". . . We have seen much in our day. Crime, poverty, drug abuse, racial discrimination, human trafficking, hate crimes. We have witnessed soldiers marched off to wars, some justified, others not. We have reported on horrible car accidents, serial killings, political corruption, disease outbreaks, air crashes, natural disasters, tragedy heaped on tragedy. But we can’t recall a president of the United States making light of the violent deaths of his fellow Americans. And to make it clear how meaningless those lives are to him, he then, in a breathtaking leap of logic, connected it all to his favorite topic, illegal immigration. . . "
Hidden Agenda
OHO (duo-Jay Graboski & Ray Jozwiak) live in Ocean City, August 2019
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Baltimore has certainly enjoyed its
share of eccentric eateries over the years, but perhaps none
so endearing—certainly none so enduring—as Martick’s Restaurant
Français. Patrons had to ring a bell to gain admittance to the dimly lit
and eclectically furnished dining room, where mismatched silver and
china topped the tables and a multifarious array of works by local
artists graced the walls. It was funky and shabby and utterly unlike
anywhere else.
The restaurant’s inimitable founder and chef, Morris Martick, died
Dec. 16 of lung cancer at the age of 88, having literally spent his life
there. He was born in the building—214 W. Mulberry St.—and grew up
working with his parents, two brothers, and two sisters in various
enterprises operated there by the Martick family: a grocery store and
then a speakeasy during the Prohibition years. (Rumor has it a gin still
remains in the building’s basement.)
Martick’s own first incarnation of the family business was running a
bar/jazz nightclub during the 1960s. By all accounts, it was an island
of Bohemian refuge in an otherwise conservative city. Painter Raoul
Middleman used to hang out there, and Martick gave him his first
show—hanging his paintings above the bar. “This was when segregation
laws were still in effect,” Middleman recalls. “And I had a friend I
really wanted to have see this show, my first show, but he was black,
and it was against the law for him to enter the bar. But Morris just
said, ‘Bring him on in.’ He could’ve gotten in a lot of trouble for
doing that. He thought segregation laws were stupid and he lived by his
beliefs. I always respected him for that.”
Former Martick’s employee Steve Pampinelli says Martick used to
recount how Billie Holiday once sang there in the nightclub days. “It
was actually against the law of segregation, but he would let black
folks in anyway,” Pampinelli says. “So when Billie Holiday sang there,
she was actually there as a patron. When people realized she was there
everyone got really excited and asked if she would sing, and of course
she did.”
“Morris really only left Baltimore twice in his whole life,” recalls
Scotty Stevenson, who worked at Martick’s from 1977 through the mid-’80s
and off and on for several years after that. “He was gone briefly
during WWII while he was in the Air Force—he was in Alaska, according to
him because ‘That was where they sent all the fuck-ups.’ But then he
came back and took care of his mother until she died in 1959, and ran
the jazz club until, he said, he got tired of the drunks and the
musicians. So he closed down in 1967 and went bumming around France for a
couple years really learning how to cook. He had always liked to cook,
he was a natural at it, but that was when he really educated himself in
formal technique. Then when he came back, he fixed the place up and
reopened as a French restaurant.”
That was in 1970, when Martick’s Restaurant Français had two dining
rooms on two floors, a maitre’d, tuxedoed waiters, and a genuine French
chef from Paris. According to Alex Martick, who survives his brother at
the age of 83, “I don’t know where he found that chef, but the man was a
goddamn drunk. He’d call downstairs for bottles of brandy, supposedly
to cook with, but he’d be drinking it himself. Then when he was good and
drunk he’d come after my brother.”
Stevenson recalls hearing the tale as follows: “One night the chef
came after Morris with a knife, and that was that. Morris was left with a
French restaurant but no French chef, and that was when he started
running the kitchen himself. Then the monkey suits and the maitre’d
evaporated, and it all became the artists and the musicians.”
It was a natural evolution, Stevenson explains, because “almost
everything in that restaurant Morris had done himself anyway—the stained
glass, the painted tile, the albino rattlesnake skin wallpaper. He was
an artist himself, he drew and painted, so he was always at home with
artists and musicians.”
Anna Oldfield, who put herself through college working in Martick’s
kitchen from 1985 until 1991, says, “Nobody worked harder than Morris
himself. He was simply always there, cooking and doing anything that
needed to be done. So anyone who worked for him got into that same zone,
that you just did everything necessary to make it work. That 75 people
were going to come in and somehow, in this little kitchen at the top of
these impossibly steep stairs in this crazy little house with a bunch of
crazy people, you were somehow going to get it together and make these
amazing French meals.
“The way it worked was inexplicable, but transformative for the
people who worked there—the ones that stayed, anyway,” continues
Oldfield, who went on to get her doctorate and now teaches at Coastal
Carolina University in South Carolina. “I was there for five years, and
in that time at least 50 people came in who had been hired and they’d
run screaming their first night. Literally run out the door in the
middle of their shift.”
“I always thought there was a little roulette wheel running in
Morris’ head, and when he met you the ball either landed on ‘family’ and
he treated you like family, or ‘intruder’ and he would chase you away,”
Stevenson says. “It makes sense because everything in that building was
his childhood—if you were banging the pots in the kitchen he’d yell at
you, ‘Stop hitting the pots!’ which is exactly what his mother had
yelled at him. Anything he yelled at you had been yelled at him
growing up.”
“Morris was challenging and irritable and he yelled at everybody all
the time. But you could yell right back,” says Katie Brennan, who began
her Martick’s career in 1985, at the age of 16—and began a friendship
with Martick himself that carried through the next 26 years.
“We’d get these Culinary Institute kids who’d be like, Oh I’m
gonna work at Martick’s and be a chef apprentice, and the first
question he’d always ask them is, ‘How long do you cook this piece of
fish?’” Brennan recalls. “And they’d start this analysis of what kind it
was and how thick and blah blah, and Morris would just shout, ‘Till
it’s done, damn it, till it’s done!’”
Martick was famous for his pâté, profiteroles, and, above all else,
bouillabaisse. “That bouillabaisse took literally days to make,”
Oldfield recalls. “You’d have to bone the fish and make the stock in all
these stages, sometimes boiling, sometimes barely simmering it, and add
all these different things at just the right times. It was a kind of
cooking that hardly anyone does anymore, because it takes so long and is
based entirely on instinct. He was such a master of that, and he never
used a recipe. He always improvised, which is why if you went there
twice and got the same dish, it would not be exactly the same.”
Jeff Smith, the Baltimore-born chef-owner of Chameleon Cafe in
Lauraville, worked briefly in Martick’s kitchen. “Even in a short time, I
learned a lot working there,” Smith says. “He definitely did things
differently from anywhere else I had ever worked.”
The brutal working conditions at Martick’s were famous among
employees—Brennan and Oldfield both recall a thermometer in the kitchen
that routinely pegged out at its top reading of 115 degrees F—and over
the years there were many tales of Martick working in his underpants, if
he bothered wearing them at all. “I worked there with a guy who had
been with Martick on and off over the years,” Smith recalls, “who told
me that Morris would be in the shower—his bathroom was between the front
and back kitchens—and customers would come in, and Martick would just
step out of the shower, put an apron on, and start cooking, his wrinkly
old ass hanging out while he was cooking this amazing food. I never saw
it with my own two eyes, but this was the legend.”
After a heyday running from its 1970 opening to the mid-’80s,
Martick’s Restaurant Français began to slowly fade from its original
eminence. Stevenson says that the opening of Harborplace in 1982 drew
diners downtown, away from Martick’s, as did the subsequent opening on
nearby North Charles Street of Louie’s Bookstore Cafe by Jimmy Rouse,
who had waited tables at Martick’s. “Louie’s drew a lot of clientele
away from Martick’s, but Morris never held a grudge,” Stevenson says.
“He would actually go and eat there almost every night. He used to sit
there at the bar, telling Jimmy everything he was doing wrong.”
“What I took from him was to not be scared of being unique,” Smith
says. “The way he just did things the way he wanted and didn’t care what
anybody else thought. The guy just had a lot of guts, and held out to
the end. I know what it’s like when it’s slow in your restaurant. It’s
scary and hard to come to work, day after day when it’s slow like that,
and he did it for years. I have a lot of respect for him.”
Martick ran his eponymous restaurant for 35 years, closing to the
public in 2008. He remained there, living in the building where he was
born, and carrying on the friendships he’d made over eight decades of
life, many of them at the center of Baltimore’s creative circles. “There
are so many people in Baltimore whose early networks and friendships
were made by working at Martick’s over the years,” Stevenson says. In
his later years, according to Brennan, Martick kept busy going to the
movies and Pimlico race track. As late as 2010, according to Pampinelli,
he was still “running a business hauling people’s trash out of their
basements or helping them move house. We’d make a few extra bucks
hauling stuff to the city dump in that board truck of his.”
In October, however, he collapsed while walking down Howard Street
and was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. “It went pretty quickly
there, at the end,” Brennan says. “A lot of people didn’t even realize
he was sick. I didn’t know literally until the night before he died. I
got [to the hospital] just in time. I got to give him a hug and a kiss
and tuck him in when he fell asleep.”
Memorial plans are still tentative, but Alex Martick says that a
celebration of his brother’s life is in the works for January. In a
Facebook tribute to Martick, amid a plethora of reminiscences both
affectionate and profane, Oldfield wrote:
I am overwhelmed with a combination of terrible sadness and
memories that range from ridiculous to hilarious to truly tender. We
were so very very very lucky to know Morris, he was like a planet that
made an alternate gravity where people like us could thrive. He defied
every law of physics [and] lousy boring stuff that people are supposed
to do and I’ll bet y’all don’t know how close you were to having that
walkin [refrigerator] fall in on your heads when you were having dinner.
. . . Now that we’re all 50 or whatever we can maybe start to
appreciate his absolute refusal to give in to all the thousands of
things that drag people into those small compromises that destroy your
soul. Morris never gave up. I’m only just beginning to get everything
that he was saying to me all that time
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. . . pesky, health-related things that you have to do when you get old. Well, when you get OLDER. Well, maybe I should say when you have health-related issues that requires medication and monitoring NO MATTER HOW OLD YOU ARE. Well, maybe I'm just bitching because I have to go out EARLY on a miserable, rainy, cold, Saturday morning. And not only do I have to go out EARLY, I can't even have my morning coffee or absolutely ANYTHING to eat. Yes that's right. Since midnight, I haven't had a thing to EAT or DRINK, except water of course, because to produce accurate results, I have to FAST on days I do this.
Two common, health-related issues are present in this particular system of mine, high cholesterol and hypothyroidism.
"The term high cholesterol is a bit misleading, because there are two types of cholesterol. If you've been told you have high cholesterol, it usually means you have more of the bad type and less of the good type. This may put you at higher risk of having a heart attack or a stroke. You won't notice if you have too much bad cholesterol, because you won't have any symptoms. The only way you can find out is to have a blood test."
"Hypothyroidism is a condition in which the thyroid gland does not make enough thyroid hormone. Symptoms: Early symptoms: Being more sensitive to cold; Constipation; Depression; Fatigue or feeling slowed down... " well YOU get the picture.
SO, here I am, EARLY Saturday morning. NO COFFEE, NOTHING TO EAT or DRINK, FASTING since midnight, terribly inconvenienced and just miserable about it just because I have to go have them draw my . . . BLOOD!
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