Louise Glück’s Life in Restaurants
If Maria Rondeau and JuanMa Calderón were literalists, they might have put nasturtiums on the menu at Rosa y Marigold, the Peruvian restaurant they opened in April, in Boston. They took the name from the novella “Marigold and Rose,” the final book published by their friend Louise Glück, the Nobel Prize-winning poet, before she died, in 2023. The story is told from the perspective of infant twins with divergent personalities—Rose is unguardedly buoyant, whereas Marigold is watchful and introspective. “The garden relied on nasturtiums, which Mother and Father ate,” the narrator observes. “It was strange to see the grilled fish with nasturtium butter melting over it. . . . But once you try it, Mother said, the taste is magic. The twins knew what magic was. It made the sun rise. Now they knew it had a taste.”
Rondeau, who grew up in Guatemala, is an architect; Calderón, her partner in life and in restaurants, is a filmmaker and chef from Peru. In September, I sat at Rosa y Marigold’s sleek U-shaped bar with Rondeau and the poet Dan Chiasson, a regular contributor to this magazine and another close friend of Glück’s, sharing thin strips of charred beef heart, tendrils of squid blanketed in a silky, lavender-hued olive mayonnaise, and a formidable mound of chaufa de mariscos—Chinese Peruvian seafood fried rice. To drink, Chiasson ordered his usual, a gin Martini, recalling fondly how Glück would fish the olives out of his glass. As an epileptic, she abstained from hard liquor, but she loved the flavor.
“The whole book is about this idea of duality,” Rondeau said. “It’s an allusion to her two grandchildren”—Glück’s only child, Noah Dranow, is the father of twins—“but it’s also Louise. I think many people are two sides.” Rondeau designed Rosa y Marigold’s dining room to have two sections, each with a mirrored-steel slab hanging overhead, slightly angled to offer a glimpse of the other side.
That afternoon, we’d visited Celeste, the couple’s first restaurant, which they opened in the spring of 2018 in a tiny triangular storefront in Somerville. Glück, whose apartment was nearby, soon became a regular, with a regular order: a cold beer, the arugula salad with lime and Parmesan, and the ceviche, sometimes followed by the sudado de pescado, a Chinese Peruvian dish of steamed fish and vegetables. She always came with a friend, occasionally two, and often requested that the music be turned down.
The couple knew little about her until, one day, Glück left behind an envelope return-addressed to Yale, and Rondeau looked her up, to get it back to her. After that, Glück made her reservations with Rondeau directly. “If anything was off—the salt, the lime, the fish—I would get a text,” Rondeau said affectionately. “She had a perfect palate!” Chiasson added. “She was our in-house critic,” Rondeau continued. “And I would always be extremely grateful, because she kept it real.”
One evening, Rondeau and Calderón mentioned that they’d been approached about writing a cookbook. The next time they saw her, she handed them a typewritten foreword, detailing how she’d first encountered Celeste in Boston magazine, which had published a photo of the ceviche. “It was a summer day and I wanted that ceviche immediately,” she wrote, admiring how it was “not drowned by the chef’s noisy creativity in shards of coconut or a confetti of pomegranate seeds / A very pure looking dish of glistening blue cod.” At the restaurant, Glück became “more like a citizen” than a regular, she wrote. “And Celeste is a world. But a world so much more wonderful and reliable than our real world.” Glück ate dinner at Celeste on the day she won the Nobel, surrounded by friends of Rondeau’s and Calderón’s, whom they’d invited to insure her privacy.
I first learned about Glück’s passion for restaurants in the spring of 2020. At the time, I was this magazine’s weekly restaurant critic, and I had shifted, suddenly, from dining out all over New York City to chronicling the industry’s attempts to stay afloat during lockdown. Glück e-mailed me to commiserate, and to ask if I had ideas for how to help. “Among so many horrors, the collapse of these enchanted worlds seems somehow desperately poignant,” she wrote.
I was lightly shocked to hear from her. I knew and revered her as one of the great living poets, and imagined her as particularly godlike, too high-minded to care about something as earthly as food. There was also the fact that she had struggled with anorexia as a young woman, which she wrote about in her 1989 lecture “Education of the Poet.” We struck up a sporadic correspondence. “I love to cook and have been a terrific and fastidious home cook,” she wrote with refreshing candor, but she yearned for the ritual of dining out. (Later, I learned that she’d bought a heat lamp for Celeste so that she could eat there outdoors.)
In “Education of the Poet,” Glück, who was born to a wealthy family in New York, in 1943 (her father, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant, helped invent the X-Acto knife), described her anorexia as an attempt to “establish a self with clear boundaries.” “The conflict played itself out most fiercely with my mother,” she wrote, who “only wavered when I began to refuse food, when I claimed, through implicit threat, ownership of my body, which was her great accomplishment.” By all accounts, Glück’s mother, Beatrice, was a wonderful cook; Glück’s papers, archived at Yale’s Beinecke Library, make clear that she grew up among people who loved to eat. In one letter from summer camp, addressed to her younger sister, Tereze, Glück wrote, “I miss—sundaes, shrimp cocktails,” next to tiny sketches of each.
Glück recovered from anorexia through years of psychoanalysis—years during which she also studied poetry with Léonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz. She published “Firstborn,” her début collection, in 1968, when she was twenty-five. Later letters detailed lavish hotel meals in Europe with her first husband and dinner parties in Plainfield, Vermont, where she taught writing at Goddard College and worked part time at a café, baking pastries in exchange for child care. (Noah, her son, grew up to be a sommelier.)
In 1980, John Dranow, Glück’s second husband and the director of the writing program at Goddard, co-founded the New England Culinary Institute, a small cooking school that operated restaurants in Montpelier. Glück sat on the board of directors until the nineties, when they divorced and she moved to Cambridge. In one poem from “Meadowlands,” an unsparing, darkly funny collection from that time, an unidentified husband and wife argue over food. “I stopped liking artichokes when I stopped eating / butter. Fennel / I never liked,” he says. “Living with you is like living / at boarding school: / chicken Monday, fish Tuesday.”
“Why do you call it rigidity?” she retorts. “Can’t you call it a taste for ceremony? Or is your hunger for beauty / completely satisfied by your own person?” The husband has the last word, accusing her of joyless pleasure-seeking: “When you make artichokes, / make them for yourself.”
The word “poet,” Glück wrote, “must be used cautiously; it names an aspiration, not an occupation. In other words: not a noun for a passport.” She could go years without writing, though she rejected the notion of writer’s block, perceiving instead a liminal state of waiting for poems to arrive. During fallow periods, Glück occupied herself with teaching, which she loved, gardening (she claimed to have read nothing but catalogues for two years), and eating at restaurants. “Dinner takes a certain shape,” the poet Katie Peterson, who ate with her frequently at Chez Panisse when Glück taught at Stanford, observed. “A familiar menu is like a rosary.”
In Cambridge, Chiasson pointed out Koreana, the restaurant where he, as a worshipful Harvard grad student, had first spotted Glück, in 1997, having dinner with the poets Robert Pinsky and Frank Bidart. (Bidart, Chiasson’s mentor, eventually introduced them.) Chiasson showed me an unpublished poem that he’d written for Glück after she died: “back before anything happened / yet it was still the bitter end / three poets sat around a lazy susan / kimchi, Tsing Tao, bibimbap, gossip.”
Earlier that day, we’d dropped in on the poet Henri Cole, in Boston’s South End. The two men, who had each shared countless meals with Glück, but never together, delighted in comparing notes, remembering her habit of sampling several wines before inevitably choosing something crisp and dry; her insistence that no meal was complete without greens; and the decisiveness with which she could turn on a place she’d loved. She almost always ordered the fish. She almost never ordered dessert, but would happily pluck the raspberry off of someone else’s crème brûlée. She preferred to eat early, and would wait outside her home, ready to be picked up.
Chiasson and Cole had last seen each at La Royal, another of Rondeau and Calderón’s restaurants, at a memorial for Glück, packed with her dinner companions. When Rondeau first told Glück, in 2021, that she and Calderón were considering opening a new place, Glück advised against it, then immediately changed her mind on a visit to the empty storefront, in a beautiful brick building from 1910, facing Royal Avenue in Cambridge. Not long before she died, Glück weighed in on the menu—both the dishes served and the printed layout—and chose the restaurant’s name.
Chiasson theorized that his friend’s love for both restaurants and poetry stemmed from her interest in “primal urges.” “We build these institutions to contain them and express them,” he said. “Marriage, restaurants, homes—they’re frames for containing all this passion.” In 1999, Glück imagined a creation story of sorts, describing small worlds that appeared in the fissures of a larger, shattered one. “On Huron Avenue they became / a block of stores,” she wrote, “whatever / they were or sold, they were / alike in their function: they were / visions of safety. Like / a resting place.” She called the poem “Formaggio,” after her favorite cheese shop, in Cambridge. ♦