St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 35

SECTION Mar. 7, 1983 LeisurePage 5 SILDUIS POST-DISPATCH Food's The Star In New De Laurentiis Show 1 McClollan V( I I I 1 I ''V 'J fA 4 ri Story and Photos By Claudia Gellman Mink BLEND a flair for spectacular staging with a lifelong passion for food and what do you get? A gastronomic extravaganza called DDL Foodshow. It's the creation of Dino de Laurentiis, producer of such films as "Ragtime," "Conan the Barbarian" and the remake of "King Kong." Splendidly cast, meticulously produced and visually stunning, DDL Foodshow is the latest of New York City's lavish array of gourmet food stores. But, said manager Hagen von Burchard, "This is not just another American gourmet food shop. We're going for the elegance and class that you find in fine European food shops.

There are very few stores in the world as elegant as this one." DDL Foodshow opened to crowds of 30,000 over the Thanksgiving weekend, when de Laurentiis himself greeted customers at the door. "It was like the premiere of a movie," said assistant manager Rena Straddioto. "Mr. de Laurentiis has been here virtually every day since when he's in town sometimes as early as 6:30 a.m. and then later in the evening." De Laurentiis, 64, and his wife, actress Silvana Mangano, live in New York City.

Von Burchard's list of DDL's more celebrated customers reads like a teaser for an Academy Awards show: Lauren Bacall, Dustin Hoffman, Sophia Loren, Burt Lancaster, Liv Ullmann and Christopher Reeve, to name a few. Ms. Straddioto said DDL Foodshow is a composite of ideas de Laurentiis has gathered in a lifetime of working with food (as a child, he sold spaghetti from his father's factory on the streets of Naples) and from visiting similar establishments in Europe Harrod's and Fortum and Mason in London, Peck in Milan, Fauchon in Paris and Dahlmeyer's in Munich. Picture the setting: the expansive, skylit lobby of a turn-of-the-century former hotel on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Fixtures imported from all over Europe.

Sparkling white tile pillars, ceramic floors, gleaming brass rails, seasoned red brick arches, rich oak cabinetry, pink Italian marble counters, bright white walls. The store has the air of a beautifully appointed, contemporary gallery where every consideration has been given to displaying fine works of art to their best advantage. Against this backdrop, the homely truffle, adorned with shiny lemons and foilage, looks far more precious than the marked price of $20 an ounce. An intricate collage of chilled baby octopi, squid, shrimp and mussels seems a bargain at $8.95 a half pound. A snail-like bread whose pink, green and white spirals are made of beet, spinach and potato flours is a priceless masterpiece.

After the initial awestruck gasp, you want it all the chocolates, the coffees, the fish, the polenta with quail, the caviar bread, even the marinating cheeses. It all starts at the bakery, where breads of every description amaze and delight customers who have just entered DDL Foodshow. There are turtles, pigs, human faces and teddy bears. There are baskets of 2- Joot-long spinach-green breadsticks and tomato flour "tortes" filled with mozzarella cheese and onions. Pairs of bakers dressed in white carry 6-foot-long pizza crusts through the store above their heads.

Even some of the bread baskets are made of flour. Everything in the bakery except the bagels, from the breads to the gorgeous, glazed fresh fruit crostatas and swans made of puff pastry and whipped cream, is made on the premises. And that brings us to the kitchen. The facility is equipped and staffed to prepare a huge variety and quantity of foods. Italian master chefs, bakers and butchers, assisted by young American apprentices, make nearly all the store's pastas, stuffed or plain, using rainbow-hued flours that contain everything from onions to mushrooms to beets to artichokes.

They make fresh mozzarella cheese daily at 6:30 a.m. They will eventually make most of the sausages in the store. I r-" New York's established gourmet food shops are crammed, frenzied places where people and sustenance collide like billions of microorganisms in relatively small pots of primordial bouillabaisse. DDL, on the other hand, is immense 12,500 square feet in all and its departments are well-spaced, permitting strolling, swooning and prolonged deliberation at virtually every turn. Some New Yorkers pooh pooh the "show" at DDL Foodshow.

Others complain about prices. Skeptics also speculate that the fine Italian chefs some of them third-generation See FOOD, Page 4 TO) .5 1A L9A i Top, at DDL Foodshow on New York's Upper West Side, the decor features skylights, gleaming wood and brass, red brick arches and pink Italian marble counters. But all this is just a backdrop for the food. Above, truffles are adorned with shiny lemons and foilage and a price tag of $20 an ounce. Right, the bakery offers sweet and savory Italian pastries, including pies filled with cheeses, meats and eggs.

A Patriot By Any Other Name ARTHUR was 34 years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Marion was also 34. Arthur joined the Navy and was assigned to the Seabees. He spent the war with the Marines, fighting in the Pacific islands. Marion did not go into the service.

After the war, Arthur slipped back into society and got a job as an electrician, which is the same kind Of work he did before the war. He flew the flag on national holidays, and he sometimes told a few war stories, but he never carried on about what a great patriot he was. Marion, on the other hand, loved to talk about patriotism, and he used to tell people how sad he was that he had been too old to serve in the war. Marion talked about it so much that pretty soon everybody considered him a great patriot. Naturally, Arthur despised Marion, i And when Arthur had a son, one of the first things the son heard was this: "Never say a nice thing about Marion." Well, Arthur's son grew up, and he forgot or ignored a lot of the instructions Arthur had given him.

But he always obeyed Arthur's command about Marion. Part of the reason, I suppose, is that Arthur's son, like Arthur himself, is a negative kind of person and seldom says anything nice about anybody. Iri fact, Arthur's son has publicly said bad things about the mayor of St. Louis, the president of the board' of aldermen, local FBI agents, leaders of Vietnam veterans' organizations, the St. Louis County executive and other assorted civic leaders.

And except for a few phone calls "Cranks!" Arthur's son would yell when he'd hang up the phone nobody complained too much. But a couple of weeks ago, Arthurs son said something bad about Marion. He called Marion most patriotic draft-dodger the country ever produced." He shouldn't have said it. Nobody gets away with saying something like that about Marion Morrison. Marion, of course, changed his name a long time ago to John Wayne.

Probably the only two people in the world who still refer to Marion as Marion are me and Arthur. And we also seem to be the only two people in the world who don't believe that Marion really landed on Iwo Jima. "How can you say he's a draft-dodger?" one person asked incredulously. "With my own eyes I saw him lead a band of guerrillas in the Philippines. I watched him charge up a hill on Iwo Jima.

I watched him command a P.T. boat. Hell, if you count the Mexican war, I've seen him die twice serving the country." Nathan Hale should have been so lucky. One woman called and questioned my patriotism. "I bet you're a draft-dodger," she said.

"The worst kind, ma'am. An unsuccessful one," I replied. "I tried to get a student deferment, but I couldn't keep my grades up. I got drafted into the Marine Corps." "I bet you never went overseas," she said. "I tried iot to, ma'am," I said, 'i volunteered for the band, but I couldn't play an instrument.

They ended up sending me to Vietnam." "No wonder we lost," she said. I was going to remind her that Marion 'was a Green Beret in the same war, but then I remembered he really wasn't. Of course, some of the complaints were pretty legitimate. One fellow suggested that it was kind of dirty to attack someone who's dead. If you wait until he's dead, he doesn't have a chance to fight back, the guy said.

"Then it's a pretty good time 'to attack, I'd say," I said. Another argument that was pretty convincing at least to my bosses was that I had been loose with the term "draft-dodger." Well, if you're draft-age and you manage to avoid getting drafted, then what the heck. You've dodged it. I don't consider that necessarily a bad thing, either. The problem is simply that the idea clashes with the image everybody has of Marion Morrison.

And if you don't think we confuse image with reality, consider this. George McGovern went to war while John Wayne stayed home. And try to imagine John Wayne playing a character who's the right age to to march off to war, but somehow ends up in Hollywood while his contemporaries go into battle. "Maybe it never occurred to ya. but somebody.

has to make movies." I've read the stuff put out by the press agents about Marion staying home. He was too old. He had dependents. Arthur was Marion's age, Arthur had dependents and unlike Marion's, they didn't have a big bank account to fall back on if Arthur got killed but Arthur still went to war. Oh well.

It's like I said reality can't stand up to Hollywood fantasy. One of my bosses got a letter from an angry John Wayne fan. The letter said I don't measure up to the standards of professional journalism. Of course, the writer was probably comparing me with the best journalists in the country. Like those guys who broke the Watergate stories.

You remember those two guys. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. f- 4 Ml X7 "The emphasis on prepared foods was Mr. de Laurentiis' idea," von Burchard said. "It answers two basic demands of our busy and discriminating clientele: quality and convenience." Von Burchard said DDL Foodshow's prepared foods account for half of the store's sales, for which the eventual goal is $80,000 to $85,000 per week.

Since it opened last fall after a three-month, $3 million installation, DDL Foodshow has sparked controversy in a city whose enormous community of gourmets seems wary of a pretty face with grand aspirations, especially one created by a flamboyant filmmaker. 'TV. l- But it is DDL's sumptuous and glittering repertoire of freshly prepared dishes 40 cold selections and 15 hot ones that give the store its soul. Pheasant pate, roasted wild rabbit from Scotland, torta basilica with layers of Romano cheese, mascarpone (an assidulated cream) and pesto, skatefish with melons, mussels and eggplant marinara, poached quail eggs green apple salad with porcini mushrooms and pizzas fit for the cover gf Bon Appetit grace the counters of the Gastronomia. The store's premiere specialite is its porcheta, an artfully boned suckling pig, its tenderloin stuffed with selected herbs and seasonings, which is basted and roasted for five hours.

Celebrating Faith With Fabric Artist Marjorio Hoeltzel finds joy in creating vestments, the decorative garments worn by priests at the altar j4 i 1 Story by Pamela Schaeffer Photos by Robert LaRouche Of the Post-Dispatch Staff IN years past, Marjorie Hoeltzel did her sewing in a corner of her basement. Besides enjoyment, the hobby afforded a tangible reward: a wardrobe for a growing daughter. At 62, Mrs. Hoeltzel no longer dresses her daughter. She has found a new, more satisfying outlet for her skills: dressing priests for the altar.

In keeping with its new importance in her life, she has moved her sewing machine upstairs from a New Jersey basement to a Central West End apartment designed around her work. Her work has "come upstairs" in other ways. Mrs. Hoeltzel has changed her self-description from "seamstress" to "fiber artist." Making vestments she calls them "body banners" has become the defining principle for what she describes as the most creative period of her life. Two rooms of her compact five-room apartment on Maryland Avenue are given over to her work.

One room is a studio for designing and making vestments the decorative garments worn for liturgical celebrations in Roman Catholic churches and in some Episcopal and Lutheran churches. A second room, a loft above the living room, is set up for hooking rugs, another skill she is developing. "I'm a vestment maker and a hooker," Mrs. Hoeltzel said with a laugh. But vestment design takes top priority, she said.

She believes herself to be the only person in the St. Louis area who approaches vestment-making as a contemporary art form. She has high praise, however, for St. Mary's Institute in O'Fallon, where the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood make traditional vestments with "wonderful, fine stitchery such great skill." Mrs. Hoeltzel said she turned to vestment design with a new sense of purpose after visiting the Chapel of the Rosary, a Dominican church Vence, France.

Henri Matisse devoted kiost of his creative energies from 1948 to 1952 to Resigning the Left, Marjorie Hoeltzel with some of the fabrics she uses in designing and sewing vestments, the decorative garments worn for liturgical celebrations in Catholic, Episcopal and Lutheran churches. Above, the Rev. Bill Chapman, pastor of Trinity Episcopal Church, in one of her designs. chapel and its accouterments. Those included six sets of vestments, which he integrated into the splashy, paper-cut-out design.

The visit to Matisse's chapel was a turning point in her artistic career, Mrs. Hoeltzel said. "I really got excited about doing vestments," she said. Since then, she has made a point of "getting backstage" to view the priestly robes at famous churches wherever she travels. Recently, she visited St.

Peter's Lutheran Church In New York, See VESTMENTS, Page 4.