Vignettes & Vinaigrettes: A Memoir Of Catering Before Food Was Hot

By Carol G. Durst-Wertheim

"Carol Durst, an important New York City caterer for fifteen years starting in the early '80s, celebrates her craft and its unsung heroes," writes Sara Moulton, chef, author of "Home Cooking 101: How to Make Everything Taste Better," and host of TV's "Sara's Weeknight Meals." "The food industry was more collegial then; co-workers and fellow chefs were family. There were no big egos; it was about getting the job done and done well—sometimes in daunting circumstances. Along the way, we're also given a portrait of the city at the time, which was marked by the devastation of the AIDS crisis. It is a fascinating read."

Durst-Wertheim takes us on a vivid journey from the very beginning of her successful career, starting a business, raising a family, and moving to the New York suburbs. She has a blithe precision as a writer, a keen eye for people and their human nature, and a marvelous, well-honed sense of the preposterous that will by turns amuse and deeply move her reader.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781946989567

Book preview

industry.

Early Years

1979–81

Why Bill Hired Me

THE SHORT ANSWER: I HAD CREDENTIALS, smarts, could get along with anyone, and was not overly impressed with myself. Also, it was apparent that I thought independently and could live outside the box, not needing job structure or a lock-step career path. I had no issue challenging the usual and customary way things were done, but I was polite about it. I spoke well and could stand before the New School administrators swapping academic lingo, lead a tour through the kitchens and recruit students by the dozen, swing by the students changing in the locker room, and not freak out at the language, drugs, nudity, and knives flashing by. Hey, I was twenty-seven and could carry myself on four-inch stilettos.

The longer answer weaves back through my life history, but I don’t have to bore you with all the details. Suffice it to say, I had a spotty undergraduate history, complete with a Me Too moment that changed my arts career trajectory. I focused in graduate school on women’s career planning, bounced through jobs in academia, then landed as a research associate at Catalyst, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to women’s career development. There, working under a prestigious FIPSE (Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education) grant, I met Adele Kaplan, part of the team representing Rutgers University. We knew one another through a professional association (NAWDAC, the National Association of Women Deans, Administrators and Counselors), and she introduced me to her son.

Can you believe he listened to his mother? That’s how I came to be interviewed for the position as director of the restaurant school Bill Liederman was creating, though I knew nothing about the restaurant industry. After Catalyst, I had moved to New York State Department of Labor to coordinate the Displaced Homemakers Program until a budget crisis forced me out of my office on the seventy-third floor of the World Trade Center. By my late twenties I had some chops in academic, not-for-profit, and government circles. I had academic credentials, writing and verbal presentation skills, and I understood how to put a legitimate academic curriculum in front of the New School dean. Bill needed the dean’s support and approval to proceed with his extraordinary idea of organizing the New York Restaurant School as a full-time eighteen-week, twelve-credit program. With my resume attached, Bill’s proposal flew past the Department of Education, Adult Education Division, in Albany, under the aegis of the New School’s licensure. There were no issues with government regulations, and we began to recruit a first class for January, 1981.

My NAWDAC dinner group gathered at my apartment the night before I was going to begin working with Bill and John Lowy in December 1980, and everyone toasted Adele for connecting me with her son’s new venture.

Just after they left, I heard sirens and saw flashing ambulance lights heading down Broadway. I turned on the news and watched Yoko Ono struggle to break free from the press at St. Luke’s Emergency Room. Weeping as I cleaned up, I heard shrieking from the streets; John Lennon had been shot three blocks from my apartment.

I dragged myself to my new work the next day; all any of us could do was sit around and cry. But the day after that, I began to interview faculty and to scratch out the first tentative schedules. We were all deeply saddened to lose John Lennon, but we had a new opportunity on the table, and the clock was ticking, so we launched our new culinary venture.

My Culinary Education Begins

TO HELP ME UNDERSTAND what culinary education was about, Bill Liederman (the kid brother of David Liederman of David’s Cookies—it’s a small world), asked me to watch a few classes in the Saucier Cuisine test kitchen on the corner of Madison Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street. This was the space where David was developing a demi-glace sauce base. He already had David’s Cookies and a restaurant on the Upper East Side, but I didn’t know much about that. I wasn’t sure I would find much to respect there. In the Department of Labor, the food industry had a terrible reputation for abusing workers.

At the time we first met, in late 1979, I was traveling all over New York State: hauling into Buffalo in February, arriving in Canton up in the North Country on a twelve-seater prop plane, cashing State vouchers for buses and trains everywhere else as Coordinator of the Displaced Homemaker Program for the New York State Department of Labor.

Bill took a table to promote his cooking school at a conference I organized in Brooklyn, in June 1980, for seven hundred women and dozens of not-for-profit agencies, employers, and politicians willing to focus on the issues of older women. I was busy and didn’t have much interest in what Bill was saying about food industry opportunities; I didn’t see what the big deal was about cooking classes. But we kept talking over the summer.

Bill tried to explain what a vocational class would look like, and what an avocational class meant. He had cobbled together a six-week professional program taught in the Saucier kitchen and he was now trying to expand that into a full-time eighteen-week program for the New School for Social Research. Gradually, I learned he wanted me as director. He and John Lowy, his partner and sidekick for years of adventures, would run the avocational classes, building an ever-increasing assortment of classes designed for home cooks, while I was to build this professional program. At least, that was how it was originally planned. We had no idea the professional program would catapult us onto a burgeoning New York City food scene, set the pattern for dozens of other culinary schools throughout the nation, and provide a major route for career changers and people who wanted to enter the food industry without spending years at the Culinary Institute of America up in Hyde Park on the Hudson River.

By the fall of 1980, we were talking more seriously, and Bill suggested I watch Pat Bartholomew, Nick Malgieri, and Jack Ubaldi to see a sampling of the classes he was describing. His plan was to keep these classes going in their present Saucier test-kitchen space until the new facility, with three commercial teaching kitchens and a fourth kitchen connected to a restaurant space, was constructed—oh, in a month or so, certainly by the end of January 1981, he estimated. Bill and John walked me through the construction site at 27 West Thirty-fourth Street and conducted my first official interview there as I wobbled around on a tipsy, torn old office chair, John sat on an upturned milk crate, and Bill balanced himself on a rickety cane-baked chair with a hole punched through the seat. They wanted to be sure I wasn’t too proper to handle work on a messy, unfinished project. I was coming down, literally, from the Seventy-third floor of the World Trade Tower II, harbor view, and they were offering me an office, with no windows, the size of my conference table. They wanted to be perfectly clear this was the deal: hard work creating an adult-training program from scratch, while workers finished the construction. Nothing would be fancy, just the very best ingredients. Would I give up my prestigious government job working for the New York State Commissioner of Labor? Turned out, I had to, but that wasn’t clear yet.

Pat’s was the first class they scheduled for me. This was fall 1980: I watched as Pat Bartholomew scraped Gruyere cheese into her Romaine salad. She carefully explained how to handle, wash, and keep lettuce fresh and crisp. She spoke about extra-virgin olive oil (in 1980, I didn’t know what that was), freshly grated peppercorns, sea salt, and sherry vinegar, in balance to create vinaigrette. I had never tasted a salad like that. I had not thought of contrasts and textures in my salads, had not really noticed whether my croutons were freshly toasted and crispy. I had mostly been eating the rancid ones Pepperidge Farms put in boxes and left too long on grocers’ shelves.

But this woman didn’t fit my preconception and stereotype of a brute cook slamming pots and cursing at staff. She was tall and elegant, erudite and educated. She worked in a corporate dining room by day, taught and was taking a graduate degree by night. Well, that wasn’t what I had expected for the evening. Neither was the salad. I thought I should look further into this cooking business.

Nick Malgieri’s class met a few days later, in the late afternoon as I recall. It was dark gray outside, late fall in New York City, hovering between rain and sleet, pending snow. Nick was introducing a group of well-heeled ladies to Spectacular Holiday Baking. He had also come out of the Trade Towers: He had been an opening pastry chef at Windows on the World. When I first met him, he was a slender, small man with a rapier wit, capacity for a multitude of languages, and the engaging flamboyance I later came to recognize as his trademark performance style.

He was demonstrating Bouche de Noel with the deep mastery that mesmerized all his students. His verbal repartee was sophisticated: He noted clues to watch as the eggs were beaten while he teased a woman with long nails painted to perfection. His strong, quick hands rolled the chocolate genoise around the fabulous buttercream, set the log and a smaller branch at a jaunty angle, draped it all with smooth, silky dark chocolate ganache, and then began decorating with tiny meringue mushrooms he’d dusted in cocoa powder (Dutch process no less), all the while calmly explaining the history of this traditional treat. Of course, it was fabulous!

Over the years I watched him grow from a skinny guy dancing at the clubs all night, flinging exquisite pastry all day, into a masterful TV presence, a traveling road show promoting his many baking books with great wit and intellectual presence. He has a remarkable palate, a refined sophistication. He is a consummate performer. Nick got me in the sweet tooth. Once he showed me Bouche de Noel, everything else looked easy.

My third class, the following morning, was butchering instruction with Jack Ubaldi. His warm eyes seduced me in moments. That gentleman, retired from a lifetime of heavy work in butchering and restaurant cooking, loved the idea of a lady boss not quite half his age. It was obvious we were friends from his first hello.

Ciao, Bella! Notes from a resonant tenor, he offered a loving embrace; eyes lit by his own smile, he was generosity personified. Jack demonstrated butchering while he cooked. He spoke of life, of his life. He sang, soothed students, and enjoyed himself as he demonstrated his skills. He eased his knives along the muscles of meat, respectful, accurate as a surgeon, accurate with an artist’s eye.

He would weave in a story about his restaurant in the bootleg days. He was there again cooking, with people partying around him all night long. Then he would find his way to the Gansevoort Meat Market the next morning to buy meat for the following night. Jack was always working, in love with feeding people. The long hours meant nothing: Where else would he be? His life was the restaurant; the restaurant was his life. Later on, it was the same with his butcher shop.

Did I ever tell you about Ed Koch buying the Newport steaks? It was this triangular muscle I used to cut into a nice steak—a good price and it was very popular. People wanted it! They asked me what it was called. I went home and watched on TV—there was an advertisement for these cigarettes, Newports? And they showed a sailboat, and the sail was just the shape of these steaks, so I named them Newport steaks! Just like that! I sold a lot of them. People really liked them! Well, Ed Koch used to live in the neighborhood, before he was mayor you know, and he’d stop in to buy them. He was a very nice man, and a good customer!

By the time I met him, Jack had already sold the Florence Meat Market on Jones Street to his assistant, Tony, but he couldn’t stand being retired, out of touch with people, so he went over to the New School and asked if they wanted him to teach some cooking or butchering classes in their cafeteria. Thus, the New School got into the culinary education business. Then Bill inherited Jack as they began to expand programs.

Bill wanted me to set up a legitimate curriculum, to show the New School he had a bona fide educator running the eighteen-week program, and I took the job, creating the New York Restaurant School. We worked incredible hours on curriculum and scheduling. We found teachers, recruited students and found them jobs. We worked out systems of operations, protocols, we opened the restaurant with the earliest trial versions of POS (point-of-sale) computer systems, we negotiated the squabbles and struggles of creating a thriving school that opened doors for people who wanted to enter the food industry.

Then, Jack made lunch. No measuring cups in sight, Jack would cook the meat his class had just butchered and he would make sauce for pasta. A salad appeared, lightly dressed with a simple vinaigrette, loaves of crusty bread, a few bottles of wine. We had our very own Strega Nona: There was always enough food for whoever wanted to eat. He just knew how to cook for us all, as an experienced traveler (or lover) knows the terrain, and I began to understand culinary education.

I Fed Al Pacino

NO, I WON’T TELL YOU WHAT HE ATE. I promised I wouldn’t. Everyone wants to know what it was like, feeding him, so I’ll tell you what I can without breaking my promise not to violate his privacy.

He was acting in American Buffalo on Broadway, living in his own home in New York City, but he could not just go around the corner, pop into the diner, and order food. Sunglasses and a fedora pulled low were not enough to camouflage his distinctive face. What a tremendous energy drain to be such a recognized face when everyone feels entitled to sidle up and start a conversation! How could he concentrate the enormous energy needed for a live performance of raging fury at every show if he was interrupted for a signature at any bite?

The job as his private chef came to me in a unique way. I had been the Director of the New York Restaurant School, a position of some authority, which included a particularly energy-draining requirement to pay attention to everyone with a question. I had students, culinary and management faculty, other administrators, guests dining in the restaurant on Thirty-fourth Street, delivery people, lost tourists—all popping their personal questions the moment they saw me. The job also demanded tact, an ability to keep my mouth shut at times, and a capacity to work independently, without a lot of strokes. These might seem like contradictory qualifications, but they overlapped most days.

Once I left the job as Director, I enrolled in the program (yeah, I know it sounds odd, but it’s true), learned to cook professionally, and planned to start my own catering business. The man who took over one of my responsibilities, for Placement Services, received a job order from Mary. She was a friend of one of our cooking school graduates who was already involved in a new restaurant venture. He suggested that Mary call the school and see if they could send over someone who could be discreet and cook for a famous person. Discretion seemed the primary qualification, so the placement officer thought of me. I was given Mary’s telephone number, but no one knew who the famous person was or exactly what would be needed. But the school administrators knew I could handle discretion. They hoped that, by the time I completed the course, I’d be able to cook. I hoped parties or events might develop from private cooking into some catering.

When I called, Mary gave me a few details: the address where the meals were to be served, and what the schedule might look like. I would need to be flexible. She asked if I would be willing to audition, to cook a few meals.

I said, Yes, sure. Will we start with a meal for one, or will there be guests? Do I need to bring my own pots? Will someone let me in, say an hour before dinner is needed? Reasonable questions, I thought. She laughed and said she had to get back to me. When she did, she suggested some favorite foods, told me to bring pots since no one seemed to know what was in the cupboards, and we chose a date for my audition.

And may I ask, for whom shall I be cooking?

Somehow that question had not been asked or answered during the first call. She giggled; we could communicate so easily already. Al Pacino. I’ll let you in Thursday, she said.

Wow, I thought. I really admired this astounding actor and thought it would be a great gig to describe to my grandchildren. I had none, not even a child, at that point, but I