Working restaurant critics—those of us who eat out at least three times a week and have survived on the publishing savanna with expense accounts large enough to pay for a taxicab or an Uber ride to dinner, or even the occasional plane to our next meal—are always, as I say, being told that we have the best job in the world, and of course it’s true. But even the best jobs are fraught with hidden and unexpected perils, and the job of a full-time professional eater can feel more perilous than most. The working life span of even the hardiest full-time critic is not much longer than that of a coal miner or a commercial fisherman, and like miners descending uneasily down into their coal pits or fishermen taking to the seas despite a stormy weather report, the longer we survive, the more we tend to spend the dark midnight hours worrying about all the horrible ways we might expire on the job.
At least, that’s what I worry about sometimes when I lie awake listening to the rumbling of my stomach late at night, or sit down to my fourth tasting menu of the week. Maybe I’ll just slowly gorge myself to death, or keep drinking the intoxicating cocktails it’s my duty to sample until my kidneys expire. Maybe I’ll suffer an allergic reaction to a rare form of shellfish, like the those the fugu ingest in the waters around Japan, or contract a grim, cannibalistic disease after sampling a few too many strange raw meat dishes in a food market far away from home. Maybe I’ll be struck down by a sudden thrombotic event, or slowly fall into a diabetic coma, or choke on a piece of pork gristle in a crowded dining room (tabloids blaring “Restaurant Critic’s Last Horror Meal!” the next day) and collapse to the floor, taking the linen tablecloth and all the crockery with me, while the guests scream in horror and the waiters rush to perform the Heimlich maneuver on my giant overfed frame.
You could build an impressive monument to all the merry, red-faced professional gourmands who’ve expired from too much eating or drinking or various horrible afflictions contracted in the line of duty. Eating is an addiction, of course, and like the doomed Augustus Gloop in Roald Dahl’s famous parable of excess, professional eaters are tempted more or less around the clock by an endless buffet of delicacies fiendishly designed by master chefs to dazzle their audience and bring them back to the trough again and again. I’ve seen brave colleagues overdose on pills and bourbon, addle themselves with too much wine and whiskey, or grow so fat and gout-riddled that they had to hobble from meal to meal like war veterans, with the help of a cane. There’s A. J. Liebling, of course, who finally ate himself to death at the age of fifty-nine, and Jonathan Gold, who had Liebling’s gorgeous prose style as well as his contempt for diets, died suddenly of pancreatic cancer when he was only fifty-seven years old. After decades of feasting (and, in his early years, hard drinking), the enviably trim A. A. Gill announced to his startled Sunday Times readers that he’d contracted “an embarrassment of cancer . . . the Full English,” and was dead three weeks later at the age of sixty-two. One of my colleagues who also managed to remain remarkably fit and trim during his long, award-winning dining career told me once that the key to his good health was avoiding bread baskets and taking the stairs whenever possible, including walking several times a day up and down the staircase of his large suburban home. Several months after that conversation, however, he also was diagnosed with cancer, although the last I heard, he was doing fine.
Not surprisingly, women seem to navigate the treacherous shoals of the dining life better than men do, although Mimi Sheraton, who is a picture of health well into her eighties, told me once as we were having a large and not very good working dinner at some nameless restaurant in New York that she’d added seventy pounds to her small frame when she was the New York Times restaurant critic in the ’70s and ’80s. Mimi is a steely and disciplined personality, and it took her five years of judicious light eating as a regular civilian to take all the weight off. “Don’t let this job kill you,” she said as she watched me merrily forking large amounts of food from everyone’s plates. “I’m telling you, it’s not worth it!”
Mimi’s right of course, but I’ve never heard of a working full-time restaurant critic who actually managed to lose weight over the long term, and if you come to the job with a built-in proclivity for ravenous eating, as many of us do, the results can be depressing. Every once in a while my older food-loving relatives furtively embarked on “cures” or diets, the way Joe Alsop, who repaired every year to the same spa in Switzerland, used to do. More often, when they weren’t toasting each other with goblets of martinis or gathering for Sunday roast beef dinners, they were muttering darkly, like Alsop also did, about being afflicted with the dreaded “fat gene,” the way other families were afflicted with dementia or alcoholism. To ease their sense of dread, they invented comic family names for different fatso parts of the body—such as “pie wings” for the ridges of paunch dripping over the belt. One of my uncles was so large as a little boy that the family named him “Count Ponty,” after the air-filled pontoons you see on the sides of ships. My father developed large pontoons of his own as a hungry young boy, but when he went off to college, he took up rowing, began to weigh himself obsessively every morning, and jotted the results down in a small leather-bound notebook, a practice he continued for most of his life. When we returned from Asia to live in Washington, DC, in the 1970s and my brothers and I began ballooning in size as we gorged nervously on high-calorie American soda pop and grease-bomb cheeseburgers, he developed elaborate diet plans for his lumbering sons and tried to run the calories off us by organizing weekend walks and touch football games.
None of these diet strategies worked very well, at least in my case, because diets rarely ever work, and also because I’m different from my father in crucial ways. I’ve always tended toward roundness, while he’s angular; I’m often as sloppy and disheveled as he is neat; and I approach the world in zigzags and circles, while he tends to go at things in a straight line. He used to peruse high-angle catalogs for newfangled gadgets with which to facilitate a dignified passage through life, and now he spends just as much time collecting these gadgets on the internet; amassing gadgetry has not been my style at all. Well into his eighties, he still maintains a revolving collection of techno wristwatches and ballistic space pens; when they become obsolete, he frequently tries to pawn off these accessories, neatly stacked in boxes on his desk, on his sons, and if we don’t want them, he gives them to his grandchildren, who accept them politely, the way my daughters do, and take them home to stow in little boxes of their own.
Sometimes the diets our father gave us when we were growing up had motivational names like the “Samurai Program,” which was developed for his giant sons as they began happily fattening up on bowls of stir-fried yakisoba noodles and pork ramen when we lived in Tokyo. I have dim memories of intricate exercise charts tacked up on the bedroom doors upstairs, complete with goals for each day of the week in neatly arranged boxes, and young Nick Jr., who began growing to full, fearsome Platt-boy size while in Tokyo, remembers my father exhorting him to do “push aways” from the table during his ravenous noodle feasts, rather than eating that second, or third, bowl of ramen. Like all of us, the former Baby Dalai Lama listened to the wisdom of his elders for a while before returning happily to his noodle dinners, and as an adult, I tended to repeat this dynamic when it came to my own diets, of course. One summer I lost twenty or so pounds in a very 1970s way on a regime of cottage cheese and little tubs of Dannon yogurt, but gained it all back when the school year began. My undoing was a long-ago submarine sandwich and future pizza shop on the upper reaches of Connecticut Avenue, in DC, called Armand’s, where I first experienced the complicated joys of that ruinous regional delicacy of the mid-Atlantic USA, the steak and cheese hoagie. The countermen knew me by sight and would fire up the onions and Cheez Whiz and shreds of fatty, previously frozen beef as soon as they saw my Godzilla-sized shadow darken the sidewalk outside. “Don’t bite yourself,” I remember one of them said as I collected my gloomy little afternoon snack and headed out the door.
Despite our father’s best efforts, by the time the Platt boys reached young adulthood we had a formidable reputation for devouring everything in our path. Once, when we were coming home to visit from overseas, one of my uncles spotted my grandfather coming back from the grocery store, loaded down with bags of TV dinners and potato chips, and asked him if he was giving a party that night. “No, the boys are coming to stay,” he replied, with a wild, apprehensive look in his eye. “They’ll eat everything in the refrigerator but the screws and the ice trays.” In young adulthood, we were famous for plundering wedding buffets and ransacking entire kitchens together, choreographing our movements precisely, without sound or signal, according to some dim genetic code. My dieting habits during those carefree days tended to be seasonal: I’d consume the most in the summertime, during the frantic family pie- and lobster-eating contests up in New Hampshire and Maine, and then starve like a hibernating bear through the winter months. Despite the stern commands of our father, the Platt boys rarely ever staggered onto a scale, unless threatened at gunpoint, and like many neurotic eaters, I still have an aversion to scales, on the grounds that they always make me gain weight. If the scale says I’m thinner than I thought, I’ll usually run out for a celebratory meal. If it says I’m too fat, I’ll usually, with glum self-flagellation, do the same thing. Even before I started eating for a living, I preferred to cruise along in a state of vigilant denial, climbing on the exercise bicycle or the StairMaster at symbolic intervals, even as I glanced nervously in the mirrors now and then and watched the notches slowly disappear on my belt.
Since I became a restaurant critic, my exercise habits haven’t changed very much, although, like lots of cagey veterans in dangerous occupations, I’ve attempted to develop strategies over the years for surviving on the job. I never like to have more than four people, including myself, at the table for a working meal, since the number of dishes it’s your duty to sample grows exponentially with every guest; and with more than four at the table, a civilized dinner can turn quickly into a chaotic, booze-filled social event. Bread baskets are the devil for any working restaurant critic, especially if you’re attempting to diet, and so are sugar-saturated cocktails and extra glasses of wine. Tasting one teaspoon of each dessert is the ideal but rarely achieved goal when eating on the job, and the same goes for the fried foods, steaks and burgers, and butter- and oil-saturated pastas that I snap pictures of, then pass on to my guests. Ideally, I engage in some light, pro forma exercise every morning, have a healthy, non-bagel-and-bacon breakfast, and eat one meal a day, preferably early in the evening, when it’s easier to find a reservation at a busy restaurant.
Most critics I know would rather avoid endless, time-wasting tasting menus whenever possible. The preferred time to dine for the weary dining professional is early, and the preferred meal tends to be a leisurely luncheon, because when the dining rooms around the city tend to be quieter and less hectic, you have time to actually consider the food, and once you’ve finished with your meal, and a glass or two of wine, there’s plenty of time for a restorative afternoon nap. Of course, in the real world many of the restaurants I review don’t serve lunch anymore and the fatso comfort foods, which any sensible dieter strives to avoid (burgers, fried chicken, pasta in all its relentlessly fattening forms), are more popular than ever and always do best on Instagram. In addition, all sorts of factors—the rise of Japan as the gourmet capital of the world; the obsessive copycat popularity in the social media era and “fifty top restaurants” lists; the brutal economics of fine dining in the post-gourmet, cost-cutting world; the arrival on the scene of a new generation of charismatic Nordic chefs who have embraced the tasting menu form because where they come from there are rarely enough ingredients to fill out a full à la carte menu, especially in wintertime—have conspired to make the expensive, time-consuming, relentlessly gut-busting omakase tasting menu the dominant gourmet dining style of today.
To manage my increasingly tenuous health after nearly two decades on the job, I now take a battery of daily medications—pills prescribed by Dr. K for my possibly diabetic blood sugar levels, pills prescribed by my long-suffering internist Dr. P to diffuse the frighteningly high levels of cholesterol and fatty lipids that have collected in my veins, and pills for the occasional El Bulli–style flare-ups of gout when the levels of uric acid in my blood reach intemperate levels. I’ve consulted a cavalcade of dietitians during my long eating career and visited my share of what A. J. Liebling, the patron saint of all whale-sized food writers, contemptuously referred to as slimming prisons, where I’ve huffed up and down arid desert hillsides, twisted myself into torturous yoga poses, and consumed vats of healing green tea. I’ve experimented with trendy juice cleanses over the years, choked down buzzy taurine-spiked protein powders, embarked on twice-a-week fasting regimes, and consulted more concerned, wraithlike dietitians and nutritionists than I care to count, before being drawn back, inexorably, to the life of leisurely, booze-filled luncheons, decadent tasting menus, and furtive midnight tubs of ice cream.