My wife, years ago, was at the Grand Central Oyster Bar when a mother
and son sat beside her. The boy was about eleven—still a kid but seeming
very grownup, sitting at the restaurant’s counter—and my wife was tuned
to the pair’s conversation by a particular tone of day-out contentment.
She heard them order a few dishes to share and then a caviar sandwich.
Caviar sandwich—the rare two-word poem. My wife assumed that it was an
off-menu item, but she checked closely (the Oyster Bar’s menu is dense
and long and apparently handwritten), and there it was.
The caviar sandwich, which from then on I would order every Friday
evening before catching the train to my home upstate, was served on
plain, toasted white bread with a little shredded hard-boiled egg. On
the plate was a small plastic tub—the type that coleslaw usually comes
in—of thick crème fraîche. The toast was rough, the caviar darkly marine
and stinging and slick, with no ovate snap to the roe. The crème
fraîche—you would shove a corner of the sandwich into it—was brilliant,
and cool on your toast-scuffed palate. The sandwich cost about thirteen
dollars—a sandwich for those who are rich, caviar for those who aren’t.
It went well with a severe martini in the Oyster Bar’s business-like
cocktail glasses.
The Oyster Bar has always been a good place for visitors to get an idea
of the city.
It’s fast. It’s loud. It’s abrupt. It’s big—two large dining rooms, a
lounge, and a series of low lunch counters—yet it’s a crush: by the time
you have hinged and folded into a seat at the counter, you will almost
certainly have pressed your body against the body of your neighbor, who
is a stranger and will likely remain so, although you will soon know his
or her business. The space, like Grand Central as a whole, is
ingeniously simple yet gorgeous, impatiently glamorous, and the caviar
sandwich is, in my mind, a perfect embodiment of the hub’s hurried
elegance. So I was saddened to notice, recently, that the sandwich had
disappeared from the menu, joining a long list of things that New
Yorkers may only be thankful that they once had.
The Grand Central Oyster Bar’s executive chef, Sandy Ingber, who has
been in charge of the menu since 1996, told me that the restaurant first
started serving the sandwich around the turn of the millennium. It was a
whimsical invention of Jerome Brody’s, who owned the Oyster Bar and also
ran, at various times, the Rainbow Room, Gallaghers Steakhouse, and the
Four Seasons. Brody challenged Ingber to find a caviar that was cheap
enough so that they could sell the sandwich at a reasonable price but
good-quality enough to serve in their restaurant. Together they tasted
several options, the cheapest of which were “very, very salty, and very
poor quality,” Ingber said, and then found their answer in a caviar from
the black bowfin, from Louisiana. At four dollars per ounce, and in
a four-ounce tin—enough for four sandwiches—the roe was much cheaper
than the next-highest-quality caviar but much better than the next
lowest.
Ingber said that they used to sell between five and eight sandwiches a
day—not the restaurant’s biggest seller, but “not bad for kind of an
oddball.” The waiters would toast the bread behind the counter and then
hustle it into the kitchen, where, Ingber said, it took less than a minute
to complete the dish. And so it was until the summer of 2017, when
Ingber got a call from his caviar supplier, who told him that, owing to
the over-harvesting of other types of roe, the demand for black-bowfin
caviar had swelled, driving the price up sharply. To continue to serve
it, the Oyster Bar would have to triple the price of the sandwich.
The decision to take it off the menu was not
taken lightly. Ingber called a meeting of his culinary board: the
controller and president, Janet Poccia; the kitchen manager and
vice-president, Mohammed Lawal; and the executive sous chef, Peter Fu.
The numbers spoke for themselves. But one of the factors that Ingber
considered was the opinion of Brody, who died in 2001. “We always
consider Mr. Brody the genius behind the restaurant,” Ingber told me.
Brody, Ingber said, was an “Ivy League man” who, with his elegant wife, Marlene, dined well,
travelled the world on his hundred-foot yacht, and raised thoroughbreds
upstate. But he “never talked down to people.” When he was in town, even
toward the end of his life, he came to the Oyster Bar almost daily, at 8 A.M., and talked to the
seafood buyer and the person who managed the books, and his word remained revered. Even if
he were still alive, though, Ingber conceded, Brody would have been
forced to admit—as many New Yorkers, at one point or another, do—that
the caviar “was no longer within our price range,” and that the sandwich
would have to go.
Sourse: newyorker.com
