serving the Upper East
Sunday, September 5th, 2010serving the Upper East Side, was the Silver Palate, a tiny shop on the Upper West Side, on what was then a drab stretch of Columbus Avenue. The Silver Palate’s genesis lay in a mid-seventies catering company called The Other Woman, a single-person operation run by Sheila Lukins, a young mother of two who cooked out of her apartment on Central Park West. As her company’s name and slogan (“So discreet, so delicious, and I deliver”) suggested, Lukins’s clientele was mostly male: professional men who wanted their dinner parties catered but not in an inordinately fussy, Edith Whartonian fashion.
Lukins was a self-taught cook, more or less — she had taken a course at the London Cordon Bleu while she and her husband lived there, but “it was the dilettante course,” she says. Her greatest inspiration was not Child and company’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking but the more practical, less labor-intensive recipes of Craig Claiborne’s New York Times cookbooks and his Sunday pieces for the Times Magazine.
chick peas