by Ruth Reichl
Finally our first courses came. I relaxed as I tasted a fine shrimp cocktail with a jazzy smoked tomato rémoulade and a parsley-lemon salad. Crab cakes were impressively served with a spicy pumpkin seed sauce. I admired roasted chunks of lobster meat in a spicy red Thai curry sauce. Even plain old Caesar salad was dressed up with sheets of crisped Parmesan. There was just one problem: my asparagus soup was nowhere to be seen.
It took a while to attract someone’s attention and point out that I had not been served. Ten minutes later, the soup showed up. No apology, but after the waiter had painstakingly poured it into my bowl, he proudly announced, “Not a drop!”
Then our entrées came so quickly that the appetizer plates were still on the table. “Hold that please,” said the waiter, indicating that I was to pick up my soup bowl so he could put my entrée down. Meanwhile, my companions were clearing off the extra plates and stacking them on the floor.
For all that, the food was impressive. Mr. Clark is serving more than 1,500 meals a day, and he has carefully constructed his menu within the limits of quantity cooking. He builds each plate around a sturdy center-piece, starting with food that can take a little abuse and using imaginative accompaniments to perk it up. His grilled pork porterhouse, a robust portion, was served with a glorious mush of potatoes, bacon and cabbage. On the side, standing in for ap plesauce, was a zesty rhubarb-apple chutney.
Grilled swordfish steak was accented with sautéed pea greens and wild mushroom dumplings. He made salmon special by giving it a Moroccan glaze, setting it on a buttery bed of savoy cabbage and a cake of cous cous. But he also knows when to leave well enough alone; his rotisserie chicken was sensibly plain, served with haricots verts and potatoes mashed with just a hint of green chilies.
Should we chance dessert? Anticipating another endless wait, we quit while we were ahead. There was, however, one bright point. As one friend noted, “They certainly didn’t rush us.”
Every restaurant has its off nights, but in my experience they are standard at Tavern on the Green. One recent night, we waited 40 minutes after placing our order before any food arrived. The captain acted as if he were bestowing a favor each time he honored us with his presence, and the waiters hardly deigned to glance our way. A request to take dessert home was met with this response: “We don’t do that.” But the worst thing was that after being requested to surrender our coats ($1 each), we found ourselves seated next to the window, freezing. We spent a small fortune on tea trying to get warm.
Still, the dinner was delicious. Short-rib-and-horseradish dumplings were a sly take on a Chinese dish. Soups were thick, a little too sweet, but satisfying. Crab cakes were filled with chunks of sweet crabmeat. And foie gras sautéed with pears was completely luxurious.
Grilled Chilean sea bass was nicely cooked; it’s a very forgiving fish. A fine loin of venison was paired with a puree of squash and cranberry sauce. And a double rack of pork, another huge portion, came with irresistible cheese-filled mashed potatoes and braised red cabbage.
Desserts were good, too. I liked the cheesecake and the crème brûlée. But the dessert that seemed most appropriate to this gaudy, glitzy, enchantingly over-the-top room was the banana split, an exercise in American excess that is almost good enough to make you forget how shabbily you have been treated.
Looking around at that fairyland of lights, I felt a surge of rage. To thousands of visitors, Tavern on the Green is New York. They are so happy to be here that you see them all around the room, videotaping one another as they eat their meals. This is an expensive restaurant; does it really have to be such a blatant example of our famous rudeness?
No, it does not. I discovered that on my last visit when waiters and captains were suddenly hovering attentively over my table. The food came in a flash. It was warm in that inner circle of the Garden Room in more ways than one. Forgive me for thinking that I must have been recognized.
The evening seemed enchanted. I looked out over that splendidly silly space as I ate beautifully arranged poached shrimp in a lime, soy and ginger sauce. Orecchiette were beautifully cooked and tossed with broccoli rabe and sausage. And if the thick fillet of smoked salmon on truffle mashed potatoes seemed more appropriate as an entrée than an appetizer, who’s to quibble with generosity?
Then there was moist turkey with stuffing, sweet potatoes, brussels sprouts and cranberry sauce: a holiday on a plate. Pork, one of Mr. Clark’s best dishes, was as satisfying as it always is.
As I sat there, basking in the attention and enjoying the Christmas decorations, I looked around at the people seated on the edges of the room. I hoped they were having as nice a time as I was. I suspected they were not.
TAVERN ON THE GREEN
Betty never got her makeover. Helen was furious when Claudia told her the truth, and when I called to apologize, she hung up on me. But in the ensuing months Betty slipped unobtrusively in and out of Felidia, Aquavit, Lutèce, and Gramercy Tavern. My most useful disguise, she usually went with a group, sitting silently at the table like somebody’s poor old aunt, the charity case, brought along out of duty or as an act of kindness. Betty never looked at a wine list and when confronted with the menu tended to say, “You order for me, dear. You know much more about food” in a voice so soft it was barely audible. Since she never paid a bill she had no need for credit cards, and she continued to be as anonymous as a shadow.
Even so, I knew I was pressing my luck the day she dined alone at La Côte Basque. I had been to the restaurant four times in total anonymity, but my most recent visit had been with a couple who had bought me at a charity benefit, and I had gone as myself.
Charity dinners seemed to be part of my job. I don’t know which charity first realized the secret yearning of many people to watch the critic at work, but once they discovered that they could auction this opportunity off for thousands of dollars, the requests came pouring in. How do you say no to worthy causes when so much money is at stake? How do you say no to your child’s school, your doctor, the American Heart Association, the public library, the James Beard Foundation . . . Although these dinners with strangers were a terrible nuisance, I rarely had the heart to turn them down. Every once in a while I’d end up eating with someone so offensive that I’d swear off charity dinners, but that never lasted very long.
The Côte Basque couple had in fact been lovely people. And everything was fine until, halfway through the appetizers, Mr. Stewart inadvertently blurted out how much he had paid for the chance to dine with me. It was such an embarrassing amount of money that I summoned the sommelier and ordered an insanely expensive wine. I shouldn’t have done that: the sommelier, who had ignored me up to that point, looked at me long and hard and then went running off to the maître d’. Suddenly the hoverage increased. Could I really expect to get away with being Betty now?
But I had to go back. As I wrote the review, rhapsodizing about the duck, I realized I had tried it only once, and that it had been with the Stewarts. What if the chef had cooked me something special? I imagined angry readers looking down at their duck and saying, “That woman liked this?” Once was not enough. I put on the wig, the too-tight shoes, and the frumpy blue dress and headed for the subway. Nobody paid me the slightest attention.
But when I walked into La Côte Basque, every eye in the room turned. And then, of course, politely looked away. I walked slowly toward the maître d’—the shoes were really uncomfortable—and said hesitantly, “Excuse me?”
The man gave me a kind but slightly pitying look. “Yes?” he said. “May I help you?”
“I don’t have a reservation . . .” I began. He surveyed me quite openly, not disguising the fact that he was trying to make up his mind. He didn’t know me, I was sure of that; I could almost see him wishing that I were a man so he could wrap me in a borrowed jacket and tie.
“Just yourself ?” he asked. I nodded. It was still early, and the restaurant was not full, which may have been why the decision went in my favor. “Right this way, please,” he
said, and I wondered where he would put me. He wouldn’t want to parade me through the dining room, but he wouldn’t want me in one of the high-visibility seats up front either. I wondered how he would solve the dilemma. In the end, he tucked me off to the side, handed me a menu, and scurried quickly away. This was not exactly celebrity treatment, but it could not be faulted.
The captain who took care of me was entirely correct; he neither fawned nor ignored me. The food was just as I’d remembered. Better, actually. I had finished my first course, a caviar-studded seafood salad, and was halfway through the delicious duck when a flutter of energy swept through the room. I looked up to see a female of a certain age moving in my direction. Swathed in red satin, she looked like Peter Ustinov in drag, and she was moving so slowly that she resembled a carnival float propelled by hidden wheels.
She came nearer and nearer, and then the maître d’ was pulling out the table to seat her on the banquette next to mine. The woman shot me a look of undisguised horror and turned to the maître d’hôtel. “Don’t you have anything else?” she asked, waving a fat paw in my direction. I thought how much she resembled one of those ugly Chinese lap dogs. “I don’t like this table,” she blared. The maître d’ hastily pushed the table back toward the banquette, smoothed the cloth, and turned on his heel. “But of course, madame,” he said, leading her away.
I had had enough. I asked the waiter if he would pack the remains of my duck in a doggie bag and bring me the bill. He hesitated for half a beat, began to say something, changed his mind, and said, “Certainly.”
I paid the bill in cash, counting out the change, dollar by dollar. I added the tip; then, thinking of old ladies everywhere, added some more. Clutching my doggie bag, I scurried out of the restaurant, convinced that the diners in their fancy finery were watching my departure with both relief and disdain.
I boarded the uptown subway, thinking how happy I was going to be to get the wig off my head and the Enna Jetticks off my feet. I was thinking up ways to describe the duck when a homeless man came shuffling through the car. His pants were torn and his army jacket was layered with the filth of too many nights on the sidewalk. A sad woolen cap was pulled down over his reddened ears and a moth-eaten gray scarf twisted around his wattled neck. He looked so ragged that people tucked their feet beneath them as he passed, hoping to avoid his touch. When he got to the end of the car he turned, took a breath, and began to speak.
“I’m hungry,” he said, his voice rusty from disuse. “I’ll take anything. If you have half a sandwich you didn’t eat at lunch, or the core of an apple, I’d be happy to have it. Maybe you’ve got a few crumbs of potato chips left in the bottom of the bag. That would do too.”
I noticed that as he walked down the aisle the other passengers looked down or buried themselves in their papers. Hunger is embarrassing. When he reached my seat, I handed him the bag from La Côte Basque and he stared in disbelief. Grabbing it, he walked to the end of the car and sat down in the seat that says it is reserved for the handicapped. I expected him to tear into the food and stuff it into his mouth, but he did not. With great dignity he spread the scarf on his lap as if it were a napkin, then pulled the container from the bag and set it on the scarf. Removing the wrapping, he examined his windfall. “Roasted duckling!” he croaked. And then, very delicately, he picked the leg up in his fingers and ate it slowly, savoring every morsel.
I did not take a shower when I got home. I did not remove the wig. I sat down and began writing a piece called “Why I Disapprove of What I Do.”
WHY I DISAPPROVE OF WHAT I Do It’s indecent to glamorize a $100 meal. Or is it?
by Ruth Reichl
“You can’t be a restaurant critic,” M.F.K. Fisher once said to me, “unless you are one of those ambitious sorts, willing to walk on your grandmother’s grave.” I nodded meekly and agreed.
It was the early 1970s. In Berkeley, Calif., where I lived, the view was extreme: food, like so many things, had become intensely political. Frances Moore Lappé had just written Diet for a Small Planet, which had convinced me, and everyone I knew, that eating meat was greedy and irresponsible. We thought the only moral response was to become vegetarians, which we did briefly, but with a vengeance. Shopping for millet at the Co-Op, we would stand in the checkout line extolling the pleasures of tofu.
Those of us who didn’t really consider tofu pure pleasure were in trouble. I found myself sneaking extra cheese into Ms. Lappé’s recipe for con queso rice and substituting cocoa for carob in her spice cake. Couldn’t food be good and good for you?
Pondering this problem, I became a cook. I was not alone. All over Berkeley, overeducated people were opening restaurants. Our parents were horrified: It was long before the era of celebrity chefs, and there was nothing glamorous about the work. Saying that your daughter was a cook was about as attractive as confessing that she had decided to dig ditches for a living.
But I found restaurant work deeply satisfying. I loved the hard physical labor. I loved working with food, feeling peaches slip from their skins to reveal the fruit’s hidden color, sniffing the air as onions caramelized. But what I liked best was watching people eat the food I had cooked, leaning in to listen to one another. Good food, I saw, was about more than merely eating.
And then a small alternative arts magazine asked me to write a restaurant column. I did it for free; I even paid for my own meals without getting reimbursed. I climbed up on a soapbox.
I wrote about the China Cup Café, where a woman named Della Hard mon served inspiration with her food. “Anything you want very bad, and work very hard for, you can have,” she said as she made salmon croquettes and collard greens. I wrote of the nutritional advantages of the Indian diet as I introduced my readers to the joys of dosa and idli sambar. One review made a case for the collective ownership of restaurants, another extolled the virtues of the northern Chinese breakfast of soy milk. I even managed to get in a dig at imperialism when I reviewed a Guamanian restaurant.
If you had asked me then if I would accept a job as a restaurant critic for the New York Times, or any establishment publication, I would have replied, without a second thought, “Of course not!” And not just because I did not want to think of myself as an ambitious sort, walking on my grandmother’s grave. Working in restaurants was honest labor; anyone could see that. Writing about them for the mainstream press was not; it felt like joining the enemy.
But reviewing was fun; so much fun that when mainstream publishers started paying me for my opinions, I didn’t do the decent thing and refuse. Before I knew it, I had stopped cooking professionally. Then I stopped cooking altogether. “She’s joined the leisure class,” my friends said.
I disarmed my critics by inviting them along; nobody I knew could afford to eat out, and nobody refused. We went with equal amounts of guilt and pleasure, with a feeling that we were trespassing in the playgrounds of the rich.
Which, in fact, we were. We didn’t belong in those starchy restaurants. We knew it, and when we climbed out of my rent-a-wreck, resplendent in vintage from the Salvation Army, everybody knew it too. We always got the worst table. And then, because I didn’t own a credit card, I had to pay in cash. The year turned into two, and three, and more. I got a credit card. I got good clothes. I was writing for increasingly prestigious publications. Meanwhile, a voice inside me kept whispering, “How could you?”
The voice is still there, yakking away. When I receive weekly letters from people who think it is indecent to write about $100 meals while half the world is hungry, the voice yaks right along. “They’re absolutely right, you elitist pig,” it hisses. And when it asks, “When are you going to grow up and get a real job?” it sounds a lot like my mother.
And just about then is when I tell the voice to shut up. Because when my mother starts telling me that all I’m doing with my life is telling rich people where to eat, I realize how much the world has changed.
Yes, there are still restaurants where rich people get to remind thems
elves that they are different from you and me. But there are fewer and fewer of them. As American food has come of age, American restaurants have changed. Going out to eat used to be like going to the opera; today, it is more like going to the movies.
And so everyone has become a critic. I couldn’t be happier. The more people pay attention to what and how they eat, the more attuned they become to their own senses and the world around them.
When I remember that conversation with M.F.K. Fisher, I wish I had not been quite so meek. When I rerun the loop in my mind, I turn to her and say this: “No, you’re wrong. A. J. Liebling had it right. All it really takes to be a restaurant critic is a good appetite.”
In March, when the article was published, people who had never spoken to me before made a point of telling me how much they liked it. I was happy about the response, but remembering what it felt like to be Betty, I understood that my piece was actually a cop-out. In my mind’s eye I saw the woman in red at La Côte Basque, and the man on the train waving his duck leg, and deep down I knew that there was something basically dishonest about what I had written. The feel-good ending nagged at me; I was making excuses, and the Betty inside me knew it.
A FRUGAL REPAST FOR BETTY
When I trailed Betty home, she bought cereal and dog food, but I like to think that she is the kind of person who makes herself a nice meal every once in a while and savors it slowly, over the course of a few days. This is the meal I imagine her making at the beginning of spring, when she wants to celebrate having survived yet another New York winter. It is a perfect little repast that provides wonderful leftovers that are good hot or cold.