Top of Mind: Lydia Shire, Extended Version

JLJ: Let’s talk about dining trends. A couple of years ago, we had “the year of the steak.” Then comfort food had a revival. Now “locavore” seems to be popping up everywhere these days—

LS: Locavore—what’s locavore?

JLJ: Trendy term for restaurants that emphasize sourcing from local purveyors, local ingredients.

I was wondering if you had any thoughts on current trends that you’re seeing now, for good or ill, and anything that you might see on the horizon.

LS: Well, one thing is what we accomplished here at Scampo, which I’m very proud of. I remember when I first brought my ideas for this type of menu that we have at Scampo to Patrick Lyons and Ed Sparks, who are now my partners. I showed them this concept and I remember Ed looking at it and saying to me, “This is good…this is good.” Basically, it was saying to hell with all the nutritionists out there that say stay away from carbs and just eat proteins, or eat this. And actually nobody should even listen to those people anyway. What you should do is follow your own head.

Food is not bad for you—no food is bad for you. It’s how you balance it in your life. Julia [Child] would be the first one to say that she had butter every day, she had a little cream every day. So, you know, there’s nothing wrong with eating fancy French foods. It’s just you don’t couple that with McDonald’s and a lot of junk in the meantime. Again, food is not an enemy.

But what I wanted to do was to have a menu here at Scampo that was fun. There are lots of inexpensive breads…and I wanted pizza, because for all these years I’ve been making pretty good pizzas. I wanted spaghetti because spaghetti is the—you know, that would be my last meal on earth. I’d have probably skirt steak or flank steak and some spaghetti aglio e olio. And I know what chefs love to eat—chefs love spaghetti aglio e olio. It’s just the simplest dish in the world. You know, they say that perfection is a dish that is three ingredients. Spaghetti aglio e olio is spaghetti, oil, and garlic. What could be more perfect than that?

…I just decided, Why not have this restaurant where people can come in and order a mozzarella salad for $15, a bread for $4, and maybe a spaghetti for $11 or $12, and get out of there for under $30, and have three courses. …I think Scampo, what we’ve done here, is pretty special,  because I think it has lots of little bits of Biba in it. It’s pretty experimental—cuisine I’m talking, not so much the look of it. We have fun putting wacky things on the menu sometimes. Again, all your children are different.

JLJ: A lot of your press coverage makes much of your role in breaking boundaries for women in the restaurant business. How you feel about that, and do you think there are still barriers to be overcome?

LS: I don’t think there are any barriers for women out there now. There are tons of women cooking now. I still think the balance is not quite equal. There are more men out there cooking—no question about it. But women have made long strides. I don’t think people even think about that anymore.

…But then again, maybe I’m the oldest one in the crowd now. Somebody had to do it, so I guess I was the one.

My son now is cooking, he’s going to Johnson & Wales—he’s been cooking at Scampo this summer, and he wants to take over. He wants to follow in my footsteps, and basically what I tell anybody who wants to listen to me is: Look around you, ascertain how much those people know, what they know, and do one more—learn one more thing, just rise another step above. And the only way you can do that is to work hard. So it means your time off is spent reading. You know, I’m a voracious reader. I travel a lot. I take notes.

…I think in my case it also helped that my parents were both artists. They were fashion illustrators, so I grew up in a home with art and color and beauty. I mean, if you were to see the three [issues of] Art Culinaire that have my work in it, my dishes and everything, you would see right away that they are very beautiful and artfully done. And that’s—is it from me, or my parents? I attribute it to my parents. Somehow it went through….

JLJ: Let’s talk a little bit about the movie Julie and Julia, and how your relationship with Julia Child began.

LS: Way back in the early ’70s, I was working at Maison Robert and I had been given a promotion to be the chef of their fancy dining room, Bon Homme Richard. And, truthfully, that was huge to me. So, Julia used to come to Maison Robert for dinner and I think she was pretty impressed that, here I was, this young girl in her early twenties, running the nicest French dining room. And she invited me to her house for lunch, and she invited me to visit her at her house in France…I mean, I don’t think I was any different from any of the other people she met. It’s just that—guess what?—I lived a stone’s throw from her. All the other chefs around the country would only see her rarely, but I saw her a lot.

I think one of the nicest things was when she invited me to England to go on the QE2 with her. This was kind of at the end of her life. She called me up, she said, “Lydia, I am dying to eat oysters and drink Sancerre at Harrods’s oyster bar. Would you like to come?” So what do you say to Julia Child?

JLJ: Was there anything in Julie and Julia that you felt like they didn’t get right?

LS: Well, I saw when they showed the meat for beef bourguignon—one of the first shots of that, of Julie going and buying some beef—it was all lean. If you’re going to cook something for a few hours, you need the fat or else it would be a disaster. So someone was not watching that scene. But that had nothing to do with Julia. In fact, I think Meryl Streep was great. I loved it.

… I guess I would just say that our friendship was a great friendship. She was always mad at me, though, because I hadn’t written a cookbook yet.