The Eighth Hungarian Tribe, 1982 (9. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1982-01-01 / 1. szám
January, 1982 THE EIGHTH TRIBE FOR THE PURPOSE OF PLEASURE By LOIS DWAN CHICAGO—The annual reunion of Travel-Holiday award winners is precisely that. Organization as such is limited to the local committee of the host city, which works a gruesome year on the logistics of presenting the glories of its place. ("I now have more sympathy for the pregnant woman,” said Louis Szathmary of the Bakery, co-chairman. “We had a nine-month gestation and four-day delivery.") Business at hand is no more pressing than determining the next meeting place. The purpose is pleasure: the pleasure of communicating, of being one of the chosen—there are fewer than 400 award winners in the United States, Canada and Mexico—and the pleasure of playing. Restaurateurs usually work while others play. The purpose, alas, cannot be an intensive sampling of regional dishes—if they should exist to be sampled—or even a fair go at the city’s best restaurants. However eager to astonish their peers, few best restaurants are equipped to handle such numbers. There were 240 restaurateurs, spouses, managers, children in Chicago a week ago, plus 60 guests. Nor is there much effort at serious dialogue, no distinguished speakers, no probing of vital problems. Restaurateurs are there for fun and, while vital problems may be probed, it is in happenstance discussions. That this possibly may be an opportunity missed was demonstrated in Chicago by the innovative wine seminar arranged by Robert Lawrence Balzer, food and wine editor of Travel-Holiday and thereby bestower of awards. Balzer invited both Californian and European wine makers to his panel. They were distinguished names: Marchese Piero Antinori and Pierluigi Bolla from Italy; Claude Taittinger and Hubert Trimbach from France; Don Jose Ignacio Domecq and Jean Leon from Spain; Allan Hemphill, Steve Mirassou, Michael Mondavi and Eric Wente from California. Each presented one wine and commented. It was impressive enough to see 10 wines poured into 2,500 glasses. Tasting as the wine maker spoke somehow created an extra subliminal communication Page 13 that held the audience for three hours— from 9 a.m. “Quiestest wine tasting I have ever attended,” said one. “What a pleasure to judge a wine on its own merits without having to compare,” said Steve Mirassou. For the most part, however, the Chicago committee, headed by Reinhard Barthel (Tower Garden, Skokie), chairman, and Szathmary, cochairman, planned a lighthearted and carefully timed schedule that included a special performance by the Second City troupe and a mystery dinner, with bus drivers heading for whatever restaurants their sealed instructions indicated. These ranged from the simplicity of Lawry’s the Prime Rib to a 12-course, 10-wine game dinner at the Bakery. (“It was all very good,” said one non-restaurateur, “but I did think the venison, the pheasant and the wild boar were a bit gamey.”) There was luncheon on the terrace of the Museum of Science and Industry— the day before the rains started—with a lesson on opening bottles of Champagne with a saber—the wine then “cascaded” down a six-foot cone of stacked wine glasses. There was a gold-medal dinner prepared by Ferdinand Metz, manager of the U.S. Culinary Olympics team that won the medal, at the Ninety-Fifth, and a grand-ball finale at the headquarter Drake Hotel, with 1,400 grapes cut into 2,800 halves to be placed around the ter nine de faisan vigneronne. There were conversations, anecdotes, complaints, ideas. . . . “My furniture is too expensive to be damaged, so I have created a special buffet room for carving, flaming, serving . . .” said John Spillson of Cafe Johnell, Fort Wayne, good idea. At the grand ball, the Drake presented Belgian endive in a glass, to be dipped into a sauce. Good idea. A restaurateur told of his training in Switzerland. “Room service was difficult. There are two doors and the waiter, carrying two trays, must open both doors with his foot. I opened the second door, looked up from my foot. On the bed was a completely naked woman. I stopped. The door swung shut, knocking both trays from my hands. I went back to six months of peeling potatoes.” “Why do people steal or buy chefs instead of training them?” “What do you do when the chef quits on Saturday night?” “You call your friends,” said Piero Selvaggio (Valentino). They will send chefs to help—and that is a little of what this gathering is about.” “No city can develop artistically until it has developed gastronomically,” said Jean Leon (La Scala). “I was a psychiatrist in the Hungarian army when I became aware that the problems of the GI were more food-oriented than sex-oriented . . .” said chef Louis Szathmary. Chef Louis and the Bakery are legends. He and his wife, Sada, each put up $10,- 000 to open, which left them with something like $270 for operating expenses. “Until we could establish credit, we walked to the market every morning, carrying bags home on the bus.” He has strong opinions on what Americans eat (garbage); on how they eat (without joy); on diets (“The people of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh are all on the Pritikin diet and they all die at the average age of 29”) ... and a few other things. I complimented him on his speeches. “Like a good pastry, they should have a little salt, a little spice and a lot of shortening. ... I talk to 300 people the way I talk to a girl in bed.” Szathmary is a beamish man of large girth and bandit’s mustache. We had lunch backstage at the Bakery with the staff, Mme. Szathmary, a Hungarian poet and his wife who spoke no English. We ate szekelysuch, which seemed to be large chunks of pork with gentled sour cabbage; zucchini with sour cream, vegetable soup with tarragon, splendid poppyseed Strudel. The only way to develop his theory of the food-oriented problems of the soldier was to resign from the medical corps. “I went to cook’s school, then to chefs school, then I fell in love with it. I decided that was what I wanted to do.” It is his contention that the theories of Dr. Sigmund Freud developed as they did because Freud’s patients were all from the upper-middle class, many of them Jewish. “He never talked to poor men, never talked to the GI. The German and Austrian Jews had escaped from Russia or Poland—if not themselves, their parents or grandparents—so the whole center of their personality was the propagation of the race. But the poor man is not interested in propagating the race. He is interested in maintaining himself. “To maintain oneself is to eat and not to be eaten, so you develop two different personalities: offensive and defensive.” If I understand the theory—and I am not sure I do—the strength of the gorilla and the speed of the rabbit are needed to escape from their enemies in order to stay alive and to eat, which is their maintenance and also their joy. “As soon as a person stops enjoying, he is ready to be eaten. And he will be eaten.”
