Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (40 page)

In the review I subsequently wrote, I referred to Chodorow as a “gimmick maestro,” noting that Kobe Club served no fewer than four kinds of mashed potatoes and thirteen kinds of sauces for the steaks, which came with little toothpick flags planted in them, to designate which of the aforementioned countries the beef had come from. The décor included more than two thousand samurai swords hanging upside down from the ceiling, a menacing canopy that prompted a server to tell my friend and me that they were properly anchored and that we shouldn’t be scared. (What
was
it with Chodorow and pointy objects?) The décor also featured rippling screens formed by hundreds of shoelace-narrow strips of leather. “If Akira Kurosawa hired the Marquis de Sade as an interior decorator,” I wrote, “he might end up with a gloomy rec room like this.”

I took exception in the review to the thirty-two-dollar price of a chicken entrée, to a rubbery pork chop, to limp iceberg lettuce, and to a clam with an alarming metallic taste. The review concluded:

The review, admittedly, was snarky. My feeling was that a negative appraisal might as well be lively, since its readers weren’t going to use it as a road map for the restaurant. And the rating surely displeased Chodorow. I gave no stars to Kobe Club.

A few weeks later, he sent a letter to the
Times.

Not to me, and not just any old letter. It was addressed to Pete Wells, the editor of the Dining section, but written for the general public, a fact made clear by something else Chodorow reportedly did: paid a premium of forty thousand dollars for the letter to appear as a full-page advertisement in the
Times
in the spot of his choosing, opposite my weekly column.

I was shown the letter just a few days before it was published. In it Chodorow claimed that my review of Kobe Club was off base, mean-spirited and one in a series of “personal attacks” by me and a few other critics, motivated by the messy debacle of
The Restaurant
. And he maintained that the issue wasn’t just my Kobe Club review but all of my reviews, and that I was flatly unqualified for the job.

It definitely rattled me, the thought that so many people might see his rant and that it might yield chatter—in blogs, maybe even in published articles—about how well or not I was doing my job. I was rattled, too, by the reminder that what I wrote often wounded people, and I asked myself questions I already asked myself plenty: How could I ever be 100 percent sure I’d given a restaurant a fair shake? How could I know I’d experienced and assessed it in the most accurate light?

Maybe, I told myself, his letter wouldn’t draw much notice.

It did. There were articles about it by the Associated Press, the
Washington Post
and
The New Yorker
, among others. To my enormous relief most of them portrayed Chodorow as a hothead and took little or no exception to my review of Kobe Club or my performance as a critic. But I was nonetheless left with a problem.

During the many interviews Chodorow was giving to journalists and bloggers, he said that the next time I was seen in one of his restaurants, he would have me thrown out. He said he was even offering a free vacation to any employee who ousted me. And yet he was about to open a new place, Wild Salmon, in the old English Is Italian location. Wild Salmon was a project splashy enough to call for a review; if I didn’t write one, it might seem that I was running away from him—that his pledge to foil me had successfully spared his newest restaurant an assessment. That wouldn’t be a good precedent. I didn’t want to let it happen.

So I had to figure out how to dine repeatedly in a restaurant from which I had been officially barred.

 

 

 

 

“
S
it still, darling,” John said to me, putting a hand on my shoulder and pushing down, trying to fix me to the bottom of the chair. “You have got to sit still.”

I couldn’t. Without meaning to, I kept swiveling my head to survey his salon and check whether the other clients were gaping at me. I kept squirming. I hated the way the wig that he had affixed to my head felt: itchy, sweaty, furry and wild, as if somebody had scraped a dead squirrel off a patch of hot pavement and slapped it onto my scalp. The wig sort of looked that way, too. I was on the leading edge of a whole new trend: roadkill chic.

“This is ridiculous,” I told John. “Nobody’s going to buy this.”

“They will when I’m done,” he said, his voice curt, as if I’d insulted him. I supposed I had. I told myself: Calm down. Lighten up. If you get thrown out of Wild Salmon, you get thrown out of Wild Salmon. It’ll be mortifying when it happens; a badge of honor by the next day. And the important part is that you’ll have tried. If the story gets around, that’s what it will prove. That’ll be the takeaway. You tried.

The unruly mass of synthetic light brown strands was much thicker than my own hair, covering up my faint bald spot and receding hairline. John pushed it a few millimeters forward, then a few millimeters back. He rotated it slightly to the left, then to the right. And he snipped and snipped, cutting it as carefully as he would the real thing. I’d had no idea that wigs got customized this way. I’d had no idea they got styled.

Some of the clients in nearby chairs and some of the stylists attending to those clients indeed stared at John and me, no doubt because we presented a mystery: Why were we taking such pains to put me
into
this wig when I looked infinitely better
out
of it?

“He’s an actor,” John said to everyone and to no one, answering a question that hadn’t actually been articulated. “He’s doing a small walk-on part tomorrow.” That’s how careful he and I were being. On the chance that someone in the salon might be connected to someone in the restaurant industry, we were guarding who I was and what I was doing there. I’d even checked into the salon under the name Frank Browning.

Before Wild Salmon, I had used disguises only twice, during my first months as a reviewer, and had concluded they were too unsettling and not effective enough, at least if they were anything less than seriously expert. And seriously expert disguises took too much time; they certainly weren’t nightly options. Restaurant critics who touted their proficiency with disguises usually didn’t mention that a night in costume was the exception, not the rule, and they either disregarded or truly didn’t know that restaurateurs often recognized them anyway but were careful not to show it. Restaurateurs didn’t want to spoil the disguised critic’s fun.

My first attempt at a disguise was for my third visit to V Steakhouse, the short-lived Jean-Georges Vongerichten restaurant that the friend who had e-mailed me about Bar Tonno had also mentioned. I had sensed that I was recognized on my second visit to V Steakhouse and I wanted to recapture my anonymity. So I didn’t shave for a few days. I used a shiny gel to slick my hair straight back; usually I wore it parted on the side, without any product. I put on little granny glasses. Did it work? I wasn’t sure. But I felt awkward, my companions kept giggling at me and I had to struggle to stay focused on the meal.

My next attempt was at Per Se. For my third visit there, about a week after my trip to the French Laundry, I slicked back my hair. I sported a minor beard, the product of a full week without shaving. And I put on a bulky, flashy pair of purple-rimmed eyeglasses with clear lenses, which I’d purchased solely to be used as camouflage. My companions couldn’t decide whether I looked like a young Bob Evans, an over-the-hill porn star or the deranged subject of a forthcoming book by Oliver Sacks. Our waiter took one look at me and, despite an obvious struggle not to, broke into an enormous, you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me smile. He was the same waiter who had spent four hours catering to Harry, Sylvia and me at the French Laundry. Facial hair, styling gel and purple eyeglasses weren’t going to fool him.

But for Wild Salmon, a restaurant focusing on the Pacific Northwest (with Chodorow, there was always a tidy theme), I had no choice. I had to try a disguise again, and it had to be better this time around.

So I contacted John, a friend who owned the salon atop Bergdorf Goodman in Midtown and had many associates in the theater business. If anyone could be entrusted with the job of disguising me, it was him. He called some makeup artists and costume designers he knew and had them send over a few wigs and fake mustaches. He gave me an appointment in the salon ninety minutes before my first Wild Salmon reservation, so I could go straight to the restaurant from there. I showed up for it dressed for the meal after, in a semiformal manner that was deliberately uncharacteristic: dark blue suit, light blue shirt, solid green tie. And again I wore little granny glasses.

John had one wig in a dark brown color that matched my hair and one in a lighter shade. After putting each on my head, he chose the lighter shade. Then he went about taming and sculpting it, spending forty-five minutes on that mission before leaving its completion to an assistant, Marco.

At some point I pressed one of the fake mustaches to my upper lip. It looked and felt like a dark centipede. I decided to skip it on this night and maybe use it for my second or third visit to Wild Salmon.

As Marco used a blow-dryer to finish styling the wig, I kept feeling it move, or imagining that it was moving—I couldn’t tell. I was sure that during the coming dinner, I’d tilt my head forward to glance into my chowder and the squirrel would drop from my head to the bowl.

“Are you sure this won’t fly off?” I asked Marco.

“Maybe in a hurricane,” he said.

I studied my image in the mirror. My face was tiny beneath this grand mane, which was indeed becoming more realistic by the second but still struck me as much too poufy and wavy. I no longer had to wonder what sort of offspring Andy Warhol and Farrah Fawcett might have produced. I was looking at him.

Wild Salmon was on Third Avenue near Fortieth Street. I’d told my companions for the night, Patty, Jason and Michelle, to meet me about two blocks away, at the Capital Grille, so we could coordinate our stories and go over our script.

I’d chosen Patty because she’d dined with me only once before, at an out-of-the-way restaurant that certainly hadn’t spotted me: there was no chance her face was associated with mine. I brought Jason and Michelle along because they, too, were infrequent dining companions. Even better, they were in their twenties—younger than most of my eating partners—so they gave our foursome a different demographic profile than that of my usual groups. I told them that they’d be posing as a couple and I told Patty that we would be, too. And I invented a story line to guide our conversation whenever servers were near: Jason and Michelle were about to be married; Patty and I were already married and were friends of Jason’s family. We were giving the newlyweds-to-be marital advice.

“What do I do for a living?” Patty asked me at the Capital Grille, as I prepped everyone.

“You’re a veterinarian,” I said.

“And you?” she said.

“I’m a pharmaceutical sales representative.” I liked the idea of having access to good prescription drugs.

“How long have we been married?” Patty said.

“Too long.”

We walked to the restaurant. I made the three of them enter just ahead of me, an advance guard. I kept my head low, looked toward the floor, tried to be inconspicuous. At the table I took a seat that put my back to the open kitchen. Whenever the waiter approached, I buried my face in the menu.

“All this fish: it’s just too much like work,” said Patty, the pretend veterinarian, as she perused her menu.

“But you don’t treat fish, sugarplum,” I mumbled, face deep in my own menu.

“I’m training,” she said. “I just need to get my scuba certification.”

When the waiter took our order, Patty couldn’t remember what I’d told her to get, and had to look to me for guidance. “What do you think I should eat, honey?” she asked me.

I told her she’d seemed interested in the cedar plank salmon, which she then ordered. As the waiter gathered our menus, I said to Jason and Michelle, “Half of what makes our marriage work is that I remember for her what she does and doesn’t like to eat.”

“The other half,” Patty said, “is the sex.” Fortunately, the waiter had disappeared before the end of her sentence.

Patty, Jason and Michelle passed me bites of their appetizers and entrées quickly, and furtively: there was no rotating of plates. At the end Jason paid the check with
his
real credit card, as I’d told him to in advance, promising him a check as soon as we reached the sidewalk.