My mother would sometimes say that although her frowning, oversized son hadn’t planned to grow up to be a dyspeptic restaurant critic, she wasn’t all that surprised that things worked out for him the way they did. I’d caught pneumonia shortly after arriving in her arms at the George Washington Hospital, in Washington, DC, and was suddenly rushed away, in her dramatic retelling, and placed by the doctors in an incubator, which she always called “that Little Glass Box.” I can’t have been happy about my time in the box, it’s true, and I would eventually emerge apparently recovered and in the pink of health. A few months later, however, the family legend of Grumpy Adam was officially sealed when the famous Di-Dee-Wash Man came to call. Di-Dee-Wash was a laundry service that picked up used cotton diapers in those days before disposable Pampers and delivered them fresh the next day. To build brand loyalty, the Di-Dee-Wash deliverymen apparently carried cameras and took snapshots of their cute little diaper-soiling customers, which they presented to their parents as keepsakes. My mother happened to be out of the house when the Di-Dee-Wash Man arrived with his camera, which may have explained the glum look on young Adam’s face as my father propped me up on my elbows in a pile of rumpled baby blankets. The gloomy portraits were preserved in one of the earliest of the tattered family photo albums under the title “The Best Adam Could Do for the Di Dee Wash Man.” Much later on, they would frame the three black-and-white photos and give them to me as a birthday present. When the magazine decided to “reveal” the identity of their restaurant critic and the scowling cover image of their son the restaurant critic appeared on the newsstands decades later, my parents merrily sent me the image with one of the uncannily similar Di-Dee-Wash photos attached below it.
When you write judgmental, sometimes unflattering things about people for a living, the presumption of grumpiness comes with the territory, of course. You get used to the outraged reactions after a while, like mosquito bites in the tropics, or the burn marks that collect up and down the arms of any busy professional line cook. Until he sensibly stopped reading reviews of his work altogether, my brother the actor would mutter imprecations under his breath, the way most actors tend to do, about the dead-end pontificators who terrorized the theatrical community in New York and whose grim, unhappy lives shaped their terminally dark, negative views of the world. It was true, I would tell him, that the long hours and low pay of the solitary writing life didn’t always inspire a sense of effusive good cheer, and I admitted that journalism tended to attract its share of questioning, skeptical characters. It was also true, however, that like, say, the forced consumption of a thousand bland grilled salmon entrées day after day after day, the repeated viewing of hundreds of mediocre movies or Broadway plays could cause even the most enthusiastic connoisseur to fall into occasional bouts of jaded despair.
Ironically, of course, the best, most grizzled professional critics tend to be animated over the long haul by a cockeyed sense of enthusiasm for the things they write about. The fearsome, glowering theater, restaurant, and movie critics I’ve met over the years—Mimi Sheraton and the famous “Butcher of Broadway,” Frank Rich, who made their reputations terrorizing unfortunate restaurateurs and actors for the Times, and that master of what my father the diplomat used to call the grumpy “boiled-owl” expression, Jonathan Gold, out in Los Angeles—never seemed to me to be glowering or fearsome at all. A kernel of the Scrooge-like Di-Dee-Wash spirit is helpful, of course, especially to establish a sense of authority and a strong, consistent point of view. The best critics, however, are storytellers—even anthropologists. Rich’s collected reviews weave a social tapestry of the ’80s theater world in New York. Gold wandered the strip malls and boulevards of Los Angeles for decades, sifting through the thousands of dumpling stands in the San Gabriel Valley, the Thai curry parlors along Sunset Boulevard, and the roadside hot dog and taco joints up and down Pico Boulevard not only to amass for his readers useful tips on where to find the best Oaxacan moles or midnight burritos, but also to convey a sense of what it meant to be alive during a certain time and place in the sprawling city of Los Angeles.
Long before I was a portly, overfed food writer, I would hand out Jonathan Gold’s collection of early “Counter Intelligence” columns to aspiring writers, whether or not they were interested in finding the best burritos in LA, and to New York friends who were going out to LA and might be interested in a single volume that captured a bit of the essence of that famously unknowable city. As I wrote on New York’s food site, Grub Street, after Gold died suddenly of pancreatic cancer at the age of fifty-seven, I’d bought my first copy somewhere, maybe at LAX, while on a random freelance magazine assignment out in LA. Hunched, cackling, in my tiny seat in the back of the plane, next to a genial man from Delhi who unrolled chapati cakes from a large silver metal tiffin tin as we crossed over the great wide middle of the USA, I read Gold’s atmospheric little tone poems about the restaurants he came across during his daily rounds, like “the hilarious, barbecue-less LA Toad in Koreatown,” where the maître d’ looked like a skull-headed version of Christopher Walken. Or his story of devouring wet tacos filled with simmered tongue and crumbles of chorizo at midnight at the stand out back of El Gran Burrito on Santa Monica Boulevard, alongside laborers and tradesmen coming off their shifts for a late dinner, where the master describes the elusive “fire energy chi” of taco bliss, which disappears “seconds after the tacos are served, and unless you’re at a first class place, you’ll never experience it at all.”
I would meet Jonathan Gold in person a little later on, toward the beginning of my time as a food critic, when I was still attempting to navigate my way around a world that seemed to be full of almost too many possibilities—too many restaurants to visit; too many delicious (and less than delicious) things to stuff down your throat before feeling jaded and overfed; too many horrible, hackneyed adjectives and descriptors to avoid (“thrilling,” “eatery,” “toques,” “melting” [still one of my favorites], “succulent,” “morsels,” “unctuous,” “delectable”) before, invariably, you started repeating yourself and sounding less like the lofty writer of lucid prose that you imagined yourself to be and more like a tired old hack. This was many years before documentary movies were made about the great man and his pilgrimages up and down the boulevards searching for taco nirvana in his battered pickup truck, before he became the first restaurant critic ever to win a Pulitzer Prize, and before he’d become famous not just as the wise man of the food culture of Los Angeles but as a kind of poet who captured and described the essence of the city itself.
The Platts were on vacation in Tuscany one summer with an editor friend who had signed Gold, possibly years before, to one of the several book deals he had over the years. Like lots of his editors, our friend hadn’t yet seen much in the way of chapters from Gold, a grumbling and tortured writer who composed his atmospheric little arias and tone poems on the strip mall cuisine of LA for the newspaper every week, the way Bach wrote his organ music for church every Sunday morning, but famously had a more difficult time with the longer, more symphonic-length pieces, which he spent months and sometimes years avoiding and often never finished at all.
I don’t think my editor friend ever got her manuscript in the end, but she managed to wheedle us an invitation to lunch at the Tuscan farmhouse to which Gold and his family retreated in the summertime to get away from deadlines and bedeviling editors “and to ponder the more important things in life,” I wrote in my Grub Street piece. “Like fire-grilled Florentine beefsteaks, unfussy Tuscan wines, and the quality of the soft, gently gamy tripe sandwiches which he liked to consume during his trips to the San Lorenzo market in Florence.”
I remember that it was a sunny afternoon, and that the house sat at the end of a winding, predictably difficult-to-find country road. When we finally arrived, we were met by the large Mr. Gold dressed in a flowing cotton shirt, with wisps of hair blowing about his shoulders, and his cheerful wife, Laurie Ochoa, who led us to a table set for lunch out on the patio, under the shade of an arbor of green leaves. “I remember,” I wrote, that “my own little girls were comforted by the sight of a restaurant writer who was possibly larger than their father (‘I think he might even eat more than you, Dad,’ one of them said).” As we ate our lunch of green salad, country cheese, and twirls of respectably fattening, cream-soaked pasta that he’d made himself, the famous critic sat at the head of the table, dispensing bits of wisdom about the food writing life with a look of owlish contentment on his face.
Did Mr. Gold believe in diets for restaurant critics? “Hell no, he did not,” I wrote.
How many times did he visit places before writing about them? He couldn’t remember, but it was an awful lot. Did the bad meals he’d had over the years outnumber the good ones? Of course, they did. He’d recently finished a stint in New York writing for Gourmet, so which was a better eating town, LA or New York? New York for technique and general excellence, LA for atmosphere, authenticity, and variety, the great J. Gold said. He’d just been to Florence, for those tripe sandwiches, and to the town of Carrera, not to look at the towering chunks of marble, but to tour the famous caves filled with gently aging hunks of lardo. “Were they worth a special detour?” I asked, as my wife shielded her eyes, and my editor friend started looking nervously at her watch. “Oh, yes, you must go immediately,” he said, with a happy, distant twinkle in his eye, looking, it later occurred to me, like a great art critic and connoisseur describing a last visit to Giotto’s frescoes in Assisi, say, or the Sistine Chapel.
Gold cultivated the quiet, slightly awkward air of someone who was just as happy making observations and comments about the state of the world around him as he was sitting silently for long minutes at a time listening, in a distracted way, to the ideas pinging around inside of his head. Between periods of silence, he told me that he’d studied to be a concert-level cellist before falling into the punk rock scene and writing music reviews, an occupation that evolved slowly into writing about his other passion—roaming through the diverse, endlessly fascinating foodscapes of LA and devouring everything in his path. Like most critics, he thought the occasional panning of a restaurant was necessary to maintain a sense of credibility, but coming from the world of low-end cheap eats restaurants, he found that people were less interested in reading about bad burritos than in finding out where they could get the really good ones. I later heard that he’d called one of the New York editors, after he’d left Gourmet, and asked, in an offhand way, if the magazine was interested in hiring him to do my job. I’m still a little puzzled why they didn’t offer it to him on the spot, although it may have explained why he didn’t ask me many questions at all, until the very end of our pleasant lunch. At that point, he took a sip of his wine and fixed me with one of his quizzical looks. “So how did a fellow like you get into the food writing game?” J. Gold said.
I can’t remember what I told him, but the truth is that being a restaurant critic, especially in a city like New York, turned out to be the perfect occupation for a writer with a sturdy constitution and a confused jumble of Proustian associations rattling around in his head. I was probably the first professional food critic ever to graduate from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service back in my hometown of Washington, DC, which was filled in those pre–Tony Bourdain days, before touring the night markets and beer halls of the world became the height of fashion, with a curious mixture of the sons and daughters of overseas oligarchs, beer-swilling students who seemed to hail mostly from sprawling gray suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey, and a smattering of earnest future UN officials and international bureaucrats. It was my vague idea to become a globe-trotting reporter, like the correspondents who would recount their adventures as we sat in the evenings on our veranda in Hong Kong, or maybe a writer for one of the tattered magazines I used to read in the beanbag chairs of the little library during my dissolute, well-fed years at the American School in Japan.
I had dropped out of college for a year and taken a job as a copy assistant at the Boston Globe, back in the days when big-city newsrooms were filled with the faint smell of cigarette smoke and the clickity-clack of beat-up IBM typewriters. In those days, reporters typed stories in duplicate, then handed the finished sheets to a copy assistant like me, who rolled the sheets into a battered plastic container and sent it with a whump sound down to the typesetters, and eventually the printing presses, via a medieval system of pneumatic tubes. I worked the late-night weekend “lobster shift,” which began on Thursday afternoons, when the newsroom was in a clattering deadline frenzy, and ran into the night on Saturdays and Sundays, when the noise of the typewriters and the threads of tobacco smoke faded away and all you could hear in the newsroom was the buzzing of the rows of tired fluorescent lights and the occasional distant ringing of a soon-to-be-antiquated push button telephone. The reporters and editors were mostly pale, grumbling men, I remember; dressed in their suspenders and wrinkled polyester suits, smoking the occasional unfiltered cigarette drawn from a pack wrapped in crinkled cellophane, they looked a hundred years old to me.
I sat near the paper’s small obituary section, across from one newsroom character who, I remember, had only one arm and dressed for work every day in a darkly rumpled black suit, like the caricature of an obituary writer out of a Ben Hecht play. He pecked at the typewriter with his one hand, usually grumbling to himself and with a perpetual scowl on his face. If it was a busy afternoon, the death notices of beloved schoolteachers from Waltham or prosperous judges and merchants from the North Shore of Boston would start piling up on his desk. By the time I arrived in the afternoon, there would often be one or two notices left to type up, so in between fetching cups of coffee and sending rolls of copy down the pneumatic tubes, I would take calls from bereaved relatives talking in the deep twanging accents of South Boston and Dorchester. Then I’d start pecking out the notices myself, one key at a time, often grumbling to myself and with a frown on my face, until late in the evening, when the newsroom fell quiet again and everyone went home for the night.
After finishing Georgetown with a C-plus in Mandarin, I went to Asia by myself and rented a small studio with whitewashed walls and iron grills covering the windows, set among rows of terraced vegetable fields outside of a fishing village on Lama island, just south of Hong Kong. An elderly blind woman lived in the studio below me, and at night, as the mosquitoes buzzed around my head, I could hear her talking to herself in Cantonese as she drifted off to sleep. I took the ferry to work every morning through the busy harbor, past trawlers and fishing boats and the kind of wooden junks that I’d sailed in as a boy, though most of them were now used, with their sailing masts cut off, as motorized party boats for company picnics and private oligarch events. I wrote confused, often heavily edited stories about China trade policy and export-import business regulations for a now-defunct research company called Business International, where a young graduate named Barack Obama would also work when he got out of college before he found bigger and better things to do. I roamed around the city with a new generation of expatriates—dissolute young bankers, aspiring foreign correspondents, and pale-faced pub crawlers from the dark, wet cities back in the UK who were trying, like me, to conjure up the old magic of the adventurous, entitled expatriate life out on the last distant fringes of the empire. We haunted crowded little discos in Wanchai and Kowloon and played American football on Saturday mornings on the grassy infield oval of the Jockey Club racetrack, which the colony’s original Scottish taipans had laid out in a flat crook of land below the hills, just south of the central part of the city, called Happy Valley. I rode up and down on the Peak Tram and posed for pictures in front of our old mango-colored apartment building at the bottom of Old Peak Road. I haunted many of the same restaurants where the Platts had been regulars during the 1960s—the Luk Yu Tea House for Cantonese dim sum, the Mandarin Hotel for overpriced afternoon tea, and the American Restaurant in Wanchai, with its battered green neon sign hanging above the entrance outside. At the American, the same cranky waitstaff laid out sweet pickled cucumbers on the table and little bowls of peanuts before lunch arrived, and the kitchen still served familiar northern delicacies like crunchy-bottomed pork and chive dumplings and strips of cool, wide-cut liang pi “cold skin” noodles the color of candle wax, and poured over them a thick, vinegar-laced sauce made with soy, chili oil, and crushed white sesame seeds.
Not surprisingly, many of my memories of these early, mostly failed attempts at “serious” journalism are framed around the comforts of a good old-fashioned expense account feed. I left Hong Kong after a year and went to journalism school in New York City, and then began working as a magazine writer in Washington, DC. On assignment back in Asia for a right-leaning publication called Insight, I dropped into the ramen and yakitori shops around our old neighborhoods in Hiroo and Azabu and checked in, like the pretend big-time journalist I thought myself to be, to the Okura Hotel, which had been the place where all the potentiates and bigwigs had stayed during the ’60s and ’70s. In its basement was one of Tokyo’s finest sushi restaurants, called Kyubei, where the women on the waitstaff dressed like courtiers at the Imperial Palace, in rustling silk kimonos, and just off the Okura’s lobby, with its pendulous, triangle-shaped chandeliers and midcentury modern Japanese-style Mad Men interior, was the Orchid Bar. This was the dissolute expatriate hangout of choice in Tokyo long before Bill Murray wearily lifted a glass of whiskey to his lips at the yet to be built Park Hyatt bar in Shinjuku. With its roster of exotic cocktails and fabulously colored tiki drinks, the menu at the Orchid Bar read like an anthropological tour through the high-end gin dens of mid-twentieth-century Asia. Sitting in the cool gloom of the room among the groups of salarymen and the hard-drinking foreigners in their tropical hula shirts, and watching the barmen pour glasses of whiskey from the rows of backlit bottles glimmering against the wall, it was easy to imagine yourself as an extra on the set of an early James Bond film.
Back in New York, I had lunch at the Four Seasons Grill Room for the first time, at the suggestion of Philip Johnson himself, whom I interviewed for a magazine profile at his office in the Lipstick Building on Third Avenue. An elfin figure, nattily dressed in a Pierre Cardin suit and wearing round, Coke bottle Corbusier glasses that made his tiny head look huge, Johnson spoke in short complete sentences, I remember, and jumped from topic to topic like a butterfly. “Order the chocolate dessert. Tell them I sent you,” said Johnson, who was eighty-one at the time and would continue to dine in the famous landmarked room that he’d designed most afternoons at his usual corner table on the south side of the room, number 32, until he died years later at the age of ninety-nine.
Later on, when I worked in midtown as a rewrite man at Newsweek, I’d sometimes go back to the Grill Room at lunchtime and prop myself up at the corner of the bar next to one of the cathedral-sized windows, with their tall, gently billowing chain-mail curtains hanging down like tapestries, and take in the strange anthropological scene. Like any bustling, renowned restaurant during its heyday, the Four Seasons Grill Room was more evocative of a certain time and place than any musty architectural landmark or tourist-filled museum. Sometimes one or two of my Newsweek editors were sitting along the banquettes on the east side of the room, where Johnson, Henry Kissinger, and the rest of the favored regulars would array themselves at lunchtime, like walruses on a rock. Long martini lunches were still one of the jaunty rituals of that mercifully vanished power lunch era, although I don’t remember seeing a cocktail cart perambulated around the offices of Newsweek during my short, gloomy tenure there, at least not like the one that supposedly rolled through the offices of the Time-Life Building toward the end of the week to help ease the pressures of the deadline crunch. There were plenty of heavy drinkers on staff, however, including my editor, a sweet and talented gentleman who would sometimes disappear on Friday evenings into his corner office—where he was rumored to stash a bottle of booze stuffed in a brown paper bag, which he’d pull on late into the evening while editing his section of the magazine.
When I moved up from Washington to take the job, I’d imagined living the kind of leisurely existence that was still possible in those vanished days of print magazine writing—exploring different stimulating topics of the day and drifting from one story to the next in the manner of the main character in Calvin Trillin’s novel Floater, a book he based on the time he spent as a writer at Time. I was soon disabused of that notion by Newsweek’s editor in chief at the time, a tinpot martinet of the old school named Maynard Parker, who kept a battered army helmet and other macho mementos from his time as a swashbuckling war reporter in his office for all of his troops to see. Maynard was probably a decent person if he liked you well enough, but having risen to the top of the totem pole of corporate journalism, he was now famous for his quixotic, dictatorial leadership style, and for terrorizing those poor cowering souls who annoyed him on the various rungs down below. One of his favorite ways to amuse himself, late at night on deadline, was by picking on lowly, hapless rewrite editors like me.
In fairness, I was not cut out for that brand of corporate deadline writing, which, if you were a bottom-dwelling junior editor, involved long hours of lounging around the musty midtown offices, in the way Trillin described, waiting for reporters to write up their files on plane crashes and palace coups from various distant corners of the globe. While the reporters happily chased down their stories, the editors and rewrite staff stewed back in New York, flipping through the newspapers, guzzling their martinis at lunchtime, or, in my case, staring idly at the office wall, which was covered with strange, vaguely menacing stains left by the previous unfortunate occupants. The office next to mine was a bleak fluorescent space occupied by a genial, red-faced man whose expanding belly was beginning to strain the buttons of his blue, corporate-issue oxford shirts. I called him Crunchy, because, as a Friday deadline loomed and Maynard stalked up and down the halls barking commands like Captain Queeg aboard his doomed, unhappy ship, he would pour out a fistful of Tylenol tablets from the collection of plastic bottles he kept in his desk and, without benefit of a glass of water, crunch them whole. As my junior stories got picked at and bounced back week after week, I started crunching handfuls of aspirin too, not to mention drinking to excess (although the most martinis I ever managed at lunch was two). Nevertheless, my paragraphs grew smaller and more incomprehensible as one deadline week succeeded the next, and eventually, as I sat in front of my oversized Wang word processor in a paralyzed sweat, they disappeared altogether.
I quit that dream job shortly before the authorities wheeled me from the building, babbling in tongues, and not long after my hasty, unplanned departure, my aspirin-crunching neighbor, who was a much more learned, facile journalist than I was, would die tragically from what I later heard was a sudden, massive coronary event. I returned to Washington, DC, where I spent a solitary year ghostwriting the memoirs of Joseph Alsop, a formidable Washington columnist of the old school. At the end of his life, Alsop had heart trouble and what he called “a spot of lung cancer,” which kept him from attempting to write his own book. So in the mornings, he would sit in an overstuffed chair in his Georgetown townhouse and reminisce about the genteel, vanished world of the capital city while puffing, like FDR himself, on one cigarette after another set in a long cigarette holder carved out of ivory. Joe Alsop had been a feared and controversial character in his day—an avid New Deal Democrat, a friend and relative of the Roosevelts, an intimate of Jack Kennedy and LBJ, a fierce Cold Warrior in the Winston Churchill mold, and a staunch supporter of the war in Vietnam—and even by the standards of the imperious globe-trotting columnists of the time, he’d lived an eventful life. He’d made his reputation as a reporter at the New York Herald Tribune, covering stories like the famous Charles Lindbergh baby kidnapping trial during the 1930s, and he’d been taken prisoner when the Japanese invaded Hong Kong at the beginning of World War II. A closeted gay man, he never talked to me about his sexuality, and he left out of his memoirs a notorious incident that took place in Moscow during the depths of the Cold War: he was caught in a classic intelligence honey trap set by the KGB after he’d picked up a bellhop at a local hotel. When confronted with photographs, he’d alerted a college clubmate from Harvard, who happened to be the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, and then returned to Washington, where he continued to write indignant anti-Soviet columns in the classic cold warrior mold. The story would later find its way into books about Alsop and his brother, Stewart, and even into a Broadway play about his life called The Columnist, starring John Lithgow.
Alsop had all sorts of quirky interests—in the Greek and Roman classics, which he read in the original, in the sciences, in Chinese history, in archaeology and the history of art collecting—and he was also an avid gourmet in the true sense of that word: he was preoccupied with the history and anthropology of food and cooking, and with the restorative pleasures of a civilized meal. He was famous for the parties he gave at his home in Washington, including one for John Kennedy on the eve of the inauguration in 1961, when he served the young president and his guests that mid-Atlantic regional delicacy terrapin soup prepared by the cooks at the Maryland Club in Baltimore and transported to Washington by car in great plastic tubs. Alsop was one of the few traditional WASPs I knew who considered proper old-fashioned Yankee cooking to be something more than the usual overbroiled chunks of roast beef on Sundays, interspersed with appetizers of stale Triscuits and cottage cheese, all washed down, repeatedly, with hearty swigs of gin. He came from a family of old Connecticut Yankees, and he liked to talk for hours about growing up on his father’s gentleman’s farm outside of Hartford, near the town of Avon. The Alsops had dressed for dinner every Sunday in long formal dresses and full tuxedos. They’d dined on old-fashioned specialties like steamed marrow bones with pickled chestnuts, grilled liver with cream sauce and buttered potatoes, platters of roasted lamb with mint sauce, and broiled chicken doused in egg sauce and dressed, for extra fatty pleasure, with strips of crisped country bacon, all followed by fresh-baked puddings and pies for dessert, with jugs of country cream to pour over them. He considered the Washington restaurants provincial backwaters compared to the cooking he’d grown up with, not to mention the famous kitchens he liked to patronize on his reporting excursions to Hong Kong, London, and Paris. Over the years, he hired a series of cooks whom he trained to produce the old-fashioned Anglo-American classics he loved: poached eggs on triangles of toast buttered with anchovy paste for breakfast; deviled rib bones with Yorkshire pudding for a stout weekend lunch; and classic Virginia country hams, which he sometimes brined in rock salt and spices in the bathtub upstairs.
Alsop was related to the Roosevelts through his mother—Eleanor was a cousin and Teddy was his great-uncle—and although he was well aware of the snobbery and parochialism of the world of privilege in which he’d been raised, he was sentimental about his “greatest generation” and their strange, vanished rituals, and puzzled by errant baby boomers like me who seemed to spend more time complaining about life than enjoying it. In an attempt to improve my frumpy appearance, he would sometimes present me with silk ties from his wardrobe and boxes of faded silver cufflinks. Once, after a long, tedious interview session, I asked his advice on a birthday gift for one of my brothers. “A pot of caviar!” cried Mr. Alsop. “After this damned book, you and your brother should take an apartment in New York together. Between the two of you, you should be able to afford decent rooms. With the savings, you should be able to afford a not-too-grand manservant. Without one, the apartment is sure to be uninhabitable!”
Alsop was aware that listening to an opinionated gentleman drone on about his life was not the most exciting job for a young journalist, and he would try to boost my morale with lunchtime leftovers from elaborate dinners the night before: chilled crab, bowls of vichyssoise, warmed-over braised sweetbreads, plates of rolled chicken and mayonnaise sandwiches with their crusts carefully cut off. In the evenings he’d bribe me with glasses of whiskey and large, frosty gin-and-tonic cocktails, which he usually began imbibing at around five in the afternoon, and sometimes he invited me to his dinners, which were served downstairs in the townhouse dining room. His guests included prominent journalists and politicians of the day, along with his oldest friends, like the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and the very formidable owner of the Washington Post, Katharine Graham, who usually arrived with a stern look on her face that softened into a smile as the friends traded stories and gossip around the dinner table. There was the time when Alsop gave a party for the young King Hussein of Jordan. Guests were not permitted, by protocol, to leave before the king, so as he danced with one woman after another, they crept quietly out the bathroom window. Another time, back in the not-so-distant ’60s, the powerful columnist’s pet toucan, which he kept in one of his Georgetown homes, vomited on Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s head during an interview. Dinner, when it arrived, might be puréed peas and tube-shaped cutlets of chicken Kiev that popped with pools of melted butter when you tweaked them with your fork, or slices of cold beef flecked with consommé jelly, followed by lemon soufflés for dessert and more champagne. Later I’d stagger home to my cluttered little apartment, and tap out my diary and tasting notes late into the evening, before falling into bed for a fitful, slightly drunken night of sleep, much the way, it later occurred to me, a bilious food critic might do after a glamorous, but overlarge, restaurant meal.