I did not meet my wife at Gabrielle Hamilton’s Prune restaurant in the East Village, that distinction belongs to Moto, the wine bar under the J train in south Williamsburg, but a lot of our early courting was done across the bar at Prune. She was a bartender, and I’d sit at her bar making goo-goo eyes while drinking the well-made Sidecars she mixed for me, eating Gabrielle’s sweetbreads, monkfish liver, raw kale with oil and parmesan, or whatever special was so incredible that night I had to have.
Hamilton’s Blood, Bones, and Butter, The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, chronicles, sort of, the genesis of Prune, but more so a life framed through a love of food. You get the feeling the chef has spent a life exploring the spiritual intricacies of the finer culinary arts at the expense of an ability to appreciate life itself. It’s crazy to say, but a lot of the early New York sections of Blood, Bones, and Butter bring to mind a late 20th-century, punk rock Breakfast At Tiffany’s (the novella). Long live the love of food. And long live New York City!
The list of chefs and restaurateurs who have worked for and been inspired by (sometimes through negation) Gabrielle is long. I mean, just from the people I know personally there is a Food Network producer, chef Matt Hamilton at Belcourt, a graphic designer to high-end restaurateurs, beloved underground supper author of Forking Fantastic (not its original title) Tamara Reynolds, chef/owners in California wine country, not to mention staff at the East Village’s new Porsena.
What makes Gabrielle’s book often so lovely is not so much the story of the genesis of the venerated Prune, but the fact that the chef, very much a writer, can actually write. Beautifully. And what stories: from her upbringing in rural Pennsylvania with a French mother and father who built sets for Broadway shows, to the birth of Hamilton’s own children in the East Village. The story is invigorating and cuts to the bone, indelibly wistful.
Author’s wife at Prune (in the day)
I do not know Gabrielle Hamilton personally. I’ve spoken to her in passing on numerous occasions, much as she has done with many Prune regulars. I am friends with a number of individuals who worked for her. I have listened to far too many diatribes against Gabrielle, as well as glowing love fests over the years, so many that it was often a bore. (My wife loves her.) If you’ve ever worked in restaurants you know that most of what people say about their bosses or co-workers is pure bullshit.
That said, what’s curious about Gabrielle’s characterization of herself in her own book is how closely it mirrors the Gabrielle I’ve heard people speak of. Passionate, violently talented, impersonal, tender, brutal. This is how she describes herself. In one passage she speaks of breaking up with her girlfriend of many years, a woman who helped her build Prune. It is one of the most concise, best written passages I have read. And just brutal.
Amazed at the sheer eloquence (she switches to second person) I had to remind myself that, like a sophist, Gabrielle had just described crushing her lesbian lover for a man she constantly proclaims she is actually ambivalent about. She does not explain this seismic event in her life, though it must have been shocking to many people around her. It just happened; it’s not important.
I’m not sure if the story Gabrielle tells of herself and Michele, the man who became the father of her children, is some kind of tender, unorthodox love story, or the demented ravings of a sociopath using a man for his sperm and Italian culinary family traditions. The fine line between these polarities is just that thin. Do I view Gabrielle as some sort of monster because of all of the propaganda I’ve heard about her over the years (and read in her own memoir), or am I a closet groupie of hers myself? I never tire of a story often told to me about Gabrielle and one of her sous chefs desperately attempting to kill an eel for the first time—blood everywhere. I am blown away by her journey; it reminds me of the scope, if less the substance, of my own life. Across cities and eras and perspectives. Are wildly successful people inevitably monsters? Or characterized as such?
When I told friends I was chasing one of the Prune ladies, with the tight pink shirts, who were all purported to be lesbian, they either did not believe me, or found a way to spend nights there with me. I watched my pre-wife hit on by both sexes, and she watched me get hit on at the bar at Prune too. Sometimes we were hit on by the same people, or couples. It’s true that Prune was like that. The food was so orgiastic, the room had such an electric vibe running through it, everything felt just lovely. Again, it did not hurt the staff was mostly women in tight pink shirts.
I’m sure that to Gabrielle I went from the guy an employee of hers was fucking, to her boyfriend, then that former employee’s husband, and then father to her children. We stopped by Prune for lunch as my wife went into early labor with our daughter, something my wife always planned on doing, and Gabrielle was very kind and comforting to us, buying us lunch. We dined at Prune as recently as this past Valentine’s Day, again for lunch, because that’s the easier meal to dine when you have a now two year-old daughter and a month-old baby boy. Trout roe, a simple and delightful Bibb salad, dining at Prune is still one of the finest moments we share together.
Many questions persist, such as the mystery of Gabrielle’s mother. There feels an incredible chasm between the mother who gave Hamilton her understanding and love of food as a child, and the person she mysteriously has not seen for twenty years by the end of the book. The rich brother who as a powerful Goldman Sachs executive hired the lawyer who got Gabrielle out of grand larceny as a teenager is a specter, ghost. In a memoir so very personal the lack of exposition on seemingly dear family is glaring. You simply cannot introduce characters important to the arc of your life, and then not explain a minimum totality of their existence and relationship to you. Gabrielle hides aspects of her relationship with family, just like she fails to mention that her father has owned a restaurant in New Jersey for many years—this fact goes unmentioned in her book. And a little advice: If you have to wonder what your “actual” class is, whether you really “have money” or not, trust me—you do.
The last third of Blood, Bones, and Butter is a tad repetitious—did you know she was chef/owner of her own small restaurant? It’s hard to argue that Gabrielle doesn’t become overly bitchy by the end. The book reeks of the fatigue inherent in a life spent in restaurants. It is as if Gabrielle runs out of things to say, stories to tell, so she just retreats to rehashing tales of her mother-in-law and cooking in Puglia. Bashing her (now ex) husband. And by the end the bashing becomes pointless and boring. But before that, in its earliest sections, Gabrielle’s memoir is vibrant, and lives up to what it aims to be—a framing of life through someone’s relation to food, in all the lovely as well as spirit-crushing guises. I came away with an enriched love for Prune, respect for Gabrielle, but also a horror. Long live the love of food, even at the expense of an embrace of life. And yes, long live our beloved New York City.
(and edited version of this essay appeared in the Brooklyn Rail)
