by Jay Rayner
I never did find out anything that anybody wanted kept secret, though I did have fun. At a warehouse party on the Lower East Side I met Quentin Crisp, the self-styled “stately homo” of old England, then in his eighty-first year, who had made a fine life for himself in New York. Later, I gate-crashed a crew-only party for a rarely remembered movie called Tap, and watched Gregory Hines, Savion Glover, and Sammy Davis, Jr. dance off against one another.
And, of course, I ate. I hummed Supertramp’s most famous song to myself, over breakfasts of pancakes, crisp bacon, maple syrup, and butter. I ate caramelized nuts from the shiny chrome food wagons that seemed to occupy every city block corner and filled the streets with the smell of hot sugar. I fell in love with the honey-roasted spare ribs at Ollie’s, a cavernous Chinese place just off Times Square. It was noisy and bustling and just the spot for a young man a long way from home who was looking to disappear into the crowd.
I had just the one proper restaurant experience, and it was a disappointment. I was invited to lunch by the late Jack Kroll, the highly regarded film critic of Newsweek, who was a friend of my parents. He told me he would take me to a media hangout for our lunch, and I imagined a corner table at one of those restaurants you could be on first-name terms with—Elaine’s, perhaps, or Michael’s Pub—where smart men talked in italics and women drank martinis and wore dresses cut on the bias. In the lift down from his office Jack told me the restaurant we were to visit was a cause of much excitement because nothing like it had opened in New York before.
When I got there, I found out why: It was an Indian restaurant, complete with flocked wallpaper, the pluck of sitars on the sound system, and a menu of chicken tikka masala and pilau rice. Indian food was literally the one thing New York had never, and still does not, do well. London does it well. London is possibly the best place for Indian food outside India. I had traveled 3,500 miles to be fed the only meal I could be certain of getting back home. I picked morosely at my seekh kebab as Jack entertained me with stories of the old days in movies before Jaws and Star Wars.
I returned to New York many times after that, to cover many different kinds of stories, but somehow all of them managed to lead me to food. In the early nineties, for example, I went to Brooklyn to write a long report about the Crown Heights riots between the African-American and Hasidic communities, and in a small bakery off Eastern Parkway, discovered the best bagels it had ever been my pleasure to eat. On another occasion I ate huge muffins with the enormously fat porn baron Al Goldstein while we discussed his battle with the TV companies who wanted to stop him from filling public-access television with hardcore porn. Later, on the same trip, I went to hear Woody Allen play clarinet to a half-deserted room, for a $40 cover charge, and marveled at how poor the food was at the Midtown bar he had chosen for his residency. He might eat out every night, I concluded, but the man had no taste.
The odd lackluster meal aside, I came to realize the one thing about New York that everybody else had already clocked: It regards itself as the greatest city in the world. Not just one of them. Not merely in the premier league. The Greatest. And New Yorkers don’t mind saying this out loud. In my room at the London Hotel I would watch television adverts for a bond issue, to raise money for investment in New York’s government. They finished with a voice-over imploring residents to help keep it “the greatest city in the world.”
Further, I realized, New Yorkers regard its restaurants as an expression of that self-confidence. The city’s residents would not have been at all surprised that some academic had been able to create a map of power in Manhattan simply through its eating houses. Where else would important people go when they needed to be seen?
It has never mattered that Paris might lay claim to the greatest number of great gastro-palaces. From the opening of Le Pavillon on East Fifty-fifth Street in 1941, seen as the city’s first formal, luxury restaurant, through the arrival of Lutece in 1961, to the transplanting of Le Bernardin from Paris to West Fifty-first in 1986, and the opening in 2004 of Thomas Keller’s Per Se at the Time Warner Center, New Yorkers have happily convinced themselves that they have restaurants that can compete with anything anywhere. It was summed up for me by an article in the magazine Vanity Fair in the spring of 2007. It was about the global spread of sushi and discussed the Japanese restaurant Masa, where the tasting menu could cost $450 a head, depending on the available ingredients, before tax and service. The writer described it, quite reasonably, as the best sushi restaurant “in America” and then added, quite unreasonably, that it was possibly “the best in the world.” Only a New York–based magazine could have the arrogance to suggest that the best sushi restaurant in the world might be in their city rather than in Japan.
Naturally, I found the pugnacious certainty of most New Yorkers—both professional critics and eaters alike—that their city was better than any other deeply annoying. After all, I lived in London, a world city in its own right, and one that also had a bunch of really good restaurants, thank you very much. But there was, if I’m honest, one thing in particular that bugged me about the way these people talked up New York, the way they shamelessly called it the greatest city on earth: I suspected they were right.
I am standing outside an Italian restaurant opposite the Time Warner Center and I am having a John Whiteclay Chambers moment. Parked up alongside the curb in front of Gabriel’s are a dozen shiny black limos. One of them has the number plate NY05.
“That’s someone seriously high up at City Hall,” says Tim Zagat, publisher of the guides that carry his name, who wants me to check out this restaurant that the politicians clearly love. “If it was NY01, it would mean the mayor was in there.”
Zagat and his wife, Nina, two former lawyers now in their sixties, have invited me on a tour of Manhattan restaurants. It is something Tim Zagat does regularly: He hires a limo and sets off with a pocket full of Zagat product, to cast an eye over a section of the city’s eateries. He says there are months when he does it every other night, and that people have bid up to $20,000 at charity auctions to join him on the tour. There is no sense of wonder in his voice when he tells me this. He makes it sound entirely reasonable that people should value his company so highly. Zagat is a large, jowly man, as befits a guy who eats out eight times a week, and he appears less to wear clothes than to have made an accommodation with them. His shirttails keep escaping from his waistband and by the end of the night his suit jacket will look as though it is trying to get off his shoulders and back into the closet unaided.
I have asked if I might join the two of them on a tour to gain an insight into the New York restaurant scene. For me it is a great opportunity, but I can’t for the life of me work out why Tim Zagat bothers. It’s not as if the Zagats actually review restaurants. They simply publish the guides, which started nearly thirty years ago as a restaurant tip sheet circulated among their friends. People were asked to score restaurants out of 30 on food, service, and ambience. By the third year of the exercise more than 500 people were providing information on more than 300 restaurants and 10,000 copies were circulating for free. As Tim Zagat once put it, their hobby “had blossomed into a $10,000 after-tax expense.”
It was in 1982 that they turned it into a business. More than twenty years and many dinners later, the New York guide sells over 600,000 copies a year and the law career is a distant memory. There are editions covering more than forty U.S. cities, as well as London, Paris, and Tokyo, all using information supplied by over 100,000 individual restaurant surveyors. There is now Zagat.com, a Web site providing information on restaurants worldwide, and Zagat for the PalmPilot.
In the Zagat guide for New York, Gabriel’s has a solid score of 22 out of 30 for its modern Tuscan food, though as Tim says, it is more famous for the famous people who eat there than what they eat. As we walk through the door, the small stocky maître d’ falls on Zagat as if he were a long-lost son. It is 8:30 p.m. and the room, which is lined with curved booths, is full. The NY05 limo, we are told in a whisper
, belongs to the New York City director of finance.
Paul Wolfowitz, who had only just resigned in disgrace from the presidency of the World Bank, had been and gone, as had the billionaire Herb Allen. Toward the back is a CNN reporter and Vanity Fair writer called Jeffrey Toobin, having dinner with his wife, who used to work for Zagat. So we stop by the table for a dose of chat so small, you would need a microscope to spot it. This is the shape the evening will take: We will walk into a restaurant, look at people eating, exchange words with someone senior in front of house, and maybe stop by a table of Zagat’s friends.
I quickly note that Nina is staying out of it. She remains in the limo, or slumps down on a sofa by the door with a magazine until we are done, as though she is merely tolerating her husband’s need to tour the tables.
We move on to the Time Warner Center. He wants to show me Porterhouse, which he says is a great new steak house, but really he wants me to meet Michael Lomonaco, the head chef. Lomonaco was head chef at Windows on the World at the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. He only survived 9/11 because he went to ground level to get his glasses fixed. Almost his entire staff died. Now he is back, with a big, butch American steak house, and Zagat clearly regards the man’s return to the stove as a sign of renewal in the city. Lomonaco comes out of the kitchen to glad-hand Zagat, as if he has nothing better to do right in the middle of the dinner rush.
Ten minutes—a long stay, by Zagat standards—and we’re done. Now he wants me to see Café Gray, a New York take on a Parisian brasserie that he tells me is flawed “because the menu never changes.” Still, he says, the interior is pretty with all its glossy wood, and shiny metal bits, and he’s right. The open kitchen is by the windows and looks out over the star field of Manhattan. Zagat tells me I must have a look at the private dining room.
“Aren’t there people eating in there?” I ask.
“Sure, but it’s not like we’re going to sit down with them. We’re just going to look.”
That’s what we do. We walk into someone’s private party, look at people eating, who look back at us, startled, as if we’re the scary drunks from the bar, and then we leave. I clench my buttocks in embarrassment.
It only gets worse. He insists we go across the way to Masa. People in this Japanese restaurant are paying at least $500 a head for dinner here. They are having a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and Zagat wants to look at them having it. As we approach the door, carved from a single piece of 2,000-year-old wood, he announces theatrically that we should be quiet, but then he strides in, stands at the end of the beautiful blond-wood bar, and hails the chef, Masayoshi Takayama, with a big hearty country club wave.
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 y
oung 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.