Proustian and Epicurean

Ariane Ruskin Batterberry and her late husband, Michael, founders of Food & Wine, moved into this apartment in 1969.

- WENDY GOODMAN

I DON'T COOK at all," says Ariane Ruskin Batterberry, which might seem like a surprising thing for one of the founders of Food & Wine magazine to say, as we dig into lunch at one of her favorite local restaurants near the Upper East Side apartment she's lived in for more than 50 years. "I have no talent. Cooking really is a passion and a talent, and I didn't have the talent; I, fortunately, didn't have the passion." She and her late husband, Michael Batterberry, teamed up with three others to found the magazine in 1978. "He would read cookbooks the way you would read a novel," she remembers, "then he'd make up something on his own."

The Batterberrys met at a charity dance on the roof of the St. Regis hotel in the early 1960s and married in 1968. They then promptly went to France for their honeymoon and decided to stay for more than a year. It was on a drive from Paris to Brittany that they bought much of the furniture for the apartment they didn't even have yet. She lives with all of those pieces to this day.