As anyone who writes about their dinner for a living knows, there are few things more subjective, or prone to myth and exaggeration, than the distant memory of an excellent meal. The same is true of a memorably horrible meal, of course, the legend of which invariably grows in horror and awfulness with each retelling. This memoir is the pieced-together record of thousands of such idealized, half-remembered events—of family dinners and picnic luncheons and summer goat roasts, which may or may not have actually been as novel or as nourishing as they seem to me now. It’s a memoir of dumpling feasts and Peking duck dinners in the far-off places where I found myself living as a child, and of the kinds of strange things you come across, and even seek out, as a professional eater, like grilled chicken uterus, or raw horse sashimi, or the icy dabs of poisonous blowfish sperm, which I ingested in a state of not-so-quiet horror for a magazine story many years ago.
I’ve attempted to re-create these episodes as I remember them, and if I can’t remember them, I’ve relied on the memories of others. Special thanks to my father for his descriptions of long-ago meals and restaurants, and whose eclectic love of a good meal set the tone for my career as an eater. Thanks to his brother, Geoffrey, and to their cousins, Charles Platt and Frank Platt, “the family gastronome,” for attempting to reconstruct the dining habits of their eccentric Yankee ancestors, the Choates and the Platts. Thanks to my brothers, Oliver and Nicholas Jr., for racking their brains about our long-ago food adventures in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, and to my mother, who spent many patient hours trying to recover the culinary nightmares from her sheltered WASP upbringing, many of which she’d managed to suppress for decades.
I’ve written more than I probably should about my diets, the various dining foibles of my daughters and wife, and the strange eating habits of the professional glutton, and portions and snippets of several of these articles and reviews, many of which appeared in New York magazine and on the magazine’s website Grub Street are reproduced and expanded on here. Special thanks to my first editor at New York, Meredith Rollins, who had the daring, slightly cockeyed idea to turn me into a restaurant critic, and to Mark Horowitz and Caroline Miller for making that strange dream a reality. Thanks to Klara Glowczewska for sending me on many pleasurable junkets during her tenure at Condé Nast Traveler, and to Pam Wasserstein, the great Adam Moss, and David Haskell for their beneficent, hands-off support during my time as the chief eater in residence at New York magazine. Thanks to my longest-serving, longest-suffering editor, Jon Gluck, for shepherding a thousand end-of-the-year “monsters” into print, and to my many other colleagues at the magazine and website—Noreen Malone, Raha Naddaf, Anne Clark, Jody Quon, Alan Sytsma, and those dynamos of the food section Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld—for their support and guidance over the years.
Thanks to my agent, Suzanne Gluck, for exhibiting the kind of patience that high-powered literary professionals aren’t generally known for during the decade or so I spent not writing this book. Thanks also to Farley Chase for his advice on portions of the manuscript, and to Hugo Lindgren for his invaluable editing advice after gamely taking the time to grapple with the entire thing. Thanks to my occasional interns, Clare Platt, Sam Hawkins Sawyer, and Olivia Caldwell, who gamely made restaurant reservations using ridiculous fake names, diligently gathered any research I asked them for, and brought some sense of digital sanity to my disheveled, paper-strewn desk. Thanks to my diligent, long-suffering production editor at HarperCollins and to the wise, ever-cheerful Gabriella Doob at Ecco for calmly guiding this manuscript and its author to print through various stages of confusion and terror. And thanks, most of all, to Daniel Halpern, who had the idea for this memoir more years ago than either of us probably cares to remember, waited with a kind of biblical patience over the months and decades for the pages to slowly pile up on his desk, and once this confused jumble of thoughts and impressions had achieved a kind of critical mass, gave the thing a name and pronounced it done. For better or worse, none of us would be reading this book without him.