Transcript: It’s one of the primary pitfalls of the trade. I try and-- I think I go through phases. I also-- I go to nutritionists now and then. I go through phases of gorging and then starving myself and gorging and starving myself but generally you try and eat not- you try and taste everything because if you eat everything-- When I first got the job I ate everything and I gained about- I gained almost 80 pounds so I was sort of staggering around and that wasn’t good so then I went to a nutritionist and I lost most of it and now I’m slowly gaining it back, but I’m trying to do it with dignity. Well, there were all sorts of things and I’ve blogged on this but you don’t- basically you just don’t eat so much. You don’t-- When-- You’ve got to-- You have to stay away from alcohol because you’re sitting in these restaurants and there’s not- you’re in a restaurant for the 15th straight night and you drink so you try not to do that. You try not to eat bread baskets or the devil as far as critics are concerned, not- no-- It’s very-- It’s sort of common-sense stuff, no carbohydrates, no pastas, just taste them, desserts, just taste them and try not to get carried away. It’s very easy to get carried away and it’s- you have to have- you have to develop a professional constitution.

Recorded on: 4/22/08

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: I don’t know. Top Chef is--  I do a blogging Q&A on Top Chef. You have to work in a kitchen to know but it’s- one of the trends--and this is again- David Chang is somewhat emblematic of that--is that the kitchen has come to the forefront. The grand artifice of the fancy place with the tuxedos and chandeliers, stuffy Frenchmen, is slowly dissolving, even- in fact even- not even that slowly. It’s basically sort of dissolved and the kitchen slave with his burns and his prejudices and his wild ravings and rants is now the subject of TV shows and books. Bill Buford’s Heat was- is a great book about the workings of the kitchen and it’s what people more and more are interested in and the chefs and the cooks are more and more I think opening restaurants on their own terms or at least they’re trying to do that.

Recorded on: 4/22/08

Transcript: Well, I think they’ve always had it but I think I notice this in younger people. They’re very educated and they have very definite opinions about what they like or like not to eat. They’ve grown up. The Starbucks generation has grown up thinking about the different grains of Costa Rican roasts that they have consumed with their indulgent and equally obsessed- food-obsessed parents so there’s a much- it’s a very- a much more sort of educated conversant opinionated--being the internet generation--opinionated group than before. New York had always been for fairly cultured eaters but generally in the ‘60s and ‘70s the grand French or Italian restaurant would open to it- open up and people would dutifully troop in and enjoy their supposed and often- usually quite grand experience and then troop out and tell their friends how wonderful it was and then that would perpetuate itself. Now it’s a much more various, multifaceted scene.

Recorded on: 4/22/08

Question: How is the recession affecting the New York dining scene?

Transcript: Well, it’s making prices go up and you’d think that it would--  The New York dining scene is subject to the same rules as a forest, these big conflagrations and a forest fire comes through and things are burnt off and a new crop of restaurants come up, and you would think that we’re about to suffer or were in the process of suffering a huge conflagration, that all these restaurants would be blowing out. However, like I said, there are a lot of great restaurants around and last year when I was writing I was accused of being crabby about the things I was writing about and that’s fine. I didn’t find a lot to write about that I liked. Oddly enough, this year with the economy supposedly going south there are a lot of quite high-profile restaurants that are opening up and that I think are pretty good. Now a lot of this is because they’ve been planned a year ahead or even two or three years ahead and I don’t know how they’ll do but the food prices have gone up a lot and it’s just a question of how affected the consumer or the restaurant goers are, but the thing is that the level of talent around I don’t think has ever been higher. In the ‘90s you had these- you had a generation of real superstar chefs. You had Jean-Georges and Batali and Danielle and David Bouley and they really haven’t been replaced but they’ve been- by these- they have been replaced by sort of similar godheads in the restaurant firmament. However, there are a lot more people who know how to cook and the model for- who know how to cook well and the model for the young aspiring chef is not anymore to go in to a fancy French restaurant and get screamed at for ten years and run the kitchen and ultimately run the restaurant himself or to open a fancy French restaurant in midtown. The model is more and more to go to a neighborhood where you might live in, a la David Chang and many others-- Wylie Dufresne is another one-- and open your own restaurant cooking the kind of food you want to eat and that’s going on more and more and more not just in New York but all over the country and there is a much wider variety of good restaurant food around now than I think there has been ever before.

Question: What is going to happen to restaurants that were in the pipeline before the recession?

Transcript: I think they are going to close but that’s generally what happens especially with the rents this high and you just- you can’t support- you can only support your space for so long without being successful so they’ll close and statistically most of the restaurants do close and I don’t know what the--  I can’t remember what the shelf life is for a restaurant in New York. I think it’s two or three, four years, but it’s really not very long.

Question: How patient will consumers be?

Transcript:  Well, consumers--  You would think they would either get bored or they would not want to pay 25 bucks for a coddled hen’s egg but from what I’m seeing eating out the appetite for restaurant food in New York remains voracious. That’s--  I’m not seeing a lot of empty restaurants. I’m seeing a lot of full restaurants and not only--  They’re all--  They’re full before they’re even reviewed and this is a product of the internet blogging phenomenon. People know about these places literally when they open and there are- if you go on the web sites like Eater you’ll see the various reporting, camera shots from somebody’s armpit of the bar being ____________ made. Anyway, so the hysteria is there and I don’t- it doesn’t look like it’s abating but I think if a recession rolls through this city it’s going to happen to a certain extent.

Recorded on: 4/22/08

Question:  What food trends are on the horizon?

Transcript: On the horizon--  I don’t know but the trends- the big trend for a while has been the whole farm to table green market, the purity of the ingredients. It’s a trend that I called--  I call it oat barnyard. I’ve probably called it that a few too many times but that has been the trend of this decade not just in New York but all over the country but it- I think that’s still that sort of- the primary dining trend. It comes in all sorts of different shapes and sizes but if you’re going to look for a trend that’s one that you’ll find running through everything, not that it’s particularly new. It’s just people have- seemed to have discovered it.

Question: Do you foresee farmers becoming celebrities?

Transcript: Well, I’ve heard that. Supply--  Suppliers are already--  If you go to Per Se, if you go to some of the- many of the fancy restaurants, they will- on the menu there’ll be little sort of poetic descriptions of their perfect suppliers off in the wilds foraging with rough hands for the perfect mushroom or the perfect scallop or--  So suppliers are more and more well known in the food community.

Recorded on: 4/22/08

Question: Whose work are you watching?

Transcript:  New York’s full of--  It’s like writing or ballet or theater. There are great young artists coming to New York all the time. The restaurant business is so vicious that sometimes it takes a while for them to sort of find their footing but recently there have been a few good restaurants that have opened up. There’s a young chef--  There’s a new restaurant called Dovetail which is on the Upper West Side. Fraser is the guy’s name and he worked at a bunch of restaurants in New York I think and even ran his own kitchen- ran the kitchens in a bunch of restaurants, the last one on the Upper West Side and I didn’t think very successfully but at Dovetail he’s the co-owner and the food there I thought was really exceptional especially for the benighted neighborhood that it’s in but there are a lot of great young chefs in New York. Andrew Carmellini is a great young chef. There are a lot of them. It’s often hard to sort of choose who’s the best.

Question: Whose star has faded?

Transcript: I review one restaurant at a time and I don’t keep track of how they’re up or down, up or down. Stars tend to dim as a general rule with expansion and empire building and this- the odd thing about Chang as I said is he’s actually getting smaller instead of bigger but the general rule is that as you expand it’s very hard to maintain control of what you’re doing. You are making more money but it’s very hard- it require- you have to be a good- a great chef but also a great manager and a great businessman and there are certain chefs who are like that. Danielle is like that. Jean-Georges is like that. They actually are able to run quite a large number of restaurants at quite a high level but I think that’s the exception rather than the rule.

Recorded on: 4/22/08

Transcript: Why, sure he can do wrong. I thought--  And I think I said this when I reviewed Momofuku Ssam. I didn’t review Momofuku Noodle Bar because it was not in the price range that I usually write about but when I reviewed Momofuku Ssam I--  He has been incredibly over-hyped and he’s not by the standards of a classic sort of a fancy New York classically trained chef he’s never run what you would call a large first-class

restaurant, and he was- but- and he was over-hyped quite a lot from the beginning. The fact is that when you go to that- go to his restaurants the food has this sort of compulsively edible quality and either you- and part of it is his obsession with— and this is not just his obsession; it’s the fashion-- of sort of the porks and the heavy flavors and the crispy, crunchy fried beefy. And part of it is the Asian influence which he just- which he- which runs through all of his food and it’s a very enticing combination and it’s the kind of thing--  His food when you go there--  You find yourself afterwards thinking about it and you may say, “Well, this is- I’m just eating”--  Certainly, at the last two restaurants, at Momofuku Ssam and Momofuku Noodle Bar, you’re eating dumplings, you’re eating crunchy pork buns, you’re eating bowls of tripe that taste a little bit like chili, you’re eating Brussels sprouts with Vietmanese fish sauce on them. They’re not--  They’re essentially simple dishes but the ingredients are top rate and you find yourself just remembering them. At least I do when I leave any--  And I said this in my other review and the cooking at Momofuku Ssam is the first time- Momofuku Ko--excuse me--is the first time where he’s really taken these what you would call more elaborate classical techniques and put his own imprint on them. And so I think it was the first time where he actually really warranted the hype and I say this in the review and I’m sure the backlash is--  It’s already happening and it’s going to probably continue. The thing about Chang is that he’s- and the people who cook with him--  They’re at a time--  Working in a kitchen--  It’s a high-energy, high-burnout young man’s profession and he is- he and the people who are working with him are working really only with one thing in mind and that’s to produce good food. It’s not to steal their restaurant. It’s not to make money. It’s not to expand to Hong Kong or Vegas. It’s really to produce the best food that they know how in the most intimate setting and in New York today that’s fairly rare, and so that’s why I went a little nuts possibly.

Recorded on: 4/22/08

Question:  You caught a lot of flak for that review. How do respond?

Transcript: Well, the bloggers criticized me for reviewing the place like a blogger so that’s my answer to them is if you’re going to do that, fine, but that’s the way bloggers work anyways but generally what I would say- my answer would be what I just said, A) the place is impossible to get in to, B) it had been open for five weeks already, C) the menu’s not going to change very much, and it was the same thing-- I remember when I reviewed Masa the second time I went back it was what am I doing here?  It’s fine but it’s the same food. Anyway, so that was- I made the decision; I’ll write it up right now. And it was glowing. Chang--  I’m on record as enjoying his food and again this is a highly subjective business and his last restaurant, Momofuku Ssam, I gave three stars to for what that’s worth. This food was of a higher caliber, five stars, no, sorry, four stars. There you go. So that’s my answer.

Question: Should you be held to a higher standard than then bloggers?

Transcript:  Well, possibly, but again remember my argument is the one I just gave. I don’t think me going back--  First of all, I don’t know if I’m going to get in. Right?  So if I go back two months hence I don’t know that it’s going to change very much. Now if it was--  And I said all this in the review and this is- Chang’s whole thing is that he’s- these are not- he’s doing things in an untraditional way at least for this city. These--  It’s sort of a non-restaurant restaurant and I chose to review it that way. Now if his menu’s changing all the time and he’s got millions of dishes--  The whole point of going back is to- so that you can- you don’t have the same dish again and again. The whole point of going back is to sample the entire menu. Now if you’ve gone once and you’ve sampled the menu there you have it. Now many bloggers go to large restaurants with huge menus and they have one sitting and they- friends eat some stuff and maybe they don’t eat everything and they blog away. So fine, but I think in this particular case I don’t think I needed to go back.

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: Is there you won’t eat?

Transcript:  No. I’ll eat anything.

Transcript: Well, I’ll eat--  I--  Yeah, within bounds I’ll eat anything. In New York you don’t really--  I have traveled a lot and you eat- there are some pretty grim things that you have to eat but they’re all edible if you eat them quickly but in New York in the kind of restaurants that I go to it’s my duty to consume everything on my plate and it’s not that hard to do. And I don’t have certain things like chicken liver that I don’t like or tripe or chickens’ feet. In fact, I like all those things so I’m perfectly happy with a big bowl of stewed kidneys.

Question: What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten?

Transcript:  The weirdest, craziest thing--  Probably--  I just--  I’ve just written an article about it. Recently, in the last year or few months, I was in Japan and Japan is-- It’s probably the best eating--  Well, Tokyo itself like New York--  It’s probably the best eating town in the world now. Michelin just did a guide there and I think the total stars they gave out in New York and London were something like- between 70 and 80 stars to all the fancy restaurants. In Tokyo they gave out 160, 170 stars to all the various restaurants there. Anyway, so the Japanese cook at this very high level all different kinds of food, Japanese, Italian, Brazilian, French, but they also cook a lot of really bizarre, strange things. You go to these beautiful department stores. In the basements they have these beautiful food halls which make for- the fancy boutique food places in New York look like McDonald’s, not quite like McDonald’s but on that level. And they are selling- next to these beautiful, shiny French pastries they are selling platters of grilled eel gizzards which taste like fish liver that’s been soaked in butane. And during the course of that trip I had those eel gizzards and I also had grilled chicken ovaries which is yakitori, which is it’s grilled on a stick, all different kinds of meat. The ovaries are--  They grill it and it’s basically these sort of gizzards which are sort of squeezed on a stick and at the end of it is the ovary which looks like a bobbing egg yolk and it actually tastes quite good but it looks so freaky when it’s bobbling around,and then you eat it and the yolk bursts in your mouth and it’s the innards of a chicken, so that was sort of grizzly. And I also had- on that trip I ate fugu which is the blowfish- which is the poisonous blowfish, which is a great delicacy in Japan, and I’ve just written a story about this. And the top piece de resistance delicacy of fugu is the engorged sperm sac of the male fish and they’ll serve that grilled in little pieces like summer marshmallows, and there’s really no taste to it but you bite--  Again it’s on a stick and they are these little burnt white things, not burnt but lightly grilled, and then you bite it and the sort of hot fish milk will sort of flood around in your mouth and it’s really- it’s sort of disgusting but I did it.

Question: Should you be held to a higher standard than then bloggers?

Transcript:  Well, possibly, but again remember my argument is the one I just gave. I don’t think me going back--  First of all, I don’t know if I’m going to get in. Right?  So if I go back two months hence I don’t know that it’s going to change very much. Now if it was--  And I said all this in the review and this is- Chang’s whole thing is that he’s- these are not- he’s doing things in an untraditional way at least for this city. These--  It’s sort of a non-restaurant restaurant and I chose to review it that way. Now if his menu’s changing all the time and he’s got millions of dishes--  The whole point of going back is to- so that you can- you don’t have the same dish again and again. The whole point of going back is to sample the entire menu. Now if you’ve gone once and you’ve sampled the menu there you have it. Now many bloggers go to large restaurants with huge menus and they have one sitting and they- friends eat some stuff and maybe they don’t eat everything and they blog away. So fine, but I think in this particular case I don’t think I needed to go back.

Recorded on: 4/22/08

Question: Where do you eat when you’re off duty?

Transcript:  Well, I live right near Washington Square Park and there are many, many restaurants within a two- or three-block radius that I would be happy to travel to from much farther than that to eat at so- and I could name five or six. Also I’m not a very picky eater. I’m happy going and getting a bag of hamburgers across the street. So they are very--  All the Union Square restaurants like Danny Meyer--   There are a lot of very solid restaurants. Danny Meyer’s Shake Shack is a great restaurant. There--  Otto,[ph?] the pizza restaurant, Mario Batali’s Pizza Restaurant is a great restaurant. There are a lot of them. I don’t really have one that’s my special favorite although there are certain ones that I like for certain kinds of events.  

Question: Where do you go for an exquisite meal?

Transcript:  Well, the most exquisite--  In Manhattan--  I’ve said this in my- in print so I--  The fanciest sort of Frenchiest five-star experience I think is still Laverna Bay[ph?] and that’s where I’d go if I wanted a fancy classical but also inventive meal, especially a New York-style meal. I think it’s a classic--  It’s a French restaurant but the classic New York- there’s a classic New York feel in that room. It’s polished but it’s also busy but it’s also very elegant. The service is the classical kind of service that you really don’t see a lot, the professional waiters that you don’t really see a lot in New York anymore. So that’s sort of the standard for that kind of dining. Masa on the Time Warner Center, the--  That’s the other--  I have a star system which was imposed on me and which I use now grudgingly and Masa was the other five-star restaurant that I- the other restaurant that I gave five stars to and that is the very effete, very expensive Japanese sushi restaurant on the Time Warner Center and that is also a great restaurant. The thing about Masa is that it’s an omakase restaurant, which means it’s Masa Takayama who is the chef’s. He serves the same menu most nights. It changes slightly with the seasons but it really doesn’t change that much so the first meal is going to be the best meal you ever had there. The second meal--  It’s like a bull seeing a cape the second or third--  The second or third time the impact is slightly less but that’s also a great restaurant.

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:   I don’t think so ‘cause I don’t know that I have that kind of power. I’m basically not thinking- like I said I’m thinking about sitting down and having a good dinner and I’m not thinking about--  I think I’m quite a easygoing critic, that people will disagree but I think I generally try like I said to just enjoy the meal and communicate the experience and I’m not looking to be egregiously mean although some chefs would be- would say that’s not true. Well, the other thing is that I don’t write- at New York magazine I don’t write every week. I write usually three times a month and there are- often when I go to a restaurant if I really don’t like it I won’t write about it because there are so many restaurants that are worth writing about and worth writing- that are good that I’ll- I will tend to write about those before I write about the ones that I just think are horrible. And now if they’re- it’s a very high-profile restaurant and I think it’s horrible then I’ll write about that but there are plenty of bad restaurants that I just don’t write about.

Recorded on: 4/22/08

Question: How do you avoid clichés when you write about food?

Transcript: You don’t basically. I think every--  I think most writers who write columns repeat themselves no matter what. The trick is to find clichés that work and use them again and again but it’s very hard especially writing about food, especially writing about descriptive- describing the same kinds of dishes again and again. It’s very hard not to repeat yourself and what I try to do is I try to take a theme that’s sort of maybe bigger than the restaurant itself and apply that to the experience. It’s not a grand theme of life or death but it’s maybe a theme in the restaurants of New York and what different styles, different types, and I try and weave that in to the actual experience of the meal and then I try and go through--  You’re essentially writing service journals and so you essentially- you have to tell people this is good, this is bad, this is not good, this is not bad, and you have to do all of that in a thousand words and you have to do it every week. So you are going to be repeating yourself a little bit.

Question: Is it hard to write about similar things over and over?

Transcript:  Well, from a writing standpoint it’s a little harder but it’s also--  Well, you see, it’s harder and it’s easier. Columns are hard because you’re- they are repetitious but you’re also writing something that’s very familiar and that you have a lot of- you have opinions about and that you have- and you have confidence in these opinions and it’s also what you’re doing all the time so you’re comfortable with doing it whereas writing features you’re more- you’re at the whim of sort of people and events. And if you’ve been doing a lot of that columns are actually refreshing, especially restaurant columns because you’re really- you’re the actor in your own show and it’s sort of a peaceful feeling after a while.

Recorded on: 4/22/08

Question: What do you look for when you review a restaurant?

Transcript:  Well, you’re just going to experience it so you- one of the- usually in any kind of reporting or journalism you really have only one crack at this situation. You go in, you look at- look around, you look at people, you do some interviews and experience the situation, and then you write it up. When you’re writing a review you have the luxury of going two or three times so basically when you first arrive you look around, you order the food, you do what anybody does. You really don’t do anything different and you’ll probably get initial impressions when you first walk in the door and then you’ll have different ones the next time you’re there. One of the things about writing about restaurants is that it’s incredibly subjective. The cooks change. They can have a cold one night. You can be sitting next to a caterwauling infant another night. The drinks--  The bartender could be drunk another night. So everything’s changing all the time and when you go back again and again you can sort of- you try and get a sense of sort of the normality of the place although you’re always writing basically from a sense of opinion and it’s really your opinion because your- it’s your experience.   

Question: What is the most underemphasized aspects of a restaurant?

Transcript:  Well, in New York it’s a different- there are different kinds of restaurants obviously. In New York in the restaurants that I write about- in New York eating out is practically a theatrical event. It also actually sort of--  It is a theatrical event and so in New York in restaurants--and this is true of most of the artistic disciplines in New York--ambitious people come here from around the world to show off what they’re doing, and so in New York you have- you don’t really have a lot of sort of generic New York food. In fact, you don’t really have any generic New York food except for maybe the porterhouse steak but you have a lot of different kinds of restaurants and everything’s a show and I think in New York people tend to- you emphasize that and people want to read about that. So you basically--  The first thing you look for when you sit down is you look around. What does it look like?  There are certain things that--  I think there are certain tip-offs as to how the meal’s going to go but you sort of- you look around. You sort of take in the scene and you start eating.  

Recorded on: 4/22/08

Question: Does being a restaurant critic require any special training?

Transcript:  I think basically that’s what it requires and it requires--  I think you have to be able to sit in a restaurant for a long time but you have to be able to- you have to enjoy it first of all. You have to enjoy at least eating and eating all sorts of strange foods ‘cause if you don’t you won’t communicate any of that in your writing. And what you’re doing when you’re a critic--  You’re judging these restaurants ostensibly but you’re really communicating the experience and whether good or bad and so if you’re bored all the time or feeling dyspeptic all the time or just if you don’t like food you’re not going to last very long and you’re probably not going to be that fun to read either.  

Question: What do you make of people who criticize Frank Bruni for his lack of food training?

Transcript: Well, I’m- I think Frank Bruni’s a great critic and I don’t- I think we’re writers first of all and like I said our job is to communicate sort of what’s happening because most of the people who read our reviews don’t go to these restaurants. They sort of get a vicarious pleasure from reading them. So I think first of all you have to be able to write. I think it’s a great- it helps a lot to know a lot about food but when you’re writing about restaurants what I try to do is I try to write from the perspective of the diner, and I’ve eaten in a lot of restaurants so I know what it’s like- I can get a fairly good idea as to what’s good, what’s bad, and that comes with experience eating at restaurants. It doesn’t necessarily come from knowing how to cook a mille-feuille or some insane French pastry but- and I’ll say that when you look at the landscape of food writers there are really sort of two kinds of writers. There are the more food-oriented, more incremental writers who look at what’s on the plate and explain to you the recipes and analyze things very minutely and then there are the more eclectic, experiential writers-- R.W. Apple was a classic example of that at the time-- who like I say communicate the experience and wander around with their expanding bellies and generally have a good time and that’s sort of what I try to do.

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