New York Magazine
"I'm a food nut," says former lawyer David Ziff. He sure is. Mr. Ziff has studied Mexican cooking with Diana Kennedy, Chinese cooking with Virginia Lee, and Italian cooking with Marcella Hazan. He'll make you an Italian, Mexican, or Chinese dinner, or any combination thereof. He also admires Simca Beck and uses some of her recipes too. Mr. Ziff has been a good student, judging by the dinner I sampled one evening last spring. He made a perfect mozzarella in carrozza, light and beautifully fried. A cold shrimp bisque was tantalizing because of a whiff of curry. The main course, called chicken escargot (a braised chicken which had been stuffed between skin and meat with shallots, garlic, chicken livers, and parsley and scented with cognac), was a little less successful, in my opinion, but I'm not especially fond of the dish. Sinfully good was his dacquoise, made with two butter creams, chocolate, and praline between ground nut layers of meringue.
By Paula Wolf
New York Magazine
AFFAIRS TO REMEMBER: Private parties for Howard Stringer; all parties for the New York City Opera; Wendy Wasserstein's Hanukkah get-togethers. Tom Wolfe is a fifteen-year client.
WHO RUNS THE SHOW: David Ziff does the cooking, along with three other chefs, and attends many of his parties. Ziff and partner Alan Bell (the business guy) are celebrating the company's twentieth anniversary this year. Ziff says he doesn't do contracts: "I shake hands with people, and that's it. You just have to trust the relationship."
Last year, Ziff did a dinner for Steve Rattner and Maureen White, but they got stuck in Washington, D.C., because the weather turned nasty. Maureen called Ziff and asked him to play host. "Everybody had a ball," he says.
TRAY CHIC: Ziff's innovative menus run the gamut from Mexican to Caribbean to southwestern to Chinese. "I've had people ask me to do things I refuse to do," he says. "The twelve-foot-hero people. You tap the phone and say, `I think you've got a wrong number.' " Ziff likes to roll seared tuna in tortillas (with wasabi mayo) and stand them on end, like totem poles, on a tray. At a fundraiser where pictures were to be auctioned, Ziff used framed pictures as trays. When one couple had a "burn the prenup" party, Ziff hauled in a Duraflame log to do the honors. As for the
menu, "we did a lot of grilled stuff," Ziff says, laughing.
THE DISH: "I don't think anybody in New York City makes better hors d'oeuvre than David Ziff does," says food guru Eli Zabar, of the Vinegar Factory and Eli's. "My mother loves him," says Wendy Wasserstein. "That's a great little latke he's got going."