I wasn’t expecting very much to happen when I booked my table for two, under the usual randomly contrived name, at a small, lavishly expensive, slightly ridiculous-sounding tasting room called ZZ’s Clam Bar, in the West Village, several years ago. I can’t say I wasn’t surprised, however, when a large linebacker-sized gentleman loomed up next to my table, halfway through what up to that point had been a surprisingly enjoyable meal, and asked my guest and me, in a polite, dispassionate bouncer kind of way, to get the hell out of the restaurant.
“I’m sorry, but you guys are done here,” said the bouncer, still wearing his thick, winter bouncer’s coat. He had been stationed outside by the door the last time I’d seen him on my way into the restaurant.
ZZ’s Clam Bar was run by two popular young chefs named Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone, following the model of young cooks like David Chang, at his seminal East Village noodle bar, and Gabrielle Hamilton, at her fine little East Village restaurant called Prune. Torrisi and Carbone had trained together in top Continental-style kitchens in New York and then opened a small, deceptively simple Italian-style deli on Mulberry Street, on the fringes of Little Italy, called Torrisi Italian Specialties. Like Chang and Hamilton, they applied the knowledge about sourcing and technique that they’d mastered uptown to the kind of everyday cooking they’d grown up with—vegetable antipasti, bricks of gooey home-style lasagna, fat veal parmesan sandwiches made with fresh-baked rolls and the finest veal, all carefully sourced and of the highest quality, unlike the usual packaged bread rolls and desiccated, leathery cutlets found at many of the corner Italian delis around town. In the evening, the corner space was turned into an inventive, modestly priced tasting room, which had received breathless and rhapsodic review treatment from critics like me, and from the ever-growing rabble of bloggers and informed, next-generation, postmillennial diners who’d bull-rushed the place in the months after it opened.
With success, however, came a certain amount of brassy swagger and attitude. The original Torrisi restaurant would close not very long after its smashing success as new money began to flow in from high-finance investors and boldface names from Wall Street and the entertainment world. The chefs’ next project was a noisy, ambitious, extravagantly expensive Italian restaurant called Carbone, which was designed to summon up the convivial, theatrical world of the traditional Italian red sauce establishment, complete with heaping platters of linguini vongole and stuffed clams, and bow-tie-wearing waiters dressed in glimmering yellow jackets, some of whom looked like they were about to burst into song. In the circus world of big-money restaurants, as in any fashion-conscious business, new trends and styles are endlessly manufactured, trumpeted, and breathlessly parroted; it was one of the ironies of those early postmillennial days around the city that just as the appetite and audience for everything about the food and dining culture was exploding, the style and quality of what used to be called “fine dining” in New York was becoming simpler and arguably less sophisticated than the days when haughty Frenchmen were setting the styles around town. This new venture was greeted with the same praise that had been showered on the first restaurant—with the exception of one grumpy, overfed critic who groused, in his grudging, one-star review, that the rooms were noisy to the point of unpleasantness, the saucer-sized pasta portions were of various quality, and the prices bordered on the insane. Moreover, although some dishes seemed to work well enough, and others were generally below the lofty bar the talented young cooks had set for themselves in their debut restaurant, one creation in particular—an unfortunate experiment called “Chinese Chicken”—tasted like it had been “slathered with a mix of Chinese mustard and crankcase oil.”
Most restaurants I review tend not to have bouncers stationed outside the door, and if a towering “doorman” does happen to be looming behind a set of cheap red velvet ropes set up on the sidewalk, it’s usually not a fortuitous sign. It means the owners are more interested in creating a nightclub-style sense of scene and pageantry than in serving decent food, although with their flair for theatrics, the Torrisi Boys, as the blogs now breathlessly called them, were specialists at both. It was months after my Carbone write-up, and I hadn’t planned on a proper review of ZZ’s Clam Bar, which is why I’d booked only a table for two. Maybe I would mention the antic, tropically themed cocktails in a drinks roundup, or write about how the ambitious high-end operations, with rents in the city continuing to climb, were retreating to the smaller, ever more discreet (and expensive) tasting rooms around town. There were only a few tables in the small room, all of which were filled, and the bar was manned by a bewhiskered mixologist dressed in a pressed white jacket who looked like he’d been beamed in from one of the trendier dive bars in Brooklyn by way of the original Ritz Hotel. My guest and I had enjoyed our drinks, a selection of clams on the half shell, and other seafood creations designed to summon up memories of summertime Coney Island clam bars by the beach. But the room had fallen quiet, a few courses we ordered didn’t appear, and suddenly the bouncer was looming over our table like the heavy in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
“I’m sorry, but you guys are done here,” the very large gentleman said, still dressed in his outdoor coat, with an implacable dead-eyed Bouncer Expression on his face.
My guest, who had worked with many of the top chefs and restaurateurs in New York and was accustomed to being treated with the highest levels of simpering deference when he dined out around town, began to sputter at the bouncer, and as he talked his face slowly turned a boiling shade of red.
“What do you mean? We haven’t done anything,” he said, doing his best to muster his own Loudly Aggrieved VIP Voice.
“This guy is done here, you can stay if you like,” said the bouncer, looking down at me as I peered into the dregs of my second, quite excellent rum cocktail, still not quite able to believe my luck. I’d heard of critics having drinks thrown in their faces by members of the irate restaurant community. In one notorious incident, the hotheaded, perpetually apoplectic future reality TV demigod Gordon Ramsay emerged from his London kitchen in a rage, overturned the table where the Sunday Times critic A. A. Gill and his guest were sitting and ordered them both out of the house. Private business owners are within their legal rights to take this kind of rash action, of course, but the timeless, carefully scripted rituals between the chefs and restaurateurs who open restaurants and the writers whose job it is to critique them have evolved over the decades for all kinds of practical reasons. In taking up space at a corner table while surreptitiously tapping notes, dressed perhaps in an ill-fitting wig, the weary, self-important critic, like the large jungle elephant some of us resemble, contributes to the delicate fine-dining ecosystem in all sorts of subtle and unseen ways. We create stars and nurture careers, and over the course of our long lives we provide coordinates for the herds of paying public, who thunder up and down the vast restaurant savanna, looking for their next meal. Critics have long, elephantine memories and tend to herd together during times of trouble, and we’re capable of irrational and unpredictable fits of destruction on the rare occasions when we’re pushed too far.
“You guys are done here,” the bouncer said for the third or fourth time in his insistent, vaguely ominous bouncer voice, the tone of which never rose or wavered. It was clear that the old elephant would be leaving this overpriced, high-tone clam bar shortly and against his will; the only question was how much of a scene we wanted to create. The chatter around the room had suddenly gone quiet, the way birds do out on the savanna when there’s trouble afoot, and our formerly friendly and attentive waitperson was nowhere to be seen. The whiskered barkeep had stopped shaking his drinks behind the bar and was watching us quietly, while the rest of the witnesses to the Showdown at ZZ’s Clam Bar were ducking behind doors and desperately trying to melt into the scenery, like comic characters in the gunslinger saloon of a Western movie.
“Let’s go, they’re kicking us out,” I muttered quietly to my guest, who looked like he was about to start throwing crockery around the room.
“This meal is on the owner,” said the bouncer.
“Really, I should pay the bill,” I replied, trying to summon my most dignified May I Have the Check Please voice.
“No, this is on us,” said the bouncer, beginning to show the faintest hint of irritation.
The company expense account is the one tenuous weapon that separates the professional critic from the other loudly yapping voices in the jungle, and so I asked for our check three more times, my voice getting lower and more monotone until I sounded, it later occurred to me, like a comic version of the bouncer himself. Finally, after several more implacable replies, we rose unsteadily from our seats, awkwardly gathered up our coats, and were escorted by the bouncer through the still saloon, while my red-faced friend sputtered indignantly to himself. Outside on the sidewalk, before going around the corner to calm my friend with several excellent slices of Village pizza, I attached a photo of one of the dishes that we’d been enjoying—four slivers of oily sardine crudo on an aqua-green plate—to a post on my new, dimly understood Twitter account and then sent the news out into the world: “Platty’s last dish at the enjoyable (though insanely pricey) ZZ’s Clam Bar before a vy large bouncer kicks us out.”
No one from the Torrisi empire ever explained why I was removed from their overpriced clam bar. There was no public statement the next day when the righteous Twitter mob of fellow critics—aggrieved diners who’d been snubbed or overcharged at their other restaurants around the city and even a few jealous, vengeful, competitive chefs—accused them of disrupting the carefully calibrated laws of the restaurant jungle and generally acting like touchy and high-handed young millennials who’d let success go to their heads. Maybe they thought that the adage about there being no such thing as bad publicity was true, or maybe they calculated that in the brave new world of overheated, breathless online coverage no one cared about the random musings of a single, dyspeptic, increasingly toothless critic anyway. One or two rumors circulated that Platt had been drinking loudly and disturbing customers. I heard my own rumor—much later, via the jungle telegram—that the chefs and a few business partners were in the basement of Carbone down the street, smoking a fierce industrial-strength strain of weed, when a breathless runner appeared with the news that grumpy Platt was happily grazing at the Clam Bar, and in a merry, stoned haze they gave the Henry VIII–style command to throw him out onto the street. The eternal laws of the jungle, however, have a way of sorting things out eventually. Several months later, when I arrived at the door of Torrisi and Carbone’s next venture—a moody, Paris-meets-New-Orleans concept on the Lower East Side called Dirty French—Jeff Zelaznick, who was their business partner and front man, greeted me at the door with a large, possibly forced smile on his face and led us to a banquette in the back of the room. “Thank you for joining us,” he said with an elaborate, almost comic politeness, bowing slightly from the waist and presenting the menus, which were printed, in the operatic Carbone-Torrisi style, on paper mortarboards in a large, cartoonishly exaggerated script. He may have even called me by the false name under which I’d booked our table that evening, as any experienced, traditional maître d’ in the New York dining world is taught to do. When the wine list arrived, I pretended to study the trophy Burgundys and Bordeaux with the intensity that a large, self-important gourmand of my station is supposed to bring to the task, and as the meal progressed we both slipped back, with quiet relief, into our familiar roles in the timeless, ritual dance between restaurant and critic, like practiced, weary actors in a long-running Broadway play.
My only surprise about the Showdown at ZZ’s Clam Bar, as I said at the time—and as I think most experienced critics would agree—is that similar fatwas and controversies didn’t erupt much more often, especially in the personal, highly subjective world of restaurants back in those days. More than most kinds of critics, restaurant critics tend to be cast in the public imagination—in movies like the classic Pixar production Ratatouille, and in Jon Favreau’s Chef, in which Oliver Platt plays Ramsey Michel, a much-feared critic, modeled in part on his brother—as the ultimate, snooty arbiters of decorum and taste. But the reality is that we have our own quirky opinions and tastes; whether we’re enjoying a scrambled egg breakfast at a local diner or forking over thousands of dollars for the most expensive kaiseki feast in Kyoto, there’s nothing more personal and subjective than the experience of a good (or bad) meal. Book reviewers reach their quirky opinions by reading the same book, and art and movie critics all see the same movies and gallery shows. But like the theatrical plays they’re always being compared to, especially in New York, restaurants are elaborate circus productions, with hundreds of moving parts that can vary depending on the time of a particular performance or the actors who happen to be onstage. A diner’s experience of a particular lunch or dinner can be affected by whether the haughty hostess decides to seat him or her at a cramped, noisy little table by the kitchen or in a comfortable, quiet space with a glamorous view of the city skyline. Maybe the chef has a cold that evening and decided to call in sick, or maybe the critic doesn’t enjoy eating garden vegetables, which happen to be the specialty of the house. Thousands of little variables like these go into the experience of a very good or a very lousy meal, and they keep on changing as the staff turns over, the seasons and menus change, and, especially during the early stages of a restaurant’s life, the stressed-out owners make frantic adjustments, the way crew members do on the shakedown cruise of an expensive, oceangoing ship.
To the horror of chefs and restaurateurs, critics come parachuting into this refined operation, with their blasé attitudes and their jaded, blowtorched palates. With the help of their randomly chosen guests and self-appointed “experts,” they often attempt to order and consume the entire menu, which is a ridiculous endeavor for any civilized person. With a few noble exceptions, most of them tend to base their lofty judgments on just one or two visits to a restaurant, and they rarely if ever come back, which, as any experienced kitchen hand will tell you, is a little like trying to divine the personality of a grown adult by interviewing a seven-year-old child. To which the critic will respond, sometimes in a meek voice, that the dining public is already spending hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars at restaurants the minute the doors open, let alone during the first six weeks of business, especially in a hothouse dining environment like New York City. A critic’s first duty is to make a case for how the paying public should (or should not) spend their hard-earned cash in a certain restaurant. It’s even possible on rare occasions that the crew on board this shakedown cruise might glean a few things from the write-up. At the end of the day, they point out, the cooks in the kitchen, the team in the front of the house, and even the critic conspicuously taking notes under the VIP table in the corner are all simply trying to do a difficult job as well as we all can.