Cooking in the Kitchen With Jim

There was a minuet going on in the Greenwich Village kitchen of the late James Beard one recent Thursday night.

Three of New England’s most talented chefs were dancing about the minefield of Beard’s imperfectly equipped kitchen while trying to chat with dinner guests all around them. With mismatched china on the shelves, only one sink in a faraway corner and not nearly enough counter space, the trio in white toques had the staggering task of preparing a five-course meal for 91 fussy foodies.

Chef Jasper White’s lobster-filled savoy cabbage rolls in lobster-and-wild-mushroom broth seemed to taste better for being served in the Beard House than at White’s restaurant, Legal Sea Foods, in Boston. Likewise, the Littleneck clams decorated with lime, wasabi and ginger and the lobster foie gras purses were gobbled rather than tentatively nibbled the way they might be in Boston’s Back Bay.

For, being New Yorkers, these diners grant prestige to those who have the courage to come and play the big time.

“New Yorkers always love out-of-towners. Even James was always better known and loved elsewhere. To the locals, he was just another colorful figure in big foppish bow ties roaming around the West Village,” said restaurant consultant Clark Wolf, a longtime friend of Beard, the cookbook author, teacher and chef who awakened the American palate by showing a generation that there was something between haute cuisine and Jell-O.

Eleven years after his death, Beard’s influence continues through a nonprofit foundation that was started by food aficionados including Julia Child to preserve his townhouse by turning it--tiny kitchen and all--into a shrine for American foodies.

A year after Beard died at 81, they bought the building and began to try to pay off the mortgage mainly by getting chefs to donate their time and supplies to create great meals for paying guests.

Since Beard’s home was turned into a brick-and-mortar monument to him, about 500 chefs have cooked in his legendary kitchen.

And for the relatively cut rate of $65 to $85 a person, diners get a five- to seven-course meal with as many fine wines as can be squeezed in. Guests are jammed around tables in what once was Beard’s tomato-soup-red living room; even a small alcove with a mirrored ceiling, where the 6-foot-3, 300-pound Beard once slept is used for a table of eight.

Such an arrangement has brought rich results--and the foundation’s annual fund-raiser this month is expected to pay off the final $280,000 of the mortgage.

But some masters of the kitchen have raised serious questions about the finances of the foundation. If Beard House dinners are now bringing in $1 million a year and the guest chefs are paying for the food and volunteers are serving as galley slaves, why, the chefs have wondered, wasn’t the mortgage paid off long ago and why isn’t the foundation flush?

Len Pickell, who became foundation president after Peter Kump died last year, acknowledges that the first decade has been difficult, but he points to progress that has been made. He lists the expenses that critics might have overlooked and the many debts incurred to keep the 1844 townhouse from tumbling down. He also provides recent tax returns and a Better Business Bureau report, and says that this year he will send out a financial report to every chef who has ever cooked there.

“We have struggled and struggled,” he said. “But no one seems to understand that.”

“Once we complete the mortgage goal,” Pickell said, “the entire board is going on a retreat to figure out what’s next. We’d like to give out more scholarships and do more outreach to find chefs in Middle America who we can bring to New York to cook.”

In 10 years the foundation has also been criticized for being overly politicized--whether it’s over the fairness of its awards or over which chefs are invited to cook at the Beard House and what they get out of that experience.

Some also question whether the foundation has been able to carry on for its namesake as a key evangelist of the food world, which remains an anarchistic universe of free spirits. They were willing pay homage to the man they called “Jim” but just don’t have the same allegiance to the house and foundation that bear his name.

For while Beard House dinners occasionally draw national food magazine editors and top cookbook editors as guests, fame and glory certainly are not guaranteed.

“Doing the dinner at the Beard House in New York has extremely minimal effect on our business in L.A.,” said Mark Peel of Los Angeles’ Campanile. “Oh, maybe it helps that you’re in this ‘club’ now. Maybe the media notice you more. But what it really boils down to is something personal. That all these other chefs you respect have done this and then to be invited into the same room with them, well, you just can’t say no.”

The foundation’s evolution from a hand-to-mouth group to a healthy nonprofit organization with a $2.8-million annual budget parallels a time in which dining became a major American entertainment, with chefs as well known as movie stars.

And though the foundation produces workshops, wine tastings, fund-raisers, an energetic monthly newsletter and annual awards--informally known as the Foodie Oscars--the almost-nightly dinners have become an important stop on the great gourmet highway.

Through these dinners, the foundation attempts to recognize young chefs who don’t want to be drudges in the kitchen but rather see themselves as engaging in a great cultural art. “We are here to showcase American chefs as well as raise the level of the culinary arts somewhere in the perspective of ballet and theater,” said Mildred Amico, a former nurse and Beard student who now books chefs into the house 200 nights a year.

And despite any questions about credibility and frequent complaints about the working conditions and the cost, chefs find the experience of cooking there both a validation and an ego trip. To get the Beard House stamp of approval is to have a national audience open its senses to their skills.

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The story of the Beard Foundation begins a few weeks after the man himself died in 1985. Julia Child was speaking to 500 food professionals when she mournfully, if not apocryphally, pronounced: “We’ve lost Jim but wouldn’t it be great to buy his brownstone and turn it into a center for the culinary arts?”

And so, the legend goes, a small circle of Beard’s friends including Child, New York cooking school owner Peter Kump, cookbook author Barbara Kafka, microbrewery owner Fritz Maytag and restaurateur Larry Forgione raised money to buy the house. Beard’s will had dictated that it be sold immediately, with the proceeds donated to Reed College in Oregon even though Beard had been expelled as a student for having homosexual affairs. But there were no buyers at the asking price of $1.5 million because two of the four floors were committed to long-term leases and the first floor didn’t even have a bathroom. So Kump scraped together a down payment and cut a deal with the bank to buy the house for $750,000.

After Wolfgang Puck volunteered to cook a benefit lunch at the Beard House, Kump dreamed up the idea of turning the great man’s kitchen into a one-night stand for chefs. Tall, thin and always burbling with ideas, Kump had vision and energy that overran competing ideas for the foundation’s future and drove its success. In fact, in the early years, the house, which was falling apart, just about survived only on his energy: Foundation membership, at $50 a year, was about 300 and the newsletter was written on Kump’s home typewriter.

By 1990, however, Kump decided that the foundation should give out its own awards, and ultimately it was the chef-awards ceremonies that brought the group to national attention. Now, chefs compete for a chance to cook at the Beard House and membership has shot up to 4,000 even though the annual fee is up to $250.

The first Beard Award ceremonies were held in 1990 on a yacht and drew 800 people; the most extravagant, in 1995, were televised on the Cable Food Network and included a 30-piece band, cancan dancers and 1,500 guests.

And with publicity and success came complaints.

Several chefs insisted--off the record, of course--that the awards are highly politicized and/or corrupt. They said the awards inevitably are given to those who support the foundation or cook at the house. Upon hearing these claims, Pickell, a wine consultant and accountant, sighs deeply. He is ready with a list of several awards given to chefs who have never cooked at the Beard House and don’t give a dollar to the foundation.

“People want to believe it’s fixed, especially when they don’t win,” Pickell said. “They’re just not.”

David Shaw, a Los Angeles Times writer who has helped judge restaurant and chef awards as well as the Pulitzer Prize, said, “It’s not like baseball where there are measurable statistics, or the Pulitzers where there is a specific story to look at, or the Oscars where there is one movie to judge. But we work through a balloting system and the Beard House has nothing to do with it.”

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Most chefs who have cooked at the Beard House have at least one horrendous tale.

Usually it revolves around the kitchen being too small or flames on the burners being too high or the frustration of having to saute 10 pieces of fish in seven minutes when there’s not enough time or space or help.

The night of the crustacean orgy, White shared the kitchen with Gerald Clare and Sam Hayward, who run accomplished but small Maine restaurants. And while they seemed thrilled to be in Beard’s kitchen, they were like cats on the proverbial hot tin roof as they tried to survive the tumult of an opening night in New York and keep pace with White--who, while he (like Beard) takes up more physical space than the average human being, has extraordinary culinary instincts.

White has cooked at the Beard House several times. This time he knew to prepare back in Boston, and he shipped five crates of food to New York rather than arrive a few hours before show time and start chopping and peeling.

But even White had trepidations.

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“I took a chance this time and air-shipped all the food,” he said. “If it hadn’t shown up, I’d have had no alternative but to kill myself.”

Beth Davis of Rowell’s Inn in Simonsville, Vt., was invited to the house three years ago to do a Sunday “mothering brunch” with four other country-inn chefs. One chef didn’t show up at the last minute. The others were locked out of the house until 30 minutes before the event was to start. Then, instead of having 40 people to feed, as they were told, 79 arrived.

“At least I made some lifelong sisters of the other chefs, and we were applauded,” said Davis, who prepared fiddlehead fern soup, bread, salad and herbed cheese pie. “But it was quite an ordeal.”

Patrick Healy, the well-regarded chef of Xiomara in Pasadena, also was exasperated by his experience at the Beard House. It cost his boss, Xiomara Ardolina, $6,000 for food and accommodations. “Never again,” she said.

Healy was disappointed, but he wouldn’t go as far to say he would never cook there again. The guests gushed over his terrine of chilled bouillabaisse and his fennel-grilled sea bass with artichoke stew.

“There isn’t enough support or promoting done for chefs,” complained Healy, an old friend of Beard’s. “But my memories of him are still with me. So I’d probably cook in his kitchen again.”

Sam Marven, the 32-year-old-chef at Los Angeles’ Modada, recently wrote to the foundation asking why it overlooks L.A.’s cutting-edge food scene and obsesses on New York chefs.

“I looked at three months of who was cooking at the Beard House, and out of 80 there were only a few from L.A., 56 were from New York and the rest from places like Tucson and Miami. They do absolutely nothing to help young creative artists like me. A group like that needs to be unbiased and look out for the bettering of food arts, not the bettering of big famous chefs.”

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Marven says he was invited to cook in Beard’s kitchen on Academy Awards night last year but was already committed for a big night at his own restaurant. And, yes, he’d like to be asked again:

“Listen, I would find it such an honor. I just want them to be more interested in new talent.”

Amico, the program director, says she is booking more non-New York chefs. Today, half are New Yorkers, compared to the early years when the foundation had to rely on local talent, she says.

Others say if an ambitious chef wants to mount a campaign to get recognition, it apparently can be done through the Beard House.

Take Miles James, who runs a 150-seat restaurant not far from Fayetteville, Ark. After a small review of his place appeared in the New York Times, he was invited to cook a “Taste of the Ozarks” dinner. He says it was the thrill of his career.

He made sure everything went right. First, he flew to New York a few weeks before his August dinner to make arrangements to prepare the meal in a friend’s restaurant on Park Avenue. Then he air-shipped crates of native ingredients. Naturally, there were obstacles--a flight was canceled and he had to save the food through all kinds of heroics; the Beard people promised four volunteers and only one showed up. But nothing flummoxed James or dampened his spirits.

The night of the dinner, he made sure the house was packed with supporters and important food editors.

“By the time the food started going out of the kitchen, we were having a blast,” said James, who estimates he spent $10,000, some of which was underwritten.

The rewards, he concludes, were immense. After he was written up in the foundation newsletter, he was invited to be the guest chef at a Moriches Island hotel. He also received new attention from food magazines.

Next, James would like to win a Beard Award, write a cookbook and get another chance to show off Ozark cuisine at the Beard House.

Wolf says cooking at the house is “not necessarily the star turn of life for a chef. But it can be part of the cumulative rumble. It’s an important audition and with the foundation giving out those awards, it’s a also a casting couch.”

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In a city that bemoans community--but where people thrive for lack of it--the one thing the Beard House unequivocally does offer New Yorkers is a cozy niche through communal eating.

Most of the people who squeeze into the narrow townhouse for dinner are dues-paying foundation members and food groupies. They’re dentists from New Jersey and investment bankers from Connecticut and lonely Manhattanites who live for their next meal. They’re also food professionals--writers, consultants, cooking teachers--and seating them all happily can be a nightmare.

“It’s like arranging a wedding--every night,” Amico said.

For some the group-seating policy can be annoying. One diner confessed that she feared she would be stuck next to some “slob from Jersey. But I love the real food nuts. If I sit next to one, we talk food, we eat food, we relive past meals.” This “regular” recalled an evening that was so awful--the chef was from the South and had never seen food he didn’t want to smother with sauce--that she and a table-mate left early to buy Alka-Seltzer.

Ken Leh, a banker and art dealer, eats at the Beard House six to eight times a month. It has become the center of his social life.

“I’m single, and while I go to the ballet, the opera and Broadway shows alone, I really don’t like eating out by myself,” he said while waiting for the Lobster Fest to begin. (During this interview and in other conversations before dinner, people rarely made eye contact, though everyone was chatting away. Rather, they watched like hawks for the next hors d’oeuvres tray to trickle from the kitchen.)

“Basically, I just love to eat and drink,” Leh said. “It’s my life.”

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Friends of Beard’s always seem to be speculating about what he would have thought of what has become his legacy.

“Oh, he loved the skulduggery and the bitchiness in the food world, and he was no bit player in it,” Kafka said. “So though he was ambivalent about what he wanted his legacy to be, if the foundation has all of that, I guess he’d be pretty happy with it.”

With Beard and M.F.K. Fisher gone; with Craig Claiborne retired and neither octogenarian Child nor the ubiquitous Martha Stewart quite interested in anointing people in the food business, there is no longer a central arbiter the way Beard was. The Beard Foundation would like to be that arbiter, but this is impossible because the food world has grown too large and no longer has an epicenter.

For now, the Beard House may just have to settle for honoring his view of food and culture rather than reincarnating the grand position he held.