Nobody Knows the Truffles I've Seen

Patrick Kuh

Americans have always loved Italy: Primi, secondi, long tables, wine-buzzed afternoons -- it's not only a pleasant place to live, it dovetails nicely with a marketing plan. The ochre gestalt of a Tuscan sunset can help move everything from Cadillacs to IRAs; it can certainly move books.

American books about Italy used to be in the style of the civilized guide. Samuel Chamberlain's Italian Bouquet (1958) intersperses recipes among pictures of ruins and monuments, fishermen and shepherds. The author knows his audience. The reader is clearly understood to be an interested outsider driving through in a sleek black Citroen 11 L on his or her way to the next listing in the Baedeker Guide. In today's books, the car stops. The writer falls in love with a farmhouse that invariably needs remodeling. But it isn't just home improvement; it's a quest. There are plenty of old-time truths (delivered by a wily local straight out of central casting) mixed with a lot of New Age mumbo-jumbo culled from the author's journal. In Frances Mayes' surprise bestseller Under the Tuscan Sun, it takes a scant few lines of transition to get from "Bella casa, signora" to "Old places exist on sine waves of time and space that bend in some logarithmic motion I'm beginning to ride." The inference, I take it, is that the author is a highly sensitive refugee.

Which is why a book that manages to be both about food and history and written by a real refugee -- political not psychic -- is so refreshing to read. George Lang's Nobody Knows the Truffles I've Seen is the story of a man who has lived a life and not just a lifestyle. A Hungarian Jew who came out of the cauldron of Central Europe after World War II, he was a good enough violinist to be "the last stand of the second violins of the Dallas Symphony." However, after hearing Jascha Heifetz play Mendelssohn's violin concerto and realizing he would never reach that level of virtuosity, he decided to pursue another career. That other career was food.

Eating "kosher bacon" one day (thick slabs of paprika-crusted goose meat) and sipping egg-cream sodas the next, Lang cheerfully traces the many stages of his American life. Busboy at Reuben's 24-hour restaurant, manager of a wedding reception "factory" in the Bowery, poker-faced banquet manager at the Waldorf-Astoria, lieutenant of Restaurant Associates (rising to manage their crown jewel, the Four Seasons restaurant), inventor of the profession of restaurant consultant, today he is the owner of both New York's Cafe des Artistes and, in a nice poetic twist, Budapest's most famous restaurant, Gundel. His is not just a culinary Horatio Alger tale, it is a fascinating real-life story about finding a place in the world.

Meanwhile, back at Mayes' bella casa, life continues on its merry pace. The well gets dug, the moldings painted, the gems of wisdom keep coming: "Restoration, I like the word. The house, the land, perhaps ourselves. But restored to what? Our lives are full." Her self-satisfied tone is grating, but something larger comes into focus only when it's compared to Lang's appetite for the rough-and-tumble of everyday life in America -- something about the difference between being an expatriate and an immigrant. Americans in Europe have decades to experience deeper and deeper levels of being outsiders; newcomers to this country can turn that into new levels of being insiders (among Lang's generation are Henry Grunwald, editor in chief of Time Inc., and Henry Kissinger). When Americans decide to leave, to use Byron's phrase when he left England for the last time, they "quit the country"; but when foreigners get here, as Lang did on July 15, 1946, they arrive. -- Salon

Library Journal

Lang's life, from the forced-labor camps of World War II Hungary to the splendor of international society at its highest levels, is the quintessential American success story. Written in an informal but genuine style, his memoirs are riveting from the onset. In the opening pages, Lang movingly recounts his early years as a young Eastern European Jew during the unspeakable horrors of both the Nazi and the Communist regimes. As he describes his initial impressions of free-world life in New York as a tailor, violinist, chef, banquet manager, and, finally, restaurateur, one can only admire the resourcefulness of an entrepreneur with extraordinary business acumen. Lang's intimate recollections and anecdotes involving such notable personalities as Elsa Maxwell, Princess Grace, King Saud, and hotelier Bill Marriott Jr. surely justify his being called a raconteur extraordinare. But it is the culinary praise from prominent food critics, beginning with Mimi Sheraton, and the close association with food stars like James Beard that gain Lang entry into the most prominent entrepreneur-restaurateur circles. The fact that Lang has successfully run New York's legendary Caf des Artistes since 1975 and has included 22 one-of-a-kind recipes at the end of his book is simply "the icing on the cake." Highly recommended for all collections.Andrew F. Ackers, New York

Kirkus Reviews

International restaurateur Lang takes stock of his life's path from small-town Hungary to the summits of world dining—and has fun along the way. Lang (The Cuisine of Hungary) was involved in the creation of the Tower Suite in the Time-Life building in New York City, the Indian Pavilion theater-restaurant at the New York World's Fair, and, more recently, the reopening of the Caf‚ des Artistes on Manhattan's West Side. He recalls warmly that his family believed in the sacredness of food and music: "Bread was almost as important to us as air, water, life itself." Lang takes no small pride in his many accomplishments, and his cheerfulness is interrupted only in recounting the inferno of his Jewish family's wartime experience: After kissing his parents good-bye at a railway station in February 1944, at age 19—he would never see them again, later learning they perished at Auschwitz—he spent time in a forced labor camp. Later, Lang and a friend managed to survive in wartime Budapest by presenting themselves as Transylvanians. Out of desperation, they joined the fascist Arrowcross militia but used their influence to aid the city's Jews. After Budapest's liberation, Lang was wrongly imprisoned for a period as a fascist. Finally immigrating to New York City, he began waiting tables in 1946, working his way into management jobs at the Waldorf-Astoria and the Four Seasons. In the uncreative US food climate of the '50s, Lang was an innovator, exploring ethnic foods of various cultures while always insisting on the freshest seasonal ingredients. He joyously depicts the members of his social circle, which has included such luminaries as James Beard and Luciano Pavarotti,and offers a selection of favorite recipes. Lang's wartime experiences were horrifying, but his book is mainly a lighthearted celebration of good friends, good food, and the good life he's found in the culinary world. (40 b&w photos, not seen)