Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (35 page)

Over the next weeks I carefully read perhaps three-quarters of the reviews that William Grimes—who went by the nickname Biff—had written, and half of those written by his predecessor, Ruth Reichl. I had conversations with Barbara and other editors, during which we discussed the ways in which restaurants were about much more than food—they were theaters, social laboratories, microcosms of their neighborhoods and their moments—and the ways in which a broad spectrum of journalistic experience might help a critic capture that.

Those editors made a request. So that I could get a sense of how comfortable I felt with this form of writing, and so that they could get a sense of that as well, they asked me to do what other candidates for the job were also doing: visit a serious restaurant and write a pretend review of it. In my case, the restaurant would have to be in Rome.

I chose a relatively new, ambitious and expensive place named Hostaria dell’Orso and went there in a group of three, so we could order and taste a variety of dishes. Then I hammered out my appraisal, noting the blandly seasoned scallops, the gummy spaghetti carbonara and the way these and other dishes contradicted the restaurant’s grand setting and ostentatious sense of ceremony. I concluded:

I e-mailed the review to the editors, shook my head—what a bonkers,
bonkers
digression this whole episode would surely turn out to be—and went back to my usual routine. I combed Italian newspapers and magazines for a new batch of story ideas. I made a round of calls to Vatican sources, checking anew on the Pope’s questionable health. I had a series of lunches with political sources, updating myself on the reliable turmoil of Italian government.

In late February, Barbara called again. She offered me the job.

And I accepted. In spite of what I’d told myself the day I sent in the review, I’d been hoping for her call and imagining it constantly over the weeks since.

There were many reasons I said yes. Although I had eighteen months to two years left before my stint in Rome was supposed to be over, I had no idea what I wanted to do next at the
Times
, and I’d seen too many former foreign correspondents at loose ends, too seasoned and too senior to be put in small jobs but not quite right for whichever bigger jobs happened to be open at the time. I worried that I’d wind up in that same situation, especially since I wasn’t interested in another posting abroad and more time away from my father and my siblings and my expanding brood of nieces and nephews, nine of them now. The restaurant-critic job was an answer to all of those concerns. It would get me back home.

In addition, New York made some sense for Louis and me. His bosses wanted to send him to a post in Southeast Asia. If we were going to stay together, one of us would have to quit his job. But my job prospects in the country that he was potentially bound for were even worse than his in Rome. New York was somewhere we might both be able to do work we wanted to.

Also, there was this: when I’d bolted from political reporting, it was partly because I craved a less frenetic and healthier lifestyle, partly because I didn’t enjoy pack journalism, partly because I simply needed a change. But in addition to all of that, I had come to dread the intense scrutiny and nasty second-guessing that went along with covering politics for a news organization as influential as the
Times.
I chafed at the skewering to which I and so many of my colleagues were routinely subjected in publications that justly turned the tables on other reporters, analyzing
them.
In my case the naysaying and nitpicking had exacerbated the full range of my insecurities, feeding the disgust I was already feeling over the mess I had made of my physical self.

I wasn’t proud of how I’d bowed out of covering anything more than the first few months of the Bush presidency and then bolted to Rome. The restaurant-critic job would once again paint a target on my back, because it was a high-profile position with a glamorous aura and serious economic influence. I didn’t want to shrink from that. In my personal life I had stopped hiding, stopped stalling; here was a way to do the same thing in my professional life. It was time.

Besides which, the very idea of the job was undeniably thrilling. When I’d gone into journalism, and then when I’d joined the
Times
, I’d relished the acquisition and upgrading of a passport into societies and experiences that I would never otherwise be part of. Here was another strange land to which this amazing passport would be granting me access. I wanted to travel there.

But what about the eating? What about the constant, compulsory eating? This was the most surreal aspect of what I was signing up for, and it did scare me.

But in Italy I’d given more than a little thought to where I’d always gone wrong and why I’d always had such troubles with food. I’d been foiled time and again by the kinds of behaviors and thinking I wouldn’t be able to give in to in this new job: the fad diets that I’d prepare for or answer with outrageous binges; the fraudulent, self-styled science of permitted foods and forbidden foods and foods eaten in bunches and foods eaten in specific combinations.

In this new job, I wouldn’t be able to practice that black magic. I wouldn’t be able to tell myself that I could be naughty today because I’d be extra virtuous tomorrow and the day after. So I’d have to watch my portions, as I’d learned to in Italy. I’d have to stick to regular exercise, as I’d done since Aaron. The postponements—the lies—couldn’t be justified. I’d have to be steady, and I’d have to be sensible.

 

 

 

 

B
efore Biff started as restaurant critic, he was allowed some preparatory time in which to travel for the sole purpose of research, of eating in places whose cuisines he wanted to know better. Over many weeks he drove slowly through Italy and France.

Now the same extreme hardship was being visited upon me, and I needed a strategy and itinerary of my own. Italy I knew: whenever I had gone anywhere in the country for work or fun, I’d sampled the local restaurants. But I hadn’t spent much time in France. So I planned a week in Paris, during which I’d hit a Michelin one-star restaurant, a Michelin two-star restaurant, a Michelin three-star restaurant (the highest rating). I also planned a week in Hong Kong, which served as a crossroads for many Asian cuisines, sometimes fused: Cantonese, Sichuan, Indian, Thai, Japanese.

But what I needed first and foremost was to reacquaint myself with New York. I hadn’t eaten in some of the most important restaurants that had opened over the last five years, not to mention a few important restaurants that had opened earlier than that. So I scheduled three weeks there, during which I’d eat out for dinner every day and for lunch, too, on many days. New York would be the first stop on my grand gastronomic tour.

I wanted to hit all five of the restaurants that had ratings of four stars—which signaled an “extraordinary” experience and was the highest number of stars on the
Times
scale—from either Biff or Ruth Reichl, so I made reservations at Daniel, Jean Georges, Bouley, Alain Ducasse and Le Bernardin.

It seemed just as important to have variety in my survey, to dine in one-star (“good”), two-star (“very good”) and three-star (“excellent”) restaurants with more casual settings, so I reserved at Pastis, a boisterous Downtown brasserie run by the star restaurateur Keith McNally, and at the Red Cat, a much beloved, unfussy American bistro on a western edge of Chelsea that was slowly attracting restaurants. I reserved at Spice Market (supertrendy Asian), Bolo (moderately trendy Spanish), Strip House (quasi-trendy steak), WD-50 (untrendy avant-garde) and about a dozen other places.

My schedule set, I headed alone to the Rome airport—Louis was going to join me a few days later—to catch my flight to New York. The date, fittingly enough, was April 1. In the plane I was surrounded by a group of American tourists who had been doing some amateur musical performances in Europe, from what I overheard of their conversations. Most of them wore loose-fitting, elastic-waisted warm-up suits.

The group members conferred with one another about the treats they had rounded up for the long trip. Someone produced a large bag of mustard-flavored pretzels; someone else hauled out a box of sugar cookies; yet another person unveiled individually wrapped chocolate cubes. About ten minutes into the flight, they started passing the food around and eating it in what struck me as a mindless, time-passing manner that I knew all too well. Although I felt my stomach gurgle, I thought:
That’s what I can’t be lured into anymore
. That’s a luxury I can’t afford.

I arrived in Newark in the midafternoon and met Barbara Graustark at Daniel around nine p.m. We stayed until midnight, savoring a meal that included curried cauliflower soup, mustard-crusted lamb and wasabi-seasoned tuna so luscious I half-wondered if a big fat bluefin could be hand-raised, if this one had been coddled in some gargantuan aquarium in an enormous mansion where it was massaged hourly.

“It’s not always going to be like this,” Barbara told me.

I nodded. I knew that. “I’m sure there are going to be more bad meals than good ones in the years ahead,” I concurred.

“Oh, yes, that,” she said. “But I mean you’re not always going to be this anonymous, not at a restaurant like this. They’ll be on the lookout for you. We haven’t announced your appointment yet, because we wanted you to have these weeks in New York in peace. Once we do, Daniel Boulud and Bobby Flay and the rest of them will be rounding up any pictures of you that they can find and studying them. They’ll be watching for you at the door. You’ll become a marked man.”

And so I did, about two-thirds of the way through my Manhattan eat-a-thon, when a
New York Daily News
gossip columnist called the
Times
for comment on a leak that I had been chosen as the next restaurant critic. The
Times
quickly distributed a news release announcing my appointment, after first making sure that my employee photograph had been taken down from the paper’s Web site. There wasn’t any way to purge my
Ambling
author photograph—once a lie, now not far from the truth—or other snapshots of me from the Internet, which was making life easier for the restaurateurs who wanted to spot critics and harder for the critics who didn’t want to be spotted.

On one of my last nights in New York, I ate with Louis, Biff and his wife at the restaurant BLT Steak in Midtown. As I was telling Biff about my meal the night before at Alain Ducasse’s restaurant, he became distracted by the arrival of a pair of well-dressed, distinguished-looking men with French accents at the table adjacent to ours. I blathered on, segueing from commentary on the Ducasse dinner to an exegesis on dinner a week earlier at Jean Georges. Biff kept glancing toward the two men, making odd motions toward them with his head and widening his eyes at me.

Finally he whispered: “You know that restaurant you were just talking about?”

“Jean Georges?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Before that.”

“Alain Ducasse?” I asked. At this point I was whispering, too, a matter of blind conformity.

Biff nodded, widened his eyes again and motioned with his head once more. And then I got it, or at least I was pretty sure I got it. Alain Ducasse was one of the men—no doubt, the older of the two—who had been seated right beside us. What were the chances?

I sneaked another peek at him and noticed he was staring at me. I chalked it up at first to the fact that he no doubt knew what Biff looked like, and was simply checking to see if he happened to be acquainted with any of the other people at Biff ’s table.

Then he asked me a question: “You are coming from Italy, yes?”

“Yes, I’ve lived there a while,” I said, responding automatically, not yet processing the situation clearly and cogently enough to be vague or to hold anything back. I assumed that Ducasse had simply overheard some comment I’d made about Italy to Biff, and was trading meaningless banter with a stranger.

“In Rome, yes?” he pressed, and only then did I think:
He knows the answer already. He knows
me
already. I haven’t written a single review, not even a syllable of a review, and I’m on his radar. Incredible.

I was trying to come up with something clever to say when he remarked, “I’m opening a restaurant in Italy.”

I’d read about it. And his mention of it gave me an opportunity to show that I’d done some homework, too.

“At a country inn in Tuscany,” I said.

“Yes,” he answered.

“In La Maremma, to be exact,” I specified, referring to a coastal area of southern Tuscany.

“Yes,” he nodded.

He smiled coyly.

I smiled coyly back.

Although the flight from Rome to Paris a few weeks later was a short, nonstop one, the airline nonetheless managed to lose my luggage, and I was due to dine that first night at Pierre Gagnaire, one of the half dozen most acclaimed restaurants in the city, with three Michelin stars. The only clothes I had with me were the ones I had on: a short-sleeved blue sport shirt from Armani Exchange that was so frayed I was planning to throw it away before I returned to Rome, a pair of gray-green Dockers chinos, Nike running sneakers.

Of course the airline wasn’t willing to give me money to buy replacement clothing before at least twenty-four hours had passed; what it gave me was an emergency toiletry kit that included not just toothpaste and a tiny, makeshift toothbrush but also a condom. Bereft of clean underwear, confined to one outfit, estranged from my usual grooming supplies, I was nonetheless expected to be contemplating intercourse with an unfamiliar partner? I was going to miss Europe.