Kurt Schmidt’s Fire Undeterred, he moved to a position behind my typewriter, had his cigarette lighter aflame . . . By Malcolm P. Ganz
During eight years working in PR for a major airline, headquartered in Manhattan, I’d spent two years publicizing the airline’s airport restaurant business. I worked out of an office near the test kitchen, which was the locus of activity for the company’s top food and beverage people, some of whom worked for the restaurant division, others for the airline’s hotel chain. Atop the restaurant division was a feisty Swiss named Kurt Schmidt. He had staked out his particular culinary territory and defended it against the top chefs of the hotel division. Schmidt and his counterparts with the hotels would have these shouting matches outside my office and there was no stopping
them. The verbal fisticuffs would alternate between German dialects and Germanaccented English. “Vat dee hell you know about cooging,” Schmidt would shout. The answer would generally be some variation of, “Vat dee hell I know? I know how to coog. You know how to fill out forms for airport food inspectors.” Whomever I was talking to at the time, in my office or on the phone, was simply of no consequence to the chefs and I held no sway in brokering a culinary truce. “Fellas? Fellas!” I’d plead, “I have the food critic for The New York Times on the phone.” A lie but drastic measures were
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