Serious Eats
Remembering R. W. Apple Jr.
Something was missing at the spectacularly moving memorial service at the Kennedy Center yesterday titled "A Celebration of the Very Full Life of R. W. Apple Jr." I just couldn't put my finger on it. The speakers included John McCain, who, in true presidential candidate fashion, called Johnny, as he was known, a great patriot; Calvin Trillin, characteristically hilarious but slightly somber; Alice Waters; and former British foreign secretary Lord David Owen. Apple protégé Todd Purdum conducted his MC duties with grace, levity, and appropriate generosity of spirit. And, oh yes, there were letters of condolence from four presidents: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Bush Senior and Junior. Guess whose impersonal words rang incredibly hollow? I report. You decide.
Of course they were all armed with enough Apple anecdotes to fill an Apple Encyclopedia. Trillin said, "The Apple story is now a subgenre of journalistic war stories. In an Apple story, certain verbs are customary. Apple does not enter a hotel in Beirut or a restaurant in London; he sweeps in. At the end of a long dinner, Apple doesn't even talk or pontificate; he holds forth. In either case he is, as Tom Brokaw once put it, 'in full Apple.'" But it was Purdum who summed up my friend's life best. He said something along the lines of, "Johnny was always a big cheese. But later in life he became a finer cheese." And this: "Johnny was always bravehearted, but over time he became a big heart."
Having met Johnny only ten years ago, I only knew the finer, cheesier, huge-hearted Johnny. I was never competing with him for a story—I never competed with him for anything. I was merely a youngish food journalist who had recently started writing for the New York Times when I met him. But Johnny took a liking to me and my obsessive searches for the best hamburgers or hot dogs or cheesesteak in the stories I did for the paper. Eating lobster rolls at Pearl, he would say to me, "Goddamn it, Levine, we need your passion, your fire, your voice in the paper. You write about the stuff that really matters to people."
You can just imagine what kind of validation those words were for a food writer trying to make his name in the world. This was Johnny Apple talking, one of the greatest journalists to grace the pages of any newspaper anywhere.
Johnny's encouraging words validated my essential worldview. Johnny thought I had something important to say, and he was willing to put the weight of his position behind that opinion. He was always trying to get the Times Dining section editor at the time, Sam Sifton, to give me more work. Thankfully, Sam didn't really need Johnny's prodding. He was the one who brought me to the paper in the first place.
When I think about it, Johnny is one of the fathers of Serious Eats. His unshakable belief in my stories about real food, in my inclusive point of view, and in my passionate and—I hope—discerning voice gave me the confidence to move forward with a project like Serious Eats. I only wish he were around to see it come to life.
Of course after the service there was food. How could there not be? This was for Johnny Apple, for heaven's sake. Perhaps the greatest fresser the world has ever known. And this wasn't the obligatory post-service spread with waterlogged celery sticks and cold pigs-in-blanket (not that there's anything wrong with a good pig-in-a-blanket). No, there were contributions from virtually every good chef and cook in and around Washington, D.C.: little pork-confit sandwiches that were scary good; crawfish pies with the flakiest, most delicate casings imaginable; pristine oysters on the half shell; the best potato knishes I've ever eaten. It was all soulful and deeply flavored. Kind of like the man himself.
It was a perfect celebration for a man who had, in Smokey Robinson's words, "more love and more joy than age or time could ever destroy." The only thing missing was Johnny himself, who would have made sure that his memorial service became a front-page story in the New York Times. (It ended up on page 26.) On Serious Eats, of course, it is front-page news. And that, my fellow serious eaters, is as it should be.
Goodbye, my friend.