Born Round Page 29

  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.

  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:On the night when the server assured me of my safety, as I put my coat back on and headed toward the door, I suddenly found that I couldn’t leave. Something was pulling me back, but what?

  A delayed appreciation for the restaurant’s triple-decker c
rab cake? A yearning to retrieve a toothpick flag? A need to make peace with the check, which had come pinned to a wooden board by a dagger?

  No, it was one of those leather strings, which had wrapped like a tentacle around me. Scary indeed.

  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.

  “Sit 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.

  In the Bergdorf salon, I meet the wig I’ll wear to Wild Salmon.

  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 must
aches 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.