Toqueland Wire

July 13, 2012
Moment in Time: The Thinking Man’s Profession?
A Lightbulb Moment as Some Woodworkers Learn About Ghostwriting
[This is my second post from Italy, where I’m traveling with Michael White, researching our upcoming book, along with Evan Sung, who’s shooting photographs for us. (First post is here.) I’ll be abroad through Thursday, July 19, so check back for further posts here in the Toqueland Wire.]

Michael White (second from right) and Evan Sung (far right) greet some craftsmen in Imola, Italy, July 12, 2012
While walking to our car in Imola yesterday, Michael, Evan, and I passed by a woodworking shop situated, rather charmingly, in the former home of a small church. Some of the craftsmen there fashioned the original woodwork for San Domenico restaurant when it opened way back in 1970, and they were old friends of Michael, who introduced Evan to the guys. They had no problem understanding when he told them that Evan was photographing his cookbook.
But when he introduced me and told them that I was writing his cookbook, he was met with quizzical glances. How could I be writing his book?
Michael explained, in Italian, the nature of our working relationship. The quizzical looks continued, so he kept explaining, until finally one of them got it. I only know a few words of Italian, but I understood perfectly what the concept-grasper said next:
“Ah,” he exclaimed.  “Tu pense e lui scrive!” You think and he writes!
Everybody cracked up, and after a second, so did I: It was the perfect, five-word explanation that eluded the food-writing world a few months back.
“Esatto,” I said. Exactly!
- Andrew
Published in Dispatches, Italy Visit 2012, Michael White, Moment in Time
July 13, 2012
Local Hero
Maybe Michael White Really Is Italian After All
[This is the first of several posts from Italy, where I’m traveling with Michael White, researching and photographing our upcoming cookbook. I’ll be here through Thursday, July 19, so check back for further posts.]

Michael White, talking and gesturing like a pro, Tre Monti, Italy, July 13, 2012
When people remark on how much Michael White loves Italy, he’s apt to go them one better, replying that “I am Italian.”
Uttered in the concrete canyons of midtown Manhattan, where Michael is the chef of restaurants such as Marea and Ai Fiori, and of Osteria Morini and Nicoletta further downtown, the line seems like a bit of a joke. If there’s one thing this perennially pale, hulking, former offensive tackle from Beloit, Wisconsin isn’t, it’s Italian.
At least that’s the logical and literal truth of the matter. But spend a few days in Italy with Michael, as photographer Evan Sung (who’s shooting our forthcoming cookbook) and I have been doing this week, and you might be left with the impression that Michael’s birthplace and nationality are mere technicalities and that he is, in fact, Italian.
I had my first inking of this when he picked us up at the Bologna airport Tuesday. He’d come out a week early to do some advance work for our photo shoots and spend some time with his wife Giovanna, and their young daughter, who are summering here. (Gio is a bona fide Italian; they met when Michael worked at the original San Domenico in Imola for a span of several years in the 1990s.)
Having spoken almost nothing but Italian for a week, Michael had a tough time reverting to English. “We have to get on the … the–” he said, trailing off. “Sorry, guys. I’ve been speaking Italian for a week. My English is—“ he made a gesture, indicating “gone.” Finally, the elusive word came bubbling to mind: “Highway! We have to get on the highway.”
Those hand gestures were more exaggerated than they were back in New York just a week prior, as well–more proof of his true nationality?
But linguistic amnesia and a tendency to speak with his hands, was nothing next to the nonstop evidence of his true identity we experienced over the next several hours as we saw Michael walk in and around our hotel in the hills of Dozza, through the kitchen of San Domenico, and in and around the streets of Imola. I’ve never been to Beloit with Michael, but Imola is his hometown as surely as any other place could possibly be. Shopkeepers stop and wave at him, and the chef and waiters at the hotel pool all know him (he never worked there, but this is, to put it mildly, a small and intimate area). What’s more, Michael recently shepherded Tony Bourdain around the region for an upcoming No Reservations episode, and the visit garnered some local media attention, so Michael is also a bit of a celebrity; strangers stop and subtly point at him, or nod in his direction as he passes by.
Word of Michael’s success in the States has spread around his old circle of friends and acquaintances, and they stop him and speak Italian, adapting his American name from the rather innocuous “Michael” to a heavily accented, affectionate, and emphatic “MY-KOL” that seems to have an exclamation mark as part of its spelling.
Everybody here seems to know that Michael’s back in America, in New York, and that he operates a lot of restaurants. They ask him how many, and he tells them. The one they all know about is Osteria Morini, named for his mentor, San Domenico’s founder Gianluigi Morini, which tickles them.

Michael White and Gianluigi Morini, circa 1994. This picture sits in the San Domenico dining room today.
Thanks to his network of friends here, our work has been made relatively easy: we borrowed an outdoor space next to San Domenico to shoot dishes for the book Wednesday (more on that later), and the restaurant’s kitchen has been available to us whenever we need it. Today, we’re shooting at a spectacular outdoor patio that belongs to a friend of his, and most of the mise en place and prep was provided and seen to by San Domenico’s chef Valentino Marcattilii (more on him later, too) who surprised Michael by taking the day away from his own kitchen to come with us and help his old charge prep food for photographs.
I’m writing this post from the patio pictured at the top of this post, the one where we’re shooting today. (That’s Valentino on the right in his chef’s whites). We’re having dinner at San Domenico tonight and tomorrow we push off for a day in Bologna, and then on to Campagna, which will be our base for the next five days. I myself am already getting a little homesick for Imola, and not just because of the incredible hospitality that’s been heaped upon us and the fact that nothing like it awaits us in the south. I’ve come to understand what this place means to Michael, and can only imagine how hard it’s going to be to push off. It’s a contagious feeling.
- Andrew
Published in Dispatches, Italy Visit 2012, Michael White
July 3, 2012
Slice of Life: Ciao, Centolire
My Last Lunch at Pino Luongo’s Upper East Side Restaurant

Pino Luongo, at "our" table at Centolire
A few weeks ago, I went up to Centolire on Madison Avenue, for a last lunch there with Pino Luongo.
I’m about the last person capable of writing an objective sentence about Pino. Not only was I briefly his publicist a lifetime ago, but we’ve written three books together and he’s been an exceptional friend to me: the year that I became a professional writer, he gifted me an office in his corporate headquarters over Le Madri so I wouldn’t have to spend all my waking hours in my cramped apartment; when he heard I was going to propose to my then-girlfriend on a trip to Italy, he arranged all of our Tuscany accommodations; and, last year, when I was rocked by a family tragedy, he was among the very few who picked up the phone and made one of those excruciating, supportive calls that nobody wants to make.
Of course, if you know anything about the New York City restaurant business, then you know that this isn’t necessarily everybody’s relationship with Pino. In an affectionate chapter in Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain famously summed up that Pino was “.. . a man envied, feared, despised, emulated and admired by many who have worked for and with him” and acknowledged that much of what his fellow chefs who’d been through “Pino’s wringer” had to say about him was “undoubtedly true.”
I’ve always found those sentences especially memorable, apt, and fair: Pino has his detractors and his enemies, but he also has his fans and friends, a small and strangely silent group of journalists and chefs who will privately tell you that they admire and learned a lot from him. For my part, I’ve generally made it a policy to go by own experience with people, adopting an “innocent until proven guilty” approach. It was with that orientation that I began my working relationship with Pino, and we’ve been tight for more than a decade.
I knew that Centolire’s closing was coming, having had a window onto Pino’s feelings about what he had long considered exorbitant rent, and of his deteriorating relationship with his landlord over the past several months.
And so, there we were at lunch. We only ever sat at one table: the deuce at the top of the stairs to the second floor, from which Pino could thank diners as they left, or urgently wave over a floor manager to tend to them as they arrived. We interviewed for two of our books there and caught up over dinner regularly when we weren’t engaged in a collaboration.
It was a spectacular June afternoon, and the downstairs cafe was full. Upstairs, in the main dining room, the crowd was sparse, as it usually was at lunch. For this momentous occasion, I wanted a pasta and selected the Bolognese, robust and soul-nurturing as ever.
It wasn’t exactly a mournful meal, but Pino was clearly a man with a lot on his mind, because news of the restaurant’s imminent closing was about to break, though we had no idea how soon that would happen. Although he still runs the modest Morso, on East 59th Street, Centolire was the last in a string of grand restaurants that went back to the mid 1980s and included such juggernauts as Le Madri, Coco Pazzo, Mad 61, and Sapore di Mare in East Hampton. Centolire opened at the tail end of Pino’s ill-fated takeover of the Sfuzzi restaurant chain in the late 1990s as well as his personal Everest, Tuscan Square, a combination restaurant and retail concept in Rockefeller Center that never quite found the substantial traction required for such a gargantuan enterprise.
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Published in Restaurants, Slice of Life
June 22, 2012
Prove It All Night
Kitchen Indifference at Gran Electrica, Late Night Redemption at Arthur on Smith

Thanks for coming, now get out (Day of the Dead-inspired artwork on the wall at Gran Electrica)
“Dana Cowin asked me to name the three warning signs that you should get up and leave a restaurant before it’s too late.”
That was Josh Wesson, the legendarily witty, charming, flirtatious, and knowledgeable wine authority, co-author with David Rosengarten of the classic book Red Wine with Fish, and founder of the retail chain Best Cellars.
Josh and I were sitting not twelve hours ago with Red Cat’s Jimmy Bradley. We were catching up for the first time in years in the spacious garden behind Gran Electrica, in Brooklyn’s DUMBO, when Josh recounted the question that Cowin, Food & Wine magazine’s editor, asked him onstage during the annual Food & Wine Classic at Aspen last weekend, where Josh is a longtime attraction (if you ever get the chance to hear him talk about wine, don’t miss it).
His answer: “A lousy reception at the door; a lag time of more than five minutes between being seated and either getting a drink order in or between the order and the arrival of said drink; and a bad bread basket.” On the last point, he elaborated that he’d never had bad bread followed by good food. Can’t say I could argue with that, or any of his criteria.
We didn’t have a lousy reception at the door at Gran Electrica, and there’s no bread basket, but the lag time between ordering a bottle of wine and its arrival was in considerable excess of five minutes. (Josh also caught an error that most wine mortals would have missed on the list: Channing Daughters Rosé was listed as being made from Refosco grapes on the by-the-glass list and Syrah on the bottle list. It also irked him that nobody could speak to the relative merits of the two bottles he was torn between on the relatively short wine card. .. make that a fourth warning sign.)
The menu consists of small plates and not-so-small plates, all suitable if not necessarily intended for sharing. We ordered tongue tacos, fish tacos, coctel (mixed seafood cocktail), carne cocida en limon (a sort-of beef ceviche), and a few others. As would be the case with many diners accustomed to the small-plate format, we intended this as a first strike, with plans to take stock and order more food and drink after devouring and imbibing what we’d so far committed to.
We detected an air of inflexibility bordering on the inhospitable when Josh asked to “supersize” an order of tacos, which come in sets of two, by ordering a third.
Our waitress was charming and quick-witted–when Josh asked if she’d had to personally stomp the grapes for our slow-to-arrive wine, she replied, with coquettish irony, “I prefer to keep my grape-stomping habits to myself, sir.”–but she didn’t have a snappy retort to the taco query: “Sorry,” she said, with the weariness of somebody who’d been in this awkward position more than a few times in the recent past. “They only come in orders of two. The chef is adamant about that.”
This didn’t go over too well with Josh or Jimmy, two old-school sorts who’d pretty much do anything to make a customer happy, certainly something as easy as letting them buy one measly taco à la carte. Warning sign number five?
The food was fine, no more or less than what you’d expect from the brief menu descriptions, and I likely wouldn’t have written about the experience at all except that when we tried to order more food, we were told that the kitchen had closed, but for desert. You would think that a restaurant like Gran Electrica, on a Thursday night, in a thriving Brooklyn neighborhood, with a pulsating bar scene, that takes your name at 8:30, doesn’t seat you until 9:30, and doesn’t get your first order in until close to 10pm, might keep the kitchen open until later than 10:45, or at least give you fair warning that a second round of small plates was out of the question. But there we were, feeling hip and hungry in the middle of an otherwise fully functioning restaurant.
The funny thing was that it was just a few hours earlier that I’d had a conversation with a restaurateur friend about the relative merits of dining when you’re known to the house, and when you’re not. “I’m starting to like it more incognito,” he said to me. “You get the real experience that way, really see what the place is about and how they’re doing.”
Not knowing anybody at Gran Electrica, we were surely getting the “real” experience, but Josh and Jimmy were sufficiently miffed by the refusal of more grub, that Jimmy felt the need to out himself, asking our waitress to: “Tell the chef Jimmy Bradley says thanks for nothing.”
I have to say, I felt the same way: Much as I love this borough I’ve called home for the past several years, and though I’m a fan of many of its restaurants (Char No 4, Seersucker, Prime Meats, Black Mountain, Franny’s, and the brilliant Brooklyn Fare, to name but a few that do it right), there are times when our eateries validate everything Brooklyn’s critics say: doing-you-a-favor attitude, poor table management (i.e., the providing and replenishment of silverware, water, and so on), and the notion tonight that it was perfectly acceptable to stop offering food at what amounted to mid-meal.
[Update 6/22/12, 7:10pm: Gran Electrica's chef de cuisine Sam Richman and I just had a nice email exchange. He says that he doesn't have a hard-and-fast two-taco policy and doesn't know why the kitchen was closed when we were still eating. He did all anyone could ask of a chef in his position: got in touch, explained as best he could, and didn't begrudge me my experience. Outreach like this makes all the difference; I'll try to give the place another chance before the summer's out.]

Arthur on Smith, after hours
On the Other Hand … 
Serving into the wee hours isn’t a problem for a new Cobble Hill restaurant that I like quite a bit, Arthur on Smith, where chef Joe Isidori just launched a late-night menu that will be offered from 11pm until 1am Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. I first met Joe a few months ago when he opened the joint, and I’m an unabashed fan, both of his food and of his unassuming demeanor.
We might not have made it over to Arthur on Smith last night for the informal soiree they were throwing to kick off the menu, except that we were suffering from dinner interruptus, and were hungry.
Arthur on Smith was full of friends of the house and local business owners, there as Joe’s guests to sample the food which was brought out as it was prepared and arrayed on a long, banquet-style table at the back of the dining room where we all helped ourselves.
There were sandwiches of lamb, pork, and perhaps most memorably and originally thick-cut mortadella, the pistachios within whole and crunchy, slathered with mustard, the best, high-class bologna sandwich you could imagine. We also enjoyed pasta carbonara, gnocchi with (I think) short rib sauce, and salads of beets and tomatoes. We washed these snacks down with Lambrusco, about which Josh uttered one of his signature throwaway gems: “It’s delicious and doesn’t have too much alcohol; a surgeon could have it for lunch and not mess up in the afternoon.”
I’m not exactly sure in what sized portions this will all be offered on a (late) nightly basis, but in a neighborhood that shuts down surprisingly early, even on the weekends, this is a great new option to add to the itinerary.
Beyond all that, we had a fun time in the cool, relaxed, midnight-in-summer vibe, joined at one point by Don Pintabona, the original chef of Tribeca Grill and an old pal of the lot of us, including Joe. There was a touching moment when Don mentioned that he was part of the Hayden’s Heroes benefit being hosted this Sunday at Colicchio and Sons in honor of chef Gerry Hayden, a veteran of such kitchens as Aureole, who’s been in the throes of ALS (aka Lou Gehrig’s disease) for the past several years. (The event, as I understand it, is sold out, but you can donate here.)  Jimmy, who’s not one of the headliner chefs at the event, immediately offered to help out in the back of the house, a spontaneous gesture of solidarity between him and Don, all in support of their fellow toque. After the indignities of our first stop on this night, the second couldn’t have been more reassuring.
- Andrew
Published in Brooklyn, Restaurants
June 20, 2012
Ain’t Gonna Be No Proposal
Grand Central Publishing Acquires Harold Dieterle Book Project Based on Toqueland Posts

Harold Dieterle (photo courtesy Perilla restaurant)
I haven’t even met Amanda Englander and she’s already made a liar out of me.
After two recent posts about the book concept Harold Dieterle and I had devised for a forthcoming project, Harold Dieterle’s Kitchen Notebook, I promised to keep you all posted on the proposal process. But that won’t be happening because Amanda, an editor at Grand Central Publishing, swooped in and bought the project, sans proposal, based on the idea, the blog posts, and on her and the company’s enthusiasm for Harold and what he does. We couldn’t be happier: while it’s always a useful exercise to write a proposal, the notion that we get to jump right in and start writing the book is incredibly appealing.
The way this all came together, with a series of phone calls and emails between Amanda and our agent, David Black, brought up a little fact of publishing life that I always find amusing: It’s very common to sell projects to an editor without having met her or him. Every once in a while you engage in a series of face-to-face meetings with editors or perhaps entire conference-rooms full of publishing and marketing executives at various houses, but it’s just as, if not more, common to sell the book to somebody you’ve never actually met, which is kind of funny when you think about how intimate the editorial process is. Amanda and I spoke for the first time just a few minutes ago (we hit if off – whew!) and she, Harold, and I will meet over coffee some time in the coming weeks.
Herewith, the publisher’s announcement:
Grand Central Publishing is delighted to announce that it has acquired world rights to HAROLD DIETERLE’S KITCHEN NOTEBOOK by Harold Dieterle and Andrew Friedman. The book, tentatively scheduled to be published in Fall 2014, was acquired by Amanda Englander from David Black at David Black Literary.
HAROLD DIETERLE’S KITCHEN NOTEBOOK will feature approximately 100 recipes based on the new American influences found in Dieterle’s food, each with one “star” ingredient or preparation highlighted on a notebook page that shares an essay on that component and more recipes and tips for using it.
Harold Dieterle is the chef-owner of Kin Shop and Perilla restaurants in New York City. Dieterle was the winner of season 1 of Top Chef. Andrew Friedman  is a prolific cookbook collaborator who has worked with chefs such as Alfred Portale, Laurent Tourondel, and Michelle Bernstein. He is also the founder and chief contributor to Toqueland.com.
As I’ve mentioned before, this is the first collaboration I’ve set up with a publisher since launching Toqueland; Harold and I look forward to giving readers a glimpse into the entire writing and production process, from now through the book’s publication in 2014.
- Andrew
Published in Harold Dieterle
June 20, 2012
The First Pop Up?
Los Angeles’ Ma Maison Was Noteworthy for Many Things, Including an Early Prototype for One of Today’s Most Popular Dining Trends
This mention of a new pop up on Kickstarter reminded me of a little nugget I’ve been looking for an excuse to share. In interviewing Ken Frank, the Napa-based chef of La Toque who came to prominence in 1970s LA, for my forthcoming book on the 70s and 80s, he recounted how he was recruited to go along with Ma Maison owner Patrick Terrail and Ma Maison’s chef Wolfgang Puck, to open a temporary French branch of Ma Maison at the Cannes Film Festival way back in 1980.
Frank was supposed to be doing other things just about then, but life interfered. Here is how it went down, in his own words:
In April of ’79, the restaurant [I was planning to open next] burned. The partner forgot to extinguish a candle in the dining room when he closed up at night and the restaurant burned to the ground. Well, not to the ground, but damn near. I finally got a chance to look at the books and I didn’t know anything about bookkeeping. I was the cook.  It turns out the partner hadn’t been paying the waiters their tips and we were really in debt so I threw the partner out.
In the meantime, because the restaurant was closed for remodeling . .. Patrick and Wolfgang invited me to go open Ma Maison Cannes at the Cannes film festival in May of 1980. We went over to Cannes and we opened a Ma Maison for two weeks . .. we went over there and . .. we had a blast in this gorgeous chateau right on the point. And of course all of Patrick’s Hollywood customers that were in Cannes for the film festival came and ate with us every night, and we went out after dinner every night and we just had a blast. 
As you can see, Frank doesn’t use the term “pop up,” because it wasn’t part of the vernacular. I’m not yet 100% sure this was the first restaurant that would fall, retroactively, into that category, but it’s the first instance that I’m aware of.
I look forward to learning more details about this episode as I continue interviewing people for the book. In the meantime, I recently came across this nugget from the great Roger Ebert’s archives, in which he related his impressions of Ma Maison Cannes as part of his mid-festival wrap up at the time. (The Ma Maison stuff is eight paragraphs in.) There are some fun details, including the fact that Terrail flew in 800 pounds of New York strip steaks. Money quote: “Their [the French] thoughts about an American flying in to open his own festival restaurant are unprintable.”
Fascinatingly, there’s no mention of Puck in Ebert’s account. Chefs weren’t celebrities then; though Puck was a known quantity to some, a Hollywood executive who lunched at Ma Maison multiple times a week, told me that “we never knew there was a Wolfgang.” That would all change shortly after the Cannes adventure, of course, when Puck opened Spago.
- Andrew
Published in 70s/80s Chef Book (Ecco Press)
May 14, 2012
Hasta La Pasta
Michael White Shoots for a Little Old School Industry Camaraderie Monday Nights at Osteria Morini

Cappelletti at Osteria Morini (photo copyright by Nick Solares, courtesy Altamarea Group)
Tonight, Michael White’s Osteria Morini (218 Lafayette Street) will kick off what the chef hopes will become a regular stop on the late-night culinary circuit: “Industry” pasta nights. The restaurant is offering all its pastas for $10 from 9:30pm until closing every Monday night. You’re supposed to mention that you’re in “the industry” but nobody’ll check your working papers or ask you for the secret handshake. So if you’re a toque on a night off, or enjoying an early push-off time on one of the quieter nights of the week, or just a pasta-loving New Yorker or visitor to our fair city who enjoys pasta, you might want to stop in and end your day with a bargain bowl of top-notch noodles, or carbo load for the long bar crawl ahead.
I spoke to Michael about this new promotion over the weekend and he says he started it in hopes of conjuring a little of the community he enjoyed as a young cook–he has especially fond memories of  late nights at Blue Ribbon–but which he feels has gone out of the biz in recent years. He’ll be on hand this evening, and I plan to drop in myself.
- Andrew
Published in Michael White, Restaurants
May 11, 2012
Inside the Writer’s Studio
A Working Session Reveals Where the Chef Ends and the Collaborator Begins 
[Editor's Note: In this post, the second of a two-part series about working on a cookbook proposal for Harold Dieterle's Kitchen Notebook, we take you inside a working session. - A.F.]

Harold Dieterle, left, and Andrew Friedman, at Morandi restaurant, NYC
The other day, I shared a little about how the idea for my next collaboration, Harold Dieterle’s Kitchen Notebook, came about. If you haven’t already, I suggest you read that post before reading this one, to familiarize yourself with the book’s concept and structure.
Today, I thought it might be interesting to take you inside an actual working session, for two reasons: (a) to demonstrate how a cookbook takes shape, from inception to publication; this is the first collaboration I’ve taken on since relaunching Toqueland earlier this year, and I plan to track its every development here, and (b) after the confusion left in the wake of some recent newspaper stories about collaborating, I thought there’d be nothing like pulling back the curtain on the process to help clear up how things actually work, at least between one chef and one collaborator.
Two of the most important components of a cookbook proposal are the sample recipes and text. Herewith, the genesis of some material, in three steps:
STEP 1:
Harold emails me a recipe for a dish.
Here is the recipe for Ricotta Cheese, Acorn Squash Tempura, Truffle Honey, Sunflower Seeds, and Grilled Bread, exactly as it was received:
Tempura
All Purpose Flour 1 cup
Soda Water 1 pint
Put the flour & soda water in a bowl; mix vigorously with a whisk, then strain & reserve.
Acorn Squash- peeled, sliced 1/4in thick 1ea. / about 16 slices
Truffle Honey 2T
Sunflower Seeds-toasted 3T
Grilled/toasted Sourdough Bread- ¼ inch thick 8 slices
S&P tt **
Extra Virgin Olive oil 4 T
[** "tt" = "to taste"]
Preheat deep fry or large pot of oil to 350f. Coat the acorn squash slices in tempura batter. Remove excess batter and place in the oil for about 2 minutes or till golden brown. Remove from oil, season generously with salt & pepper and lay on paper towel.
To The plate;
Place 2 slices of bread on each plate drizzle each slice with olive oil, place ricotta cheese on each slice. Next drizzle truffle honey over the cheese, sprinkle sunflower seeds over the top. Finish by laying squash tempura over the top.
[NOTE: Harold also sent along his recipe for homemade ricotta and ways to vary/use it, all of which has been edited below. In the interest of space, I'm not including his version here; suffice it to say the level of detail and description was comparable to what you see above.]
STEP 2:
We conduct an interview based on the recipe.
Here’s the audio of our interview about both the dish and the ricotta cheese. I’m presenting the full, 7-minute dialog here for those interested in how all elements find their way into the text that follows, but you might well get the gist after a minute or two.
Harold Dieterle Interview – ricotta (April 13, 2012)
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Published in Harold Dieterle
May 9, 2012
Eureka!
After Months of Brainstorming with Harold Dieterle, A Cookbook Concept Emerges
[Editor's Note: In this post, the first of a two-part series, we take you inside the process of developing of a new book project. This piece describes how a concept is devised; the follow-up, which I'll run on Friday, will take you inside a working session, complete with audio of an interview and an illustration of how a chef-collaborator relationship works. - A.F.]

Right in Front of Our Noses: Everything We Needed to Know was Locked in Here (photo copyright by Andrew Friedman)
Every so often, somebody pondering a book idea asks me for advice. One of the questions that inevitably arises is how long it takes to write a book proposal, the document that literary agents circulate to editors and publishers in hopes of setting the project up with a publishing house.
“Writing a proposal only takes a few weeks,” I say. “The variable is how long it takes to come up with a concept.”
With very few exceptions, even the most well-known culinary celebrities need a solid concept to convince a publisher that their book is viable. Oh, sure, if you’re a big enough television star, you might be able to sell the flimsiest of ideas, or even enter into a blind book deal, with the idea to come at a later date. Generally speaking, though, a concept will make or break one’s publishing prospects.
I’ve collaborated on projects where the concept was evident from the get-go, restaurant books being the most obvious examples, along with those that grew directly out of a chef’s area of specialization, such as Go Fish, which Laurent Tourondel and I conceived while he was the chef of the posh seafood temple Cello. In cases where the concept isn’t as turnkey, my main goal is to come up with a concept that bridges what a particular chef does in his or her restaurant kitchen(s) with what home cooks do in theirs. Sometimes the answer reveals itself quickly; others it can take several frustrating months
As mentioned a few months back on this site, Harold Dieterle and I have been engaged in a sporadic dialogue about a possible cookbook project since last fall. It’s been a long and winding road: At first, we were going to write a Thai book since Harold has such a passion for it. But we succumbed to the commercial limitations of that notion, switched gears, and decided to write a more general cookbook. To put it in restaurant terms, we went from focusing on what Harold does at Kin Shop to what he does at Perilla.
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Published in Harold Dieterle
April 18, 2012
The Toqueland Interview: Alan Harding
The Godfather of Brooklyn’s Dining Renaissance on Discovering Smith Street, Outer-Borough Economics, & Creative Restlessness

Alan Harding, photographed outside Littleneck Restaurant, March 2012
Back in 1997, Alan Harding, who first garnered attention at Nosmo King in Tribeca, stunned New York diners when he crossed the East River and opened Patois on a desolate stretch of Smith Street in Brooklyn. The space that housed Patois is now home to red-hot Battersby and Smith is, of course, one of the premiere thoroughfares of the modern Brooklyn dining scene. Harding and his Patois partners Jim Mamary and Mamary’s brother Paul, collectively and individually, would go on to have a hand, if not necessarily a stake, in more than a dozen Brooklyn restaurants including Uncle Pho, Schnäck, and Pacifico.
Though widely acknowledged as Brooklyn’s culinary Pied Piper, Harding is no longer associated with past projects other than the Gowanus Yacht Club, a seasonal, open-air MASH unit of a watering hole in Carroll Gardens. But he’s still very much a factor out here in Kings County, currently as the chef (though not a partner) at Littleneck, a fish house on Third Avenue, between President and Carroll.
Last spring, while pondering a possible book about Brooklyn, I sat down with Harding in the open air of the Gowanus Yacht Club, which happens to be Toqueland’s favorite place to knock off early in the summer, and as he puffed on a stogie (a habit he’s since quit), discussed his pioneering of Smith Street and what’s transpired in these parts since those days. The book never happened, but I recently came across the dialogue and, with Harding’s consent, decided to share it here.
TOQUELAND: Let’s contextualize: I remember, when I lived in Park Slope twenty years ago, if we made plans with people in Manhattan, there wasn’t even a discussion about venue; the assumption was that the Brooklyn people came into “the city.”
HARDING: Correct.
TOQUELAND: And now, Manhattan people might come to Brooklyn.
HARDING: Well, you know, we decided to do a project in Brooklyn because we all lived in Brooklyn and because the city at that time was hard. It’s always been hard.
TOQUELAND: You don’t just mean financially?
HARDING: Financially and logistically and entrepreneurially and bureaucratically. For a long time, Brooklyn was off the radar as a place that the city could generate revenue from the entrepreneurship. The Board of Health never came to Brooklyn because they were so busy doing places in Manhattan. For a long time it was like this like secret little place that had people that enjoyed good food that were sick of going to Manhattan.
At Patois, there was a line out the door and they had to wait in the backyard in a tent where there was a wood-burning stove. Nowadays, if someone said, “There’s a tent in the back with a wood burning stove,” probably the first five calls would be to 311.
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Published in Brooklyn, Interviews