Interviewee: Hillary Baum Session #1

Baum - 1 - 1

TTT

Interviewer: Judith Weinraub New York City

Date: September 22, 2009

Q: This is Judith Weinraub. It’s September 22, 2009, and I’m with Hillary Baum at her home in Riverdale, New York.

Good morning.

Baum: Hi, Judith.

Q: Why don’t we start this with your telling me where and when you were born and something about your early life, where it took place, what your parents were like.

Baum: I was born in New York City in a hospital that doesn’t exist anymore on the West Side, and the first couple of years of my life I lived on the East Side of New York City, and then we started our moving around, which we did over several years when I was young, and moved up to New Rochelle, New York, and then the next thing I remember is we moved to Florida, where we lived till I was about five or six years old, and then we came back up to New Jersey for a few years, ultimately coming back into New York City when I was about eleven or twelve years old. Then I became very aware that the reason we kept moving around so much was because of my father’s career.

Q: How did your father’s career necessitate those moves?

Baum: Because he was going to work for different people in different places. And I realized, I guess, around that age how really important my dad’s work life was. Even though I don’t have specific memories of his being away from home a lot, I do remember as an elementary school kid that my dad was never home for dinner. [laughs] Then I understood, well, that had everything to do with the kind of work he did in the restaurant business. So for those first few years and actually for many years, my mom was the mainstay, the base, really, for all home life and a very attentive and very reliable kind of mother.

I have two younger brothers. One brother is just a couple years younger, and then there’s a bit of a gap. So my brothers are Ed and Charles, with Charles being the older one of the two of them.

We lived in Summit, New Jersey, and then we moved to South Orange, New Jersey, and it was around that time that my dad opened his first giant restaurant, which was the Newarker restaurant at the Newark Airport, and it’s then I understood that my father was very prominent and also that we could have incredible birthday parties as kids by going to some of these restaurants and having a sense of tremendous celebration and so forth in our lives that were very often associated with going to these places.

Q: Before he opened the Newarker and started his own business, did he have jobs working for people?

Baum: Oh yes. The Newarker was not his own business. He did not have his own business until very much later.

Q: So what kind of jobs in the restaurant business did he have before that?

Baum: I’m sure that somebody will correct me on this, but I think he started off being like the food and beverage director. He was basically doing a lot of the accounting work for, I want to say, Zeckendorf. One of his assignments was to take on a nightclub to make sure—I think they wanted this business to fail or something. I guess my dad must have worked for an accounting company first, and I think one of his clients must have been the person who owned the nightclub, and so he got involved in the nightclub business to begin with.

Then when we moved down to Florida, he worked for Shine, and they had the Roney Plaza and the really famous hotel area just north of Miami, whose name is escaping me right now. Boca Raton. So I guess my dad must have run all the food and beverage operations in those places.

Then he came up to New York and worked for Abe Wechsler. It’s a chain that doesn’t exist anymore that turned into Restaurant Associates, and so then Joe was at Restaurant Associates for many years until I guess I was graduating from college, so until 1969, 1970. It was during that time, between the mid to late fifties, in that time that the whole American restaurant industry really blossomed very much under his influence.

But here I was, still a kid, and spent a good portion of time being very aware of the development of these restaurants and being in the restaurants, though my father had a very firm policy that his kids were never to go into any of the restaurants unaccompanied by one of the parents. There were other kids that were allowed to go in, and my father felt it was really bad for the morale of the staff and that we were never ever to do that when we were young.

But one of my fondest memories is when they opened the Four Seasons, I remember that my mother—especially the grand opening of the Four Seasons was such a huge deal, but for every new season like it would have been, I guess, tonight, since today’s the autumn equinox, was a huge special event, which was a change of the seasons at the Four Seasons. It was a huge press event. It was a huge culinary event. Everything changed in the restaurant, the uniforms, I guess some of the plantings. I mean, everybody talks about how the color on the ribbon on the typewriters and the menu colors changed, and certainly the menus themselves changed to reflect the change in the seasons. But part of my memory is of my mother getting really dressed up to go for this big opening. It was a very big event, and it would happen on a seasonable basis. My mom spent a lot of time in my dad’s restaurants.

So as I was turning into a slightly older kid and we had moved into Manhattan by then, and that was primarily because of my dad’s hours and his crazy professional life. My mother went back to college. She was developing as an artist. She was a sculptor, but she was also extremely involved in the North Side Center for Child Development. I guess she started there as a volunteer and then eventually got very involved there with young kids from disadvantaged social as well as emotional situations, actually. That’s what North Side Center was about.

Q: Let me ask you about the Four Seasons. Did you understand what it was about?

Baum: Oh yes, I did, as I described. I understood and it really had a huge impression on me.

Q: Tell me about that.

Baum: Well, that this concept of seasonality, it was so much a part of the concept of the restaurant, and so it definitely had a lot to teach a kid like me. I was very interested. I also was aware pretty early on, I don’t how early, but pretty early, that a lot of what was going on there was also this development of relationships with farmers. I remember my dad used to talk about these trips they would make to Pennsylvania and going to these greenhouses and how they had special things that were produced for the restaurant. I remember that, to me, that seemed like something very, very new and exciting. I don’t think I understood the significance of it at that moment, how innovative it really was at that time.

Q: Was it his idea?

Baum: Well, he was very much the creative force behind the restaurant, but he had a team of people that he worked with as well. I certainly wasn’t privy to those magic brainstorming moments, but there were a lot of people involved in the development of that, including Jim Beard was very involved at the Four Seasons, as was Mimi Sheraton. Maybe Barbara Kafka was involved, and I know she worked with Joe later for sure.

Q: Did you meet those people?

Baum: Yes, I met a lot of those people, and I got to know them more as I grew older, but I was a teenager. I was in junior high school and high school during those times. One of the things that is so funny to me is that there’s a bunch of people who I know who are my colleagues and my really good friends, and we would swear we were sitting back to back, you know, whether it was at the Four Seasons or at La Fonda del Sol or some place like that, because a lot of people who are really involved in food also grew up in those restaurants at the same time as I did, only, obviously, my relationship was a little bit different.

Q: I worked in the Time and Life Building for a little while, so we were very aware of the La Fonda del Sol, but to us it was a place where people went for two-, three-martini lunches and not for the likes of us.

Baum: Well, that’s where I had my Sweet Sixteen.

Q: Oh, my.

Baum: That had a gigantic influence.

Q: How so?

Baum: Well, because the food was outrageous and so appealing and so different, the décor was like nothing anybody had ever seen, and all those little Alexander Girard scenes, all that incredible folk art that was in there was something of tremendous interest visually and also culturally. But also it was then, and really before, but it was then that I realized how significant my dad’s work was in terms of the artists and the architects and the graphics people and the advertising people, including, of course, the chefs who I haven’t really mentioned yet, but that he put together these incredible teams of professionals that all would come together under his direction, really, to create these places that I think he had very much envisioned, but I think was very much the product of this tremendous creativity that he brought together in one place where there was always a lot of give-and-take amongst the people who were part of this team.

Q: What was the attitude toward food like in your home?

Baum: Well, it took me a while to figure out that my father was not a chef, that that was not what he did. My mother was a wonderful home cook. I think certainly a lot of it was self-taught, but also she was able to take classes with Jim Beard and went to some of these early tastings, and she took classes with Paula Peck, Albert Stockli and others.

Q: You mean for the restaurants?

Baum: Yes. She participated in that. I have found like notes from that had to do with Albert Stockli’s recipes for the Four Seasons and other places, and so I know my mom was involved. But as kids, we always had home-cooked dinner on the table every night, and dinner was a very important time and everybody had to be at the table.

When my dad was around, it was a big family joke, but the only time we would see my dad when we were young was on Sunday mornings he didn’t go anywhere. That was time when he was home, and the big joke was that he always liked to tease my mom about how long certain things were in the refrigerator. So he’d go into the refrigerator and he’d start pulling things out, and the big thing that Joe would do was he would make an omelet of whatever he could find, and we had to eat it. [laughs]

But then, actually, my dad got much more involved in cooking and the pleasures of outdoor cooking and grilling and so forth. They had a country home in northern Westchester in North Salem, and that’s when my dad was in the kitchen and at the grill and got really involved, and we used to do these incredibly delicious, fabulously fresh meals but as a family. They had a giant kitchen. We were all in there all the time, all cooking together, and it was quite, quite wonderful.

Q: Jim Beard’s grilling book was one of his very earliest books. Do you think that that had any impact on your father’s grilling?

Baum: I don’t know. [laughs] I can’t really say, you know. My father was certainly a wonderful instinctive cook, but he didn’t always have time to do that, and a lot of the way we saw food at home very often reflected his personal likes, but a lot of that time what that meant was a big spread of various things, you know, always vast platters of tomato and onion salads and stuff like that that was always next to the seventeen different kinds of herring that would be on the table or something like that.

But a lot of the tremendous generosity about food that was expressed through the restaurants was very often expressed in our home, especially around special events or Bar Mitzvahs, weddings, all those kinds of things. They were always things we’ve always done in our own home and they’ve always been extremely influenced by my dad. So I have socked away menus, insane shopping lists from when we went on family trips and we took coolers of stuff with us. Like my son’s Bar Mitzvah, it was like insane. It was all over the outside here. There was a whole tent that was all from Russ & Daughters. [laughs] Still close friends, even though my parents are gone for many years. Anyway, it was crazy. And even for my own wedding, it was somewhat of a potluck. My father’s friends brought dishes.

Q: That’s wonderful. Now, what kind of friends were these?

Baum: These were people like Jim Beard and Alfredo Viazzi and a bunch of other restaurateurs who actually came and brought the dishes for my wedding. I have to admit I couldn’t taste anything. I was too excited, but I hear it was great. It looked great. [laughs]

Anyway, the influences at home were on many different levels around food and interest in food, but also the interest in presentation, the interest in sourcing. When Joe opened one of the restaurants at the [World] Trade Center, downstairs next to the Big Kitchen was one of my favorite restaurants, The Market Bar and Dining Rooms. On the menu they listed not the producers, but the purveyors.

Q: And that was early.

Baum: This was like in the mid-seventies, ’76, when they opened everything in the Trade Center, and so I don’t know. I assume that Jim Beard had worked with him on all the places, but in particular I know he did Windows on the World. So did Michael Whiteman, [Barbara] Kafka. Zraley and others. There was the Big Kitchen down there, which probably was one of the first what we now call food courts, but a lot of that preparation that they did for that, I know I have the pictures, they went to Europe, they went to the great marketplaces in Europe, and that was the kind of thing that they used for influence in terms of how they put together the Big Kitchen.

It was very interested because I worked for my dad at various times. As influential as he was in terms of my career development, actually my mother had a huge amount to do with one of the biggest steps I ever took in terms of how my work has evolved, and that is, I went into the food business not with my father, but with my mother. [laughs]