TTT Interviewee: Mimi Sheraton Session #1 Interviewer: Judith Weinraub New York City Date: July 2, 2009 Q: It’s July 2, 2009. This is Judith Weinraub. I am with Mimi Sheraton at her home in Greenwich Village. Good afternoon. Sheraton: Good afternoon. Q: Could we start, please, by your telling me something about where and when you were born and something about how you grew up, what your parents were like, what they were doing. Sheraton: I was born in Brooklyn, in Midwood section of Flatbush, in 1926. I had one brother. My parents, Beatrice and Joseph Solomon. My mother born in Brooklyn, my father in London and came here when he was an infant, so they grew up and went to school here and so on. My father was in the wholesale fruit and produce business and came home a great deal talking about his work and the produce that came in, and what was better than what. My mother considered cooking probably the most important thing a woman should be good at, so there was a great deal of talk about cooking. She cooked a lot. Whenever I wanted to see her, she was in the kitchen, so I picked up a lot of interesting food. We lived in a nice house with a garden. Q: Where did she learn to cook? Sheraton: I think she just learned from her mother and taking off on herself. My parents were descended from Ashkenazi Jews, but they were not kosher, although their parents were. We lived not too far from Sheepshead Bay, and my mother made a great deal of shellfish, oysters, clams, lobsters, all of that. We were not kosher in any way. She cooked everything, and in addition to that Eastern European Jewish cooking, she did a great deal of what was then American cooking, recipes torn out of the newspapers. She was very social; she had a lot of people over for luncheons and card parties. So she tried a lot of dishes and baked a lot of things. She made what I think of as Fannie Farmer-era American cooking. She was very active in all kinds of groups. I went to public school, public elementary school, Midwood High School, and then I went to New York University. Q: Let me take you back for a second. Your father worked at the Washington Market? Sheraton: Yes. Q: What was that like? Sheraton: It was fabulous. There are small remnants. When I go down to the restaurants now, I recognize some of the sheds and some of the loading platforms, especially around restaurants like the Tribeca Grill and a few of those. It’s very much of a night business. The trucks would come in with the produce from all the farm areas in the United States and begin to pull in twelve, one o’clock in the morning. The market really became very busy three, four o’clock, as far as the buying and selling. Then in the daytime when my father was there, you had all the accounts to take care of. But he would get there very early, six, seven in the morning. Sometimes when my mother and father would take me to New York to see a play or go to a restaurant, on the way back to Brooklyn—we would drive, and on the way back to Brooklyn, my father would say, “I want to stop in on the street and see what’s going on.” And that was always a very glamorous time because there was loads of activity, people shouting and yelling and all the lights were on. If it was winter, there were fires in the oil drums to keep warm. I loved that scene. I think that’s where I got to love night markets like Tsukiji in Japan and the fish market I went to in Ancona, because these people are up and awake and doing their food thing while the whole city is asleep. It’s like a secret society. At the end of the day, they would go to restaurants for dinner, and they would maybe have some chops and a steak at eight o’clock in the morning, and then go home. I can remember when the Fulton Fish Market was in full swing, Dick, my husband, and I would sometimes go to a restaurant called Sloppy Louie’s that was for market men and closed after lunch. We would go at eight in the morning and have bouillabaisse and softshell crab. It was very rough bouillabaisse; it was really fish soup. It was very, very elementary. Then we’d take off for the day and drive out to Buck’s County or somewhere. Q: Where was Sloppy Louie’s? Sheraton: Sloppy Louie’s was on South Street, right opposite the Fulton Fish Market. It was around the corner from where Sweet’s was. I don’t know if that was Pike Street or just what that street is, but we can find an address for Sloppy Louie’s. I have many old restaurant guidebooks. As I say, it closed at two o’clock in the afternoon, so it was breakfast and lunch. There were a lot of markets like that. The Old Homestead. Q: I don’t know about that. Sheraton: That’s on Ninth Avenue near Fourteenth Street. It still exists. It’s a steakhouse, and there used to be steak breakfasts there because that’s the center of the meatpacking district, so the wholesale butchers would get done at that time and go in for a steak. My father worked there before he went to fruit and produce, before I was born, in fact, in the wholesale poultry market, so he knew both markets, but most of the time he was what was called a commission merchant. Q: I’ve heard that, but I couldn’t figure out what that meant. Sheraton: It’s a very exciting occupation. I don’t know if it still works that way. A commission merchant sold a farmer’s crop on commission, but what it also meant is the experts—in this case, my father and some of the people he worked for—would go to the farms before the planting season. They would get to know—and they never called them farmers; they were called growers. They went to see the growers to see if they were reliable, to see if they had the land, unless they had worked with them before. Remember, this was the Depression. So they would advance them money for seed and to get through the next year’s crop, and therefore contract for that crop if they were not fields that they owned. Some commission merchants owned fields. People like D’Arrigo, which is Andy Boy, they would have the fields and the distributorship at that time. I’m not sure if Sunkist had an outlet here. And different commission merchants specialized in different vegetables and fruits, generally. My father did a lot with the Imperial Valley, in Salinas and around there in California and Florida, Georgia. Georgia peaches. Florida grapefruit. He never thought Florida oranges were very good; he thought California oranges were better. But he bought Florida grapefruit. [laughter] This is what I heard all the time, growing up. It was just the dinner table conversation. No apples from the West Coast; they’re terrible. You need apples from New York and Massachusetts, where it gets cold at night. He hated what we used to call steamer basket fruit, if anybody remembers what a steamer—well, a steamer was an ocean liner, and when a friend went on a big trip, people would send baskets of fruit to their stateroom so they would have fruit for the voyage, I guess, and not get scurvy. [laughter] And they were very elaborate. You see gift baskets now. But they were what my father called hothouse fruit. They were big and gorgeous, but tasteless. Q: Even then. Sheraton: Even then. Absolutely. And there were a lot of places that specialized. There was one in Brooklyn, very famous, in downtown Brooklyn, called Ekleb & Geyer, very, very fancy shop for steamer basket fruit. He would talk about the buyers from the different restaurants or food stores who wanted everything choice, who not only wanted to pick the box of fruit, but they wanted to open the box and pick the fruit. The buyer from Longchamps Restaurant and the buyer from Gristede’s at that point I remember particularly. Then the other part of it that was interesting is that toward dawn, when the main part of the market was closed, six, six-thirty, pushcart people would come in to pick up the remains, because, as I said, this was the Depression and there were people going up and down the streets. Even in our very nice residential section in Brooklyn, you could hear in the afternoon someone either with a cart or a truck, yelling, “Corn! Watermelon!” Street crying up and down. My mother would go out of the house. Other people would go out of the house. “There’s a man with corn. I think I’ll get some tonight.” Q: These were things they paid for? Sheraton: They paid for, but they paid less because it was what was left over. They got it cheap. And also if my father or any other head of a company or salesman had sympathy for them, they would throw things in or, you know, they knew someone, something like that, but they paid for them. This was also true, though it wasn’t that market, people would come through peddling fish. A man might pick up a bunch of flounders in Sheepshead Bay or a fish market, and so down Twenty-ninth Street in Brooklyn, in the middle of the afternoon, “Flounder! Flounder!” It was street crying. Some had horses and wagons and some were in trucks and some were in big, big hand pushcarts. Q: This was the thirties? Sheraton: This was the thirties, yes. I was born in ’26. I’m sure it was going on through ’29, but I was not as aware of it, almost to World War II. There were all kinds of street criers. There was a knife sharpener who would come up and down. Then there were several very famous cake and bread delivery places. Dugan’s was one of the big names in New York. What was the other one? Just flew out of my head—I’ll think of it. It begins with a K. I’ll think of it. And they had routes. You knew the Dugan man was coming on a certain day and you knew what cakes he had that you liked, and then you knew what the other one would have. And, of course, ice cream trucks came up and down. This was not food, but there was the I Cash Clothes man. Those were usually little Jewish men who had on heavy coats, even if it was summer, tied with a rope, big sacks on their back, and they would go up and down these quiet tree-lined streets of Brooklyn, yelling, “I Cash Clothes! Buy old clothes! I Cash!” And the women would save things, because they knew it was about due for the I Cash Clothes man, and they would sell it very cheaply. They got fifty cents, seventy-five, and he—God knows where they resold them. But the streets were very busy with people doing all of those things. Krug was the other one, K-r-u-g. Q: Did your mother actually buy things from these people peddling on the streets? I mean food-wise. Sheraton: Food, yes. She didn’t buy from the I Cash Clothes man; she sold. Yes. You know, you say, “Dinner’s coming. Here’s fresh corn,” or, “Here’s watermelon.” She would be inclined to do that more than fish, because fish she probably got in advance and so on. But absolutely everybody ran out. The women were home, you know. Most of the women were home all day. Q: Does this mean that your father had to lay out a lot of cash before each season? Sheraton: Yes, and then—this was a very exciting part—as the produce was ready to be delivered, was beginning to be trucked up, the prices in the market might change. There might be a glut of string beans or a crop might have been rained out, and the prices changed all along the route. The trucks would call in to my father all night long, because there were no cell phones. They would have to stop. And he would tell them, if string beans were a glut on the market in New York, he would say, “Dump them in Baltimore.” Q: How fascinating. Sheraton: Yes. And the four cities he was involved with were Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, New York. So if it was a glut on the market and you had to sell them cheap, you sell them as close to the south, where you began, as you could. Of if you were coming from the west, you sold it. My father wrote two books about the business. One was called The Railroad to Recovery, because he thought the railroad was the answer, rather than trucking, and he wrote another one, called Controlled Distribution of Fruits and Vegetables, that the distribution should be controlled so that the growers are not at the mercy of the market. In both cases, Henry Wallace had him down to Washington to discuss the theories. Henry Wallace was then the Secretary of Agriculture. So he was very well known for those. They’re very slim books. I have just one. I never was able to find the other. But they were very important at the time. He also wrote articles for—there were two newspapers for the fruit and vegetable business. One was called The Produce News, and I think it was a weekly, and it was pink, the paper was pink, so it was known as the pink sheet. They were, I believe, in the building that is Six Harrison Street, where Chanterelle is. The editor was Al Haglund, and he was a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, and a very good friend of my father’s, who helped him with the editing of his books, and my father wrote some articles for that paper. The other paper, which I think was a monthly—if The Produce News was a weekly, The Packer was a monthly. If The Produce News was a daily, which I don’t think, then The Packer was a weekly. The Packer was a more serious, bigger paper, printed on white. Packer, meaning the food packer. They were all down in Washington market, which was very exciting. I mean, when I had a day off from school, my father would sometimes take me to the office and he’d work in the morning, we’d have lunch, then we’d go to Radio City Music Hall or something. I loved being in the offices because they were like these houses, you know. They were the little old Dutch houses that the market had just moved into, and they had these side staircases like brownstones, except they were very narrow and very steep, and the offices were all off these stairways. There used to be lady bookkeepers at high desks, with green eye shades, and they used to give me rolls of adding machine paper. I loved blank paper. [laughs] I don’t like blank paper so much now, but I always said, “I’m going to write a long, thin story,” on this adding machine paper. And the smell was wonderful, because it was wet orange crate wood, there would be some crushed vegetables underfoot. If onions had come in, there was a faint warm whiff of onions. I know I enjoyed it then, but I don’t know if I realized—I guess I didn’t—how much that was going to lodge in my memory for markets and night markets, which I wrote a whole book on markets for Harry Abrams, and I just never stopped going to them. You don’t think, when you’re doing that, “This is going to be my profession,” because, first of all, what he was in was a man’s business, and it wasn’t until Frieda on the West Coast began going into it that women—you know Frieda? Q: No. Sheraton: Frieda was a woman in the Los Angeles produce market—the company’s still there—who began to bring in, you may remember, sun chokes and also little teeny pearl onions. She began to bring in all sorts of specialty exotic produce—Jerusalem artichokes, things that weren’t around here. I visited her once in the L.A. market and did a story on her out there. The business, I’m sure, still exists, because I think her daughter was in it. But it was very unusual food. Q: When would that have been? Sheraton: Well, when I was on the Times, and I was on the Times from ’75 to ’84, so somewhere in the middle. Q: But her business started before then, no? Sheraton: I’m sure she was in the market because it was her father’s business she went into. But around that time we all began to be aware of more exotic and unusual items, so whether she was in that aspect of the business before, I’m sure you can go on Google and find out the history of Frieda. Marion Burros did stories on her; everybody did. But it was unusual for women. Now, the market here, Washington market, was primarily Italians and Jews. There were a few Irish people, but my father worked for a big Italian company who had houses in Sheepshead Bay and grew their own tomatoes. Jill Brothers was their name. Frank Jill was one company and Jill Brothers was another. Q: Gill with a G? Sheraton: J-I-l-l. I’m sure it was J____ or something and they changed it. And the Italians really understood the produce because they had come from farm areas, like the Balduccis came from farms who grew broccoli de rabe in Puglia, so when they came here, they understood that business. So I grew up in this kind of food atmosphere, and my parents also. I’m the older child by seven and a half years, so I was an only child for quite a while and got taken to a lot of restaurants with them. They loved to go to restaurants. We went to Lundy’s in Brooklyn, the famous Lundy’s, when it was still out on the water side of Sheepshead Bay. It was out on a pier, on a dock, and then later moved to where it grew and where it folded and where there’s a ghostly building now on the other side of Emmons Avenue. We ate all kinds of fancy things. My father had very special ways of ordering in a restaurant. If it was squab or softshell crabs in season, he would say, “Just bring me a big platter of those and no green stuff.” You would think a man of—he hated vegetables. So we learned to order a very different way. We didn’t order a squab and a blue plate. He ordered eight squabs, you know, and then some fried potatoes. Again, it must have lodged in my mind, and they were great old restaurants they took me to. If they had a wedding anniversary, we might go here to—first of all, there was The Lobster near Times Square, which was a great—and then there was a steakhouse called Fan and Bill’s, and I remember the specialty there. I must have been six or seven. Plank steak. It was a Chateaubriand that came out on a plank, on an oval carved platter with a bordeur of mashed potatoes that had been glazed brown, and in between the potatoes and the steak, all kinds of vegetables, like sort of a della Robbia. Q: Sounds great. [laughs] Sheraton: Plank steak. It was a very, very good thing in those days, as were Lundy’s and The Lobster, what were known as [unclear] dinners, which usually had half a chicken, half a lobster, clams, steamers, Manhattan clam chowder—Manhattan clam chowder always—corn. And at Lundy’s, Huckleberry pie. Not blueberry; huckleberry. I can remember the kids used to get all excited about their tongues and mouths being purple, and you’d show your mother and she’d say, “What are we going to do?” So those are random food memories of childhood, and I guess it always mattered to me. Q: Did your mother enjoy going to these restaurants too? Sheraton: Oh, loved it, loved it, loved it. And I always knew how to cook. I can’t remember when I didn’t know how to cook something. Q: She let you in the kitchen with her? Sheraton: I would do my homework, sit there while she was fixing dinner. You know, you’d talk. My grandmother, her mother, was a great cook and lived near us, and I would go to see my grandmother, and if she was making her special cookies that had chopped walnuts and cinnamon and sugar, I had the mortar and pestles here that I used there to crush the walnuts. I have her mortar and pestles, two of them right on the shelf there. My job was to crush the walnuts for these cookies and to help brush the egg on the challah if I happened to go there on Friday morning. So without realizing it, food was everywhere. As I did say in my book, my mother’s reaction to every special event was “Call the butcher.” She just felt you had to have soup, you had to have tongue, and you had to have a brisket, because those things you could slice for anybody who came in hungry. No matter how bad or how good things were, you had to have that. So that was always what went on. Q: It’s funny, I was here originally to go to graduate school—this was in the sixties—and my mother was extremely food-phobic, and for some reason— Sheraton: Food-phobic? Q: Yes. And for some reason, one of the first things I wanted to make was tongue. [laughs] I mean, I have no idea. I must have watched my grandmother make it or something, but I wanted to make a sweet and sour tongue, which never had crossed the dining room table of my own home. I guess they were there and they were really interesting. You couldn’t buy anything like that now. Sheraton: We used to make tongue with sweet and sour cabbage. We didn’t make sweet and sour sauce on the tongue, but we had sweet and sour cabbage or we had regular cabbage, like corn beef and cabbage, tongue and cabbage. My mother made sweet and sour string beans and sweet and sour cabbage. Q: So you always knew how to cook, but was your mother willing to share responsibility? Sheraton: I never really cooked at home unless she was away. As I got older and a teenager, and my brother was seven and a half years younger, sometimes my parents would go away for a weekend and I would cook some little thing for my brother. I never remember cooking a meal for my parents. I made my own breakfast if I got up very early. I could make eggs and toast and milk, not coffee. Q: What did your parents look like? Did they gain weight easily? Did they not? Sheraton: My mother tended to be a little chubby. My father weighed 135 pounds all his life. He loved potatoes and he loved chocolate. He could eat a five-pound box of chocolate at night, sitting there reading the paper, and any kind of potatoes and, of course, meat and fish. Shellfish. He was not big on vegetables other than corn or maybe sweet and sour vegetables, something like that. Q: Did they have any concern about whether or not you would get fat? Sheraton: Not really. I was a very bad eater as a child, and very skinny. Q: You mean you didn’t eat much? Sheraton: And I threw up a lot. I think they worried about, at a certain point before I remember or before I know I remember, they worried about me being too skinny, but that was never—my brother and I and my mother were all inclined to gain weight, so it’s been all my life a battle. Q: You went to high school in Brooklyn and then what happened between high school and the School of Commerce? Was that pretty direct? Sheraton: Yes. I graduated high school and went to NYU School of Commerce, except that at the end of my sophomore year I eloped with someone I had been crazy about for about three years. He came home from the Air Force, and I wanted to do something irrevocable, something that took me beyond the control of my parents. [laughs] At that time, the age of consent in New York was twenty-one, and I was only nineteen, so we went to Greenwich, Connecticut, where the age of consent was eighteen, and went before a judge and got married. I moved to Greenwich Village because I felt I wanted to support myself, and I switched to night school. My parents paid for the school and I paid—my husband worked—for our own living expenses. So the last two years I finished at night. I got a job right away. It was easy to get a job. The war was just over. We got married barely a month, maybe not even a month, after VJ Day. You couldn’t find an apartment to save your soul. You just pounded the streets, looking for an apartment. The war, you could not get an apartment in New York. People would read the obituaries and call Saturday night. They’d get the Times, read the obituaries, and call and say, “Is this going to be a vacant apartment?” And we just pounded the streets. One day it was very hot and we went into a bar on Eighth Street, a bar I knew from college because all the kids went there, Ed Winston’s Tropical Bar and Grill. We went in for a sandwich and a drink, and we said, “You don’t know of an apartment?” He says, “Oh, yeah, around the corner, Mr. Sittenham has an apartment on Ninth Street.” It was a one-room basement apartment right on the street, like My Sister Eileen, which was very romantic then. It was furnished with horrible furniture, and we took it. Seven East Ninth Street. Q: What was the kitchen like? Sheraton: The kitchen was a tiny, tiny closet. It had one of these three-burner stoves, one, two, three, with a little oven under it, except one burner was under the drainboard. The sink was at right angles to the stove, and the drainboard came over one burner, and if you opened the door of that oven, you could not be in the kitchen. You had to stand in the living room and bend around. The refrigerator was in another little—it was like a room, but it was a big closet. The refrigerator and the clothes closet and the dish closet was in this other little sort of room. And a bathroom and a big front room like that one. That’s where I began. I was a very ambitious cook. I had already begun to read Gourmet. I had a maiden aunt, a career woman, who lived with us for a few years when I was a kid at home between my grandmother’s death, who she had lived with, and her own marriage, and she was a very big career woman for her time. She was a traveling saleswoman. Q: Wow. Sheraton: And she was very modern. Of course, when she wasn’t traveling, she commuted to her New York office. Subways had very elaborate newsstands, and I remember she brought home an issue of a new magazine that she thought was beautiful, and it was Gourmet. I began to read it. Q: You were how old? Sheraton: I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, somewhere in there. I was sixteen when we moved into that house. We moved into that house on Pearl Harbor Day. We were unpacking dishes in our new house on Pearl Harbor Day. It was shortly before my sixteenth birthday. I read this, and it was just wonderful. It still didn’t make me think I wanted to write about food, because whoever heard about writing about food? Although the newspapers, the Brooklyn Eagle and the Sun and the World Telegram, we got like six, seven newspapers a day, had home economists doing recipes, and my mother tore a lot of them out. I still have some. It looks like a box of old cornflakes. They’re all flaked apart and brown, but I still have some of her torn-out recipes for pogachas and cheesecake, little fancy things for company. Q: But there must have been a disconnect between that as a career and— Sheraton: It was just something nice to read about, but I think it started my mind thinking of food in a lovelier way. I can remember a particular day after I was married and moved into this basement apartment, and at one point I had a very good job at an ad agency, and they gave me the summer off so I could go to school and not lose any time and graduate summer school. So it was a really hot day in July or August, and of course there was no air conditioning then, and we didn’t have a shower; we had only a bathtub. I came home boiling. And I had a new issue of Gourmet. I got into a bathtub full of cold water and I began to read this story called “Yogurt and the Bulgarian Colonel.” I have it upstairs. I have a big collection of Gourmets from the forties. Q: Oh, my lord. Sheraton: I’ve read it since. I had never heard of yogurt. We ate sour cream, but we didn’t know anything about yogurt. Q: Let alone a Bulgarian colonel. [laughs] Sheraton: Yeah, and the colonel. Well, he was very famous. Menshnikov, who discovered the bacteria, the yogurt bacillus. I think his name was Menshnikov. I began to read this, and I wanted to taste yogurt. At that time, Dannon was in stores, but of course it was all plain; there was no strawberry, raspberry. Gristedes used to be a very fancy chain of food stores, full service, not supermarket, and there was one on University Place between Ninth and Tenth. That’s where I shopped, and I bought a container of plain yogurt. Well, I’ve always loved buttermilk and sour cream, so it wasn’t a leap. I ate it mostly with vegetables. It somehow never occurred to me to eat it with anything sweet. Many years later when I was in Lebanon, I happened to mention to someone yogurt over sweet fruit, and they looked at me like I was crazy. “You only eat it with salt. We eat it with cucumbers. We eat it with radishes,” which is still how I prefer it. So I began eating Dannon’s plain yogurt. And that “Yogurt and the Bulgarian Colonel,” I read it only recently because of something I was doing for a book, and I didn’t realize until rereading it now that the colonel was the man who discovered the bacillus, a Russian or in Bulgaria, something like that. So, Gourmet. And I would make very exotic things from Gourmet in this ridiculous kitchen, where the only work surface was a small shelf my husband attached to the inside of the kitchen door. It was a tray that he set on a frame, and that was the only workspace. If I had to do something big, I’d pull over the dining table. It was a gateleg table and I would pull it over near the kitchen and open it if I was going to roll out pastry, if you can imagine such craziness, when I worked all day, went to school at night, and then was trying to do this madness. Q: That’s a lot. Sheraton: That’s a lot. And the first Thanksgiving that I had the apartment—we moved in in September, October—I invited my mother, father, and brother for Thanksgiving. And of course my mother was overwhelmed that I really got a turkey into this oven and I had to cook two things and then put them on top of two other things to keep them hot. I had to wash the turkey in the bathtub. Of course, it didn’t fit in the sink, and the water came down all over me. You know. But I did it, and it was not bad at all. My mother brought the dessert. She was famous for lemon meringue pie, so she brought lemon meringue pie. And there’s your nineteen-year-old daughter a few months out of the house, doing creamed onions and string beans and candied sweet potatoes. Q: Was she impressed? Sheraton: Oh yes. Q: And surprised? Sheraton: Oh, my mother and father were just bursting with pride, absolutely, yes. Q: So then you were working at the ad agency, is that right? Sheraton: Yes. It was what was called a mat service. This was an agency that dealt with small retail stores all over the country, and the illustrations were on little mats. Remember those pink matrixes? You used to have them at newspapers. That’s what they printed from. That’s what they printed from. They were like pressed paper, pink, with the illustration. So they had illustrations for every occasion, for jewelry stores, furniture stores, savings and loan associations, lumber companies, and they gave me the task of writing copy for the jewelry stores and the home furnishing stores. You just batted it out. You would get a request from the store, what they wanted for the month. “I want a birthstone ad.” “I want a wedding ring ad.” “I want a silver ad.” Or furniture, mattresses, clearing, and so on. When I did that several years and graduated from college, I wanted to get something else. I went to an employment agency and they sent me to Good Housekeeping magazine, who was looking for a home furnishings copywriter in the decorating department. That’s the job I got, and I had no idea what I was in for, because the woman in the department was very, very serious, about home furnishings departments on design. She was a very serious decorator. She succeeded Dorothy Draper, who had had the job before. And all the offices in the Hearst Building on our floor were done in Dorothy Draper—cabbage roses everywhere. The black lamps and the white sink vases on the lamps with the black shade. The color scheme was magnolia leaf green, black, and white. Plus pink roses, cabbage roses. I had a terrible time with it, because I didn’t know design. If only I knew furniture stores, Joe Blow’s Furniture Store in Akron, Ohio. But I learned. In addition to writing the copy, you got to help out on the sets. If it was a Christmas story, you wrapped packages. I liked it, and I wanted to be a home furnishings editor. So I went to the New York School of Interior Design at night and became a certified decorator, and went to Seventeen magazine as the home furnishings editor. Q: You set out to find a different job? Sheraton: Yes, as an editor. I shared the office with the food editor, and the test kitchen was attached. In the beginning, I worked for her until they separated the departments. I used to help her cook. I have always been interested in cooking, as you can tell, and so I splashed around in the kitchen a lot with Beryl. Then as a result of covering home furnishings, one of the very big fields in those days, believe it or not, was hope chests for teenagers. Sterling silver flatware, china, glass, bed linens, blankets, and that was home furnishings, and also fixing up their rooms. So I went twice a year to the Furniture Market in Chicago and Grand Rapids, and I went a couple of times a year—Seventeen was very good about this—to Scandinavia, because that was the time of Scandinavian design, plus I took a leave and took a three-month trip with my husband, my first husband, around Europe, and I was prepared to quit Seventeen if they didn’t let me take this trip. They said, “We want you to go. We’ll give you half salary. Please call on our advertisers in your field.” Spode, Wedgwood, Royal Dalton, Minton, Royal Copenhagen, Haviland. So it made the trip wonderful, because all those people entertained me. I had another reason for being there, which I have since felt you’ve just got to work when you travel or it doesn’t mean as much. And I spent a lot of time in Scandinavia, got to love Scandinavian food, still do it here a great deal in fall and winter, and the food all over. So when the food editor left Seventeen, the editor, who had become a very good friend of mine, Irene Kamp, said, “Why don’t you do that too. It’s not such a big deal on Seventeen.” So I was the food editor, the home furnishings editor, and I also did—magazines used to have shopping columns, you may remember. I was the shopping column editor. Q: And you were how old? Sheraton: Well, I got the job in 1949 and I was there until ’54. I was born in ’26, so I was twenty-three when I got there. Q: It’s a big responsibility. Sheraton: Then I felt that if I’m going to do home furnishings, I have to do it for a grown-up magazine, because it was limited to what you could do. Seventeen, I don’t know about now, but the woman who invented it and was the editor a large part of the time I was there, Helen Valentine, sold it to Walter Annenberg as an idea. He was the publisher, Triangle Publications. That it was specifically for high school teenagers, and we had to keep in mind never to grow old with our audience, which was a temptation. It’s like “Last year I wrote about sophomores, this year I’d better write about juniors. I’d better write about going to college.” We never went to college. We never did your college room. We never did clothes to take to college. We might do how to apply, but we kept going back to the fourteen-year-old. Otherwise, you lose your audience. It was geared—I don’t know what this has to do with food, because I’m talking at random, but it was geared, obviously, to fashion, and teenage was a size. Q: What do you mean? Sheraton: You have misses size, women’s size, junior. Teenage was a size that the magazine wanted to promote. It was clothes cut to the not-quite-developed teen figure, as opposed to juniors, which are a little wider, a little broader, a little fuller. It was a fashion niche that the fashion people at Seventeen tried very hard to advance, to make themselves unique to this market, and there were teen departments with clothes for teenagers. That was not juniors, although they had to sell some junior clothes because there weren’t enough teen clothes to fill. Juniors used to be sized in the odd numbers, three, five, seven, so on, whereas misses was two, four, six. Teens were also two, four, six, but it was a teen six or eight or ten, and of course teen cosmetics. Of course, in those days, girls didn’t wear a lot of heavy cosmetics, but still there were a lot of light things that advertised and so on. That was the core. And we carried more sterling silver flatware advertising than any magazine, more than Vogue, more than Ladies’ Home Journal, anything, because they wanted these kids to register their patterns. I mean, it’s wild, but they did. Q: Did you think of yourself as having a career? Sheraton: Oh yes. Oh yes. Always. Q: How common was that among people you’d gone to high school with? Sheraton: Not very. Not very. And my parents always thought of me having—it was always, “What are you going to be when you grow up?” Certainly my mother expected marriage, children. I think given her druthers, she would have liked me to marry a rich doctor in Scarsdale and stayed home. But it’s their own fault, because they said, “Are you going to be a doctor?” Are you going to be a this? There was never any question about college. Not many of the girls I went to high school, even though who were brilliant and valedictorian, much smarter than me in school, because I was like B-plus, A-minus. I never tried very hard. A few things I excelled in. There were a few subjects I really excelled in. But the real machers in the school, it’s interesting to me that they have happy, fully lives, but they did not turn out to be very well known or distinctive in anything, which I found—because I was in awe of them. I never thought I could aspire to—I was never a class president or things like that. I think in high school, as I once said, I was Principal for a Day, I majored in boys. [laughter] That was my very big concern. But I think, you know, getting married to someone who just came back from the army, who was going to go to school, I had to work, in a way, and the career took off and I loved it. The magazine world, when I got to that, I had never dreamed of working for a magazine, and it has done more for my life. I have learned more how to live in a way I think I would not have lived if I had not entered the magazine world of furniture and decorating and doing what I call collecting beautiful dreck. I especially loved the art department in these magazines, because they always had beautiful little things, whether it was a stone they found or a Baccarat paperweight. The kids in the art department always had these things and I caught the bug. I’ve been collecting dreck every since. [laughs] Q: Did you think of a career as something that you adamantly wanted to do, as just a natural outgrowth of who you were, or what? Sheraton: A career or this career? Q: Any career. Sheraton: I wanted to be famous. That’s it in a nutshell. Q: How old were you when you realized that? Sheraton: How soon did I know what fame was? [laughter] I can never remember. You know, I’ve often wondered about that, because it may have been an offshoot of something that gave me a feeling when I was a kid. My father’s father was a very prominent rabbi in Brooklyn, and his brother was a very prominent physician, Rabbi Solomon and Dr. Solomon. When I would go to someone’s house, a new kid, and meet them and they would say, “This is Miriam Solomon,” or Mimi Solomon, they would say, “Are you related to Rabbi Solomon?” And I’d say, “Yes.” I was so proud. Or, “Are you related to Dr. Charles Solomon?” “Yes.” Of course, with Rabbi Solomon, he was the chief mohel at the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, which was the place for Jews to be born, and almost every boy I went out with was circumcised by my grandfather, and my mother would ask that question as an icebreaker. She would say, “Have you any idea who circumcised you?” This is in a couple of my books. So we were famous relatively, and the Solomons were well known in this tiny, tiny community in Brooklyn, and I think it gave me a feeling that somehow I was a little more special than the other people. It wasn’t yet that you could get a seat in a difficult restaurant. [laughter] That came later. Or what I have come to appreciate more is getting to see a doctor quickly. Never mind the table in the restaurant. You call a doctor, it’s important, they say three and a half weeks. Now they see me right away. [laughs] So maybe that was it. I don’t know. But I really did want to be known. Q: The jobs that you had before you much later got to the Times all seem to either encourage travel or allow you to travel. How did you do that? Sheraton: I’m a schemer. [laughter] Q: And clearly it wasn’t natural. Sheraton: No. I scheme. Q: Why did you want to do that? Sheraton: Because I wanted to see the world. That was another really, really obsession since geography classes. We used to have those little steel engravings of the little far-off—I remember the place where copra comes from, always these little islands with tropical palms and suntanned natives. One of the places, copra came soon. I was never quite sure what copra was, but— Q: Where was your first husband stationed during the war? Sheraton: He was in this country, in training. He was young and he never went— Q: So it wasn’t like he brought home European memories. Sheraton: No, no, no. No, no, no. We were married for ten years. Nine, really. Separated, then we got divorced a couple of years later. I married Dick, and that’s when I began freelancing, because we had a lot of traveling to do. After Seventeen, I went to House Beautiful supplement edition. They published various magazines, half of which were drawn from material— [Interruption] Sheraton: House Beautiful published two architectural books, two gardening books, and four bridal books a year, half of the material drawn from pages in House Beautiful, using the illustrations, not the story, and half of it original. I was the managing editor of that division until I started to freelance, and then I freelanced for twenty years, until I got to the Times. Q: I must say I find that fascinating, because most people hate freelancing. I certainly do. The whole process of selling yourself and pitching stories and all of that. And you took to it. Sheraton: Yes, I think I should have been an agent. I sometimes think I should have been an agent. Q: You don’t seem to have had any fear about where the next job would come from. Sheraton: Well, you do, and that’s why you take too many when you can get them. I think every freelancer, “I’d better take this because there won’t be another.” And while you’re doing one, you think, “Gee, what am I going to do when this is finished?” I mean, I don’t have that quite now, but— Q: Why did you go in that direction? Sheraton: Well, when I left House Beautiful, I had just married Dick and we were traveling, and there was nothing at the moment in the way of a full-time job, and although I was freelance, I did have some contributing contracts, and one of them was with Cue, for whom I was the restaurant critic. Q: How did that happen? Sheraton: Well, my friend who was the editor of Seventeen, who knew how much I loved food and restaurants, had been on Cue and knew the editor, and they needed a restaurant critic, so she said, “Talk to Mimi.” Q: Had you ever done anything like that? Sheraton: No, but I saw it. I mean, I was reading restaurant reviews in Gourmet, which was about the only place then. Newspapers didn’t do them in those days. And I thought it was heaven. Q: Tell me what you thought the job would be. Sheraton: I was passionate about restaurants. Someone was going to pay me to go to restaurants and pay for the restaurants and eat? I’m sure that my early reviews in Cue were probably inane. I was impressed with everything, you know, until you learned all the food and so on. So when I left, I had that as a base. I left Cue when I had a baby, because it wasn’t practical with a new baby to go out for dinner every night. I began doing research. I knew the Restaurant Associates people. I had met them when I was on Cue. Joe Baum was looking for a researcher for the Four Seasons, to find menus and recipes and dishes that were seasonal expressions, and to help with menu writing and so on. At the same time, I had an idea for a book. I was going to write a book, before I got pregnant, that I had a contract with Random House and SAS. Do you remember Myra Waldo? I was going to do an around-the-world restaurant cookbook. I got pregnant, and I felt that I couldn’t keep the book because you have a new baby, you don’t know if you can leave the baby. And I gave the book to a woman named Charlotte Adams, who was a well-known food writer. After the baby was born and fine and a year and a half old, SAS said, “We owe you a trip. Would you like to make a book out of our pamphlets, called City Portraits?” which would be a guide to sixty cities of the world on everything, not only food. My mother was marvelous. She said, “Marc can come and live with me.” The nursemaid/housemaid we had lived around the corner from my mother, by luck. Dick was fabulous. And I took off for four months on a trip around the world. At the same time, I did four articles for Mademoiselle on four different cities, and I bought samples of folk art for Georg Jensen, because Just Lenning, who was the head of Jensen’s, was a good friend of mine from design days. So I had all of these assignments plus a huge assignment from Restaurant Associates to do a survey of all the food that I came across, in case they ever needed it. And that’s what paid for it, because although SAS would take me around the world, they didn’t pay for hotels and meals, but Restaurant Associates did. Q: What made you think you could do all of that at the same time? I find that quite amazing. Sheraton: Well, you have a lot of time in a town. You look at the sights, you see if there’s folk art. I could stay as long as I wanted. The material for the articles I was getting for the book anyway. Q: What kind of notes were you taking? Were you very orderly about certain things for certain articles? Sheraton: Yes, and of course the wonderful thing was that SAS would send things home every place I went if I bought stuff, samples, they’d put it on a plane and send it home. They had my winter, fall clothes all packed here, and when I changed climates, I put all the summer clothes in a suitcase. They took that home and brought me the winter clothes. I mean, it was a dream. I still can’t believe it. I used the time to go to Russia, the Far East, the Middle East, Indonesia, all the way down to Bali, because I had been all over Europe by that time. Q: It was very gutsy, wasn’t it, to do that by yourself? Sheraton: Yes. They were there for me in certain places, and in certain places they weren’t. In certain places the head of the office left a package of pamphlets in my room, and that was all I ever heard of them and I was on my own. But I had contacts. Dick, who was at that time a merchandise manager at Gimbel’s, knew people who were importers. In Japan they were very happy to be with me. I just knew a lot of people by then. Q: Did you feel at all uncomfortable about going to markets or restaurants by yourself? I mean markets at night. Sheraton: I remember going to a night market in Singapore by myself on a little island, but there were lots of people there. It wasn’t lonely. And other places, the SAS people were people I knew. We all liked each other instantly, fortunately. I’m still friends with many of them. That was 1960. I bought all kinds of crazy cookware for Restaurant Associates and all kinds of folk art for Jensen’s. It was a great four months. And I learned about the food, by the way. I would, when I traveled, try to find someone to teach me the cooking of the area in a few places. I had a very good friend in Denmark who gave cooking classes and was on TV. We used to cook together in her country house in Denmark when I went there. Then in Istanbul, I was invited to go to the school of a very famous restaurateur and teacher. He’s now considered like the Escoffier of Turkey. His name was Ekrem Yegen, and for five days I went to one of his courses that he did for young Turkish brides, teaching the basic Turkish dishes. In Beirut, a Lebanese friend arranged for me to spend time in the kitchen of Georges Keyes, the famous Lebanese chef at the Bristol Hotel, a Lebanese and a French kitchen. In Phnom Penh, the SAS people arranged for me to go to a restaurant there for a few days that did Cambodian and Vietnamese cooking. Q: And you kept good records. Sheraton: Right. Q: What was food writing like at that point? Sheraton: I really didn’t do much food writing then. I did a few pieces for Town & Country on food, but I did more travel. Q: But was there food writing? Sheraton: Oh, sure. 1960, Craig Claiborne was at the New York Times. He came in ’58, ’59. While I was working for TA, I remember they’d talk about this new man came to the Times, Craig, and he began restaurant reviewing, which didn’t exist before, honest restaurant, but they were very small, little reviews in the Wednesday food page, unless the food page was Thursday. I’m not sure. There was a time when food pages were Thursday, and then they got changed to Wednesday. Q: And Gourmet was still kind of the old Gourmet at that time. Sheraton: Yes, with these grandiose articles and these lofty and beautiful—I would say the forties to the mid fifties was the best period of Gourmet, and I collect the forties. I’m missing the first year, which was ’41. Q: Where else might it have been— Sheraton: Well, of course, all the magazines had food stories. Look had food stories. Life—there was a wonderful woman who did food for Life. I forget her name, but she was a real marvelous, showy woman. And the newspapers had food stories, and Ladies’ Home Journal and Women’s Home Companion, Good Housekeeper and Family Circle, they all had food departments. Q: But it wasn’t food writing as it developed, or was it? Sheraton: I don’t know. I don’t know if they had sophisticated writers and if they had sophisticated ingredients. The whole thing began, after World War II, there were many more foreign foods that people here were interested in. When I went to the Times, what was really bursting and what was huge was gourmet home cooking. The Times used to publish, every Labor Day, right after Labor Day weekend, a directory of cooking schools in the city. When I got there, I said, instead of publishing a directory—I mean everybody sent theirs in—why don’t I go to them and critique them for next year. I went to 125 and I critiqued them. Some of them were really bad and they didn’t want to let me in the next year to do it. There were cooking school teachers who were one class ahead of the course they were giving. You couldn’t get into a cooking class. That’s when people began to want Garland ranges in their home. The Cuisinart, which Craig, I think, rightly credited as being sort of a watershed, that suddenly people felt there were things easier to do, but they had to have their own pasta machines, sausage stuffing, ice cream. Couples would take Saturday, you know, two couples would get together and do a meal and invite friends, but they had to make the sausages, they had to make the pasta. There was this sort of religion about it. Suddenly, in the eighties, everybody was buying takeout and going to restaurants, and who was using the Garland ranges? They were using not microwaves then, maybe, but what was close to it. So there was gourmet cooking. Americans had discovered the ingredients, and so the ingredients became available. It used to be who knew from anything but a champignon in the market? There were four kinds of lettuce, maybe; there was Bibb and Boston and Romaine and iceberg. If you lived in an Italian neighborhood, you had escarole, you had rugala. Except for Balducci, and Balducci came here in ’45, just when I moved into the Village. They opened up their first store, and they had unusual things. They had other lettuces. They had odd kinds of peaches and all of this stuff. It was just beginning. Craig lived on Thirteenth Street. Jim Beard at that time lived right on Twelfth, near Sixth. I believe that’s where he still was. John Clancy was on Sixth Avenue near Eleventh Street. Paula Peck didn’t live down here, but she spent a lot of time with Jim. She was sort of a James Beard acolyte. But there were lots of food people down here, and you would see them in Balducci on Saturday morning. “What are you buying? What are you buying?” So that began to happen. And Jim always had cooking classes, and that’s when Marcella Hazan had her classes, and Giuliano Bugialli and Lydie Marshall. And there were some very, very good courses. Lots of Chinese courses. Grace Chu was the first to do—she was one of the Wellesley girls. There was a whole group of Chinese girls who had studied at Wellesley, missionaries. Many of them opened restaurants. Sheila Chang, who had the Great Shanghai up on Broadway, Emily Kwoh, who had the Mandarin House on Thirteenth Street, which is the building in which Craig lived, and Grace Chu. Q: During this period of time, I notice that you started writing books kind of early in all of this. How did you bring that into the whole mix? Sheraton: I had an idea for—of course, the thing that got me to the book and publisher first was City Portraits, the book I did. So then I knew a publisher, although it was a different publisher that did the next book. It was called The Seducer’s Cookbook. Q: I saw that. I looked for it at the Society Library, and I was very impressed by the breeziness and the ease, really the quality writing. Sheraton: Of course, it’s very dated in terms of what was sophisticated, but it was of the period, very much. Q: And very felicitously written, as though you—I mean, you had been writing a long time at that point, I guess. Sheraton: But I take a sort of light view toward sex, so I thought it was kind of funny. I did, in between all this, some articles for Helen Gurley Brown at Cosmopolitan on boy-girl, men-women relationships, because when she came to Cosmopolitan, the book was pretty old by that time, five, six years old. She found a copy in her office and decided to serialize it. She liked it. So she serialized it in Cosmo and then I began to bring some stories for them, “What Kind of Men Makes the Best Lover,” by profession. Q: You mean like doctor, lawyer, Indian chief? Sheraton: Right. Writer, salesman. Then I did one on “How to Get Over a Broken Love Affair.” I did a diet piece. And long before that, I did an article—I don’t remember the name of the magazine—called “The Respectable Pickup.” Q: I missed that one. [laughs] Sheraton: I had Dick go to various places and pick up women that I thought were respectable, a library, a museum, a park. I also thought a stockholders’ meeting. [laughter] It was a very funny article. And then when I took this trip around the world, I did a piece that appeared in Eros. Q: [unclear]. [laughs] Sheraton: Yes. When I was going to Japan and I worked for all these crazy guys at Restaurant Associates, they said, “Bring back French ticklers.” I knew there was a famous sex store, because I had a friend in Tokyo who was a big newspaper, CBS reporter, Pete Kalisher, and I said, “Where do you get French ticklers?” He said, “There’s a sex drugstore in Yokohama.” So I was having a car and driver take me from Tokyo to Hakone and we were going to go by Yokohama, and there’s this whole story of how I got this driver to understand where I wanted to go, and how I got into this sex shop, which was full of G.I.’s, and how I picked out the things I wanted, and all the crazy things they had. I sent the story home in a letter to Dick, and he was having dinner with all these people I worked with at R.A., and he read it and they sent it to Ralph Ginzberg, who was the editor of Eros. So when I came back, Ralph said, “I want to run it as a story.” By that time I had given all the French ticklers out, so we made them with condoms and we used those very fancy women bathing caps that had rubber flowers on them. We clipped those off with a very famous art director, Herb Lubalin, who did the photographs for Eros, and he and I sat around making French ticklers so he could illustrate them. Then Ralph Ginzberg took me out to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, where they had a Japanese Torii gate, and took a picture of me in front of the Torii gate. So the only thing about the article that wasn’t authentic was the photograph used to authenticate it. [laughs] There’s a lesson in that. I did a couple of other pieces for him on his other magazines. Q: I want to ask you two things before we stop here. First of all, let’s talk about when you met Dick. Sheraton: I met Dick through business. He was a merchandise manager at Gimbel’s, and one of the many departments he had in housewares was unpainted furniture. I did a lot of stories on unpainted furniture for teenagers, finishing stories, because, you know, that’s what they needed for their room. Those days, maybe now too, if you ran a story, you ran a retail credit, and you tried to get stores all around the country. Gimbel’s took the credit in New York, and I went to talk to the buyer about how it might be displayed and show him advance photographs. We had met at a market display given by a manufacturer whose furniture I wrote about and he bought, so we met at that party. Then when I did this story, I was still married then; I was not divorced. So I went to see him at Gimbel’s about doing this promotion. We kind of liked each other. Then a couple of years later when I got divorced, we met at a housewares market in Atlantic City. There was always a big July housewares market. And began going out. Q: Where did he live then? Sheraton: He was from the Bronx, but at that time lived in Queens. His mother had just moved to Queens, and he had moved her over there and was about to move out and get an apartment in the city, but then he met me and I had an apartment in the city, so we spent time in that apartment, and then we took a house together one summer in Wainscott, and we eloped and got married in Sag Harbor. I never had a big wedding; I could never stand it. Q: When was that? Sheraton: It was 1955. We’ve been married fifty-four years this month. Q: That’s really wonderful. The other thing that’s been on my mind is, you were balancing so many different things in different kinds of articles. What kind of notes did you keep? Sheraton: Well, first of all, I have a phenomenal memory, fortunately. In all the years I was a restaurant critic, I never took a note in a restaurant. And I kept notes. My only problem with notes is that I can’t always read my handwriting. I used to bring back things, a brochure, a matchbook, a label, something like that, and I just put it together. Q: But you weren’t carrying around like manila folders where you could put these notes for that article and these notes for the next? That’s just amazing. Well, along those same lines, it always amazes me when people, truthfully or not, can recount meals that they had many years ago, but you seem to really be able to do that. Sheraton: Oh, absolutely. No question. Q: How do you do that? Sheraton: I don’t know. I guess it’s a good memory, and I guess I focus on it and I tend to see it in a context. If I say, “What did we eat at that meal?” I sort of see what the person was wearing in the room or what was on that plate. Every once in a while I have to ask, “Did you have this?” or, “Did you have that?” or, “Was this in that?’ Not often, but sometimes. Q: But you never kept diaries or notes or anything like that? Sheraton: I kept notes on meals when I traveled and was going to come back and write. Like after I left the New York Times, I had a contract for five or six years with the Condé Nast Traveler, and I traveled all over the country doing stories on food in different cities and doing an annual story on fifty restaurants worth a special visit. There I took notes because I wasn’t going to come back and write it for a long time. But I brought menus. I would either steal or ask, just as a tourist. I never said who I was. A lot of tourists ask for menus. I would check those at night in the hotel room so I’d remember what dishes I had. If I had a comment, I’d sometimes put it on the menu, because seeing something like that menu was better for me than seeing my own notes. Suddenly the whole room is there. You know, I didn’t do all the articles at once. I tended to have one article. I wasn’t writing for Helen Gurley Brown while I was writing my book or something, I don’t think. Q: You were more or less serially doing things? Sheraton: Yes, I guess this week that, next week that. And what I used to do in our previous apartment before we moved here and after our son was born, I would go to a hotel in the Village with a portable Olivetti typewriter, which is what you used in those days, and do my assignments in hotel rooms, because the little room I had for an office in the other apartment, baby, nanny, and they were very inexpensive hotels here, the Earl, which is now the Washington Square Hotel, the Van Renssaleer. Rooms were three-fifty, four dollars a day, and you could go in at nine in the morning, checkout time was three o’clock the next day, and they would store my typewriter, so the following day I could check in again and the typewriter would be there, so I would get two days’ work for one night’s charge. Q: And they obviously knew what you were doing, with our typewriter there. Sheraton: Oh yes. Many writers did that, many writers. I went home to sleep; I didn’t sleep there. But it was a way to get away and be quiet. Then when we moved here, I had the whole third floor for offices. My son was seven when we moved here, but still, he wasn’t a baby running around screaming. He was in school. Q: Do you have as good a taste memory as you do for the actual meals? Sheraton: Yes, absolutely. Q: Do you articulate that at all to yourself after a meal? Sheraton: I think I recall it when I have to. It just comes. I don’t know if what I tasted forty years ago and thought was terrific I would think was terrific now. I may remember it as terrific, but I’m not sure. I’d probably remember if it had cinnamon in it or cloves or something distinctive about it. Q: But the few minutes I’ve had meals with you, though, I’ve always been impressed that it was a “no bullshit” articulation and discussion. It was very sort of specific to what you were eating at that time, and even the things that you recalled at the same time. I don’t know how to explain this correctly, but I was just very interested that you could remember as much as you could from other times, other places. Sheraton: Well, don’t you think that people who specialize, don’t you think that fashion writers who go to fashion shows can remember clothes they saw a long time ago? I bet you Bernadine Morris remembers Yves St. Laurent’s Russian period and the fabrics she saw and whether they had darts or shoulder pads. It’s your specialty and you’re obsessed with it, and you just remember. Of course, that’s what you think about, I guess. Q: When you go to remember at all now or in the years that you’ve been freelancing since you left the Times and the other magazines where you worked, do you take more notes? Sheraton: No. No. Q: So if you had to think about what was it that was on the menus in, I don’t know, 1984, how would you go about doing that if you were just trying to think about— Sheraton: What was on the menus? Q: I mean what kinds of food were popular at what periods of time. Sheraton: Of course, I have all my guidebooks. I wrote a New York Times Restaurant Guidebook, so I have 1981 or something. I have my articles. I have every article I ever wrote. Q: You do? Not just from the newspapers, but from everywhere? Sheraton: From everywhere. Of course, after Cue, I did restaurants for the Village Voice before I went to New York Magazine. I have maybe not every one, but almost all of them. Q: You kept scrapbooks? Sheraton: I kept the clippings in a folder. And then at the Times I had a wonderful secretary who filed everything. When I left, she packed up all the files and sent them to me. So I have that, and I have them by months and I have them by subject, so I can always look in there. Now, of course, I tend to just go online and go to the Times archives and not dig through the dusty files unless it was before they put it in the archives. Then I do have what interests me very much, a few old restaurant guidebook to New York. I have one for 1923 that’s just marvelous because it shows such social attitudes. There was nothing P.C. They talk about “little Japanese,” “little brown people who did this.” You should see the way they talked about Greenwich Village. It was so funny. They quoted someone who had written an article saying it had been originally inhabited by Indians who didn’t have very much furniture, but what they had was painted blue. The men had long hair, the women had short hair. The men wore jewelry. Everyone thought they were peculiar, and the more peculiar they were thought to be, the more peculiar they became. [laughter] Q: Somebody made that up. Sheraton: It was some writer even before this guidebook who had written this parody on Greenwich Village as being these Indians who were bohemians. I love the more peculiar they were thought to be, the more peculiar they became. [laughter] Of course, I just loved the Village. When I moved into the Village in ’45, I was in heaven. Everybody was crazy and I loved it. I still love it. Q: Do you have memories of what the restaurants were like? Sheraton: Very much. Of course I had to save money like mad to go to any of them, and for a long time the only thing I would have when I went to them was chopped steak, because it was the cheapest thing on the menu. And it suddenly occurred to me, what’s the point of going to all these restaurants and then coming out and saying, “I don’t think it’s so terrific.” The Brevoort was a very famous restaurant, and the Lafayette, and Charles French Restaurant, which was where the Jefferson Market is now. Oh, there were a lot of restaurants down here. Mother Bertolotti’s. Even Asti’s in those days, on Twelfth near Sixth, was a very good restaurant. It wasn’t just funny with the opera singing. Luchow’s, of course. With Dick, we went to Luchow’s at Christmas and other times. So there were a lot of very good restaurants here. Q: What about the little places that you might have seen? Sheraton: Rocco’s was a wonderful one, still exists. It’s not good. I shouldn’t say that. I haven’t been in in ten years, but subsequently, new management. That used to be a great favorite of José Quintero. You could see him eating there. The very great photographer, Eliot Elisofon, always ate there. It was Romeo Salta’s favorite Italian restaurant. There was an Abruzzo wife and husband and brother who ran it. And since Dick’s mother was from Abruzzo and they made all the food she made, I knew it before I married him, but then when we married, we went to Rocco’s a lot. It’s still there. It’s across the street from Lupa, but as I say, it’s not the same. Q: Was Dick’s mother a good cook? Sheraton: Fabulous cook. I don’t know if you saw the piece I wrote to The New Yorker in their November food issue, but I wrote a whole piece on brodetto that began with her. She was a fantastic cook, very light, very delicate. Abruzzo people are supposed to be very good cooks, and she certainly was that. [End of interview] Sheraton 1 - PAGE 1