Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (17 page)

At his own book party in New York City a while back, Harrison, whom I’d met previously only once, spent the entire evening standing outside with me, whom he hardly knew, chain-smoking and talking about food, ignoring the rich, the powerful, the famous, and the smart who waited for him inside. At the grizzled age of seventy-two, suffering variously from gout and many other complaints, he is a rock star in France—barely able to walk down the street without being mobbed—and he lives like one. The French understand the greatness of such men immediately.

The lazy and the foolish compare him to Hemingway—which is a terrible injustice, as Jim is both a better writer and a better man.

I don’t know many people who could be called “great.” But Jim would be one of them. He smokes, he drinks—and regularly attempts frottage with an impunity and a style that will disappear after him.

Speaking of Old Fuckers:
the James Beard House goes on the villain list—because it harbors and gives safe haven to villains. It gives them somewhere to go. It provides comfort and succor and the illusion of importance to a bunch of supremely irrelevant old fucks who have nothing to do and nothing to say of any significance to the restaurant business they claim to support and love. It’s a private dining society for the soon-to-be-incontinent—like the Friars Club for old mummies who never themselves told a joke but like to hang around comedians.

When the president of the Beard Foundation got pinched for embezzlement a while back, it should have come as a surprise to no one. For years, even the casual observer could watch as “money goes in—nothing comes out,” but nobody gave a shit. After the news went public that this nobody, this nebbish from nowhere, had been feathering his nest, everybody was shocked! shocked! and rushed to separate themselves from the wreckage with unseemly speed and appropriate expressions of outrage. But that was the purpose of the whole enterprise. To give jobs and power to the otherwise powerless and unemployable.

I’ll never forget my friend, chef Matt Moran’s experience. Matt is a Big Cheese in Sydney; his restaurant, ARIA, one of the best in the country. Invited to cook a meal at the Beard House, he packed the best of his kitchen staff, all his ingredients and his bags, and flew them all, at great expense, to New York. Having heard of the notoriously impossible-to-work-in kitchen at the House (why would an institution honoring the work of
chefs
actually have a kitchen they could cook in?), he managed to arm-twist every chef friend he had in New York to make use of their busy restaurants’ kitchens to prepare. I agreed to help finish and serve the meal.

We managed to crank out the meal—a very ambitious, very modern menu featuring the best of Australian seafood, meat, cheese, and wines—and afterward, when the chef was summoned to the dining room to take a bow, receive much deserved kudos, and answer a few questions, I watched.

He walked into the room expecting the “cream” or at least “some” of New York’s food media. There was none. There rarely is. He would surely have settled, I’m guessing, for what could optimistically be called a complement of the town’s “influential” diners—or “foodie elite.” No. Not at all.

One look at the clueless duffers blinking up at him uncomprehendingly from their tables, and it was clear he’d been snookered. How much had he spent on this exercise in futility? To fly all that food, all those cooks, all those miles from the other side of the world? Put them up in hotels? Ten, fifteen, twenty thousand dollars? All that work? And here comes the first question from the floor—yes, the gentleman over there, who looks like he just limped away from the shrimp buffet at a suburban golf club.

The man fixes Moran in his blurry gaze, leans back in his chair, pats his belly for effect, and asks, “So, chef. You’re from Australia, right? How come we didn’t have any kangaroo—or like…
koala
on the menu?”

Somewhere inside Moran, I saw something die. He knew now. He had the information.

Beard House. Evil.

Ariane Daguin
is a hero.

Twenty-five or twenty-six years ago, Ariane, who had been working for a purveyor/manufacturer of French-style charcuterie, started up a small business dedicated to producing and providing to local chefs New York State foie gras, as well as other products and preparations that French chefs of the time wanted, needed, and had not previously been able to get. She started out with one truck and a dream.

A quarter century later, her business, D’Artagnan, has become very successful. But at great personal and financial cost. She’s had to wage a constant and very expensive war—both legal and for the hearts and minds of the public—to protect her right to sell this traditional product. Yet she has gone way, way beyond protecting her own interests and her own business. Almost alone, she has been there for chefs and purveyors across the country who have run afoul of the at-times dangerous anti-foie activists. She was a prime mover in the counterattack after foie gras was banned in Chicago. She is there to offer support when individual chefs are terrorized or their businesses targeted for vandalism or disruption. She has put her money at the service of people who will never buy her products or know her name. Nearly alone, she defends a culinary tradition dating back to Roman times: the right to hand-feed ducks and geese, who live in far better conditions than any chicken ever sold at the Colonel’s, until their livers become plump and delicious.

She has shown far, far more courage on this issue than any chef I know.

Mario Batali and Eric Ripert and José Andrés
are heroes because they raise more money for charity—and put in more time doing it—than movie stars and CEOs fifty times wealthier than they are.

José Andrés is also a hero because (I strongly suspect) he’s secretly an agent for some ultra-classified and very cool department of the Spanish Foreign Ministry. He’s the unofficial food ambassador for Spain, Spanish products, and Spanish chefs. You can’t talk to the motherfucker for five minutes without him gently slipping mention of Spanish ham or Spanish cheese or Spanish olive oil into the conversation. When José’s lips move, you never know who’s actually talking: Ferran Adrià? Juan Mari Arzak? Andoni Aduriz? Or the nation itself? Somebody is sending you a message—you can just never be sure who. At the end of the day, all you can be sure of is that the message will be delicious.

Regina Schrambling
is both hero and villain. My favorite villain, actually.

The former
New York Times
and
LA Times
food writer and blogger is easily the Angriest Person Writing About Food. Her weekly blog entries at gastropoda.com are a deeply felt, episodic unburdening, a venting of all her bitterness, rage, contempt, and disappointment with a world that never seems to live up to her expectations. She hates nearly everything—and everybody—and when she doesn’t, she hates herself for allowing such a thing to happen. She never lets an old injury, a long-ago slight, go. She proofreads her former employer, the
New York Times
, with an eye for detail—every typo, any evidence of further diminution of quality—and when she can latch on to something (as, let’s face it, she always can), she unleashes a withering torrent of ridicule and contempt.

She hates Alice Waters. She hates George Bush. (She’ll still be writing about him with the same blind rage long after he’s dead of old age.) She hates Ruth Reichl, Mario Batali, Frank Bruni, Mark Bittman…me. She hates the whole rotten, corrupt, self-interested sea in which she must swim: a daily ordeal, which, at the same time, she feels compelled to chronicle. She hates hypocrisy, silliness, mendacity. She is immaculate in the consistency and regularity of her loathing.

She is also very funny—and, frequently, right about things. And always, even when I strongly disagree with her, worth reading. She rarely if ever commits the first and most common sin of food writing—being boring.

For inventing cute names for her targets, though, and not having the stones to simply say what everybody knows she
is
saying, she’s a villain. If you’re going to piss on Mario every other week, say “Mario Batali.” Not “Molto Ego.” Stand up fucking proud and tell us why you hate Mario Batali and everything he touches. Which also makes her a villain in my book: because it’s all fine and good to loathe Mario in person and in principle, but to deny any value at all in any of his enterprises is criminally disingenuous—particularly for a food writer.

His name is “Frank Bruni,” not the funny name “Panchito” she refers to him by. And for the unpardonable act of being insufficiently critical of George W. Bush in the run-up to the election (a transgression Bruni was hardly alone in committing), his every word as the eventual
Times
dining critic was (for Ms. Schrambling, anyway) utterly worthless—or worse.

I think Alan Richman is a douchebag. Writing the chapter about him in this book felt really good. Regina should try to be as specific as possible and clearly identify the targets of her derision.

Hero/villain, with Regina Schrambling it doesn’t matter. She is—even at her crankiest, most unfair, and most vindictive—good for the world of food and dining: a useful emetic, a periodic scourging, the person shouting “Fire!” repeatedly in a too-crowded room. You have to respect the depth and duration of her scorn. I do.

She is, unfortunately, a return to that vanishing breed of food writer and “gourmet” who claims to love food yet secretly loathes the people who actually
cook
it.

While this might, if you think about it, be an indicator of good instincts on her part, it is unlovely, to be sure. But
somebody
has to call “bullshit”—regularly—on those of us who cook or write about food or talk about it. Even when wrong. There needs to be someone out there, constantly watching. It may as well be Regina.

I can’t wait to read her next blog entry.

T
he intersection where chefs, writers,
restaurant reviewers, publicists, and journalists meet has always been a swamp, an ethical quagmire where the lines between right and wrong are, by unarticulated consensus, kept deliberately permeable. It’s like a neverending hillbilly joke: we’ve all fucked each other’s sisters. Everybody in the family is aware of it—but we delicately avoid the subject.

The
New York Times
struggles mightily to remain above the orgy of pride, vanity, greed, gluttony, and other sinful behaviors around it—traditionally by keeping its critic as anonymous as possible. False identities, wigs, and other disguises are employed in an effort to keep their writer from being recognized. It doesn’t always work, of course. Any restaurant with serious four-star aspirations always has someone on staff who can pick out Frank Bruni or Sam Sifton from across a crowded room. To what degree that helps, however, is debatable. To the
Times’
credit, I’ve never heard of anyone “reaching” a full-time reviewer, influencing the review through favors, special access, or things of value. From what I’ve heard, lavishing extra attention on them is risky—and not necessarily rewarding. Knowing the
Times
guy by sight is useful mostly for making extra-sure you don’t fuck up—rather than providing you with a real edge. Those chef-players who
do
dare to send extras are very careful to do the same for all the surrounding tables as well. Anonymity does not provide 100 percent protection from special treatment. But it’s an extra layer, an added degree of difficulty—the ethical version of a wet suit or hazmat garment, keeping the
Times
man (or woman) safe from contamination in the primordial soup of free food, bodily fluids, and slow-festering morals they must swim in.

Journalists who write about food and chefs are in the business of providing punchy, entertaining prose—hopefully with a good human-interest story attached, and some good quotes. More important, they want and need an angle or perspective different from what every other food or dining writer is doing. They would greatly prefer it if a Web site or food blogger has not already comprehensively covered the same subject. This is, to be fair, extraordinarily difficult. People who write professionally about food—to the exclusion of all other topics—are painfully aware of the limitations of the form. There are only so many ways to describe a slow-roasted pork belly before you run into the word “unctuous”—again. Trying to conjure a descriptive for salad must be like one’s tenth year writing “Penthouse Letters”: the words “crunchy,” “zing,” “tart,” and “rich” are as bad as “poon,” “cooter,” “cooz,” and “snatch” when scrolling across the brain in predictable, dreary procession. Worse, while your editor has just asked for an overview of “Queens ethnic” in a week, some lonely food nerd has been methodically eating his way, block by block, across the entire borough and blogging about it for years.

Pity, too, the poor chefs. One of their new jobs in this brave new world of dining is co-opting, corrupting, and otherwise compromising food writers whenever possible. The care and feeding of the Fourth Estate—and their bastard offspring, food bloggers—has become an important skill set for any chef looking to hit the Big Time. It’s no longer enough to cook well, to be able to run a kitchen. You have to be able to identify and evaluate all the people who might hurt you—and (as best as possible) neutralize them ahead of time. One memorably bad review can punch a hole in a restaurant’s painstakingly acquired reputation, letting the air out of one’s public profile in a way that’s often hard to put back. One snarky Web site, early in a restaurant’s life, can hobble it in ways that might well prove fatal in the long run.

When you are repeatedly made to look ridiculous, lowbrow, or déclassé, on Grub Street or Eater, it’s very hard to get your mojo back—as operators like Jeffrey Chodorow have found, to their displeasure. Nowadays, the professional snarkologist will confidently imply that a Chodorow place will surely suck even
before
it opens. In a business where something as nebulous and unmeasurable as “buzz” is seen as a vital factor for the bottom line, everybody with a keyboard is a potential enemy.

But, traditionally at least, “turning” a journo is usually a pretty simple matter. Just feed them for free. You’ll never have to remind them about it later. Believe me. They’ll remember. It’s like giving a bent cop a Christmas turkey. They may not be able to help you directly—but they’ll at least make an effort to not hurt you. And if you can make a journalist or a Webmaster your “special friend,” you have a powerful ally. In addition to singing your praise early and often from the rooftops, they can act as your proxy, shouting down those who might question your magnificence.

Every time a restaurant opens, the joint’s PR firm sits down with the chef and the owner and starts running down the list of usual suspects, wanting to know who are the “friendlies” and who are not. Most restaurants have one version or another of the same list. They are all, presumably, the sort of people who want to come to a special pre-opening “tasting” at your restaurant. They will not be reviewing you—yet, which lets them off the ethical hook, so to speak.

Few are the people who, when passing the smiling woman with the clipboard from the restaurant’s PR agency, want to find themselves off that list the next time a restaurant opens—particularly if it’s a high-end, high-prestige operator, or if there’s a hotshot chef involved. The thinking is: “Okay, I hate
this
place. But if I take too ferocious a dump on it, I won’t be welcome at the
next
place—which might be really good!” Or…“I really enjoy being able to get a table on short notice at X (an existing, hard-to-get-into, fine-dining restaurant). I don’t want to fuck that up!”

When it comes to yours truly, I confess to being hopelessly mobbed up. While I do not claim to “review” restaurants—or even write about them for magazines much anymore—I cannot be trusted or relied on to give readers anywhere near the truth, the whole truth, or anything like it.

I’ve been swimming in those blood-warm waters for a long time now. I’m friends with a lot of chefs. Others, whom I’m not friends with, I often identify with, or respect to a degree that would prevent me from being frank with a reader—or anyone outside the business. After all those years inside the business, I’m still too sympathetic to anybody who works hard in a kitchen to be a trustworthy reviewer. I’m three degrees separated from a lot of chefs in this world. I get a lot of meals comped. If I were to walk into one of Mario Batali’s places, for instance, and see something unspeakable going on in the kitchen—animal sacrifice or satanic rituals, or something unhygienic or deeply disturbing, I’d never write about it.

I’ve been on both sides of the fence. Eager chef, looking to make “friends” out of journos or bloggers. And a bent, compromised writer—whose interests are way too commingled with his subjects for him to ever be truly trusted.

But for all the awful things I’ve seen and done, I’ve never stooped to…well…let’s begin at the beginning…with a food writer, critic, and journalist who could, on balance, be considered among the very best: a lion among the trolls, an excellent writer of sentences, with remarkably good taste in restaurants, a refined palate, and decades of experience. But I digress. Let’s get to the action.

I called Alan Richman a douchebag.

So, Richman, respected elder statesman of restaurant criticism, winner of an armload of James Beard Awards, and writer-reviewer for
GQ
, responded in keeping with his position as the “dean” of food journalism and in the time-honored tradition of his craft.

He reviewed the restaurant I worked at.

Actually, it was somewhat worse than that. He reviewed the restaurant I
used to
work at.

Though he acknowledged, by paragraph two of the gleeful take-down that followed, that he
knew
I hadn’t worked at Les Halles in nearly a decade, he forged on, absolutely savaging everything from upholstery to lighting, service, and food. He did mention a dessert favorably, attributing its lack of awfulness to the probability that I had not contaminated it. It was a thorough critical disembowelment: the words “grubby,” “acrid,” “flavorless,” “surly,” “greasy,” and “inedible” all making appearances in the same few paragraphs.

It’s the customary practice of major media to devote their very limited restaurant review space to three categories of restaurant: (1) new endeavors brought to us by already critically acclaimed chefs, (2) the rarer discovery of a new chef ’s debut effort, or (3) a change of guard or concept at a well-known, already well-reviewed restaurant. Les Halles did not, by any stretch of the imagination, meet any of these criteria. At no time did Richman suggest why he might be reviewing a sixteen-year-old restaurant of limited aspirations. Whatever its virtues, Les Halles was not “hot” or particularly relevant to today’s trends. The menu certainly hadn’t changed in years—and there had been no change in chefs.

Nor did he mention anywhere in his scorching review what was surely the most cogent point: that only weeks earlier, I’d repeatedly called him a douchebag. In fact, I’d nominated him for “Douchebag of the Year” in front of a hooting audience of half-drunk foodies at the South Beach Food and Wine Festival (an award Richman won handily, I might add).

The award, only one of many honors handed out in a silly, half-assed faux ceremony (presenters wore shorts and flip-flops), was widely reported on the Internet. And I guess Richman’s feelings were hurt.

Enough so that he was inspired to remove his bathrobe, brush the cat hair off his jacket, and head into Manhattan to review—after all these years—Les Halles. A steak frites joint.

Now, let me ask
you
a question: If I were to call you, say…an asshole? You’d probably call me an asshole right back. Or maybe you’d go me one better. You’d call me a
fucking
asshole. Or, better yet, get really personal: “A loud, egotistical, one-note asshole who’s been cruising on the reputation of one obnoxious, over-testosteroned book for way too long and who should just shut the fuck up.”

This would be entirely fair and appropriate, one would think. I call you a schoolyard name. You respond in kind. You acknowledge the insult and reply with a pithy riposte.

But not Richman. He is, after all, an impeccably credentialed journalist, critic, educator, and arbiter of taste. Not for him a public pissing contest with some semi-educated journeyman who called him a dirty name.

No. What this utterly bent, gutless punk does, metaphorically speaking, is track down my old girlfriend from junior high—whom I haven’t seen in years—sneak up behind her, and deliver a vicious sucker punch.

That’ll teach me, right?

It’s the old “I can’t hurt you—but I can surely hurt someone you love” strategy, made more egregious and pathetic by the simple fact that Richman, douchebag or not, is a fairly erudite guy, fully trained in the manly art of the insult. He
could
have nailed me directly. An option whose possibilities are only hinted at in his review when he makes a most excellent (and painfully funny) comparison of me to beefy, direct-to-video action star Steven Seagal. That was what you’d call a palpable hit.
That
hurt.

In order to better understand Richman’s inappropriate and unethical coldcocking of my blameless former comrades, you need to go back, to examine what moved me to accuse this beloved titan of food journalism of epic douchebaggery in the first place—and ponder if even that description is adequate. Was it, perhaps, part of a larger pattern of behavior?

A year after the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States, New Orleans was a city still on its knees—1,836 people dead; 100 billion dollars in damages; untold thousands of its citizens dispersed, dislocated, traumatized; lifetimes of accumulated possessions, photographs, mementos gone forever. Worse, still, there was the realization by the residents of an entire major American city that their government, when push came to shove, just didn’t give a fuck about them. The city was still in shock, whole neighborhoods stood empty, one hospital was fully functioning, and the restaurant industry—which had been among the first to return after the flooding and was desperately trying to hold on to its staffs—was down 40 percent in business. Or more.

And that is when Alan Richman comes along, having decided in his wisdom that
now
is the time for a snarky reevaluation of the New Orleans dining scene. He’d already determined that New Orleans pretty much deserved what it got. Inspired, perhaps, by the Tyson defense team, he launches right away into a key component of his argument. That “the bitch was asking for it”:

He suggests that bad character and loose morals have led directly to what happened to New Orleans. For one thing, they like food too much, he goes on to say. This from a man who, for decades, has made a living shoving food into his crumb-flecked maw—then writing about it in a way calculated to make us feel like we should care. And we
did
care. So it’s monstrously disingenuous of Richman to now claim that, perhaps, we care too much: