This is a table setting for one of Robert Meyers-Lussier’s dinners. (Photos courtesy of Robert Meyers-Lussier)
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George Olive
Friday, December 03, 2004
WHEN YOU THINK of the world of legal consulting and software training, the phrase
“good food” does not come immediately to mind. Robert Meyers-Lussier’s
new cookbook “This Is Delicious! What Is It?” hints at the author’s
own journey from Army intelligence man to caterer to legal consultant, in its
subtitle: “An Eclectic Collection of International Comfort Foods”.
As a gay man who was first inspired by a movie to experiment with cooking,
Meyers-Lussier’s personal eclecticism includes a published book of poetry,
a television cooking show for Bloomington Public TV, sports writing, a run for
state lawmaker in Minnesota, and legal consultant.
The recipes in his cookbook are all connected to some stage of his life, including
his coming out.
“Delicious” has an international menu, with few recipes that are
“American” in any traditional sense of that word; the book invites
the cook to venture out from his or her comfort zone, but still be comforted
by the food. This parallels Meyers-Lussier’s own journey from Midwestern
roast beef guy to gourmet caterer-teacher-chef.
Meyers-Lussier’s nascent interest in food really burst forth when he
was in Germany stationed with the U.S. Army as an intelligence analyst. As he
tells it, it was toward the end of his stint in the military that he happened
to rent the film “Babette’s Feast,” which changed his life.
In the film, Babette, a famous French chef in exile among a religious sect
in Denmark, wins the lottery and spends all of her money to put on a spectacular
feast for the small, austere community. Suspicious at first, people there eventually
are won over by the food and wine, and begin to loosen up, mending old hurts
and rediscovering their spiritual zeal.
It was, as he says, “an epiphany.” The author was moved to tears
both by the spectacle of the meal, the generous soul of Babette, and the effect
of the feast (and the wine) on the staid diners.
He wanted to recreate this experience for himself and for others. So he went
immediately to the library to find out about the food of other countries. He
organized a series of dinners for his barracks buddies — five-course dinners
from five countries (France, Greece, China, Mexico and Italy) on five nights.
Some classic international comfort foods from this extravaganza he included
in his cookbook: crepes, moussaka, Peking duck, rum-banana cake, and zabaglione.
These were all never-before-attempted creations for Meyers-Lussier, the likes
of which had not been seen in his barracks dining area. At the time, he was
well closeted and the flamboyant culinary display raised no eyebrows.
What it did raise was his barrack’s profile: Upper level officers began
to show up at the dinners.
IT’S ALMOST UNBELIEVABLE that up to this point, Bob had done little cooking
himself. He grew up outside of Minneapolis, where macaroni and cheese reigned
and hamburger was helped in many ways.
When I asked him how he could pull off such an amazing series of dinners with
no previous background in cooking, he replied, “I’m good at following
instructions.”
His childhood was often difficult and unhappy. When he was 12, his parents
divorced. His mother was committed to a state mental institution, where he would
visit her. Eventually, she was evaluated, deemed not insane, released, and given
custody of Bob and his brother and sister.
Out of this tense, struggling household, Robert began to hone his cooking senses.
His mother worked two jobs, at K-Mart and as a housekeeper, but it was barely
enough, so she turned to public assistance.
Bob tried to cook as a way to help mom. “I saw that she was working so
hard,” he says.
Perhaps out of an innate interest fueled by some pleasant memories of Julia
Child, he helped his mom a couple of times by making vichyssoise and Welsh rarebit,
two dishes that had Midwestern comfort ingredients, could be done cheaply, but
still had a gourmet sensibility.
After he left the armed forces, he lived with his father and cooked for him
as a way to try to reconnect. The menu was filled with Midwestern comfort food.
Three of his cookbook’s recipes were from that time: borscht (because
his father liked beets), gingered roast beef (because his father liked mushrooms
and beef), and turkey tetrazzini (it contained comfortable noodles and cream).
Meyers-Lussier studied pre-law and waited tables at Pannekoeken Huis, a local
Dutch restaurant chain. From his restaurant waiting experience he met many people
with whom he could talk about his burgeoning passion of food and cooking. One
regular customer asked him one day if he would like to cook a dinner for him
and some friends.
From this invitation grew a catering business, “The World on a Platter,”
which lasted four years, until 1996, and helped Bob add many new dishes to his
repertoire. Many of the desserts and finger food for his cookbook come out of
this period: lemon bars, cheesecake, prosciutto and pear rollups.
Cooking and politics have also been connected in his life. After a sour experience
with the Ross Perot campaign in 1992 during his college days, he decided on
a whim to run for Democratic state representative from Minnesota against a 16-year
Republican veteran, Kathleen Blatz (now a chief justice in Minnesota). He lost,
but got a third of the vote.
After his political loss, he worked part-time at Williams-Sonoma in Bloomington,
the gourmet kitchen supplies store. Through his previous contact with the station
manager of Bloomington Public Television, he came up with the idea of a cooking
show called “Talking with Your Mouth Full,” a combination cooking
show–talk show.
Ironically, his first chat guest was Blatz, his previous political opponent.
For reasons even he doesn’t know, he fixed a vegetarian torta as his dish,
an odd choice one would think for a Republican politician in Minnesota.
Some of his political connections also asked him to do dinners or spreads for
their political events. One significant one was Dean Barkley, who had run for
the House in 1992 with the Reform Party and was eventually appointed to replace
U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone, after the Democratic senator’s death in a plane
crash in October 2002.
Barkley’s wife wanted Meyers-Lussier to cook for a Reform Party gathering,
where they were going to try to convince Jesse Ventura to run as a candidate
for governor. Bob can’t swear that it was his dinner that had the right
effect on Ventura, but the evening was a smashing success on all fronts, so
he’d like to imagine that it did.
There’s a pattern here. The author believes food is “the best way
of getting people together of different views” to move them in some direction.
FOOD BECAME A critical player in another stage of Robert’s life. He had
started conducting online chats in the winter of 1995 with gay men, his first
contact with the gay world. He was losing a lot of weight and was beginning
to feel better about himself physically.
During one online chat, he was invited to a party in Kansas City, and agreed
to help with the party. The host was a barbecue beef kind of guy, but he loved
pesto, so Bob spent a month experimenting with pesto recipes.
The weekend of July 4, 1996, was when Meyers-Lussier met real live gay people
for the first time. And his pesto pasta dish was a hit. (It’s in the cookbook,
too: spinach-walnut pesto.)
Not long after his closet walls came down at this party, he came out to a female
co-worker from his legal firm where he worked part-time, over a meal he had
cooked, and soon after she asked him to be her roommate. Within a couple of
months, they moved into Minneapolis, Bob’s first experience living in
a large urban area, and his gay life exploded as quickly as his cooking life
had back in 1989. After that, nearly every time he came out was done over a
dinner he had cooked.
Only his father was slow to embrace his acknowledgment that he is gay. Meyers-Lussier
did not tell him over a dinner. Maybe he knew it wouldn’t have made a
difference. It wasn’t until this year, eight years later, that father
and son reconciled.
Recently, I asked the author why his cookbook is not overtly gay. Is there
a queer cuisine?
“Good food is good food,” he says. “It’s beyond gay.
If anything, it’s the theater of cooking, the process and the entertaining
that attracts gay men.”
In an era when cooking has become another kind of voyeuristic entertainment,
his goals seem attractively old-fashioned, even noble. And he’d like us
to be comfortable with that.
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