How the Kiwi Changed New York’s Food Scene

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/t-magazine/food-1980s.html

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KIWI WAS THE gateway drug. Native to southern China, where it was known as mihoutao, or monkey peach, the hairy fruit with the chlorophyll-rich, jade-green interior first started coming in bulk to the U.S. via New Zealand in the 1950s under the name “Chinese gooseberry.” It made little headway — perhaps due to Cold War-era fears of Communist China — before it was rechristened in honor of the equally fuzzy kiwi bird. But not until the early ’80s did it begin appearing with merciless persistence at restaurants across Manhattan, in tart after tart, fruit salads, compotes and even savory dishes, lending an algal tinge to beurre blanc. By 1983, it was stocked in every supermarket and featured in recipes on the back of cake-mix boxes. The New York Times declared it passé.

No matter: It had served its purpose, opening eyes and palates to fruit of all colors, shapes and textures, beyond the familiar apples, oranges and bananas. New Yorkers welcomed speckled Asian pears; papaya with its lode of dripping black seeds; rough-skinned litchi disclosing creamy white flesh; knobby cherimoya with guts of custard; star fruit with its sharp angles and plasticized shine. They came from distant lands, unfamiliar and strangely armored, and took root in our grocery stores. True, the kiwi quickly became a punch line (The Times’s restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton called it “the emperor’s new clothes in fruits” in 1982), and none of its cohorts would go on to receive the same kind of cultish adoration. But together these fruits achieved something at once ordinary and radical: They became part of the cityscape, as if they’d always been here, as if New York — and then America — couldn’t exist without them.

There was a dark side to this bounty. The new produce didn’t come cheap. Nor did the breeds of lettuce that began to supplant iceberg at chic dinner parties — often purchased at one of the recently opened Greenmarkets in town and dressed with high-end extra-virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar imported from Europe, varieties of which were now available at specialty shops alongside sun-dried tomatoes, medallions of French chèvre, fresh coriander (as cilantro was known), edible nasturtiums and pink peppercorns. Imports of pink peppercorns were briefly suspended in 1982 by the F.D.A., citing concerns over potential toxicity, but when Dean & DeLuca — anchored in the SoHo that still belonged to artists — issued a recall, some customers refused to part with their floral-spicy stash, which scarcity had only made more valuable.

In the ’60s and ’70s, caring about what you put in your body had been primarily a countercultural concern, privileging natural over artificial, handmade over mass-produced. Now the kind of artisanal ingredients long celebrated on the Pacific Coast by activist chefs like Alice Waters were being embraced by New Yorkers exhausted by two decades of social agitation and the fiscal crisis of the ’70s, which had gutted not only the city’s safety net of public services but the liberal ideals that supported them. This turn inward, away from public life to private, was due in part to the economic boom presided over by Ronald Reagan — people finally had the money to splurge on radicchio flown in from Italy and crème fraîche from France. What had been political choices became personal luxuries: The revolution was here, and it was salad.

OF COURSE, New Yorkers being New Yorkers, they couldn’t just bow to the national agenda. Gary Waldron, a Bronx-born IBM manager, refused to quietly tend his own garden; instead, working with the nonprofit Group Live-In Experience, he planted one the size of a city block in the East Tremont section of his neglected native borough, setting it among the torched buildings and slumlord tenements, with the goal of giving jobs to disadvantaged youth. It was an added bonus that the tarragon and basil they cultivated turned up at the likes of Le Cirque and the Four Seasons; the restaurant Lavin’s touted them on the menu as “Herbs de Bronx.” (It was an unlikely crossing point for the two New Yorks: those uplifted by Reagan’s tax cuts and gospel of prosperity, and those not.)

On the Upper West Side, residents were still in mourning for their neighbor John Lennon, who was shot in early December 1980, under the archway of the Dakota co-op he called home. A few blocks away, at her tiny takeout shop, the Silver Palate, Sheila Lukins — a neighbor of Lennon’s at the Dakota, from whom Yoko Ono ordered pecan pie daily in the months after his death — was starting a different revolution, showing home cooks how to make polished dishes that didn’t require the convolutions of French technique. “The Silver Palate Cookbook,” published in 1982 by Lukins and the shop’s co-founder, Julee Rosso, would become one of the best-selling cookbooks in history. Even now, New Yorkers continue to consult its stained and creased pages to make chicken Marbella for dinner parties and Passover seders, leaving the bird to wallow overnight in vinegar, green olives, capers and prunes before roasting and then bearing it triumphantly to the table, wafting the scent of the Mediterranean.

But not every flavor beloved in the trickle-down years has retained its aura; some, particularly those associated with nouvelle cuisine, quickly soured. New York magazine’s longtime restaurant critic Gael Greene lamented in her 2006 memoir that her early praise of white chocolate mousse triggered “an avalanche of soapy white chocolate.” Boozy, caffeinated tiramisù, whose origins are traced back to Treviso, Italy, infiltrated the menus of Italian restaurants throughout New York, where the dessert remains today, its light dimmed but still occasionally capable of dazzling. Uramaki, an inverted form of sushi roll with rice outside and nori within, is said to have been improvised by a Japanese chef in Los Angeles to assuage 1970s-era diners squeamish about seaweed, and has since been viewed by purists as slightly suspect. But it did not seem out of place at Midtown’s Hatsuhana in 1983 when The Times anointed it with four stars — one of five restaurants in the city at the time to receive the honor — transforming sushi in Manhattan from an expensive, forbidding novelty into an enduring status symbol.

Soon, Starbucks, a small chain of stores based in Washington State that focused on selling whole coffee beans, would brew its first latte. By the time its first Manhattan storefront opened on the Upper West Side a decade later, the city had entered the age of the multinational corporation, when everything distinct and unique had become a commodity.

Still, something of that early ’80s restive spirit has stayed with us. During the breakdown of the ’70s, families with means fled to the suburbs in even greater numbers than their ’50s and ’60s forebears. What saved the city was immigration, replenishing the population with 854,000 new arrivals between 1980 and 1989. (Midway through the decade, whites of European descent lost their majority.)

And while the Patrick Batemans fought to land tables at the Odeon and the Quilted Giraffe, any citizen, rich or poor, could walk down the street and meet the world. The Times reported that the number of sidewalk vendors doubled between 1979 and 1982, and at almost every crosswalk you could now find falafel, souvlaki and kebabs, alongside signs saying “Free Afghanistan” and dollar Chipwiches from New Jersey — ice-cream cookie sandwiches that each weighed a quarter-pound. As Reagan was championing free trade, New Yorkers were living it. The world had come to the curb and to the corner bodega, and we were ready to eat it up.

Top photo: 19th-century Meissen porcelain bust of girl, Alexander’s Antiques. Bottom photo: large 18th-century Meissen figurine and small 19th-century Meissen figurine, Robin’s Antiques. Retouching: Anonymous Retouch. Digi tech: Cason Latimer. Photo assistant: Caleb Andriella. Prop stylist assistant: Marci Leiseth. Food stylist assistant: Lauren Schaefer