Remember to look for the lady wearing a very large hat,” I think I hear my wife say, with a helpful, slightly wan smile, as I inspect my new jacket in front of the mirror in a nervous, slightly bug-eyed lather. One of us has read somewhere that in the mysterious Kabuki world of the professional restaurant critic, Gael Greene is famous for her extravagant hats. Hats are supposed to be Gael’s calling card, her signature prop and pseudo-disguise. Over the decades, as the critic for New York magazine, she’s been photographed sitting in the banquettes of grand restaurants, sipping flutes of champagne, peeking slyly out from under colorful wide brims of every design. She’s sported so many different varieties of headgear over the years—summer straw hats, floppy felt hats, wedding hats, ship captain hats emblazoned with spinning globes and golden anchors—that I’ll later hear that the restaurant people (who tend to spot the only person in the room wearing a hat every time) sometimes call her “Sergeant Pepper” in whispered tones behind her back.
My new jacket is size 48 extra-long, or possibly even larger and longer than that. I’ve just purchased it off the rack at a store called Rochester Big and Tall in midtown, which, in the summer of 2000, is where many of the city’s prominent giants—basketball stars, ox-shouldered linemen who play for the Jets and the Giants, even Rush Limbaugh himself—purchase their fancy, Gulliver-sized threads. The jacket is boxy and coal black and looks like it’s been constructed out of yards of shiny black undertaker’s cloth. I’d told the bemused salesman at the fatso store that I wanted a durable, sensible garment, something I could wear to polite restaurants and grow into if I gained an inch or two around the chest and belly. I wanted something in a dark color with the slightest hint of polyester sheen, a jacket that could be cleaned easily, when I stained it, discreetly, with streaks of Hollandaise sauce and steak fat.
I put on this giant, flapping undertaker’s garment, and Mrs. Platt and I both regard my looming reflection in the full-length mirror for a time, in studious silence. I’m the nervous worrier of the family; my wife is the cheerful, optimistic one, always living life on the sunny side of the street. We are different in many ways, my wife and I, and it won’t be long before she’ll grow weary of the restaurant grind, and then of restaurants altogether, and even for healthy lengths of time, of eating altogether. But at the beginning of this grand culinary adventure, our differences are complementary: she’s petite, organized, and sensibly trim; I’m large, disorganized, and prone to fits of mumbling and forgetfulness. She was raised by cheery, relentlessly well-adjusted parents on a steady American diet of Pop-Tarts, tuna salad sandwiches, and Campbell’s tomato soup. I come from a family of phlegmatic, generally reserved, East Coast establishment Yankees who never did much home cooking in the traditional sense of the phrase. She spent most of her childhood in the same tidy redbrick colonial house, on the same street, in a leafy tree-lined suburb of Detroit. As the child of a diplomat, I spent most of my youth wandering like a displaced, upscale gypsy, from one world capital to the next. My mother-in-law once told me that the Phillipses used to eat the same sacred rotation of blue-plate specials every day of the week out in Detroit: spaghetti with tomato sauce on Mondays; Chicken Divan smothered in cheddar cheese sauce and broccoli on Tuesdays; pork chops and applesauce on Wednesdays; and some variation of tuna casserole or beet and rice “porcupine” meatballs to round out the week. The Platt family’s diet, however, consisted of a kind of rotating cook’s tour through the countries in Asia where we lived, and we happily frittered away perhaps too much time in restaurants all over the world.
“This jacket is as big as a circus tent,” I say, as we stare at my new restaurant critic costume in the mirror.
“I think it will work better for you than a hat,” she says.
Gael has summoned me to lunch at the new restaurant of a French chef named Alain Ducasse, which in the summer of 2000, in the cosseted, self-regarding, pre-apocalyptic world of New York City’s haute cuisine establishment, is a little like being invited to Buckingham Palace for tea with the queen herself. Or if not the queen exactly, then a courtesan of long standing, one who has survived—the way Gael has over the decades through a combination of talent, ambition, toughness, and more than a little sexual intrigue. Aside from her sharp palate and collection of baroque hats, Gael is probably most famous among the writers I know for her one-night stand with Elvis. (“I don’t remember the essential details,” she will write in her memoirs. “It was certainly good enough.”) Gael has written pornographic novels, conducted passionate affairs with porn stars and famous chefs, and had Elvis-like flings with assorted movie stars of her day (Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood). For years the major themes of her “Insatiable Critic” column have been the intertwining joys of those two social revolutions of the last half of the American twentieth century—the sexual one, of which Gael is a card-carrying member, and the gourmet revolution, which, in her colorful impressionistic style, she helped to disseminate, the way the other original New York magazine writers, like Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, and Gail Sheehy, did in their particular orbits.
At that time, Alain Ducasse is the most famous chef in France—and therefore the entire world—and his new restaurant, which is just being unveiled in the back rooms of the Sherry Netherland Hotel on Central Park South, is the most eagerly anticipated opening of the season, or so I’ve been told. My lunch with Gael is supposed to be a polite meet-and-greet session, and also a kind of ceremonial passing of the torch from one critic to the next. With some fanfare, Gael has announced that she will be retiring from the weekly grind of restaurant reviewing at the end of the summer. After an exhaustive and mostly fruitless search during which many of the candidates seem to have turned the job down, I’ve been chosen by the magazine’s editors to take her place. The decision is a mystery to Gael (“So what exactly were you writing about before this?” she’ll ask me) and to other people as well, including my mother, who, when she hears the unexpected news that her eldest son has decided, after bouncing around many other jobs in the realm of journalism and writing, with different levels of star-crossed success, to become a professional restaurant critic, will put down her cup of tea and say, to no one in particular, “That sounds wonderful, but I didn’t know Adam wrote very much about food.”
As usual, my mother would have a point. At the dawn of my strange, accidental career as a professional eater, I’d demonstrated a love for food and a wide-ranging appetite for culinary adventure, it’s true. But I’d never subscribed to Gourmet magazine, or Cook’s Illustrated, or any of the usual gastronomic bibles that my food-obsessed friends liked to pore over with manic, Talmudic intensity. I didn’t save menus from the restaurants I visited, or record every morsel of every dinner I’d ever eaten in my dining journal, the way serious gourmets were supposed to do. I did have a mostly unread copy of M.F.K. Fisher’s famous translation of Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste sitting on my cluttered desk, although I’d never gotten very far past the letter C. I vaguely knew who Auguste Escoffier was, but to my deep shame, I’d never heard of the real father of grand Continental haute cuisine, Antonin Carême, and if you’d asked me to describe the difference between mis en place and sous vide, chances are I would have stared at you in puzzled silence for a time and quickly changed the conversation.
Unlike many of the food obsessives I know, I’ve also never held a job in a professional kitchen, unless you count two grim weeks in college when I worked as a busboy at a restaurant in Boston, before the manager quietly let me go for what he described as “general incompetence.” I have no beloved, tattered scrapbook in which I’ve lovingly scribbled down my favorite family recipes, and I can count the number of cookbooks my wife and I own on the fingers of one hand. The only dishes I’m able to reproduce with any reliable success in the kitchen of our little downtown New York apartment are Craig Claiborne’s durable recipe for roast chicken and an enthusiastic approximation of that nomadic northern Chinese specialty, Mongolian Hot Pot, which my mother learned in China and Hong Kong in the 1960s, and which we would attempt to approximate as we set up camp in other distant parts of the world, the way the Mongols did as they roved from place to place.
“The reservation will be under the name Mrs. Rebecca Limos,” Gael had said when she called over the ancient landline telephone wire, speaking in a deep, hushed voice that managed to sound both commanding and conspiratorial at the same time. I should arrive at precisely the appointed time, which I dimly recall was one o’clock. The restaurant’s entrance would be in the back of the hotel, not the front. She pronounced her fake name “Leee-mooohs,” drawing out the vowels in an exaggerated way. Like many famous Michelin-starred establishments, this debut restaurant in New York had a kind of waiting area before you got to the dining room, a small, elegant space appointed with gilt-edged furniture; diners could sip champagne there or nibble on petits fours and examine the ridiculously priced wine list before moving on to the main dining room once their guests arrived. “If I’m late, wait for me there,” said Mrs. Limos, before ringing off.
IN THE SUMMER OF 2000, CULINARY TRENDS STILL ROLL INTO Manhattan periodically from the hinterlands (from California, from Tuscany, from Spain), but in style and structure, the idea of a proper restaurant dinner hasn’t changed very much in the city since Henri Soulé opened his celebrated Le Restaurant Français at the French Pavilion of the 1939 New York World’s Fair in Queens. You can still get an excellent plate of that Belle Époque delicacy, pike quenelles, at Jackie Onassis’s favorite restaurant, La Caravelle, at 23 West Fifty-Fifth Street for $15. The famous Alsatian chef André Soltner still lives with his wife, Simone, above his famous townhouse restaurant, Lutèce, on East Fiftieth Street, although, ominously, he’s in the process of quietly selling his four-decade-old business to an investment group from Las Vegas. With a few exceptions, like the Japanese fusion master Nobu Matsuhisa in Tribeca, the most admired chefs in the city, like Daniel Boulud on the Upper East Side, David Bouley down in Tribeca, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, are steeped in the classic French techniques that the gourmets and experts of the small, cosseted food community still refer to in hushed, reverential tones as “haute cuisine.”
The food revolutions that are about to turn this ancient aristocracy on its head—the rise of a much more populist, egalitarian cook’s culture; blogs; reality TV cook-offs; a new, empowered No Reservations generation of diners who care more about a well-brewed cup of coffee or a superbly griddled cheeseburger than cheese soufflé prepared at their mother’s favorite snooty restaurant—are still hovering out of sight, just over the curve of the horizon. In the summer of 2000, the internet is still a curious and obscure tool used in food circles around town, the way it is everywhere else, only by a small (but growing) horde of misfits and underground enthusiasts to ferret out and debate the merits of their small-time obsessions: where to find their favorite soup dumpling, or pizza slice, or bowl of Japanese noodles. In this ordered, bucolic little world, Brooklyn is still a wild and distant gastronomic wasteland that most serious-minded gastronomes from Manhattan visit now and then for a ceremonial bite of steak at Peter Luger, in Williamsburg, or dinner at one or two of the borough’s iconic pizza destinations. A mercurial young cook named David Chang is studying to be a professional chef at what was then called the French Culinary Institute, downtown, although it’s possible he’s already hatching plans to open up a modest little noodle bar down where he lives in the East Village, serving an elevated version of the kind of pan-Asian comfort food that he grew up with, which young line cooks eat at staff meals or late at night after they get off work—bowls of Japanese ramen, spicy home-style Korean specialties, steamed buns from Chinatown stuffed with strips of pork belly—if things don’t work out as planned in the ferociously Darwinian world of the traditional big city restaurant kitchen.
The future pied piper of this restive, No Reservations rabble of cooks and kitchen slaves, Anthony Bourdain, will publish his memoir Kitchen Confidential in a few months, but right now he’s still putting out grease fires in the kitchen of the popular Park Avenue bistro Brasserie Les Halles. Those familiar buzzwords of the coming “slow food” revolution—“sustainable,” “handcrafted,” “local,” and “master forager”—are only just beginning to creep into the conversations of enlightened food people, but like most things in this curious little backwater, they are a long way from becoming part of the buzzing public imagination. TV’s future Top Chef, Tom Colicchio, is in the process of leaving the Gramercy Tavern, the popular downtown restaurant he opened with Danny Meyer, and planning a radically subversive establishment, called Craft, which will be devoted to the weighty issues that working chefs traditionally spend their time pondering in private—sourcing and ingredients, the rhythms of the seasons, how to roast the perfect country chicken or sear the perfect Atlantic scallop. The clean, wood-toned dining room will be devoid of the usual Eurocentric, front-of-the-house frippery (oil paintings, carpets, linen tablecloths) when it opens for business the next year. Instead of recipes written in a flowery script, the spare runic menu will feature nothing but the ingredients, and patrons will be encouraged to compose their dinner themselves.
For the most part, accepted tastes in this peaceful, mannered little universe are still disseminated by members of what Nora Ephron called “the Food Establishment” in an article she’d published in New York in the late ’60s. This small, tight-knit group of mandarins—magazine editors, critics, consultants, chefs—are as insular and exotic in their inbred, self-regarding way as the tottering aristocrats of Europe in August 1914, before the Great War broke out and the old order was swept away. The genial, rotund cookbook writer from Oregon, James Beard, was a founding member of this establishment, and so was Craig Claiborne, who arrived in New York from Mississippi after the Second World War and worked his way up from writing restaurant press releases to the lofty pinnacle of power, reigning as a feared New York Times critic and also the editor of its dining section. Gael Greene was a member of this fractious, competitive little group (in her precise, hilarious way, Ephron also described the many sub-establishments within the Establishment), and so was Ruth Reichl, who’d grown up in the Greenwich Village apartment next to the one where I now happened to live and was famous for wearing elaborate disguises when she went out to review restaurants for the Times. Reichl has recently left the paper for Gourmet magazine, the periodical bible of the Food Establishment for many decades, which, unbeknownst to her and everyone else, will be out of business in four years, undone by the erosion of magazine ad sales, not to mention a horde of avid food bloggers and restaurant websites, which will soon overrun the media foodscape, like herds of wild trampling wildebeest. In that summer of 2000, Claiborne has only just died, at the age of seventy-nine, after a long, slow decline into querulousness and drink. The city’s most feared food snob eventually lost his taste for escargot with drawn garlic butter, choucroute garnie, and all of the delicacies he helped popularize with the great French chef Pierre Franey. Late in life, as David Kamp records in his history of mid-twentieth-century culinary manners and trends, The United States of Arugula, Claiborne didn’t leave his apartment very much, and when he did, it was to go to Planet Hollywood on East Fifty-Seventh Street, where he admired the qualities of the club sandwich.
As it turns out, Alain Ducasse will be one of the last in a long line of accomplished, mellifluously named Belle Époque chefs—Joël Robuchon, Jacques Pépin, Gilbert Le Coze, Franey—who are greeted by members of this vanishing New York gourmet aristocracy with elaborate ceremony when they arrive in town, like a succession of visiting popes. Ducasse grew up in southwestern France and made his reputation by imbuing the seasonal Mediterranean recipes of the Côte D’Azur with a sense of intricate, often extravagant, high-minded elegance. The cookbooks I’ve hurriedly consulted are filled with glossy photos of shiny plum-sized scallops decked with carefully shaved black truffles, ivory-colored filets of loup de mer dappled with Ossetra caviar, and a glistening, dome-shaped version of the classic French dessert baba au rhum, scented with oranges and crowned with towering clouds of whipped cream. His restaurants in Paris and Monaco have been three-star destinations for years, and once Michelin expands its portfolio to include London, Tokyo, and New York, he will manage to gather more stars than any chef in this pompous, influential, highly subjective guidebook’s history. The opening of Restaurant Alain Ducasse at the Sherry Netherland Hotel is already front-page news in the Times, and even back in Paris. According to some of the papers I’ve seen, the wait for a table is eight and a half months long, although how that figure is arrived at is difficult to say, and they claim it’s growing longer every day.
But when I arrive at the appointed hour for my lunch with Rebecca Limos, the gilded little dining space in the back of the hotel seems to be mostly empty. The ceiling in the main dining room is painted white and edged along the corners in gold, like one of the private dining rooms at Versailles. The pale, mint-green carpet looks like it’s been lifted from one of the guest bedrooms of my step-grandmother’s house in South Hampton. The middle of the space is crowded with two black-painted, faintly sepulchral, Greco-style columns, and the decorations include a bizarre art installation of battered trumpets and trombones splattered with dried paint. I wander for a moment among the deserted tables, until the maître d’ leads me politely to a little antechamber, where Mrs. Limos is perched alone on a couch, sipping a glass of what I dimly remember as champagne. I make a mock bow in my overlarge Frankenstein undertaker’s jacket.
“Mrs. Limos, I presume.”
“Just call me Gael,” says the critic with a weary smile.
Gael isn’t wearing one of her hats today. Her movements seem slow, and slightly exaggerated, and with her pale makeup, she reminds me of a stately Broadway actress out for a discreet restaurant meal between shows. When we move to our table in the mostly empty dining room, a waiter pulls out her chair with comically elaborate ceremony. He brings over a little footstool on which she places an overstuffed handbag. As I sip my water in silence, the critic takes out a crinkled little notebook and a ballpoint pen and begins, furtively, to scratch out notes under the table.
“Do you know Alain’s cooking?” she asks, still scribbling away.
At this early stage in my fledgling food writing career, I don’t know shit about Alain Ducasse’s cooking, of course. My idea of a grand New York dining experience is lunch at our local diner in the Village, Joe Jr.’s, where a bowl of the vividly green, crouton-laden split pea soup costs $2.50 and Louie the head waiter bellows out “Good morning, El Jefe!” to the regulars when they shamble through the door. Louie knew that I preferred to sit at the end of the counter at Joe’s for my solitary afternoon BLTs, and when my infant daughters grow up, he will remember the soups they like, and that the younger one always takes hers with extra crackers. Louie, who would die, tragically, of a massive heart attack, was the indispensable front-of-the-house man at Joe’s. He kept order when drunks would stagger in off the street, and he had a knack for calming down the unconventional West Villagers who frequented the place, like “the Tattoo Lady,” whose face was covered in a pattern of intricate tattoos, and another regular who had a habit, when she was overwhelmed by the cares of the world, as New Yorkers often are, of screaming out her order—“Eight coffees, light and sweet!”—at the top of her lungs.
“Is there a lunchtime price fixe option?” I hear myself say to Gael as I scan the almost cartoonishly large menu, attempting to conjure up witty and knowledgeable avenues of conversation. Unlike at Joe Jr.’s, a single veal chop costs $76 at Monsieur Ducasse’s establishment, and it doesn’t take a professional critic to figure out that the prices are bordering on the insane. To get a taste of the chef’s famous truffled chicken breast, you have to fork over $66, all for a dish that, later on, when I revisit the restaurant on my own expense account, I’ll describe as tasting like some strange, denatured form of steamed pork.
“I believe the word is pronounced ‘preeee fixxxxxe,’” says Gael, elongating the X with a soft hiss of her teeth.
“I hear the chef’s baba au rhum is quite wonderful,” I say, exaggerating the word “rhum” in a ridiculous-sounding faux French accent.
“Why don’t we try something savory first,” she says gently.
The savory dishes begin to arrive at our table minutes later, served by a succession of stiff-backed gentlemen, who are dressed like palace butlers in starchy, smoke-colored suits. They appear at the table like ghosts as each course is served, then drift away in the restaurant gloom. I have dim memories of a pasta dish, possibly, and a wan-tasting salad, and of two pale miniature roulades of sole that appear to have been blanched in tepid bathwater for an hour or two too long. I take tiny little bites of my lunch and make innocuous comments like “This seems lovely” and “Mmmmmmmm, I really enjoy the texture here,” while Gael tastes her food with an increasingly sour look on her face and puts down her fork, occasionally, to scribble a few notations in her crinkled little book.
In her dyspeptic cover story review, the critic will pronounce my roulades of sole “pathetic” and compare the grandly named Ducasse creation Prawns à la Royale to “simpering baby food.” She’ll call attention to the breast of squab, which is served deboned and cut into delicate, liver-colored rounds roughly the size of cough lozenges, and explain that in France, prior to roasting, the baby birds are gently strangled in order to preserve the deep crimson color of the meat. As the strangled birds are served, one of the whispering waiters will appear from the gloom to offer a selection of special squab-cutting knives laid out, like cigars, in a ridiculous satin-lined box. “Were Ducasse to try that gimmick in Paris,” she’ll write of this stunt, and others, “I think they’d roll him through town to the guillotine.”
As we contemplate our lunch in increasingly stilted silence, Chef Ducasse suddenly pops out from the kitchen, as if on cue. The chef is smaller than I imagined, and like lots of hardworking restaurant cooks, he has the pale, ghostly complexion of a submarine captain who spends months at a time submerged in a small space, away from the sun. Seeing us at our window table, he effects a look of shocked surprise, and then opens his arms wide, like a man who’s greeting long-lost friends.
“Mon amie Gael!” Ducasse cries out to the suddenly startled-looking Mrs. Limos.
“Is it really you?” says Gael, effecting her own look of mock surprise.
They buss each other on both cheeks, like two friendly European matrons.
As Ducasse hovers over the table in his spotless chef’s whites, Gael raises one of her bejeweled hands and waves it languidly in my direction. “This is my friend Mr. Duffy,” I think I hear Gael say as I rise in my flapping dark jacket to shake the great man’s hand.
“Call me André,” I hear myself say.
“Welcome, Monsieur Duffy,” he says.
What name did Gael actually use to introduce me during that first critic’s luncheon long ago? Who really knows? Who really cares? From that day forward, in my fevered imagination, the legend of André Duffy was born. During my long career, I will book tables under a whole array of odd crackpot stage names. I’ll make reservations under “Branch Rickey” and “Tyrus Cobb” and whatever else comes into my head. I’ll run through the names of deceased relatives, former girlfriends, and the names of formerly eminent, long-dead politicians like Huey Long and Sir Edmund Burke. But “André Duffy” always struck me as having the proper balance between authority and farce. I’d reserve tables under Monsieur Duffy’s name for a month or two, until the restaurants around town made a note of it, and I even ordered him his own credit card on which to tabulate the vast sums accruing to his expense account.
I liked to imagine the Great Duffy strolling the avenues on his endless gastronomic rounds with a silk handkerchief tucked into his jacket pocket and a pair of sky-blue suspenders holding up his size 44 expandable trousers. He’s a boulevardier of the old school, fluent in the Romance languages and capable of getting around the markets of Chinatown with a smattering of Cantonese. He’s familiar with the house specialties at L’Arpège in Paris and Brennan’s in New Orleans, and he has a fondness deep in his artery-clogged heart for the ancient trencherman specialties—whole hog North Carolina barbecue, icy buckets of Belon oysters from Brittany, heaping piles of Alsatian choucroute garnie. The Great Duffy repairs to his favorite spa in the hills around Lausanne each year to diet on mineral water and stalks of celery, while rereading the parts of the food canon he loves—Brillat-Savarin on the many signs of gluttony, A. J. Liebling on his beloved RhÔne wines, Julia Child on the proper way to cook an omelet. He keeps his statin pills secreted away in a small gold box shaped like a seashell and carries a silver-tipped cane, which once belonged to his grandfather, to help with a recurring touch of the gout.
In my mind, Duffy started out as an amusing alter ego of course, a way of laughing off, and in many ways protecting myself from, the strange and slightly comical role that the restaurant critic has always cut in the public imagination. But in time the fantasy of André Duffy and his gastronomic exploits and the reality of my daily routine in the trenches as a professional critic would blur together in all sorts of slightly unsettling ways. I never stuffed silk cravats in my breast pocket or carried a silver-tipped cane, but it wasn’t long before the real Adam Platt began to suffer from a touch of gout and began to keep his statin pills in a plastic box by his bed rather than a little gold case shaped like a seashell. It wasn’t long before he developed a healthy sugar addiction, along with a taste for unhealthy, cholesterol-saturated offal products and a tendency toward perhaps a few too many goblets of Liebling’s beloved RhÔne wines. I never wore sky-blue suspenders on the job, but my next purchase at Rochester Big and Tall, after the jacket, was an expandable webbed leather belt favored by rotund country club golfers, which grew and shrank with the size of one’s trousers, and soon I was returning to the big man’s store up on Sixth Avenue again and again to browse the aisles for easy-to-clean polyester dress shirts, more plus-size jackets, and other tools of the trade.
After a few more pleasantries, Ducasse disappears back into his kitchen with a perplexed look on his face. With her cover blown, Mrs. Limos’s mood seems to grow a little darker. I don’t ask what kinds of “disguises” have worked best during the course of her career, or whether other critics around town are on a first-name basis with the cooks they cover. I don’t ask why she’s decided to retire after all these years, or what her favorite food is, or what she likes to cook on off days at home. Later on, after I’ve endured my own share of strained dinners at a seemingly endless stream of mediocre restaurants, making conversation and answering the same questions from friendly people I barely know—friends of friends, well-heeled New Yorkers who have bought dinner with the critic at their school auctions—I’ll have a better understanding of this strange, mannered world from Gael’s point of view. I’ll understand that there isn’t glamour in every restaurant dinner, and that after a couple of decades in the trenches you’ll get to know certain chefs, and they’ll get to know you. I’ll understand that she’s probably gone to some trouble to secure this table, and that she could have invited one of her friends instead of this bumbling giant dressed in his badly fitting suit. I’ll understand that in the end, while her guests are making conversation and dribbling sauce onto the tablecloth, she has a job to do.
After a wave of harsh reviews from the New York critics, Ducasse will do away with the squab knives and a few of the other gimmicks, including the practice of presenting his startled guests with a selection of pens on a satin pillow with which to sign their obscenely large bills. He will lower his prices a little and change his executive chef several times. But it won’t matter. In the broader sweep of the city’s dining history, his timing couldn’t have been worse. Tastes are changing all over town to a simpler, more egalitarian brand of dining, and New Yorkers will roll him to the proverbial guillotine anyway, along with many of the other revered French chefs around the city. The next year, La Caravelle stops serving its fluffy pike quenelles forever. The Las Vegas group that buys Lutèce closes the restaurant down and abandons the space in André Soltner’s famous townhouse, although the chef and his wife keep living in the apartment above it. Restaurant Alain Ducasse closes quietly, three years after it opened, and is replaced in the back of the musty Sherry Netherland Hotel with a coffee shop. The chef will open three more restaurants in New York, but only one of them, a midtown brasserie called Benoit, will survive. Most of the reviews of that simpler, scaled-down project, named for the famous brasserie that Ducasse restored in Paris, will be lukewarm (including mine), although on her blog Gael, grudgingly, has some kind things to say about the quality of the sautéed skate.
A MONTH AFTER MY LUNCH WITH GAEL, I’LL USE ANDRÉ DUFFY’S freshly minted credit card at another French dining establishment on East Fifty-Second Street called Le Périgord. The restaurant has been open since the Francophile glory days of the 1960s, and it will survive the coming fine-dining apocalypse thanks mostly to the loyal patronage of European diplomats who work at the nearby United Nations and a scattering of devoted grandees and cave dwellers from the staid, spacious apartment buildings around Sutton Place. I know that the proprietor, Georges Briguet, has recently hired a young new chef from Belgium because I’ve read about it in the “openings” section of the magazine, and I still have a dim idea that serious restaurant critics are supposed to review French restaurants. I book a table for two, at lunchtime, just as Gael recommended I do, because it’s usually easier to get a table at a popular restaurant during lunch. For moral support, I invite my mother, an Upper East Side resident of the old school who grew up among gently aging dowager restaurants like this and has a keen appreciation for tables set with white linen and fresh roses, waiters dressed in dusty tuxedos, and classic, slightly archaic delicacies like Dover sole and soufflés tinged with a little extra Grand Marnier.
I put on my critic’s jacket, which after only a few weeks on the job is already stained with streaks of gravy, spilled wine, and pork fat. I arrive at the restaurant before my mother does and announce my name to the maître d’, who happens to be Monsieur Briguet himself, dressed that afternoon the way he always is: in a black bow tie and stiff-cuffed white shirt. The restaurateur looks me up and down, the faintest trace of a smile on his face, and then says, with elaborate courtesy in his possibly exaggerated accent, “Follow me, Monsieur Duffy.” The snug, bustling dining room smells of baked bread and freshly cut flowers, and the tables are filled with serious-faced gentlemen in charcoal-colored suits and gaggles of well-dressed women from the neighborhood sipping glasses of Brouilly wine from the Beaujolais country with their lunch, just as I’d seen Parisian ladies doing at lunchtime when I visited Paris.
Monsieur Briguet leads me to a small, slightly cramped table near the kitchen door, which it soon becomes clear is his little restaurant’s equivalent of deepest Siberia. As waiters come rushing in and out of the swinging door, he asks if I’d like a little wine with my lunch. I tell him I’ll wait for my guest before ordering the wine, but could I please see the menu? Monsieur Briguet returns to the table and hands me the ancient, beautifully scripted menu, along with the wine list, which is embossed in weathered leather and seems as thick and heavy as an old-fashioned phone book. I pretend to examine the menu for a time in studious silence, while Monsieur Briguet hovers over my cramped little table by the kitchen with what I later imagine is a look of imperious, Gallic distraction on his face. “What’s good today?” I finally say, shooting my cuffs the way I think André Duffy might do and smoothing a few bread crumbs from my shirt. Monsieur Briguet smiles a faint smile. “You tell me, Monsieur Duffy,” he says, with an exaggerated little bow. “You’re the critic.”