Cooking For Mr. Big

Adventures in fancy cooking for fancy people (who really don’t give a shit).

Back in the day, yes, when I lived in an even tinier apartment than the one I live in now, I cooked dinner for Mr. Big. (No, that irony is not lost on me.) We used to be friends. And, to be clear, it was not the actor in the SATC series, but the actual person/man who inspired the character in the series in the first place. Author Candace Bushnell’s real-life boyfriend at the time, who played a starring role in her original HBO show, that I and a zillion other people, read with glee every week in The New York Observer (side-note: Simon Doonan also had a column in the same paper around the same time…and, it was fantastic). 

When we met, I was an assistant to the CEO of Condé Nast, and he was a high-rolling publisher at Vogue. We always chatted when he was waiting to go in for meetings with my boss (who was also his boss). And he was always kind, curious, a bit goofy. Almost paternal, if that doesn’t sound too weird. It’s funny that the HBO series always framed Big as a womanizer, but I never got that vibe from him. And at 24 years-old, working in the publishing industry in the mid ‘90s, that vibe was absolutely everywhere.

I had become friendly with his assistant at the time, and there were a few of us, assistants to a slew of celebrity executives, who remained in touch even after we’d paid our dues in some of the hardest, most thrilling, and occasionally worst entry-level experiences you could have if (at the time) you ultimately wanted to make it in media. And, I really did. So did a lot of the assistants I worked alongside. And we rooted for each other. Years later, when I was an editor at Gourmet magazine, and his assistant had moved on (so did he, to launch Talk magazine with Tina Brown), we remained in touch, occasionally going out for beers and to see a band at Ludlow Street Café. At the time, Mr. Big might have been going through a divorce, I can’t really remember, but we always had good conversations, mostly about music and media, rarely about our personal lives (of which I had almost none). And, he never hit on me. I remember getting a call one weekend that he was in town and oddly had no plans. Could we have dinner? Or, better yet, could he just come over and “hang out.” Hang out? At our place? My roommate and I thought…what, this person who regularly frequents every Four Seasons across the globe, wants to come…here? To our itty-bitty apartment in a walk-up building over a nail salon on the corner of 77th Street and 2nd Avenue?

Okay, sure.