Free Steal the Menu by Raymond Sokolov Page A

much less than the salary I’d been offered. I inquired. The nice lady in personnel had taken me at my word. When she’d seen that I was young and I’d said I was to be handling food, she’d made me an N2, an assistant salad handler in the cafeteria. We sorted it out.
    In fact, I had inherited a little empire several floors above the
Times
newsroom. The phrase “splendid isolation” might have been coined to describe the food department. While the newsroom wasmaking history by printing the Pentagon Papers, a leaked official study of the Vietnam War and its failures, I luxuriated in my peaceable kingdom. The most splendid of all its appurtenances was the test kitchen, whose professional-style Garland range, immaculate expanse of butcher block counters and forest of heavy-gauge copper pots came with an English test cook and a Polish maid to clean up after her.
    The test cook, Jean Hewitt, was handsome, a diplomate in home economics from London, and quietly furious that I’d gotten the job she thought, with some real justice, she deserved more than I did. My staff also included a secretary, Velma Cannon, a very refined black lady of late middle years devoted to the white southern gentleman who’d previously occupied my desk. Last, but crucial to our ability to respond to the flood of mail that rolled in every day, was the stenographer, Anita Rizzi.
    When the phone rang in that office my first day, I reached for the receiver at my elbow, but Anita beat me to it. Part of her job was to be the first responder. And if she was already on the line, Velma picked up the next call. If Velma and Anita were both busy with calls and still another rang, Jean took that one. I was last in this inverted pecking order, answering the phone at my desk only if the other three were already handling our ever-inquisitive readers. No one ever explained this to me. But I soon figured it out and fell in line. And like the others, when I answered a call, I said, “Food news.”
    I thought it was funny. Downstairs, where the real reporters were, they covered the news. We “covered” fast-breaking recipes and the policy decisions of chefs.
    My irony was misplaced. Even though a great deal of what the
Times
food editor wrote about was not newsworthy, a crucial part of it, as Claiborne had defined the job, really was food news. My respect for him grew as I read through his old articles in the officefiles. He had discarded the old food-page model of recipes handed out by food-product companies and restaurant “reviews” redacted from press releases or based on meals eaten on the cuff. Instead, Claiborne had hunted down fresh developments in the food world (a concept he was instrumental in inventing): new chefs and newly arrived ethnic cuisines; and, when the opportunity arose, he did actually cover the news in his field. For example, when Albert Stockli resigned as executive chef at Restaurant Associates in 1965 to open his own restaurant in Connecticut, Craig wrote about it, and the article was an early example of the sanctification of a celebrity chef in the major news media.
    It was easy to miss the journalistic core of Claiborne’s work, because he was so careful and clever about folding it into the epicurean format he’d invented for himself. In a given week, he would contribute a food feature, most often about an interesting home cook, to the Thursday women’s page, euphemistically rebranded as “Food, Fashions, Family, Furnishings”—or in
Times
-speak, the four-F page—and, later on, as Family/Style.
    On Friday, he would review restaurants, places he’d visited several times with three or four guests. These reviews were the reverse of impressionistic, filled with expert calls about ingredients and flavors, lapses in authenticity. To make things easier for the reader, he graded each place with from one to four stars. Very few restaurants got the maximum four stars, and the list barely changed from year to year, which was an accurate