by Jay Rayner
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.
It 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.
No one knows this better than Gordon Ramsay, whose restaurant at the London Hotel, where I was staying, had received a kicking since its opening in November 2006. Some of the criticism had come from the old media. A major profile in The New Yorker magazine had portrayed a shambolic operation with a gifted, ambitious, but troubled chef desperately trying to play catch-up. The review in the Times had been mediocre. “For all his brimstone and bravado,” Frank Bruni wrote of Ramsay, “his strategy for taking Manhattan turns out to be a conventional one, built on familiar French ideas and techniques that have been executed with more flair, more consistency and better judgment in restaurants with less-vaunted pedigrees.”
What had really damaged the place, what had really put it on the back foot, was a constant stream of bad stories on the blogs. First there was Bruni announcing that, when he booked, he had been told he could only have his table for two hours. He was also informed that he had to wear a shirt and jacket. “Glad to have that spelled out,” Bruni responded. “Like many a New York diner, I often enter r
estaurants bare-chested.”
Then, Eater.com revealed that the place was threatened by an all-out strike by non-unionized European staff who had discovered they were going to be cut out of the tip pool. Neighbors also moaned to the blogs about smells from the extraction units. It was okay when they were cooking bacon, they said, lousy when it was duck. Naturally, I read every single one of these stories, hungering for any snippet of gossip I could find, for I liked to live the life of the virtual restaurant goer.
The restaurant’s spokespeople tried to claim these were just normal teething problems—that the two-hour limit was a mistake by an overzealous reservation clerk; that the union-tips issue was just a little local labor difficulty—but the sense that the restaurant was in trouble was unavoidable, not least because Ramsay quickly sacked his head chef, Neil Ferguson, and replaced him with a New Zealander called Josh Emett.
Ramsay’s restaurants now felt to me like embassies for Britain’s culinary efforts, their chefs the ambassadors whom I called upon as a matter of courtesy if I happened to be in town. I had eaten at his place in Dubai and interviewed his chef there, Jason Whitelock. In Tokyo I had met up with Andy Cook, Ramsay’s head chef at the Conrad Tokyo. Now I was in the kitchen at the London sipping coffee with Emett.
“I find it all mind blowing,” Emett told me. “There’s just so much information out there, and we’re constantly trying to work out where it’s coming from. You just don’t get that sort of thing in London.”
I asked him if he read everything. “Jean Baptiste [the maître d’] reads everything and he tells me what to read and what not to read.” For a while he brooded on the fact that they had been ridiculed for not knowing the precise definition of a Nantucket scallop when they put the term on the menu. “I was concentrating on other things, not geography, so we came a cropper on the whole Nantucket scallops thing.” He looked around at his huge brigade of chefs busily preparing for the lunch service. “You only have to look at how much effort is going into this to know how serious we are about it.” And then, almost desperately, “We did this exactly the same as any opening. We didn’t do anything differently.” He was at a loss as to why they had received so much negative publicity.
I thought I knew why. A couple of nights before we met, I had eaten at Gordon Ramsay at the London Hotel, in the subdued melancholia of the dining room with its mother-of-pearl-style walls and its gloomy elegance. If this room had been a person, it would have been an elderly lady in an expensive cashmere two-piece, hair just so, ankles crossed tidily under the table: attractive but hardly exciting. That night I had eaten, well, I had eaten . . . food. There was a scallop dish. There was a duck dish. There was something with sweetbreads and an apple tarte tatin. It was all expertly prepared. It was all assured and confident. No one should ever attempt to deny the glossy professionalism of the Ramsay operation.
It was also completely unmemorable. What did stay with me was the clientele. Just as Ramsay’s in Dubai had been it was full of English people: a couple of braying posh boys in rugby shirts; some girls in footballers’ wives dresses with bottle-blond hair; a few mousy English couples, fidgeting at their seats. Dubai had been Guilford. This was suburban London, a little farther into town, but not by much.
That night, after dinner, I went to my hotel room thirty-five floors above, fired up the laptop, and went looking for other people’s thoughts on Gordon Ramsay’s attempt to take Manhattan. I read reviews on both egullet and OA, many of which agreed with me, some of which did not. I browsed pictures of platefuls of neoclassical dishes—seared protein, reduced sauce, turned baby vegetables—and grew tired. It was when I started looking for reviews on Mouthfuls that I decided I had had enough. I was done with this restaurant. I didn’t need other people to confirm for me that my money had bought me a boring experience. I logged off, closed the laptop, and went to bed. I decided I could stop worrying about my Internet gastro-porn habit. I was clearly making progress.
There was one hot place in town that didn’t appear much on the discussion boards. It was called the Waverly Inn and it didn’t appear much because few people on the discussion boards could get into it. The Waverly Inn, an old-style pub in the West Village, with low ceilings, black beams, and saggy red banquettes, was now part-owned by Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, who had styled it as a clubhouse not for the people who read his magazine but for those who appeared in it. In the few months since it had reopened after a makeover in the autumn of 2006, it had become a regular haunt for the likes of Sean Penn and Gwyneth Paltrow, Tim Robbins, Robert De Niro, and Bono. Getting a table was not simply a matter of phoning up the restaurant.
For months, if you did call the number, you would hear a voice (on a machine that didn’t take messages) saying it wasn’t yet officially open. Notionally it was in a try-out period, but this went on for week after week, and its dining rooms were always full. It was open but not open. If you were so presumptuous as to want to eat there, you had to call the only real reservation clerk, who was one of Graydon Carter’s assistants in the Condé Nast building in Times Square. Assuming you knew either Carter or his assistant.
If John Whiteclay Chambers were mapping New York’s power restaurants now, he would, of course, include the Waverly, and naturally I thought I should eat there, too. I had heard that, while it was a scene—the presence of so many film stars turned it into a movie set—the food was rather good. I had just one possible route by which to get a booking. As a sometime contributor to Gourmet, itself a Condé Nast publication, I would simply have to debase myself by shamelessly begging the office of Gourmet’s editor to make a call on my behalf to Graydon Carter’s office.
I received an e-mail, suggesting I had about as much chance of getting a seat as joining the kick line of the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, but that they would see what they could do. Then came the startling news that, by some miracle, through some unexpected rupture in the fabric of time and space, they had found a table for me.
And so, on a Friday night, I went to the Waverly Inn. As I stood in the bar with my friend Greg, a senior editor on another magazine, I scanned the room for faces that I recognized. I was looking for Gwyneth, Sean, or Bobby. I didn’t see anyone. Later we were led into the dining room, with its dimly lit corner tables and its mural of all the famous New York faces by Edward Sorel—the likes of Norman Mailer, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and Marlon Brando. I saw all those faces on the wall, but only in passing because we were led into the dining room—and straight back out again into what is widely regarded as the Siberia of the garden room. There had been nobody famous at the tables in the dining room and there was nobody famous out here, either.
I ordered a bowl of chili to start, and then a veal chop. Greg had a chicken pot pie, under a dome of golden puff pastry. It was comfort food, very good comfort food, as it happens, but comfort food all the same.
“You realize,” Greg said to me over his pie, “that you are the only person here I have ever heard of.”
Drunk on the cheapest bottle of wine on the list, I took him seriously. “I’m not famous,” I said, puffing myself up at the thought that my writing had finally given me a profile in New York.
“Er, no, you’re not. That’s my point. I’ve only heard of you because you’re a friend of mine. Everybody else here is a complete nonentity, just like you.” Then he slumped back in his seat, struck by a thought. “Of course! It’s a Friday night. Everybody worth seeing has been helicoptered off to their place in the Hamptons.” I had debased myself to get into the hottest restaurant in town, on one of the few nights when it was as hot as Alaska in February.
We looked around the room. It was full of boys in bandannas, and the girls who love them. Greg told me most of them would have been personal assistants to media big wheels, taking the place of the big wheels themselves. I had no reason to doubt him. Conversations were shrieked, air-kisses puckered out like so many rounds of automatic gunfire. The room was filled with the smell of lip gloss and highly flamm
able hair gel. I wished I had a cattle prod to hand. These were people I could never have tired of hurting.
It all seemed a terrible waste of a perfectly nice restaurant, with nice food at a not unreasonable price. Suddenly I found myself thinking back over my restaurant experiences: to the bottle-blondes at Ramsay’s and the social X-rays at Jean-Georges, to the braying Russians in the gilded restaurants of Dubai, and the big-ticket Americans in their red suspenders, clanking their fiercely expensive bottles of wine into ice buckets at Pushkin in Moscow. Now an image came to me, a clear and unappetizing picture of the kind of people who occupy the dining rooms I so often review in London, and that in turn led me to an unavoidable truth:
HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE
If you want to see what skilled professionals can do with very sharp knives to expensive pieces of meat, you could do worse than visit one of the top restaurants in New York, London, Paris, Moscow, or Dubai. You’ll find enough face-lifts in those dining rooms to make a whole new party of six from the off-cuts. You know the sort: shoes by Manolo Blahnik, scarf by Hermès, permanent look of surprise by the hottest surgeon in town—and that’s only the men.
Or maybe you don’t know the sort, but I do. This has been the true horror of my job as a restaurant critic. Yes, I get to sit in opulent dining rooms, eating extraordinary food and having Dom Pérignon squeezed into my mouth from a South Seas sponge, and all on somebody else’s dime. But I also have to do this surrounded by the sort of trussed and lacquered, gold-encrusted, preening, lobotomized, bigoted, tasteless, self-satisfied, self-abusing, arguments for involuntary euthanasia—Won’t somebody put these bloody people out of my misery?—that, even in this post-Soviet era, could make a strong argument for Bolshevik revolution.