I hadn’t expected Batali to notice my modestly subversive response to his “miserable fuck” outburst, but in retrospect, why wouldn’t he? In today’s more egalitarian, digital world, where a negative Yelp review can have as much of an impact on business as the lordly pronouncements of a self-serious critic, superstar cooks tend to cultivate a more studied, user-friendly persona. They aren’t just cooks anymore, they’re philosopher kings, and with Instagram and Twitter providing a window into top kitchens around the world, they comment on everything from politics, to the environment, to what their children had for breakfast that morning. As writers from Orwell to Bourdain have pointed out, however, there are few tougher, more Darwinian, more dictatorial working environments than the traditional, French-inspired “brigade” in a working restaurant kitchen. Before restaurant kitchens around the country began to mercifully reform thanks to the #MeToo movement, many of the cooks who managed—either by force of will or talent or both—to fight their way to the top of this mostly male, testosterone-fueled, high-pressure world were autocratic, imperious personalities who didn’t always take very kindly to criticism.
The talented Frenchman Daniel Boulud was another member of the beloved star chef pantheon back in my early days as a critic, who went to extreme lengths to cultivate a polished, almost cuddly public persona but was a famous martinet in the kitchen and could be touchy about critics and their misguided views. “Adam Platt is my bitch,” he loudly declared to anyone who would listen at a hastily convened press party in the fall of 2009 after his flagship Upper East Side restaurant, Daniel, was given the predictable three-star treatment by the resolutely Eurocentric mandarins who put together the bible of bygone dining trends and styles, the Michelin Guides. Never mind that I’d heaped effusive praise on many Daniel projects over the years, including his revolutionary foie gras–laced DB Burger, which was responsible for creating the Great Gourmet Chef Burger Craze of 2002, from which the dining world still hasn’t quite recovered. Daniel’s rage was directed at two reviews I’d written many months before. One was about Bar Boulud, near Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side, a modest, perfectly decent (one star means good!) exercise in the casual-bar dining trend that was sweeping through town. The other concerned a more populist, star-crossed, and ultimately doomed gourmet beer hall–style venture on the Bowery called DBGB Kitchen and Bar (the name being a slightly tortured reference to the famous Bowery punk club, which was once down the street) where the casual menu was filled with patés, Alsatian sausages, and various other less successful examples of the gourmet burger craze. I dimly recall that I had plenty of complimentary things to say about both places (the now-shuttered DBGB also received the dreaded one-star “good” rating), but Daniel was used to receiving glowing notices from the local press, who in those days had a habit of treating outsiders much more harshly than local heroes like Batali and Boulud. And both restaurants received respectful two-star write-ups from the Times, which no doubt added to Daniel’s sense of outrage. “We are working so hard to create pleasure, to make people happy,” he announced to the slightly bewildered reporters, who were probably hoping to hear about the joys of having achieved the pinnacle of Michelin success. “When you see a guy who is miserable like Platt, it doesn’t matter what you do!”
Traditional restaurateurs who learned their trade in the mannered and theatrical hall-of-mirrors region formerly known as “the front of the house” tended to be more diplomatic and discreet in how they went about cajoling and influencing the critics. Like the chefs, they were adept at spotting the critic once he or she entered the dining room and, unlike the eccentric Georges Briguet back at Le Périgord during my first months on the job, would place the critic at the best table, with the best waitstaff, and order up what used to be called the “soignée” treatment: for VIPs, the kitchen would find the fattest, most succulent scallops available if they ordered the scallop entrée, or the tenderest cut of roast duck or prime rib. Daniel and his fellow top chefs were famous for this kind of excessive VIP treatment too, but the front-of-the-house restaurateurs tended, with one or two exceptions, to be less prone to intemperate outbursts and more adept at playing the long game when it came to buttering up susceptible writers, if not for this review, then for the next one.
Early on, before I’d ever visited any of his restaurants, Sirio Maccioni, the charming, tuxedo-wearing owner and front-of-the-house man at Le Cirque, wrote me a perfectly penned letter on his thick personal stationery, asking for advice on how to “adjust” his menu to the tastes of “the younger generation.” Danny Meyer, whose children attended the same grade school as mine in downtown New York, would often greet me in the halls of the school—he dressed in his natty suit, I in my usual rumpled trousers and track shoes—with his trademark smile and a firm handshake, no matter what enraging things I’d written about his restaurants the day before. Like many canny professionals, Danny kept track of the critics’ reviews and studied their tastes. He had his chefs hold in reserve certain choice trencherman items that the kitchen called “Plattnip”—such as pork chops, or the odd prime cut of fiorentina beefsteak—so that they could quickly shuffle them onto the menu as specials whenever I loomed up at the door of one of his new restaurants, dressed ominously in my flapping black coat.
One morning at school, after I’d attacked the quality of the cooking at what was at the time a much-hyped Danny Meyer barbecue restaurant called Blue Smoke—the baby back ribs were “like Chinese takeout,” the chili “tasted like something from the kitchen of a not very reputable sports bar,” and the Texas beef ribs had the “texture (and taste) of old pastrami”—I spotted him, to my horror, coming toward me at full speed with his hand outstretched, like a pastor greeting one of his favorite parishioners on a bright Sunday morning after church.
“Hello, Danny,” I said, looking down at my shoes while hastily attempting to pull up my gently sagging sweatpants.
“I just want you to know, that was an excellent review that you wrote. My team read every word, and it was very valuable to them.”
“Umm, thank you very much, Danny.”
“I also want you to know that, thanks to you, we’ll do better next time,” he said as I smiled a pained, uncomfortable smile, while clutching at my sweatpants. “The restaurant is a work in progress, and I hope you’ll be back to visit soon.” I did go back to Blue Smoke, as it happens, and whether it was thanks to Meyer’s famous powers of persuasion or my own developing palate, I wrote that I liked the ribs much better the second time. It would be several years before I gave a Danny Meyer restaurant a harsh review again.
One of the exceptions to the general rule about old-school restaurateurs was that mercurial king of the New York brasserie, Keith McNally. His habit of blasting critics with furiously penned letters at all hours of the day and night blossomed into a kind of performance art with the rise of social media and the new crop of competitive, round-the-clock food blogs eager to get story tips (and possibly a free meal or two) in exchange for a steady stream of free and breathlessly favorable publicity. Originally from London, McNally made his reputation by filtering the style and sensibility of the classic Paris bistro, with the smoky mirrors, nickel-topped bars, and platters of boeuf tartare and steak frites, through his own transatlantic sensibility—first at the Odeon, that much-imitated scene restaurant of the ’80s, and then at a succession of hit establishments like the popular faux brasserie Balthazar in SoHo and the Minetta Tavern in Greenwich Village. I had taken to describing the carefully staged look of a McNally restaurant—which he, like any good businessman, duplicated again and again in different ventures around the city—as “McNally Land,” a name that the great man might not have appreciated.
Every now and then McNally tried to vary his formula, usually by serving Italian bistro food instead of French, and in the spring of 2010 he opened a restaurant called Pulino’s Bar and Pizzeria on the corner of Houston Street and the Bowery downtown. In my review, I cataloged the features of the familiar McNally style—“The faux bistro bar clad in distressed metal,” the “walls lined with glimmering backlit bottles of booze,” the “magazine rack in the corner,” and, in the evenings, a room “filled with that trademark of all McNally venues: a carefully calibrated, golden light.” The difference between this McNally Land outlet and others, however, was the casual Italian menu prepared by a young, award-winning chef from San Francisco named Nate Appleman, whom the British restaurateur had somehow cajoled into leaving the comforts of his small, laid-back, seasonal restaurant kitchen on the West Coast for the shark tank of high-pressure New York dining. Six weeks after the opening, it was apparent that the transition was not going smoothly. The menu was overcrowded and confused; the locavore theme was noble (Appleman and his team made their own charcuterie and even broke down whole hogs in the basement) but nothing seemed to taste very good, even the pizzas, which were dressed with an “almost toothpastelike tomato sauce” and had brittle crusts that tasted, according to one of my guests, like stale matzo crackers. “In fairness to Appleman,” I wrote, “he’s not in Kansas anymore. Serving carefully wrought escarole salads to sun-splashed foodies in San Francisco is not the same as feeding a roiling piranha tank of New York scenesters pretty much around the clock.”
I was sitting down to work one bright morning not long after the review came out, feeling bloated and fuzzy brained from dinner the night before, and dressed in my usual writer’s attire of rumpled socks and gym clothes, when an email popped up from my friend Ben Leventhal, who had cofounded the restaurant blog Eater just a few short years earlier, asking if I had any comment on Keith McNally’s letter.
“What Keith McNally letter?”
“He wrote an open letter about your Pulino review, which we’re going to run.”
“Oh shit,” I muttered, or something to that effect.
“I don’t think Keith liked your Pulino review, Platty,” said Ben with the quietly suppressed glee of a writer who knows he has a good scoop on his hands.
Eater’s amusingly malicious headline, which went up within seconds after I typed out my conciliatory reply, read: “McNally Calls Adam Platt Bald [which was true], Overweight [sadly, also true], Out of Touch [debatable].” In his letter, McNally had protested, as aggrieved recipients of a tough write-up are prone to do, that I’d reviewed the restaurant way too early. The more respectful two-star write-up in the Times was published two weeks before mine, however, and although six weeks is early in the life of any restaurant, it’s not egregiously early for a print critic working at the relative dawn of the Yelp era. McNally accused me of having a bias against “less formal restaurants” like Pulino, and of mistakenly identifying the blue sweater I described him wearing one of the nights I dropped in as a “cardigan.” “I may not be a paragon of fashion,” wrote the indignant restaurateur, possibly while waving a clenched fist in the air, “but I haven’t worn a cardigan since 1965. (The year Dylan went Electric!)” I replied that I’d admired Mr. McNally and his restaurants (which was true); “as always, in these cases,” I added, “he is entitled to his opinion and I, as a bald, middle aged and, alas (slightly) overweight professional restaurant critic, am entitled to mine.”
In the end, things did not go well for Nate Appleman in the big city. The San Francisco chef would be out of a job within six months, and a few months later, after more futile tinkering, McNally brought in weathered veteran bistro chefs from elsewhere in his empire, remodeled the space in the mold of the other prosperous McNally Lands around town, and installed a French menu heavy on the beefy chops and frites that his New York audience (and the New York critics) were sure to love. Except for my allies at Grub Street and Steve Cuozzo in his New York Post column, the reaction from other corners of the internet had been swift and amusingly slanted toward the celebrity restaurateur. “Platt Acknowledges He Is Overweight, Stands by His Bad Review of Pulino’s” was the headline on Gawker, then run by the Balthazar regular, and fellow expat Englishman, Nick Denton. And then, just as predictably, the buzzing locust horde forgot about the incident and moved on to other momentary crises and events.
The doomed Pulino was replaced, in time, by a more familiar French concept called Cherche Midi, which I reviewed respectfully (“Two stars means ‘very good’”!) and without incident, reserving special praise for the very fine Plattnip-style cut of English rib roast. That restaurant has also closed, however, and the cursed space on the corner of Bowery and Houston stands empty these days, although after all these years, if you Google the names “Adam Platt” and “Keith McNally” together, the immortal words that pop up below my name are “Bald, Overweight, Out of Touch.”