TTT Interviewee: Barbara Kafka Session #3 Interviewer: Judith Weinraub New York City Date: April 13, 2009 Q: We were starting to talk about Joe Baum. Kafka: Yes, because certainly he was an extraordinary man, and he was a very consistent part of Jim Beard’s life. He was a supporter. He gave him work to do, which was more important toward the end of Jim’s life when he was not as strong and as independent. But starting with the Four Seasons, Joe hired him as a consultant. Joe is the first person who had a restaurant that concentrated on American food, local food, fresh ingredients. John Cage picked wild mushrooms for him. He grew herbs on top of the Four Seasons. He was very involved with research, and he really, to my mind, was the person who put or organized a significant new American food onto the menu. Q: Was it recognized as such? Kafka: Yes, and it was successful. It was informal in the bar room, but I think people were particularly—for instance, Jim talked to him about baking potatoes that used to be served on the railroad. Q: Jim talked to— Kafka: Joe. Talked to him about baking potatoes, that the railroads used to have specially grown, very huge baking potatoes. I don’t know if they’re still on the menu, but for years they were there. And if people knew, people in the know, and they would have one of these things as a great treat. All of these things were radical in their way at the time. You may not see it today as radical, but it was radical then. Q: Could you describe the contrast between what else was out there at that point, how this was radical? Kafka: There were checked tablecloth Italian restaurants. There were French bistros. There were fancy French restaurants. There was always, at that point, hotel food, international food, all of it really fairly mundane. There was wonderful food in New York as well. There was good Chinese food. There was good Asian foods of other kinds. There were very talented chefs like Soltner, who were making wonderful things, but they were not making things that honed in on local fresh food, seasonal food. I mean, you can tell how important fresh was because it was called the Four Seasons, and every season the décor changed and along with it, the menu. Q: And was that more Joe Baum or James Beard or both? Kafka: Joe. Which doesn’t mean that Jim didn’t—I mean, Jim certainly would understand it, go along with it, and help with it, but Joe was the driving creative force. Jim was a repository of knowledge that was extraordinary, and Joe used his knowledge. I mean, he paid to use it, but he used his knowledge as a source. But Jim was more interested in communication, in teaching, in being involved with people than he was with—I mean, he liked restaurants. He wrote about them often. He went to them a great deal. But creating a restaurant was not his big deal. Q: It’s a huge amount of work. Kafka: Oh yes, it’s a lot of work, and Joe worked very hard, and he was extraordinarily productive and creative. After the Four Seasons, although he did do Zum Zum, which was German, and he did various other, quote, “ethnic” restaurants. I mean, things that today are taken for granted. He had a Central and South American restaurant in the Time-Life building. It was before its time. It was wonderful. I think that was the first place I interviewed him for the article in Revue des Vins de France, and it was wonderful food. He had sent Mimi Sheraton down to those countries, and she was supposed to come back with ideas. Then he hired Alexander Girard, who was a great graphics person, who had a wonderful collection of folk art, which, when they folded the restaurant and Joe was no longer there, the collection went up at auction for nothing. It was ridiculous. So he had a vision. Sometimes it was too early, but it was extraordinary. It was beautiful. They had open grills, all kinds of things that people take for granted today. You take for granted today that you can buy a tortilla in the supermarket. You couldn’t buy a tortilla to save your life in New York City in those days. So he was just remarkable and very creative, very intelligent, and I think he and Jim got on because they were both extremely intelligent and they both had a memory of foods and things they’d eaten and styles, and they came together over those things. Q: You started to say something indicating that there was a difference between the grillroom and the other room. Kafka: There is. Q: I meant in the menu. Kafka: They’re different menus. Q: But was one of them more in line with his thinking? Kafka: No, they were both that way. But you’d have a hamburger in the grillroom on the menu, and you’d have something a lot fancier in the poolroom. I mean, if you were a regular and you wanted a hamburger in the poolroom, I’m sure somebody would have obliged you. And American wines, I mean, these things were not common then. And, of course, Jim went out to California a lot. He was very close to Helen Evans Brown, and she gave the first citation that I could find for a dip. You know how dips have taken over the world. And I don’t mean in the Tango. She had a guacamole. Well, this was a California woman, right? But guacamole today is a standard. It’s a cliché. It’s, quote, “boring.” There’s even a tortilla chip that’s called guacamole, as if it were the only thing they would ever be used for. So we have come a far piece, and it’s hard to look back and understand just how extraordinary what was being done was there. Of course, Jim was a West Coaster. He lived in New York even before the Second World War. But there was some part of him that was very loyal to the West Coast, and he had seen and tasted a lot out there. Q: It seemed to me that his thinking had to be formed by the food out there, or informed. Kafka: It wasn’t like that there either. Q: It wasn’t. Kafka: No. Dungeness crab, he loved. And he was always interested in people who were doing things with ingredients, so that what is now Tsar Nicoulai caviar, Dafne Engstrom remade the caviar industry in America. Well, at one of our tasting classes, he had a tasting of her different caviars, and he was very interested in all that. Q: I guess what I wondered was, was there greater access to local foods out there? Kafka: In California? Q: Yes. Kafka: I think you had to go looking. You have to remember that, as with most places, there were supermarkets. They were not local particularly. They were price-sensitive. The climate is more conducive to growing things for more of the year, but it’s only when you get to Alice Waters, who Jim supported as well. He championed her. He took me there the first time I was there. And she was very into it, as you know—and it’s gotten to the point where it’s proselytizing and not all of it worked out, but in any case. So Tom Chino—well, that’s not local for her. He’s down near L.A. So within a hundred miles, which is the definition which most of those people give, would not be accurate. For instance, Joe and I put Olympia oysters on the menu in the Cellar in the Sky. Now, Jim, of course, knew about Olympia oysters. He came from that part of the country. But nobody in this part of the world, and even out there, it took a long time for people to think they were good. Jon Rowley is a seafood maven, and he does a great deal of work with companies and with so forth, and he discovered—he’s in Seattle—that there were mussels that he had never seen mussels like them in the bay. And he called me. Q: This is the San Francisco Bay? Kafka: No. Outside of Seattle. And he called me and he described them to me, and I said, “John, those are Mediterranean mussels, and they must have come off a ship and taken hold.” So he took them to an academic and, yes, indeed, they were Mediterranean mussels, which are different. They’re redder, they are smaller, they grow somewhat differently on the West Coast than they do in Europe, but all of those things—well, that came after Joe, but all of those things, that’s the kind of thing that I could have gone into Joe’s office and said, “Joe, I’ve just found out we can get Mediterranean mussels from the Pike Place Market.” And, by god, we’d have Mediterranean mussels from the Pike Place Market on the menu. So it was extraordinary. Q: How do you account for that? Kafka: For Joe? Q: Yes. Kafka: Brilliance. Q: And openness to new ideas? Kafka: His parents owned a hotel restaurant in Saratoga. He worked there. He grew up in the business. But I think he was just very curious, very open to—and very sensual in many ways, and also because he realized that new things sold in New York. They were stories. He was very press-sensitive as well. So if he had a restaurant in Washington and he’d had the first mussels, Mediterranean mussels, on his thing, then his version of Roger Martin, who was his PR person, would have contacted you at the newspaper and say, “Hey, have I got a something for you to taste. Come on in and let’s have lunch.” Q: That was smart. Kafka: And another story would be born. And stories, as we all know, sell. Q: You talked a little bit about the projects that you did with him and for him, but I wondered if we should gather them together in one place. Kafka: I basically wrote about him to begin with, and then there were all these different food places in the Trade Center, the ones on the inter floors and, of course, Windows on the World. I started out essentially buying china, glass, and silver tabletop and equipment, because he thought I must know how to do that after The Cooks’ Catalogue. I hadn’t got a clue, but I did it. And then he began to play with menu, so he told me to write a menu.” So I wrote a menu, and he would show me. He’d say, “That’s not a menu item. That’s an ungarnished thing. It’s not a menu item.” Then at some point, I said to him, “Joe, you don’t have any wine. You don’t have a wine program.” He said, “Make me a wine list.” There was nothing he didn’t trust me with to do, and I did it for him. He had other people as well; I’m not saying that I was unique. Michael Whiteman was there and probably wrote more of his speeches. But the first place was—I forget what it was, on the forty-fourth floor or something, it was one of the inter floor things, because it was finished, whereas Windows was—I remember standing up on the slab with him on the top of Windows, what was going to be Windows on the World. But, I mean, his powers of persuasion as well. He got the Trade Center people to, instead of keeping the same line of the windows going up all the way to the top, to broaden out on the top two floors that were going to be Windows and make the mullions further apart for the view. So there was nothing that didn’t interest him. The size of a chair, the comfort of a chair, the look of a chair. He was extraordinary. Q: And to what extent did he and James Beard stay in regular touch, do you know? Kafka: Oh, I think they spoke every few weeks. Jim didn’t come into Windows. It was too far and it was by then too difficult and he didn’t do anything in the kitchen. I mean, there I was, still a youngish woman, and I’d made the menu, and there I was telling this older French chef what to do, what we were cooking. Q: How did that work for you? Kafka: With a great deal of friction, but André René really tried. He really tried. And Joe and I and so forth would have tastings to taste the foods and so forth, and I would sometimes have to go into the kitchen during regular service and say to André, “You know, you’re cheating again. You’ve got caramel in that sauce instead of brownings,” and so on and so forth. Yes, I never had the cleanest mouth in the world, but I certainly learned how to swear up a storm in the kitchen. I mean, kitchens can be violent places. I once stepped between two guys who were going to go at each other with knives. And I learned that if somebody said, as I was carrying a pot, “Dear, would you like me to carry that for you?” to say, “Keep the fuck off. I can carry it myself.” Because if you didn’t, then you were a girl. Q: Can we talk a little bit about Jim Beard toward the end of his life at that point? Well, actually, let me start another way. To what extent did the food world, meaning in part the home economists and in part the more sophisticated part of the food world, realize how important he was? Kafka: The home economists respected nobody. They had Helen McCully. They attacked her. They attacked me like crazy. They didn’t set out after Jim so much. I mean, I think there were advantages to being a man and a big strong man. That made it easier. But home economists were becoming more and more irrelevant. Jim, I think everybody in the food world, and that kept growing, recognized his importance. I don’t think they knew exactly why he was important. They knew he had the column, they knew he had books, they knew that he taught, and they knew that he was a presence. But I’m not sure, even today, I don’t think people pay enough attention to his extraordinary intelligence and his voraciousness with cookbooks and history and so forth, which made the American food book possible. The most visible influence, from most people’s point of view, was his espousal of grilling, outdoor cooking, because that’s something, as you may have noticed, men will do, and therefore he served as a role model. Gay though he may have been, that was an acceptable role. And he was very popular. His column was very popular. It was in hundreds of newspapers. Q: What is your take on why he was important and remains to be, obviously? Kafka: Well, all of these things, and he had a voice, which was particular, that he communicated with men and gay men as well as women. His was not necessarily directed at little ladies at home, although many women were still at home. He had traveled. He had drunk wine. In those senses he was a sophisticate, and he was an important influence in that he went to new restaurants and found out about the chefs and promoted them, and he had this thing about American food, which was a major influence and certainly again was early. And it’s not the American food you’re hearing about today. Q: Tell me what you mean. Kafka: Well, when I wrote American Food and California Wine, which was my first book, I thought people would accept the California wine part because it was informational, but I thought surely somebody was going to say, “What makes this American food?” Because it was really far out for that time. It probably looks tame today, but it was far out for then. And Jim was writing about a more traditional American food. You know, as a newspaper person, you’ve seen all the readers’ columns in newspapers, my mother’s roast turkey, the pan dowdy, the whatever, and that’s what interested him, the traditional and not necessarily colonial, but what people made at home, as against all this restaurant food. And he had an enormous collection, at that time, of cookbooks of the twenties, thirties, and so forth, and went back to them. So it was a different kind of American food. More interest in chowders and things like that. Q: Do you think there was a lapse of interest in American food after he died, or was there a thread that was continuous? Kafka: Well, we had entered the era of Julia, and Jim sponsored Julia at the beginning. They were both at Knopf. They had the same editor, Judith Jones, and Jane Friedman, who was a wonderful publicist, was publicist for their books. And so Jim gave a party to introduce Julia to the food world. He did the same thing for Richard Olney, who was not at all American in style, although he was an American. But Julia, I think, spoke to Jim. She was as big as he was, not quite as tall, but pretty darn close, and she was a big woman, big bones, big woman, hearty, Californian, West Coast again. He was comfortable with her. So the era of Julia started—I mean, these are recurrent things, nothing is linear all the time—French food, making it at home. Certainly some of it should never be made at home, in my opinion, but she got people to make French bread at home, lining the oven with terracotta bricks and what have you. So Jim admired her for that. I think at that point there wasn’t the same thing. Italian food was beginning to be respectable; not checked tablecloth. I’m not talking in New York necessarily; I’m talking around the country. But he liked talent and people. He liked Marcella Hazan. He did not like Diana Kennedy. Because he was also loyal, so he had much earlier sponsored work with Lizzie Lambert Ortiz, who was also an English woman like Diana and like his mother, and who had lived in Mexico, like Diana, and was married to—she was married to somebody at the U.N. So that was his authority on Hispanic food, Mexican food, and he never switched loyalties. He could turn on people, but he didn’t in those cases. So there were all sorts of things beginning to happen. I mean, Chicago has become the second largest Mexican city in the world, moving from California and what have you, and now you’re going to see it move into the general population. I mean, you can go to any supermarket and you can find masa de harina, you can find beans in cans, you can find tortillas, taco chips. I mean, they’re standard. I remember when there was one—whose name is now escaping me, but one Hispanic restaurant, and then there was Victor’s, which was Cuban. But there was one. So lots of things have come along, and I think American food has in a funny way been taken for granted, and it’s been co-opted in the same way that I co-opted it. All the chefs, except for Daniel [Boulud]—but even Eric Ripert is using American fish. He’d be a fool not to. And he’s modified his cooking. So that what goes around comes around, you know. Q: Did he leave a space to be filled after he died? Kafka: Oh, it left a very large one. Q: I mean, were there conversations? Kafka: There were lots of people. Marion thought she was that person, Cunningham. She certainly looked the part, sort of like a Grant Wood. Q: You mean that person representing American food? Kafka: Yes, the American. She did the Fannie Farmer and she’s done a breakfast book, or she had done. And so she, in a sense, took that over, and he got her the job to do the Fannie Farmer. So there were lots of people, but you have to remember there were lots of people before, too. I mean, Poppy Cannon went over and worked with Alice B. Toklas on her second book. Just scads of people. So I don’t think it’s that there is a dearth of people. I think there are positions that he took that probably are not being taken. I don’t know if he ever did one, but let’s say something like a tuna casserole. Now, mac ‘n cheese has become a big restaurant item and is coming back, but it’s not coming back because it’s American. It’s taken for granted, and it should be wonderful, and maybe it should have brie in it. So I don’t think Jim—nobody replaces one for one another person. And you can see, if you look at Erma Rombauer’s books, you can see what she did, which was extraordinary in her era, extraordinary. And that was American food. And then her daughter and I think her daughter-in-law continued with those books. Now, if you look at them, they become more international. Q: The various editions of the Joy of Cooking. Kafka: Yes. And, of course, that is what was happening in America. They’re not very good compared to what she did with her stuff, and I would always suggest that people go back and look at an early edition. The last edition that came out was, again, a crazy quilt. But that’s just to say there are all these people. There was Paula Peck on baking. But think of all the different cuisines. I hate the word “cuisine.” All the different kinds of cooking. It’s just like Jim hated the word “gourmet.” He said, “The gore-me people.” Q: And to him that meant, obviously, I guess— Kafka: Pretension. We were cooks, we were not chefs, and I still don’t like to be called a chef. Q: It’s inappropriate, really. Kafka: I’m not a chef. Q: Yes, exactly. Kafka: I have worked as a chef, but I am not a chef, that’s not my training, that’s not my background. But we had a French person who was very successful before Julia. We had Dione Lucas. Little alcoholic, but otherwise. Julia could knock them back and so could Jim. Q: But I think certainly when he died, what we see is a different landscape altogether than when he started out. Kafka: Yes, but his last book, which was really about younger chefs, he was not left out or left behind. He was very aware. As I said, he’s very intelligent, and he saw what was happening, and he was not grudging about it. Q: What was happening, meaning? Kafka: In food. Q: Just amplify a little bit. Kafka: Just all the stuff I’ve been talking about. All the international influences, the young chefs, young American chefs. When he started, chefs were European in fancy restaurants. By the time he died, they were Americans, Larry Forgione, all Americans. Larry, of course, was very influenced by Jim. As I told you, he sat in his hospital room. Jim’s version of American food was something that Larry was deeply involved with. There were all kinds of people. It’s always a mistake to think that something is really new and really different. There are new things and there are different things, but there are echoes. There are continuities. I used to get so tired when everybody was doing their year-end wrap-up for newspapers and television shows, and people would call me, some eager young reporter who had been given the assignment, and they would say something like, “Isn’t it wonderful that we have French bistros today?” And I said, “Well, we had French bistros here in the thirties.” They just have no memory and no sense of history. Whereas Jim had both a memory and a sense of history. And he was generous with other writers, giving blurbs and so on and so forth. Q: What happened immediately after he died? Kafka: Nothing. Q: I know he didn’t want anything particular. Kafka: Jim was somebody who wanted posterity and didn’t. He had talked about and gotten involved with Burt Wolf, because this cooking school idea was going to be his memorial, and he was going to have all this teaching and all of that going on. Well, of course, he never did anything about it, and he left his money to Reed College, which he was thrown out of. So it’s a really odd story. He really didn’t want to confront the grim reaper, and while he wanted immortality, as I suppose everybody does, the only way he can have it is presumably—I mean, Peter Kump tried for him with the Beard Foundation. Q: I was going to ask you, why was it Peter Kump who took up that role? Kafka: We used to teach at Peter Kump’s. Peter had a cooking school and he started by cooking in having the school in somebody else’s space, I think it was a kitchen for advertising or something, and so Jim and I would go there and we would teach, and then I kept teaching for Peter. And Peter, again, was loyal. He felt this deep connection with Jim. Q: And the committee was assembled by him, or other people volunteered the committee to— Kafka: By whom? By Peter? Q: Yes. Kafka: Yes, Peter essentially. Peter was the engine, and he raised the money. I mean, the house had to be bought and it had to be paid off, and that’s why I wrote The James Beard Celebration was to try and raise some money for the house. So each of us did something. Q: Thank you. This is great. [End of interview] Kafka – 3 - PAGE 1