Requiem for a Foodie

Twenty-eight years ago, in Paris. I’m in a hotel suite on the Left Bank; my 16-year-old daughter is with me. The place smells funny. Lisa and I can’t figure it out. We can’t pin it down. We wander around, looking under the bed and on the window sills and finally find it: a greasy stinking substance wrapped loosely in brown paper. It’s eel sausage, one of three kinds that have haunted us for several days. Our friend, Harvard Gordon, has been on an eel sausage binge; he’s out now, scouring the rainy streets of Paris, hunting down more.

Lisa and I consider this misbegotten minced fish at some length and finally put it out in the hall for the hotel cat to eat. The cat will have none of it.

A year before, I’d come to Paris with Harvard for a couple of weeks in search of the perfect meal. At least, that’s what he told me. It turned that he was rendezvousing with his old girlfriend, Virginia, who’d flown in for the occasion from Rome. Or was it true, what he had originally said? Virginia, when she showed up, took us to La Serre, where above us the roof regularly cranked open and shut, and she and Harvard argued bitterly about butter.

“You can’t get butter like this in the States,” Virginia said.

“You can,” Harvard countered. “You can now. You just have to know where to look.”

“No you can’t,” Virginia said. “Americans have no concept of freshness. And you don’t have to eat everything you order, Harvard! You can just taste things, you know!” (Because Harvard, even then, couldn’t say no to any kind of good food.)

So here we were again, Harvard and I and my daughter, Lisa. When we ventured into a two-star place, Harvard commented in a very loud voice that the specialty of the house had too much salt. The chef came out, irate at first, but sat down to tell us the story of his life and the state, then, of cuisine in Paris.

It is hard to find the perfect meal. A fashionable bistro served us duck with olives; it was just that: a fatigued duck with a jar of green olives emptied over it. At a cha^teau outside of town, a nervous young man brought us a plate of raspberries with a dish of creme chantilly, but he tripped, and the berries went flying. Lisa laughed.

Finally, at Mere Michelle, we had the perfect soupe de poisson (but some Americans at another table crabbed, “You call this fish soup? Where’s the fish?”), and souffles Grand Marnier, each souffle hand-whisked by Mere Michelle herself, souffles that didn’t even try to keep their shapes but fell across the plates they were served on. Harvard cried out with joy.

Food meant everything to him. He didn’t write about it, he didn’t make a living from it, he didn’t follow trends or fashion; he came before the trends or fashion. He went to Stanford in the ‘50s, then spent two years in Hawaii surfing full-time. He raced cars. He found his girlfriend, Virginia; they spent time in Europe. He was a fiend for private planes. He loved to go to the Mustang Ranch, where he’d party the night away and then cook for the girls in the morning. He became a camera boom operator--an excellent one--but the idea of a career, “of getting ahead,” was utterly foreign to him.

When I met Harvard 30 years ago, he would drive hours north on PCH for perfect oysters. He browsed small restaurants on Ventura Boulevard, eating at Le Sanglier until he just couldn’t take it anymore.

As restaurants in town became more flossy, Harvard became more irritated with them. He had no use for artful lighting or luxurious banquettes; he craved freshness and pure taste. He spent a year or so dining each evening at Musso & Frank. Later he went night after night to VIP Harbor.

He admired Wolfgang Puck but began to label him, bemusedly, a “businessman.” He fondly called Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken “the girls” and put in more than his share of dinners at the Border Grill and City restaurants. He loved the old American Bar and Grill and Billy Pflug’s date-stuffed shrimp. He went back, again and again, to Paris, in search of the perfect meal.

Harvard Gordon lived alone; he was low on civilizing influences. By the time he hit his 60s, he had evolved a sort of uniform: baggy trousers, Hawaiian shirt, baseball cap and a Walkman strung about his neck. He settled on Campanile as his home away from home; he loved Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton as his own children. Like a curmudgeonly old uncle, he’d plow back into the kitchen, snooping and sniffing. He once tortured a sweet lady line-chef about his fish being too well done. “How do you want it, raw?” she asked indignantly, and tears came to her eyes. He was the tiniest bit pleased that he’d made her cry.

During the last three years, I saw Harvard only twice--once at Akbar, where he groused so earnestly about his tandoori chicken having been overcooked that they took it away in a bit of a huff and brought him, basically, a raw fowl with some spices on it. Harvard ate the whole damned chicken; it was, he said, spattering blood around the table, just the way he liked it. That night, driving me home, he careened in a 180-degree turn in the dead center of the intersection of Washington and Lincoln boulevards in order to pass by a restaurant, Rosalynn Thai. “It’s good!” he said. “You have to try it. But you have to go when the grandma is cooking, or maybe it’s the aunt. OK? OK?”

By that time he was dying.

Last Saturday, some of his friends gathered at Campanile to talk about Harvard. The Peels put a small plaque with Harvard’s name on it at his place at their bar.

It was terrible to think of his last nights all alone in his apartment. We had all worried about it. Wouldn’t he like to go to a hospital, where he could at least have some physical comfort, some professional care? No, he would not.

But from the nurse who stayed with him, we heard that Harvard gave himself his own best consolation: Around 2 in the morning, when it was just coming up on the dinner hour in France, Harvard would call up his favorite restaurants in Paris: What had looked best in the markets that morning? What were they offering as specials that night?

Harvard Gordon, 68, died of cancer Nov. 21, 1999.

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See is a Southern California writer. Her latest novel is “The Handyman” (Random House, $22.95).