Everyone Comes to Elaine's: Forty Years of Movie Stars, All-Stars, Literary Lions, Financial Scions, Top Cops, Politicians, and Power Brokers at the Legendary Hot Spot
Author: A E Hotchner
You know the name -- you've heard of the people -- and now the doors to Elaine's, New York City's famed night spot, are finally open. And no one, not even Elaine herself, is standing guard at the door.
Elaine Kaufman's creation certainly came from humble beginnings. Forty years ago the now legendary restaurant on Eighty-eighth Street and Second Avenue was deemed too far uptown for anyone of importance to frequent. It was there that Elaine served, catered to, and nursed young starving writers and artists of the day.
As these customers grew and matured into Woody Allen and Norman Mailer, Andy Warhol and Jack Nicholson, Elaine's grew with them. By the time these artists were deemed legends, well, Elaine's had already become legendary.
A. E. Hotchner was there at the beginning, is still there today, and has a table reserved for tomorrow. There is no better person than "Hotch" to tell the story of Elaine's. He was there for every bit of it.
They're all inside: Jackie O., Truman Capote, Frank Sinatra, Liz Smith, Joan Rivers, Lauren Bacall, Judy and Liza. The stories are all here. The night Jackie came to dance. The night Sinatra snubbed The Godfather author, Mario Puzo. When Sinatra's ex-wife, Mia Farrow, asked Michael Caine to introduce her to Woody Allen. When George Steinbrenner was turned away at the door the night his Yankees beat the Mets in the Subway Series.
Everyone Comes to Elaine's is more than a story about New York City. It's more than a story of celebrities. This is the story of a "family" with a domineering mother who will stop at nothing to protect those dearest to her. This is an American saga.
Elaine's is a microcosmof the people and events of the last forty years, from the sixties, when Beatles and Stones held forth there, to the start of the twenty-first century, when painful wakes were held for the regulars who perished on September 11. Just as Gertrude Stein presided over her salon in Paris in the twenties, Elaine now presides over hers.
So pull up a seat. You're invited. Everyone comes to Elaine's. Enjoy!
Publishers Weekly
The daughter of working-class Jewish New Yorkers, Elaine Kaufman barely graduated from high school, but for some 40 years she has owned and managed one of the most exclusive nightspots in Manhattan: Elaine's. As Hotchner (Papa Hemingway) puts it, what "Rick's place was to Casablanca, Elaine's is to New York." Soon after Elaine bought the old neighborhood bar at 88th Street and Second Avenue in 1963, she welcomed writers as her favored clients, allowing them to run tabs and make her place their second home. Authors George Plimpton, Pete Hamill, Hotchner and others were among Elaine's earliest customers-but as word spread, the tables filled. After the writers came their agents and editors, and then glitterati of all persuasions. As Hotchner explains, the food has never been the point (sometimes it's quite inedible, he indicates). But the atmosphere is everything, and the atmosphere is pure Elaine. Young men just starting out could eat at Elaine's and find their first agent, sell their first play or be consoled over their first failures. As for young women, well, Elaine's nastiness was notorious, reports Hotchner. Writers' wives were treated, according to Nora Ephron, "as if they were temps." "Women were not welcomed at early Elaine's, except as d cor," Jules Feiffer remarked. Why? Perhaps Elaine herself needed to be "the principal female attraction," as Gay Talese put it. Readers offended by Elaine's misogyny may savor the account, near the end, of her disastrous attempt to lose weight and get a husband. Hotchner isn't known for writing fluff, but this reads like an extended glossy magazine feature, dripping with famous names and celebrity photos, full of dish-but leaving readers with little appetite. Photos. (On sale Mar. 30) Forecast: This titillating tribute to a New York City landmark is bound to attract local and national media coverage, culminating in respectable sales. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Look this: How to Publish Your Communication Research or Basic Guide to System Safety
The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears at the World's Most Famous Cooking School
Author: Kathleen Flinn
A delightful true story of food, Paris, and the fulfillment of a lifelong dream
In 2003, Kathleen Flinn, a thirty-six-year-old American living and working in London, returned from vacation to find that her corporate job had been eliminated. Ignoring her mother's advice that she get another job immediately or "never get hired anywhere ever again," Flinn instead cleared out her savings and moved to Paris to pursue a dream-a diploma from the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school. The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry is the touching and remarkably funny account of Flinn's transformation as she moves through the school's intense program and falls deeply in love along the way. Flinn interweaves more than two dozen recipes with a unique look inside Le Cordon Bleu amid battles with demanding chefs, competitive classmates, and her "wretchedly inadequate" French. Flinn offers a vibrant portrait of Paris, one in which the sights and sounds of the city's street markets and purveyors come alive in rich detail. The ultimate wish fulfillment book, her story is a true testament to pursuing a dream. Fans of Julie & Julia, Almost French, and Eat, Pray, Love will be amused, inspired, and richly rewarded by this seductive tale of romance, Paris, and French food.
Publishers Weekly
When the author, an American journalist and software executive working in London, is sacked from her high-powered job, she enrolls as a student at the Cordon Bleu school in Paris. With limited cooking skills and grasp of the French language, she gamely attempts to master the school's challenging curriculum of traditional French cuisine. As if she didn't have enough on her plate eviscerating fish and knocking out pâtéà choux, she determines to write a book about her experience and gets married along the way. The result is a readable if sentimental chronicle of that year in Paris in which her love life is explored in great detail, dirty weekends and all, and cooking features as a metaphor for self-discovery. Some readers may feel disappointed that the narrator's encounters with French cookery remain largely confined to her lessons at the Cordon Bleu. On those rare occasions when she ventures into the food-obsessed city, the descriptions of meals are glancing at best. Although her struggles with the language and lack of knowledge about the culture lend comic elements to the story (once, trying to order a pizza over the phone, she said, "Je suis une pizza"-I am a pizza), they, too, constrain the author's culinary explorations. (Oct.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationKirkus Reviews
An American expatriate follows her dream to study at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. When 36-year-old software executive Flinn got fired in 2003, she was faced with a choice: She could look for another job or pursue her passion. Actually, it's two passions: cooking, and a man. While a corporate wage-slave, she feared making a commitment to Mike back in Seattle. Now unemployed, single and with no country to call home, nothing held her back. She called Mike, drained her savings, moved with him to Paris and started classes. Part memoir, part insider's look at the famed culinary institute where the world's elite chefs have been trained in the art of French haute cuisine, the text takes the form of chronological chapters interweaving lessons learned at the school with lessons learned about life. We meet characters both eccentric and multicultural, from the seemingly bipolar Gray Chef to a roster of far-flung classmates. The range of students from Europe, America, South America, Asia and the Middle East makes it apparent that French cuisine is now global, but Flinn merely touches on that theme. It's not the only potentially fascinating topic she scants; she barely seems to notice that Paris now competes with London, formerly the butt of many jokes about bad food, as the home of superlative dining. Instead, Flinn attempts to use cooking as a life metaphor, a dicey tactic when your personal revelations mostly resemble outtakes from Sex and the City. The book is best when she sticks to cooking, France's culinary history, diverse regional traditions and the challenges of meeting the impeccable standards of Le Cordon Bleu's demanding chefs. A fascinating look inside a famed elite institution, unnecessarilygarnished with lackluster autobiography. Agent: Larry Weissman/Larry Weissman, LLC
What People Are Saying
Elizabeth Gilbert
I can never get enough of true stories about people who stop in the middle of their life's journey to ask, 'What do I really want?' and then have the guts to actually go get it. Kathleen Flinn's tale of chasing her ultimate dream makes for a really lovely book-engaging, intelligent and surprisingly suspenseful. (Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love)
Table of Contents:
Author's Note xiiiPrologue: This Is Not for Pretend 1
Basic Cuisine 5
Life Is Not a Dress Rehearsal 7
Lost in Translation 17
Culinary Boot Camp 25
Taking Stock 35
Memoirs of a Quiche 46
La Vie en Rose 56
No Bones About It 66
Splitting Hares 74
The Souffle Also Rises 83
As the Vegetables Turn 92
Final Exam-Basic 103
Intermediate Cuisine 113
Class Break: Spain 115
C'est la Vie, C'est la Guerre 118
A Week in Provence 128
Rites of Passage 134
The Silence of the Lamb 143
"I Am a Pizza for Kathleen" 150
A Sauce Thicker Than Blood 158
La Catastrophe Americaine 164
Bon Travail 171
Final exam-Intermediate 177
Superior Cuisine 183
Class Break: Normandy, then America 185
Back in Bleu 189
Great Expectations 202
Gods, Monsters, and Slaves 211
La Danse 220
Bye-bye, Lobster 231
I Didn't Always Hate My Job 243
An American Hospital in Paris 249
Final Exam-Superior 259
Epilogue: Thanksgiving in Paris 271
Extra Recipes 275
Acknowledgments 279
Selected Bibliography 281
Index of Recipes 283
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