Like most grizzled professionals, traditional restaurant critics tend to develop their own quirky routines over time. Many of these strange little rituals are established early on in our careers and tend to be repeated again and again, often as a matter more of comfort than of convenience, until we are replaced, retire from the field, or expire on the job, clutching our knife and fork with a rictus grip, a rumpled, grease-streaked napkin still stuck under our collar. The bartender at a beautiful little castle hotel on the west coast of Ireland told me once that the staff could usually spot the Michelin “inspectors” who regularly came through their little dining room because they tended to be middle-aged men who ordered many more desserts than most gentlemen of their age, drank at least a bottle of wine with their dinner, and almost always dined alone. Critics have their own tastes, of course—some are partial to Italian food, others consider themselves to be French scholars; because of my time in Asia I fancied myself a Chinese and Japanese food scholar, and tended to judge those places in a lordly, high-handed way. Some critics like to ambush kitchens, instructing their guests to sit down and order dinner before they make a grand, hurried entrance into the dining room. Some scribble their notes under the table, some run microphones up under their shirts and blouses to record their whispered impressions, while others run off to the restroom periodically to tap furiously on their cell phones. Some critics bring large parties to dinner, especially if they’re visiting a restaurant only once, and instruct their guests to take a single bite, then pass the dish on to their neighbor, with a kind of comically choreographed precision. Some critics like a party atmosphere when they eat, especially in the early days, when expense accounts could accommodate several bottles of wine, while others cultivate a serious, almost priestly air while on the job. The latter send around emails to their guests ahead of time, the way one of my colleagues told me he used to do, with carefully notated bullet points on how to comport themselves during a proper review dinner; raise their hands for silence if the conversation grows too loud; and go around the table to ask their slightly terrified guests to offer short murmuring tasting notes on the silky texture of their freshly grilled turbot, say, or the pleasing floral qualities of their possibly oversalted early spring vegetable soup.
A self-serious air of priestliness is one of the classic perks of the restaurant critic’s job, of course, although I quickly found that this pose didn’t work for a disheveled, non–type A personality like me. The first restaurant I ever reviewed for New York magazine was a polished, progressive little establishment on Barrow Street in the West Village called Annisa, which was opened in the late summer of 2000 by a talented young chef from Detroit named Anita Lo. She had studied with Guy Savoy, among others, and worked in many of the finest kitchens around the city. I booked an early 6:00 table because, as I soon discovered, the very early or very late tables were the easier ones to get on short notice, especially at a popular new restaurant in New York City. I’d also learned, as a young father, that if I sat down to eat around 8:00, I tended to nod off to sleep shortly after the entrées arrived. I reserved a table for four people under the comical name of “Mr. A. Duffy,” not because I thought four people would be the perfect number of guests for a proper review, but because the dining room at Annisa was a tiny-sized West Village space and the polite woman on the other end of the telephone line said they couldn’t accommodate a larger party. I would also discover, through a process of trial and error, that a table for four was the optimum number for a civilized review dinner. Like a small platoon in battle, a table of only two or three diners risked being overwhelmed by the waves of ridiculously rich food, especially at a large Chinese restaurant or pasta-heavy Italian joint. If there were more than four people, however, dinner could quickly devolve into a party, and it was difficult to keep track of the blizzard of dishes, let alone how they tasted, or what your guests thought of them, and which unruly guests might order a second round of drinks for the table (one drink per person was the hard and fast early rule) or even a third expensive bottle of wine.
Another one of the restaurants I reviewed in those very early days was a sturdy, short-lived French establishment called D’Artagnan, which Ariane Daguin, one of New York’s famous purveyors of classic French foie gras, among other rusticated barnyard delicacies, opened in midtown to showcase her products. Daguin’s family comes from Gascony, home of the Three Musketeers, and the waiters wore Musketeer-style outfits, I dimly recall, as they hoisted platters of game sausages, roast duck, and other stout delicacies famous to the region around to sturdy banquet-sized tables. There were six of us at dinner, including a young gentleman from Paris, who appeared at the last minute, dressed for a refined dinner, in his business jacket and silk tie. Speaking French, I also dimly recall, the Parisian merrily instructed his slightly puzzled, faux Musketeer waiter to bring a glass of sweet Alsatian wine to go with his foie gras appetizer, and then an expensive red, possibly a bottle of Bordeaux, to go with that Gascony specialty, cassoulet, which Madame Daguin served in the traditional way—with sausages, shreds of roast duck, and white tarbais beans, all mingled together under a crust of bread crumbs. The merry young Frenchman devoured his crock of cassoulet, followed by a cheese course, a spoonful of dessert or two, and then, despite my stern looks and quiet pleadings, an after-dinner Sauterne followed by a snifter or two of Gascony’s favorite post-meal digestive, Armagnac. “Thank you so much for the lovely dinner,” the young Frenchman said, a little woozily, after I’d paid the substantial bill and we’d staggered together out onto the sidewalk. Then he bent over and, with the dignity that comes only with experience and practice, threw up in the gutter just an inch or two away from my shiny new restaurant critic shoes.
Mercifully, nothing like that happened during that first, relatively sedate visit to Annisa, or to a Spanish restaurant called Meigas, which I visited next. Looking back, however, I’m aware of some quirky, unexpected discoveries on those very first dining excursions, about the imperfect art of the restaurant review, that would gradually turn into general rules of operation and that I would use again and again. The culture of food writing and criticism has moved into all sorts of different styles and mediums in the clamorous, post-print digital age, and these days the title “restaurant critic” encompasses an ever-wider collection of video artists, cultural anthropologists, and antic online “influencers.” Back in those days, however, I always thought that the quaint little backwater world of food journalism could be divided into two broad schools of learning and operation. There were the traditionalists, led by towering figures like James Beard, Julia Child, and Craig Claiborne, who tended to write about recipes and cooking and mostly focused on what was in front of them on the kitchen range or the restaurant plate. Then there were the reporters and bon vivants like Calvin Trillin, Joe Liebling, and Joseph Wechsberg of The New Yorker and Johnny Apple, who were given to a more atmospheric style of writing. Members of the traditional school focused on the intricacies of cooking and taste; their counterparts wrote about the pleasures of a good meal, and the curious culture of dining and food, the way Trillin chronicled his beloved Kansas City barbecue, for instance, or Wechsberg wrote about the foie gras geese farmers of Toulouse and the eccentric habits of the ancient waiters he’d known at the Tafelspitz restaurant back in prewar Vienna. Occasionally these two styles would come together, say, in Elizabeth David’s atmospheric writing about the food of Provence, or the culinary cultural ruminations of Ruth Reichl or Jonathan Gold. But as I looked around the little dining room and tasted Chef Lo’s elaborate fusion creations—which included an ingenious gourmet version of Taiwanese soup dumpling filled not with pork but with little nuggets of foie gras—it was clear that if I was going to survive for more than a few months in my strange new occupation, it would be as a junior, bumbling member of the reportorial, flaneur school of food writing.
Reporters always ask questions, take notes, and find it useful to obtain hard documents, like menus—which I asked Mrs. Platt to furtively slide into her handbag during that first dinner at Annisa. Back in those pre-smartphone days, I kept boxes of crumpled little pocket notebooks that I’d fill up with my pinched, handwritten scrawl on my non-food-related travel and reporting excursions. As the first courses arrived that night, I took out a shiny new notebook from my jacket and began scribbling away. “You don’t look like a restaurant critic anymore,” Mrs. Platt would sadly remark years later, when I had stopped scribbling obsessively under the table in my crumpled little notebooks and started tapping out notes on my newly purchased iPhone, like every other distracted diner in the house. But so what? The lordly objectivity that traditional Michelin-style critics did their best to convey in their reviews seemed faintly ridiculous to me in this swirling, changeable, highly subjective world where the experience of your lunch or dinner tended to change dramatically depending on all sorts of factors—where you sat, what time of day you visited, whether or not the chef happened to have a cold—and it would keep changing, often for the better, long after your review was published. The best you could do in this fluid situation, I concluded, was to make an argument and to paint a composite picture of dinner for your readers, many of whom would never find the money or the time to visit a restaurant like Annisa and sample the wonders of Anita Lo’s famous foie gras soup dumpling.
Making my rounds in those early days, I’d try to sit with my back to the wall so I could take in the scene; I’d look for bizarre dishes on the menu because failed experiments often made better copy than good ones; and I’d attempt to tell readers the story of a particular meal, in a particular time, and at a particular place in the strange, spangled world of New York restaurants the way a reporter would who covered horse racings, say, or the British royal family or a succession of Broadway shows. I’d try to populate this world with a cast of characters to whom the reader could relate, including a few recurring ones, like my Mrs. Platt, or cousin Frank the family gastronome, and the narrator, who had his own settled tastes and a definite point of view. That first review was no literary tour de force, but it did have many of the conventions that I’d repeat again and again: a fondness for words like “dainty” and “natter”; an opening setting of the restaurant scene; a description of the meal as it progressed in three classic theatrical acts, from the appetizers to the main course and finally to dessert; and the sense that the writer, like most of his readers, was less of a stuffy, know-it-all gourmet than a curious, affable stranger adrift in a strange, curious land.
“I’m someone of extended culinary appetites, the kind of eater the writer A. J. Liebling used to call a feeder,” I wrote in that first, introductory review of Annisa, an influential restaurant in its own right, which I would revisit and review with pleasure several more times.
Feeders are discerning omnivores of the old school. They favor hearty dishes over subtle ones, and lots of food over just a little. Faced with a choice between a robust veal chop, say, or a tidbit of carefully articulated quail, a feeder chooses the veal chop every time. So, it was with mild trepidation that I made my way to Annisa, the sleek new restaurant at 13 Barrow Street, in the clamorous center of the West Village. The storefront space is one of those Zelig-like addresses where chefs and their clientele come and go over the years, always more or less approximating the spirit of the times. It housed chef John Tesar’s One/3 not long ago, and the stolid neighborhood joint Rizzolio’s for years before that. Now it has been redone, by co-owners Jennifer Scism and Anita Lo, in a blaze of clean minimalism, with an array of dainty fusion items on the menu and two garden benches outside (plus a potted-fern garden), so patrons can natter on their cell phones in the peace of the great outdoors.
As with the name (it means “women” in Arabic), there was a tangible feminine brightness to the proceedings at Annisa. After picking my way among the seedy trinket joints around Sheridan Square, I was pleased to find Ms. Scism herself mixing cocktails in a bubblegum-pink dress. An orchid decorated one corner of the honey-colored bar, near a jar of spindly garlic, fresh from the Greenmarket in Union Square. A pair of women sat at the bar sipping flamingo-colored cosmopolitans in perfect unison. Ms. Scism suggested a martini made with Lillet, the sugary aperitif from the south of France. A bowl of speckled eggs (salted duck as well as chicken) were on display at the bar, and when I lunged for one, she nabbed it first, cut it in half, and placed it delicately on a plate. “It’s purely a nibble,” she said.
“Nibble” was the operative term at Annisa, where the dining area was the size of a commodious suburban garage. Grand restaurants often peddle the illusion of intimacy; it is rare, however, to find an intimate restaurant that manages, unobtrusively, to appear grand. It’s a stylistic trick as well as a culinary one, and Annisa pulled it off. The walls were painted in creamy, outdoor colors, and a variety of architectural tricks—suspended lampshades, a shimmering wall curtain—gave the space an elevated, lofty feel. The bar faced two tall picture windows, and the tables—there were only thirteen—were behind it on a little rise, so diners were lifted above the view of the careering traffic outside. I focused diligently on a nice bowl of vichyssoise larded with iced oysters (after the sweet cocktail, the cool leek flavor had a soothing effect) while glancing furtively around the table at the little towers of lobster salad (leavened with avocado), a helping of grilled squid atop a pedestal of white bean salad, and the plate of zucchini blossoms—golden-fried and stuffed with a North African blend of chickpeas in a tomato sauce with saffron—being fiercely nibbled by my wife.
Chef Lo, who was Chinese American (from Detroit) and had last worked at the doomed pan-Asian restaurant Mirezi, specialized in these cross-cultural tricks. The finicky Japan expert at our table pronounced the tuna appetizer (a sashimi-carpaccio hybrid, brushed with a cod-roe sauce) slightly underwhelming. But everyone fought for a taste of the seared foie gras soup dumplings in an aromatic Chinese broth—reduced from pigs’ feet, among other things, Ms. Scism sweetly explained—with a delicate hint of vinegar, plated in a symmetrical pattern. My softshell crab had a tempura lightness and arrived on a bed of corn salad, shot full of creamy Japanese uni. The lamb tenderloin, garnished with minted yogurt and cucumbers, was a successful riff on the classic Greek dish. The saddle of rabbit, wrapped with scallions and sizzly strips of applewood-smoked bacon, was so delicious I ordered it twice. “That Thumper was farm-raised in California,” said the waitress when she saw my beatific smile.
More conventional items on Chef Lo’s summer menu met with a more conventional response. The roasted fillet of cod tasted chalky despite a pleasingly crunchy pistachio sauce. My friend the Italian snob turned up her nose at the pan-roasted chicken, unmoved by a savory sauce laced with white truffles and sherry. “That’s a fatty chicken,” she exclaimed. “That chicken hasn’t been anywhere. That’s an American chicken.” Not that we voiced these complaints to Annisa’s terminally upbeat staff. The sommelier was dressed like Elvis Costello and announced his recommendations with operatic vigor. I drank a fine Pinot Meunier with my crab one night, and iced organic sake (at $10 per glass, from the temple city of Nara) with my rabbit the next. The sommelier also had poetic opinions about cheese. “It’s from the Loire Valley” went his description of one well-known chèvre. “It tastes like a late August afternoon.”
Whether other diners at Annisa enjoyed similar Proustian moments is hard to say. The mini-crowd seemed to be an odd mix of boisterous girlfriends and eccentric neighborhood couples. I spied a man with pickle-colored hair one night, next to a claque of aspiring models zipped into airtight hip-huggers. Another evening their places were taken by some startled-looking tourists and an elderly couple dressed in matching safari outfits. Ms. Scism, who spent a formative year as a hostess at Chanterelle, managed this diverse room with a neighborly touch. On my second visit, she recognized me as the Lillet martini drinker and cheerfully suggested the sweet house cocktail: champagne spiked with pastis, ginger syrup, and cubes of candied ginger. Her malicious pick for dessert was the Chocolate Beggar’s Purse, a cholesterol bomb of flourless chocolate cake and port-soaked cherries baked in a feathery North African pastry dough called brique. This confection caused group mayhem at our table, obliterating all other sweets in its wake.
Later on, when my jittery taste buds had subsided, I made my methodical way through a perfectly proportioned apple tart drizzled in caramel sauce, then an artful mound of carrot cake, which was light in texture like a madeleine but crispy-cornered like a muffin. After that, I paused, Zen-like, to imbibe a blossom-filled pot of green tea. There are more elaborate spirits on Annisa’s menu ($220 for a bottle of the Krug Grande Cuvée), but perhaps I was feeling healthful, even a little demure. A tray of miniature fruit ices appeared after dessert, along with mint truffles and slivers of candied ginger. I took a few rabbit-size bites of a single truffle, then put it back down. It was purely a nibble, after all.