Born Round Read online

  “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.

  And we got away with it. We actually got away with it. The staff at Wild Salmon hadn’t known I was there. I was certain not just because I hadn’t been ejected, but because no one in the restaurant had paid an iota of extra attention to us and because our server, without a trace of irony or self-awareness, had recommended certain dishes by saying that they’d been praised in early reviews of the restaurant. That comment and many of his others weren’t the kind a server would ever make to a known critic.

  For my second visit, I brought Joyce and Max, who were considerably older than my usual dining companions. I wore the same wig and, for variety’s sake, the mustache, glued to the flesh between my nose and upper lip. I kept imagining that it was slipping and I couldn’t stop poking at it to make sure it was still in place. Every time I did this Joyce frantically lifted a napkin to her mouth and swiped vigorously.

  “Did I get it?” she’d say, thinking I’d been signaling to her that she had a smudge of food on her face.

  I’d shake my head no and point emphatically to my fake mustache, and she’d interpret the gesture to mean she should swipe again—and even more vigorously.

  “Now is it gone?” she’d ask.

  My third time at Wild Salmon I had a different wig, darker and stippled with gray, purchased from a Manhattan wig wizard who often dealt with celebrities with cancer. I went to the restaurant in a group of four men of different ages and looks, all of us dressed in suits, the conceit being that we were colleagues fresh from work at the bank. Again the food sharing was done with special subtlety. And again the restaurant seemed not to notice us in any particular way.

  I gave Wild Salmon one star. I took pains to say that the various kinds and preparations of salmon were appealing, but I couldn’t ignore how uneven the rest of the food was, and I had to call Chodorow out on his stubborn penchant for gimmickry, which I flagged at the start of the review:I wish I’d had Al Gore with me at Wild Salmon, where I stumbled across a new sign of climate change. It concerned dessert, and it might well have concerned him.

  I ordered the baked Alaska, a frigid diorama in which the meringue is molded to resemble an igloo. And I noticed right away that something was extinct: a proud chocolate penguin, described in write-ups of the restaurant, that had once stood beside the frosty abode. In its place a few humble chocolate fish were adrift.

  When I ordered the dish a second time, even they were gone, the ecosystem impoverished once more. The igloo looked smaller, and its ice cream interior was softer. A fluke? Maybe. But I wonder about global warming.

  A week later Chodorow took out another ad in the Dining section. This one was small, squeezed into the corner of a page far from my column, and went largely unnoticed. It was also in the form of a letter, addressed this time to me.

  “Dear Frank,” it read. “The penguin has returned to the South Pole where it belongs. I’m contributing the money I would have spent on a larger ad to the fight against global warming. Really glad you loved the wild salmon at Wild Salmon. It is like no other salmon I’ve tasted. Regards, Jeff.”

  Nineteen

  Through it all I ate, often with the people I’d eaten with from the start. I ate with Harry at the restaurant Blue Hill in Greenwich Village and with Dad and Dottie at its bucolic offshoot, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, in Westchester County. I ate with Mark and one of his business partners at Eleven Madison Park, on Madison Square Park in Manhattan, and I also ate there, separately, with Uncle Mario and Aunt Carolyn. I ate with Uncle Jim and Aunt Vicki at Alto, an Italian restaurant in Midtown. I ate with Adelle more often than with any other family member, because she was living just outside the city and traveled in and out most frequently. She saw the reviewing rigmarole as the very summit of all intrigue.

  “Are they on to you yet?” she asked at the restaurant Jean Georges, where she, her friend Val and I sat down one night after ten for dinner. Adelle was always obsessed with the question of whether we were flying under the radar.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. Jean Georges was the kind of restaurant, like Le Bernardin, that was going to do whatever it took to make sure critics didn’t go undetected. But I sensed that our late arrival at the restaurant, which was visibly winding down, had possibly thrown the servers off our scent, at least for the time being.

  “What do you think, Val?” Adelle asked. “What’s your read?” Adelle’s tone was breathless, revved-up. She liked to whip up some drama, some suspense, whenever and wherever she could. At Princeton, acting had been one of her passions, and in a sense it still was. She’d merely moved her theatrical performances offstage.

  “I just saw that waiter over there motion to a busboy to come over, and then the waiter leaned over to say something to the busboy!” Val whispered, as if she’d been let in on an important secret and was passing it along.

  “Well,” I said, draping my voice in sarcasm, “that settles it. The two of them can’t possibly be talking about, I don’t know, the need to clear the dishes from that table by the window.”

  “There should be more servers looking this way,” Adelle sighed, knowing what usually happened when I was spotted. She sounded disappointed—defeated. “I don’t think they are on to us. Damn!” She preferred it when they knew. She found the fawning hysterical, and when a particularly obsequious server would drift right out of earshot, she’d make jokes about the various errands or chores we might ask of him or her, charting a whole twelve-labors-of-Hercules agenda that included the retrieval of dry cleaning and maybe even some attic cleaning.

  I also ate with old friends and new friends and even, on a few occasions, celebrities, because some of them were food lovers who thought my job was glamorous. The pathetically starstruck side of me couldn’t resist the opportunity that that presented, so I found myself at the restaurant Artisanal one night with Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker. She had a curious culinary pet peeve.

  “Would you mind,” she asked me, “if we asked the kitchen not to put any parsley in anything?”

  I wasn’t planning a full-fledged review of the restaurant, and I couldn’t imagine that there’d be much parsley in many dishes to begin with, so I didn’t mind at all. But I also wondered if she was pulling my leg, because I remembered a Sex and the City episode in which Carrie tells a server that she’s flat-out al
lergic to parsley as a way of making absolutely sure no parsley wanders into or near any of her food.

  I didn’t ask her if she was allergic or just averse. But I tracked down a server to find out if it was too late to tell the chef “no parsley.” Our table had placed its order ten minutes earlier.

  “The chef already knows,” the server assured me. “He’s cooked for Ms. Parker before.”

  I ate with strangers who’d paid six thousand dollars at a charity auction for the three open seats at a table for four in one or another of the restaurants that I was visiting for the purpose of a review.

  I ate with dates. I was almost always seeing someone, because my determination to have an active romantic life trumped pickiness, and I still got too excited when someone for whom I felt even the barest flicker of interest was interested in me. I seldom saw any of these people for very long. We’d turn out to be incompatible in ways that could have been predicted at the outset, had I in fact been less eager, more skeptical and more alert.

  But as I traveled further and further from my loneliest years and as dating came to seem less remarkable, I did get wiser and more cautious. The frequency of my casual encounters diminished. They weren’t really what I wanted. What I wanted was someone steady, something intimate, a relationship like the one I’d had with Louis. But that wasn’t easily found.

  I ate in the service of contrived journalistic experiments. During one week I stayed in a different Manhattan hotel every night so that I could assess room service dinners and breakfasts. On a three-day trip to gastronomically advancing Atlantic City, I hit seven relatively new restaurants, fitting in that many by having two dinners on Thursday, another two on Friday and three in a row on Saturday.

  I ate at some of the most revered temples of refined cooking, including elBulli, on the northeastern Spanish coast. To get a reservation I had to use my Times credential—permissible in this situation, because I was far from New York and reporting on the restaurant rather than reviewing it—and I wound up getting a meal more elaborate than any other diner’s that night. It comprised about thirty courses: all the dishes that were being served to everyone in the restaurant, plus another dozen that the chef and owner, Ferran Adrià, made specifically for me, so I could sample what he considered his greatest hits.

  I also ate at places of less lofty repute. I checked out Hooters one night because I’d heard the chicken wings there were excellent—that turned out to be an exaggeration—and I thought that a post about the meal in the newspaper’s dining blog might be fun. I repeatedly visited the steakhouse in the Penthouse (as in magazine) Executive Club because I’d heard the aged beef there was exceptional—that turned out to be no exaggeration at all—and I thought an actual review of the restaurant might be entertaining and worthwhile.

  For the first of those visits, I happened to arrive before my companions and was alone in the lounge when one of the many barely clad women who sidled through the place—and sometimes stepped up onto a stage to dance—slipped into the chair beside me.

  She introduced herself. I wasn’t sure I’d heard her name correctly.

  “Mahogany?” I asked, checking.

  “Yes,” she purred.

  “Mahogany,” I asked, “do you know where you’re going to?”

  She didn’t miss a beat, moving on to another of Diana Ross’s hits. “I’m coming out!” she sang, waving her arms, wiggling her hips.

  She said she was running low on cabernet. I took the cue and asked if I could buy her a fresh glass.

  “Yes,” she said. “And you can pour it on my toes.”

  On a subsequent visit to the steakhouse, officially named Robert’s, a woman who identified herself as Foxy approached my table to hawk neck and shoulder massages at twenty dollars apiece.

  “Foxy,” I began, then stopped myself, wondering if I was being too familiar. “Are you and I on a first-name basis, or should I address you as Ms. Foxy?”

  “You can call me Dr. Foxy,” she said.

  “Is that an MD or a PhD?”

  “Yes,” she answered, as if that settled it, and went back to rubbing lotion on the shoulders of one of my dining partners. I had told him I’d expense the massage, which was integral, after all, to an appraisal of this particular dining experience.

  My point is that I ate out almost as often as a person could, seven nights on many weeks and more than once a night on some occasions. And most of these meals weren’t anything like a typical diner’s, because a typical diner didn’t get every possible course at every restaurant while also sampling the bread basket—the bread, after all, might be worthy of special praise or derision—and partaking of the petits fours, should the restaurant be the kind in which they were served. A typical diner could, and usually did, pick and choose his pleasures, focusing on starches if he liked to carbo-load, meats if he was on a carnivorous tear.

  I had to sample it all.

  And in order to work my way through a restaurant’s entire menu over the span of several visits and to try at least a few dishes twice, I sometimes ordered even more than the three or four courses that the place normally served. I might ask for two kinds of the wood-oven pizza, which most other diners selected as an appetizer or entrée, as preappetizer snacks for the foursome in which I was eating. I might then ask for a fifth communal appetizer in addition to the four individual ones we’d ordered, and I might later ask for a fifth communal dessert.

  None of these meals could be constructed in a way that reflected health or weight concerns. If the restaurant took pride in its twenty-ounce rib eye, I took the measure of that steak. If fettucine with a heavy cream sauce and a blizzard of pancetta was on the menu, it would also be on my table during one of my visits. Fruit sorbet wasn’t a tenable alternative to molten chocolate cake. It was more like a cop-out, even a dereliction of duty, because the sorbet, unlike the cake, was probably prepared elsewhere and merely purchased by the restaurant, and thus not a test of the kitchen’s skill.

  So my only real option for keeping at least some cap on the calories I ingested was the most time-tested, most widely advocated and least flashy method of all, the one on which the truly enduring diet organizations were founded, the one too unimaginative and incremental in its impact to ever foster the kinds of short-lived cults that developed around the cabbage soup diet, the grapefruit diet and their ilk. It was the method I adhered to during my single most gut-endangering foray as restaurant critic: a cross-country drive, from sea to greasy sea, devoted to sampling familiar and unfamiliar fast foods.

  I wanted a real digression from my usual high-end dining, so I traveled from New York to Los Angeles with a changing cast of companions on a trip that was part roving binge and part warped road movie: “Transfatamerica,” we dubbed it. Instead of three-hour meals at beautifully set tables, I ate three-minute meals in the driver’s or passenger’s seat, the dashboard doubling as a buffet, an automotive altar across which Quarter Pounders and bean and cheese burritos were arrayed. Until I hit an In-N-Out Burger in Torrance, California, on the eighth day, all of my fast food was consumed, as fast food often is, in the car, which smelled worse and worse as the trip went on. Like an obtuse houseguest or a Supreme Court justice, the scent of a White Castle slider lingers.

  My odyssey ultimately spanned nine days, fifteen states, 3,650 miles and forty-two visits to thirty-five restaurants (I hit some more than once), for an average of nearly five fast-food restaurant visits a day. And for each of those visits, I wouldn’t get just a burger or other sandwich apiece for my companion and me. Determined to try as much as was reasonably possible of whatever was on offer at Wendy’s, KFC, Culver’s (a Wisconsin-based burger chain in the Midwest and Texas), the Varsity (an onion ring institution in downtown Atlanta), Yocco’s (hot dogs in Pennsylvania), Raising Cane’s (chicken fingers in Louisiana) or Taco Cabana (Mexican delights in central Texas), I’d get enough food for four or five people.

  But I’d never finish all of it, or even close to all of it.

  �
�Have you tried the fries?” I’d ask Alessandra, my McPartner from Atlanta to Dallas, who had replaced Kerry (New York to Atlanta) and would later be replaced by Barbara (Dallas to L.A.), the friend who had helped me with my Ambling photograph.

  “Fries: check!” Alessandra would say, and I’d transfer the paper sleeve from the dashboard to a bag we were using for garbage, even though most of the fries were still in it.

  “The super-duper double-trouble whatever burger?” I’d ask after about a quarter of it was gone.

  She’d nod again, and the burger would go into the garbage, too.

  A third of the way into the chicken sandwich, we’d throw that away. And then we’d toss the basic unadorned cheeseburger, a sandwich small enough that fully half of it was gone, each of us having eaten a whole quarter.

  “Taste and trash,” I’d remind Alessandra, restating our method for managing all of this food without having to loosen our clothing.

  “Taste and trash,” she’d repeat, then glance longingly at the frozen custard dessert with crumbled Oreo cookies that she was holding. She wouldn’t want to stop at the three spoonfuls she’d had, just as I hadn’t wanted to stop at the four I’d permitted myself. But there was no justification for more than that. She’d sigh and dispose of it as well.

  Soon the dashboard would be clear and the garbage bag full and we’d pull out of our parking space in the restaurant’s lot, swing by the nearest trash can or Dumpster and be on our way.

  It was an extreme example of my job survival mechanism, of what I did to a lesser extent at elBulli and in Atlantic City and on most nights in New York. I’d abandon the double-cut pork chop after two bites from its edge, where the meat had a band of fat attached to it, and three bites from its center, which was the best gauge of whether the meat was over- or undercooked. That was all the pork chop I needed, and afterward just a half of one of the three large profiteroles would do. By the end of a given evening I’d have eaten a full meal—really, a fuller than full meal—but I hadn’t staged the kind of bacchanal a less frequent diner often does in a serious restaurant on a big night out.