And how it happens to a cook by Peter Meehan it, you don’t have to deconstruct it,” she tells me. She is downplaying her “Was there life virtuosic skill, ignoring how hard it is to make simple food beauti- before Gramercy?” ful enough to be served with noth- ing to hide behind, and absolutely not addressing how she yanked New Claudia Fleming York restaurant desserts out of the ’!"s and into the modern, season- ally-informed style that is still dom- laughs my question inant today. Not that she would take the credit, sitting there on a weather- about her training beaten folding chair in the grassy green backyard of the inn on Long back at me. “I think Island that she now runs with her husband, Gerry Hayden. Claudia won the James Beard Foundation’s I was born there.” Award for Outstanding Pastry Chef at the turn of the century after nominations two years in a row before that. Bon Appétit lauded her in the pre-Bro Appétit era (Best Pastry Chef #""#); she was routinely fêted by Food & Wine until a falling out with the magazine’s editors around #""$. Her name has receded from the conversation about pastry except when chefs like Brooks Headley of Del Posto or Nicole Krasinki of State Bird Provisions cite the influence of her desserts or her out-of- print cookbook, The Last Course, co-written with Melissa Clark. “I don’t care about dessert,” she says. I will note that she is telling me this while I am stu%ng my face full of her pastries, scarfing them like a sunburned little fat boy in a pie- eating competition. You know the But there was. Life before and Danny Meyer from savants to lumi- Pinterest-perfect confections of after her nine-year tenure as the naries. Her desserts were a philo- all the little artisanal pastry shops celebrated pastry chef of Gramercy sophical wrecking ball that toppled that have opened in the last decade? Tavern, during the era that perma- the spiraling spun-sugar artifices Right now one of Claudia Fleming’s nently installed that restaurant at and architectural pastry excess of crostatas is lifting its leg on those the top of tourist itineraries in New mid-nineties New York. amateur-hour concoctions in a York and elevated the statuses of “I was putting two things on a show of shaming dominance. When chef Tom Colicchio and restaurateur plate: there’s dessert, you can eat I was a dumb kid just moved to New

!" Lucky Peach York from the Midwest, anytime got to share the same hallways as she recalls. “Jonathan and Melvyn”— somebody’s parents came to town Nureyev, Baryshnikov, and Twyla the chef and his business partner, with money to throw down, we’d Tharp. (At fifty-five, after nearly Melvyn Masters—“would rack up a make them take us to Gramercy, three decades of professional ice $"),))) lunch bill in a month at La and the desserts—as plain Jane as cream and cookie making, she still Goulue. They were drinking Cristal they pretended to be—always hit has the lithe build of a dancer.) at breakfast.” me like the moment when Doro- She gave herself until twenty- Fleming eventually became the thy’s world goes from sepia toned five to “make it” in a major dance o*ce manager, and was often told to to color, or when Kelley LeBrock company, waitressing a bit along the lock up the credit cards, only to be came alive in Weird Science. way to pay the bills. She was wait- bribed into releasing them when she “My best days are behind me,” ressing at a dive restaurant on the was invited to come along to lunch, Claudia tells me, dismissing the West Side when a coworker’s hus- too. But the Bright Lights, Big City flaky, buttery evidence to the con- band introduced her to some guys excess isn’t why Jams was an impor- trary that has made a mess of my who were opening a restaurant on tant station on her journey. It was shirt. “Let people take the mantle the Upper East Side. “I wasn’t in the the food, which was called Califor- and do what they’re going to do. It’s food world,” she says. “I wasn’t read- nian at the time. “There was grilled a young person’s game. To be good ing magazines or anything. I was just pork tenderloin in a salad,” she told at it you can’t really have too much digging the restaurant business and me with honest reverence and still- other stu! going on. I used to go it turned out to be Jonathan Wax- preserved enthusiasm, even though to sleep thinking about things and man and Jams.” that sounds très Olive Garden today. wake up thinking about flavor com- Jams is a restaurant of legendary When she saw I was unmoved, I binations. Do you know what a lux- excess and wide influence; Claudia think she felt the generation gap ury that it is? You’re sealed o! from was on the opening team in "#$%. It between us. “People weren’t doing shit—good shit, bad shit. But I don’t was the first place where a real in- that at the time. I come from an feel competitive any more. I don’t the-flesh disciple of Alice Waters— Italian family, so good food was have the fire in my belly, you know?” Jonathan Waxman, the first chef at always in my life—but not di!erent She says sincerely, “Life happens.” Chez Panisse—brought (some) of good food.” the ideas of the covenant of Berke- Then there was the kitchen, ley to New York. “So we had free- where three women held positions range chicken. Organic baby veg- of power. “Stephanie, Helen—who etables. Laura Chenel goat cheese— was later married to Alfred Por- who knew about goat cheese at the tale—and Gale. I loved them. It was time?—all FedExed from California very much a man’s world and they every day.” made me think I could do it,” she I had a hard time picking my said of kitchen work, which she was jaw up o! the lawn. This is a busi- slowly being seduced by. “They were ness where the talk of margins is incredibly inspirational. Every bit JAMS typically accompanied by modifiers as e!ective and e*cient as a man, leming was born on Long like “razor-thin” or “non-existent.” especially Jonathan, who was any- Island (“Brentwood, right in Really FedExed? thing but e!ective and e*cient.” the middle, horrible place, “Those were the heady days of She still has great a!ection for not at all nice”) but spent as grilled chicken and french fries for Waxman—now the chef-owner Fmuch time in New York City as she $&',” Fleming says, citing Jams’ most of Barbuto in the West Village— possibly could. By her late teens, in famous dish. (That would be a $(" as does nearly anyone I’ve ever the seventies, she’d moved there dish of chicken and fries in ')"&.) “It met who has worked with him. He and was studying dance, landing was fun, fun, fun. There were Hock- knows everybody, or somebody eventually at the American Ballet neys on the wall and Ginori china on who knows the person you’re look- Theatre at the time when “all the the table. The waitresses wore white ing for. He regularly helped open Russians were defecting” and she bucks. Mick Jagger came for dinner,” doors for Claudia as she made her

Lucky Peach !" way. But once it was clear that the says she is and was too old to deal “And I didn’t get it, not at all,” cocaine-fueled rocket ship that was with the immaturity. Claudia says. I think it’s a telling Jams wasn’t going to stay aloft for- After Union Square she went nugget about New York restaurant ever, Claudia found new employ as a to work at Tribeca Grill, where she culture around "##$. California server at Union Square Café shortly reported to Gerry Hayden, whom had rediscovered nature, and after it opened, when Danny Meyer she would marry a little over a dec- found the writings of Richard was still working the floor and wet ade later. Gerry is the sort of cooks’ Olney and probably Patience Gray, behind the ears, before he became cook who mastered both the pas- had embraced simplicity and a burger baron. “He was Mr. Nerd try and savory sides of the kitchen what we generally shorthand as compared to the two guys I’d been and could run either (and at Tribeca “Mediterranean” ideals. New York working for,” she says, “and the food Grill, he did, under the stewardship was still chained to the hierarchical, wasn’t great.” But the restaurant was of executive chef Don Pintabona) male-centric conception of still white hot. making him a perfect fit for Claudia, kitchens and chefs; manipulation Fleming dabbled in the kitchen a de facto pastry chef, not someone trumped simpler pleasures on at Jams, and as she neared thirty, born to it. the plate. she realized she wanted to get more Soon enough, phone calls started Claudia had been hounding serious about it. As she saw it, wait- to trickle in: pastry chef job o!ers. Maury Rubin to hire her at City Bak- ing tables was a dead-end game. She Even though she’d barely been in the ery, New York’s hottest bakery at nurtured a daydream of a sand- kitchen a couple years, she’d worked that time, and while he repeatedly wich shop that supplied the Jit- at the right places, met the right told her no (“He said I’d take every- ney buses that connect the city to people. “I was like, I don’t know any- thing he taught me and leave”), her Long Island, and she enrolled at thing.” So she decided to get serious persistence eventually broke him Peter Kump’s New York Cooking about the profession, to try and get halfway: he wouldn’t hire her, but he School, before it became the Insti- a real education so she didn’t always would set her up with a baker he’d tute of Culinary Education, when it feel like she was treading water. studied with in France. was still just a townhouse uptown. “I’d always wanted to go work And so at thirty-three, Claudia But she found school to be a waste with Nancy Silverton because she went east, to Paris. of time—she preferred to learn on was my idol,” she says. “Jimmy Brin- the job. She split her time between kley, the pastry chef at Jams, had the kitchen and the dining room at worked for her [at Campanile, the Union Square Café, then staged at groundbreaking restaurant Silverton Montrachet under Deborah Ponzek, and Mark Peel ran in Los Angeles] and who righted the course of that res- he talked about her all the time. And taurant after the departure of its her first book was what really got me opening chef, David Bouley, keeping turned on to pastry. She had worked its three-star rating from the New for Wolfgang, so she did this really York Times. French stu! but Americanized it, and When Union Square Café needed that was really appealing to me.” PARIS an assistant pastry chef, she took the Waxman arranged an audi- he arrived, she got an job and never left the pastry kitchen ence with Nancy Silverton over the apartment in a lesser after that. “It seemed like the fast- phone. “I called Nancy and I asked arrondissement, she worked, est way to get somewhere, and a lot her a question that when people she joined a French-English better than duking it out with the ask me I just want to spit on them,” Sconversation group that met up twenty-year-old boys on the line. I she says, taking a second to pitch over wine. The group netted her a liked the autonomy—it’s so separate her voice up to helium height for French boyfriend who’d be less than from the kitchen. You have your own maximum annoyingness. “‘So what is a footnote in her history if he didn’t plates and your own space. I can’t your favorite dessert?’ greet her with the news one evening even handle the knives and fire and “And Nancy said to me, ‘A ripe that he’d secured her a stage at boys and…” she makes a sound that peach.’ Fauchon. Now we’re done with him.

!" Lucky Peach Fauchon was then a great French so much opportunity in repeti- She had one more stop she brand that was heading toward tion—it means you can do it better wanted to make after Hermé: Così. an era of protracted torpor. One this time than you did last time. You “I had ripped this article by Colman thing that elongated that protrac- can always do it better. And until Andrews,” who would later go on to tion was the hiring of boy genius you’ve done it a thousand times, found Saveur, “about a place called Pierre Hermé. Claudia arrived four you haven’t done it. Until you can Così, where this man baked the or five years after Hermé had taken fix it, you haven’t done it at all. You bread fresh every day and had mari- over; he was “up in the o!ce at that get to make it the best and then nated sardines and fresh artichokes point.” They became friends much make it better. You get to under- and prosciutto and all these beau- later in life; at that juncture she was stand it inside and out, you learn tiful ingredients and people made down in the kitchen, the lone women it well enough that you can teach their own sandwiches.” working alongside a legion of men. other people. The parallels between Her dream of a sandwich shop “There were forty boys and me. cooking and dance are all there: the that supplied the Jitney was still In Europe cooking is a trade: chefs, repetition; don’t question the guy alive. “That’s what I wanted to do schmefs, it’s for people who can’t in charge; wait until an appropriate in the States: open something like go to college. This was not the brain time to ask a question.” Così.” She went and accosted Drew trust of France. They were crude Does she enjoy repetition? I won- Harré, the chef-owner, and told him and rude and talked about girls and der aloud. she practically needed to work there, cars. So I was with these fifteen- “That’s just who I am. I like to ask that she wanted to bring the place to-twenty-five-year-old boys and people, ‘Do you like monotony? How back to the States, that she’d work I was thirty-three at the time and about working when everybody’s for free. Harré, a New Zealander who completely invisible. Like I was a having a good time? Weekends, night, had adopted Paris as his home, said, grandma, and nobody wanted to talk no money, no insurance, no vacation. “I’m not French. I’ll pay you.” And she to me, answer questions, anything.” Do you want a dirty, yucky job where stayed until her visa ran out. While she was happy to be you won’t get so much respect from She was planning on return- apprenticing to one of the great anyone outside the kitchen?’” ing to Paris to work with Harré, pastry chefs of all time, she began She did, so she stayed at Fauchon who wanted her to stay on and help to realize that had she gone to work for six months, working for free. The him grow the business, but a boy- for Nancy Silverton in California, at most puzzling part of her presence to friend convinced her to stay in the least someone would have answered her coworkers was she wasn’t inter- States. She started working around her questions. ested in cakes. “They thought I was in New York kitchens again and one She doubled down on work to weird because the elite do gateaux night Tom Valenti—another name make up for it. “The morning shift and I was more interested in petit almost lost to time, but a giant of was from six to two,” she says, “then fours and doughs.” Then she dropped the era—gave her a ride home from the afternoon shift from two to six. a little bomb: “I don’t like cake.” a party and told her she should call I was staying the whole time. It’s a I probed her on this point and Tom Colicchio, fresh o" of a star factory job. It’s fabrication. I loved found that she really does not like turn at Mondrian, because he and doing that; I still do. It’s the kind of cakes—particularly the bizarre Danny Meyer were opening a new person that I am. It’s about cranking custard-and-gelatin-layered a"airs place together. it out at a certain point.” that were the height of fashion when It was too high profile. It was too Claudia’s body language changes she was in Paris—and has worked much pressure. She didn’t want to when she talks about fabrication, hard to avoid making them over the work for Danny again—she very about making and making and mak- years. “I just don’t get them. I love much liked and respected him, but ing. “This is a creative field but that making custards—frozen or baked or it felt like a step backward. She can doesn’t mean you get to create all eggless or whatever–and doughs— rattle o" a lot of reasons that she the time. You have to do the rote pies, pu" pastry, croissant. And I love wasn’t right for the job and the job thing—you’ve got to practice your making crostatas. If I could make a wasn’t right for her. scales, you have to know all your living just making crostatas I’d be the And, of course, none of those positions. I like to tell kids there’s happiest person alive.” things were true.

Lucky Peach !" A version of Bras’s molten choco- “I saw a YouTube video of the des- late cake went on the opening menu sert course at Alinea, where they along with a panna cotta. Ruth serve the dessert all over the table,” Reichl, reviewing the restaurant she says of a recent-ish development for the Times, called it “a trembling at Grant Achatz’s avant garde restau- mound of cream that seems to be rant in Chicago, where a bare table held together with a wish.” top is painted and piled (in an elegant Over the years, buttermilk panna way!) with the dessert course. cotta became a Claudia Fleming sig- “And I’m like, ‘Please, God, don’t GRAMERCY nature and one of the most oft-imi- let that catch on.’ That is going to edia fanfare is de tated dishes from her repertoire. be a fucking disaster. But people rigueur around the “I got the recipe for it in Australian are going to start imitating it. In the opening of a restaurant Vogue,” Fleming tells me matter-of- short term it’s gonna be people who that has the potential factly when I ask about the origin think it’s a good idea but it won’t be Mto do more than suck these days. If of the dish. “I made it once when I in the right hands. In ten years, it’ll an unlikely alliance of rising stars— was at Luxe, the restaurant I was at be at Applebee’s. How about when which is what the partnership of before I went to Gramercy. I ate it and everybody starts squirting Hershey’s Danny Meyer and Tom Colicchio was thought: this is gonna be a thing. This all over the table?” at the time—were forming for a res- is gonna be my thing. Those Austral- Of course all that remains taurant project, Eater would install ian food magazines were awesome, so something for us to look forward a webcam and embed a reporter way ahead of the U.S. Everything was to in the future—Gramercy opened and we’d know every time a nail was fresh and easy and awesome.” before the first foam ever spurted pounded or a chair delivered. In ten or so years of writing out of a siphon gun. Her near- Gramercy got the !""# ver- about chefs, I can count on the fin- decade there made Claudia a chef. sion of that. Peter Kaminsky wrote gers of my elbow how many times “I would call Tom my greatest a multi-page cover story for New one has copped to the source of one mentor. I idolized Nancy and Pierre York magazine that hit newsstands of their dishes so plainly. “For me but I learned the most from him. opening day and trumpeted that nothing is original,” Fleming tells me. He would come over to my station Gramercy was an attempt to rede- When pressed, she’ll half-admit and take stu$ and use it, which was fine the four-star restaurant. It set to feeling like an under-credited secretly thrilling for me. up enormous expectations, not that influence herself, though she hides I learned everything from him. the pair didn’t court them. In the it well. “If you can do it better than About what’s good. And how to cook. years since Claudia first worked for me, then hat’s o$ to you. It’s fucking A lot of cooks call me a cook’s pas- him, Danny Meyer had gone from food. And in my case, it’s not even try chef—because I don’t do frou- a wide-eyed aspirant to a bonafide food, it’s dessert! You don’t need it. frou and I cook a lot of fruit—but I restaurateur, recognized as one It’s an afterthought—I mean I love was taking a lot of my cues from the of the savviest and most sincerely that about it: you have to choose to line because I was so insecure about innovative since Joe Baum. have dessert.” my pastry skills. So I started doing About Colicchio, Fleming says, She delineates what she did— things that people didn’t do—which “He’s very well spoken and very which was giving center stage to sounds ridiculous to say now— intelligent. But I was not the least dishes that existed in some way like to sauté fruit à la minute. I was bit charmed by him when I met him.” shape or form before she served covering the fact that I didn’t know Colicchio had just returned from them—and what followed. “It’s what was going on.” cooking at Michel Bras, and after easy for me to say nothing is origi- Claudia was in charge of a ten- hiring Fleming, he spread out the nal. Because I was just working with person pastry team that oper- menus and book he’d brought from inspiration from other people, not ated seven days a week, two ser- there. “He was like, ‘This is what I like going into a lab and trying to vices, doing five hundred covers on want to do.’ Everything was di$er- literally recreate the wheel. That is most days. She created and oversaw ent, everything had herbs in it.” some crazy shit. eighteen desserts between the two

!! Lucky Peach menus, plus petit fours and the like. project just around the corner. “I support Gerry, who had toiled for I remember late in her tenure there, remember Tom saying it wasn’t too little credit building up the she replaced the tasting menu petit worth it to upset the apple cart names of guys like Charlie Palmer fours with a basket of just-made and have me go do Craft restau- (first at the River Café and then dur- donuts, and it was news. “Petit fours rant,” Claudia tells me, biting her lip. ing two separate and long spells can be grotesque at the end of a big “Fucker. He left me behind. That was at Aureole). He got his own place, meal—they end up in the trash half so sad. I’ll never forgive him for that. Amuse, soon after, and Claudia the time. By the time I left, it was My life would have been so di$er- worked the door, not the stand a basket of tiny, warm, just-made ent—I would have actually been an mixer. But Gerry’s relationship with donuts. I wanted it to be something executive pastry chef, I would’ve this partner Steve Tzolis soured, and enticing.” These days, at the North been traveling, I’d still be in the Tzolis bought out Gerry’s interest. Fork Table Inn she serves a sin- city… ” she trails o$, still hurt, still The couple landed in South- gle housemade mallomar. Nobody’s feeling abandoned. old, in the far reaches of the North written about it. “It’d be gossip at Karen DeMasco, who worked for Fork, two hours east of the city. church on a good Sunday,” she quips. Claudia for two years, was installed Claudia was commuting, consulting “Look, I was the ‘It’ Girl for as pastry chef at Craft, and, with on the pastry menu at Five Points a minute. But it was absolutely Tom absent, Claudia’s tenure at restaurant, but soon enough a plan because of where I worked. Did I Gramercy drew to a close. hatched to open Gerry’s dream res- suck at what I did? No. I was good at taurant out on Long Island and cut it. But I worked for Tom and Danny. their ties with the city. “The dream If I was just Claudia Fleming and was his own restaurant—which I worked somewhere else, I could wasn’t gonna happen in the city have been ten times better and no because who was gonna give him one would have ever heard of me. the money?” Tom Colicchio never took credit for The found a restaurant and inn what I did, and he always men- at a price they could almost manage. tioned me, and that’s a huge part of They tore the place apart, put in a it. Anytime they asked Tom to do a poshly comfortable dining room, fundraiser, he’d say, ‘We’ll do des- THE EAST END and opened it in !""%, serving sert,’ and he’d take me. I’d do all the uring that whole time dinner on the weekends to city work and he would go and play. But at Gramercy, Claudia’s refugees and wine country tourists look where it got me: everybody sandwich fixation never who needed a place to eat or sleep. knew who I was.” quite cured itself. She was A few years back Claudia installed a One year at the James Beard Do$ered a job at Pret a Manger, a food truck in the parking lot—the Awards, Claudia ran into her old chain from London that had just truck was so fugly, they ended up chef and friend Gerry Hayden. They arrived in New York, and took it. “I putting a trompe l’oeil-painted fence got to talking, and a friendship wanted to be married and have a around it to help it blend into the started that would later became a family; I thought I wanted a di$erent landscaping—and started serving real relationship. After years of not life. I spent six months in meetings,” lunch and pastries. settling down, she was finally ready, she says of Pret a Manger, which Then, in !"##, Gerry found he and she and Gerry got married in she left after those six months, see- was having trouble holding a pan. !""#. They both worked like mani- ing that she’d never really have any He thought he had a pinched nerve, acs, both liked drinking at the bar at e$ect on the food. “And where was I and so he did what all good cooks the Red Cat, and, soon enough, both gonna go? There was no better res- do, which is work through the pain. wanted a family. taurant than Gramercy. There was Even in his mid-forties, Hayden was Her seriousness about her rela- nowhere better to go. There were no the kind of chef who wanted to be tionship was a big part of the reason better guys to work for.” on the line cooking. His mold was she left Gramercy. The other was Plus, she says, she felt like she’d cast in the era when that is what Craft, Coliccho’s new restaurant had “her turn,” that it was time to cooks did and aspired to do.

Lucky Peach !" When the muscle between his Disregarding his condition, handles this”—there are not words, thumb and forefinger started disap- Gerry organized and launched a so she omits them—“like... it’s really pearing, and grasping pans became Friday morning farmers market amazing. I’d be a wreck. I don’t know near impossible, he went to the doc- this summer. Local oystermen, what he’s found. tor and was diagnosed with amyo- ranchers, orchards, and fruit “How the fuck am I going to trophic lateral sclerosis, sometimes farms now gather to sell to the support myself for the next who called Lou Gehrig’s disease. “ALS is a community and weekenders in knows how many years? Am I degenerative muscle disease—your the parking lot of their inn. But employable? I’m fifty-five years old. senses are fine. It’s so weird. There’s in the six weeks leading up to That’s old to be, like, looking for no cure and no treatment and when my interview with Claudia, he’d work. It’s kind of scary. you’re diagnosed you get a three- experienced a steep decline. “My dad died really young, he to-five-year life expectancy. Ulti- “The wheelchair was huge died when he was fifty-six. He mately what happens is your lungs, because once you get in, you’re not worked really hard. He was a freak- which are dependent on muscle, getting out. He was dreading it. ing purchasing agent for a school stop working, so you can’t breathe,” Dreading it. Like, didn’t want to live. district, but he took his job so seri- Claudia tells me matter of factly, as But then when we got it, it was like, ously. I was like, ‘Dad, you can’t get we drive from her restaurant to a Oh my God, this is so much easier. so worked up about stu!—your nearby apple stand to pick fruit for It’s like you never really know when job does not define you!’ Ha! Really? that night’s dinner service. “Oddly you’ve had enough.” Claudia smiles And he just looked sad, because it enough,” she adds, “the two muscles for a second: “Even in a wheelchair did define him and it’s all he knew that aren’t a!ected are the heart he’s in his kitchen more than most how to do. And it seems hilarious and the eyes.” chefs! in retrospect that I had the gall to “But he can’t lift his arm to feed say that to him when I did the same himself more than a few bites. He exact thing.” can’t throw the covers o! if he’s She says she has friends who can warm. At a certain point I assume help out, and she’s talking mainly that your life is so consumed with about Mike and Mary Mraz, the cou- just trying to breathe that you can’t ple that runs the inn and the front of think about asking for help. The ego house at the restaurant. In my brief is just completely gone. interactions with them, they seem “That has probably been as hard extraordinarily patient, capable, or harder than stopping drinking. and kind; Claudia spoils Mike and Gerry and Claudia had finally He never asked anybody for help Mary’s boys in hopes that when they opened his dream restaurant; they’d for anything ever. So for him to ask go through that disobedient phase tried to have a family but now fully for help is very hard. The amount of of their teenage years, they’ll come had each other—Gerry quit drinking work that he’s had to put in on being running to her. before the North Fork Inn opened, okay with that… I mean, nobody “And I do love what I do,” she and Claudia barely drinks at all any works harder. He is always trying says. “I told Mary, all I want to do is more as a result. Now there was to get his head around something. come in the morning, see an empty this to contend with, and a busi- I can’t even imagine. I’m living this, cart, fill it up, and go home. I just like ness that requires an extraordinary and I don’t even understand it. It’s making shit.” amount of daily labor from the two too bizarre.” And with that, Claudia had to of them to keep running. Some old She wells up as she tells me about check on dinner service before she friends—like Don Pintabona, the a recent ALS benefit she cooked for went home to be with Gerry, and I chef of Tribeca Grill, where Claudia at Hearth restaurant in Manhattan, went to catch the Jitney, a few hours and Gerry met—have stepped up and how she spent the next night in back to the city, watching sandy and stepped in, trying to help carry the city to tape a television segment, corn fields give way to browned-out the load where Gerry physically can’t and snuck out to eat at Blue Rib- cities until New York rose up, twin- any more. bon, an old haunt, by herself. “Gerry kling in the distance.

!" Lucky Peach