The food landscape in New York would soon explode into more enthusiasms, crazes, and golden ages than it was possible to count—for cheese-makers and coffee bars, for farm-to-table foraging and “fast casual dining,” for pickle-makers and southern comfort foods and ye olde craft brewers who were already setting up shop in abandoned industrial lots across the river in Brooklyn, to name just a few. But those early twilight years when the previous millennium wasn’t quite old yet and the new millennium was barely new, turned out to be a kind of golden age for the traditional restaurant critic who wandered the streets looking for strange and interesting things to write about and to eat.
In the summer of 2000, Bill Clinton was still the president of the United States, Danny Meyer had only a few restaurants in his small, neighborly portfolio, and Thomas Keller’s famous California import, Per Se, wouldn’t arrive in the city for another four years. As I’ve said, there were no clamorous, yelping bloggers to contend with, the obtrusive glories of Instagram were still years away, and the presumptuous out-of-town inspectors from Michelin were still terrorizing chefs back in Paris, Lyon, and the other bastions of what was still referred to in hushed, respectful tones as “le haute cuisine.” New York still occupied its traditional place as the glittering fashion runway for the world’s culinary scene, the place where reputations were ruined and made, and where the different styles of the day were chosen and then disseminated out in the hinterlands. Like Czarist Moscow before the revolution, all sorts of exotic characters from different dining eras still mingled together on the runway stage. There were old-world aristocrats like André Soltner at Lutèce and Rita and André Jammet at La Caravelle on Fifty-Fifth Street, whose original owners had named their restaurant after the lines of an elegant style of French sailing ship. There were ambitious young cooks like Anita Lo, whose pint-sized, discreetly chic establishment would be a model for ambitious restaurants around town in the coming stripped-down, post-gourmet era, and Dan Barber and Tom Colicchio, whose radical notions about sustainability and technique would soon combine with other mini-revolutions and movements in the kitchen world to stand the former order on its head. Like one-name rappers and basketball stars, larger-than-life cooks left over from the just-ended super-chef era of the ’90s—Nobu, Daniel, Jean-Georges—were still stalking the landscape, and Joe Baum’s Windows on the World was at the very end of its long, theatrical, ultimately tragic run atop the World Trade Center.
Baum had died in 1998, but the elaborate, big-box, P. T. Barnum style of dining he’d pioneered for decades at theatrical productions like the Four Seasons, the Roman-themed Forum of the Twelve Caesars, the Tavern on the Green in Central Park, and the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center were still being imitated by ambitious, deep-pocketed restaurateurs around the city who could still afford in those days to turn old midtown bank buildings and abandoned downtown dance halls into colorful sushi palaces and fanciful, industrial-sized steak halls, and whose fortunes, like those of other theatrical, fashion-conscious artistic professions around New York, tended to rise and fall with the boom and bust of the stock market. Alan Stillman, who’d built the green-and-white-trimmed Smith & Wollensky steakhouse on East Forty-Ninth Street into an impressive cash machine, was busy opening other concept restaurants around town. So was a real estate financier and former co-owner of Braniff Airways named Jeffrey Chodorow, whose imaginatively crackpot, and sometimes very successful, dining schemes were a constant source of pleasure to the larger, more rambunctious group of dining critics who patrolled the restaurant world back in those days.
Then as today, the dining critic for the New York Times reigned supreme over this rabble of sauce-stained scribblers and hacks, although the tastes of the talented writers and reporters who occupied that powerful throne could differ fairly radically from one reign to the next, and some were more hesitant than others to use the powers of the office to upend the star-system status quo that had been so carefully cultivated over the years by Craig Claiborne, Mimi Sheraton, and others. In this much smaller, top-down world, I used to think only the Times had the power to actually close a restaurant in the big city or substantially alter its trajectory, although that would also begin to change in the coming years of turmoil and disruption back then and, as today, bad restaurants had a habit of closing themselves. You could wander from one antic, exotically themed production to the next, describing the thousands of samurai swords that dangled menacingly from the ceiling of a Chodorow venture called Kobe Club, or the strangely oppressive smell of truffle oil mingling with traces of burned beef fat that hung over the room of another mercifully doomed midtown Chodorow venture called Tuscan Steak. “It swirls in the air on the sidewalk outside, above the limos and courtesy cars idling two and three deep,” I wrote in an early review titled “Tedium Rare. “It smells of commerce instead of cooking, like the whiff of cigarette smoke hovering over a busy casino floor.”
My rule for tough reviews was the usual one every young copy assistant or reporter is taught in journalism school or during the first week in a newsroom—to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. There could be different shades to a negative review, however, especially in those days when the range and styles of dining tended to be more exaggerated than today. When I grudgingly got around to adopting a star system, I quickly discovered that the respectful one-star review was considered a cataclysmic disaster by an ambitious three-star restaurant, and that even a vaguely critical three-star review would provoke howls of displeasure from prominent cooks who were used to the preening five-star treatment. There was the grudgingly respectful two-star review that read like a one-star review, and the damning-with-faint-praise one-star review that read like no stars at all. I also quickly discovered, as any regular week-to-week reviewer does, that for many restaurants, the ultimate negative judgment often turns out to be no review at all. Every working critic has reams of notes that they dutifully compiled while glumly sitting through entire dinners at an endless series of mediocre brasseries, steakhouses, and cafés that they visited only once and never returned to again. One of the worst meals I ever endured during those early days was at a nameless Japanese place near our apartment in the Village. The kitchen special on the fateful evening I happened to drop by was squid risotto, which I imagined would be the usual light, buttery confection of carefully turned Carnaroli or Arborio rice, mixed with a little squid ink, say, and nuggets of melting, gently cooked calamari. What arrived from the kitchen instead was a yellow, gummy mass of rice and hot cheese, stuffed inside the long, hollowed-out carcass of a grown, rubbery-textured squid. As this grim creation was gamely being hoisted to the table by members of the quietly horrified waitstaff, an unfortunate malfunction in the kitchen caused clouds of greasy back-draft stove fumes to billow out over our heads in the little basement dining room. As we glumly ate our dinner, the chef started to wave his arms around frantically in the smoke and yell at his staff like the captain of a sinking submarine ship, at which point I called for the check and evacuated the dining room as quickly and politely as I possibly could.
Other high-profile disasters were more difficult to ignore, especially back in those days before the explosion of bar restaurants and casual dining and before the gradual erosion of the idea of a Manhattan-centric New York City as the culinary capital of world, when prominent, ambitious productions seemed to open around town week after week, like Broadway shows. Those early reviews are peppered with accounts of blowups and magisterial flameouts that you don’t see much anymore in the broader, more democratic, crowdsourced dining era of today. In the first few years on the job, I reviewed an ambitious Italian restaurant in midtown called Barbaluc, where an unfortunate sardine-and-branzino-stuffed ravioli “smelled like it had recently been hauled from some turbid Venetian lagoon.” I also visited One C.P.S., a lavish, short-lived production, financed by the steak baron Alan Stillman, in one of the dining rooms at the Plaza Hotel, where David Burke, another talented fabulist chef from the ’90s, instructed his legions of cooks to mold piles of lobster meat into the shape of beefsteaks and to stuff fried chicken wings with chunks of crabmeat, an experiment that New York magazine would describe as “a gooey, pointless concoction that tasted of mildly fishy chicken fat.” During those first months on the job, I also sampled all sorts of delicious things, of course, including what was possibly the finest example of funky, gently simmered tripe I’ve ever tasted at a wonderful, now-vanished Galician restaurant in Chelsea called Meigas, where the Platt family gastronome cousin Frank, whom I quoted frequently in those early reviews, chattered to the waiters in broken Spanish and toasted the room with several bottles of Spanish wine.
“Tripe is a lunchtime dish at Meigas,” I would write in my review for the magazine,
a tapas-style primero plato on a menu crowded with fanciful, traditionalist items like piquillo peppers stuffed with marinated tuna and braised oxtail croquettes rolled in a dusting of crushed pistachios. But my Uncle Frank more or less ignored these delicacies until his tripe arrived. He talked of Galicia (meigas means “sorceress” in Galician), the family seat of Francisco Franco and Fidel Castro. “Galicia produces great dictators,” he said. “The waiters can be dictatorial, too.” Our tripe was served by a grave-looking gentleman wearing a priestly goatee. He watched in silence as the aficionado sniffed the paprika bouquet and stirred the velvety stew with his spoon. Cubes of ham were mingled with the veal belly, which tasted sweet and gamy and evaporated in the mouth, like some strange smokehouse confection. Uncle Frank took one taste, then another. “Mercy,” he said, rolling his eyes to the heavens. “Mercy me.”
New Chinese restaurants were opening around the city in those days, and new Dutch restaurants that served cool rolls of herring along with trays of bitterballen filled with curries and satays from the old spice islands of Indonesia. I reviewed tapas restaurants, restaurants devoted only to French cheeses, and little bunker-style sushi bars in the East Village where the uni was flown in, miraculously, just hours after it was fished from the chilly waters of Hokkaido. For the first time, I tasted hand-foraged wood ear mushrooms at Tom Colicchio’s Craft, and I scribbled a few dismissive paragraphs about yet another new Gulliver-sized Asian fusion joint in midtown called Tao, which I failed to predict would soon be the most successful restaurant in the entire United States. I took my mother to a series of lunches—to Monsieur Briguet’s restaurant, Le Périgord; to the soon-to-be-shuttered La Caravelle, where she commented politely on the timeless qualities of the perfectly textured pike quenelle; and to a new bistro in midtown where we wondered at the qualities of a stately creation called the DB Burger, which that paragon of big-city Continental gourmet cooking, Daniel Boulud, unleashed on an unsuspecting public in the summer of 2001.
It’s difficult to overstate the impact of Boulud’s famous dish, which, in retrospect, was a canny acknowledgment of the more casual style of comfort dining beginning to seep into the upper realms of what was still being called the world of “fine dining,” as well as a kind of love letter to the more elegant but now slowly vanishing style of haute cuisine on which he’d made his reputation. The DB Burger cost $27, which was an astonishing amount to pay for any burger in those days. The bun was freshly baked and flecked with bits of parmesan and layered in a confectionery way with a smear of freshly whipped mayonnaise, a bouncy sprig of frisée, and a tangy sweet tomato compote instead of ketchup. The ground prime rib beef contained braised short ribs, deposits of truffles, and a melting chunk of foie gras in its soft center. When all of these delicate elements were carefully assembled, the finished dish was brought to our table cut in two fragile halves, alongside a silver cup of round, crisped pommes soufflés.
My mother had arrived for our midtown lunch wearing a summer dress, I remember, and with a napkin spread neatly in her lap, she cut her portion of Boulud’s elegant creation in half. She took one delicate bite and then another, and then she put down her fork. “I hope you’re not planning to write anything mean about the poor chefs this week,” she said.