TTT

Interviewee:  Clark Wolf							    Session #1

Interviewer:  Judith Weinraub					        New York City

Date:  June 15, 2009

Q:  This is Judith Weinraub.  It’s June 15, 2009, and I am here with Clark Wolf.
Good afternoon.

Wolf:  Hi there.

Q:  I thought we would start with my asking you to tell me something about, first of all, where and when you were born and a little bit about your childhood.

Wolf:  Certainly.  Well, I’m first-generation American, and I was born in southern California, actually in Los Angeles, at Queen of Angels Hospital in 1951.  My Jewish immigrant mother woke up surrounded by nuns and was quite shocked until she remembered where she was.  I don’t remember that; this is just family lore.
	Both my parents came to this country, my mother when she was twelve, and my father when he was about eight months old.  The reason I say this is because it’s very much a part of my early upbringing.  My mother came at twelve.  She was a concert pianist.   She was a very talented handworker.  She wove things and embroidered things and did handwork and won awards in Kishenev in Maldova, and in Europe was an award-winning concert pianist and craftsperson. I don’t really know what it was called, but she won something at nine or something.

Q:  Amazing.

Wolf:  For many years, we weren’t really sure, but after my parents passed away last year, we discovered my mother’s lycée school report card, so she did, in fact, study French and Italian and English and all those things that we had only heard she’d done.  We had proof.
	[Referring to street noises]  Is that disturbing?  Okay.  It’s New York.

Q:  Exactly.

Wolf:  Anyway, she came to this country at twelve in ’39.  They sold everything.  They were landed Jews, which wasn’t too common.  They had a forest and lumber company.  This is my mother’s mother’s family.  But my mother’s mother died when my mother was two, and she’s a woman for whom I’m named, Clara.  When Clara died, her sister, Sonia, was made to marry my grandfather.  This is fundamental because this is fundamental.  So I was raised by my parents, but I grew up with my grandfather Misha Morris Barenstein (Bernstein), and Sonia, really my Great-Aunt Barenstein, and they were in Hollywood.  They were in La Crescenta, which is near Pasadena.  They had a huge impact on my life early on because they were quite sweet to us when we were children, when we were small, and my grandfather always grew grapes, anything.
My earliest memory of seeing them was in La Crescenta at a home that had a gas lamp out front, glass, dark burgundy with a column between it, and in the back after the yard was a vineyard.  I’d always assumed that it was there, but I’m told that my grandfather apparently planted vineyards wherever he lived.  This is every house.  When they were in the Hollywood Hills, they would buy a house, fix it up, and sell it.  That’s what they did as immigrants.  And they had an apartment building at one period of time where I used to visit them and stay with them for a week at a time every summer.
	So my grandmother cooked, but my grandfather—I think I got it more from him—my grandfather planted fruit trees and planted herbs and tomatoes, and I never saw a tomato in the refrigerator.  I never saw a melon in the refrigerator.  There was fresh cheese in a Melmac bowl, plastic bowl, on the table at lunch and at breakfast every day that I was there.  I have very, very vivid memories around food with my grandparents, and it was very positive.  It was very beautiful.
	I remember being in the Hollywood Hills with my grandparents in a pink stucco, two-story, and roses and dichondra.  My grandfather had planted fruit trees on the terraced hill behind, and we stood there one day and suddenly from above a deer came down and really very comfortably reached up and began eating a peach off the tree.  I said, “Grandpa, Grandpa, the deer is eating the peach.”
	And my grandfather said to me, “So, somebody has to eat it.”  I mean, that was part of what he did.  As a human being, it was part of his job in life to grow food.
I’ll go into this a little bit more, but what’s interesting is that when they came to visit me in the eighties when I first moved to New York, we were at Orloff’s Delicatessen.  That’s where they wanted to go, to a delicatessen.  And my grandfather began to tell the story of his family.  Now, my mother’s mother’s family, Sonia’s family, was fancy, two carriages, one ebony inlaid mother-of-pearl and the other a wagon, depending on if the Russians or the Romanians, you know, what the Hapsburgs were doing that Thursday.  But I guess my mother’s father’s family wasn’t so fancy.  They had one or two inns and a peasant grocery.  When my grandfather said, “Yeah, so we had a grocery, dried beans and salted fish in a barrel,” my grandmother got hysterical and said, “Shut up, shut up, shut up.  It’s no good.  It’s no good.”  She didn’t want me to know that they were low-class.  Here I was being a fancy grocer, coming to the world through the pantry, and as a food professional that was extraordinary, and I came by it genetically, honestly.  My grandfather always had a big, big huge bar of chocolate in his back pocket.  So we’d hug him and steal the chocolate.
	So the point is that good food was part of everything.  Affection and food went together from my grandparents’ perspective.  Growing up in the San Fernando Valley, we were surrounded by orange groves and lemon groves.  We had a tangerine tree, an apricot tree, Meyer lemons, roses, lilacs.  To me there is something very connected between the smell of a real garden rose and the scratch of the skin of a Meyer lemon.
	Ironically, my mother, who made her debut on the stage of the Hollywood Bowl with the André Previn’s Los Angeles Youth Philharmonic, didn’t do a whole lot with that.  She married my dad and they settled down and had kids, and my mother was not a very good cook.  She, being Romanian and being an artiste, she cooked things until they were dark brown.  Truly, I used to joke that I was twenty before I found out that zucchini wasn’t brown, you know.  Very funny.  And I think we were of modest means.

Q:  Do you know why they went to California?

Wolf:  Family.  My father’s father, they went to Philadelphia first, and then they found that my father and his mother, who also died early but in her sixties, and apparently I’m very much like these two women who are dead, so I can kind of do whatever I want, because there’s no model, he had scarlet fever as a child and his mother was asthmatic. It was mostly for health reasons they moved to California.
	My mother’s family came because my maternal grandfather had a brother who had moved out before, and apparently it was very similar to where they all were from in Odessa and Maldova.  I mean, Maldova and Kishenev sound a little like the San Francisco Bay Area in some ways, rocky vineyards and towns, five or six hundred thousand that was the center of a larger—you know, it sounds kind of similar.  But, of course, southern California was then the promised land in the thirties and forties, certainly not during the Dust Bowl, but by the end of the thirties and in the forties and fifties, it was something.
	Max Factor is somehow related, the makeup guy.  My father’s father owned a piece of Wilshire Boulevard, selling it moments before it was valuable.  But he had a dry goods store, and there was very much actually a memory of my father’s father in and around Fairfax Boulevard and Kantor’s Delicatessen, and the smell and the community and the taste and the sharing of food was very, very important.
	I visited my great-grandfather.  We think he was anywhere between 96 and 106, depending on how close my mother was in relationship to the truth that year or month; we didn’t know.  But whenever we visited, he had a paper bag full of grapefruit or oranges for the kinder.  So, love, health, safety, food, citrus, season, all that stuff was very much ingrained.

Q:  Was anybody a good cook in all this family connection?

Wolf:  My grandmother was a good baker.  She made strudel.  I mean, oddly, there was a real respect for the food.  She had compote.  That’s what I remember most about my grandmother, strudel with cheese layers and sometimes fruit or honey, and compote twelve months a year, and it was always different.  Sometimes it was in a glass jar in the fridge, cooked.  Sometimes it was on the stove, stewing.  Sometimes it was in a bowl, kind of macerated.  But she always had fruits from the garden enhanced by some fruits that you bought, enhanced by whatever it is she did, and it was a one kind of expressive word, “compote.”

Q:  What is that?

Wolf:  It was a state of mind.  It was not a compote.  It was a compote.  It was like plasma.  You know what I mean?  It was a critical element of our lives.

Q:  What was your education like?

Wolf:  Well, interestingly, I went to a grammar school around the corner.  I mean, I walked.  I went to junior high school, where there was one black person, and I remember bad food.  It was terrible.  When I got to high school, I was the editor of the newspaper, the school newspaper, and I was in an advanced placement class, so I began to get—it was a very middle or lower middle class, middle middle class, but white, suburban education.  Pretty mediocre, but apparently better than most now.
	My brother went to college.  I have an older brother, one older brother.  That’s it.  He was tested in the third grade with an IQ of 185.  He went to college at about fifteen or sixteen on a full scholarship to USC and then came home, and all the family resources went that way.  So when it was time for me to go to school, and I always felt I was supposed to, I did the first thing I could, which in those days was to go to San Fernando Valley State College, which became university, Northridge State University, and then after doing that for two and a half years and that was $35 a semester the first year.
When I left school, I was at San Francisco State University, and it was $235 a semester.  I transferred, and the two state colleges, those two particular campuses had been elevated to state universities.  They weren’t on a caliber with, let’s say, Cal, Berkeley, certainly not Stanford, and they were much better than a community college.  I ended up getting into Northern California by auditioning for the only department that I could get into that was of interest, which was the drama department.  There was apparently at that time very good, mostly children’s theater, but I had to audition, so I had to get in, and I got in, and I was pretty proud of that.  Did that for about a year, and blech.
	But transferred to the English department, because when it became evident that I needed to declare a major, I had a 3.1 overall and a 3.89 in English literature classes, so I clearly was an English major.  And Kay Boyle and Mark Harris and these other, Carolyn Schrodes,  S.I. Hayakawa, they’re amazing semanticists and poets and writers at this school at that time because it was a kind of a public thing, and because this was post-fifties and sixties, there was in the Bay Area great respect for writerly efforts.
	So I was in a department and actually got a student assistantship, which was how I survived, $2.45 an hour, in a group that was very smart.  In my early twenties when I moved to San Francisco, I became friends with my detective fiction teacher, who was in her early thirties.  So all my friends were ten years older and they were professors.  They were highly literate.  So I began to get an education not just in the written word, but in social discourse and intercourse.  And, of course, they and we drank a lot.  It was, you know, San Francisco.  But these were very interesting people.

Q:  What was your living situation like?  Were you by yourself?

Wolf:  Oh, my.  When I moved to San Francisco, I had a roommate for a very brief time, a couple of times.  It was terrible.  I just was not the kind of person that has a roommate.  I was very independent.  But I was sometimes living on Kraft dinner, nineteen cents a box.  It was tough.
	But I really did—and I claim this honestly—I had an epiphany over at the San Francisco Chronicle with a Dungeness crab, and at their recommendation, “Take this newspaper and lay it down.  Buy a freshly boiled Dungeness crab.”  I bought a half, a baguette of Boudin sourdough bread.  I thought it was pronounced “bo-dayn,” but it was “boo-deen” or “bo-deen” or something.  Mayonnaise, Meyer lemon, and a bottle of Wente Brothers chenin blanc.  It was pretty bad, but the crab was great, and I just thought, “This is really cool.”

Q:  Why did that appeal to you, I mean, why doing it?

Wolf:  Well, I moved to San Francisco for transformation.  I moved to San Francisco to not be in the fifties or suburban California.  I moved there to be in the world.  I saw San Francisco and I went there.  I had gone as a child.  All the time we grew up, if dad was doing okay, we got a one-week vacation.  If dad was doing a little bit better, we got a two-week vacation, or they were both working, and I could always tell because—and I still have it—my mother had a black very ornately painted tin sewing box.  My grandmother made Mandel bread, hard cookies, basically biscotti de Romania, you know.  And if it was half full, we were going for a week.  If it was all full, we were going for two weeks.  So, yeah, and we went up and down the coast and all through California, from the age of, I’m told, when I was four months old was the first trip to Yosemite.  So we went to Yosemite and we went to Carmel and we went to the Sequoias and we went to Monterey and we to San Francisco and all those places.  So it was very normal to do that, and so I had seen San Francisco as a child, and I was enamored.
So I went there for transformation, and part of the transformation was to not eat Green Giant green beans almondine out of a plastic bag from the freezer, you know.  I thought that there was something transformative, and I immediately was connected by the social mobility of food.  It struck me as this magical, elegant, wonderful, visceral, sensual, metaphorical, poetical, tasty thing.  And I found very quickly that I had an affinity, so when I finally left the English department, the last thing I did was to cater the English department faculty party, 167 English teachers, and I covered, bound, a master’s thesis in foil, made them into steps and put palm trees on them and quotes from Shakespeare, you know.  “For one sweet grape, who will the vine destroy?”  I mean, it was hilarious.  I was the mascot of the department.

Q:  How did you learn to cook so that you could actually cater something?

Wolf:  I was hungry.  My mother was a terrible cook.  Actually, I just took to it.  I don’t really remember.  My mother in our family was known for making the JELL-O salads.  This was a concert pianist with great aesthetic ability, and a beauty.  My mother was a very striking woman, and a lot of serious costume jewelry, and a brilliant gardener.  So she had some of them right, but she hadn’t the patience for cooking, or the taste, and also my father was her audience and my brother was her audience, and they just kind of scarfed it down or wanted it less interesting.  And I was the sissy, and I wanted something beautiful and delicious and wonderful.  Apparently, when I was a little kid, my aunt, who was a gal Friday at William Morris, took me to the Brown Derby, to Chasen’s, to Perino’s.

Q:  Fabulous.

Wolf:  Again, I don’t remember except for one instance, but it was an often told story that, you know, I walked in to one of them and said, “We’d like the table by the window.” You know, that was my nature.  The one thing I do remember, and I was pretty young, I was expressive, let’s just say, with my body and hands and whatnot.  I was sitting at a table, and I think it was the Brown Derby, but I don’t remember.  I know it wasn’t Chasen’s, because I would remember the red banquettes, the red Hollywood booths.  A man came over to us and said, “I’m a director.  If that child can speak Italian, he’s in a movie.”
	And my mother said, “Sadly, he can’t.  He can speak ad nauseam, but not Italian.”
	So I mean, I was quite gregarious, and I think also a natural for the catering business, I was in a youth group at synagogue.  I was Debra Winger’s youth group leader, and she and I are two of the few that got out, and many of them are still there.  I had fifty relatives, aunts and uncles and cousins, that are still in the Valley, if they’re not dead, or they moved out to the beach, ooh.  And I was hungry for something more interesting.
	But as youth group leader, fifteen or sixteen, we gave parties and events, and I remember very vividly at the age of fifteen or fifteen and a half, I was the outgoing president of the youth group, and there was an incoming president, and we gave an inauguration night, or it was called something, I don’t know what, installation night.  And I knew that people were going to be paying $75 a couple for what was basically spaghetti on paper plates, and so it occurred to me that they needed to get something.  And I picked up a microphone, and the rest is history.  The point is that I knew that an evening and a dinner was more than a sum of its parts.  I got that message very early on, that you did the best you could with this and this and this and this, and you brought them all.  So they were all the elements that were interesting to me.
	When my parents turned—I guess when they were married thirty-five years, maybe, because I was already living in New York and I already had a boyfriend here, we all went to Yosemite for their anniversary, and the first night we stayed in these big cabins.  That was the other thing, is that we went to Yosemite.  When we were kids, we stayed in canvas tents and just ate whatever, you know, canvas tents with wooden bases that were six dollars a night.  But when we got a little bit older, the family would rent a couple of cabins in the Wawona Basin above Yosemite Valley.  Actually, it was called the Wolfs, which is funny.  These people had bought and built these cabins before it became a national park, and so they were allowed to keep it as long as they rented it out.  And the families would all stay together, cousins and aunts and uncles, you know, and other people who really weren’t relatives but always traveled with us, and we always thought they were cousins, they were longtime family friends, and all cooked together.
	Anyway, this one time, my boyfriend and I had our own cabin, but there was a big family cabin where we all gathered, and my mother wanted to be in charge of the dinner for the first night.  The main course of that dinner was a brisket, I joke, was conceived when I was.  It was black rock.  And we had bought some asparagus to bring along, and it was steaming away happily, and I said, “Mom, they’re done.”
	She said, “No, they’re not.”
	I said, “Mom, they’re done.”
	She said, “No, they’re not.”
	“Mom, it’s what I do for a living.  They’re done!”  You know what I mean.  And I took them off and rinsed them in cold water and put them on the table.  And my father ate asparagus for the first time in maybe twenty years, and my mother didn’t speak to me for a day and a half.  For her, they were supposed to be gray or grayer.  I mean, you know, I don’t know if it was the Romanian thing, because in that particular part of the world when she was growing up, things were cooked a lot.
I also do think that we were very poor at times.  We were very strapped for money.  In his maybe forties or fifties, my dad had a heart attack after an automobile accident, and blah, blah, blah.  I remember as a kid, she would make a roast or a brisket and it would be parceled out.  “This is how much you’re having tonight,” you know.  Some of it was Depression left over, even though they weren’t in the Depression.  Some of it was my mother controlling us, and that was all the control she had.  Until she went to work when I was about twelve, she was a stay-at-home mom and she was one of those people who—my mother was pretty difficult.  She was quite wonderful in retrospect, but in fact quite difficult and wanted to see the world and wanted to be in the world, but wanted to be married and all that.  And what they did with women in those days is they gave them pills.  So my mother took pills, and later on, when she stopped taking the pills, she drank secretly, so that’s another whole story.  But it’s an element of it.  I don’t know, looking back, how many times my mother got plastered and served us mush.  Who knows.  You know what I mean?  We were not aware.  We didn’t drink in our house.  My dad had the same bottle of Cutty Sark forever, and every once in a while would have a little sip just to approach being butch in some ways.
	Also then when she went to work, I was growing up, you know, and we fended for ourselves.  Again, I was raised in a household where my mother said, “I can’t be bothered.  This is so too much trouble.  It’s too much.  I’ve got too much to do.  It’s too upsetting and besides, no one cares anyway.” And my father kind of didn’t care and my brother didn’t care at all.

Q:  You mean about the food?

Wolf:  About the food, yes.  I mean, you know, to this day, well, my brother’s still learning and getting better, but there’s great insecurity there.  For me, it was freedom.  I could tell the difference.  When I catered my parents’—I want to say twentieth, maybe twenty-fifth—no, twentieth because I was still living with them, I was in my teens, late teens—anniversary, I orchestrated it, and what I did was I got everybody in the family to bring what they were best at, and I knew.  I had a great aunt on one side—I shouldn’t say “ah-nt,” because we always said “ant,” but I can’t help it—who made brilliant kreplach, I mean, like air, and she made something that her family called bubby cookies.  She was their bubby, their grandmother.
So I had these little patches of—and if you grow up really knowing—because you eat in the height of the season—watermelon and asparagus and citrus fruits in the winter, you have those things.  Tomatoes, I really knew once what those things tasted like.  And then you tasted other things next to them, you know that this dog won’t hunt.  When you have some people in your family that make some things that are cookery and transcendent, then you know when other things are made that are lousy and leaden.

Q:  The fresh vegetables and fruit that you ate, would you mother buy those too?

Wolf:  Oh yeah, yeah.  Yeah, she did.  I mean, again, we were not allowed white bread.  We fought a lot about Fritos and things like that.  She wanted us to be American enough, but not so American.  Canned vegetables were there for economy and convenience.  She preferred fresh, but when she, again, began working after I was twelve, it was harder, which in fact it wasn’t.  I mean, the irony is that if she had embraced it and taught me a little bit more and let me.  She was very afraid to let go of her domain.
	The other thing is that I was a gay kid, and my father knew before I did.  My mother and I were very close, so my father, they were very nervous about my being a sissy any more than I already was.  So where I may have done things in the house—I mean, you know, this wasn’t a big, rolling lovely southern neighborhood.  This was a little cookie-cutter suburb.
So they were also quite concerned, I’m sure, that I not do too much at home that I repeat and be beaten for next door, and believe me when I tell you I was, you know.  I got home from school as quickly and as invisibly as I could because I was beaten up all the time, and it wasn’t even over—and the irony is and what’s funny about it is, in retrospect, there were other gay kids, but I was not particularly sissified in that respect.  I didn’t like sports.  I was verbal and I was intellectual.  And the irony is that I just spoke to a friend that I had not seen in years, we met in Berkeley at a party, and we locked eyes and later hooked up, and the first thing he said to me when we were alone was, “I didn’t know if you were gay or European,” which I’ve used as a joke for years.
But that part of what happened was my father knew gay from gay, because my dad had been in the army and my dad was a guy, and my dad was a good guy, a very good guy and sensitive human being.  My mother was an immigrant who came at twelve, not speaking very good English, and really wanted to get along and fit and wanted to protect her children.  You know what I mean?

Q:  Yes.

Wolf:  And in a lot of ways, I’m guessing that she saw things that I might do that could be construed as foreign, as the enemy.  So food was not—in the fifties and sixties in southern California, it was all about—I remember going with my brother to McDonald’s, and it was nineteen cents.  We would go, the two of us, with a dollar.  It was a special occasion.  Mom said we could go to McDonald’s.  We would go together.  He’s two and a half years older.  We would walk, go to the Mickey D, get a hamburger and a French fries and a small Coke, each of us, and it was a dollar total, you know.  So it was a big deal.

Q:  When you graduated from college, what did you think you were going to do next with your life?

Wolf:  I left college before I graduated.  I was in that very difficult period of time in the seventies where we didn’t know whether to commit or not commit.  We didn’t know whether to join the culture or fight the culture.  I was a second child, not a first child.  The simple difference is my brother went to USC on scholarship and then loans when he was taking too many drugs to maintain the scholarship at the full level, but when he got arrested for protesting against the war, one of his rich friends bailed him out.
	I went to a state college with my own money.  I supported myself all the way through school entirely.  So I was much more independent and cranky, and I was better at dinner parties.  I was amusing company, because I needed to be.  But I had to leave school when I couldn’t go anymore.  It was just “I can’t do this anymore.”

Q:  Were you living at home?

Wolf:  No, no, no.  Well, in southern California—

Q:  Oh, you couldn’t be.

Wolf:  —I did the first two years—

Q:  That’s what I meant.

Wolf:  —living with my parents.  I didn’t leave until I was twenty, for two reasons.  One is that my brother had left so early and that had been so hard on them, I thought I would make up for it.  It was a huge mistake all around.  And then there was no money, so I knew when I had to go, I’d have to go it on my own, and it’s a little bit daunting or very daunting.  It’s terrifying.  And I did it.  But anyway, so I moved up and I finished, they came to the graduation.  I hadn’t finished; I had a couple things left to do.  But I got a couple of jobs.  I worked at the—

Q:  Why did you leave?

Wolf:  I left because I was done, because I couldn’t do it anymore.  I was done.  All my friends and also because my parents so needed to be at that graduation.  It really didn’t matter.  So I went through it, as I say, and I told them later, but not immediately.
	I got a job.  Well, I was working in a family counseling agency.  I don’t know the order of all these things, but I got a job as a waiter on the railroad between Oakland and Chicago, and I have to say that was a real awakening as well.  I was often the only white person working.  We served six hundred people in forty-eight seats at ninety miles an hour in two hours.  Most of the food came out of the can, if you were lucky, or a bag.  It was pretty bad.  And yet some of the equipment was, number one, left over from so long before, that it was wood-burning.  There were stoves that were burning wood.  What they wouldn’t give for that now.  The food that we served was terrible.  The food that I ate was brilliant at times, because they were all black cooks and you would have gumbo and jambalaya and ribs and ham hocks and all this stuff.

Q:  When you cooked for each other?

Wolf:  No, we didn’t cook for each other.  They cooked for us.  When the cooks cooked for the general public, they’d cook what was on the menu, designed by the company and out of a box or a bag or a freezer or a can.  But they made staff meal, and staff meal was genius.  And I just thought this was the coolest thing.
I thought I was in a book.  I thought I was in a novel.  So I would always have a tan, a good haircut, a manicure, starched white shirts.  We wore all that funny little stuff, you know, jackets and bowties and all that stuff.  I loved it.  And two and a half days to Chicago, twenty-six-hour layover, two and a half days back, sometimes double and triple out, which means you left the next day.
	When I went to Chicago, when we got to Chicago, I had to remember, number one, none of them would share a hotel room with me.  There was a given hotel room, meaning they gave you a hotel that was like worth about nine dollars a night, if you can only imagine on the South Side of Chicago near the train station.  Yeah, I didn’t stay there too often.  So you took your tips and got yourself a little bit better hotel room, usually with a friend, but most of the time if I was with a mostly black crew, they wouldn’t room with me, and it wasn’t because I was gay, it was because I was, you know, a white guy.
So I would save my pennies, and I went to the Pump Room, I would go to a little café or I would go to the coffee shop of a big hotel to be in a big hotel, and then get up the next morning and go to the Art Institute or the Art Museum of Chicago, Chicago Art Museum.  Do you know what I mean?  I’d been in San Francisco, but San Francisco compared to Chicago is nothing.  I’d never been to New York yet.  So to me, this was a big city, and it also the rest of America.  I was amazed.
	Then when I could eat chocolate, I would go to Marshall Field’s and buy Frango mints and eat each one very slowly as it melted in my mouth.  So it was wonderful.  Do you know what I mean?

Q:  I do.

Wolf:  I also knew that I could really enhance the experience of people’s travels across the country by how I treated them at the shaking and rumbling dining table.

Q:  It was somewhat formal service, wasn’t it?

Wolf:  It was old-fashioned service.  It was white tablecloth and lots of silverware and all that stuff.  It was kind of ridiculous.  But it was wonderful.  It was vestigial, but it was brilliant.  And the old black cooks would tell me stories about how they used to have to sleep under the tables and how at times during certain wars if you were black and you weren’t in the army or whatever it was, they would pull them out of service and you had to live in the dining car because that’s where you lived.
I mean, so I got this whole other—and here I’m first-generation American Jew, so I had survivor’s guilt implanted DNA and also quite specifically.  I did have relatives who died, and I was always told they sold their property at a loss, but they sold it and got out.  They were stopped in Gibraltar on the ocean liner by Nazis, my mother and her parents, and the Nazis boarded, but somehow they got through, bribes or whatever it was.  So the point is I was really lucky, and it was told to me over and over in many, many ways.  I have all kinds of—every survivor’s guilt you can think of, pick three.
So I had an intense appreciation for life and intense need for it.  I grew up in a little room that I painted, myself, hospital white.  My mother had a thing about “Is it mother clean or Clarkie clean?”  You know.  So I was going to show her.  My mother, may she rest in peace, was a fairly crazy Virgo, very controlling, very frightened, and so I, kind of both to satisfy her and to also feel myself, had to kind of outdo her in a lot of ways, and I did in a lot of ways.  I made it cleaner than she could imagine.  Of course, in the process of painting that room, I totally destroyed a Chinese hooked rug that my grandparents gave me.
So it was a real combination of things, where my grandparents in some of their homes had room, a room, for me and my brother, so we had a room at our grandparents’ with a four-poster bed and a hooked rug and beautiful things on the wall.  Do you know what I mean?  My grandmother had amassed, with not a lot money but a great deal of taste.  It always had a what they called a gong, a dent in the back, it was cracked, but it was a good piece.
	I mean, I vividly remember brushing my grandmother’s hair in her house in their suite of rooms.  I mean, they lived beautifully.  They lived with great aesthetic style, and they were kind of grand.  So I had some of that grand in me.  You know what I mean?  And my mother was very striking and very dramatic in her way, but subscribing to this new fifties kind of household and always trying to do it in a way that made my father proud but not scared, a very, very tough line.
	One of the great things, now that I think about this, that food offers is it can be something that’s actually brilliant and not scary.  My favorite thing in life with food is to be able to provide food that for the sophisticated person is extraordinary and resonates on a lot of levels at once, and for an inexperienced person or for a sheltered person, they’re not afraid of it.  I used to say, I want it for your Auntie Mame and your Aunt Millie in Ohio because that’s, to me, the universality of food.  On the emotional level and on the visceral level, I like things that are deeply satisfying.  I like the resonance of it all.

Q:  What did you do after the—

Wolf:  Train?

Q:  Yes. Dining car.

Wolf:  Well, in this period of time, I should say, I moved to San Francisco in 1972, at the age of twenty, with hair to my backside.  I mean, all the way down my back, I mean all the way, blue black.  The girl that I was dating at the time—I moved up to kind of figure out my thing about guys, but I fell in love with a woman, who I’m still friends with and who is very dear and who, also, I will say came from a very kind of refined family on a 250-acre gentleman farm in northern Illinois, and so I got some exposure to the table with her and from her.
	One of the things that happened was she was renting a room in the house of a woman in Berkeley, and to make ends meet, I helped.  I cleaned that house once a week or once a month or twice a month, I don’t know what it was.  She was one of the original investors in a restaurant in Berkeley, and one day she said to me, “I’ll take you to this restaurant,” because I was an attractive young man who was good company.  I learned that one early on.  And my girlfriend was away or something, and so this woman, Jean Opton, took me, and because she had helped save the restaurant, she had a card that said meal for two once a week or once a month for the rest of your life.  There was no table, so we sat on overturned garbage cans in the kitchen of Chez Panisse.

Q:  Oh, my.

Wolf:  She had a shop on Shattuck Avenue called The Kitchen, and she taught a lot of people in Berkeley how to pick up and hold a knife.  I bought dishes from her that I still have that were from the south of France, that are blue on white in a way that doesn’t disrupt the food, that has pattern.  And this is a woman who used to say, “When you’re done cleaning, please do the following.  Take the leg of lamb out of the refrigerator.  Roll it, braise it,” and she would give me these instructions that—

Q:  Did you know what the instructions meant?

Wolf:  No, but I always did them, and she was always pleased.  So I, “What?”  This was, unbeknownst to me, one of the most refined people in a most refined community.  So those are my early—

Q:  Did she teach you what something like what braise or boil or—

Wolf:  No, no.  She left a note.  Sometimes I think I must have looked things up or asked people or sometimes I just went by instinct.  “Brown all sides of the—.”

Q:  Got it.

Wolf:  So there was only one pan out, so I browned it in that pan.  One time I put oil in the pan, and by putting oil in the pan it took longer to brown, so I tried to brown it without putting oil in the pan.  Do you know what I mean?

Q:  Yes.

Wolf:  I didn’t do it that much, though, but everything—and you should have seen what she left me for lunch.  Oh, my god.  All I remember is how I feel about food.  The fireplace in the living room you could walk into.  It was on La Conte and Le Roy.  So the aesthetic was similar to my grandparents, except that it was arts and crafts as opposed to Hollywood Hills, you know, 1930s, and 19-teens, Hollywood, whatever.

Q:  This was after the railroad car?

Wolf:  No.

Q:  Before?

Wolf:  This was before.  Interestingly, it was before.  I mean, again, all that period of time is kind of overlapped.  No, it was before I went on the railroad, after Alice, after I stopped being involved with women.
	When I came back from the railroad, I was living on lower Nob Hill, Nob Hill adjacent, and, again, it was very important for me to walk through beautiful neighborhoods.  I had grown up in just nothing, in horrible suburban developments that just got worse and worse and worse.  So it was important for me to walk on Nob Hill, and San Francisco and Twin Peaks, and I did all those things and I had this youthful intensity and tension.
	I had a boyfriend, a really beautiful boy, who was very slender, very fragile, and delicate actually in a lot of ways.  His name is Stephan Hennigan.  He had pale skin, dark, dark brown hair, dark, dark, long, long lashes, and his eyes were actually golden, golden.  This beautiful creature.  He was a bird.  He was a creature, and in some ways transitional between man and woman, although he was definitely a boy.  And I said, “You know, you can’t just lie around the apartment every day.  You have to go get a job.”  And I said, “I saw a sign in a window.”  In those days, and still, you rent an apartment in San Francisco, and you get a job with a sign in a window that says “Apartment for Rent.  Don’t bother owner.  Call.”  Or “Knock quietly on Apartment 4,” which I thought was just the most romantic thing.
	Anyway, he came back very quickly and said, “This is the job for you.”  It was a sign in the window that said “Wanted, manager for soon-to-be-open cheese and wine shop.” 
So in 1976, I got a job to open a cheese and wine shop.  I spent the first couple of weeks going back and forth.  These people had another shop in San Mateo, a wealthy suburb near Stanford University; South Bay, I think it was called.  So I would go and see how the other shop did it, and there were some lessons because it was kind of a franchise from the seventies of a cheese shop based in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Q:  Why was it a job made for you?  I mean, why was that perception there?

Wolf:  I don’t know.  What was funny is that what I really wanted—and I wrote in a journal, and I had a lot of journals in those days—that I wanted a job that was vaguely European, not that I knew what that meant, and that had something to do with being in the community.  I wanted to connect somehow.  I wanted to feel like I belonged somewhere, and so it was about cheese.  I had been going to the co-op Cheese Board in Berkeley, and I liked food, and cheese was something I could learn, and I had to make the shop nice every day, and I was fastidious in that respect.  My brother used to joke that I had an apartment that was pathologically clean.
	So I got this job, and I learned about it, went back and forth.  I remember the first week there was a woman that walked in, a big bouffant with a flip and argyle—I mean not argyle, alpaca sweater, and those stretchy pants with the straps, you know, really unfortunate.

Q:  Stirrups.

Wolf:  Stirrups, yes.  And I said to the boy next to me, because I liked a good stage whisper when I could, “She really has got to stop going to Catherine Hearst’s hairdresser.”  Of course, this was in a period of time when Patty Hearst had been kidnapped and the Hearst family was very much on everybody’s mind, certainly in the Bay Area, and Catherine Hearst was a much maligned object of ridicule.
	So this woman ordered a Cheddie Cheese Log, which is really cheese food.  It’s disgusting.  It’s byproducts and stabilizers and fillers and colors and flavorings and salts and some other chemicals rolled in very expensive chopped up pistachios and made into a log.

Q:  This was for the cheese shop?

Wolf:  Yes.  We did it ourselves from a block of gelatinous mush.  Then she bought some caviar spread which is made from red—you know, who knows what it was, lump fish, some horrible thing, and creamed cheese.  Anyway, she writes a check, and it’s Catherine Hearst.

Q:  Oh, my god.

Wolf:  It was Catherine Hearst.

Q:  Oh, my.

Wolf:  So I thought to myself, “Taste, money don’t go together.  Okay, this is cool.  I’m poor.  I have taste.  Okay, cool.”  Do you know what I mean?

Q:  Yes.

Wolf:  It was a huge life lesson, not to mention hilarious story.
	I managed this—the company went Chapter 11.

Q:  Rather quickly.

Wolf:  The company that owned the two shops went Chapter 11 in the second week of my employment, so I got to know what that means, and so I basically—it was a subsidiary of an old family Italian business where the grandson inherited it in his thirties and liked limousines and cocaine and leggy, blonde women, so he spent it all.
	So I got them to give me—he was introducing White Leopard.  It was a liqueur from the Campari people, and he said, “Oh, the cheese shop can cater it.”
	I said, “Okay, but you have to pay me, because I don’t have any money or cheese.  So give me $750.”  I remember this so vividly.  Cubed cheese is horrible, with toothpicks, but it got me going.  So little by little, I got revenue and product from the other store, and knowledge.

Q:  But, meanwhile, it was still in Chapter 11?

Wolf:  The company was in Chapter 11.

Q:  I see.

Wolf:  And I ran this little shop at the base of Nob Hill, and I made it nicer every day.  I brought out 350 cheeses every day for the walk-in and made it pretty.  There was nothing to go in the window, and so I would do window displays that I made up from packing material from—I would make a joke.  It was January, I did a January white sale, and it was white butcher paper, white peppercorns, and white wine.  I was amusing myself because I’d been a funny kid in the English department.  So I made jokes in the window, and it got in the San Francisco Chronicle.
And I remember we’d open cracker boxes to give a sample to go with the cheese that was on the counter, and, of course, after a couple days, the crackers were stale.  So I had all these half boxes of crackers that you couldn’t give away.  In fact, they were bad.  So I thought, “What the heck am I going to do?”  There was a broken cornucopia basket that I shoved into the corner of the window, and it was a classic bay window with a wooden base and glass, you know, lovely, kind of old-school.  I put the cornucopia, shoved it in the corner and began making a flat mosaic of all the different crackers, you know.  Right?  I had a little friend who was in the neighborhood who was like a regular customer, kind of a groupie.  I can’t remember his name.  Daniel or David or something.  But he was a funny little kid with a beard, and he would wear a beret once in a while.  And I said, “Do you have a picture?”
	He said, “I’m a photographer.”
	I said, “Would you bring me a picture of you in black and white in the beret, with your hands askew, like, ‘Oooh’?”
	And he said, “Sure.”
And he mounted it on some cardboard for me, and I did this mosaic on the ground, and this picture of him with a big sign that just said “Crackers,” you know.  It was like—and people would stick their head in and go, “You are!  You betcha!  Me and you!” whatever.
	San Francisco was very kind of—and this was at a time when Margaret Cho’s parents had a bookstore down at the corner.  This was on California between Market and Polk.  This is a very interesting time, you know.

Q:  How old were you?

Wolf:  I was twenty-five.

Q:  Were you the cheese buyer as well?

Wolf:  I was everything.  In fact, it was a while before I could hire anyone, and they could only come—it was so funny.  I really did get this pretty quickly, that I think they were two dollars an hour, four dollars an hour, something like that, and they would come in the afternoon for two hours or four hours.  I would immediately run up the hill, which was a park nearby, and lie in the sun to get a tan because besides the fact that I was vain, I truly believed that people would buy nicer cheeses from someone who looked well rather than somebody who looked sickly.  I needed to look like I had just gotten back from Biarritz so that they would buy a piece of cheese.  I was learning.  I was desperate, and I was also talking on the phone to people, and cheese people and cheese distributors would teach me how to do it.
	There was a guy named Jim Sebastiani, a bearded guy, and he was vaguely from the Sebastiani wine family.  But he would come up in a little refrigerated van, and I would climb into the van, and there would be goat cheeses and French specialty cheeses that you wouldn’t believe.  I mean, this was the mid seventies.  They were just coming to this country.  They were amazing.  I would invariably buy more than I could afford and therefore have to sell them, so I friggin’ sold them, you know, because I had to.  If I didn’t sell them, there would be no money the next week.  Do you know what I mean?  There would be no money.  So I was learning how to run a business as if it were my own, never forgetting that it wasn’t, making a living entity, building it little by little.  Credit for cheese is short, seven days, and liquor even shorter, and cracker and specialty foods a little longer.  So I learned how to do that.

Q:  You mean how to balance payments?

Wolf:  How to make it work.

Q:  For vendors, yes.

Wolf:  Yes.  And I did all the bookkeeping, because when I was twelve, I helped my cousins, who were accountants, post and spread, so I knew what it was.  It’s not brain surgery.  Bookkeeping is very simple.  You write it here, you write it there, you add it up, you make sure, you know, it fits.  They gave us a little training focus on basic principles.  You always had the safe bolted into the ground, so that somebody looking through the window could see if you were being robbed, you know.  You don’t put it in the back.  Put it in the front.  That’s why grocery stores have it in the front window, so if you’re going to take a gun to me, everybody’s going to see, kind of thing, even though we did get robbed, but by an employee.  I learned all those lessons. 

Q:  There probably weren’t very many shops dedicated to cheese at that time.

Wolf:  Three.

Q:  Three, in San Francisco?

Wolf:  Or four.  In the whole Bay Area.

Q:  Oh, in the whole Bay Area?

Wolf:  Yes.  It was a big deal, and when people—I remember after doing it for a year or so—I did it for two and a half years.  When I moved to San Francisco in ’72, all I wanted was to see anyone that I knew.  It was like, I just wanted somebody to say, “Hey,” across the street.  Ten years later, I couldn’t get away from people I knew.  Because I was in retail, very visible.
	So I remember, just in this little cheese shop, that I finally took a day off on Thanksgiving the following year or something, and I’m at the top of Twin Peaks with a friend, and there’s nobody there, and we’ve walked to the top, and up over the hill comes some guy, and he looks at me and he says, “Hey, Jarlsberg,” you know.  I was like arrrgh.  So thus began my love/hate relationship with being publicly known.
But, you know, it was good.  I mean, I borrowed an old Metropolitan, black and white Metropolitan.  I have photographs of it, a car, little car, for the grand opening from a friend, and put balloons on it and gave things away and tastes and all this.  I have still photographs today.  I made a fuss.  I said, “We’re here.”  I learned all these things.  Some of them were natural to me.  Some of them they kind of told us to do and I embellished, and some of them just—I don’t know.

Q:  What kind of customers?

Wolf:  Oh, well, interesting, a broad range.  Quirky, mostly, the kind of people that shop in little shops.  When I later went to the Oakville Grocery, some of them came with me because I had gone on to something that was more comprehensive, and some of them wouldn’t come with me because the new shop was a little bit too fancy and worldly and upscale and public.  So, I mean, it was a cross-reference.  We had a lot of regular customers who were legendary we would talk about and tell stories about because they were—some were wonderful, some were horrible.
	This one woman always used to drive us crazy, German woman who found something wrong all the time, would bring a cheese back three weeks later that I think had been under her couch.  I remember one day she walked in, Mrs.—oh, gosh, I can’t remember.  But one day she walked in with one black shoe and one white shoe, and she was saying she woke up that morning blind in one eye.  It was all we could do not to giggle for three weeks, because, I mean, these were characters.  You know what I mean?  This was a reality television show.  It was hilarious.

Q:  Is that where you met Jim Beard?

Wolf:  Yes.

Q:  How did that happen?

Wolf:  One day I was by myself, and the door darkened.  I mean, it was a little shop on one side of California Street, and the door darkened.  I looked up and I was like, what, is it a cloud, what, a storm?  And there was this huge man in a black leather trench coat that went from the sky to the ground, and, you know, wearing jeans and some big striped shirt or something, but black leather trench coat.  Terrifying.  I knew it was James Beard.  I don’t know why.  I guess I was aware of him, and I think he must have had a column in the paper and this, that, and the other.

Q:  With maybe a picture, a picture of his face?

Wolf:  Oh yeah.  So I said to no one, “That’s James Beard.”  He came in and he bought Morbier’s, St. Nectaire, and Appenzeller.

Q:  Morbier’s, St.—

Wolf: Morbier, which is a French cheese that has—

Q:  Ash.

Wolf:  —a line of ash in the center, separating the morning from the evening milk.  Appenzeller, which is an alpine melting cheese.  And St. Nectaire, which is a real, from the Savoie, table cheese with a natural rind.  All complex, interesting, fairly sophisticated, specific cheeses.  And he says, “You know, my doctor says I’m not supposed to have any of these things.  I’d like some of this, some of that.”  And we had a short little chat, and he walked out.
About a year later, I had been hired to do the cheese department of the Oakville Grocery.  The Oakville Grocery was originated in Oakville, which is a little town across from the Mondavi winery on Highway 29 in the Napa Valley.  In the thirties, it was the general store, had a post office and everything.  In the seventies, it became the supply hut for the Mondavi farm workers, sold beer and pretzels and potatoes and sandwiches, whatnot.  Then as Michael James and Billy Cross, of the Great Chefs of France, this couple of crazy, you know, very flamboyant gay men, actually, were bringing great chefs from France.  It was called the Great Chefs of France, and then there were the Great Chefs of the World.  Troisgros and La Notre and Bocuse and all these people were coming to do one-week cooking classes for rich ladies from either the Napa Valley or Texas, mostly the two.

Q:  In the Oakville Grocery?

Wolf:  In the Mondavi winery, in their kitchen across the road.
	So we were the grocery.  Joe Phelps, Joseph Phelps, the winemaker actually now, but at the time he had been a billionaire, which in those days was a lot of money, from Hensel Phelps Construction in Denver, huge, freeways, highways, towns, whatever.  He had started Phelps Vineyards, Joseph Phelps Vineyards, and gotten a lot of acclaim.  He was in the middle of a divorce and it was induced by this young man to buy the Oakville Grocery.  As I understood it, some of the thinking was in the divorce, if Solomon says cut the baby in half, he could give the wife the Oakville Grocery, the upscale fancy grocery, you know, and he would keep the vineyard and the winery.  He kept it all, but that’s beside the point.
	And I was hired in San Francisco, [for their new shop there] from this cheese shop.  I was looking for a job, and I was either going to become a salesman for a cheese distribution company or I was going to get this job.  There was this fellow named Phil Quattrogiochi.  I think he worked for Daryl Corti at the Corti Brothers in Sacramento, and he was offered the job at the Oakville Grocery, and I was offered the job selling cheese for this cheese company.  We said, “Nah,” and switched.  So he really didn’t want to be in retail, and I didn’t really want to be in wholesale.  I wanted to be on the stage of a shop, and he wanted to be in an office.
	He went on to be a co-owner of San Francisco International Cheese Imports and later died of AIDS, and be a good friend, and I went on to do the Oakville Grocery.  I started out being the cheese guy, so I’d once again go up to the Oakville Grocery in Napa and learn about what they were doing there and be part of a team that was developing this new grocery.
	I have very vivid memories of pulling up to this building with a 1930s Coca-Cola sign painted on the entire side, thinking, “Hmm.  This is an important moment in my life.  This is a strong visual.  I will remember this for the rest of my life,” and I have, needless to say.  And I redid that store, much the same way as—except for one department.  It’s the way I did it.

Q:  You redid it when you became more than the cheese guy?

Wolf:  No.  I redid it when they were paying me and I was the merchandising kid.  The guy who owned it knew about people.  His name was John Michaels.  He had bought it from Tom Maye, who had owned it and sold it to Joe Phelps.  He—I think I gave you the letter—was looking for—I mean, it’s so interesting that in all that time John turns out to have been a closeted gay man, married, with children.  I mean, there was all this subtext.  I mean, at that period of time in history, the homosexual subtext of food was extraordinary in certain sectors, not in all.  Certainly not in restaurant kitchens so much, but certainly in specialty foods.

Q:  What else did the Oakville Grocery sell?

Wolf:  Well, there or in San Francisco?

Q:  Where you were.

Wolf:  Well, I was coming once or twice or three times a week to the Oakville in the Napa Valley to prepare.  The San Francisco store, we rented an apartment at the top of Nob Hill near where I lived and we had people coming in to taste hundreds of olive oils and hundreds of mustards and hundreds of hams, and they were Alice Waters and Ruth Reichl and Jeremiah Tower and Joseph Phelps and Marion Cunningham and Catherine Brandel.  These people were the cream of the crop of the Bay Area, and the Bay Area is the cream of the crop of the country, quite frankly.  And I think James must have sat in from time to time, but I don’t remember that specifically.
	So there was this coterie of really brilliant food professionals and cookery folk, and basically we were assembling their fantasy larder.  The thing about San Francisco is that it always had very fine groceries, but they were invisible because it was a hilly town and big trucks couldn’t get in.  So they were like little tiny groceries, corner groceries, that could get you anything and did, black truffles, fois gras, but you had to ask.
	So this was a truly discretely sophisticated town.  This was the home of Williams-Sonoma, and those people knew about that, and I can tell you—I got to know Chuck Williams because I would spend Thanksgivings at Marion Cunningham’s and he was always there.  And I spoke with him and interviewed him for various things over the years.
	So about a year later, I had been hired by the Oakville Grocery, and we were in the development period, and I was initially hired to do the cheese department.  I was always involved in the tastings, and two weeks before we opened, I was told to go to New York, take a look at Dean & Deluca, Balducci’s and Fairway and Zabar’s and come back and do a California original, because they knew I could merchandise.  And I had nine days, and the national press was coming.  What did I know?  So I made it up as I was going along.  And two weeks after we opened, I was doing all the buying and all the selling.  So in other words, I did all the ordering, and two months later, I was running the store.
It was very nerve-wracking for Joe because I was twenty-six, twenty-seven, he didn’t really know me, and I had no allegiance to him.  I was poor, Jewish, gay, you know.  Right?  And I scared him, and I found that out later.
	But I was in love with this.  We did $17,000—no, I don’t remember what we did.  Maybe $17,000 one day on a short day on Christmas Eve the first year, and no wine, no liquor sales, no takeout.  We had four salads that we filled, platters that were filled from a two-burner plug-in.

Q:  Who cooked?

Wolf:  This woman called Rick O’Connell, and I’ll tell you about her.  But the point is that we sold cheese.  For the first six months, 16 to 46 percent of the business was across the counter, because I knew how to do that.  I put on a show where, you know, I had the cheese boys and we had people who were sampling and tasting, and it was in the middle—we had amazing produce.  I would ask everybody about everything, and so the Häagen-Dazs frozen ice cream truck from the Natural Foods Company pulled up and I said, “What else you got back there?”
	“Well, we’ve got these farm chickens.”
	“What?”  We were selling free-range chickens in 1980, you know.  Brilliant cooks were saying to me, “Can you get capers and salt?”
	And I’d say, “I don’t know.  What characteristics should look for??”  And I’d get them because I didn’t know I couldn’t.
	I brought arugula all the way from Italy.  The first year it was $18 a pound.  The next year it was 89 cents a bunch.  You know, people would walk in and go, “Oh, weeds.  Well, you know, I can grow that.”
We had hand-gathered wild mushrooms because we discovered that there were all these organizations hand-gathering mushrooms, collecting them, vetting them, and sending them to western Germany—remember West Germany?—where they were boiled and put into cans and sent back for what James called the “gourmie” section of the grocery store, which was that little jobbed thing in the middle, sometimes there with the frozen stuff where mushrooms would sit there, Champignon or Chanterelles, and they’d collect dust, or for that one German lady who had to have them.

[Interruption]

Wolf:  So it was extraordinary, and I was learning about thousands of things.  I had some rules, you know.  I made my own rules, but I got them from brilliant people.  If it has things on the label that I don’t understand, just don’t eat it.  Don’t even try it.  Don’t even worry about it.  Just no.
	After we opened, we had more than four thousand things in the store, and, again, this is stuff, individual, eight kinds of rice and a hundred mustards and sixteen, eighteen, twenty-two, thirty-two olive oils from different—and this is in 1980.

Q:  How big was it?

Wolf:  Two thousand square feet.

Q:  Oh, my. 

Wolf:  And there was a wine shop in it, so we were only about sixteen thousand square feet.  It was extraordinary what we did.  And this produce section, I had this brilliant guy who did produce, but he would often not show up, because he was a brilliant guy who was crazy.  So I had to learn how to take care of everything, because otherwise, it would go bad.  So these had to be covered with a damp cloth, and these had to be left open, these had to be put in water.  I got this huge postgraduate course in food.
	Part of the cost of money is often somebody’s relative, and so Joe said to me, “You have to be nice to my daughter,” Leslie.  She was part of the cost of money.  She was the assistant manager.  This is a girl who would give me cocaine in the middle of the afternoon.  I would go to the bathroom, put it into a tissue, wrap it up, put it in my pocket, come out, run around, because cocaine and me, that’s kind of redundant, and then I’d give it back to her on her birthday, you know.  “Here, Leslie.”  “Oh, thank you.”
	The tenth anniversary of Chez Panisse was held at Phelps Vineyards, and there was an oyster booth, and there was a grilled corn and sausage booth, and there was a crépinette booth, and there was an extra virgin olive oil and tomato booth.  This is in—must have been the early eighties.  Upstairs there was a cocaine booth.  I mean, you know, you went upstairs and there was Jeremiah Tower.  Anyway.
	So Joe Phelps said to me at one point, “You know, you need to be a little bit easier with Leslie.  Sometimes she finds you intimidating.”  And he paused and he said, “In fact, sometimes so do I.”
	All I thought to myself was, this is a billionaire, and I’m this funny little immigrant.  This food thing is kind of good, you know, because it’s the most important thing and people know it.

Q:  Now, during this time, were you getting to know Jim Beard when he came to California for the classes?

Wolf:  What happened was I was in process of getting this shop opened, the Oakville, as part of the team, and I started seeing this young man, John Carroll, sort of dating.  John came to me one day and said, “I’m one of James Beard’s assistants, by the way, and he remembers meeting you in the cheese shop and would love it if you’d join us for dinner on Friday evening at the Stanford Court.”  James lived there half the year.  He learned and taught me early on that New Yorkers get tired of you, so you have to leave a lot.  And he said, “Now, don’t be insulted if he sends us home at 10:15 saying he’s tired.”
And at quarter to one a.m., when John went to the bathroom and James and I were each sipping our second Glenlivet neat, the second in my life, he said, “Come around tomorrow and we’ll have a good gossip.”  You know, he knew a kindred spirit, I guess, fast and funny and silly and reasonably smart and all those things.  You know what I mean?

Q:  So this is, what, maybe a year after you met him after he came into the cheese shop?

Wolf:  He probably came to the cheese shop in ’78, and this happened in ’79, because I think it was before we actually opened the Oakville Grocery.  Then he invited us to Christmas in New York, and, as you saw from those newsletters, when I came back the next year, for the next Christmas, I wrote about having been there.

Q:  What did you two talk about when you were with him?

Wolf:  It seemed very normal.  He was a worldly man who had been all over the world.  He was a gay man who lived in Paris in the fifties.  That’s all I cared about.  You know, we didn’t talk about food that much.  We shared sensibility.  He asked me things.  What impressed me was at ’83, I brought—this is sometime later—a thirty-year-old Iranian Persian guy who I was working with who imported caviar.  We brought this caviar to Jim’s house.  We tasted all these caviars.  They were amazing.
	The next day, I got a call from James Freaking Beard asking me to ask my young friend some questions.  You know, here he was, James Beard.  He remembered Tehran in the sixties, and he was describing the tile and the paint on the wall to the point where my friend was in tears, and he was asking questions.  So I thought this food thing is really cool.  It’s okay to ask questions and learn for all of your life.  You’re young for all of your life.  You’re never going to learn all of it.  It’s food.  It’s all of nature.  So I loved that he loved people.  I loved that he was conflicted, you know.  I also knew that I was never going to be the object of his affections.

Q:  How did you know that?

Wolf:  We know these things.  Not his type.  And that clearly he was not my type.
	So I was sleeping with John, who was this very handsome guy who everybody thought was gorgeous.  That was always a good idea.  And so James was a bit of a connoisseur and mostly visual when it came to good-looking guys, and he liked attractive young men around him.  Who doesn’t?  All the women I know feel the same way.  Most of the men I know, even straight men, it’s just having nice attractive young people, vital and with life.  But also James loved people in every age.  I would meet people at his doorstep.  He would call me—so we got to be friends a little bit.

Q:  In California?

Wolf:  In California.  I came to a couple classes, blah, blah, blah.  But clearly I was an adult to him, as opposed to John, who was one of his minions, albeit gorgeous.  You know, he really did classify people in different ways.  I had a pretty—I liked my classification.  He acknowledged me nicely pretty early on.  I’m not sure why, maybe just because I knew about stuff that interested him.

Q:  When you saw him, what kinds of events, for want of a better word, were they?

Wolf:  Well, in California, it was at a cooking class or a dinner, a table.  In New York, we came to visit him for the holidays, and we went to his house.

Q:  You and John.

Wolf:  John Carroll and I.  I don’t remember where we stayed.  We did not stay with him.  He never had people over to stay.  But we had lunch and dinner and all those things.  It was me, John, James, his longtime upstairs miserable companion Gino Cofacci, and John Ferrone.  That’s it.

Q:  This was before you moved here?

Wolf:  Yes.  And then after, the reason I moved is I was growing uncomfortable there.

Q:  Because?

Wolf:  Well, I was becoming the star of the Oakville Grocery, and it was making Joe angry, because Joe liked to be the star of the world.  There was another guy who was running the wine department, who was a wine guy, and so they could get drunk together.
What happened was Marian Burros came to California, and she was doing these pieces about California cuisine.  She’s the one who kind of wrote about it in the New York Times.  She’d just come to the New York Times not long before, from the Washington Post.  She called up and said, “I want to come to the Oakville Grocery and I want to talk to you about California foods and people and whatnot.”
	I said, “Great.  Come on Sunday at twelve-thirty.  We open at twelve.  Saturday’s our biggest day, so that will give me a chance to get cleaned up and be ready to speak with you.”
	She arrived at eleven-thirty.

Q:  [laughs] Oh, man.

Wolf:  I took her up to my desk, sat her down, gave her a cappuccino and a croissant, said, “I’ll come back to get you at twelve-thirty.”  I don’t know why.  It was just like I wasn’t intimidated.  I invited her into my store.  I was going to take time.  It wasn’t my store.  That was the other thing is that I really did treat it as not just somebody else’s, but a public trust.  It’s kind of how I feel about food in general, and I don’t mean that to be too grand, but it is a public trust, for god’s sakes.
	So she came downstairs.  And Marian is now one of my best friends in the world.  She came downstairs and grabbed something, I don’t remember what, and said, “What do I want to do with this?”
	And believe me, what I said in my mind and what I said to her were not the same.  “You know, whatever you want, lady.”
But we got over to the produce department, and there was a big tub of fresh tofu.  Remember, wild mushrooms, fresh tofu.  Right?  It was barely the eighties from the seventies.  And Marian, who had always been very interested in healthy food things said, “Now, what do you do with tofu?”
It was such a food lady, food section, home-ec question, and I said, “Well, nothing in public.”  And she cracked up, and we became friends.
	So a couple years later, she did the story, I mean, and the first part of the story came out, or the story came out in the Times.  Things that we had talked about were there.  People we talked about were there.  Ideas we had talked about were there.  No mentioned of me, no mention of the Oakville Grocery, nothing.  I thought, okay. 

Q:  This was about the California cuisine?

Wolf:  Yes.  I thought, okay, so that’s how that works.  Ouch.  All right, fine, whatever, you know.
	I was then asked to come to New York to go to Bloomingdale’s, because Bloomingdale’s in those days did these national promotions.  So they do a French promotion.  Everything in the store is French, the clothing and the dishware and—

Q:  I remember.

Wolf:  And their food hall was all French too.

Q:  You were supposed to do what?

Wolf:  I was supposed to come out representing the Oakville Grocery to possibly be part of a California promotion.

Q:  Got it.

Wolf:  The problem was a couple of things.  Number one, Barbara Kafka wanted me to come to work for her.

Q:  How did you know her?

Wolf:  Through James.  She was working in the classes, too.  I’d met her.  Marion Cunningham and Barbara were the senior helpers, and then there were all these other hangers-on.  Barbara didn’t want to call me because she did some consulting work for Joe, she did wine lists for Joe, and she put Joe’s stuff here and there.  So she didn’t want to call because it was a conflict, so she had James tell me.  By this point, I was talking to James on a regular basis on the phone.  He was a great phone guy, and I was a great phone—I love talking on the phone.
	So I get a call and, “Hi, Barbara would love it if you’d come to New York.”  And he said, “And I’d love it if you were here too.  I’d really enjoy having you here.  I’d get to see you lots.”
	Well, that’s a no-brainer, so I decided I would come and see about this.  And I 
bring my stuff, and I get a call.  I’m here in New York.  I’ve gotten them to pay my way.  
I have these specialty food products, California goat cheeses and some boxes and this, that, and the other.  And I get a call from Bloomingdale’s, “I’m terribly sorry, but tomorrow is the launch of our promotion for the Philippines.  Mrs. Marcos is going to be in the store, and there will be a demonstration on Third Avenue.  The security will be too tight.  You can’t come.”
	Barbara Kafka takes me to the Four Seasons for lunch, to the Grill Room.

Q:  That was a good thing to do.

Wolf:  “There’s Henry Kissinger,” she said.  “There’s Arthur Schlesinger.  Wouldn’t you like to move to New York?
	And I said, “Would we be eating here a lot?”  [laughter].  What?  You know, what do you say?  Right?  I really did say that, and she was very nervous.
Anyway, I didn’t know what to do, because I had had a falling-out with Joe and I really did want to leave and I really did want to come to New York and I wanted to accept this job, but I didn’t know what it was.  Clearly Barbara Kafka is wack.  She’s, I think, at heart probably a good person somewhere, and I think she wasn’t unkind to me, but she’s crazy and she was crazier then.

Q:  What did she tell you you would be doing?

Wolf:  Oh, I was going to help her open and run Star-Spangled Foods, an all-American food store.  This is in 1982.  This is before its time, and she had things from all over the country, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I was just bringing my expertise and some other things from California, blah, blah, blah.
	“But I don’t want you to run the store.  I want you to open the store and then run several.  We’ll have three, we’ll have six, we’ll have a chain across the country.  We’ll take over the world.  There’s Henry Kissinger.  There’s Arthur Schlesinger.”  So, you know, it’s like what am I going to do about this?
	The next morning, the second part of Marian’s obvious two-part piece comes out in the New York Times in the Wednesday section, and I and the Oakville Grocery are about 30 percent of it.  And I get a call from Bloomingdale’s.  “We figured out how to have security.  Please join us.”  So I am twenty-nine years old.

Q:  That’s fabulous.

Wolf:  And with my fluffy black curly hair, and I’m first-generation American, grown up in the Valley, I mean, you know, in the middle of nowhere.  Now I had gone back, as I said, and learned a little bit about my mother’s mother’s family because I wanted a little grand credibility, for me, just to get through the afternoon, just to make me feel like I wasn’t a piece of total garbage, or nothing, that I was not hopeless.  I really did feel that way, that if you dig into your past, you’re going to find upsetting things and you’re going to find hopeful—things that give you hope.  I decided that I was going to lean on the stuff that gave me hope and a place in the world.

Q:  Do you mean not feel hopeless or not feel like a country bumpkin or what?

Wolf:  Well, both.  Not feel worthless and not feel—

Q:  Unsophisticated?

Wolf:  Yeah, that.  Not have any genetic connection to success.  My father sold hardware.  His name was Izzy, for god’s sakes, you know.  My mother’s name had been Devora Barenstein, and she became Delly Wolf.  I mean, can I breathe here?  Do I have a place here?  Do I have a voice, you know, somehow?
	I used to read a lot of books and kind of live in the literature, but this was real.  So suddenly I’m in Bloomingdale’s, and I have my VP Purchasing and my security guy, and over there is Imelda Freaking Marcos with puffy starched sleeves and her VP and her security guy, and she’s looking at me like, “Who the heck is that?”  What?
	So I didn’t say anything to Barbara.  I just did the thing, came back to California.  I borrowed a woman’s house in the Napa Valley and took my then boyfriend, which was another guy named John, and we swam in the sunshine and I spent a day and I went in and said, “I’m leaving.”  In six weeks, I sold everything on the street, some of which was—

Q:  Your personal things?

Wolf:  Yes, some of which was like pretty good arts and crafts wicker.  Damn.  And moved to New York.  James fed me about once a week, once every other week, Saturday or Sunday, oftentimes until a point where Gino would say, “He has to go.  He has to go,” because they wanted to listen to opera on the radio.  And sometimes James would say, “Oh, go listen upstairs.  We’re still talking.”
I spoke to him every morning.  I opened her store.  It turns out I brought most of the products for the whole store.  It turns out the thing was kind of scam.

Q:  What do you mean?

Wolf:  She didn’t have the stuff.  She said she needed me or she couldn’t have done the store without getting me.  She would not have done the store.  I had the Rolodex of life.

Q:  I see.  She didn’t have the product or the connections to get it?

Wolf:  Exactly.  It was kind of smoke and mirrors.  Her father was dying.  Her mother, one of the meanest people I’ve ever met.  She was overspending and breaking every rule.  She didn’t have the money.  She didn’t raise the money to do it.  So she lied about most of it to me, and it was a very difficult year, because she had painted the store the colors of Giverny, which, you know, is not exactly the best way to have an American food store.  She didn’t want to—she’s an obscurest.  And while there might be an interesting intellectual connection, that’s not how people buy or experience food.

Q:  Wait a minute.  In terms of the color, you meant it wasn’t red, white, and blue, it was—

Wolf:  It was the colors of Giverny.  It was that pinky blue and—

Q:  With that same subtle—

Wolf:  —yellow, none of which are good food colors.  She decided that if she’d made the shelves eighteen inches deep, she wouldn’t need storage downstairs, because she didn’t have any.  Well, the reason shelves are shallow is because that way they always look full.  She didn’t bother to learn anything.  She didn’t have any respect for any history.  It was only about her, and she actually did sit in the window at her own typewriter, typing, writing her column for Vogue.  She was being a Vogue-ette—she was then the food editor of Vogue—in her own shop.  She was being clever, but she was being clever about food, which doesn’t work.

Q:  What was the idea behind the store, though?

Wolf:  That it would be the first food store that had only American foods.  She would do the first international store that brought food [only from America].  The problem was she wanted everything categorized by state.  What was interesting was it was all about her, not about the people buying the food.  And you can do that with perfume and fashion to some degree, but only to some degree.  But with food, it’s absolutely not about you; it’s about everyone else.
	So, in fact, a lot of struggles.  She introduced me around to really some very interesting people, some heinous people.  The first day I went to meet her, besides the fact we went into her basement that was very small and very stuffy and she farted a lot and thought that was okay, that was my introduction.  I thought where is Henry Kissinger and Arthur Schlesinger when we need them?
	This woman called Paula Wolfert was working with her, for her, and Paula said, “Do you want to share a cab?”
	And I said, “Sure.”  We were both going, I don’t know, uptown or downtown, probably downtown because Barbara lived on 92nd Street, still does.
	And the first things out of Paula Wolfert’s mouth were horrible things about Barbara.  She basically wanted to gossip about what a horrible person Barbara Kafka is.  And I said, “Excuse me.  She just brought me to New York, and we’re not going to have this conversation.”
	When I was on the phone with Barbara, she was on the phone with Stephen Spector.  Stephen was another of Jim Beard’s friends, and a very important person.  He changed American food in restaurants, actually.  He had a restaurant called Le Plaisir for two years.  It was the first real place where food people got together in a restaurant and talked about the food, and later on it became an American place for Larry Forgione.
	And Barbara said something horrible and catty, because basically she was homophobic in a way that people love fags, you know what I mean, very fashionista.  And she said something horrible about a third person and handed me the phone and said, “Here’s Stephen.”
	And Stephen Spector, bless his heart, said to me, “This is not how you want to meet me, is it?”
	I said, “No.”
	He said, because James had said I was a nice young man, I guess, or something, “Meet me tonight at Cherche Midi.  I’m having dinner there.  Meet me later in my dinner and we’ll have a cup of coffee, tea, and go for a walk.”
	So Stephen Spector, after that, took me on a walk in Central Park—this is 1982—with his six champion terriers, told me the story of New York, and became my friend, you know, really was very generous and dear.

Q:  He was approximately how old?

Wolf:  I have no idea.  Maybe in his fifties.

Q:  But a lot older than you.

Wolf:  Yes.  Maybe in his fifties.  He was the partner of Peter Josten.  He used to refer to himself as the last of the Lehman Ladies, because Peter Josten was of the Lehman family.  And Stephen Spector had an apartment on Fifth Avenue at 880.  It was the penthouse just below the Frick.
	When I left Barbara a year later, and what I did with Barbara was I finally—at one point we were fighting about this, that, and the other, and I said, “Barbara, you’ve got to get some more money.  You’ve got to get money by October 31st or I’m closing the door because—.” 
	She got the money from her mother.  “But it will cost me.”
	I said, “You mean emotionally?  Who cares.”  You know what I mean.
	And she would buy a new bauble at Bulgari and not pay for it, but then we didn’t have money to pay the jam lady or Milton Glaser, who did a bad job.
Anyway. we’re walking and we’re discussing all this.  Finally she says to me, “So, but how are you otherwise?”
	I said, “What do you mean?”
	She said, “Well, you know, how’s your personal [life]?”
	I said, “Barbara, I moved all the way across the country to find out everything you told me wasn’t true.  That’s as personal as I’m getting with you.  My professional life, that is my personal life.”

Q:  What did she say?

Wolf:  Nothing.  I mean, no one had ever talked back to Barbara before, you know.  They were all afraid of her.  Everybody was afraid of her.  And it was like, “Barbara, you’re full of shit,” you know what I mean?  You know what a tomato is, and aren’t you excited?  You know it because you went on vacation to the Amalfi coast.  I went because they grew in my backyard.  Next.
	It was a very interesting time because what I realized when I got to New York was that what I knew more than a lot of other people, what James knew, was what things tasted like.  We came from the West where things grew, and we came to New York and could identify and were much less dependent at that time on European travels.  We had a healthy sensibility about the French sensibility.  I mean, I went to Berkeley.  I knew what France was.  I knew what a croissant was.
	At that point I will admit that after I worked at the cheese shop and before I started the Oakville Grocery, I took the only vacation of my life that was a month long and I went to Europe, and I was post the age of being able to sleep on the floor, so I went to cheap hotels in pension and I went to Paris for a total of nine days at different times, London, Paris, Surrey, Brussels.  I took the overnight train that went through many different borders to Berlin, to what was then West Berlin, Milan, Florence.  You know, I went many, many places because I needed to find out what the fuck this was all about.

Q:  This was before you actually moved?

Wolf:  No, this was before I worked for Oakville Grocery.

Q:  Oh, oh, oh.

Wolf:  It was after the cheese shop before the Oakville Grocery, because I needed to go to Pek in Milan, and I needed to go Fauchon in Paris, before I opened the thing up.  I couldn’t be overly impressed by Balducci’s.  I needed to know what Milan looked like, what the street flow—I went and I was ravenous.  I was a gay man in his twenties who didn’t hook up with any other men until the last night before I was leaving, and I was so broke by that time that this boy and I sat and had deux Beeg Mac and deux maxi frites and deux Coca-Colas at the McDonald’s on the Champs d’Elysées, which they later closed.  I mean, you know, I was really starved for culture and flavor and texture and context and experience in life.
	And James had it all the time.  He would call me up.  See, that was the other thing that, in retrospect, was so enriching.  He would call me up and say, “The ambassador from Spain is coming, and I’m tired.”
	And I’d say, “I’ll be right there,” and I would go over and sit on the floor in my little jeans and t-shirt, and he and the ambassador would talk, and then he’d fall asleep and I’d talk to the ambassador.  Because I really basically like talking to everyone, and I do believe that if you really—one of the things I loved about the language of food is that there isn’t anyone you can’t speak with.  When I went to Italy, I didn’t speak a word of Italian.  I was in the Formaggio Peck cheese shop [in Milan].  I talked to a guy across the counter.  He didn’t speak a word of English, I didn’t speak a word of Italian, we spoke for twenty-five minutes and cried three times.  You know what I mean?  You know what I mean?

Q:  Yes.

Wolf:  Because you can speak because it is the most important thing.  It is the great universal.  I remember being told later that Mrs. Getty was so pleased by the way I was so natural with her.  I didn’t know who she was.  She was a pretty lady who spent two grand.  I liked her.  You know what I mean?  It didn’t matter, and it still doesn’t matter.  I’m not impressed by titles.  I’m impressed by the heart and soul and reality of a person.  Do you know what I mean?  In that way, I guess, I’m egalitarian and truly Jewish.  We’re nomadic.  I just like good people wherever I go.  I don’t know what that is.

[End of interview]








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