Free Steal the Menu by Raymond Sokolov Page B

reflection of the placidity of the tiny world of elite food in New York from 1957 to 1971.
    Also on Friday, there were brief recipes. And on Sunday, Craig would collaborate with the in-house photo studio on an illustrated recipe for the back pages of the
New York Times Magazine
.
    This was a job description that fitted Craig to a T but nearly flattened me.
    Toward the end of my tenure, I sat on a committee to discuss the future of Family/Style. Soon after, the section was parceled out into separate daily sections, with many journalists working on them. This redesign, which I favored, because it broadened food coverage and presented it more coherently, divided the food editor’s superjob into slots for a principal restaurant critic, for other critics covering budget restaurants, for food reporters and a recipe writer.
    I continued to perform all those functions while the redesign went forward. I did it all without training or contacts in the food community, and, worst of all, I had to operate in a depressed economy that hammered the luxury restaurants that were my basic “story.”
    A critic in any field needs lively new work to judge. If publishers stopped publishing books, book critics would have to stop writing reviews. This, of course, will never happen, even if and when all books are electronic. But in the New York restaurant world of the early 1970s, new restaurants of consequence rarely opened. Instead, several famous eateries were closing their doors. In my first few months at the
Times
, the city’s most famous restaurant, Le Pavillon, served its last meal. So did the regal Café Chauveron, with its glittering array of copper pots, where I’d interviewed W. H. Auden for
Newsweek
in 1968, the winter following his sixtieth birthday. The Colony, an evolved speakeasy with fancy French food for a high-society clientele—pressed ducks and the like—also went out of business.
    In journalistic terms, I didn’t have much of a story, but that wasn’t obvious to me or anyone else reading my pieces during my first few weeks at the
Times
, because I was able to make news all on my own.
    Really, I didn’t want to cause a commotion. I didn’t suspect I was going to. Coming from
Newsweek
, which no one I knew everread, and whose several million readers almost never raised a peep over anything I wrote, I did not dream that a short article about a Chinese restaurant in suburban New Jersey could spread frenzy throughout the tristate area and beyond.
    But it did.
    In my defense, I will stipulate that Craig and Charlotte made me do it. At the
purée mongole
lunch on my first day at the paper, far more important than Craig’s grandstanding about the cafeteria chef’s heavy hand with bay leaf was his offhand announcement that he would be leaving the city for his East Hampton dacha without supplying copy for that week’s Thursday food feature. It was Monday. There was no time to get to know my staff or plan my debut article with my editor.
    Craig wished me well, with a smile I can be excused for thinking faintly malicious, and Charlotte sent me off to personnel to become a salad handler and then to walk through an obligatory tour of the
Times
building for new hires.
    What should have been an unchallenging bit of institutional tourism—a swing through the newsroom, a look at the acre of linotype machines that filled an entire floor of 229 West Forty-third Street and the presses in the basement—turned into a distracted, panicked perambulation during which I occasionally interrupted the tour leader’s spiel to transact real business on the fly with the photo department or the Family/Style copy desk. Eventually, I found my way to the food news department, introduced myself to my very curious staff, and gave Jean Hewitt the recipe she would have to test under exigent circumstances, which included shopping for hoisin sauce in Chinatown.
    For my first article as food editor, I chose the tryout piece I’d written about a Chinese