His next book, Winning the Kitchen Game, is due from McGraw-Hill next winter.
Jacobs dines out at least once a day while in the city. He visits restaurants several times before doing a review — always anonymously, and generally accompanied by others. "My job," he says, "is to find worthwhile places that our readers will want to go to. The magazine's policy is not to do unfavorable reviews. If I think a place stinks, I don't go back and I don't review it. … Most of our readers are knowledgeable about food, somewhat self-indulgent, affluent, and well-travelled. When they come into New York, they don't want to find some cut-rate taco house, and they don't want to know about the bad places. They're only in for a few days, and they want to hit the high spots.
"The daily press have a different readership and a different function. … When they do a favorable review, it can damage a restaurant in that it generates a sudden spurt of interest that the restaurant can't handle."
The father of four boys, Jacobs is a very sociable person who enjoys throwing parties for 50 to 60. To prepare the food, he says, "I lock myself in the kitchen for three or four days."
His Gourmet reviews are so detailed that Jacobs gets letters from readers across the country who tell how they have recreated a night at the Four Seasons or 21 "by analyzing what I have written, and approximating the dishes." But what makes his job particularly gratifying is the restaurant people themselves.
"I'm very impressed by these restaurant guys. If you travel in Europe you see them when they're 13 years old, schlepping suitcases in some motel and dreaming of the day when they open their own restaurant. They usually come out of small towns or even villages, and don't have the benefit of birth or upbringing or schooling. And the next thing you know, it's 30 years later and they can converse very adequately with Henry Kissinger or Jackie Onassis or anyone else, and maintain a business and make it work."
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WESTSIDER RAUL JULIA
Star of Dracula on Broadway
5-26-79
"It's nice to be a vampire eight times a week," says Raul Julia, the star of Dracula at the Martin Beck Theatre. Last October he took over the role made famous by Frank Langella, and now Julia — pronounced "Hoo lia" by his Puerto Rican countrymen — has developed a cult following of his own, in this classic remake of the 1927 Broadway hit.