Dinner at the Dakota
“Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.” That’s a motto Sheila Lukins lives by. Once upon a time, Sheila was just an innocent and passionate hausfrau concocting sublime little dinners that prompted friends to urge her to go professional. She became a caterer, the Other Woman (“So discreet, so delicious, and I deliver”), rescuing kitchen-wary bachelors, and soon cofounded the Silver Palate, a modest carryout venture that has grown to a sprawling corporation. Success almost eliminated the sublime little dinners at the Lukinses’ Dakota digs, so today when she does steal the time to feed friends, Sheila likes to feel that it’s special. Men in black tie and woman in fluttering ostrich boas do make it special. So does dressing up the table. “All the wedding loot I thought I would return seventeen years ago and didn’t – the Wedgewood, Tiffany glasses, and old silver” – mixes with her collection of baskets and old lace on the bare travertine-and-brown-lacquer table.
Everything is done ahead except for the finishing touches so Sheila can be a guest at her own party. String beans are ready to pop into a veal stew dressed up with giant morels plumped in wine and stock and zesty with the last of the fresh herbs from the Lukinses’ country garden (she’ll dry and freeze the herbs that remain for all the soups and stews of winter). Deep-garnet beet puree is spiked with Sheila’s own blueberry vinegar. Pungent arugula-and-watercress crisps are ready to toss and be served with a melting wedge of creamy Roquefort and a round of toasted country bread. Itinerant waiter Jim Tracy knows the Lukins kitchen well enough to read her mind… almost. Sheila believes help is not a luxury but a necessity.
Midway through the afternoon, as Sheila dashes between home and the Silver Palate, a block away, it looks as if the gingerbread will have to be sacrificed. “And had I but one penny in the world, thou shouldst have it to buy gingerbread,” writes Shakespeare in Love’s Labour’s Lost. No love lost tonight. Stubbornly Sheila finds time to throw it together, turning out two dozen spicy little muffins to go with the mousse. That leaves no time to make chocolate truffles. Success forces a compromise and finances it, too. Champagne truffles with Teuscher’s is a compromise no one will weep over.
Enter the debonair crew, the men expressing hints of rugged individualism: Bridgemarket builder Harley Baldwin’s tie is red foulard. Lawyer Morton Goldfein sports a pink pig on his lapel, to the amusement of Silver Palate partner Julee Rosso and Congressman Charles Schumer and his wife, Iris Weinshall Schumer, vice president, Urban Development Corporation. The music is pleasantly eccentric too. “I knew the Swingles Singers would come back if I just held on to my records long enough,” says businessman Richard Lukins. True to Sheila’s philosophy of a long prologue for drinks – an hour or more – guests are getting friendly over the green-peppercorn pâté, even exchanging phone numbers as Jim passes buttery hot puffs filled with onion marmalade and spiced apple. Everyone is glowing now, spirits rising to the drama of their dress. And just as Sheila predicted, it takes two or three calls to get them floating in for to dinner.