I committed, to my knowledge, only one war crime. That occurred near San Isidro Airfield, outside Santo Domingo. I was a willing partic-ipant in the theft, slaughter, and roasting of a goat that had strayed from its home. Several of us, crazed from months of military rations, constructed a great pyre and blistered the innocent beast. We did not escape justice, because all of us who consumed the meat became deathly sick.
Even today, when I am in a restaurant and the waiter proudly announces that the special is goat, I am visited by queasy flashbacks to the bonfire of shame in the field behind the macadam-paved strip where the Dominican Republic Air Force parked its World War II–era P-51 Mustangs.
I ate badly in Vietnam, too, although I did gain considerable weight from the huge bowls of strawberry ice cream I’d plunder from the mess hall every afternoon. It was so hot the ice cream boiled in the bowl as 8
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it passed from a solid to a gaseous state without ever becoming a liquid, a phenomenon I was able to identify as sublimation from my ineffectual tenure as a chemistry major.
I had come home from Vietnam and was working on the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin when a colleague taught me an invaluable lesson: how to lunch in style. She was Leslie Bennetts, then a feature writer for the paper and now a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. When I was leaving to take a job as the sports columnist for the Montreal Star, Leslie invited me to a good-bye lunch, a gesture of generosity she appeared to regret when I recently reminded her of it. I phoned to tell her the meal had meant a great deal to me, and she replied, “I treated you to lunch? Why did I do that? Are you sure this is true?” Then she laughed, rather unkindly.
She went on to explain how little she liked me in those years, because I was alleged to have referred to her as stuck-up when she arrived in Philadelphia from New York. It was probably true, because we Philadelphians assumed all New Yorkers were that way. Leslie seemed to confirm this assessment when she said, “Certainly I was more sophisticated than you. I came from New York and went out with older men.”
I recall the restaurant as small and extremely French. I ordered chicken tarragon, new to me. I drank white wine with it, and though this wasn’t my first drink, I’d never sipped wine in broad daylight sitting alongside a tall blonde of overweening New York sophistication. I perspired heavily throughout the meal, but that might have had less to do with Leslie’s attractiveness than with the all-rayon shirt under my all-polyester blazer, a Stanley Blacker double-knit in chocolate brown with gold buttons.
Leslie, who claimed to have remembered nothing about our lunch, added, unnecessarily, “I never let men pay for me, but I don’t know why I would have paid for you.” She said what she remembered of my dining habits is that occasionally my mother would stop by the Bulletin offices to drop off brown-bag lunches. “And one rainy day,” she cruelly noted, “she brought galoshes in for you.” F O R K I T O V E R
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I didn’t become a full-time restaurant critic until the start of the nineties.
I dabbled in reviewing before then, treating it more like a hobby than a calling. While I was a sportswriter in Boston, the Globe sent me off to find the best Peking duck in the city, and I managed to turn that into a sideline lasting nearly a year. While I was the sports columnist for the Montreal Star, I was made the co-restaurant critic under a pseudonym. That part-time position provided me with dinners for more than a year. My motivation for doing both assignments was simple: the glorious prospect of free food. I was paid hardly anything extra, which is where I got the idea that I couldn’t actually make a living being a restaurant critic. Critics got fat, I thought, but they didn’t get rich.
I was hired by Gentlemen’s Quarterly in 1989 to do profiles, but I still dabbled in comestibles. I was writing a monthly wine column for GQ when the editor-in-chief, Art Cooper, asked me if I wouldn’t mind turning it into a food column. That was my big break: becoming a food writer who was paid like a profile writer. I had the best job in the entire field of criticism: restaurant reviewer. With all due respect to art, film, and theater critics, I’ve always believed their work was less fundamental than mine. Food is life. The rest is parsley.
I was well-prepared for the job. I’d eaten my way through all the important American food trends. The majority of them occurred from 1975 into the early nineties, exactly when I was traveling around the country the most. I got to forty-four states, a pretty extensive overview.
I even ate at the Safari Grill in Manhattan, where the cooks wore pith helmets. I didn’t miss a lot.
Much that I’ve experienced has come and gone, but a few trends have gripped our culture and cannot be shaken loose—Perrier water, domestic goat cheese, comfort food, celebrity chefs, free-range chicken, farm-raised game, baby vegetables, microbreweries, recitations of specials, vertical presentations, tapas, raw fish, olive oil, arugula, cilantro, white truffles, molten chocolate cakes, reconfirming reservations, wild greens, power breakfasts, menus dégustations, fresh ground pepper, 1 0
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sun-dried tomatoes, and undercooking. I remember telling Fabio Picchi, chef-owner of Cibrèo in Florence, that Americans were demanding their food barely warmed, and he replied, “Yes, I know this problem.” Not all food trends stuck. Basically gone are oat-bran bagels, edible flowers, white eggplant, mesquite grilling, cold pasta (or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my
