Medium Raw

But Terrance Brennan actually did—and continues to—“educate” his customers. And somehow to get away with it—even succeed and expand. After introducing the cheese concept at Picholine, he built a whole additional business around it at Artisanal—so far in front of everybody else he’s still out front, years later. He not only heroically defied the conventional wisdom of the times, he helped change the conventional wisdom. Where there was no market at all, he created one.

The dining public may not have known that it needed a selection of over a hundred cheeses. They certainly didn’t know they needed to know about small-production American cheeses from previously unknown cheese-makers in Maine, Oregon, and even New Jersey. Brennan, by taking a chance on cheese, helped create not just a market to sell cheese—but an emerging sector dedicated to making cheese. Finally, for all those lonely would-be cheese-makers pondering the possibilities of great, homegrown American cheese, there was a chef/restaurateur out there who might buy them, promote them, dedicate himself and his business to hand-selling them to the public.

Terrance Brennan is a hero. By taking a series of mad risks, he’s raised all boats—made things better for all of us.

Jim Harrison is a hero.

Because there’s nobody, nobody left like him. The last of the true gourmands—the last connection to the kind of writing about food that A. J. Liebling used to do. Passionate, knowledgeable, but utterly without snobbery—as likely to gush over an ugly but delicious tripe à la mode or order of roasted kidneys as a once-in-a-lifetime meal at a triple-starred Michelin. Harrison, author of many fine books and even more fine poems, has done everything cool with everybody who’s ever been cool dating back to when they invented the fucking word. He knows how to cook. He has impeccable taste in wine. He knows how to eat.

At his own book party in New York City a while back, Harrison, whom I’d met previously only once, spent the entire evening standing outside with me, whom he hardly knew, chain-smoking and talking about food, ignoring the rich, the powerful, the famous, and the smart who waited for him inside. At the grizzled age of seventy-two, suffering variously from gout and many other complaints, he is a rock star in France—barely able to walk down the street without being mobbed—and he lives like one. The French understand the greatness of such men immediately.

The lazy and the foolish compare him to Hemingway—which is a terrible injustice, as Jim is both a better writer and a better man.

I don’t know many people who could be called “great.” But Jim would be one of them. He smokes, he drinks—and regularly attempts frottage with an impunity and a style that will disappear after him.

Speaking of Old Fuckers: the James Beard House goes on the villain list—because it harbors and gives safe haven to villains. It gives them somewhere to go. It provides comfort and succor and the illusion of importance to a bunch of supremely irrelevant old fucks who have nothing to do and nothing to say of any significance to the restaurant business they claim to support and love. It’s a private dining society for the soon-to-be-incontinent—like the Friars Club for old mummies who never themselves told a joke but like to hang around comedians.

When the president of the Beard Foundation got pinched for embezzlement a while back, it should have come as a surprise to no one. For years, even the casual observer could watch as “money goes in—nothing comes out,” but nobody gave a shit. After the news went public that this nobody, this nebbish from nowhere, had been feathering his nest, everybody was shocked! shocked! and rushed to separate themselves from the wreckage with unseemly speed and appropriate expressions of outrage. But that was the purpose of the whole enterprise. To give jobs and power to the otherwise powerless and unemployable.

I’ll never forget my friend, chef Matt Moran’s experience. Matt is a Big Cheese in Sydney; his restaurant, ARIA, one of the best in the country. Invited to cook a meal at the Beard House, he packed the best of his kitchen staff, all his ingredients and his bags, and flew them all, at great expense, to New York. Having heard of the notoriously impossible-to-work-in kitchen at the House (why would an institution honoring the work of chefs actually have a kitchen they could cook in?), he managed to arm-twist every chef friend he had in New York to make use of their busy restaurants’ kitchens to prepare. I agreed to help finish and serve the meal.

We managed to crank out the meal—a very ambitious, very modern menu featuring the best of Australian seafood, meat, cheese, and wines—and afterward, when the chef was summoned to the dining room to take a bow, receive much deserved kudos, and answer a few questions, I watched.