something hot in the market, they were confiding to each other the addresses of good restaurants.

  The finest restaurant in France, and perhaps anywhere, it was agreed by my always well-informed friends, is not in Paris. If I wanted to have the epicurean experience of my life, they assured me, I would have to go to Vienne, a town of twenty-three thousand inhabitants in the Department of Isère, seventeen miles south of Lyon, at the confluence of the Rhône and Gère rivers. There I would find the Restaurant de la Pyramide and its proprietor, the great, the formidable, the one and only M. Point.

  “Ah, Fernand Point!” said one of my French friends with a deep sigh. “The greatest epicures in France and Navarre sing his praises. His gratin d’écrevisses reaches perfection. The yearbook of the Club des Sans-Club awards him the mark of Excellent—its highest. I once had a volaille en vessie there that…”

  “Point’s hors d’oeuvres alone are worth a trip from New York,” someone else said. “He calls them hors d’oeuvres but they are a meal in themselves—and what a meal! There is a pâté….”

  “Last year at Point’s I had the best lunch I’ve had since Escoffier left the Ritz,” a third gourmet friend told me. This friend is a man of seventy-four years and 320 pounds, and he has spent most of the former in increasing the latter with good food. “In short, you must go to Point’s restaurant.”

  I objected mildly that I wasn’t much interested in the show places of la grande cuisine. Since the disappearance of the black market, France’s restaurants have returned to their prewar standard, which is, by and large, the best in the world. I could see no reason, I said, for patronizing fancy establishments when there is such an astonishing number of small restaurants all over the country where one can get a delicious omelet, a succulent veal stew, a fine cheese, and a bottle of honest vin du pays for less than six hundred francs, or something under two dollars.

  “Ah, but Point’s restaurant is not a show place,” my old friend said. “It is a temple for gastronomes who know that la grande cuisine must be well orchestrated, that it must be surrounded by careful details, ranging from the temperature of the dining room to that of the wines, from the thinness of the pastry shells to that of the glasses, from the color of the fruits to that of—”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll go.”

  “But it’s not a question of whether or not you will go,” my friend said. “The question is will M. Point let you eat in his place? He has thrown out American millionaires and
French ex-ministers when he didn’t feel like serving them. Only last week, a friend of mine called M. Point long distance and asked him to reserve a table for the next day. That, of course, was a mistake, because M. Point usually insists on being notified at least three days beforehand. My friend gave his name—a very important name in French politics, I assure you. Ha! M. Point pretended to be totally unimpressed and kept saying, ‘Would you mind repeating the name?’ Before long, my friend had lost his celebrated poise and could only mumble that he was being recommended by M. Léon Blum. And what do you think M. Point said to that? He said, ‘And who is M. Blum, if I may ask?’”

  My friend chuckled. “But I think I can help you out with an introduction. I have a British friend, M. Piperno, who happened to be among the Allied troops that liberated Vienne, and I’ll have him give you a letter that will open all doors to you. Any friend of M. Piperno’s is treated royally at Point’s. But be sure to call M. Point well in advance to reserve your table. And for heaven’s sake, don’t think of ordering your meal! You don’t order at Point’s. He tells you what to eat.”

  A few days later, I received a note from my friend enclosing an amiable letter of introduction from a Mr. T. H. Piperno, and decided to put in a person-to-person call to M. Point without delay to reserve a table for lunch some day the following week. Finally, after some misunderstandings involving Point’s name, my name, and the name of a girl, Denise Something, who had a lovely way of yawning and seemed to be the long-distance operator in Vienne, I got hold of a man with a high, querulous voice who said yes, he was Point, and there were no tables available for the next week—or the next two weeks, for that matter. I quickly said that I was a friend of Mr. Piperno’s. M. Point’s voice abruptly dropped several notes as he said “Oh!” Then he precipitately told me that I might come any day I liked, absolutely, it would be a pleasure, and how about tomorrow? And in whose name should the table be reserved? I began to spell out my name, but M. Point must have got restless, because he said not to bother with the name—there would be a table. He hung up forthwith, without a goodbye.

  My friends in Paris had urged me to prepare myself for my monumental lunch by eating only extremely light food, and very little of it, during the preceding twenty-four hours, and I was hungry and cross when my overnight train pulled into Vienne early the following morning. A gentle rain was misting down upon the green trees of the town’s miniature boulevards and blurring the outlines of the narrow streets bordered by old houses and small, dark shops. I set out for the nearby Grand Hôtel du Nord, where, again on the advice of my friends, I had engaged a room. “You’d better plan to spend the night,” they had said. “No use trying to rush away. You have to relax after a meal at Point’s.” There were only a few people on the street—pale, stockingless girls who were carrying small lunch boxes, and shabbily dressed men who looked as though they surely had never lunched or dined at Point’s.

  The Grand Hôtel du Nord was, despite its name, an unassuming establishment that did not indulge in such extravagances as elevators, a bathroom on every floor, and warm water after nine in the morning, but my room was clean and the comforter on my bed was filled with eiderdown. I had a pleasant view of two sides of a square—on one flank the town museum, on the other the Café du Commerce et des Voyageurs and its clients, all of them, I was sure, busy in lively discussions of politics, soccer, and the high cost of living. I washed up, read a newspaper I had bought at the station (politics, soccer, and the high cost of living), and finished my interrupted sleep. When I awoke, it was getting on toward twelve o’clock, and nearly time for me to present myself at the Restaurant de la Pyramide. As I stepped into the street, I was stopped by a young man wearing a raincoat and a beret and carrying a pipe. He smiled at me like a Fuller Brush man, asked my pardon for his presumption, and informed me that he was Jean Lecutiez, an archeologist who had been sent to Vienne by the Ministry of National Education to dig up the ruins of the houses, temples, aqueducts, baths, and assorted monuments that the Romans left there two thousand years ago.

  “I happened to be visiting my friend the desk clerk of your hotel as you came in, and I saw on the registration blotter that you were a writer,” M. Lecutiez said. “Right away, I told myself that I would make it my business to take you around.” I tried to protest, but he said, “Oh, don’t worry—no bother at all. My two colleagues will carry on with the work. There are three of us archeologists here—a very old man, un homme mûr [a mature man], and myself.” M. Lecutiez prodded me energetically with the stem of his pipe. “You must realize, Monsieur, that Vienne, the old Vienna Allobrogum, was the capital of the Allobroges in the first century B.C. Julius Caesar established a colony here. Later, the Romans went up north and founded Lugdunum, which eventually became Lyon. Naturally, the people in Lyon don’t like to hear this, but it’s true—”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s wonderfully interesting, but I have a luncheon engagement at…”

  M. Lecutiez ignored this interruption. “Vienne, like Rome, is built around seven hills,” he went on as he grasped my arm and relentlessly walked me away. “They are Levau, Mont Salomon, Mont Arnaud, Mont Pipet, Sainte-Blandine, Coupe Jarret, and Mont Saint-Just. I’ll take you up on every one of them. Now, this afternoon we’re going to start with—”

  “It’s almost lunchtime,” I said. “How about an aperitif? Then I’ll really have to run for my appointment.”

  “Thank you, I never drink,” he said. “Would you like to see the pyramid?”

  “Ah,” I said. “That’s exactly where I’m going. I’m lunching at Point’s.”

  “The restaurant, je m’en fiche,” said M. Lecutiez. “I mean the real pyramid, which for hundreds of years was commonly, and erroneously, thought to be the grave of Pontius Pilate. There is nothing like it anywhere. Come, it’s no distance at all.” As we crossed the street, a wild bicyclist almost ran us down, but M. Lecutiez seemed not to notice. “It was the great French architect Delorme who first stated that the pyramid dates from the fourth century and was the domed center of the spina, or longitudinal center wall, of a Roman circus, where chariot races were held. Now we turn here, and voilà!”

  There before us, an island in the middle of the street, was the pyramid, a monument, perhaps fifty feet high, that looks like a giant metronome. Its square base is pierced by four arches. The thoroughfare it stands in is one of those drab, deserted side streets that one sees in so many small French towns.

  “Excavations undertaken in 1854 by Constant Dufeu proved Delorme completely right,” M. Lecutiez went on, hardly pausing for breath. “We are indeed standing in the middle of what was once a vast Roman circus. It was a big arena, fifteen hundred feet long and…”

  On the other side of the street, set in a ten-foot wall, was a gate, and beside it a black marble plate inscribed in red letters FERNAND POINT, RESTAURATEUR.

  “…and the chariots must have come from over there,” M. Lecutiez was saying, pointing up the street. “They would pass right where we’re standing, and then—”

  “It’s been a tremendously instructive talk,” I broke in, “and I am most grateful to you, but I must go.” M. Lecutiez looked at me with a hurt expression, but I walked firmly across the street toward the gate in the wall. On the left, the wall connected with a decrepit three-story building that looked as if it should have been condemned long before the Renaissance; on the right it joined a house that was considerably newer but seemed rather run-down and in need of a coat of paint. The rain had stopped and the sun had come out, but even under these favorable conditions the exterior of M. Point’s temple for gastronomes presented an unprepossessing appearance. I walked through the gate and found myself suddenly, without any transition, in another world. I was in a garden with clean gravel paths, green lawns, beds of flowers, and a terrace shaded by old maples and chestnuts and covered with white tables and wicker chairs still wet from the rain. The courtyard walls of the building that I had thought should have been condemned were completely
cloaked with ivy, which blended admirably with the beautifully landscaped grounds. To my right was a two-story house—the one that from the front I had thought was run-down. Its garden side was immaculate. The frames of its wide windows were freshly painted, and the whole building looked as clean and spruce as a Dutch sugar house. I walked up three steps, scuffed my shoes on a mat, opened the big door, and entered the hall of what seemed to be a handsome country residence. On the wall were paintings and an old print of the pyramid, bearing the caption UN MONUMENT ANTIQUE, VULGAIREMENT APPELÉ LE TOMBEAU DE PILATE.

  A man in a white jacket approached from the rear of the house, greeted me cheerfully, and took my raincoat and hung it on a hanger in the hall, as is the custom in French homes. I said I wanted to see M. Point, and was ushered into a small, pleasantly furnished salon. The walls were hung with paintings and mirrors, a gold pendulum clock stood on a buffet, and a large glass-topped table sat in the middle of the room. On the table were champagne glasses and a half-empty magnum of champagne, and behind it was standing a huge man. He must have been six feet three and weighed three hundred pounds. He had a longish, sad face, a vast double chin, a high forehead, dark hair, and melancholy eyes. I couldn’t help thinking that one of M. Lecutiez’s sybaritic Roman emperors had come to life. He wore a comfortably large suit, and a big bow tie of black silk ornamented with a flowery design, like those the eccentric citizens of Montparnasse and flamboyant Italian tenors wore in the old days.

  I introduced myself and we shook hands. I gave him Mr. Piperno’s letter. M. Point read it casually and shook hands with me again. “Sit down!” he commanded with a magnificent gesture. “For the next few hours, this house will be your home. I’m delighted you came early. Gives us a chance to talk and drink champagne. Quiet, Véronique!” On a chair beside him, a precisely clipped brown poodle was making hostile noises. “Véronique belongs to the family,” he said. “We also have a nine-year-old daughter, Marie-Josette. Enfin!” He filled two of the champagne glasses and said, “A votre santé.”