As the new universe of online journalism mutated and grew and, in short order, began to devour the quaintly mannered routines of weekly magazine journalism whole, Josh Ozersky would be succeeded at Grub Street by a series of ever more professional, shipshape, conscientious editors who didn’t mutter ancient Yiddish sayings to themselves in their cubicles, or take furtive favors from the people they covered, or dabble in addictive mail-order stimulants the way Mr. Cutlets did. They were a little more expert at navigating this new and clamorously democratic landscape, where swirling digital weather patterns caused fast-moving trends to pop up in Tokyo or Copenhagen one day, and in Paris and Brooklyn the next. They were adept at searching out different styles and story lines and scanning the great spaces of the internet, the way ambitious chefs were increasingly doing, for that single dish that would catch the imagination of the viral hordes, the way David Chang and his pork bun had done back in the day.
This was the Era of the Great Crazes in the restaurant world—the craze for high-end “burger blends” perpetuated by Keith McNally’s famous Black Label Burger at Minetta Tavern; the craze for eye-catching multicolored cookies and bagels, for pizzas of every shape and size, for kale salads and avocado toast; the craze, most of all, for the kind of ingenious mashup creation that a young former Daniel Boulud pastry chef, Dominique Ansel, would create at the dawn of the Instagram age. Ansel had the brilliant idea of marrying together the buttery lightness of a classic Parisian croissant and the satisfying sugary crunch of an American doughnut, filling it with different-flavored varieties of custard, and calling the final product, which took months of experimentation, a “Cronut.”
The Great Cronut Craze of 2013 was a Grub Street scoop, as it happened, orchestrated by one of Ozersky’s very un-Ozerskian successors, a talented young editor named Alan Sytsma, whose work habits were so orderly, industrious, and above reproach, whose cubicle was so shipshape and spotless, whose manners were so formal and polite that I gave him the nickname “the Admiral.” After receiving a tip from Ansel, whose bakery was located, conveniently, only a few blocks from the office, the Admiral dispatched a studious former line cook turned writer named Hugh Merwin to investigate. Merwin wrote a three-hundred-word post on this round, multilayered, strangely delicious object and described the “genius pastry engineering” that went into deep-frying each thin sheet of delicate croissant pastry dough. (During his experiments, Ansel had found that linseed oil bubbles at a certain temperature, giving the dough a perfect crunch without turning it to mush.) The post ran complete with alluring pictures of the first-ever Cronut, coated with a rose-colored glaze and stuffed with a light, technically perfect cream filling made in the classic French style and flavored with Tahitian vanilla. The next morning when they went on sale, there was a line stretching out the door of the little bakery and down the block, and the first batch of Cronuts—always limited to just a few hundred, Ansel coyly claimed, because his small kitchen wouldn’t allow the baking of any more—sold out in thirty-eight minutes. That same afternoon videos of people enjoying their Cronuts began popping up online, and it wasn’t long before the line became so long and unruly that brokers, for hundreds of dollars, began to offer early same-day Cronuts to people who didn’t feel like getting up at 5:00 a.m. or risking being trampled in a Cronut stampede. Ansel officially trademarked the name of his invention just weeks after unleashing it on an unsuspecting public. Years later, despite thousands of imitators and populist Dunkin’ Donuts knockoffs, there are Ansel bakeries in Tokyo and Paris, and some mornings the line for the original Cronut in SoHo still stretches around the block.
Even before the Cronut Craze of 2013, however, the professional description for those of us who still clung to our “greatest job of the twentieth century” was changing, just as Ozersky had predicted, in all sorts of strange and unsettling ways. Many of the traditional restaurant critic jobs, which required hefty expense accounts to do properly, had already disappeared outright at money-losing newspapers and magazines as they cut costs, then their staffs, and then began to go out of business altogether. When I’d started tapping out my weekly reviews in the summer of 2000, there were close to a dozen other full-time restaurant scribblers wandering from dining room to dining room, filing their flowery, carefully considered impressions of the trends of the day for newspapers and glossy publications around New York. More than a decade later, that number had shrunk to a small handful, and plans were being made at New York magazine to move the print operation, which had been published more or less every week since it was founded by Clay Felker and Milton Glaser in the spring of 1968 as an offshoot of the old New York Herald Tribune Sunday magazine, to a biweekly schedule. Grumpy, slow-moving print critics like myself were being told to write fewer actual reviews and more roundups, more top ten lists, more snappy, digestible items about food trends and stunt dishes. Permutations of the now-sainted and much-imitated Cronut were popping up all over the wild foodscape in the form of neon cookies and candied ice cream swirls and giant $100 doughnuts made in the Filipino style with purple-tinged yams; one of those would be delivered to me later on at the office from a local Filipino restaurant, wrapped in crepe paper and encased in a shiny cardboard box, like one of my grandmother’s fancy summer hats, and covered entirely in 24-karat gold leaf. The quiet, carefully reasoned murmurings of the lordly old mandarin critic still had some value in the chaotic democracy of the dining world, and thanks to many different factors—the leveling democracy of the internet, the rise of a more accessible style of dining, along with an obsessively informed new generation of consumers—the interest in food and the food culture had never been more popular or widespread. But those of us who were used to the stately routines of the job were beginning to feel less like the judicious arbiters of taste we imagined ourselves to be and more like loud, yammering carnival barkers dressed in spats and top hats, herding the growing crowds of informed and unruly diners from one spangled, ephemeral, short-lived attraction to the next.
Since the arrival of Josh Ozersky and Grub Street, I’d been trying to raise my digital profile in various haphazard, slightly awkward ways, like an out-of-shape former track star donning his rumpled and stained college sweatshirt and attempting, at the advanced age of fifty-five, to sprint a few laps with the energetic young team of his former alma mater. I’d written occasional online musings for Grub Street, under the title “The Gobbler,” about behind-the-scenes restaurant critic peeves like the perils of dieting, the many rules on how to eat out with your children, the foolishness of the Michelin rankings in New York (and star systems in general), and the legions of sacred cow dining institutions around town—like the sainted, consistently overrated Brooklyn steak palace Peter Luger, which had risen above what I called “the Shit Line” and drew in crowds of customers day after day no matter how bad the service or the quality of the beef or what the bilious critics said. But even for much younger, more energetic writers who weren’t spending their mornings in a calorie-induced daze, the voracious appetite for online content could turn quickly into a bottomless and terrifying black hole. And after a few jaunty early sprints around this hyper-caffeinated track, the Gobbler’s efforts slowed to a wheezing crawl before petering out altogether. As rocket-fueled stunt dishes like the Cronut took off and the print magazine advertising continued its march into oblivion, however, our editor at New York, Adam Moss, had another idea on how to raise the profile of his ponderous, print-oriented, stubbornly twentieth-century restaurant critic.
Adam Moss had been an editor at the Times during Ruth Reichl’s heyday there and had dined out with her while she was on the job, possibly when she was dressed in one of her famous disguises. He knew as well as anyone that, like the myth of objectivity, which the Michelin stars had also been designed to convey, the myth of anonymity was a powerful marketing tool for traditional, old-line restaurant critics. It added a sense of magic, even a touch of lordly, Oz-like mystery, to the popular cartoon conception of the all-knowing restaurant critic—like Anton Ego in the Disney movie Ratatouille, or Ruth at the height of her magical costume powers—and enhanced their credentials in the subjective, constantly evolving, perennially fashion-conscious world of fancy restaurants as the ultimate, dispassionate arbiters of taste. But audience tastes in the participatory, postmodern, increasingly riotous and quirky, crowdsourced age were changing at the usual warp speed. You could find anyone’s image online these days with a couple of clicks on the keyboard. In London, star restaurant critics routinely ran their mug shots above their columns, and even in New York, high-profile food writers who sometimes doubled as critics, like Alan Richman of GQ, had been out of the proverbial closet for years. With the posts about the lowly Cronut generating more clicks than any restaurant review ever had, and faced with marketing yet another formulaic, end-of-the-year monster print magazine restaurant roundup to an increasingly restive and distracted audience of readers and advertisers, Moss asked me whether I’d like to come out of the closet too.
“We’re putting your face on the cover, it will be great!” the editor announced, with one of his mischievous grins, after I’d been summoned from my cubicle for one of my infrequent meetings in the corner office.
“That’s not going to be good for newsstand sales,” I said, with one of my characteristic Eeyore-like sighs.
“Don’t worry, they’ll make you look fabulous!” said Mr. Moss, waving his hand in the direction of the photo department, with a happy glint in his eye.
The cover, when it appeared on January 1, 2014, would feature my giant bald head, floating against a white background, above the cutline “Hi, I’m Adam Platt, Your Restaurant Critic.” The photo session had been suspiciously short. I’d smiled dutifully for the camera several times and dressed, as instructed, in a clean white shirt. I even put on a series of comic “disguise” props, which I thought would be an amusing touch, including a plastic Groucho Marx nose and mustache. Of course, the one glum, unsmiling, boiled-owl look I gave the camera was the image that Moss and the magazine’s great photo director, Jody Quon, immediately chose, I’m sure with a good deal of mischievous laughter and cackling. As my parents happily pointed out, the photo of their glum-looking son bore an uncanny resemblance to the famous Platt family baby picture that the traveling diaper salesman had snapped on that fateful morning back in Alexandria, Virginia, many decades ago.
“I told you it would be fabulous,” said the grinning Mr. Moss as we regarded a mock-up of the cover, where a tiny piece of sushi was photoshopped beneath my Gulliver-sized fist, accentuating the suspended, Oz-like roundness of my giant, bald, unsmiling head.
“Oh no, Dad,” said my daughters, almost in unison, when they saw the cover, and Mrs. Platt said more or less the same thing, before turning away, like she usually did when photos of her husband the critic loomed up in public, and burying her face in her hands. Out in the wide world, the reaction to New York magazine’s momentous restaurant critic reveal was what you’d expect—a flurry of nattering comment, followed by an uneasy, gently fizzing silence as the digital hordes moved on to the week’s next event. I was coaxed into appearing on a network morning show, along with assorted other media outlets, to explain my reasons for coming out of the closet; the rambling and semi-coherent sound-bite explanations I offered would put my dreams of a TV career permanently on hold. Out on the job in my newly unanonymous state, the familiar cat-and-mouse charade between chef and critic continued like Moss predicted it would, although from my perspective, the routine seemed much less fraught and ridiculously self-conscious than before. I would continue to book tables at odd hours, under a string of randomly contrived names, although the increasing use of online reservation systems helped restaurants collect these pseudonyms more efficiently than before. Nevertheless, I didn’t run a photo above my column, the chefs generally left me alone to dine in peace, and many of them still larded their menus with Platt-friendly hungry man specials—pork ribs, roast chicken, veal chops—just as they’d always done.
After he’d gotten over the horrible shock of seeing Platty’s giant mug plastered on the cover of a national magazine, Mr. Cutlets called to congratulate me on finally dispensing with all of the dated restaurant critic’s mummery and to welcome me to the twenty-first century of food writing and brand building. Ozersky was situated out in Portland, Oregon, by then, working as Esquire’s roving restaurant expert and living among the cheerful picklers and cheese-makers of that seminal, post-milennial food town, where he made the rounds of his favorite destinations for Thai food and fried chicken and cheerfully trumpeted the names of his favorite restaurants where he was a made man. After much striving and drama, he’d finally attained a kind of public intellectual status, at least among members of the small, fractious food world intelligentsia that we both inhabited. But in addition to his many addictions and medieval afflictions (like me, he was a veteran of the dreaded gout attack), Cutlets also suffered from epilepsy, and in the end he would die tragically at age forty-seven, when he blacked out in his hotel shower, after a characteristically wild evening of karaoke and carousing at the James Beard Awards in Chicago. I hadn’t seen him much lately, but like several of his old friends back in New York, I’d gotten a hectic, breathless message from him the day before. He was coming to town and wanted to go out on one of our Johnsonian rambles, like in the old days, searching for strange and delicious things to eat and dropping into smoke shops and bodegas along the avenues to buy lottery tickets in the hopes of striking it rich.
Instead, I ended up going to his memorial service several weeks later, at a restaurant in Harlem called the Cecil, run by a talented young African American chef named JJ Johnson. Mr. Cutlets, having anticipated the need for a broader, more inclusive restaurant world years before the rest of us, and relishing, as always, a good shuttlecock-worthy story, had crowned the Cecil as Esquire’s best restaurant in the United States just months before. On the night of his memorial, the room was filled with a weird, slightly disjointed energy as a rogues’ gallery of characters from the many different lives, eras, and realms that Ozersky inhabited during his short, eventful career mingled hesitantly together. There were big-name chefs in the crowded room, like Michael White (the Sultan of Spaghetti was looking a little gaunt on his new diet) and assorted meat cooks and members of the kitchen slave revolution, some of whom would soon be swept up in a different kind of earth-shaking kitchen revolution, which was looming just over the horizon. There were raffish downtown barkeeps from his old haunts in Alphabet City, rumpled print writers from the Times and Esquire, and former food and restaurant bloggers from the early cowboy days of the internet who had moved into the profitable mainstream and were now dressed in their newly pressed suits. There were wiseguy restaurateurs and celebrity butchers, like Pat LaFrieda, whose upmarket blends of prime beef and fatty brisket Josh had vigorously championed as the burger mania spread from its beginnings in LA to Keith McNally’s Black Label Burger in New York, and then out and around the globe from there thanks to Danny Meyer’s Shake Shack empire.
As all of these enemies, allies, and frenemies of the Great Ozersky clustered around the bar that evening, drinking bourbon and eating sliders and ribs, a Harlem church choir sang gospel songs out on the sidewalk. There were no tearful speeches or memorials, although at one point a friend of Josh’s, an eccentric spice expert with a twirling wax-tipped mustache named Aaron Isaacson, burst out in a tearful rendition of the Irish song “Danny Boy,” substituting “Joshy” for “Danny.” Plenty of bourbon was poured at the crowded bar after that, and I remember that as the strange, mournful celebration went on into the evening, a few of the oldest Cutlets friends and veterans sidled up to me and asked quietly who I thought was footing the bill.