2001: Enters the Outlaw

Doorway near Kerala, drawn by Lucey Bowen. from her photograph.

     An old friend, foodie, and fellow Gourmet aficionado observed of the magazine's audience in the 1940s, 50s and 60s:  "There used to be men who were not gay and considered it manly to be knowledgable about food and wine."  Add men who consider it macho to ingest the hottest of curries, hot sauces, organ meats, and voilà, there is Anthony Bourdain, profiled in August, 2001.  He'd just published an un-masking of himself and the New York restaurant world,  Kitchen Confidential, and was about to launch his television career with A Cook's Tour,  "a socio-cultural essay on the role food plays in various cultures," but what got "everyone's attention was the extreme eating that Tony engages in."
     The essay, "Kitchen Cowboy," is not about food or travel, although the author followed Bourdain to Mexico for the filming of the series.  It is about a new kind of culture broker.  The twenty-first century culture broker is post-colonial, post-modern, even post-literary. He's all sauced with ironic self-reflection, rarely found in reality television stars.  Not incidentally, the thrust of Bourdain's comments is his Mexican-born kitchen staff that are producing the great French food of Manhattan.
     In retrospect, the greater irony lies in Gourmet's writing about Bourdain.  Yes, he's a famous author and chef.   However, the medium of television, and soon the internet could prove as reliable as the magazine in providing the information and the intimate knowledge of food and place that had been Gourmet's specialty.
    The magazine's graphics had become lyric and evocative.  The travel articles illustrated increasingly exotic destinations reflecting the ever growing sophistication of the audience.  In Kerala, an Ayurvedic spa awaits.  Restaurant reviews had often included a bit of the life story of the owner or chef, but now he or she is the story, as in the Toronto based Sesur Lee and his fusion food.
     2001 was Gourmet's 60th Anniversary.  The September issue was a retrospective. Ruth Reichl commissioned food historian Anne Mendelson to capture the spirit of the magazine's six decades in six one page summaries.  Memorable quotes and recipes followed.  You will remember Anne Mendelson as the biographer of the Rombauer-Beckers of The Joy of Cooking, who I quoted in writing about Alice Richardson in July, 2011.
     I didn't read Gourmet that September.  No sooner had it arrived than we awoke to the news of destruction of the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center.  I wrote in my journal of the enduring feelings of desolation and hopelessness.
     I'm reading her summaries now, a decade later, as I prepare to perform the same sort of analysis on Gourmet's final decade of representing Asia and Asian cooking.  9/11 was the event which would shape the decade, but how do my perceptions from my narrow perspective compare with Mendelson's?  I'm reassured that she sensed much of what I've described.  She wrote of the early Gourmet thusly: "a more intangible , but supremely important element of the magazine's identity was an intense fixation on the past as the standard of meaning." She expressed beautifully the hunger of travelers at that time to experience "a kind of time travel through physical travel."
     She characterized the magazine in the 1970s as pervaded by the sense of loss, a sense that the country and the world were growing ever more homogenous.  She noted that Gourmet was late in recognizing the importance of farming and of new immigrants.   Indeed she wrote that Gourmet was late in paying attention to the food that "New Immigrants"  were bringing and eating.

     France was still the focus of my travel and food fantasies.  Inspired by our stay in Southern France and by my continuing dedication to my-exercise-to-eat triathlon endeavor, Dick and I booked a biking and eating tour through the Dordogne region.  My notebooks filled with drawings and recipes for goat cheese salad with lardon.  The children went to summer school at my father's WASP boarding school in Connecticut.
     When all returned to home, the two teenagers in high school, with all the drama and after-school-sports.  Their school year would be marked by what we saw on television when we woke up that morning.  Four days later, I was to compete in a triathlon on the Pacific Coast.  Unlike many sporting events that week, it was not cancelled, but dedicated to all those who had died.  As a family, we stood as taps echoed across the water and we sang the national anthem with tears in our eyes.  Plunging into the frigid ocean, I felt cleansed.

   


New York:
Sweet-n-Tart Restaurant at 20 Mott Street is closed.
Sweet-n-Tart Café at 76 Mott Street is closed.
Sweet-n-Tart Café at 136-11 38th Avenue, Flushing is closed.

San Francisco:
Ana Mandara at 891 Beach Street is still Ana Manadara.
Masa's at 648 Bush Street is still Masa's.

Los Angeles:
Restaurant Katsu at 11920 Ventura Bourlevard, Studio City is still Katsu.
Banh Cuon Tay Ho #4 at 9629 Bolsa at Westminster is still Banh Cuon Tay Ho.