Born Round Read online

  I combed my brain, feeling like an idiot. I had some vague recollection that the reservation name might be Carlisle. I knew I had a reservation at some restaurant I was due to visit in this span of days under Carlisle. Maybe it was this reservation. Without any other alternative, I gave the name a try.

  “Carlisle party of four at nine forty-five,” I said. That I had reserved for four and for nine forty-five was definitely the case.

  “That’s so funny,” the hostess said, “because someone else checked in under Carlisle”—she motioned toward the bar—“but we don’t have any Carlisle in the book.” I looked in the direction she’d indicated and saw my friend Charles there. I’d apparently given him this same reservation name to use, and I’d apparently been as wrong then as I was now.

  The hostess asked, “Which other names should I look for?” She obviously assumed that if I ticked off the people in my party, we’d trip across the right name. She assumed wrong. The reservation wasn’t in the real name of anyone in this group of regular dining companions.

  What now?

  “Well,” I said cheerily, sidestepping her question, “it must just be whichever party of four is in your book for nine forty-five!”

  “Like Langston?” she asked, glancing at her reservation book.

  “Yes!” I said, not because I was trying to pull a fast one but because, as it happened, Langston sounded like a name I would use—or, in this situation, had used. It was the last name of a good friend’s husband: that’s no doubt where I’d gotten it.

  “Langston,” I repeated to the hostess. “That’s me!”

  She looked at her reservation book more closely.

  “Mrs. Zoe Langston?” she said, noting the first name on the reservation.

  I could have told her that I’d meant to say I was part of Zoe Langston’s party, but, unfortunately, all my companions that night were men. So instead I stood in front of the hostess silently and glanced around idly, trying to buy time, hoping a hole might open up below me and swallow me. When I looked back at her, she shrugged her shoulders, laughed and just went ahead and led Charles, me and our other two friends, who had shown up by that point, to a table.

  I made other blunders, too.

  In an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side, I put, on the table, in full view of our server, a bag of prescription medicine with a label stapled to the outside. I didn’t notice how clearly the label spelled out Frank Bruni for a good long while. In an Asian restaurant in the East Village, I left behind an issue of The New Yorker with the subscription information, including my name, on the cover. A server gave it back to me while I stood in the vestibule, zipping up my coat. He looked at me closely and smirked just a little.

  A few months after I resettled in New York, I heard again from Scott: Scott, my first-ever boyfriend from Carolina, the one who’d found me when I was living in Washington. Back then I’d told him I was too busy for the two of us to catch up, when really I was just too fat. This time, when he told me that he and his partner had relocated to New York and that he’d love to see me, I said yes. I invited the two of them to join me for dinner. We had an effortlessly chatty, comfortable time, and soon afterward I made plans to meet Scott and a friend of his for drinks.

  On the night in question, he gave me the time and place: nine thirty at Therapy, a gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen.

  I hadn’t been in a gay bar in nearly a decade. In New York in my early thirties and then in Washington, I’d avoided gay bars on purpose, not wanting to subject myself to any visual assessments by men who might be looking for someone to date, men who might look right past me. But I wasn’t so afraid now. Besides, I was heading out to Therapy at a relatively early hour on a weeknight. The atmosphere wouldn’t be sexually charged.

  At the bar Scott, his friend and I ran into two men that Scott knew, and the five of us grabbed beers and found an open table in a lounge area. The man I was seated next to, Paul, focused his attention on me, but I assumed that it was just a logistical thing, a matter of my being physically closest to him.

  When I got up to leave around ten forty-five, he got up, too, saying it was time for him to head home as well.

  As I set out on foot for the short-term rental nearby where I was living until the purchase of my apartment went through, he tagged along, talking all the time but never saying a word about what he was doing, where he was heading.

  I wondered if his place was also just blocks from Therapy—if he didn’t need to hail a cab or hop on the subway—and was in the same general direction as mine.

  I wondered if he was some strangely gallant guy exercising an atavistic impulse to escort me.

  Finally I accepted the most likely possibility. He was wordlessly hitting on me.

  I went with it, letting him accompany me into the building, letting him through the door of my apartment, and never really pausing at all to ask myself what I was doing, or whether it was something I wanted to be doing with this man. I was too caught up in the excitement—in the relief—that I could do it.

  I’d gone from romantic exile in that dingy upstairs bedroom in Georgetown directly to Louis, who had seemed to me like some sudden and random gift from nowhere, and quite possibly a fluke. Apart from him, there had been almost no dates and no kisses for the vast majority of my thirties. Now here I was, on the edge of forty, aware of my imminent slide into middle age, angry about how much of my youth I’d squandered. Could I make up for it now? Before it was too late?

  There were months during my first years back in New York when I went out to a gay bar as often as once a week, a frequency unusual for some other men but extraordinary for me. Even in Detroit, before Greg, I hadn’t found myself in a gay bar more than once a month.

  But in my current state of mind and need, I liked the terms and dynamics of a gay bar—liked knowing that the men who approached me or invited my approach did so without any knowledge of my job, which was considered unusually interesting by many people. These men were attracted by the way I looked. And for me that was an affirmation more powerful than it was for many others.

  During the long period when I’d been sure nobody could possibly want me, I hadn’t consciously asked myself: What if I never climb out of this? What if these size 40 pants are as good as it will ever again get? What if I can’t lose more than 15 of the 268 pounds I’ve somehow managed to put on?

  But I realized now that on some level, I had pondered and dreaded all of that, because my behavior and elation on the far side of fatness were those of someone living in a country he never thought he’d see, with privileges he never thought he’d have. And I saw that there might be something harder to repair than the physical damage Aaron and I had gone to work on a few years before.

  Eighteen

  After about six months in the job, a friend e-mailed me one day.

  “Had an excellent lunch at V Steakhouse,” he wrote, “and I had a great meal at Bar Tonno, where the owner reports you have been spotted twice.”

  I shook my head, amazed. “It’s very interesting,” I responded, “that the owner of Bar Tonno says he’s spotted me twice there. I’ve never been!”

  The friend explained that he had asked the owner if many reviews of the restaurant had come out yet, and the owner said he was anxiously awaiting mine. “He said he wasn’t there when you came in, but that ‘everyone’ spotted you instantly,” my friend reported. “I love that! You are like a ghost!”

  I wished.

  With each passing month I got more of an education into just how much of a premium restaurants put on identifying me when I was there and just how much energy they put into being able to do that.

  I turned one day to the Web site Eater, a gossipy report on restaurant news and restaurant-world personalities, and saw an item headlined: “To Catch a Critic: The Case of the Kitchen Flyer.”

  It presented a snapshot and description of a piece of paper that apparently hung in many a restaurant kitchen and was meant to help the staff recognize me when I
was dining there. At the top of the flyer was a fuzzy copy of the Ambling book jacket photograph. Below that was a list of six aliases and two fake phone numbers I’d been known to use. It was precisely the sort of compendium I’d been warned about, and I assumed it would be considerably longer if I weren’t taking all the precautions I was.

  And below that were some descriptions of me intended to be helpful to any restaurateur wondering if I was in his or her midst.

  “He looks very young,” said the first line of the description, and—I’ll admit it—I paused happily after reading it, then read it a second time.

  “His guests are very often female,” the description continued. “He is extremely polite with staff.” Here I paused again, this time for Mom. She’d always been adamant about proper etiquette. She would have been thrilled.

  The flyer finished: “Questions about food are asked in a very casual, unassuming manner.” This was true, and this was on purpose. For all that I messed up, I wasn’t about to press servers for the specifics of a dish’s cooking or ingredients in a rapt way that tipped my hand. I wasn’t that clueless.

  The flyer was only a part of it.

  At Le Bernardin, I’d been told, the chef Eric Ripert insisted that his staff do more than merely round up whatever pictures of me existed on the Internet. A staff member also researched where I’d appeared on television during my political-reporting years, then went to those networks and acquired footage, so the workers could get a sense of my facial expressions and body language.

  Sometimes I’d be sitting at a table near the front of a restaurant and I’d notice someone walk in the door, huddle with a server or manager, look in the direction of my table, then loiter in the vestibule or bar area for just a few minutes, stealing second and third and fourth looks my way. Minutes later the person would leave, without having had so much as a glass of water. And days later I’d see that person again—standing at the host station of a new restaurant that critics, like me, were in the process of visiting. I was just starting to make sense of this when a friend in the restaurant industry explained it for me outright: managers at restaurants that had spotted me would instantly send word out to peers in nearby establishments so they could hustle over and see me in the flesh.

  When it came to identifying critics, restaurants weren’t in competition with one another; they were in cahoots. One night I stopped by a Midtown restaurant for a glass of wine with my brother Mark, who was visiting from Boston on business, before the two of us joined two friends of mine elsewhere. A manager at the restaurant recognized me and heard me say, as I paid the check, that I was off to dinner. She assumed for some reason that I was on foot and destined to eat somewhere nearby. So she called several prominent restaurants within a five-block radius to warn them that I might be walking through the door at any minute. They waited for me in vain. I was in a taxi headed to an Upper East Side restaurant some twenty-five blocks uptown.

  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 just went to [redacted] for lunch and had a long conversation with [chef]. He told me a juicy Bruni tidbit. On one of his two visits to [restaurant], Bruni rode in on a scooter. Not a Vespa—a scooter. He was also wearing running shorts and a fanny pack. Is Frank just a sartorially weird scooter enthusiast, or was this an attempt at disguise? Note: if you decide to publish the scooter bit, [chef] doesn’t want you to mention him or [restaurant]. Bruni still hasn’t reviewed the restaurant and [chef] doesn’t want to incur his ill will.

  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, esp
ecially 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.