Mr. Recipe is crazy about spices. (Photo by Emily Anne Epstein)

Aaron Isaacson is a strange man. It’s not just the bizarre waxed moustache, which juts out from above his lip like a kind of spice-sniffing antenna, nor the oversized bald head on which it is the most prominent feature. Even more odd is his ardor for spices, about which he rhapsodizes, with a kind of fanatical abandon, to everyone he meets.

“Spice is the magic of food,” he said. “If you can’t use them, you can’t cook, and if you can’t cook, you can’t eat.” He calls himself Mr. Recipe and is, by nearly all accounts, the city’s top spice importer. His business, strictly speaking, amounts to selling seasonings to the city’s top chefs.

His Madagascar vanilla, which is grown specifically for him (“I INSIST on no less than 90,000 seeds per pod”), goes for $200 per half-kilo (about 1.1 pounds). His Iranian saffron powder (“not the stamens, the powder!”) is literally carried down from a mountaintop by sherpas, and is sold by him for $400 an ounce. The prices are, by any standard, steep: a typical high-end bulk vanilla bean might sell for $80 per pound, a good saffron powder $130 an ounce.

(Photo by Emily Anne Epstein)

Mr. Recipe, to some extent, has created a luxury market for the world’s best spices, but no one could accuse him of being a canny marketer. His passion for spices is too unfeigned, too evangelical; he sometimes comes across as scary, like a hard-money crank dilating on the Federal Reserve. When speaking on the subject, his eyes open wide and the great egg-like dome of his head begins to color, especially when he feels that spices are being insufficiently appreciated.

“People don’t understand spice,” he said. “It’s too complicated for their minds.” Even his friends admit he can be a little unnerving. By his own reckoning, he sells
87 different kinds of chilies alone, “dried, kibbled and powdered”; he once spent 11 years only selling vanilla.

(Photo by Emily Anne Epstein)

Mr. Isaacson frequently gives lectures and demonstrations about spices on cruise ships and at events, and has become something of a status symbol among Upper East Side society women, who occasionally bring him into their kitchens for a spice lesson.

Despite his best efforts at broader fame, his television appearances thus far have been limited to a single History Channel documentary called The Epic History of Everyday Things, which he hopes will be picked up as a series, with himself as one of the talking heads—a position for which he is singularly qualified. He is also exploring the possibility of having his own Internet TV show or even channel, which would be called, not unexpectedly, “Mr. Recipe TV.”

The concept is not as far-fetched as it may sound; his reputation as a private chef-tutor is growing. Paola Bottero, the owner of Paola’s restaurant on the Upper East Side, has introduced him to many of her customers, deep-pocketed gastrocrats more than willing to pay the high costs of buying spice from Mr. Recipe—who then will come to their homes to instruct them in its use. “It’s something I throw in because I want them to understand,” he said. “They don’t use the right amount. Either too much or too little.” Mr. Recipe’s own kitchen in his Upper West Side apartment is home to 400 or more spices and blends at any given time.

“Recipe is extremely knowledgeable and passionate about what he does, and he shares that with my customers,” Ms. Bottero said. “When he comes to sell, he stays to eat and makes friends with them, offering them samples and sharing tales of his latest trip. They just can’t get enough of him.”

It was at Paola’s that I had my first extended encounter with Mr. Recipe. I did an Ozersky TV episode there, in which Mr. Recipe schooled me on all I had been missing in the realm of peppers and spice. I have to admit that I thought of Mr. Recipe as yet another portly self-promoter, much like myself.

But the experience opened my eyes. His spices are astounding. His aleppo pepper envelops anything it encounters with a nimbus of sweet fire. Even his bay leaves, that most invisible of seasoning agents, are vivid. And his ability to integrate them into food is impeccable: Paola’s is one of the best Italian restaurants in New York, with up to 20 specials a day, half of which I think I ate that afternoon, and they all were improved signally by his peppers and powders.

“Mr. Recipe is weird, we all know that,” Marea’s Michael White told me subsequently. “But his spices really are the best.” He is right: the black pepper is explosive; it lights up your palate like cocaine. The white pepper is ineffable and creamy-hot.

(Photo by Emily Anne Epstein.)

I asked Mr. Recipe why his products are better than, say, the ones you get in little red bottles at the supermarket. He was taken aback. “You can’t begin to compare my pepper with that stuff,” he said disdainfully. “Mine have an enormous amount of volatile organic compounds. They’re picked by hand, stringently sorted out, hand-dried in the sun, separated by size, and they’re four times the size of regular peppercorns. Those guys just get cheap Brazilian or Vietnamese pepper and grind it all up. Filler pepper, I call it.” A 15-minute discourse on the biochemistry of peppers followed. After a short while, I tuned out.

Even some chefs find his enthusiasm overwhelming. “Mr. Recipe is pretty goddamned annoying,” one chef told me under condition of anonymity. “He’s always carrying on about his spices. I mean, yes, his double-husk extra-bold telecherry pepper is amazing, but it costs more than twice as much as what I pay my spice guy. And it totally doesn’t register at all on the customers.”

For his part, Mr. Recipe is appalled by chefs who complain about his prices. “You want me to take a Rolls-Royce and make it into a Ford Eclipse,” he said dismissively.

His problem, however, is bigger than the simple economics of spice. It’s that he loves spices so much that his attention to them transcends business or fame. Even his health is at risk; the 51-year-old Mr. Recipe has Type 2 diabetes. But he has to suffer for what he considers a higher calling. “My doctor said if I lost 70 or 80 pounds, I wouldn’t have diabetes,” he said. “But telling Mr. Recipe to go to the best chefs I sell to and, when they give me a plate of beautiful food and say, ‘Look what we made with your spice,’ to say, ‘I’ll just try one bite and spit it out’? I DON’T THINK SO!”

Mr. Recipe is vehement about his commitment to his work; every aspect of his life, emotionally and intellectually, is wrapped up in it. And yet, when Mr. Recipe starts talking about vanilla, which he calls “the key to my existence,” all of his other obsessions drop away. There is no more talk of aleppo peppers, the Scoville Scale or his other pet topics.

“Vanilla is the greatest of all flavor enhancers,” he told me one day. Goading him, I asked, “What do you mean? Isn’t it just something you put in ice cream or cupcakes or whatever? I don’t even like vanilla.” Mr. Recipe was taken aback and required a few moments to compose himself. “No, no, no! Do you understand, Josh, that there are 256 separate flavor compounds contained in vanilla? Nothing else even comes close.”

(Photo by Emily Anne Epstein)

His moustache twitched.

“So you mean, like, you can use it in other kinds of desserts too?” I asked. “Or do you mean candies?”

Mr. Recipe, discerning that I was having a little fun, settled back into his familiar avuncular mode. “Josh, there are a whole panoply of savory dishes you can make with vanilla. I make a vanilla bean salad dressing. When I worked for Christian Delouvrier at The Maurice, we made a sauce vanille for lobster that was one of his signature dishes. What you have to understand is that ...” And like that, he was regaling me with tales of his trips to Madagascar, and of his famous speech to the World Vanilla Congress. “Every important person in the vanilla world was there,” he said.

Listening to Mr. Recipe rhapsodize about a spice so uninteresting that its very name is a synonym for blandness was fascinating. His passion for spices, it seems, is all consuming. “Most women have disappointed me,” he said. “I look at food as my lover, as my wife, as my girlfriend.”

Does he miss having a family? “No,” he said. “All spices are my children.”

editorial@observer.com

Marea, oh my!

Before Jeffrey Eugenides was attacked on a Princeton-bound train by a man singing a ditty about his genitals, the author of Middlesex was having a pretty nice boys’ night out.

“We’d had an outstanding celebratory dinner at Marea,” Farrar, Strauss & Giroux president Jonathan Galassi—his date for the evening—told The Observer. “Then I dropped Jeff off at Penn Station.”

The dinner, at Central Park South’s ritzy seafood mecca, got quite celebratory indeed. The receipt obtained by The Transom shows that the duo started out with a bottle of La Castellada ($95) and carried forth with the pricey, scaly stuff. The typical Marea four-course prix-fixe runs $91 per person. In total, the duo’s bill came to just over $520.

Seriously, what didn’t they have? Waiters served dishes of Sogliola (sole), Ono (wahoo), Sgombo (mackerel), Seppia (cuttlefish), Dentice (snapper) Baccala (salt cod) and Ricci (sea urchin), alongside a heaping of spaghetti and a spread of cheeses. After, Macluan Torcolato dessert wine cleansed the pallet, and then Campari cocktails eased their literary minds.

What a shame that the night had to be ruined by a drunk fixated upon the Middlesex author’s nether-regions! As a train carrying the author bounded south of Manhattan, an assailant harassed the passengers in the car with shouted obscenities. After he refused to stop, Mr. Eugenides grabbed at his phone, and promptly got socked in the side of the head.

“I was happy that chivalry is not dead on N.J. Transit, and that it should be alive and well in Jeff Eugenides,” said Paris Review editor Lorin Stein, whose publication was the first to excerpt The Virgin Suicides, back in 1990.

The author attended a private reading in his honor at the lit journal’s offices last Thursday despite the black eye and cut-up mug.

“Oh, he looked dashing,” Mr. Stein told The Transom. “I would have ran with it, but I don’t usually get in fist fights.”

The publicist for Mr. Eugenides said he would rather not comment on the affair.

And what’s become of the man crooning about his naughty bits? Some sources told The Transom that the man has been arrested. On Twitter, the handle “@cyberhack7” sent out a message claiming to be the infamous attacker, and did so because Mr. Eugenides wrote a David Foster Wallace-esque character into his new novel, The Marriage Plot. “i should have beaten him to death but i didn’t have time,” he said.

Regardless of who and where this guy is, though, it’s pretty clear the train was better off without him. “Jeff told the story in a very self-deprecating way,” Mr. Stein said, “but, as my sister said, he’s a hero.”

Last week, one of the hottest chefs in New York-hell, in America-turned a plastic crank, demonstrating a strawberry-red Tupperware hand mixer, the Whip 'N Prep, for a crowd of diners at a pop-up restaurant dubbed the TupperClub, in the penthouse of the Setai Hotel.On the menu? Nova Scotia lobster with burrata and eggplant al funghetto.

You might not expect to find Michael White at a Tupperware party, even a swanky one. Not with his restaurant, Marea, on Central Park South, attracting the likes of Bill Clinton, Michael Douglas, Sumner Redstone and Henry Kravis.

But it's a touchy time for the Norwegian food wiz. Two restaurants he helmed or founded-Alto and Convivio-closed unexpectedly on March 3, following Mr. White's split with his partner of three years, restaurateur Chris Cannon, and a lawsuit by waiters over allegedly plundered tips.

And so, the chef's colleagues and rivals said, he's on a bit of a goodwill tour.

Mr. White hooked up with Mr. Cannon after the restaurateur's infamous split with Scott Conant in 2007. They expanded swiftly, rebranding one restaurant and opening two more in three years. All were solid efforts, but nobody expected a spot as buzzy as Marea, which won the James Beard Award for best new restaurant last year.

Yet the White-Cannon love affair was short-lived. In August, Alto was hit with that class-action suit. (It is being settled, attorney Rachel Bien told The Observer.)

By January, the two men's Altamarea Group was kaput, reportedly over differences over who got credit for their success. Mr. Cannon declined to comment.

In the divorce, Mr. Cannon got Alto and Convivio; Mr. White and Ahmass Fakahany, the company's chief executive, got all the rest: Marea, Osteria Morini, Al Fiori in the Setai and two spots in New Jersey. Then Mr. Cannon closed his two.

"It's unfortunate," Mr. White told The Observer after the dinner, refusing to comment further. He also deflected questions about rumors that he plans to expand Osteria Morini, on Lafayette Street. He emphasized, however, after tweeting a related message to his 3,900 followers, that he liked Tupperware.

His guests would soon judge for themselves. The gift bag included a variety of products, including that Whip 'N Prep. But oddly, no bowls. A publicist explained patiently: "Tupperware's not just bowls." -Alexandra Peers

"André," Ms. Banks said, clutching the microphone with two hands, "was the begininning of taking America's Next Top Model to high fashion."

Mr. Talley, in a black leather trenchcoat, nodded.

"Andre and Miss J were the first people I went to, 8 years ago," Ms. Banks went on. "And André was, like, 'What is this reality show thing! Ahhhh!"

"Ahhhh!" Mr. Talley joined in, and burst into laughter. As the reel for the new season ran he kept on laughing — well, he mostly laughed when his face appeared onscreen, usually behind the judges' booth.

After the presentation, the two of them sat down at our table and began to discuss how the partnership with Italian Vogue and its editor, Franca Sozzani, would take the show to a new level. 

"Tyra had brokered this extraordinary relationship with Franca—having been in Franca's legendary, fabulous, collector's-item issue that was all about black models," Mr. Talley said.

Mr. Talley reached for a strawberry from the rich spread of fruit and popped it in his mouth.

"She wanted to do something deeper with me," Ms. Banks said of Ms. Sozzani. "She really wanted to take Vogue Italia to the American audience. She felt that we had a strong connection to the American audience."

The conversation segued to a debate regarding the problem with pushing very young children — those who are 13 or 14 years old — toward modeling, and soon Ms. Banks was talking about the fictional book series she's been working on, Model Land. It will be about four less-than-perfect-looking girls who infiltrate a school governed by body image, she explained.

There was a brief discussion of Lady Gaga's Terry Richardson-shot cover for Vogue Homme Japan. "She posed with meat? Raw meat?" Mr. Talley exclaimed. Then a bell rang, and the duo left for the next table.

After bacon, eggs, blueberry streusel muffins and sticky buns were all served, Mr. Talley and Ms. Banks again took to the microphones at the front, this time to answer random questions drawn from a box. One question prompted Ms. Banks to list her worst fears, which happened to be "Birds, cats, fish, whales and dolphins," she said.

Another asked for advice on posing for cameras, which led to a discussion about the red carpet. "I hate the red carpet," Ms. Banks said. "Like, I haaaate it—"

"I hate it too," Mr. Talley said.

"I don't like the red carpet because with a model background — well, I'm not modeling anymore, I'm retired — there's one photographer and you know where that one photographer is and you can find whatever angle is right because of that photographer," Ms. Banks said. But on the red carpet, "there's like a hundred of them. And so it's like, 'ugly shot, ugly shot, ugly shot, pretty. Ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly—pretty.'"

Then, to answer the question "What is the best angle for a flattering picture face-wise," Ms. Banks shared her own personal trick.

"You have to do the turtle. So everyone do it together." She stuck her head out slightly. "Do the turtle, and then raise it a little higher, push it out, and it's gonna look crazy from the side, but from the front, girl, you're gonna look so fine."

By then everyone in the room was doing the turtle. 

"And then we're all gonna take a picture, one by one, me and Andre. We're gonna do a smize, and I'll teach you guys how to smize."

To smize, as fans of Ms. Banks know, means to smile with your eyes. 

On Friday, May 1, the 48-year-old operator of acclaimed midtown eateries Alto and Convivio will debut his latest effort, Marea, an Italian-style seafood spot in the former San Domenico space at 240 Central Park South, with a splashy party benefiting the charity Citymeals on Wheels.

The new restaurant, outfitted from floor to ceiling with materials imported from Italy, is Mr. Cannon’s third venture with replacement chef Michael White, who’s turned out to be a more-than-capable backup. (Last October, New York Times critic Frank Bruni awarded Mr. White three stars at Convivio—a full one-star improvement over the Tudor City Place restaurant’s prior incarnation, L’Impero.)

The confident Mr. Cannon fully expects more of the same at Marea, considering how well things have been going so far with Mr. White.

“We came from similar experiences,” Mr. Cannon told the Daily Transom. “He had a situation with his partner, Steve Hanson, and couldn’t work with him. And I had I situation with my partner and I couldn’t work with him. And we kind of fell into each other.”

In an interview last week, Mr. Cannon couldn’t say enough good things about his current partner: “He’s a great guy. He’s classically trained. He’s incredibly creative and incredibly passionate. His motivations to do what he does are solely like my motivations in that we love food, we love eating. Like, when we go to Italy together, it’s like two 4-year-olds in a toy store. We’re just having fun the whole time. And, yeah, my wife hates us. I think both of our wives hate us because it’s like, ‘You call this a job!’”

Meanwhile, that pesky matter with the former chef, Mr. Conant, is finally over. The two culinary heavyweights settled their long-standing legal battle on March 13, according to court papers.

The pair had parted ways amicably enough in March 2007. “The whole thing with Scott, when we separated, was totally civil and good and done very well and quietly. No one knew it was happening,” Mr. Cannon said.

But things soon unraveled. In a 2008 interview with the trade publication New York Restaurant Insider, Mr. Conant was quoted associating his former business partner with “the Peter Principle, where people rise to their level of incompetence.” (Full disclosure: The Observer’s August 2008 profile of Mr. Conant was also later submitted into evidence.)

As a result, Mr. Cannon stopped sending deferred-compensation checks to his ex-chef, with his lawyer arguing that such “disparaging and defamatory remarks” violated a non-disparagement clause included in the estranged duo’s legal separation agreement.

Mr. Conant then sued, claiming that Mr. Cannon had violated the agreement himself, by criticizing his former chef’s cooking style in an interview with Alto Cucina Inc. as “too refined. With dishes like his hamachi with ginger oil he strayed too far.”

This past December, Manhattan Supreme Court Judge O. Peter Sherwood ruled that “neither [of them] met their respective burdens,” according to court papers.

In some ways, Mr. Cannon blamed himself for how things turned out.

“Part of the reason I’m in the position I’m in right now with my ex-chef is that I never really sought press,” he told the Daily Transom. “I never really got any notoriety or any reputation or anything. For me, it was always about the restaurant doing well and that was it. And, you know, the nature of the business in the last 25 years has been very chef-driven. … A lot of the reason we split up was because, basically, leverage. In any relationship, there’s leverage, either with your wife or whomever. In this situation, it was with a chef, and the chef felt that, because I was getting no notoriety, that he could do whatever he wanted. So things happened that led to the whole thing falling apart.”

Mr. Conant, now the owner of two Scarpetta restaurants in Manhattan and Miami, told the Daily Transom: “I’m sorry to hear that’s his perspective on the relationship. It’s been two and a half years. At the end of the day, I have real affection for Chris. I’m proud of what he’s doing, not only for him and his family, but for Italian food in general.”