One of the characters I met during my time at Mr. Alsop’s house was a merry, disheveled Englishman named Alexander Chancellor, who’d made his reputation in London writing columns for the Fleet Street papers and editing the Spectator magazine during its heyday in the 1970s and early ’80s. When Tina Brown hired Alexander to run the “Talk of the Town” section at The New Yorker, he gave me an assignment or two, and eventually offered me a contract to come up to New York and write for the magazine full-time. One of my first pieces was a sketch of the mess hall dining room in the White House, where I unlimbered the old chestnut descriptive phrases about dining rooms (“The little space looked like the state room of a ship”) and food (the pickles accompanying my club sandwich were a green “irradiated” color) that I would end up using in my next professional life again and again. My assignment was to pay a call on the great gourmand R. W. “Johnny” Apple, who was the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times and already a legendary figure at the paper for his extravagant, Rabelaisian appetites. The barrel-chested Apple had rose-colored cheeks and effected the brusque manners of the swaggering, macho newspaperman type that I’d observed during short unhappy tours in other big-time newsrooms. Apple was famously the only reporter at the Times to be issued his own personal company credit card, on which he happily rang up huge sums over the decades at his favorite trencherman dining establishments, like L’Ami Louis in Paris, which A. A. Gill of the Sunday Times would so merrily pan in a legendary review for Vanity Fair, and Wiltons on Jermyn Street in London, where he advised me to order half a dozen oysters, followed, if I could afford it, by the famous Dover sole, which the kitchen always brushed with gouts of melted country butter. The wall of Apple’s corner office was decorated with antique maps of the brandy-producing provinces of France, Armagnac and Cognac, and his favorite dish, he told me with evident satisfaction, was a heaping platter of sausage- and sauerkraut-laced choucroute garnie from Alsace, which was A. J. Liebling’s favorite dish too. Apple told me that he always wore brightly colored tailored shirts from London because they cheered him up on gloomy days, and when he traveled, he habitually carried a pepper mill in his suitcase because like Mr. Alsop, he felt that most restaurants, especially in Washington, DC, couldn’t be trusted to properly season their food.
Like lots of journalists who find themselves on the other end of an interview, Apple hated the little story I wrote about him and complained bitterly that I’d gotten everything wrong, including the name of his London tailor, which I’d pulled from one of his books and had been rechecked several times by the New Yorker fact checkers. But after the piece was published, I got Alexander’s official job offer and moved back up to New York, and into a small cubicle at the New Yorker’s posh new offices on Forty-Third Street, where the magazine had recently moved after being purchased by the Condé Nast Newhouse empire for a cool $200 million. I spent my few brief, happy months at The New Yorker passing my old literary heroes (Brendan Gill, Roger Angell, Lillian Ross, and the great Joseph Mitchell, who appeared at the office every morning dressed in his gray fedora) in the silent halls and venturing out into the city to find the kind of classic “Talk of the Town” characters I’d grown up reading about in the magazine. I contrived to cover boxing matches at Madison Square Garden, as the great Liebling had done, and for a series of baseball stories I took the train up to Yankee Stadium, where I ate large numbers of the ballpark hot dogs, available to beat reporters up in the press box for less than a dollar apiece, and called my brothers to tell them that I’d finally attained a state of nirvana. I interviewed Jesus Christ impersonators, Japanese baseball interpreters, and virtuoso violinists, and spent a happy afternoon with the longest-serving bellhop at the Algonquin Hotel, who told me that he once dissuaded Thelonious Monk from jumping off the hotel roof (“What Mr. Monk was doing up there, I have no idea”) and that William Faulkner used to check into the hotel, disappear into his room, and not emerge until he’d consumed a bottle or two of gin.
NOT LONG AFTER I ARRIVED AT MY NEW JOB, HOWEVER, A FLUSTERED Alexander would depart back to London, and not long after that, his replacement invited me to lunch at the Oyster Bar, where, over a bowl of richly simmered oyster pan roast, he fired me too. Like all of my failed, star-crossed dream jobs, however, this one had a silver lining: the atmospheric, closely observed writing style I attempted to practice at The New Yorker would be useful later when it was my job to sit in a thousand different dining rooms—not just the glittering upscale dining rooms of the past but the ever smaller and noisier rooms, decorated in the same mind-numbingly spare, utilitarian style, of the present—trying to come up with a new way to describe the same cookie-cutter style of decor again and again.
It would turn out, in fact, that I was more qualified for the strange business of restaurant writing than I imagined when I sat down for lunch with Gael Greene at Monsieur Ducasse’s restaurant years later. The knack of writing to a compressed space—a required skill at Newsweek—would be helpful too, and so would the exercise of taking a tired formula, like obituary writing at the Boston Globe, and making it sound fresh and vaguely new. After The New Yorker, I would write travel stories, magazine profiles, and a diary column for the New York Observer in which eccentric family characters kept popping up and being quoted—just as they would, for better or worse, in my restaurant reviews. I wrote about all kinds of food during my journalistic travels, and the best way to do this, I would gradually discover, was to avoid flowery adjectives and just let the dish—whether it was fried chicken or a pot of cassoulet or a cool glass of milk—describe itself. And when I finally became a professional critic and began to roam around the city on my daily rounds, I would also discover, to my happy surprise, that I’d finally found a kind of calling. The restaurant critic’s job turned out to be the perfect vehicle for a rambling, inquisitive, dyspeptic personality who wasn’t a classic company man or much of a team player at all but had a healthy appetite and a taste for what my iron-stomached compatriot Ed Levine calls “deliciousness.” I would discover that the actual review—part cultural essay, part personal diary, part service journalism, and part travel and cultural commentary—involved bits and pieces of all the various styles of writing I’d attempted or failed at over the years. And I would discover, as time went on, that the job had a unique kind of magic to it, especially in a great dining metropolis like New York City, where it’s possible, if you have a little money in your pocket, to sit in a newly opened mixology bar in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, say, or at the bar of an ancient, steamy noodle stand or deli somewhere downtown, or at a grand linen-covered table at the latest gilded new Indian or French restaurant in a midtown hotel, and watch the whole world unfold before your eyes.