Born Round Read online

  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.

  I called Daphne, the administrator of the Paris bureau of the Times. She had made the Pierre Gagnaire reservation for me, and because she had had some difficulty getting me in, she’d used my real name and cited my Times affiliation in order to pry loose a table. That was something I would never do in New York, but it was permissible in these circumstances, on the opposite side of the Atlantic, in a restaurant I wasn’t actually reviewing. On the phone with Daphne from the airport, I said she’d have to move my dinner to a subsequent night. I explained that I didn’t have the proper attire and wasn’t willing to buy it: I’d spent $150 on new shoes for that dinner at Daniel in New York, because Continental had briefly lost my luggage, and a few months before that I’d spent $400 on emergency clothing in Ankara, Turkey, after Turkish Airlines had misplaced my bags for an entire week. I’d had enough.

  “I bet it’s OK for you to go as you are,” Daphne said.

  “You haven’t seen me,” I told her, then described myself. “Please, please, try to move the reservation.”

  She called me back five minutes later to say that the restaurant had insisted that I come that night anyway, and had done so even after she specified how I was dressed. The restaurant assured her that many of its customers these days dined in jeans and the like.
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  Hours later, I pulled up to Pierre Gagnaire in a cab. The restaurant’s doorman gave me a once-over—focusing not on my face but on my outfit—and blurted: “Mr. Bruni!” Apparently word on my attire had gone out, and apparently no one else really could be expected to show up at Pierre Gagnaire looking like I did.

  “I’m so sorry,” I sputtered. “I’m so embarrassed. I just flew in from Rome, and my suitcase didn’t follow me.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder and nodded sympathetically.

  “What can you expect?” he said, his voice dismissive as he went on to mention Italy’s principal airline. “Alitalia.”

  And I laughed, not at the recognition of unreliable Italian service but at the confirmation of French arrogance. I had flown in on Air France.

  But the French knew how to cook, and how to stage an elaborate meal; there was no taking that away from them. At Pierre Gagnaire I had a dozen or so courses, some with a variety of dishes that celebrated and toyed with a single theme or ingredient: a crab consommé, for example, beside strands of pulled crabmeat beside a crab mousse. The meal spanned three and a half hours. I wondered how I’d possibly show up to lunch the next day with any kind of appetite.

  But show up for lunch I must, because I had a reservation at a Michelin two-star restaurant, which is no meager number of stars: any Michelin stars at all are a sign of distinction. Still stuck with the same outfit I’d worn for Pierre Gagnaire, I had Daphne call ahead once again to make apologies, which was how this restaurant, at the Hôtel Le Meurice, also came to be told exactly who I was. As the lunch ended, the chef appeared at my table to ask me, in a visibly nervous fashion, how I liked the potato-crusted cod, and if I thought the mustard-flavored ice cream in the gazpacho was a success. Inside my head I responded: You’re going by me? Not so long ago I was sitting on a stained futon at two in the morning watching Law & Order reruns with a large pizza and a box of chicken wings in my lap.

  Back then, no one had been watching me eat. I couldn’t get over how closely people were watching me now, a reality that hit home even harder a few months later, when I visited the French Laundry, in California’s Napa Valley.

  By that point I had settled back in New York, and I was paying regular visits to, and getting ready to review, Per Se, a multimillion dollar project on the fourth floor of the new Time Warner Center and arguably the most significant restaurant, in terms of its culinary ambitions, to open in New York in a decade. Its significance stemmed from the worldwide acclaim that its guiding chef, Thomas Keller, had earned at the French Laundry, which regularly made almost every list of the world’s top twenty-five or even top ten restaurants. The French Laundry was America’s most celebrated temple of haute cuisine. And my editors and I agreed: to see Per Se clearly, I should intersperse my visits there with a meal at the French Laundry.

  It was an extravagant decision, so I booked the trip to last little more than twenty-four hours: JetBlue from New York to San Jose one afternoon; dinner that night; JetBlue back the next day. I asked Harry and Sylvia, who had moved a few years earlier from New York to Los Angeles, to join me. Harry had by this point become an even greater success; flying round-trip from L.A. to the Napa Valley for dinner wasn’t any hardship for him.

  The three of us showed up at the restaurant around nine. We gave the made-up name we’d used for the reservation to a hostess, took seats in the outdoor garden, had some Champagne and waited to be brought to our table.

  Once we were at the table, a waiter presented us with menus but said that we had another option beyond the menu: we could just turn ourselves over to “Chef Keller” and let him cook a multicourse meal of his choosing for us. For one or two “VIP” tables a night, a restaurant like the French Laundry or Per Se would make this offer, and the diners who received it almost never said no. They’d be fools to. So as Harry and Sylvia looked to me for guidance, I said yes, we’d let Keller cook for us, because there was no way to know for certain why the offer was being made—maybe there simply hadn’t been any “real” VIP tables that night and we’d drawn some lucky number—and because even if I’d been recognized, which seemed unlikely, it made practical sense for me to be exposed to, and aware of, the very best that Keller could do.

  Our waiter smiled and exhaled too loudly; his delight that we’d made that choice was so obvious it was suspicious. Why should he care so much?

  Over the next few minutes I noticed that servers who had nothing to do with our table slowed down as they walked by it and took long, curious looks at us, especially at me.

  And then the courses began to come, and they didn’t stop coming, and for most of them Keller sent out not three servings of one dish but three different dishes, so that I had something different from Harry, who had something different from Sylvia, who couldn’t stop giggling.

  “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” she said when the ninth course came, sounding at once exhilarated and overwhelmed. Five courses later: “This is crazy! Unbelievable! I’ve never, ever eaten like this.”

  We had something like twenty courses, representing something like fifty dishes. It was a show of virtuoso skill so ostentatious it verged on caricature.

  “They know,” I said to Harry and Sylvia. I shook my head. “In New York, that wouldn’t surprise me, but out here? How do they know?”

  I learned later, through food-world back channels, that the restaurant’s manager, Laura Cunningham, who regularly shuttled between New York and the Napa Valley, had looked out into the garden, seen me and recognized me instantly from a visit to Per Se, where she had in turn recognized me somewhat less instantly from my Ambling photograph. Once she spotted me in the garden, the French Laundry went on full alert, and my meal became the primary concern of Keller and everyone on the staff.

  It was an epic meal, an endless meal, and my stomach was so swollen with such rich food that I couldn’t sleep that night. Me, the champion binger. Harry told me the next morning that he hadn’t been able to sleep, either.

  “How many nights a week do you do this?” he asked.

  “This?” I said. “Almost never. It usually isn’t anything like this.”

  “I know,” he said. “But how many nights do you eat out?”

  “Well, seven,” I said, because that was the truth so far. “On a couple of nights I’ve even eaten two dinners in a row, and I could see that happening again from time to time.”

  I broke it down for him: I was supposed to review one restaurant every week, and I was supposed to visit every restaurant I reviewed at least three or, better yet, four times. Meanwhile, I was supposed to acquaint or reacquaint myself with restaurants integral to understanding the ones being reviewed, and I was also supposed to try restaurants that might, after one or even two visits, prove too inconsequential to be written about. With only seven nights in a week, I pretty much had to use all of them for dinners out in order to make the math work. On some weeks I could throw a lunch or two into the equation, but the vast majority of restaurants really weren’t best judged at lunchtime. Lunch wasn’t the answer.

  “How many years does someone usually do this job?” Harry asked.

  I told him that no recent critic had done it for less than four.

  He refined the question: “How many years do you think you can do this job?”

  I wondered what, if anything, was behind the “can.” Did it refer to the possibilities of exhaustion and boredom? Or to the threat, and then maybe the reality, of regaining an unhealthy, misery-making amount of weight?

  I told Harry the truth. I had absolutely no idea how long I’d manage this.

  Seventeen

  Here’s what I did before that twenty-odd-course dinner at the French Laundry: went to the fitness room at the Marriott where I was staying, commandeered a treadmill and didn’t budge. For forty-five minutes. The treadmill measured my run as nearly six miles long, and as I built up to that distance, pushing past the three-mile and then four-mile and then five-mile mark, I told myself, Foie gras. I told mysel
f, Coddled eggs. Lamb. Petits fours. In a few hours this and more would probably be coming at me, and I could eat it with a stab of terror about the way I’d feel in my clothes afterward, or I could earn it—could subtract hundreds of calories now so I could add these hundreds of calories later—and thus enjoy it. Stride after stride, mile after mile, I earned it. Or at least some of it, as much of it as I could reasonably manage on a treadmill in a Marriott with only an hour’s free time and a thirty-nine-year-old body that hadn’t always been maintained with care.

  And here’s what I did back in New York, not the first day back, because my flight arrived too late, but the second day: laced up my sneakers and set out for Central Park. I ran the whole six-mile road that traces an ellipse just inside the park’s rectangular outline, ending at the point where I’d begun and not taking any shortcuts, even though I was desperate to stop halfway through. I had to keep going. There were too many dinners ahead, dinners lined up all week long, some in restaurants where the norm was four courses and the food was relentlessly heavy. I couldn’t afford to let up. I needed to get this exercise done now, and it had to be sustained, serious exercise. I inhaled deeply and pumped my legs some more.

  From the moment I signed up for the new job, I’d been more virtuous than ever. More virtuous even than with Aaron. It started right away, with the family’s annual Hilton Head vacation, which fell just before my April eat-a-thon in New York. On the island I ran daily, never less than four miles.

  It continued over the weeks and months that followed. In Paris I took runs in the Luxembourg Gardens, anywhere from three to five miles a pop. Between lunch and dinner in Hong Kong, I would spend ninety minutes in the hotel gym: thirty on the treadmill, thirty doing mat work or lifting weights, thirty on the StairMaster.

  In fact I was so faithful that by mid-May, when I landed back in New York for good, I was pretty sure I’d actually lost some weight. The first time I visited the studios of WQXR, a Times-owned radio station to which the restaurant critic contributed a short daily broadcast, the station manager looked at me and said, “Not another ectomorph!” She was referring to the beanpole thinness of Biff, who had seemed genetically incapable of gaining so much as an ounce. He certainly was an ectomorph, that slimmest of body types on the scale from ecto- to endo-. I definitely wasn’t. That she had tried to cast me as one, even half-jokingly, kept me smiling for hours.