Remembering Leslie Revsin: The Trailblazing Chef & Cookbook Author

Today, we are accustomed to seeing women chefs not only in restaurants but all over the media, from TV to TikTok. But not long ago, a woman chef was a scandal and not to be tolerated. My late friend, Leslie Revsin, changed all that. Leslie was born in Chicago but bounced around the country as a student, soaking up regional cooking along the way, ending up in Brooklyn. There, the international grocery stores and restaurants inspired her, and after self-educating her cooking at home, she signed up for professional courses at our mutual alma mater, New York Technical College. No rules prevented her from attending, but her presence was unusual. Even when I attended NYTC about twenty years after her, most of the women students were in class because they were lined up to inherit the family bakery or restaurant business and they wanted some outside training. Being a chef was not something most women aspired to. Restaurant work was physically demanding, and the men who ran the profession thought a woman wouldn’t have the stamina for the long hours and heavy lifting. There are even stupider ideas tossed around about the inferiority of a woman’s palate and other dumb comparisons. They were wrong. NYTC was a bland technical school that also taught other trades (cooking was a trade, not an art), but it had one huge advantage: It was in New York. You didn’t have to move to New Hyde Park (where CIA was gaining a reputation) or Ithaca (for Cornell’s Hotel School), or Paris (for Le Cordon Bleu, whose classes were taught in French anyway). Johnson and Wales’s culinary school in Rhode Island didn’t start until 1973, and this part of Leslie’s story is taking place in the late 60s. The enormous variety of cuisines that New York’s five boroughs had to offer was at her fingertips. Why leave? Leslie got through NYTC’s courses and elbowed her way into the vast kitchens at the famous Waldorf-Astoria hotel. It was a lowly position, but Leslie (who was slim) proved herself by lugging enormous pots of stock around the stove and not slugging the guys who were stupid enough to try to pinch her. After this trial by fire, she bounced around at different restaurants, sometimes as her own boss, other times working as the chef. These were not storefront operations, but big places like One Fifth (where I dined often), The Rainbow Room (where I ate when I was being treated), and the Inn at Pound Ridge (where I would go if someone else drove or hired a limo, which was more typical as it was that kind of place.) Leslie did get a reputation as being “difficult,” as happens to many bold women whereas strong men are allowed free rein. The press noticed that there was (finally) a woman running New York’s kitchens. To be fair, there had been women chefs before, but their restaurants were more casual. I am thinking of Dione Lucas and her omelet shop. She also had a very early TV cooking show, before James Beard, who is sometimes credited with being the first TV chef. Or Edna Lewis at Nicholson Café, a haunt of Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and other fifties’ literati. Another trailblazer at the time was Abigail Kirsch, Queen of the Caterers, who challenged Martha Stewart for that crown. I do not include Madeleine Kamman, who was French, and had a reputation for being meaner than any male chef. But this was related to common sexism, where a woman is “difficult,” while a male can misbehave all he wants without criticism. But Leslie was cheffing at the haute-cuisine level and creating her own recipes, too. Her signature dish was Roquefort Beignets with Apple Purée, a recipe with 70s excess written all over it. I remember how delicious they were, but they involve wrapping Roquefort in crêpes, then dipping them in batter before frying and serving them on applesauce. Oy. That’s why we eat out at restaurants, so someone else can make this kind of complex dish. In 1985, a TV show, *New York’s Master Chef*, really increased her visibility in the media. Two friends of mine, Bruce Franchini and Richard Sax were involved (Bruce as director, Richard as recipe tester and writer), and they sang Leslie’s praises. In about ten years, she had gone from peeling potatoes in a basement to being one of New York’s “Master Chefs.” Along the way, Leslie was asked to write cookbooks. But with a big difference. She was not repeating her complicated restaurant recipes for the home cook. Instead, she shared what she knew about cooking at the home cook’s level of comprehension, with titles like *Great Fish, Quick* and *Come for Dinner*. She was one of the few chefs willing to work this way, as most wanted to show off recipes that cost $20 at their establishments and took an entire kitchen crew to replicate. When I was asked to do a restaurant cookbook, I tried to use her as an example, but my client wanted to play it safe with their off-the-menu recipes. The expensive, coffee-table restaurant cookbook was a trend that crashed and turned when people got tired of sourcing fennel pollen and yuzu juice for their dinners. In her late fifties, she and her husband Phillip moved near Seattle to be closer to her daughter and her family. But sadly, she developed ovarian cancer. She was writing two books in a series that she called *The Simpler The Better: Sensational One-Dish Meals*, and its companion, *TSTB: Sensational Italian Meals*. Her treatment destroyed her appetite and senses, so she asked me to take over. We would chat on the phone about recipe ideas, and then I would work them out in my kitchen, then send them over for her approval. The great thing about this exercise was thinking about how we could wrest the most flavor from the food with the fewest ingredients and effort, since each recipe had a limit of three steps and fewer than ten ingredients. I still make many of these dishes myself in my dinner rotation. This story doesn’t end with Leslie’s passing in 2004, but on April 19, 2005. Why do I remember that date? I was scheduled to promote our books on *The Today Show*, one of the many times I’d appeared there over the years. Being on *Today* was the Holy Grail of TV cooking demos, but it was also a royal pain to get through them. First, they made you come into the studio the afternoon before at 4 PM for a rehearsal. But when the show ran live the next morning, nothing went according to plan. Of course, with the show starting at 7 AM in New York, I had to show up at the studio around 5:30. This meant I had to stay in the city the night before, sleeping in a strange hotel bed…Although I got to know the beds at the Hotel Warwick intimately, a short walk from Rockefeller Center and NBC Studios. NBC would sometimes send a car to my loft in Jersey City, but then I had to rise even earlier. But not as early as the food stylist my publisher hired to prepare all of the food for the segment. We usually hired my friend Marie Haycox, who would simply stay up all night to pull up at the loading dock around 4:30 AM. No matter how you cut it, it was not fun, and I had to donate about 24 hours of my life for a 3-minute spot. The worst was the timing. Cooking demos were officially allotted 5½ minutes, but that never happened. Cookbooks got the last spot before sign-off, and every time a previous segment ran a few seconds over, the producers shaved time off the cookbook demo. Meaning, I ended up with a minute or two. This was a joke, and I grew sick of it. I did finally rebel, but that’s another story. (Contrary to the rumors, Ann Curry’s involvement in my retaliation did not play a part in her firing. And Matt Lauer never touched me.) At this appearance, as sad an occasion as it was, everything went as well as could be expected. I’ve had some crazy things happen on set, but this time no one cut themselves and no one spit out the food. Somehow, I got through the demo in record time. *Today* had a delayed feed to the West Coast that started three hours later at 10 AM Eastern Time for 7 AM Pacific. My family, who by now was used to seeing me on the small screen, was nonetheless huddled around the TV to see my segment. “And next, when we come back, Rick Rodgers is going to cook some fast and simple recipes from the book he wrote with chef Leslie Revsin.” At 12:45 PM ET/9:45 PT, the screen went blank. A voice said, “Breaking news from Vatican City. White smoke has just risen from the chimney in the Sistine Chapel, indicating that the cardinals have elected a new pope. We interrupt this programming to go to…” I was bumped by the Pope! I did my best to honor Leslie by swearing in both English and Italian. My people will call your people. Rick Uncovered with Rick Rodgers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rickrodgers.substack.com/subscribe