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By Jason Diamante
I’ve been sitting at the bar at the Old Homestead Steakhouse for five minutes before the host finally walks over to me. I’m guessing he noticed me eating all the free candy overflowing from a massive plastic martini glass and decided to ask if I was waiting for somebody. I tell him yes, and decide to go with “a tall man” as my descriptor for Eric Wareheim. Wareheim is tall— small-forward-sized. But because I haven’t specified his exact height (6’ 7”), the host, who’s about four inches shorter than me, thinks I’m talking about a man who’s sitting alone in the dining room. He leads me to the table and the man smiles. “Bradley?” he asks, in a way that tells me he’s never met Bradley in person before and this was likely a first date.
Everybody sitting in the restaurant is on a date; it’s Valentine’s Day. People love old steakhouses on February 14th. I guess splitting a prime rib is some people’s idea of romance. All I know is that the entire situation feels very Wareheim; somewhere between the comedic absurdity of his work with Tim Heidecker, and the tiny-detail-obsessed, food-centric stuff he’s been increasingly focused on over the last few years.
Unfortunately, Wareheim and I didn’t have a romantic date for Valentine’s Day; She chose this position because one of the big projects she is running is an e-book documenting steakhouses across the United States. When, after all, I find him sitting alone at a table in the Old Homestead’s upstairs dining room, she’s drinking a blue-chilled martini. olives stuffed with cheese. He wears a gray Stoffa suit with a t-shirt underneath. I go for the white Ferragamo Velcro shoes because he’s a big guy whose legs don’t have compatibility under the coffee table.
Wareheim is at an attractive moment in his life. He will turn 48 in April. Many people know him even better for his work with Heidecker on Tim.
But his influence on the first two seasons of Master of None was also undeniable. He played Aziz Ansari’s most productive friend on the hit series and directed episodes featuring some of New York’s liveliest bars and restaurants of the past decade, including Carbone, the Four Horsemen, and Westlight; Wareheim was also the camera for the Season 1 finale, which began with Ansari’s Dev and Wareheim’s Arnold searching for the most productive tacos in New York, and ends with Dev boarding a plane to Italy to examine pasta-making.
His paintings on display as a mild-tempered and highly productive friend were a delightful wonder to those of us who had followed him before, but it was also fair to wonder what he was going to do next. He has a knack for leading, however, as check writers in the entertainment industry have proven time and time again, skill doesn’t fit monetary results. Some other people don’t quite understand this and, as their careers go on, they sometimes make the decision that if formula can’t work for them, they will work for formula. This is how the skill becomes obsolete. Luckily for Wareheim, he had other plans and there were many.
“I still like comedy and sometimes I do things,” Wareheim says, tilting his Sony A7c toward a plate of Rockefeller oysters that look like they’ve tanned too long under the warm lamp. As a follow-up to her best-selling 2021 cookbook, Foodheim: A Culinary Adventure, she is publishing an e-book documenting American steakhouses that will be released next year. There’s also Las Jaras Wines, the label she co-founded with winemaker Joel Burt. You might hear this and think: sure, he has a cookbook, and what celebrity user isn’t reaching for a bottle of alcohol? And that is correct. The Rock and George Clooney own tequila brands, news of a celebrity making an investment in a bar or eating place overshadows whatever the stall serves, and indie bands have tried to make extra money with everything from coffee even beer mixes. Ed Sheeran has hot sauce, Kristen Bell makes granola bars, and everyone from The Sopranos stars to Eminem has learned that there’s money to be made from their cultural ties to (Mom’s) spaghetti.
So, of course, I was a little surprised when I found myself using and enjoying his cookbook, and then when I found myself on a North Fork beach drinking cans of Las Jaras’ Waves Rosé, I had to make sure I wasn’t when I proclaimed it to be the most productive canned wine I’d ever tasted. I’m a little cynical about those things. But when Wareheim asks me to place my hand on the foot of my martini glass in a tied fashion, he connects what he’s doing with what he’s having on his mind lately. “Making someone laugh is a lot like making them a pizza. And the intensity of this feeling reminds me of my childhood. It’s a network thing. Your friends get together. I think that’s why I wrote Foodheim: that feeling was so special. I wanted everyone to know how to prepare a salad or a pizza and for young or old to make those recipes. I need other people to appreciate those things.
Using the term “gourmet” is embarrassing at this point. You could also call someone a hipster or tell them that you’re glad that “jazz cigarettes” are now legal. But there was a time – ten years ago – when it would have been easy to dismiss Wareheim as one of those people, the kind of user who sees food as a sport, a festival to see who can create a better burger and which one. The online page describes it as the most productive in the city.
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Wareheim admits he did get into food in that era of abundance, about fifteen years ago, after a trip to Alinea, Grant Achatz’s multiple-Michelin star-getting Chicago temple of modern gastronomy. Watching the chefs garnish small bits of pork belly or a purée frozen solid with the aid of liquid nitrogen was a small revelation for Wareheim, but it also got his mind working. It made him think about his mother, an immigrant born in Germany, and the garden she had behind the house when Wareheim was growing up outside Philadelphia. “She came to America and she was like, oh fuck, this is America—your supermarket, I can’t eat anything there. So I grew up with her complaining about that. But she made it work, and I was spoiled because my mom grew everything from the garden.”
A waiter dressed in a red vest, a white blouse, and a cashmere tie comes to see us. Our table is made up exclusively of appetizers: a small plate of calamari, which Wareheim doesn’t seem to be too keen on, his Rockefeller oysters, and a half-dozen raw veggies that come on a plate with a side of lettuce and celery that we think Array are meant to look good. Like a dragon, none of us are safe. Wareheim is obsessed with it and asks the waiter what it is, but the guy ignores the question and asks us if we want to order food because the rush is coming and they want the table. We tell him two more martinis and the bill. Wareheim is no stranger to this treatment. He raises his cholesterol levels all over the country by frequenting the steakhouses that other people propose to him. Old Homestead was the one he was interested in, as he claims to be the oldest in New York. He became obsessed with steakhouses at the beginning of the pandemic, when they were the only restaurants he could find open.
“I was like, Why do we feel so nice inside here?” he says. “You dress up a little bit and it’s nostalgic and we know what’s on the menu. I want to highlight that, that feeling. And there’s not really an official book about that. It’s so different than just something about me. It’s really about the people and the places and it’s a different gear to work in.” At some point, he found himself in North Carolina with Heidecker—who Wareheim says also loves food, but would “just chill” after shows while Wareheim went in search of far-flung burrito or burger spots on the edge of town—and they went to a Charlotte steakhouse called Beef ‘n Bottle. “It had that Southern hospitality, like you were eating with a family,” he says. “It was also sort of like a David Lynch film.”
At the moment, Wareheim still doesn’t know exactly where this is all going, but that’s the point. He admits that “I’ve overlooked my film career,” but he’s written a few things with Heidecker, as well as other presentations “for a big channel that’s all about wine. “But he likes the concept of creating real physical things. He loves writing books and making wine “because it’s anything you can get your hands on. “He thought about doing a cooking show, but he’s convinced that the ideas he came up with in the past didn’t work: “I wasn’t in a position to say what I wanted to say about food. It’s often as if it’s just “It has to be Anthony Bourdain. There’s also a wine bar, inspired by a successful pop-up Wareheim did in Los Angeles with another Philadelphia food veteran, Joe Beddia. True to their roots in the City of Brotherly Love, they served wine with hoagies. The call of the night and the bar imaginable?P. S. Hoagie. Es a very Not your parents’ favorite for drinking Chardonnay.
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We paid our bill and walked through the crowd of lovers so we could share steaks and creamed spinach. It’s around 7:30 p. m. , and it’s been a long night. Add to that the cold, and I can end the night with just two martinis and a few oysters. As we leave, I mention everything I’ve been thinking about since attending a dinner hosted in Wareheim to showcase their new wines a few months earlier. It took place at one of my favorite places, the Frankies 457 Spuntino in Brooklyn, and it wasn’t anything fancy in terms of a multi-course Italian meal: masses of food, large portions. But in the end, after we were served the homemade cheesecake with ricotta, Wareheim said there was a surprise: pizza for dessert. It’s just a pizza eaten as a last course. A simple pie, a pepperoni pie and a clam pie that I took off my socks.
A savory dessert is all Wareheim has been offering at dinner parties in Los Angeles for a few years now. “We made this whole dinner,” he says, “and we made it ourselves. And I thought I wanted to make a bird out of parma. Also because I didn’t have any sense with food, but I know my friends and I know they love the parmesan bird and they would find it funny. Since then, he serves orange dessert bird, also reheated leftovers and served them. as the ultimate dish. ” We like not to end the evening when something is magical,” he says. That’s why I need things to continue. I don’t need dessert to mean we’re done.
Keeping this thought, as we wait for our respective Ubers and I dream of coming home and hiding blankets, I ask Wareheim if he has any plans for the evening after our cocktails and appetizers.
Of course, he said, “I’m going to dinner. “
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