The Man Who Ate the World (27 page)

The small, bald, Japanese man comes over to see him. It strikes me that no chef would refuse to talk to Zagat, but this one looks awkward and is clearly eager to get back to his customers. Zagat seems oblivious.
He wants to know about a kind of stone that has been used for the décor so that he can get his architect to buy some for his house. Masa shifts from foot to foot and glances back over his shoulder at his $500 a head diners. Eventually Zagat lets the chef go back to feeding his customers.

We climb into the limo and barrel on down to the Meatpacking district, where, Zagat says, 2,000 new restaurant seats recently opened on one single city block. “The expansion of the business is at such a rate right now that it’s even got this optimist thinking it can’t last.” We wander through pan-Asian brasseries and Mexican places and faux French joints, carved into old funky warehouse spaces, with bare brick walls and polished concrete floors and the ripple of heavy sub-base in the air. Every table is occupied, every chair filled.

Zagat does not appear to be recognized everywhere we go. Occasionally he is challenged by a glossy young person at the door holding the reservation book. He says, “We’re just taking a tour,” like people do that every night in New York’s restaurants, wandering around, sticking their heads into private dining rooms or standing between tables as waiters thunder by with plates of food. They all let him pass. Sometimes he stops at a table and offers the diners a Zagat guide, a map, or a card with a code that will give them a free subscription to
zagat.com
.

“It’s not a business card,” he says. “So don’t throw it away. It’s worth $30.” Some people are baffled by this tousled man. Others appear genuinely grateful. This element of the tour—personal hand-to-hand marketing by Zagat himself—makes a kind of sense. But it still seems a lot of effort from a guy who runs such a huge company. It’s certainly not necessary to the business. If it were, somebody would be doing the same in London, and I know for a fact they aren’t.

“I like restaurants,” he says when I ask him why he is doing this. “I like being in them. I like watching people. This is my version of being a politician.” In launching the Zagat guides—by harnessing the critical faculties of all diners—he says he has created “a new form of democracy.” This point is unarguable. The Zagat guides predicted the era of online democracy, when the Web would allow every consumer a critical
voice, and did so long before the Web had even been thought of, let alone provided an easy mechanism by which to achieve it.

He also says that wandering around restaurants gives him a sense of how the business is doing. “I can tell just by looking at the tables, by seeing who’s here and what they’re ordering, how healthy the restaurant is.”

“Really?”

“Oh, sure. It’s important to see the age of diners.” Not that he appears entirely comfortable with what he finds. We stand in the middle of Morimoto, a slick, buzzy Japanese restaurant, designed in shades of white, and he mutters, as if to himself, “Look at them, they’re all so young. They’re all so damn young.” In another place he reacts with surprise at the sight of four women eating together. “It’s good that they have the confidence to do that.”

I suggest gently that this might be a generational thing; that in the twenty-first century young women eating together is not exactly worthy of a stop on a sight-seeing tour. “That’s what I’m saying,” he replies. “It’s good to see.”

In Mario Batali’s Italian place, Del Posto, he relaxes. “Look!” he says, pointing. “Look! People with gray hair.”

He leads me into a pan-Asian restaurant called Buddakan, which is exactly how I imagine hell would look if the devil went into catering. It is a grotesquely large restaurant of bare brick walls, and overinflated chandeliers, made up of interlocking echoey chambers reached by huge staircases, and I can’t help but think that somewhere is a final staircase that leads to a fiery pit, full of horned beasts, serving only “Belarus Home Cooking.”

We shuffle through the crowd. “A girl could get pregnant on the way to the bar here,” Zagat barks into my ear, above the noise. Young people wolf down plates of chili rock shrimp and spiced tuna tartar as though their lives depend upon it and my ears consider hemorrhaging in time to the music.

Suddenly Zagat spots some friends at a corner table. He introduces me to “everyone’s favorite old-time cop,” a late-middle-aged man, with
stubble over his fat-pleated chin. Bo Dietl, a former New York policeman, is reputed to have arrested more felons during his career than any other, and is now a private investigator. His suit, with its Stars and Stripes lapel pin, shines under the light, and his receding hair is slicked back. With him is a media-friendly Harvard law professor who shares his name with the playwright Arthur Miller, and a silver-haired class-action lawyer called Mel Weiss, who is under investigation by the federal government for allegedly paying plaintiffs to bring lawsuits.

They shout questions about restaurants and food at Zagat, who shouts back. Dietl makes apologetic noises about their choice of restaurant that night.

Zagat waves them away. “You’re not here for haute cuisine,” he says to Dietl.

The former cop grins up at him. “No. We’re here for pussy.”

Zagat, startled, rocks back on his heels.

“Oh, yeah,” he says awkwardly.

I can’t help but look down the table at the two young women, wearing shiny dresses in primary colors with plunging necklines, who are sitting with these old men.

It is while we are escaping this festering live-action movie by Hieronymus Bosch that an unexpected thought occurs to me. I am hungry. It is nearly 11 p.m. and I have just spent the past three hours wandering New York’s top restaurants, watching other people eat. I have seen plates loaded with magnificent steaks, and platters of pristine sushi. There have been roast chickens, and complex Asian curries and huge, crisp salads of a size that only Americans would consider reasonable. I have not been able to touch any of it. I would say I had been like a eunuch in a harem, except that a eunuch is supposed to have no urges, and I was now one huge, trembling heap of urge. I couldn’t remember when I had last been this hungry. I was sure it was sometime before the onset of puberty.

This, I realized now, was a genuinely rare occurrence. While eating in
restaurants obviously fulfils a basic need, I generally don’t go to them because I’m feeling dizzy through lack of food. I go for the experience, for the taste, for the pleasure. Nutrition comes a distant second. That was all the more true on these eating trips of mine. The issue was not about getting enough. It was always about more, about fitting everything in. I didn’t do the work-outs merely to keep off the fat. I did them to build up an appetite.

Now I have one, a serious one, and it is an uncommon pleasure. After much debate, and a few calls to various restaurants to discover the kitchens are closed, we head for the Pearl Oyster Bar, a New England–style seafood restaurant in the heart of Greenwich Village. Nina raves about it en route and reads me the review from
Zagat.com
on her PalmPilot. Tim falls silent for the first time as we approach the narrow street where Pearl is located and at last I begin to understand at least one reason why he might undertake these tours. At the end there is always the promise of a well-earned meal, which is the best kind of meal there is.

That night we eat deep-fried oysters in a crisp overcoat of batter with coarse tartar sauce. We eat meaty steamer clams, dipped in pulled butter, and then I have a lobster roll, the most promiscuous use of a luxury ingredient I have ever come across, created purely out of abundance: the prime meat of an entire one-pound lobster, bound in a mayonnaise sauce on a sweet, soft-grilled hot dog bun. It isn’t pretty. It isn’t subtle. But it is definitely dinner.

I
t was in New York that I first began to worry about my Internet gastroporn habit. I feared it was out of control. My morning could not begin unless, perched naked at the hotel room desk, my back arched to avoid it touching the cold plastic of the chair, I had checked the food discussion boards. There were now so many of them: egullet, obviously, which was the online equivalent of a noisy conference center. There was Opinionated
About, for a more select discussion, plus Mouthfuls, a breakaway from both egullet and OA, set up by people who resented the latter’s exclusive invitation-only policy. And then there was the secretive NIAC, a tiny site with just a few dozen members who didn’t think the OA membership policy was anything like exclusive enough. (“First rule of NIAC: Do not talk about NIAC.”) Nobody knew what NIAC stood for save the founders and they weren’t telling. It merely added to the cliquey, college-society feel of the site.

I belonged to all of these, and I was left with a terrible sense of incompleteness, of tasks undone, if I had not logged on to all of them first thing to get the latest news from New York. In London, seeking news on foreign restaurants like this almost made sense; now that I was here, continuing to do so was bizarre. It made the similarities between Internet gastro porn and the below-the-belt variety unavoidable. It was about doing vicariously at my desk what I should have been doing for real.

Back in London I had wasted hours reading accounts of other people’s meals at Jean-Georges or Per Se. Because I earn my living as a restaurant critic I had been able to tell my wife that this was vital research. Sadly, she’s not stupid. Every time she caught me salivating over pictures of someone else’s lunch she observed me as if I had been found with my trousers about my ankles. It got to the point where I wished she’d catch me looking at something genuinely made of naked human flesh rather than the roasted animal variety. It would, I concluded, have been slightly less embarrassing.

Here, in New York, I felt that self-disgust all the more keenly. Only sad people look at pictures of other people’s food on the Internet. The main issue, I realized, was the yawning chasm that could open up between the business of looking and the business of doing. This had been brought home to me on my first night in the city when I went to dinner with friends at Peter Luger’s, the legendary Brooklyn steak house just over the Williamsburg Bridge from Manhattan, which was established in 1887. For years I had read about the steaks at Luger’s, and dreamed
about going there to try one for myself. Britain does not do good steak. We have the cows, but not the will. British restaurants are never prepared to cut the beef thick enough or to serve it in large enough slabs. The British steak is a thin and insubstantial thing, an insult to the animal.

Digital pictures of Luger’s steaks suggested a different dish altogether: a crisp blackened char on the outside, cut to reveal innards of pink or purple that leaked their juices across the plate. People wrote about these dry-aged steaks as if they were wines that had been allowed to develop a fine “mineral” taste, with a rich meaty “end.” They discussed the smoky fat and the virtuous interplay of meat, salt, and fire. When Michelin gave Luger’s a star in their first New York guide—a remarkable award for a restaurant that had no fancy linen and refused to accept anything other than cash—I decided that one day I would go there.

It looked as I had imagined, all rough-hewn wood and bare floorboards. The waiters, with their barrel chests, thick forearms, and sharp backchat, also fitted the script. I liked the side dish of fried potatoes and I loved the thick-cut, dry-cured bacon. But the steak itself was a huge letdown. It was dull, insipid, just so much blood-sodden meat on a platter. Eating it was relentless.

I knew that Steve Plotnicki was a regular at Luger’s. He was a regular everywhere. I described to him how my steak had been nothing compared to the ones I had read about online. He nodded sadly. “My dad the kosher butcher used to say ‘you can’t crawl inside the meat.’”

I frowned. “By which he meant?”

Plotnicki shrugged. “Every animal is different. You can’t really tell whether the steak is going to be any good until you start chewing.”

Perhaps, but at $250 for a three-person steak dinner, I had the right to expect a reasonable quality threshold. I returned to reading other people’s online accounts of heroic meals at Luger’s, like a newly deflowered virgin staring at something X-rated and wondering, baffled, why my first time hadn’t been quite like that.

The only comfort I took in my online habit was that it was not unique to me. In London, the online food community was small enough that we
could get most of us around one table. (We had once done so. A few years ago I went out with fifteen of them to eat a whole pig at St. John in Clerkenwell, and I quickly realized that almost all the people I had ever corresponded with were there.)

By comparison, New York’s online world is gargantuan. It isn’t just the discussion forums. It is also the blogs, with their instant reviews. For years, New York’s restaurateurs had been used to worrying only about
The New York Times
critic, who could be relied upon to come at least three times and as many as five. A bad review from the
Times,
usually written with all the wit and energy of a church sermon, might be devastating for business, but at least the chefs and owners knew it was properly researched. Nobody could or would say the same about the bloggers.

“They play to a different set of rules,” I was told one morning by Danny Meyer, the owner of Manhattan landmark restaurants like the Union Square Café, The Gramercy Tavern, and Eleven Madison Park. “They don’t have to check their facts. They can do it anonymously. Speed is the name of the game. That drives me nuts.”

Mario Batali, the celebrity chef and restaurateur, felt the same way. “Many of the anonymous authors who vent on blogs rant their snarky vituperatives from behind the smoky curtain of the Web,” he wrote online, in the summer of 2007. “This allows them a peculiar and nasty vocabulary that seems to be taken as truth by virtue of the fact that it has been printed
somewhere.
Unfortunately, this also allows untruths, lies and malicious and personally driven dreck to be quoted as fact.”

Batali’s diatribe appeared on Eater.com, a commercially run blog about New York restaurants, which makes its money from advertising. There is also Grub Street, the blog of
New York Magazine,
which competes with Eater to be the first with gossip from the city’s food business, and Diner’s Journal,
The New York Times
food blog, where Frank Bruni, the newspaper’s critic, posts stuff he can’t fit into his column. Now, any chef trying to open in the city has to have one eye on the plate and one on the computer screen.