Aspen – Where do you take a person for lunch when she has eaten in every major European city, knows or has known many of the world’s great chefs and restaurateurs and fears no food?
Easy: You take her to Taqueria El Nopal, a tiny, off-the-beaten-track Mexican eatery in the down-valley community of Basalt, almost in the middle of nowhere.
Then you sit back and watch her eyes light up as she bites into a taco de cabeza made with tender steamed beef-cheek meat, homemade salsa caliente and a dot of guacamole, then swoons over a fish taco, the specialty of the day on Friday.
If that person is Gael Greene, author and former primary food critic for New York magazine, it is a magical moment.
Greene, who was in Aspen to sign her memoir, “Insatiable,” at the Aspen Food & Wine Classic, also knows Aspen’s restaurants, and seems genuinely appreciative of the outstanding tacos served in this modest little place. She is not a food snob. To the contrary, she takes credit for bringing potluck suppers to Aspen.
“Most of my friends are good cooks, but when I lived here while I was writing, I didn’t have time for the kind of dinner parties I used to give,” Greene says between bites. “But I wanted to stay in touch so I came up with this idea for getting together where one person would bring this, and someone else would bring that, and we’d have a great time.
“People who know me know I don’t come to their homes to review their food. I do that in restaurants.”
And for the better part of two decades she celebrated excellence and savaged mediocrity, praised imagination and denounced the lack thereof. She shares all in her seventh book, a memoir with a difference.
It’s written by a woman from the Midwest who lived her life unencumbered by traditional notions of what a woman ought or ought not do with her life. Greene discusses her evolution from lover of good food to, well, a lover of good men.
Along the way, she also sheds light on what her life was like behind the printed word, and it was anything but dull. One look at the wide-brimmed red straw hat atop a head of nicely toned blond and brown hair, her busty upper torso clad in a Brooklyn Diner T-shirt over black pants, and you can feel she exudes a certain sexiness even now.
The fingernails are bright red, and Greene is fussing because she didn’t bring her red lipstick to revive lip color soon to be dulled by munching chips and guacamole and tacos, chased by ice water from a paper cup emblazoned with a Coca-Cola logo.
But she graciously accommodates a photographer who wants to take pictures in several points around the restaurant. Other patrons, oblivious to the strange notoriety their little restaurant has garnered, remain glued to the soccer game playing itself out on the television anchored near the ceiling in the middle of a long pink wall.
Much has been made of Greene’s detailed sexual exploits, from Elvis to Eastwood and beyond. But her narrative style is neither prurient nor boastful. It was just how she lived her life, apparently to the fullest, every day.
Over the 357 pages in which she chronicles her adventures at table and in bed, readers visit New York’s famed restaurants of the ’60s, and ’70s. They witness foodies before the term was invented jockeying for position at tables and banquettes at 21, La Grenouille and Elaine’s; dining with the Troisgros restaurateur family in France. Readers dine with food greats, most notably Craig Claiborne, who, with Pierre Franey and James Beard, launched the modern American food scene.
But we also are forced to witness the protracted, painful dissolution of a marriage that sounds from the start as though it could never end.
Interwoven with wonderful food and emotional drama is the life story of a woman who has the courage to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It is a little too much truth for some.
And yes, she admits a lot of her success had to do with being in the right place at the right time. But she is equally proud of her accomplishments on behalf of City-
meals on Wheels, a nonprofit organization that provides meals to the homebound elderly. Sex, food and a social conscience. What a gal.
“I was very lucky to have lived in a time when women’s attitudes toward sex were changing along with the way Americans were starting to look at food,” she says. “But I also knew most people did not eat the way I did. I was lucky to have Craig Claiborne cook his fried chicken with a quarter-cup of black pepper for me.”
And to hear others tell it, they were fortunate to have Greene in their lives.
During a book signing at the home of longtime friend Richard Edwards, Bobby Flay drops in to congratulate Greene and give her a hug. Edwards owns the Baldwin Gallery and Aspen’s “it” place, the Caribou Club.
“I’ve known Gael for 16 years through the food business,” Flay says. “When I opened Mesa Grill, Gael was the pre-eminent critic in the country. She put me on the map. She’s iconic. People have tried to copy her, but no one has come close. You can’t get bored reading her stuff.”
Staff writer Ellen Sweets can be reached at 303-820-1284 or esweets@denverpost.com.
