Born Round Page 25

  The scale said 92. My weight was 92! I went to my laptop, went online, found the conversion. It equaled just under 203 pounds. That was still more than I should be, more than I wanted to be. But 203 was 65 pounds less than the last time I’d known what I weighed.

  It was a weight I could live with and sometimes even forget about, which was the main thing, the best thing. I felt lighter in spirit, and I preferred life this way, enough to stop myself before I rounded up too much food when shopping for groceries and to catch myself when I was about to order the biggest dessert on the menu.

  I was having an adventure. I was having a blast. One week I’d find myself plying the canals of Venice in a floating police cruiser for a story about a crackdown on boaters breaking the maritime speed limit;a another week I’d find myself on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius interviewing stubborn residents who refused to relocate somewhere beyond the threat of lava.

  I spent weeks in Turkey monitoring its government’s response to the American invasion of Iraq, and even traveled close to the border between Iraq and Turkey, to watch for any signs that Turkish troops were taking advantage of the war to move into Kurdish strongholds on the other side. I spent weeks in Israel pitching in with reporting there at times when Israeli-Palestinian tensions spiked even higher than usual.

  Wherever Pope John Paul II went, I went: to Guatemala, Croatia, Poland. Poland was something else. As a gesture of respect for the Pope, any city or town he visited there went dry, at least officially, for the duration of his stay. But veterans in the Vatican press corps found ways around this temporary prohibition. They packed their own flasks of whiskey and vodka, and if you were nice enough to them, they shared. Or they sweet-talked waiters into serving them alcoholic drinks that didn’t look like alcoholic drinks. On a papal trip to Poland, the screwdriver suddenly became every reporter’s cocktail of choice. To the naked eye, at least, it was just a glass of orange juice.

  And in every country, in every city, I sized up the food. The logical coda to a long day of reporting—and a good way to get acquainted with a new place—was to go out and find something special to eat. So I tracked down the juiciest lamb in Diyarbakir, Turkey; the fluffiest falafel in Hebron and Jerusalem; the richest veal-stuffed agnolotti in Turin; the most vibrant pumpkin-stuffed ravioli in Parma. But it wasn’t food as a compulsion; it was food as an investigation, an education, a discovery. I found I could enjoy it without overdoing it. In fact I could enjoy it more, because it wasn’t tinged with anticipatory guilt or incipient panic over how much tighter my pants might feel the next day.

  At home in Rome, Louis would be waiting, in our rambling, oddly situated apartment. It was on the top floor of a six-story building in which the first five floors belonged to a middlebrow hotel, with which it shared an entrance and elevator. The hotel desk clerks were our de facto doormen, cranky Donatella and affable Stefano and gorgeous Giacomo, who always flirted, simply because he enjoyed the effect. If I ran out of coffee and was too lazy to go out for it in the morning, he let me walk downstairs to the breakfast room in the basement and pretend I was one of the hotel guests. He winked at me as I went.

  Like Greg, Louis cooked, but he didn’t cook like Greg. He cooked more like Grandma, in a frenzy of motion, pots clanging, crumbs scattering, liquid splattering. The kitchen was the smallest, saddest room in our otherwise spacious, light-filled apartment; within minutes of the beginning of a meal’s preparation, Louis would have every square inch of it covered in excess syrup, fugitive grease, discarded peelings and spilled powder. I’d look in on him and think how I should get a drop cloth, put it under him, maybe even line all the cabinet faces and countertops with plastic.

  And I’d wait and wait for the results, as the hour grew late even for dinner in Europe.

  “Forty-five minutes out!” Louis would shout at about nine fifteen, the first of a series of curiously timed progress reports.

  At ten he’d announce: “We’re only a half hour out!” He made it sound like a positive update. Like a happy surprise.

  At ten twenty-five: “Just twenty more minutes, sweetie! Is the table set?” The table had been set since eight forty-five.

  And at ten forty-five: “About seven minutes, maybe eight!” That meant fifteen, so I’d wait another ten to light the candles.

  Cleanup was a nightmare, but I felt obliged to do at least half of it, since he was doing the cooking, and since he’d done all the shopping. With his days free, he scoured Rome for ingredients, and it took him forever, because he wanted to make and eat food at home that we couldn’t easily find in Rome’s restaurants and that wasn’t typically stocked in Rome’s stores—Thai food, Indian food, that sort of thing. He was going through this whole Asian phase.

  We ate out as often as we ate in, and made a vigorous tour of Roman restaurants, finding unheralded ones, developing favorites. For its lavish antipasti spread, delivered to each table as soon as the diners sat down at it, we loved Santopadre, just a half block from our apartment, where the mistress of the house, Dina, would greet us with kisses and wonder why we hadn’t stopped by in so long, even if we’d been there just a week earlier. She reminded me of Grandma.

  For its savory Parmesan and Gorgonzola and zucchini-flavored custards we loved Trattoria Monti, about two miles from our place, where the female chef’s two handsome sons, Enrico and Daniele, recited the entire menu in perfectly enunciated Italian, punctuating the mention of each dish with the phrase e poi abbiamo, which meant “and then we have,” before naming the next option. We would order several courses, always concluding with the pistachio semifreddo in bittersweet chocolate sauce. Then Enrico or Daniele would put bottles of amaro, limoncello and grappa on the table, so we could help ourselves, free of charge, to however much of whichever we wanted. That was the way Italian restaurants treated cherished regulars, which we’d become. We often left Trattoria Monti more than three hours after we had arrived, and were usually the last customers to go.

  Before long Italian friends who had lived in Rome much longer than I had were asking me where to eat. Somehow, I’d segued from restaurant enthusiast to restaurant savant, and without gaining any appreciable weight.

  Sixteen

  Y ou’re not going to believe this,” I told Louis when I walked into our apartment one night in January 2004.

  He had to turn off the food processor, in which he was whipping up some Asian concoction. He had to turn Ydown the volume on Mary J. Blige.

  “I got a call today,” I said, then filled him in on a chain of events to which I hadn’t attributed much meaning before then.

  Weeks earlier Barbara Graustark, an editor at the Times whose purview included the Dining section, had sent out an e-mail to the staff announcing that the current restaurant critic, William Grimes, was leaving the job. I knew Barbara a little—I’d written some stories unrelated to food for her in the past—so I took the opportunity of her e-mail to write back and say a chatty hello.

  “I hope you’ve got a lot of extra space on your desk,” I said in my e-mail, “because you’re about to be deluged with résumés and appeals.”

  She replied: “Will one of them be yours?”

  I didn’t take the question seriously. “It would be a dream job,” I wrote back, and on a conscious level, at least, I meant that literally. It was a job I’d have, and be able to do, in my dreams, in some fantasy realm where my suitability and aptitude didn’t matter, and where I didn’t have my warped history with food.

  But she didn’t interpret my response that way. She sensed, maybe correctly, some curiosity on my part. Now she was circling back to tell me that in the meetings of editors mulling the question of who should be the newspaper’s next restaurant critic, my name had come up. And she had told those editors that I might just be interested.

  On the phone she explained that editors at the Times were looking at the situation two ways. They had drawn up a list of food mavens who had already written extensively about dining out, but they were also considering writers n
ewer to the subject matter, with potentially fresher perspectives. Apparently I fell into the latter category.

  To the thinking of Barbara and several editors above her, I had plunged into political reporting without considerable buildup or past experience. The same went for foreign reporting. So why not restaurant criticism? Especially when I was a known restaurant fan? Many of the paper’s senior editors were aware of that because they’d eaten with me. They also knew that years earlier I’d been a movie critic for the Free Press, so criticism wasn’t alien to me.

  I assumed the chances of being chosen were slim, but it was harmless fun to contemplate it. So I told Barbara that if Times editors were willing to consider it, I was, too. In a few weeks, I thought, this diversion would end with the appointment of someone else.

  I didn’t hesitate to share all of this with Louis, who was hardly bound to Rome or invested in my continuation as the newspaper’s correspondent there. His leave of absence from work was finite and he had already begun wondering aloud about what we were going to do and how we were going to stay together, given the lack of any work for him in Italy. So I expected him to be intrigued by the prospect—no matter how fantastic—of my returning to New York, a much easier city for him to navigate professionally.

  I also expected him to find the idea of my becoming a restaurant critic absurd.

  To my surprise, he didn’t.

  He noted that almost nothing pleased me more than a great meal—it was why he loved cooking for me—and that almost nothing disappointed me more than a bad one. He reminded me that in Rome, in Athens, in so many other European cities and in Vietnam, where we’d taken a long trip together just weeks earlier, I was always on the prowl for interesting restaurants and I always put dining at the top of my agenda.

  “You’ve eaten in more countries than most other people,” he said. “You’ve eaten in more kinds of restaurants.”

  It was true, I supposed. For some reason I’d never before thought of my travels as eating expeditions, though many of them had turned into precisely that.

  Did I actually have some legitimate qualifications for this job? Could I take a credible stab at it? Possibly. What I didn’t know I could make a point of learning. I was capable of that sort of diligence. I’d bring energy to the task, given the newness and challenge of it. I was opinionated: no problem there. And to the extent that I wasn’t a dyed-in-the-wool foodie, well, what fraction of a restaurant review’s readers were? Maybe I’d be a better proxy for consumers than someone more deeply immersed in the world of restaurants would be.

  Then again, maybe not, and I didn’t want to sign on to being a hack. I didn’t want an assignment, especially one that meant as much as this one did to many readers, that I was bound to fumble. And I didn’t want to be plagued day in and day out by the worry that I was out of my depth.

  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:So much elaborate show, so little actual event: maybe this is a restaurant tailored to today’s Italy, in which confidence often trumps performance and surface sheen counts more than what lies beneath.

  Around the time I dined at Hostaria dell’Orso, the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was admitting that the reason he had spent a solid month away from office, in hiding, was cosmetic surgery. His popularity seemed unaffected. Hostaria dell’Orso could be a huge hit.

  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 i
n 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.

  Before 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.