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Questions and Answers with William Grimes, Curator of
New York Eats Out
New York, NY, October 11, 2002 -- William Grimes has been the restaurant critic of The New York Times since April 1999. Before that, he wrote on food and drink for the newspaper's dining section, and for many years covered the arts for the Times. He earned a degree in English from Indiana University and a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Chicago. He is the author of the books Straight Up or on the Rocks: The Story of the American Cocktail and My Fine Feathered Friend, the tale of a mysterious chicken that came to roost in his backyard. It started with Paul LeClerc, the Library’s President, who called me up and almost in an offhand way said “Would you be interested in developing an exhibition from our menu collection so we can let people know about the rich material we have here?” I was intrigued and said yes, and he left it up to me to figure out what type of exhibition it would be. There was definitely a thrill of discovery in opening up one box after another, not knowing what would be there. For example, I went in not even thinking about the World’s Fair, but there was a treasure trove of material gathered carefully from the restaurants there. That naturally became a feature of the exhibit. It was a process of wading through many menus that were not very interesting at all to find the elusive white whales, menus from storied restaurants from years gone by, like Delmonico’s, the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and Café Martin. You also had to keep an eye open for offbeat, surprise menus that make one single point in a thrilling way. Even if the menu is kind of prosaic looking, it can really shed an interesting light on how New Yorkers ate a century ago -- a humble oyster house, for example, showing how many different ways oysters were prepared and how many different types of oysters were available in the 19th century. The nature of the exhibition developed out of the material. Once I figured out what the strengths of the menus were, it defined a historical period for me. I thought that rather than presenting fabulous menus that had no relationship to each other it would be more interesting to do a continuous narrative or chronology so people could take a ride through history, working their way through the world’s biggest meal. We started with Delmonico’s because the historical record and surviving documents from before 1830 are almost nonexistent. There are no menus from Dutch taverns for example. The first drastic decision was to start with the first great restaurant. Fortunately, there was great material to support that decision. The Library has a good selection of menus not just from fancy restaurants but from ordinary places where average New Yorkers would eat. That prompted the decision not to concentrate specifically on expensive restaurants catering to the upper crust but to make it a more comprehensive picture of how all New Yorkers ate. The terminal date was also determined by the strengths of the collection. Once you get to the mid–1960s there’s a fall off in the number of menus. The glory years of the collection have to do with the strange Miss Buttolph. She was collecting from 1900 to 1924, so you have a very good selection from that opulent period when the wealthy were spectacularly wealthy and the restaurants were palatial and the grand dinners were shockingly grand. We all take for granted that ethnic dining is one of the great pleasures in present-day New York. I wasn’t aware of how true that was from almost the beginning. In the 1870s there was a little French Quarter in what is now Soho where New Yorkers with a sense of adventure could eat at French bistros. In Greenwich Village you could find Syrian and Lebanese restaurants. The mosaic of ethnicity has changed, of course. German cooking used to be enormously important in New York, and there’s almost nothing of it today. That was one of the fascinations about putting this show together. You could sort of reimagine this picture of ethnic dining in New York 150 years ago. Also, street food has always been a big factor in New York. There’s a very good collection of photos of street vendors at the Library, and you notice how that’s changed too. For example, you don’t see coconut vendors anymore. You don’t see people selling Halvah off a cart. The rise of commercial soda drinks has completely changed the way people sell from carts. The old root beer vendor and the coconut juice vendor and fruit juice vendor have faded into history and now you just buy a can of soda. The huge seismic shift you can see is the evolution of high-style dining from formal and French to a point where you can have sophisticated cuisines from almost any country, including the United States. Americans always enjoyed eating American food, but the idea that it could share the same status as French food is relatively new. At the end of the exhibition we show that you can present American food and American ingredients in an architecturally sophisticated setting and expect to be taken as seriously as a restaurant like Le Pavillon. Although it’s a leap forward in time, Windows on the World has a strong connecting thread to restaurants like The Four Seasons. They were both conceived by Joe Baum of Restaurant Associates. There was a twofold reason for adding it to the exhibition. In some ways it was the most daring, experimental, and audacious project that Joe Baum ever undertook. And it has a claim on the hearts of New Yorkers because of the events of September 11. The towers were built at a time when New York was down on its luck. It was a great expression of pride at that time to think that this city could ever rebound and be the great glittering city of skyscrapers and enormous wealth. That restaurant has a lot of special reasons to be included. I was always a kid who would order the weirdest thing on the menu, the opposite of a picky eater. I was thrilled whenever my parents would take us to a restaurant, which was almost never, because it wasn’t something that happened that often in the 1950s. Later, when I could get around on my own, I was always scouting out interesting lunch places near where I went to high school outside of Baltimore. One of my great finds was this grungy diner frequented by sanitation workers. It had great Southern cooking and I ate a lot of meat loaf with gravy, fried chicken, and huge hand-carved French fries. At one point some Jewish friends of mine opened my eyes to delicatessens -- food like liver knishes, herring in cream sauce, and challah bread. I ate that nonstop for a while. With time I would begin to travel more and eat more. My wife is also a food-obsessed person and we would plan a weekly French feast, gathering the ingredients and finding the right wine. I was working at Esquire and I was drafted into doing a cocktail column. That got me into writing about food history. When I came to the Times, I did a fair amount of writing for the Travel section and the Living section on food-related subjects. The biggest leap came when the Times redesigned the dining section in 1997 and the editor asked me to come over from the Culture section and be the food writer. Instead of writing about food in a scattershot way, I was doing it full time. Then when Ruth Reichl quit the critic’s post to become editor of Gourmet I was asked to be the critic, which became official on April 1, 1999. It’s all been very haphazard. Your own enthusiasm catches up with you from behind. You were doing it but didn’t realize you were doing it. By sheer accident things fell together in a particular way. It varies. Not seven nights a week. You’d grow to hate the subject you write about. Four or five nights a week, plus lunches. Sometimes you do. There’s a sort of weekly cycle of intense eating where by the end of the week you really do look forward to having a home-cooked meal. However, you wake up every morning and you’re hungry again. It’s an infinitely renewable resource, hunger. If you take one day off, you’re revved up and ready to go to the next bistro. It’s good to eat at home anyway. You lose touch with real food if you eat out every night of the week and never get near a stove and never get your hands on raw ingredients. You end up inhabiting this ridiculously rarefied world, a place no normal person lives in. Your own failures in the kitchen help you appreciate the successes of the restaurants. Yes, sometimes more so than my restaurant reviews. There’s some sort of mystique around the restaurant critic’s job and way of life that people are drawn to. There’s a little bit of the espionage aspect that people are intrigued by, the idea that you might be in disguise or traveling under an assumed name. I usually like to keep my methods mysterious, so I’ll leave it at that. I certainly don’t reserve a table in my own name and don’t pay under my own name. I take every possible step to insure I’m not recognized or identified, either when I’m in a restaurant or when I’m paying a bill. Making sure that you’re not getting special treatment so that you can report on the restaurant the way an ordinary diner experiences it. You want to offer the readers a true picture of how they will be treated and how they will eat. All that gets distorted if the restaurant knows they’re feeding a restaurant critic. I certainly do get recognized. When you go to a new restaurant and you’re going multiple times in a period of a few weeks, members of the staff are on high alert to begin with. Common sense tells them that the person who keeps showing up might be the critic from The New York Times, so it’s a game in a way or a competition between the restaurant owners and me. Sometimes I get away with it. You try to preserve anonymity but you can’t guarantee it. Sometimes they recognize you on the second visit, sometimes on the third visit. This can backfire, by the way. Service can become over attentive. People make mistakes they wouldn’t ordinarily make. They get nervous and drop things on the floor. They try so hard to please that they wind up annoying you. In the end they probably would have been better off not recognizing the critic. Think about it, how much can they change? They can’t go out and remake all their stock. They can’t go out and get better ingredients. The chef can’t go out and become a better chef. They are what they are. They can fuss around at the margins but can’t suddenly elevate the quality level for one evening. I come from a skinny family. It’s not willpower. If it depended on will power, I’d be doomed. People hate me for this, but I eat as much as I want as often as I want, and if I don’t I will actually lose weight. ### New York Eats Out press release Support for this exhibition has been provided by Cascade Linen and Uniform Service. Additional support has been provided by The Nash Family Foundation. Support for The New York Public Library’s Exhibitions Program has been provided by Pinewood Foundation and by Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III. Contact: Herb Scher and Sabina Potaczek, 212-704-8600
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