CityHallNews.com

French Fare with Carolyn Maloney
Talk of Nathan’s hotdogs and the war in Iraq with the East Side’s Rep.

One of Rep. Carolyn Maloney favorite East Side restaurants is Pascalou, on Madison Avenue between 92nd and 93rd streets. It was started by a friend of hers years ago and the Congresswoman still swings by to grab take out on the way home after a late night at the office. Maloney, who has represented the East Side and parts of Queens in Congress since 1992, sat down one recent day to talk about the blackout in Queens, her role as an East Side powerbroker, and her big break on film.

CM: Maloney: You know what I like? I don’t even see it. [To waiter] You don’t have any lobster? I want the lobster salad.

CH: Do you have any recommendations since you’re a regular? Have you had the goat cheese and phyllo torte?
CM: I just like all the healthy salads.

[Maloney orders the yellow squash soup, lobster salad and hot tea; City Hall gets the torte and an iced tea.]

CH: “World Trade Center” just came out. I know that you used that as an opportunity to draw attention to medical conditions that haven’t been addressed. Did you see the movie and what did you think of it?
CM: I haven’t seen the movie. I think seeing it is very much a personal decision. Some family members have told me that they don’t want see it it’s so upsetting; living though it once is enough. And most nights I’ve been out in Queens with this blackout I haven’t been able to get to it. I hope the movie will draw attention to the thousands of people who rushed in to save the lives of others and the realization that many of them are still sick.

CH: Since the blackout, you’ve been very active in writing letters to Con Ed and requesting funding from the federal government. What’s your take on Con Ed’s handling of the situation? Are you pleased with their response?
CM: Let’s start with the good news: in Manhattan they handled it much better. In Manhattan they called me and other elected officials and said there might be a blackout. They notified businesses, asked them to close. They asked everyone to turn off all the air conditioners and lights. All of us responded. Queens was an unmitigated disaster. First of all, they mislead us. He testified that he knew it was going to be out a week but they weren’t telling the businesses that. So people did not get generators. They did not make alternative plans. People lost millions. They need to invest more in their infrastructure, in the management and in their maintenance.

CH: Did you support calls for Con Ed CEO Kevin Burke to resign?
CM: I did not. I felt that my approach is to work more on the problem and the management in general than one individual. By having him resign, what do you gain? You have the person in charge who hopefully has most of the answers moving on and then you have someone sitting there who can’t answer anything.

CH: You picked a French restaurant, so I’m wondering if you supported the “Freedom Fry” movement in the House cafeterias.
CM: I just think that it’s sort of silly. There are so many problems to be working on that that is not a legislative priority of mine. It shouldn’t have been changed in the first place.

CH: You haven’t had a major challenger in a while so you haven’t had to do any serious campaigning. Is that to your disadvantage, because campaigning keeps you more in touch with constituents, or is it a benefit because you get to spend more time doing your job?
CM: If I had had a serious campaign, I doubt I would have been able to put together the report on the ill 9/11 workers. I doubt I would have been able to put as much time as I put into Queens [during the blackout]. If I had campaigned, I would have been out on the street handing out literature as opposed to sitting down and really trying to help people with their problems. It lets you work on the big issues that affect people’s lives.

CH: I hear you’re originally from North Carolina. How did you end up in New York City?
CM: I was born in North Carolina and my parents moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia and I was raised there, so I’m a product of the rural, conservative South. And I came to New York to visit a friend and I just never left. I just loved it. I love the vibrance, I love the excitement, I love the diversity. We’re the capital of everything.

CH: Do you like Southern cooking? I always think of barbecue when I think of North Carolina.
CM: I love fried chicken. I like salads and vegetables. I like the diversity. I like Italian. I’ve often thought I should do a cookbook on my district, of all the fabulous cuisines. We have Little Italy, we have Little Athens in Astoria, there’s Bangladesh, India—there’s all these wonderful cuisines that are very unique.

CH: You’ve been able to wrangle a lot of East Side politicians together for endorsement events. Busy people, busy schedules, but you got it to work. Do you feel like you have clout? And do you feel now that Gifford Miller is no longer Speaker that the power has waned a bit?
CM: Gifford Miller was an incredibly effective Speaker. He was good for our neighborhood. To put it in perspective, when I was first elected in 1993, the East Side was considered a Republican area. I defeated a 14-year incumbent, Bill Green, who outspent me five to one and was considered unbeatable. And I took him on and I beat him and it was probably the biggest upset in the nation. All the elected and party leadership on the East Side for the Democratic Party…we jointly started working to change from red to blue various seats. And all of them were open seats—I was the first one to take out an incumbent. So five seats under my leadership, of course the help of many other people, switched from red to blue.

CH: When is someone going to swipe a MetroCard and get on the Second Avenue Subway?
CM: We will break ground this year. I have a breakdown of the money, we have roughly $2.5 billion in place and we’ll break ground this year. And the first segment, which will connect roughly 96th Street to 63rd Street then connect and go all the way downtown, they’ll begin this year and they’re projecting it will be completed in 2012.

CH: You voted for the war initially.
CM: Yes, I did.

CH: Is that a vote you regret?
CM: I cast my vote based on the information that was given. And the information that was given us was that this was going to give them power in the United Nations to secure more support and we didn’t really realize this was going to be going to war, but at the same time they were saying that they had weapons of mass destruction. And they were telling the world that. And they were also telling us that they could deploy them to areas that they wished to cause trouble. And we know New York is an area number one. And they implied, or they said, that the politics of containment no longer worked, that you could no longer contain them. That someone with a backpack could come in to New York’s Times Square, blow it up and kill hundreds of thousands of people with a dirty bomb. There will all kinds of allegations that have proven not to be true. When I found out they’re not to be true, and they’d been so incompetent in their actions, I joined in on the [Rep. John] Murtha amendment, which calls for them to de-escalate.

[Waiter brings menus for dessert]

CM: Now the worst part about getting older is, when I was young, I had 20/20 eyesight. Now I can’t see. What are you going to get? Let’s order dessert. I like crème brûlée. What about this French vanilla with Grand Marnier? Ooh, blueberry cobbler: blueberries, raspberries and strawberries.

CH: Kind of patriotic.
CM: Yeah! And ice cream.

[Waiter comes to take order]

CM: I’m going to have the berries with vanilla ice cream. And I would prefer to just have blueberries and raspberries, no strawberries. Why don’t we have a cappuccino?

[City Hall orders the warm chocolate cake.]

CH: Are there other local restaurants that you like to go to?
CM: Anna’s Corner for Greek food in Astoria, Queens, it’s great. And I have a very special treat for my birthday every year: one of my girlfriends takes me to lunch at the Four Seasons, which is elegance personified. The food is great. The décor is very modern and simple and I love it. It is, I think, the best restaurant in New York. Of course, it’s not a place I go to very often, but for my birthday...

[Maloney adds Equal to her cappuccino]

CH: Did you always want to go into politics, growing up?
CM: When I was growing up, politics was not a profession for women. There was only one woman in the House. Her name was Margaret Chase Smith. She got there because her husband died and she took his position. I remember reading an article about her. They asked her, “What would you do if you woke up in the White House?” And I’ll never forget her response. She said, “Well I would apologize immediately to Bess Truman and leave.” No woman would answer that way today. When I was growing up the role models for young women were teachers, librarians and nurses. Those were the professions that I considered and they were the ones that were open to women. And I remember studying them and thinking, which one am I going to be? And I became a teacher. When I came to New York I taught in East Harlem for a while. I taught English as a Second Language and also eighth grade equivalency for math.

CH: You have no plans for retiring, yet people talk about who might run for your seat. Does that make you feel strange?
CM: It’s politics, everyone’s going to run. Everyone likes to talk and everybody wants to run. I’ve never lost an election. I do not intend to begin now. I thought it was very humorous when K.T. McFarland was running against Hillary [Clinton] she announced, “If I can’t beat Carolyn Maloney I’m going to run against Hillary.” The East Side is the most Republican district in the city of New York. She said, “I can’t run on the Upper East Side, it’s unbeatable.” That’s really my district.

[Dessert arrives]

CM: Wow, this looks delicious. We’re very lucky in New York, we have the best of everything. They wanted me, in Washington, because I represented the pizza capital of the world, to rate the pizzas. So they brought in all these pizzas and I tasted them and I rated the top three pizza places in Washington. But none of them were as good as New York pizza. What I think is so interesting about my job is I work in the capital of the government, but New York City is the capital of the private sector.

CH: So you get the best of both worlds.
CM: I think there are just plain too many statues in Washington and everybody thinks they’re one of them. I like coming back to the real world, right here in New York, the private sector. In Washington, none of the food is good. And I love the hotdog stands and the bagel stands and you get those big pretzels. You’ve got the best of the sophisticated and you’ve got the pretzels and hotdogs—Nathan’s. Nathan’s hotdogs, the best in the world. I’d have to say Nathan’s is one of my favorite restaurants.

CM: Why don’t we trade tastes? I want to taste some chocolate. Mmm, it’s superb!

CH: What do you guys have on tap for the afternoon?
CM: I have an interview with a movie. They’re making a movie out of the Debbie Smith bill that I authored. This woman testified on the use of DNA to convict rapists before a committee and I called about 20 women; they wouldn’t testify. She testified, she had everybody in tears. So then I wrote this bill that required the government to process the backlog of DNA and created a national database of DNA. And it passed. And Lifetime Television called me and said they’re making a movie and they want to interview me. I want them to cast me, wouldn’t that be fun?

CH: Who would you want to play you? Meryl Streep?
CM: She’s my favorite actress, bar none. Oh God, I love her. I’d love her to play me.