Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (37 page)

Every Wednesday. Week after week.

It was an expensive habit, especially for a newspaperman paying a mortgage on a two-bedroom apartment in a prime Manhattan neighborhood, but that was the point. The roughly $280 round-trip train ride, on top of the $160 for the two back-to-back sessions, was a statement about my priorities, made by me, to me. It was also a method of taunting myself: How could I possibly spend this kind of money and then go ahead and gain weight? How much of a fool would that make me?

The weekly twofer was less about what happened on that Wednesday than about what happened on the six other days of the week. I’d once again turned Aaron into my Weight Watchers check-in. And it was not only useful but comforting to have him harangue me about doing another repetition, to listen to him berate me about abbreviating the intended range of motion on a shoulder press. It served as a reminder of a time when working out had been a more desperate measure.

I kept the Wednesday ritual secret. I didn’t tell my editors, who were accustomed to having me work from home and could still get me on my cell phone on the train. I worried that if I made them aware of my vigilance against any weight gain, they might start looking for it to happen, checking on my waistline, making
me
check on my waistline more than I already did. I needed to stay sane.

I didn’t tell Adelle or Mark or Harry or Dad, because I knew that they were all scared on some level about my decision to take this job, and I didn’t want them to think that the only thing separating the fit me from the old me was a regimen this extreme, or that I was having to struggle with all my might to hold back a tide of flesh. I was working hard at it, yes. But my visits to Aaron were preventive, not remedial. They were born of caution, not urgency.

I would surely have told Louis, if he had followed me to New York. But in the end he hadn’t.

He hadn’t really wanted to quit his job. He had long wanted to live in Southeast Asia, an opportunity now available to him. And his time in Rome, without work or a wide network of his own friends, had been tough on him. It had convinced him: he wasn’t comfortable signing on to someone else’s journey and deferring to someone else’s agenda. I could certainly understand that.

But I was stunned, now, by how lonely I felt, given how thoroughly on my own and isolated I’d been for years before he came along, how practiced I was at it. This new loneliness was nothing like what I’d felt after Greg. It wasn’t tinged with relief or overshadowed by the ugliness of the disentanglement. Louis and I hadn’t picked at each other as we parted. We’d shed a few tears and shaken our heads: Why did it have to be so complicated for two people who love each other to
be
with each other? Why couldn’t we have met in easier circumstances or had career paths that converged?

Over the next months the sadness subsided, mainly because there wasn’t much time or space for it among all the new challenges I was facing, and because the exhilarating unfamiliarity of what I was doing filled the cracks in my life.

As a restaurant critic, I discovered, I needed skills beyond those of a typical journalist, and I needed to be more than just a gourmand. I had to become a concierge, a cruise director, a counselor, a covert operations agent.

I should explain a bit about how it all worked—especially about the intricate scheduling and elaborate arithmetic of the job. In a city as mammoth, as addicted to novel experiences and as filled with modest and immodest dreamers as New York, many hundreds of new restaurants opened every year. From their ranks and from the ranks of restaurants that had gone unexamined too long, I picked a weekly target for review, sometimes combining two targets in one week. I operated pretty much as I’d been told that my predecessors had, considering a new restaurant fair game for a published appraisal around its two-month mark; in its very first weeks, the thinking went, it might demonstrate a shakiness—or, conversely, a focus—that wasn’t a reliable indication of what was to come. I planned most visits to a new restaurant during its second month and tried to separate each visit by at least a week.

For every visit to a restaurant I used a fake name and typically reserved a table for four. I needed three companions to order different dishes and help me cover as much of the restaurant’s menu as possible. If I was making my first visit, I usually laid down only one rule for my tablemates: no duplicate orders. Four different appetizers. Four different entrées. Four different desserts. If I was making my second or third visit, I’d call out the dishes that had been previously tried and shouldn’t be ordered this time around.

How to try a bit of everyone’s food? There wasn’t really any good way to avoid drawing a server’s attention to the aggressive food sharing at the table and arousing suspicion that a critic was in the house. My companions and I could use bread plates to ferry food to and from one another, but some companions were less adept than others at making sure that the sample of salmon they provided was glossed with the sauce and accompanied by the ramps that the kitchen had included with it.

I preferred to have everyone rotate the plates, lazy Susan-style, even though it was just as attention-getting. At three- or five- or seven-minute intervals, determined by how quickly the fastest eaters at the table were going through their food, I’d chirp, “Let’s pass!” At least I’d try to chirp this, in an upbeat fashion, to avoid seeming and feeling as much like a petty culinary dictator as I was. I’d decree a clockwise or counterclockwise motion for the plate passing, usually in accordance with whether I was most eager to try the dish to my left or the one to my right. And I discovered that people in midconversation and mid-Chardonnay tend not to have the best sense of direction. Two people would pass their plates one way and two would pass the other way, the plates knocking against each other, arms entangling. What had been intended as a stealthy, fleet and efficient transfer devolved into a tabletop version of Twister.

How to remember what I ate and liked? At first I kept tiny pages of notepaper, along with a pen, in one of my pockets and paid frequent visits to the bathroom in order to scribble on the pages. Then I realized I could use my phone to send text messages to myself. Or I could step into the bathroom to call myself and essentially give dictation to my voice mailbox. Later that night or the next day, I’d transcribe the dictation into a computer file.

So that I didn’t have to carry around hundreds of dollars of cash or pay at the end of a meal with a credit card with my name, I had many pseudonymous cards, acquired via a special arrangement between the
Times
and American Express. I got more than one, and changed an old batch for a new batch every so often, because I’d been warned that restaurants that had figured me out might write down any and all details about my visit—including the name on the fake card—and pass them along to other restaurants.

In the very beginning, a few times, I used my own card when I was sure the restaurant was on to me, reasoning that the jig was up and I should at least safeguard the fake cards. But I stopped doing this when I realized how easily it could be misinterpreted.

That realization came after one of my first visits to Per Se, when a server offered me and my tablemates a tour of the kitchen. This was before the French Laundry visit, and I wasn’t at all sure that the restaurant’s staff had detected me, so I accepted the offer, as most diners would—I figured that turning it down would be the more suspicious response. In the kitchen, it turned out, Thomas Keller stood ready to greet us and shake our hands. When he introduced himself, I was the only one in my group who said hello without saying my name.

A few days later I got a call from a gossip columnist checking out a rumor: Was it true that I’d divulged my identity at Per Se by brazenly marching into the kitchen to meet and chat with Keller? Rather than go into the whole chain of events and spell out my thinking, I said no, it wasn’t true, because it hadn’t gone down that way—it wasn’t at all like that. The columnist never published an item on the incident. But it taught me that I should never do anything, no matter how justified or innocent, that an uninformed onlooker might regard as a reckless surrender of anonymity. That ruled out paying with my own credit card, even if it was abundantly clear that the restaurant knew who was paying.

What I’d do, instead, was surreptitiously give one of the fake cards to a companion, hoping the restaurant would assume that the card actually belonged to him or her. It was a flawed ruse, because no matter how well the companion understood the game being played, he or she almost always did this: held the card up high, stared at it long and hard, squinted and said, too loudly, “Who am I? Joseph Mazzone? Is that what it says? How did you come up with that name?”

Mazzone was Grandma’s maiden name, Joseph just Joseph. For my first batch of five fake cards, I made the mistake of choosing only male names. This presented a problem if I dined with three women, none of whom could pass convincingly for Joseph or Joe or Gavin. For subsequent batches of cards, I threw some gender-neutral names into the mix. I had a card that said “Pat Reynolds,” a card that said “J. T. Martinson,” a card that said “Robin Parker.” This solved one problem but not others. The fictive Pat or Robin or J. T. still held that damned card up and stared at it and then, after signing the check, handed the card and receipt back to me, at the table, rather than waiting until everyone was outside on the sidewalk, beyond the view of restaurant managers and servers.

There was a reason most people didn’t go into the spying business. They had no aptitude for it.

 

 

 

 

And my own aptitude? It came and went, waxed and waned, serving me well with certain of my covert operations, less well with others. And it was attended, always, by the feeling that I was living a surreal life, which I found alternately exhilarating, exasperating, nifty and just plain silly. Not silly because it was unimportant: the job seemed to me very important, in terms of how seriously so many New Yorkers regarded restaurants, in terms of how seriously I myself regarded them. Silly because, by a quirk of fate and in a matter of weeks, I’d gone from political analyst and papal chronicler to gastronomic double agent.

I adjusted immediately to the reality of caller ID, making sure my number was blocked whenever I contacted a restaurant from home or from my cell phone. I adjusted immediately to the need, when the restaurant asked for a callback number, to blurt out a plausible but imagined sequence of digits, so that there’d be no actual phone number that might be recognized as one I’d used before or that could be traced back to me or a known acquaintance. I tried hard to do everything possible to prevent restaurants from knowing in advance that I was going to show up.

I usually remembered to call the restaurant and to confirm my reservation before the restaurant tried to, because if the restaurant dialed the imagined sequence of digits I’d given them and got a nonworking number, a red flag might be raised. But sometimes a restaurant beat me to the punch, and when I contacted it the day before or the day of my reservation, the person on the other end would say, “What’s your number? Because the one we tried wasn’t right and we had trouble reaching you.”

I was ready for this. I’d look in my schedule, where I’d written down the imagined sequence of numbers as soon as I’d imagined it. And if the sequence was 874-2576, I’d say, “874-2567.” The person on the other end of the line would say, “Oh, we mixed up those last two digits!” Situational dyslexia would take the blame for the restaurant’s unsuccessful call to me, and my cover wouldn’t be blown.

But the tricky part for me, the part I kept screwing up, was coming up with the fake reservation name. It had to be a different fake name almost every time, because if a restaurant
did
spot me, it might put the name under which I had reserved on a list—for future reference and for other restaurateurs—of “tells” that I might be coming. For that same reason I could use the name and number of any friend who was a regular dining companion only once or twice. And I couldn’t use one of the pseudonyms on my American Express cards, in case the restaurant had taken note and passed along those names, too.

But I could be Greg Jones or Bill Jones, Tom Johnson or David Johnson, Michael Smith or John Smith, as long as I wasn’t using those names over and over again. I could be Maladupa S. Dupamaladis if I so desired, though I’d be drawing more attention to my reservation than I’d ideally want to with a combination of letters like that. The point was that I had a boundless world of possibilities open to me, yet I repeatedly, by virtue of some odd and persistent tic, failed to decide on a fake name beforehand, then froze and went blank while on the phone.

I didn’t do this every time I called a restaurant, because each episode of freezing and going blank would remind me, for the next three or four restaurants, to settle on a name in advance. But then I’d relapse. A voice on the other end of the line would ask me for my name, I’d realize I hadn’t come up with one, and I’d panic, glancing frantically around me.