There is a reason Truman Capote titled his thinly veiled exposé of New York City’s society women and their secrets “La Côte Basque.” The French restaurant on East 55th Street in Manhattan was the center of their world. It was the place to enjoy a lunch that lingered into dinner, the place to gossip over Champagne, and crucially the place to be seen doing both. As Vogue writes, Women’s Wear Daily would send photographers to wait outside, hoping to catch a shot of famous patrons like Jackie Kennedy Onassis or Frank Sinatra.
So of course meals and drinks at La Côte Basque are central to Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, Ryan Murphy’s campy retelling of Capote’s relationship with women like Babe Paley, C.Z. Guest, and Lee Radziwill. That’s where Tamara Reynolds comes in. The chef and food stylist, with her team, has worked on shows like Billions, Succession, Dead Ringers, and American Horror Story, creating food that furthers a show’s narrative. What Connor and Willa choose to serve at their wedding on Succession is just as important as what they wear. And what is Billions without its conspicuous consumption at New York’s hottest, and most expensive, restaurants?
When Reynolds was brought on for the first half of the shooting of Feud before Colin Flynn, she knew she had to get La Côte Basque right. She spoke to Eater about researching vintage menus, the difficulties of making a soufflé that will last for hours under hot TV lights, and why the “ladies who lunch” lunched, especially when they were often consuming nothing more than a bite of frisée and a bottle of scotch.
How does cooking food for television props work?
I’m the food stylist along with my team, Greta Dana and Millicent Souris, and then our pastry is Jenny Kellerhals. The Feud situation was kind of unusual because normally a prop master hires different stylists, because we provide just an edible prop. But in this case, production wanted to hire the food stylist because the food is so important to Truman Capote’s story. He actually published a recipe for the soufflé Furstenberg that you saw in there.
Jon Robin Baitz wrote the show; I have worked on several of his scripts now and he does his research. I love the way he writes his food scenes, and love bringing them to life. But the most important thing I have to say is that they really wanted Colin Flynn to do the styling; we refer to him around the house as the Meryl Streep of foods. He did Julie & Julia, and currently he does the Gilded Age. But he could not be there for the first few weeks, so they needed someone to fill in. I was like, Are you kidding? You’re asking me to like open for like the Stones! Of course I’m okay. I love historical projects. And we got to establish La Côte Basque.
One of the first scenes centered around food is when Slim Keith (Diane Lane) eats a soufflé at the restaurant. How did you go about creating that? Did you reference Capote’s recipe?
That was the very first day of shooting for us, and it took the three of us three weeks to figure out how to create it. It’s spinach and cheese with a poached egg inside, and in the script there’s a whole paragraph about the soufflé and the runny yellow of the yolk. Making a soufflé with a poached egg inside is not that hard. But making one for the cameras a whole different story.
We looked at Capote’s recipe, which would have been fine if it was for you and me, but it does not work for TV. Because TV is all about waiting for the actors and the lights and everything. We were like, well it can’t be an actual soufflé but it has to look like a soufflé. So then we started to do a version of sheet pan frittatas, and cutting them into pieces, and architecturally building it and sliding the poached egg in under the other components. Millicent was the one who actually came up with the final construction, it was a sturdier frittata on the bottom, the poached egg, and then this much lighter frittata on the top. And you could cut into it, and the egg did run. And then I admit, when I saw the first episode, and she didn’t cut into it, I was like, Oh, you’re kidding me.
This restaurant is at the center of the story that blows up Capote’s life, the titular feud takes place in and around La Côte Basque. What research did you do on it?
I moved to New York in 1997, and the restaurant was still open, but it’s one of the ones that I never made it to. So I really could kick myself now. There’s YouTube videos of people discussing their memories of La Côte Basque. It’s a living thing for many people. They ate there, right? So you can’t fake it.
We went to the New York Public Library’s menu collection, which is a national treasure. So we looked at the menus of La Côte Basque, and at other historical menus to see what other people were eating at that time. There were a lot of Jell-O molds in the U.S. psyche, but there aren’t going to be Jell-O molds here. But there might be an aspic. We recreated a lot of the dishes that were on the menu, which is pretty classic French bistro. When you look at the La Côte Basque menu, and then you look at the Balthazar menu, they’re not so far apart.
What dishes stood out to you that you were excited to make?
We think about the character. These women would not want to be seen eating a lot, so someone gets a pate with endive so she can eat endive. Chloë Sevigny gets an airline chicken breast in a sauce — sauces were king — with some asparagus so she can eat the asparagus. Truman, because he’s a man, but he’s also so feminine, gets sole Véronique, which is a filet of sole, rolled, poached in white wine and served in a cream sauce with steamed grapes and tarragon. You aim to create dishes for the characters as well as whatever’s in that historical time. John [O’Shea, Capote’s lover], it was scripted that he had a rabbit leg. It’s very manly.
There’s an episode that has these dueling Thanksgiving feasts, one in California and one with the New York society crowd. How did you work to make those meals distinct?
We did not get to do the California meal, they ended up shooting in LA with a different team. We were super sad about it, but boy, I love seeing it on screen. Ours was also scripted to have Parker House rolls and creamed spinach. It almost felt to me like there was like a Southern Living aspect to it a little bit, even though it was the WASPy New York Thanksgiving. I don’t know if it was a nod to Truman, who would have been there, or if this was just supposed to represent the very best Thanksgiving. And then of course when you’re breaking that Thanksgiving table down and you’re creating plates for the actors to have at their place settings in the mid meal, you give the leg to a big burly dude, and you give a tiny little piece of white meat with the skin all pulled off to the side to Babe or someone who’s never going to eat the skin.
Was there anything you found in your research of La Côte Basque that you really wanted to cook, but it just didn’t work for the shoot?
Jenny created an entire desert trolley, and we also had a whole prime rib trolley that there didn’t end up being space in the set for. The dessert trolley was a heartbreaker for me. There were little individual floating islands, and a beautiful raspberry Charlotte. To see a whole cart of it was just almost too much. I know the crew probably decimated those by the end of the night.
You’re always thinking about what can hold up, what can survive the lights. Some prop masters will never allow seafood on a set at all just because of the lights and smell. So I was lucky that this kind of demanded seafood in many ways, like these beautiful seafood salads with squid. That’s what those women eat, when they’re not drinking Chablis and smoking.
There’s so much conspicuous not eating among this crowd, that it does make it ironic that this story and their lives really revolve around a restaurant. Why was La Côte Basque so important for these people?
They think of themselves as the royalty of New York City. I believe it’s Diane Lane who says in episode two, “Do you think they come here for the fucking salad nicoise? They come because we do.” And La Côte Basque was certainly respected for its food, it was both fancy and functional. But those women, none of them have jobs. Their job was to socialize and look great and be on committees. They’re living their lives out, and places like La Côte Basque are kind of their stage. The food is really in service of giving them a reason to be in public for as long as they are. Truman [says], “Oh, I can’t bear to leave, can we just have dessert and then stay till nighttime?” He doesn’t want to go back out into the world, because this is this magical place where he’s with his beautiful ladies, and everyone’s looking at them and watching them.
Also, Capote loved food. He loved Edna Lewis, there’s all sorts of stories that he would wade out by the back door of her restaurant Gage & Tollner and she’d bring him biscuits out back. He’s a Southern man who loved all these things.
You mentioned Gage & Tollner and Balthazar, it’s clear this retro food, whether it’s French bistro or a baked Alaska has some staying power. Why do you think that is? Is there anything you found on old menus that you think is due for a comeback?
Part of the reason it endures is that every chef who goes to culinary school gets that training. They’re always in the back of somebody’s mind. Even for somebody like me, when I’m asked to create a nice restaurant, the first thing I think of is classical French cuisine. I start thinking, well, we can do some background plates with some pate and frisée salad; that’s a dish where instantly the audience knows what’s going on.
TV not only tells you verbally, it tells you visually, and my job is to center food so you know where you are, and you understand who these people are through their orders. I view it as another form of storytelling. We’re supporting the actors’ choices. But when I started researching La Côte Basque and I was looking at these menus, there was a little part of me that was disappointed, because I would say 75, 80 percent of that menu were things we see all around Manhattan today. We didn’t get to put an aspic in there, though, and that is a regret of mine. They were very popular, especially at lunch. Women like that 1,000 percent would be eating an aspic. But then we went on to do American Horror Story and that was aspic galore.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
