Legendary restaurateur Joe Baum (right) with Alan Lewis & Chef Andre Renee

The person’s risk taking may be as simple as highlighting a Five Ingredient Fix, then elegantly presenting it in an original and charming manner. The risk taking could involve a variation, a new interpretation on a very good idea. It is also why I so admired and often speak of my friend and mentor, Joe Baum.

(He has been in my thoughts since my recent sentimental journey of Windows on the World.)

Few have taken risks and demonstrated such powers of original thinking as Joe. We would be astonished to learn that Charlie Trotter had opened a hot dog stand or that Alice Waters was presiding over a steak house. Yet this is just the sort of thing Joe did, over and over again. He produced one extraordinary stretch of the imagination after another.

Among the 167 restaurant concepts he created were Zum  Zum (a hot dog restaurant), Charley Brown’s (a steak house), Charley O’s (an Irish Pub), John Peele’s (with the menu written in olde English and beer served from yard-long hunting horns), The Hawaiian Room, The Forum of the Twelve Caesars, The Four Seasons and the Brasserie, La Fonda del Sol, Aurora, The Tower Suite, Trattoria, Paul Revere’s Tavern and Chop House, The Fountain Café and Tavern on the Green in Central Park, Spats (a twenties-style speakeasy), The Newarker at Newark Airport, The American Restaurant at Crown Center in Kansas City, and The Heartland Market (the forerunner of the now-ubiquitous food court).

Joe was also responsible for the menu at the International House of Pancakes, the restoration of The Rainbow Room, and two incarnations of Windows on the World. Each site had a distinctive regional or historic flavor and covered territory extending from the Pacific Islands to France, Italy, Latin America, Germany, England, Ireland, and Colonial America.  He targeted his places to every taste and all sizes of purses.

One of Joe’s few regrets was that he never created his own version of a genuine Jewish deli.

At first all of these restaurants may seem wildly different, but conceptually they were built from the same DNA. Just as a successful mystery writer writes the same book, with the same characters, over and over again, Joe Baum created one plot and made 166 variations on the theme.

He created his own language for restaurants and wrote it in many different dialects. All good restaurateurs, of course, share the same basic grammar. What differentiated Joe from others was the boldness and clarity of his concepts, the design of his physical spaces, the wording on his menus, his care for his guests and respect for his staff.

Joe was the kind of risk taker we should all aspire to be like–even if we must do so with both hands firmly holstering our money bags.

Windows on the World iconic logo

The Windows on the World collection of restaurants and bars – WOW – sitting aloft 107 stories in the sky took a virtual village to create and maintain. Developed under the visionary leadership of restaurateur Joe Baum and his partners, here are a few facts that made “Windows” hum.

• Windows sat 1,314 feet high in the sky; 1,274 feet above mean sea level.
• Over 2,450 food items were ordered every week.
• 2,000 bottles of beer were on hand at any give time in the Greatest Bar on Earth.
• There were over 20,000 bottles of wine in the cellar. (If you laid their corks end to end, the corks would measure 3,333 feet.)
• 700 wines from around the world made it to Windows’ wine list.
• The Greatest Bar on Earth featured 16 different kinds of vodka.
• Over 27,000 bottles of champagne would be sold in one year (imbibed with 51 lbs. of caviar per week!)
• 1,000 calls or more were made to the Reservations office every day.
• There was always a seat in the house — in one of the 2,500 chairs.
• 3,600 eggs were bought every week (that’s a lot of chickens).
• 700 lbs. of shrimp were consumed every week.
• It took a lot of cooks to cook up all of that shrimp and caviar — 52, to be exact.
• A rose by any other name would smell as sweet — 3,000 flowers were ordered every week!
• The dishwashers would clean 3,000 forks a day.
• Windows’ panorama of color included 145 different shades of paint, 19 fabric wall coverings and 11 custom carpets.
• The oldest member of the staff was born in 1921; the youngest in 1978.
• Windows had the Manhattan’s youngest sommelier — 25 years old.
• There were more than 500 people employed at Windows on the World, speaking 25 different languages.
• The beaded glass curtain on the 107th floor contained 430,000 imported glass beads on 1,178 strands of steel cable.
• On a clear day, you could see 90 miles in every direction from the 107th floor.
• In high winds, the tower could sway 11 inches.

View on Manhattan from legendary icon Windows on the World

I can still remember.* In 1976, Gael Greene, then, the Insatiable Restaurant Critic of  NY Magazine, described Windows on the World in its first incarnation, as “the most spectacular restaurant in the world–a place where guests could woo and con each other in tax deductible splendor.”

Windows on the World first opened in 1976, under the direction of restaurant impresario Joe Baum, and in many ways represented New York City’s proud rebirth. “Windows” as it was affectionately called, quickly became New York’s most dazzling and desirable place to be. Simultaneous with its launch was the much-heralded arrival of the Tall Ships in New York harbor, bringing a new spirit of optimism.

Tall Ships passing NY's Twin Towers in 1976, courtesy of Victor Parker Photography

When Joe (and his team) again was invited to remake Windows as that singularly magical dining in the sky experience, he accepted the challenge without hesitation–and with almost total disregard to cost. An official at Port Authority was overheard muttering, “If Joe had an unlimited budget he would find a way to exceed it.” And to no one’s surprise, Joe did.

Joe was fascinated with great urban spaces where people gathered. He viewed them as marketplaces of ideas that served a function similar to the Forum in ancient Rome. From the beginning, his idea was to create Windows on the World as an urban refuge, satisfying the many appetites of body and soul. And he succeeded beyond imagination.

And, my role in all this? Recently I was asked this very question, and I found myself unable to answer simply. In ancient times, I suppose, I would have been considered a scribe. I was Joe’s speechwriter and designated composer of menus, press materials, and scripts for everything from the correct response to a telephone call to the reservations desk, to the required wording for directions to the men’s room.

After one typically infuriating planning meeting in 1995 to discuss the re-opening of Windows in 1996, a meeting where Joe had changed the agenda to his own, he made a list of what needed to be done. The last, the 13th item, is now painful to share.

It read: “Reassure guests there are no mad bombers within 500 square miles.”

* This remembrance is excerpted from Joe Baum: An Exaltation of Larks, published in Gastronomica magazine. For a complete copy of this article, please contact me.

My conclusion is if you are looking for a wide circulation for your work, write about people and food. 

How to Interview and Profile a Celebrity Chef

Interviewing is a complex skill. Don’t ask questions the answers to which you could have found in advance. Try instead to think of questions no one else has asked. But if you are not certain the information you have is right — ask for confirmation. Facts need to be verified. It is okay to go back and check but not too often (you should have been listening carefully in the first place).

Study the pros to learn how to be a better interviewer. Don’t ask confrontational questions like “Do you think the recently fired chef is a jerk?” Instead ask, “What were your impressions of XXX” or “Many people are saying….” Or “What can you say to people who think…?” or “Do you think it is possible that…?” Like a good waiter, you have to learn when to wait; when the subject of your interview is about to say something else but is hesitating to reveal something important, just wait. The tension of silence may cause him to blurt out something interesting.

Don’t quote anonymous sources. This is the bailiwick of political reporters. If you print false information purposefully or even accidentally, you can be sued. You can also be in serious trouble if you reveal anything that is clearly intended to be off the record, even if the subject of the interview has not specifically said this is privileged information.

Your job is not to provide your opinion or share your experience. The profile is not about you. It is the writer’s job is to present the subject’s story accurately. A playwright puts words in the actors’ mouth. An interview puts another person’s words on the page in the rhythm and cadence in which they have spoken.

If there is a question that may anger the person being interviewed, save it until the last. It’s like nibbling around the edges before taking the last bite. Everyone has an agenda. Determine your own agenda first.

Food Job

A man says he wants to be a writer and loves to be around famous chefs.

As you know, the obituaries of culinary legends are written long before they actually ascend to the great banquet in the sky.

I suggest he can write an obituary column with the title: The Dead Beat.

It was her vigorous curiosity and joie de vivre that made Julia Child so appealing to so many people. And it is one of the many things that set her apart from many of today’s celebrity chefs and lifestyle entrepreneurs. But she could sometimes show her “flinty” side, too. This was an aspect of her personality that people tend to overlook or ignore, yet it was just as much a part of her as the fun-loving “ham” and “hayseed” that was her television persona. She was not simply a funny tall lady who dropped food on the floor and appeared to swig wine intemperately. In fact, she drank relatively little. She was a driven and rigorous technician, a well-trained and hard-working cook who loved French cuisine in part because it had what she called “rules.”

She wanted things done right and had an acerbic quality to her personality that was rarely seen in public. She hated the joyless, thin-lipped food police who didn’t understand the joy of cooking, eating and drinking. Pommes Anna was one her favorite dishes. It consists of thinly sliced potatoes, garlic, Parmesan and lashings of butter and cream. She said: “If you are worried about using so much butter, substitute more heavy cream.”

Julia said: “People looked at me and thought, ‘Well if she can cook, I certainly can.’ If you watch people who are too expert, you think you could never do it. But if you see a sort of normal person cooking, it makes you feel more confident. I had learned to cook at a mature age myself, so I understood that beginners need lots of details. At that time a lot of the recipes were very brief; they’d say put it under the broiler for 20 minutes. Well. I remember the first time I did that. When I came back, the chicken was all burned up. I’m sometimes laughed at for having long, detailed recipes, but if you don’t know how to cook, you really want to know how far under the broiler to put the chicken, what to baste it with and how hot the oven should be.”

Her epitaph was that she made millions of people happier. But she also showed them that nothing good comes easily and that pleasure is the reward for hard work.

I was dazzled and delighted.

Purely by chance that evening I ran into George and Jenifer Lang and told them about the review I had just received from my clever student.

George asked to see the material and I told him I would ask Paul’s permission. Then George, generous as always, invited Paul to have lunch with him at the Cafe

Paul was thrilled…dancing round the classroom…(showing off!)

I brought Paul a copy of George’s memoir, “Nobody Knows the Truffles I’ve Seen”  and instructed him, firmly, to read every page. Paul peeked inside the cover and discovered George was Hungarian. “My family is Hungarian,” he remarked. “Do you speak the language,” I inquired.

“Yes.”

At the next class I was eager to learn about the lunch.

“Oh, I didn’t go,” said Paul.

“Did you let George know you weren’t coming,” I asked.

“No.”

It turns out George was looking for a smart culinary student to assist him as he was restoring the Gundel’s a famed restaurant in Budapest.

Had Paul showed up for the lunch, speaking Hungarian, and with considerable culinary knowledge, George would likely have offered him a job as his personal assistant. Paul would have been able to rub shoulders with all George’s associates: the bright shining stars of the restaurant world. He could have driven five minutes to Paris, five minutes to London, five minutes to Madrid, five minutes to all of Europe and beyond. Instead, he accepted his fiancees father’s offer of a job in the insurance business in Iowa. It came with a car.

A few months later he called to ask if there was a chance the job with George was still available.

The answer was a resounding:  “NO.”

I mention this, just to say, you never know and if you don’t present yourself in person, but instead, send a resume and even a super cover letter, it will probably be tossed out.

Mark Twain said, “Showing up is half the battle for success.”

If you send out a thousand resumes, you may think you are doing something useful, but you are being afraid.

Take your courage in both hands!

If you risk everything by picking up your phone and making an appointment with the company you love, the answer may be “Yes.”

You never know!

If at first the answer from the Human Relations department is “No” you will be no worse off than if you hadn’t called.

Be politely persistent. Hold onto your hope.

An interviewer is far more likely to remember you if  you have shown up in person. Later on they may they come looking for you to fill a role you may never have anticipated.

While thinking about all these things, may I suggest you read William Grimes obituary in today’s New York Times. Admire the quality of his research and his dazzling writing.

And admire George Lang and the risks he took.

His was a life well-lived.

The research involves researching the person, writing the copy (and inserting client edits and updates), providing supporting links and tags along with an image of the subject. It also helps to look at Wikipedia’s profiles of culinary legends like Julia Child, Robert Mondavi, even those curiously American little yellow peeps.

This effort also involves figuring out a fee for your work. It will take more time than you might estimate, so do a trial run before deciding how much to charge.

I suggest $500 as a starting point.

The food & art of an artichoke

I love being a food essayist, and especially like it when I’m asked to read my essays aloud.

This happened recently when WAMC, Northeast Public Radio, invited me to be part of a series of broadcasts entitled Mixed Ingredients, which was made possible through the support of the New York Council for the Humanities.

Below is the essay I offered. If you prefer, you can hear it for yourself and listen to the other contributors’ works too. I begin by saying:

Art and design sell everything we touch.

We are delighted by the curve of a wine glass and the innovative artistry of a wine label.

Lavish sums are spent not only on what food goes on a restaurant plate, but on the plate itself, perhaps a lovely cobalt blue glass plate on which to serve the rosy pink smoked salmon, or the rustic pottery casserole for the beef stew, the perfect lavender-colored plate on which to display the chocolate cake or the pristine white porcelain pot for the mint tea.

Even the display and presentation of the food itself can be considered visual art.

Daring chefs are presenting their food on twigs and wires and other wildly creative forms. Working with sculptors and jewelers, they are inventing new artistic ways to serve — and even eat — their food.

Anyone who has attended a banquet or sailed on an ocean liner will gasp at the creativity of food and ice carvings. And visitors to the TV Food Network are astonished to see the breathtaking constructions of cake designers and chocolatiers.

It was The Four Seasons restaurant in New York that permanently changed the way we now view fine dining restaurants.

When it opened in 1959, the Four Seasons became the inspiration for the modern American restaurant. It was one of the purest examples of an idea transformed into vibrant reality.

The planning for the restaurant consumed two and a half years, and cost four and a half million dollars — a mighty heap of money in the 1950s. At that time the average price of a car was $2,200 dollars. Gasoline was 30¢ a gallon, and the average annual income was considerably less than $6,000.

This was the first restaurant to employ famous architects and graphic designers. Philip Johnson, the architect for New York’s famous Seagram Building, designed the space and graphic designers of the stature of Mies van der Rohe and Eero Saarinen were invited to join the planning team. Their work has endured and can still be admired today.

The Four Seasons was a pioneer in many ways: it was the first restaurant to purchase fine art to grace the space. Dubious New Yorkers scoffed at the idea of hanging Picasso, Miro and Chagall paintings on the walls of a mere restaurant.

Now art and design are essential elements that contribute to the success of grand restaurants, bustling bistros and even comfortable cafés like Panera.

Under the steady rain of goods and services we know as the consumer culture, the graphic designer is the invisible force in nearly every transaction between producer and purchaser. His is the persuasive hand responsible for the design that says to the buyer: “Look at me, remember me, trust me, want me, and buy me — NOW!”

We spend more in a well-designed supermarket, and often choose our food on the basis of the attractiveness of its packaging.

Brilliant design even plays a persuasive role in packaging for fast food restaurants, soda cans, bottled water, many specialty foods and even dog and cat food.

The art director is a trained specialist in color, texture, form and function, who creates the look and feel of magazines, newspapers, cookbooks and menus.

You need only to step into a gallery, craft shop or museum to discover that artists have been working for centuries to turn food into art in the form of decorative Faberge eggs, and distinctive serving dishes.

Jewelers, potters, glass blowers and craftspeople use every media from clay to precious metals and gemstones to render food into images to admire and to use.

Food is art for everything from shopping bags to Christmas tree ornaments and greetings cards. Commercial designers and manufacturers produce a dazzling array of kitchen equipment and elegant, useful tools for cooks.

Still life paintings depict the last supper, a recent hunting expedition, a silver bowl of ripe fruit, a table laden with a simple loaf of crusty bread, cheese and a goblet of wine, or an entire meal consisting of ham, pheasant, figs, cheese and cherries.

Here are feasts to last for gastronomic eternity in the form of fine and everlasting art.

Menu from La Fonda Del Sol, 1960

The exacting dedication to detail that went into every one of legendary Joe Baum’s fantasies was poured into the building of La Fonda Del Sol, a restaurant that involved several junkets throughout Latin America.

At La Fonda, fashion designers draped the waiters in ponchos, serapes, and high-heeled matador boots.

For the dining room, color was used as architecture. The room’s sun-drenched adobe walls set off vibrant purple and orange banquettes.

Recesses in the walls were stocked with hundreds of Latin American dolls, small toys, and figurines made of Ecuadorian, Brazilian, and Argentinean festival breads.

La Fonda Del Sol open kitchen, 1960

For the first time, Joe added an open kitchen, which lent vitality and energy to the room.

Rows of chefs tended spits and grills laden with suckling pigs, legs of lamb, sides of beef, and whole turkeys that turned slowly and aromatically over beds of glowing coals. Cauldrons of soup simmered to the beat of the marimba and mariachi bands and, later in the evening, to the haunting strains of a classical guitar.

Food was center stage, but when the new chef offered the señor a traditional South American dish of stewed tripe with rice, Joe leapt from his chair and shouted at him, “Forget it! No one’s gonna eat this shit.”

The entire staff at La Fonda was from Latin America. They infused the restaurant with a sense of excitement and gaiety, also reflected in the advertising campaign, featuring a mustachioed hombre with eyes closed and head on the table, making  various wise-guy pronouncements such as:

“No. no. stupido, we said, ‘Fiesta at La Fonda del Sol, not Siesta.’”

Or, “We are not responsible for articles lost or exchanged on the premises, nor for deals and bargains struck during meal periods.”

And, “There is to be no dancing on the tables after midnight and if you go home with someone other than the person you came with, it is no fault of the management.”

Genius! Pure Genius!

One way to relive this experience is by visiting the glorious archives of the New York Public Library’s Menu Collection in person or strolling online at Cooked Books, Rebecca Federman’s wonderful blog.

Patricia Rain, the Vanilla Queen

I admire Patricia Rain. I think you will find her story to be wonderfully inspirational. It again shows how one dedicated person can change the world.

Becoming a true Queen isn’t an everyday occurrence. Rather, it is earned through years of dedication and hard work, rather like the fairy tales of old where the heroine endures many tests to prove her worth before being bestowed with the title and keys to her Queendom.

Perhaps my early childhood intoxication with the fragrance and flavor of vanilla was an indication of what was to come, but my conscious journey began in 1985 when I wrote The Vanilla Cookbook, after reading an enticing article about the King of Tonga and a royal decree for his vanilla crop.

The book catapulted me into the position of “vanilla authority,” and eventually to a conference in Puebla, Mexico, where I spoke at a conference on the foods of the Americas. After the conference I took a bus to the Gulf Coast, birthplace of vanilla.

The vanilla farmers of Mexico knew of me from my book, and I was astonished to learn that I was a local celebrity. They asked for help to rescue their struggling vanilla industry. My work, largely voluntary, slowly expanded until I launched The Vanilla.COMpany in 2001, just before 9-11 and the anthrax scare, and just after the dot.com crash.

Holding a bootstrap business together was an enormous challenge. But hold on, we did. Our women-owned and operated, socially conscious company continues to grow in ways we could hardly have anticipated.

Through the extraordinary power of the Internet, I met farmers in such far-flung areas as Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, India, The Americas, and Africa. During the five-year crisis when vanilla was unavailable and prohibitively expensive, I coached farmers new to the industry through the steps of selling their village’s crops, and I became “auntie” to many young men and women who often traveled hours to reach an Internet café.

Vanilla by Patricia Rain

It was gratifying to learn that through my assistance the farmer’s lives improved.  Over the years, I visited the world’s vanilla growing regions, and my interest as an anthropologist ultimately led to writing, Vanilla: The Cultural History of the World’s Favorite Flavor and Fragrance.

In gaining the farmers’ trust, my reputation spread globally and I am now known everywhere as the Vanilla Queen, an honor I don’t take lightly. But, in the greatest test of all, I learned that I am really their queen.

In December of 2003, I was diagnosed with advanced metastatic breast cancer.  I was advised to “put my affairs in order and to enjoy my life.”

Word spread quickly around the world, and in the most humbling and transformative experience imaginable, the farmers organized their churches, mosques, temples, villages, and schools to pray for me.  Letters, advice, and prayers poured in from around the world, and continue to do so, incorporated into their daily lives. The upshot of the story is that I am cancer-free.

The farmers and I are now launching an International Tropical Farmers Network created with a determination to teach sustainable agriculture and to empower the producers of the products we love so much.

And this how I went from being an ordinary woman to earning my title as the Vanilla Queen.