Chef Draws the Line at Kiwis

After 26 years of operating a Chicago North Side restaurant, chef Louis Szathmary has an appetite for retirement. Next month he is closing the Bakery--a restaurant that has never seated more than 170 people at one time, and where all the five-course dinners had a fixed price: from $5 in 1962 to $25 this year. Szathmary, 70, is giving his 24,000-volume cookbook library to the University of Iowa. Other items in his collection will go to Johnson & Wales University in Providence, R.I. Some of the books date to the late 1400s, he said. The more modern works include ones by Szathmary, who has written “The Chef’s Secret Cookbook,” “American Gastronomy,” “The Chef’s New Secret Cookbook,” “The Bakery Restaurant Cookbook” and the 15-volume “Cookery Americana.” The Romanian native came to the United States in 1951, and spent 11 years in food research before becoming a restaurateur. “The restaurant business has changed too much,” he said. “ . . . One thing I am proud of, though. I never served one kiwi fruit.”

--The word was “spoliator.” And it spelled victory for Scott Isaacs, 14, an eighth grader from Littleton, Colo., who won the 62nd annual National Spelling Bee in Washington. It was his third time in the national finals. He defeated Ojas V. Tejani of Hixson, Tenn. They were the survivors of the largest field in the bee’s history, outlasting 220 other contestants. The word “spoliator” means a spoiler. Ojas, a 12-year-old sixth grader, missed the word “senescing,” which means growing old. Scott spelled that word correctly. Then he spelled “spoliator” to win $1,500. In third place was Arthur A. Hodge, 14, from Pottsville, Pa. In fourth was Samantha Cassell of Johnson City, Tenn.

--President Bush is still taking shape at the hands of editorial cartoonists. “The first perception we all had about George Bush was that nothing was there,” said Kevin Kallaugher, one of 150 newspaper and syndicated artists at a convention in Newport, R.I. “As he fills out his own public image, his face (in cartoons) is filling out more too. . . . “ Kallaugher is a cartoonist for the Baltimore Sun and the Economist of London, who goes by the name KAL. “Ronald Reagan didn’t bequeath the Teflon jacket to George Bush, so in a way, he’s a great deal easier,” said Signe Wilkinson of the Philadelphia Daily News, one of three woman members of the Assn. of American Editorial Cartoonists. And even if Bush material is thin, several of the cartoonists said, they always have Vice President Dan Quayle.