-(Huxley , Brave New World Revisited, 1958)

Has anything changed, afterall? 

Question: How have food bloggers affected your work?

Transcript: I like it. It’s a way of--  I think restaurant critics are used to working kind of- in a kind of a vacuum. It used to be sort of a stuffy, somewhat cliquish world and you like to look at the blogs and to know that people are out there in a frenzy running around and they care about it and it gives import to what you do, and if people are attacking you and- that’s fine also. So I don’t have any problem with it. I--  As far as blogging and people reviewing- quote, unquote, reviewing restaurants that they’re blogging, I’m fine with that too. That’s the internet phenomenon. That’s what--  That--  It’s immediate and I don’t think you can expect anything less. So I’m not going to play the stuffy old critic disapproving of the way things are done now. I think the internet is--  It’s more and more- we’re- not even more and more--  We’re all internet journalists now and some- the process is just a little different for some than for others.

Question: Would you ever blog a la Frank Bruni?

Transcript: I do that a little bit. The magazine has a very good restaurant blog with full-time employees and so- and I contribute to that but I tend to do it every week as opposed to every five minutes. Now as far as being a blogger, if- I actually like the media. I think it’s actually more--  I like the immediacy and I like the unedited quality and often when you’re doing a blog you’re more- you can- you’re more spontaneous and- than you would be in your sort of measured reviewerly prose so I actually think it’s refreshing.

Recorded on: 4/22/08

Transcript:  Well, writing about--  Anyone who lives in New York is sort of disconnected from the rest of the world. That’s in many cases why they’re here but no--  Restaurants--  The phenomenons--  The restaurant phenomenons that I’ve been talking about are not just--  They’re happening all over the country. It’s not just in New York and in New York when you travel you go to- you’ll go--  There--  Most cities will have several really good places to eat there. If there are not, quote, unquote, fancy gourmet restaurants, there are other kinds of places and often the thing about New York is that- the phrase, the ______________ of a place, the sort of what comes out of the sort of unique environment of place, will inform what people eat, and in New York you don’t really have a lot of that. In New York, like I said, what you have is people coming from all over the world and displaying their talents so it’s really a bazaar of fancy foods, of different kinds of cuisines and different sort of culinary affectations and it’s actually refreshing going to Nebraska to eat real steak or Maine to eat a real scallop or San Francisco to eat a real vegetable. So I don’t think- I don’t see New York in that sense as really--  It’s sort of the center in a certain sense of a sort of the grand restaurant world but as far as food in general and eating in general that’s all over the country.

Recorded on: 4/22/08

Transcript: First of all, most of my- all of my reviews are on the internet so the- I’d say probably the majority of people that read my writing are reading it online. As far as the actual reviewing of a restaurant, it’s beginning to change I think but it’s changed more the restaurant reporting and so there’s much more of sort of a frenzied--  People pay attention to what you’re doing more, at least they seem to, but as far as the actual rhythm of writing a review generally you want to go to a restaurant a month after it’s opened. I generally start going three weeks to a month after it’s opened and I generally write it up within six weeks of its opening. Now in internet terms that’s seven decades. That’s an enormous length of time but that’s still how I do it and still how I do it in New York Magazine, and so that hasn’t changed. I have a feeling ultimately it will because the time cycle just keeps getting collapsed, closer and closer and closer and closer and closer. Recently, I wrote a review of David Chang’s. David Chang is the hot chef downtown in the East Village. He runs the sort of- the Momofuko empire and I wrote a review of his restaurant, Momofuko Ko, which is a small omakase place, very elite, very hard to get in to. It’s modeled on the--  I was talking about Masa’s restaurant uptown. It’s modeled on that Japanese model of everyone gets the same meal, there are 12 people in the room, and I wrote that--  I got in I think it was the fifth week it was open and I- and they have this arcane computerized system for getting in and I had a bunch of people at the magazine log in on our computers and there was a cancellation and I got in, and because I didn’t think I was going to get in again within- I didn’t know if I’d get in again and because the- he only serves this one meal which doesn’t vary very much I wrote it up after one visit and put it out in the- on the internet before it was published. That’s the first time that I’ve done that. Maybe it’ll happen again, we’ll do it more. I don’t know.

Recorded on: 4/22/08

Transcript: The whole issue with non- anonymity is sort of one tries to remain anonymous but if you’ve been doing this- if you’ve been doing a job long enough in New York and if the restauranteurs are out to find you the rule is that in my experience they generally will. Now they’ll pretend not to know that you’re there but if they’re looking for you they’ll generally find you. In many cases they know what you look like already. They’ve worked on the restaurants where you’ve been in. After the second or third visit somebody will say, “There is that guy,” and if it’s me I’m 6 foot 6 and I weigh 480 pounds so they will- they’ll spot you anyways and in my case if I’d try to disguise myself it would be even more absurd a situation. So I don’t although I register under different names and I have a credit card with a different name on it and I try in various ways not to call attention to myself, but generally if a restaurant is just opening, within the first two to three months, they’re- A) they’re going to see the critics when they’re there, B) they’re treating everybody like a restaurant critic in New York. They’re the--  The level of service is sniveling to the nth degree. It’s their job. It’s a service industry and they’re- it- they are- the restaurants are at the highest level and they’re treating everybody quite well. I think when- where disguises make a difference is where critics will go back after the second or third year and there’s the conceit of taking away stars or adding stars, and we don’t do that at New York so I don’t do that, but whenever I go back to a restaurant or when I go out on my own--excuse me--and the place has been open for three or four or five years and they don’t recognize you or they’re not paying attention to you, you notice the difference in service. And it’s basically because the fancy restaurants survive by cultivating the clients who go there again and again and if you’re not one of those people and they don’t know you they are going to treat you- they’ll treat you well but they’re not going to treat you as well, whereas in the first couple of months they’re treating everybody really well.

Recorded on: 4/22/08

Question: Do you ever worry about falling into the Adam Gopnik trap?

Transcript:  Well, maybe I already have but I’m not--  It’s--  You write about--  I write about her and I also write about other people that are with me because people enjoy reading about them and it breaks up what is- I won’t call it the monotony of food writing but it gives it a little bit of a dimension. And it so happens that she comes out with me and she has things to say and so I quote her although it’s funny. When I first got this job she’d come out a lot and now it’s- I have to really drag her out to restaurants. She’s--  Basically, she’s full up.  

Question: Any places she likes going back to?

Transcript: Well, we don’t really go back. We go to sort of--  We don’t--  We have two little kids so when I get a night off I don’t really go to- we don’t go to a lot of restaurants. We go to places in our neighborhood and for certain events we might go to a fancy restaurant sort of a birthday or something like that but we don’t--  And I think this is probably true of a lot of critics. They don’t habitually eat- especially if they have families, although many of them don’t, they don’t habitually eat out when they don’t have to, and that’s the case with me and it’s certainly the case with her although she’s not a restaurant critic.

Recorded on: 4/22/08

Transcript:  Why did I decide to go in to--  I always wanted to--  I wanted to write and to travel and to experience things and to write about it and I went to Georgetown University. I was in the School of Foreign Service. I graduated from that but I quickly decided that I didn’t want anything to do with working at a large bureaucracy so I’m probably the only restaurant critic in the history of the discipline to have graduated from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. Anyway, so I was working- I was a business writer in Hong Kong and I decided that I wanted to A)not do business writing and not do- not even do news writing but to do feature writing and that I also- having lived overseas for- at various- for various stages in my life that I really was tired of it, that I wanted to sort of become an American and have a sort of solid identity and a steady home or at least attempt to do that. So I applied on a whim to Columbia, living in Hong Kong, thinking that I could A)get back to the States and B)try out different kinds of writing. And really what I wanted to do was to be a magazine feature writer. I was a magazine feature writer for a long time and they offered me a steady job and I took it and that was seven, almost eight years ago.

Recorded on: 4/22/08

Transcript:  I’d like to see a difference, sometimes, in the way media covers me, frankly, you know, as an environmentalist.  I think, it’s real easy to, sort of, peg me as a person who is just planting trees and doing parks.  You know, which is great, and I love it, and I will, you know, “Look at some of the things I’m most proud of.”  But there’s, also, a real economic agenda associated with it.  And I think that the media is not so hip to really say, “Hey, oh, this is like a strategy to move people out of poverty.  This is a real strategy, you know, that’s designed to, like, do poverty alleviation and remediate the environment.”  And those are the kind of things that, you know, me and Van, in particular, are really interested in pushing.  But again, I think that-- so on a whole, I think, we’ve gotten some tremendous support, you know, from really, really smart folks in the media.  But at the same time, I think it’s, kind of, like, they don’t quite know what to do with us.  I really believe that.  But hopefully that will change, because I’m seeing signs of it.

Recorded on: 3/17/08