A Celebration of Chefs and Others

At first glance, the Hollywood restaurant Kate Mantilini's seems an unusual backdrop for life-sized pictures of Mad Men, a show set in 1960s New York. That is, until owner Marilyn Lewis provides the back story. 

Q: What's the history behind Kate Mantilini's and why did you put up the Mad Men display.

A: It's been 21 years since we opened Kate Mantilini's, which I named after my Uncle Rob's mistress. My mother wouldn't let me speak to her, nobody would allow us to mention her name, but she was a very strong woman and I wanted to name my restaurant after her. My husband was under contract with Warner Brothers, and he did 50 films in the 1940s before we went into the restaurant business.

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Eating alone is a trying thing for some people, writing cooking and eating off as products of a banal bodily necessity. I love to eat and cook alone, using the kitchen as an improvisational laboratory to experiment with recipe ideas, flavor combinations, and cooking techniques. MFK Fisher, a witty food writer with a fluid, deeply expressive writing style bursting with gastronomic knowledge, shared my passion. She was one of the best food writers out there, blurring the lines between the genres of food anthropology, ecology, travel literature, and cooking.

Simply put, she made being a foodie cool long before it was fashionable. Her great strength as a writer is her ability to drag you into her prose to taste, smell, and feel your way through her experiences in and around the kitchen. Mary Frances was not afraid to dine alone, in fact she loved it, and one short and sweet chapter of her An Alphabet for Gourmets sums up her point of view. “It took me several years of such periods of being alone to learn how to care for myself, at least at table. I came to believe that since nobody else dared feed me as I wished to be fed. I must do it myself, and with as much aplomb as I could muster.” In regards to eating alone, I have taken a page from her book, and as a result treat myself to lavish meals regularly.

I’m not really a baker.  I make perfect oatmeal cookies (once every three years), perfect chocolate chip cookies (if really bored – Laraine Newman thinks the Joy of cooking recipe is the best, I just use the one on the back of the Nestle’s chocolate bits bag) The secret to chocolate chip cookies is fresh nuts, if you ask me, the quality of the pecans or the walnuts, changes the equation.  Sometimes, if I’m feeling really wild, I’ll make butterscotch chip cookies, same recipe, but butterscotch bits instead of chocolate and totally delicious.

I went through a phase where I made bread (when I was at boarding school in Vermont and there was a Country Store down the road that sold 100 varieties of flour from the grist mill down the road) so it was sort of hard to resist.  And we didn’t have a television, but we had a kitchen in our dorm with a sweet old Wedgwood stove and somehow, the smell of bread, and an occasional roast chicken, made it feel somewhat more like home.  But I can’t really find good flour any more and fresh baguettes abound.

Clementine, the great west-side L.A. charcuterie has amazing candies, too...

Ok, so I love Shirley Temple.  Anyone who thinks I’m a sap can eat me.  She was a genius.  There’s never been a child performer who could do what she did.  At the age of 3, she could sing, dance and act. 

When she uh, matured, one of the many things she did was a television show called Shirley Temple’s Storybook. It ran from 1958-1960. She did all the classics and even starred in some of them. 

As young as I was, I was aware of the schism between her matronly plumpness and the tight fitting costumes she squeezed into as she appeared as The Little Mermaid among others.  But, that never diminished my love for her.