Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (39 page)

The staff at Bar Tonno weren’t the only twitchy, overeager bird-watchers convinced they’d happened upon their quarry even when they hadn’t. The restaurateur John McDonald e-mailed me one day in regard to one of the places he ran, writing that he had noticed me in the restaurant the previous night and that I’d left behind a notebook. He said he’d sealed it tight in an envelope and was eager to send it back to me, calling it a “Pandora’s Box that I prefer not to possess.” When I sent him a response, I told him he should feel free to make like Pandora and let the mischievous creatures out to play. They didn’t belong to me. I hadn’t visited the restaurant in many weeks.

Eater posted the following communication from one of its readers, who apparently demanded certain redactions:

I hadn’t been on a scooter since Europe in 1986. And someone who’s worried that his ass, like his love handles, might be too big doesn’t wear a fanny pack.

 

 

 

 

When I was legitimately spotted, I usually knew it. The table’s server became awkwardly stiff or entirely spastic, while other servers did what those at the French Laundry had: drew close to the table for no good reason and studied me, no doubt because management had told them to take a good look so they could assist in my detection on any future visits.

If I was spotted ten or twenty minutes into a meal, the restaurant might swap out a less experienced server for a more experienced one. Or it might swap out a moderately attractive woman for the most attractive man on hand. The restaurant had done its homework. It wasn’t going to leave any trick untried.

I was a magnet, when recognized, for extraordinary courtesy and extreme solicitousness. If it was raining out and I’d arrived at the restaurant unprepared for that, the manager, host or hostess would try to shove a complimentary umbrella on me. On my way out of many restaurants, there’d be as many as a half dozen workers of various altitudes lined up like flight attendants to say “good-bye,” “have a good night,” “hope you enjoyed your evening,” “good having you,” “
great
having you,” “
so great
having you,” or “we look forward to seeing you again.” I never believed that last line. It was contradicted by the audible gust of relief I’d hear as the door closed behind me.

At L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, in the Four Seasons Hotel, the staff went into a panic when I clumsily spilled some red tomato sauce on my white shirt and I began trying to undo the damage with a wet napkin.

Suddenly a manager was at the table.

“One of the advantages of being in a hotel,” he said, “is that we have laundry services on the premises. We can launder that for you right now.”

I declined, mainly because I didn’t want to accept special treatment, but also because I wasn’t about to sit in my white V-neck Banana Republic undershirt in the middle of a restaurant that served entrées between thirty and fifty dollars.

Toward the end of my fourth and final meal at Nobu 57, an Uptown successor to the Downtown standard-bearer, I returned from the bathroom with a dark splotch on the front of my tan shirt. Embarrassed, I explained to my companions that I had been klutzy with the soap dispenser.

A few minutes later, when our eavesdropping waitress brought the check, she announced that two glasses of white wine weren’t on it. They’d been removed as an apology for the way the bathroom soap dispenser malfunctioned.

“But it didn’t malfunction,” I assured her. “I malfunctioned. I banged way too hard on it and was leaning too close to it.”

“Well,” she said, “you have our sincere apologies.”

Not wanting to prolong the awkwardness, I didn’t insist that the wine be added back and instead covered its cost with an extra-large tip. I got up to leave.

As I walked toward the door, a manager intercepted me.

“Sir,” he said, “I want to apologize about our soap dispenser.”

“What about it?” I asked, though I knew what was coming.

“Didn’t it malfunction?” he said.

I corrected him. Exonerated him. Told him he really, really needn’t worry.

He handed me his card. “Even so,” he said, “if you have trouble getting the shirt clean, please contact me. We can pay for dry cleaning or for a new shirt.”

At this point I felt the need to draw attention to a crucial detail that suggested that the splotch would come out rather easily.

“It’s
soap
,” I said.

To which the manager added, with audible pride: “And it is
Kiehl’s.
”

 

 

 

 

Being recognized meant that my experiences were—obviously—different from other diners’, but there wasn’t any good way around it, especially as I logged more and more time in restaurants. Managers and servers who’d figured me out over the course of four visits to one establishment sometimes wound up at another just a few months down the line, and they’d nab me there on my first or second visit. Like my pseudonyms and fake phone numbers, surreptitiously taken cell phone photographs of me circulated among restaurants—one of them even got posted on Eater—and gave them a less dated image of me than the
Ambling
picture or old TV footage.

But being recognized didn’t mean that I (or the many other frequently recognized critics) couldn’t see a restaurant accurately and evaluate it skeptically, noticing its flaws. Most of those flaws couldn’t be hidden at the last minute. A restaurant couldn’t reinvent its menu or find a new purveyor of better ingredients just because a critic showed up. It couldn’t retrain the kitchen staff: I got undercooked fish and overcooked pasta in places that knew full well I was there.

What it could do was deploy extra waitstaff to my table or have the manager keep a closer eye on me and my companions. So I took that into account and made adjustments for it. I never automatically assumed that the pampering I was receiving—or that the nervousness-induced flubs by servers dealing with me—extended to other tables. I looked around to see what was happening elsewhere in the restaurant.

And I kept a distance, as best I could, from the restaurateurs and chefs in my sights. Part of what had made me attractive to my bosses at the
Times
as a reviewer was my independence: I hadn’t forged any relationships or crossed paths with prominent figures in the New York restaurant world. I didn’t have friends I might not want to insult or people I owed any favors or special consideration. When invitations to restaurant-related parties came my way, I declined them. I didn’t go to awards ceremonies. I didn’t go to food festivals.

But that didn’t stop chefs, restaurateurs and their emissaries from trying to influence me. No one ever tried to bribe me, something Biff told me he’d encountered when a restaurateur pleading with him to drop by for a visit kept repeating that it would be “worth your while.” But publicists e-mailed me rhapsodic accounts of meals just eaten in clients’ phantasmagorical new restaurants, swearing that the praise was untainted by any professional connection. If I went on to write negative reviews of some of these restaurants, the same publicists would e-mail anew, as if they hadn’t done so before, to tell me I was absolutely right and that they had given their clients unheeded warnings about the precise failings I’d pointed out.

Before one review appeared, a woman who identified herself as the mother of the restaurant’s chef e-mailed me to fill me in on the life of hardship he’d overcome. “Sorry if I compromise you in your profession,” she wrote, then went on to tell me about the recent grave illness of the chef’s father, about his own health problems, about his fierce work ethic and about how little he slept. A day later the chef e-mailed me and I heard about his father’s health problems again. Both e-mails arrived after I’d already written my review, which was mostly positive, and decided on a rating—two stars. I didn’t know if that was a star less or more than the chef and his mother were hoping for. I tried not to think about it.

In one fancy restaurant, as my companions and I waited for our desserts, the owner walked right up to our table to talk to me. At first it wasn’t clear that he owned the place, but it became obvious in the course of what he said.

“These are my four stars,” he began as he held his iPhone toward me to show me images of children, presumably his.

Four
stars
? Was he making a reference to reviews, acknowledging what I did for work and what I was doing—and deciding—right then and there, in his restaurant?

He kept scrolling through the images, talking not only about how much the kids meant to him but also about how much he’d risked by pouring his money into the restaurant. He detailed the work that had gone into the restoration of the space the restaurant inhabited. He looked around the dining room, which was mostly empty, and bad-mouthed his publicist, who he said was doing a lousy job.

“No one even knows the place is open yet,” he groused.

Then, eliminating any doubt that he was trying to lobby me, to emotionally manipulate me, to
guilt-trip
me into praising the restaurant, he said, “We’re really hoping for a positive review.”

“Anyway,” he concluded, “I hope you had a good time tonight.”

We hadn’t, not particularly. The steak had been sauced too sweetly and lavishly. The pork chop hadn’t been any juicier than a dog’s chew toy. I winced inwardly, because I knew that I’d have to reflect that in whatever I wrote and that while he was likely aiming for three stars, I was about to give the restaurant one. My main obligation was to be honest with readers.

But at times like this I wasn’t eager to be. At times like this the job made me feel a little sick.

Only occasionally did I hear from chefs or restaurateurs after a review appeared. Bobby Flay was the classiest, reacting to a review in which I demoted Mesa Grill to one star from two by leaving me a voice mail that thanked me for at least taking the time to visit the restaurant and assured me he wanted to fix whatever was wrong with it. Mario Batali, too, had a jolly way of rolling with the punches, even when I could tell he was ticked.

Another Italian-American chef, Cesare Casella, sent me a gift of sorts after I wrote a short appraisal, not a full review, of his restaurant Salumeria Rosi. In the article, which was a mixed bag of positive and negative remarks, I noted Mr. Casella’s trademark habit of keeping a decorative clump of rosemary in his shirt pocket, and I observed that the clump had “mutated from the few sprigs he used to sport to a bundle of branches—to a shrub, almost. If he stays on this trajectory, he’ll be clumping around his next restaurant with an entire tree slung over his shoulder.” What arrived on my desk a few days later, with a card from him, was a large rosemary bush.

Few review targets complained, no doubt because the damage was done and they didn’t want to risk alienating me—I might review that restaurant, or another with which they were connected, down the line.

But there were exceptions. One restaurateur wrote an actual letter, as opposed to an e-mail, to tell me that on the morning when his restaurant received two stars instead of the three he was shooting for, he’d been unable to get out of bed. Keith McNally, who owned the famed Downtown brasserie Balthazar, publicly attributed my one-star rating of Morandi, an Italian restaurant he opened in Greenwich Village, to its employment of a female head chef and to my clear sexism.

And then there was Jeffrey Chodorow.

 

 

 

 

In the 1980s and 1990s Chodorow had opened a string of hit restaurants, including China Grill and Asia de Cuba, both of which continued to flourish. They weren’t exactly critical darlings, but they’d never received the kinds of drubbings meted out to some of his subsequent efforts, which also didn’t do as well commercially.

Chodorow had suffered two particularly big failures right before I became the
Times
’s restaurant critic. One was a collaboration with Alain Ducasse called Mix; it survived just two years. Another was a collaboration with the chef Rocco DiSpirito called Rocco’s on Twenty-second Street. It wasn’t so much a restaurant as a stage set for a reality TV show,
The Restaurant
. And it died an even faster death than Mix had, though it lived on in a miasma of civil litigation between its principal players, including Chodorow.

So he wasn’t riding high when I came along, and my responses to the restaurants he opened on my watch didn’t make things any better. To his tricked-out Japanese restaurant Ono, in the Meatpacking District, I gave just one star. Then I gave a no-star rating to his Italian collaboration with the chef Todd English, goofily named English Is Italian.

I didn’t formally review his next restaurant, the even more goofily named Brasserio Caviar & Banana, a Brazilian befuddlement. But in a brief write-up I warned diners that the décor evoked a third-grade arts and crafts project and that the thicket of long skewers on which grilled meats were served made the whole experience rather pointy and frightening, like dining with Edward Scissorhands.

Chodorow churned out new restaurants at a brisk clip, and not too long after Brasserio came Kobe Club, named for an area of Japan where special
wagyu
cattle, known for their fat-marbled flesh, are raised. Kobe Club’s conceit was to serve, and let diners compare,
wagyu
beef from Japan, Australia and America. The restaurant was an apt, colorful illustration of not only how popular steakhouses had once again become but also how the glut of them was prodding restaurateurs to fashion novel takes on the genre. So it warranted attention. I scheduled—and made—my customary series of visits.