Nach Waxman is a man of infinite patience. Consider the customer standing before him in Kitchen Arts and Letters, the only culinary bookstore in Manhattan. He’s just back from San Francisco.
“Chez Panisse was never singular,” he sniffs. “And Square One has lost its point. It isn’t singing, isn’t resonating. The best was Silk’s.”
Waxman half shrugs.
“You don’t like it?” the customer asks.
“Well, the atmosphere there is, uh, a little refined,” he says.
The man leaves to check his parking meter. Is he a chef?
“No, he’s a chemist,” Waxman says, sighing. “He’s something like a physicist I know who’s just obsessed. I guess they have so little to talk to the world at large about, they either cut off totally or develop a series of interests–food, wine, art–as a way to communicate.”
Because Waxman is also a man of infinite passion when it comes to subjects edible, he can spot it immediately in others. Which is how he has become the most sought-after expert on food history and publishing in New York since opening Kitchen Arts and Letters at 1435 Lexington Ave. in 1983. Last month, Waxman, 58, (his nickname is pronounced KNOCK, short for Nahum) was inducted into the James Beard Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in America.
Though most of his customers are professionals–chefs, restaurant owners, caterers, cooking teachers, food writers and editors–he is well known enough to be called on by a staggering array of clients seeking his expertise. Waxman has advised Citibank on a banquet menu for the Venezuelan minister of finance (and supplied the reference books to its catering department). For an exhibition on rain forests at the American Museum of Natural History, he found rain-forest recipes from New Guinea and South America for the museum’s dining room.
The customer has returned, and buys $185 worth of books. After he departs, he is replaced by a food writer who purchases a copy of “100 Easy to Make Gujarati Dishes.” Waxman studies it. “Thank you,” he says. “I never even knew this was here.” With the 10,000 titles the store carries, that’s not surprising.
“Do you have cookbooks with glossaries of Indian condiments in several different languages?” she asks. He recommends a book on Malaysian cuisine. “It has a neat table of them, but it’s gone out of print,” he says. “I’ll tell you what. We keep a reference copy around. I’ll Xerox the table and send it to you. And it’s not only Indian. It’s also Sinhalese, Burmese, the sweep across Southeast Asia.”
“He studied Hindi, you know,” she says proudly and possessively. Waxman blushes.
“Without this place, I’d be in severe trouble,” he says. “The nice thing about this business is you don’t have to be adored. Just useful.”
A man calls looking for a first edition of Emily Post’s “Etiquette” from 1922. No can do. He recommends the name of a dealer in Ann Arbor, Mich. If the customer were looking for “Foods of the Azores Islands,” “Traditional Ukrainian Cookery” or “East Anglian Food and Wine,” he would have better luck. In addition to cookbooks, Waxman’s personal obsession is his extensive collection of books about food–literature, scholarly works, social history.
“These books are my pride and joy,” Waxman says. “It always fascinates me in fields like anthropology when you find monographs on warfare and information on music and myth recorded in great detail, that there is barely a monograph or anything I’ve ever seen about food. A little on production, that side of it, but not the making and the eating. Food customs exist in a highly abstracted kind of way.”
And what have they been like in the 12 years he has had the store?
“The role of food for people here is finally getting some perspective back,” he says. “When I first opened, it was wildly out of control. There was some very competitive entertaining, especially among people outside the city. Places like Bend, Ore., and Orangeburg, S.C. A woman would call asking for the new really hot books, and after I told her, there would be a warning at the end of the call: `Now don’t you tell Charlotte about these books if she calls.’ People were pursuing the exotic to ridiculous extremes.
“Now, I think mercifully the rage has passed. What we’re left with is that we are eating better in every sense of the word. We’re able to be better cooks and eaters in the same way you become a better music listener or art viewer. Wine has had that, but food, not really. Though wine has become a form of personal showboating that ranges from the unattractive to the laughable. I hope food won’t be the same way.”
“It’s really the professional business that’s the gratifying business. People who are expanding their skills and the scope of their work. I will tell you, when the lease was up a few years ago, I gave serious thought to moving the store to a second floor somewhere just to make it a place for motivated people, not casual drop-ins. The people who come here have a language in common. Just sitting and selling books is boring; it’s making change and putting books in bags. What’s fun is helping people solve their problems.”
Though Waxman contributes recipes to other cookbooks (his brisket of beef is featured in “The New Basics” by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins) he has no plans to publish his own, primarily because he rarely uses recipes. “I encourage people not to,” he says. “I try to encourage them to get to know food, what flavors go together, to internalize this. Really good cooking is not cooking by numbers; it’s how well you understand the ingredients.”
A young man buys a copy of Cook’s magazine. Waxman talks to him a minute. “He’s one of the kids at Daniel,” he says. “Drops in probably twice a week. We love the beginners. The food industry has a very tolerant entry point–dishwasher, vegetable peeler–and the opportunity for advancement is tremendous. My favorite kind of thing happens when these kids in jeans come in, some of them rough-looking characters, and say: `My chef told me I should read Escoffier. What do you recommend?’ “
A call comes from a magazine researcher for a book on the cooking of China arranged regionally. With folklore. Waxman sighs. “It’s a dream that that book exists,” he says. “It does not.”
That Waxman can say that so definitely is a testimony to both the 20 years he spent in publishing and his academic career. After growing up in New Jersey, he studied anthropology at Cornell University, did graduate work at the University of Chicago and transferred to the Ph.D. program in anthropology at Harvard University, where he became a specialist in South Asian studies. After three years there, he became an editor at Macmillan, Harper & Row and Crown. Ultimately weary of large corporations and dispirited by the overtly commercial direction of publishing, he opened Kitchen Arts and Letters.
He lives on the Upper West Side with his wife, Maron, a consultant to publishing companies, and their children, Joshua, who just graduated from Harvard, and Sarah, who entered the University of Chicago this fall. Another call comes, from Australia, an inquiry for an anthropology bookstore in New York. Waxman stops his conversation to look for a bookstore guide. He seems never to say no. Though he may not have liked academia as a profession, he loves to teach and has the heart of a researcher. His real accomplishment with the store is that it fosters the intellectual curiosity of academia without anyone having to suffer its politics.
Still, he keeps his hand in the publishing industry, advising editors on a book’s subject matter and potential salability. But his dissatisfaction with his former occupation reigns.
“Let’s say a book is needed on Peruvian cooking or what to do with the new varieties of potatoes,” he says. “Publishers would rather do another safe book on pasta. That doesn’t represent a real contribution. They’d rather do dopey little gift books.”
