The mannered, front-of-the-house restaurant culture wasn’t the only stuffy, anachronistic institution to get turned on its head during my early years as a self-important, and increasingly old-fashioned, big-city restaurant critic. “Your day is over, Platty, the barbarians have stormed the gates,” Josh Ozersky would gleefully cry in his strangely lilting, high-pitched voice when I drifted over to his cubicle in the new downtown offices of New York magazine on the far western fringes of SoHo, where the company moved when the midtown rents got too oppressively high. Ozersky was the first editor of Grub Street, which the magazine launched in the fall of 2006 to compete with the rabble of popular restaurant news and food sites (Eater, EGullet, ChowHound) that were sprouting up around the media landscape like pods of fast-growing mushrooms during those early cowboy years of the internet culture. Ozersky was not a natural creature of this glib, ephemeral world—as he liked to endlessly remind me, and anyone else who would listen, he’d earned a PhD in American studies at Notre Dame before washing up in New York, and he’d written learned books on popular culture, including one on the ’70s-era sitcom All in the Family, and his masterwork, The Hamburger: A History, was published by Yale University Press while he was writing for Grub Street. Ozersky had dreamed of being a respected public intellectual and historian in the mold of his heroes Samuel Johnson and the Victorian historian Thomas Macaulay—both of whom he liked to quote at length while jamming a steady stream of cheeseburgers down his throat.
Ozersky had the passion and disputatious nature of a natural online journalist, however, and he also had the metabolism of one, although when the pressure of turning out a post every hour of the day, beginning at 8:00 a.m., started to grind him down, he would supplement his resolutely nonvegetarian burger and steak diet with a variety of stimulants, including that favorite drug of jet fighter pilots and manic writers everywhere, Adderall, which he obtained in little wrinkled mail-order envelopes from India. Like lots of people in the business, including me, he’d found his way to the food world in a meandering, circuitous way. When the magazine’s online editor, Ben Williams, who had an eye for spotting eccentric talent, hired him to run Grub Street, he was living out in the Ditmas Park neighborhood of Brooklyn—a distant exile region he liked to call “Ozerkistan”—churning out food guide books (he was proudest of a beef primer called Meat Me in Manhattan) and grainy, low-production videos celebrating the glories of beef and starring himself as an antic, bug-eyed character he called “Mr. Cutlets.” When Ben hired Mr. Cutlets, he brought us together for lunch at a steakhouse near the office. Mr. Cutlets, who had an aversion to the heat and was built, he liked to say, like a burly Jewish linebacker, was sweating profusely through his shirt. He ordered a large platter of porterhouse or some other giant cut of beef, and as he devoured it, more or less on his own, he regaled us in his bluff, insecure way with stories about all the chefs he knew (he had a habit of calling them by their first names, like basketball stars, which often left you guessing which one he was talking about). Adding to our general confusion, Mr. Cutlets also quoted liberally from his beloved North American Meat Processors manual, a book of standards for butchers and producers, published by the US Department of Agriculture, which he’d committed to memory with a kind of Talmudic devotion and carried with him during his forays into the field.
Ozersky used to half-jokingly call himself a polymath, and on the topics that interested him—Victorian history and literature, NBA basketball, the richly fatty joys of the “top flap” cut of deckle meat on a well-cured slab of pastrami, the writings of his fellow Adderall-addled literary hero, Philip K. Dick—this was not far from the truth. His parents died at an early age—his father was a failed painter who made his living designing stage sets for the casinos of Atlantic City—and he had no siblings. So like an orphan from a Dickens novel, he was free to invent all sorts of characters for himself as he made his way through the world, and there were many of them—the erudite gourmand with a fondness for cheeseburgers; the conspiracy-obsessed, left-leaning intellectual; the neurotic tummler from the Old Country, always rolling his eyes to the heavens and cursing the fates in Yiddish; and the slightly deviant wiseguy flaneur straight from the pages of Damon Runyon, who wandered the bright avenues of the Emerald City at all hours of the night, wearing his Homburg hat.
Like his literary hero Samuel Johnson, Ozersky cultivated a convivial, almost clubbish sense of community among his equally eccentric, ragtag group of friends, many of whom would gather with him at dive bar hangouts like the old Box Car Lounge in Alphabet City, where he would regale them with a familiar grab bag of favorite quotes and sayings. Late one evening, I heard him recite Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” from beginning to end, to a startled group of diners. Having committed James Boswell’s famous biography of Johnson more or less to memory, he had an endless supply of Johnsonian quotes on writing (yes, it was true, no one but a “blockhead ever wrote for money”) and the joys of a good feed (“A man seldom thinks with more earnestness than he does of his dinner”). The one he liked best was the famous Johnsonian prescription for fame and notoriety, which the scholar compared to the endless batting back and forth of a feathered badminton shuttlecock. “It must be struck at both ends; if struck only at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the floor,” Ozersky would declaim in a loud baritone voice from his cluttered office cubicle—a predictably chaotic space filled with freebie bottles of bourbon, stained, half-read cookbooks, and piles of sandwich wrappers and desiccated sandwich ends—as he monitored the shuttlecocks zinging to and fro via this new medium called the internet.
The Ozersky cubicle sat in those days next to the magazine’s fashion desk, a land of slimming salad lunches and rows of neatly ordered Post-it notes, whose occupants regarded the new Grub Street restaurant blogger with a mixture of amusement, fascination, and quiet horror. As Ozersky raved away across from her well-ordered desk, a young reporter named Sharon Clott Kanter began quietly jotting down a diary of “Josh-isms.” She noted his frequent cries of “Oy vey ist mir!” when he was beaten on a scoop or otherwise exasperated, which was often; “Do me a Mitzvah” when he wanted a favor (which was often); and the much-used “She gave me the Mitten!” when his invitation to dinner, or for a drink, or to return to his surprisingly fastidious apartment across the East River in the wilds of the distant outer borough he called “Ozerkistan” was rebuffed. She recorded his quirky names for people and places—“Manahatty” was the favored Joshism for “Manhattan”—and his endless hectic, increasingly fraught conversations with sources as he attempted to wheedle information for his hourly posts. Ozersky occasionally used the communal office refrigerator to store the vanity meat products he obtained during his wanderings, and a heated office drama ensued one afternoon after an artisanal Ossabaw hog jowl, which he was saving for one of his pork dinners, disappeared from the fridge. “What kind of nut steals a man’s jowl?!” the meat aficionado asked in a loud, pained voice, before sending out an irate staff email that read: “Somebody took an Ossabaw pork jowl which I left in the refrigerator for a few hours today. I acquired it at great personal expense and difficulty and need it for a special meal I’m preparing this weekend. Please return it to the refrigerator; there will be no questions asked.”
As the Ossabaw incident shows, Ozersky wasn’t a traditional company man. He belonged to that early pioneer generation of writers who’d grown up in a more discursive and settled world of letters and had to adapt on the fly to the relentless burnout blizzard of posts, retweets, and digital hot takes. “I’ve been in a bad marriage, survived a doctoral program, suffered obsessive episodes requiring medication, lived with a girlfriend who worked as an escort, struggled to keep a business afloat, been in tax trouble and written nine books,” he wrote, long after he’d left New York, “and I never felt the kind of pressure I did when I was helming Grub Street.” But he recognized early on that the Johnsonian batting back and forth of the shuttlecock was a perfect metaphor for this emerging world of online journalism, where “conversation” and “engagement” were already replacing the statelier, less immediate, more “objective” brand of magazine journalism that we were both used to. During the manic early years of Grub Street, he would compete in a desperate frenzy for hourly scoops with his sworn enemies at sites like Strong Buzz, Eater, and Serious Eats over the kinds of stories—outer borough bar and pizza joint openings, obscure menu changes, the comings and goings of talented but temperamental cooks—that just months before traditional print food writers like myself would have filed away for possible use in some distant, carefully composed essay, or more likely would have just ignored altogether. But from his new perch, Mr. Cutlets could also see that these endless incremental crumbs of minutiae and the ever growing, ever more informed, ever more passionate audience that fed on them hour by hour, and even minute by minute, like roving, jittery, endlessly distracted schools of fish, were changing not just the news cycle and the way people processed information but the very nature of the restaurant business itself.
Like the rest of the United States, New York’s dining community had traditionally taken most of its fashion cues from elsewhere during the twentieth century—from German cooks during the early part of the twentieth century; from Paris in the 1950s and ’60s; from Italy in the ’70s and ’80s, when Sirio Maccioni infused classic French cuisine with a dose of Tuscan conviviality at his midtown restaurant, Le Cirque; and from California and points east during the ’90s, when chefs like Nobu Matsuhisa and Jean-Georges Vongerichten arrived in town with their impressive bag of fusion tricks. But with the coming of the No Reservations generation early in the next century and the opening of influential restaurants like Tom Colicchio’s chef-centric venture, Craft, in the Flatiron District in 2001, the heat emanating from New York’s kitchens began to have a vibrant, original quality all its own. Later on, I would compare this new sensibility—brassy, heavily flavored, accessible in the utilitarian way most iconic New York dishes tend to be (the pizza slice, the bagel, the Porterhouse), but filtered, like the Torrisi Italian deli, Roberta’s out in Bushwick, and Chang’s noodle bar, through a certain sophisticated big-city swagger and style—to a loud, new, distinctive big-city sound. It was the online writers who heard the music first, however, and gave it a local audience; eventually it was picked up by the slower-moving mainstream writers, like myself, and broadcast through the usual ponderously slow official channels, out into the large and expanding universe of food fashion and culture to be dissected, reworked, and imitated again and again.
Several months into my new career as a restaurant critic, I’d reviewed Craft for the magazine, and looking back, I can see that, like most people, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. I wrote about the menu, which was framed around ingredients instead of elaborate recipes, and described the polished, wood-paneled room with its bare, linen-free tables and pods of filament bulbs, which would soon appear in trendy restaurants around the globe. I quoted someone at the table saying, “It’s as if they’ve rearranged the way traffic works,” although just how radically Colicchio and his cooks—who would go on, like the Frenchman at Le Pavilion a generation ago, to spread their gospel far and wide—had rearranged things wasn’t entirely clear. The culinary theme wasn’t faux French, or crypto-brasserie, or even haute Californian (that would be Thomas Keller’s specialty at his Napa Valley restaurants and later at his New York restaurant Per Se); the theme was the purity of those twin chefs’ obsessions—ingredients and technique. Sixty-five ingredients were listed on the first menu (Colicchio’s original radical idea was to have no actual recipes at all). Although several new restaurants around town, and, indeed, around the country, were peddling a similar bucolic version of farm-to-table haute cuisine (Savoy in SoHo, for instance, or Blue Hill, the restaurant near Washington Square Park that a pale, intense, young chef-owner named Dan Barber had named after his family farm in the Berkshires), no one had articulated the new cult of simplicity and unpretentiousness in quite such a fashionable, immaculately pretentious New York City way.
The same would be true of Colicchio’s little spin-off establishment, Craftbar, when it opened shortly afterward in a small space next door to the mother ship, on East Nineteenth Street. The idea for the casual, counter-style operation had been popularized by the chef’s former business partner Danny Meyer, at the Union Square Café and Gramercy Tavern, where Colicchio was part owner and executive chef. When I got around to reviewing this afterthought of a restaurant, I commented politely on the small plates menu, which featured fried oysters and a variety of fine dishes that appeared to have been culled from the chef’s red sauce youth out in New Jersey, like soft veal meatballs dressed with shingles of parmesan and the most delicious bread sticks I’d ever tasted. I had no idea, however, that this modest operation, which closed after a year or two and ultimately failed as a larger franchise concept, would help spawn a whole new generation of small, nimble, out-of-the-way, endlessly imitated bar restaurants—like the modest ramen shop that opened a couple of years later, in the fall of 2004, by a former Craft employee and line cook named David Chang.
I heard about an innocuous little Japanese-style noodle bar, down on First Avenue in the East Village and named for the famous inventor of instant ramen noodles, Momofuku Ando, from my underground gourmet colleagues at the magazine, Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld, who’d given the ramen, and the gently simmered pork and chicken broth in particular, a short but glowing review in the magazine. I was putting together my usual year-end monster package and hunting for material, so I wandered into the Momofuku Noodle Bar alone early one weeknight off the street and bellied up to the bar, behind which the chef and a few of his cooks were at work in a cloud of steam. The narrow space was surrounded by the usual collection of tattoo parlors and bodegas I remember, and it had the temporary, just-decorated quality you would see later on around town, when pop-up restaurants were all the rage. Rap tunes played from little speakers attached to an early-generation iPod stuck above the bar. The cooks on the line worked with their backs to their customers and delivered my steaming bowl of pork ramen when it was ready in the curt, no-nonsense style I remembered from my high school days haunting noodle bars back in Tokyo. The rich, silky, steamy broth was like nothing I remember tasting back in Japan, however, having been simmered over time—according to Underground Gourmet, with the care of a classic gourmet chef—in a pot filled with bacon, ham hocks, roasted pork bones, and a small mountain of fresh chicken legs.
The menu items that caught my attention, however, were the steamed bun sandwiches, which were made from the kind of plump, white, folded bao dumplings that you could buy by the dozens in shiny cellophane packages in Chinatown. One of these inspired little fusion tea sandwiches was stuffed with a slab of Berkshire pork, with a familiar type of Peking duck–style garnish of cucumbers and hoisin sauce, and the other contained delicious crackly-skinned deposits of the roasted chicken. I remember enjoying the chicken bun much better than the one with pork; in fact, I liked the chicken bun so much that I ordered a second one from the silent, glowering cooks at the anonymous little East Village restaurant and proceeded to extoll its delicious qualities to anyone who would listen.
“A word to the wise, Platty: always write about the pork,” Mr. Cutlets liked to say whenever I told this story. Being an Ossabaw connoisseur, Ozersky was partial to pork products, of course, and in those days before they had their famous falling-out, he was one of the earliest and most vociferous disciples of the Cult of David Chang. Because he followed the flurry of shuttlecocks as they batted back and forth in the ever-expanding digital ethosphere, Ozersky knew much better than I did that formerly hidden cooks’ pleasures like pork chops and late-night noodles were being jacked directly, via this supercharged new delivery system called the internet, into the cerebral cortex of the culinary mainstream. At that particular moment, in the early aughts, the internet culture was having the same transformative effect on the restaurant industry that the coming of MTV had had on the music industry in the 1980s. As the medium grew, the appetite for story content exploded, going from a few stories and posts each week to dozens and then hundreds every day on all the competing sites, and each post would be replicated and repeated, echoing and expanding forever out into the exploding cyber-universe in an endless twenty-four-hour loop. The opportunity for cooks and chefs and restaurateurs to develop and tell their own narratives—as opposed to, say, waiting for a weary print journalist to come knocking on their door—would expand exponentially too, and over the years, savvy, inventive chefs like Chang and, later on, René Redzepi at Noma would take the opportunity to re-create their own stories again and again. Blog posts were like self-replicating Von Neumann machines, Mr. Cutlets would later write: each one helped to create hundreds and then thousands of others like itself, which is why an ingenious fusion creation that might have been registered, then politely forgotten, by tastemaking critics just a few years before, like the Changian pork bun, could take on a life of its own. Which may also have been why, when I returned to the Momofuku Noodle Bar a few months later for a taste of my beloved crispy roast chicken bun, the item had disappeared from the menu forever.
Ozersky worked at Grub Street for only two years, but we became friends, and for a time we would venture out together on our culinary rounds to my review restaurants, or in his case to sample the endless stream of burgers and meat products turned out by the chefs he was always championing, often, I would later learn, in exchange for a free dinner or two. Ozersky liked to inveigh against the preciousness of what he called gourmet “tweezer food,” and he had endless euphemisms for kitchens where he was known to the chef (“I’m big here”) and for his habit of never picking up a tab (“Platty, I was born with a permanent case of alligator arms”). Sometimes after I’d paid for his large dinner we’d dive into delis and smoke shops to buy a fistful of lotto cards, which he’d scratch out with a big smile on his face, hoping to win a few bucks. Sometimes during his rounds he would drop by the apartment unannounced and spread out on the couch for a restorative nap, and the girls, who were small and impressionable at the time, would come to me in my office on their tiptoes and whisper, “Daddy, who’s that big fat man snoring on the couch?” It was Mr. Cutlets who gave me the name “Platty” and recommended that I check out the comically named online messaging service called Twitter, which went live the same year Grub Street did, in the winter of 2006. I eventually got around to signing up under the Cutlets-inspired name “Plattypants” because a doppelgänger restaurant critic in Minneapolis named Adam Platt had taken my name, and who would ever take this “social media” business seriously anyways. Then I watched in bemused horror as within seconds schools of strangers began lighting up my newly purchased smartphone.
Ozersky and one of his eccentric cronies from the online underworld, a genial former nightclub bouncer and reformed skinhead turned meat blogger and food photographer named Nick “English Nick” Solares, would amuse themselves by calling my traditional restaurant critic’s job “the last great job of the twentieth century,” which even back in those early days wasn’t far from the truth. In the fast disappearing pre-digital world I’d been inhabiting for years, restaurant critics were like miners, searching around a mostly hidden landscape for nuggets of gold, shining our creaky headlamps on carefully curated discoveries, many of which took weeks and sometimes months to find, and then sending the news back to a small, captive group of readers in carefully curated articles and magazine spreads. But with the new juiced-up, interactive news cycle, the old hidden mysteries of the restaurant kitchen—which strange and delicious recipes the best cutting-edge chefs were conjuring up, where to find them, how to order them—suddenly weren’t so mysterious anymore. Online services like Yelp would soon allow the crowds of formerly docile, captive diners to voice their critical opinions on everything from the quality of the French fries to the cleanliness of a restaurant’s toilets. When that game-changing Godzilla of the dining world, Instagram, arrived a few years later, cooks (and diners) were suddenly able to peer into restaurant kitchens and dining rooms all over the world, in real time, and it became increasingly clear that ponderous “legacy media” dinosaurs like myself, who’d grown to enormous size over the decades guiding the slow-moving herds from one watering hole to the next, were going to have to adapt to this rapidly evolving new landscape in order to survive.
Mr. Cutlets took pleasure in heckling his new dinosaur friend about the coming apocalypse—about the exhausting number of posts to file, the diminished role of authority in this crowded, noisy world, and the disguises and mannered pageantry of the traditional critics’ routine, which he called “mere outmoded mummery,” with a Johnsonian wave of his pudgy hand. Like most passionate online personalities in the early days of the web, he preferred the role of booster and bombastic connoisseur to the traditional, dispassionate pose of the critic. He also preferred the company of workaday chefs and line cooks to ironic, self-serious journalists and writers, and when I took him out on review dinners, I often had to restrain him from wandering back to the kitchen in his bluff, Falstaffian way and announcing his presence to the chef in a loud voice. Like his nineteenth-century heroes back on London’s real Grub Street, he enjoyed playing favorites and picking fights, usually in an attempt to keep the shuttlecock endlessly in the air, and to promote what web writers in those days were already calling “the conversation.” He picked fights with the growing myth of Brooklyn dining, a place that he viewed, in the old-world New York way, as a provincial region of exile, full of poor, pretentious souls who couldn’t make it among the emerald towers of Manhattan. He picked fights with devotees of M.F.K. Fisher, whom he thought was similarly pretentious and overrated, and as the shuttlecock began to increasingly fly out of hand, he picked fights with his friends, including me.
In the end, we had a falling-out over another modestly critical three-star review I wrote about another elaborately posh Italian restaurant called Marea, in midtown, operated by one of his most loyal favorites, a talented chef named Michael White (“the Sultan of Spaghetti,” Ozersky christened him). He had a much more public feud with David Chang, who famously banned Mr. Cutlets for life from his East Village dining empire for what, I’m guessing, was a Grub Street story he didn’t much like, combined with a few too many Falstaffian visits back to the kitchen looking for a complimentary dinner or two. After the Marea incident, during which I’d assumed my usual boiled-owl expression and said nothing in public, Mr. Cutlets would come around to the apartment with a sad, slightly sheepish look on his face, bearing a bottle of Irish whiskey as a peace offering. He’d left Grub Street by then and was desperately churning out content for a short-lived website that he’d christened The Feed Bag. The pressures of keeping the shuttlecock in the air had caused things to spin out of control, he said with a sad shake of his head, and he was sorry for what he called his “traitorous deed.” I accepted his apology and we shared several stiff afternoon glasses of whiskey before he wandered off again looking, I later imagined, like a bear going off into the woods in search of his next meal. We remained friends after our falling-out, Mr. Cutlets and I, although I began to see less and less of him after that and the girls would notice that he never came back to the apartment again.