Adam Gopnik - The Table Comes First

Loiseau, it now seems, thrived briefly at a short, fundamentalist moment in the history of cooking, just between the Protestant Reformation of nouvelle cuisine and the rococo Counter-Reformation of today’s cuisine tendance (“trendy cooking,” though “speculative cooking” might be a better name), the kind of ostrich-tongue-with-rutabaga-foam-and-Jurassic-salt-on-a-stick cooking that unites Ferran Adrià, of elBulli; the Californian Thomas Keller, of the French Laundry; and New York’s own Wylie Dufresne, of wd-50.

Yet Loiseau is hard not to love. He was, like everyone, a casualty of history and his own demons; but he was also, as Chelminski insists, a perfectionist, for whom the disapproval of a single diner was almost impossible to accept, which is what makes his story heartbreaking and instantly understandable. “Why didn’t he like it?” he would moan inconsolably when one of a hundred diners sent a dish back unfinished. The chef’s life is a long struggle with the reality that tastes differ, and tastes change. The mutability of taste is a truth chefs live with every night.

And the Loiseau example suggests that the divide between the mock-epic and the microcosmic schools expresses an even simpler divide between the way critics and cooks experience food. The diner experiences it as a form of comedy and the cook experiences it as a form of work. (The cook’s recompense for not having fun—for those hours and hours of life spent chopping onions—is a sense of soul and of significance.) One goes for pleasure and believes in his right to mock and have fun; the other cooks in desperate exhaustion and believes in his right to a livelihood.

Ruth Reichl’s Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise , a memoir of her time in the hottest of critical hot seats in America, that of restaurant critic of The New York Times , tells the story from the other side of the mirror. Her book would make a terrific romantic comedy, if Lubitsch or Billy Wilder were alive or if Nora Ephron wanted to make it. Reichl, in order to conceal her identity from the restaurant people who were desperate for her good opinion, dined in disguise throughout her five years at the Times , not merely wearing wigs and dark glasses but actually creating and inhabiting whole alternative characters: a chorine called Chloe, a sad Glass Menagerie –type lady called Molly, and even a motherly type, homey and sensible. A Method critic, she came to live these characters: they wrote the reviews. In the movie of her life, of course, the hard-eating, Falstaffian R. W. Apple, Jr., character would hate her in her fussy office identity as a “nouvelle” eater, and fall for her in one of her disguises in the restaurant. (There is even a wisecracking, snooty but winning friend—obviously the Stockard Channing role—who has to be converted to the merits of sushi.)

What makes Reichl’s book genuinely touching is that—in a plangent complication—she sees herself first of all as a cook, and seems to identify secretly with her targets. Compelled by admirable maternal instincts, within a two-career marriage, to take her son from one overpriced, overwrought restaurant meal to another, she convincingly suggests that the restaurant critic’s life is an ordeal; the recipes she inserts in the text (leg of lamb, matzo brei ) seem to be intended as oases of sense in the midst of all this madness, and as signs of her real identity, as a cook.

At the same time, the book is wonderfully revealing about the double consciousness of the critic. Although pain-giving herself (and she likes to read “delightful” pans of restaurants), she is sensitive about criticism of her own criticism, and spends time collating phone messages for and against, walking the streets with anxiety when her first review comes out as she waits to hear what the bosses think. (Critics never allow these two parts of their brain to communicate, or stop to think that the pain you take, as the Beatles might say, is equal to the pain you make.) The back-and-forth between the soulful stuff that she writes about her family and the sometimes surprisingly catty stuff that she writes about her working life (she is not particularly kind about her editors at the Times ) is conscious, certainly, but also deeply felt. You think, She really didn’t like the gig.

There is a moment when, after she reviews Le Cirque, she walks back to her childhood neighborhood, reconnecting with what actually made food into a significant thing for her. She clearly feels that there is something ignoble, or at least remote from her original infatuation, in sending expense-account diners off to this or that French temple. This is the lesson critics learn the hard way, and we are as relieved as she is when she is at last set free and gets a job as editor of the magazine Gourmet . She is tired, we know, of eating in disguise, when what she really wants is to be cooking for her family out in the open.

Reichl, after all her experience, compares the restaurant world of New York to a theater, with the diners and critics merely players in it. But everything can be described in terms of performance and theatricality; all the world’s a stage. Surely it is identity politics, rather than just playacting, that is at stake in costly dining out. All those people waiting in line at Le Cirque are not waiting for their selves to be lost or exchanged; they are waiting to be affirmed, even enhanced, and they do it even at the risk of humiliation. Not “Enter and become another!” but “You belong here” is what we want the maître d’ to tell us. (And the illusion that we want the chef to give us is not “I work for you” but “I feed you from love.”)

This affirmation, it seems, is easier to get than we might think. Steven A. Shaw is identified by his publishers as a former attorney who began a second career as a food and restaurant critic in 1997. He has a book called Turning the Tables: Restaurants from the Inside Out , which attempts to show you how not to be intimidated or overwhelmed when dining out: he wants you to be an expert at eating in restaurants, even as the author is an expert on eating in restaurants. This seems a queer expertise, a self-evident specialization, but he does give much sound, neighborly advice on getting reservations (just humble yourself to the person who answers the phone, and someday the table, like your prince, will come) and some sane if fairly obvious counsel: “Understanding one’s own preferences and needs, as well as those of your dining companions, is foundational to making good restaurant choices.”

He is briskly tough, though, and quite courageous in his assaults on the Times ’ reviewing. The whole elaborate, boastful rigmarole of disinterestedness and disguise celebrated in Reichl’s book he sees not as honest but as ignorant and provincial, common sense clouded over by fear—as though restaurants were there to scam you. He insists that the food in the kitchen is, of necessity, the food that gets served to everyone, critic or yokel (and the few exceptions are those restaurants where contempt for the paying customers is apparently part of the charm, as at Le Cirque). There is no more need for the elaborate masks of the restaurant critic than there is for the art critic Robert Hughes to go to a museum in a Groucho Marx nose and glasses. A good critic can’t be fooled. The best that the critic can hope for is to be treated as a friend of the house, but all you have to do to become a friend of the house, Shaw says, is to be one. Restaurants are businesses before they are anything else. Dine twice a week at Le Bernardin, the thought is, and you will magically have the table you want at Le Bernardin. This is only partly true; the known critic gets sent out far more plates and extras and desserts than you or I do, and often far more than he knows what to do with. (I once ate with a very fine chef who had the habit of sending out extra plates to friends at his own place. When the chef at the place where we were eating kept sending out extra plates to him, he said, finally, “You know, it never occurred to me before how annoying this is. You’re forcing people to eat things they weren’t in the mood for and then to make a big show of appreciating them.”)