A Colossal Wreck (78 page)

Two Republican candidates for their party’s nomination to the presidency promptly bring out the hearse, most recently deployed to freight denunciations of women’s right to birth control. Newt Gingrich states that Obama’s comments are “disgraceful” and that “Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period. We should all be horrified, no matter what the ethnic background. Is the President suggesting that, if it had been a white who’d been shot, that would be OK, because it wouldn’t look like him? That’s just nonsense.”

Then Rick Santorum chimes in, stating that Obama should “not use these types of horrible and tragic individual cases to try to drive a wedge in America.” This unleashes Rush Limbaugh who says that Obama is using the case as a “political opportunity.” Geraldo Rivera suggests Martin brought it on himself by wearing a hoodie. At which point the conservative columnist William Tucker has had enough. In the hard-right
American Spectator
, under the headline: “Count Me Out on Trayvon Martin: Why Gingrich, Santorum, and Many Conservatives Are Dead Wrong on This One,” Tucker writes, “Republicans have no reason to intervene in this fight. Seventy-five percent of the public thinks Zimmerman should be charged with something … Personally, I can’t wait until Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum get offstage so we can start running a presidential campaign that isn’t based on trying to alienate the vast majority of Americans over irrelevant issues.”

What is it that prompts Republicans to try so hard to alienate women, blacks, Hispanics, independents, and all those millions and millions of Americans to the left of the Tea Party they’ll need to beat Obama? Maybe they feel it’s their last throw. All the demographics look unfavorable for any future Republican majority. So there is a desperate effort to get everything they can right now. Conning working-class whites with racism, sexism, anti-gay/anti-immigrant rhetoric, etc., has worked so well since Nixon that it’s become an addiction.

April 18

This has been a bad year for grand restaurants in the three- to four-star range. The clang of their closing doors raises the question—is the whole gastro-frenzy that stirred into life in the mid-1970s finally lurching towards closure? Goodbye Iron Chefs, sayonara “molecular gastronomy” in the style of Ferran Adrià, farewell those overcooked paragraphs of fine restaurant writing that became the hottest reading in the
New York Times
.

On March 7 the high society eatery La Côte Basque (used as a chapter heading in habitué Truman Capote’s
Answered Prayers
) closed its doors. This last Wednesday the
New York Times
mourned at length the Chicago restaurant Charlie Trotter’s, slated for extinction in August. According to the
Times
, Trotter’s “had a huge and lasting impact on Chicago’s culinary landscape, if not the nation’s.”

Okay, a couple of big time restaurants bite the dust in the great recession. So?

For several years one of the
New York Times’
most avidly read writers was Sam Sifton. Sifton approached his job con amore. Not from him any cavils about price, let alone high-end gastro flim flam. His prose had the confident lilt of a man writing for Wall Streeters for whom a couple of thousand dollars dropped on a dinner for four was absolutely no problem, and indeed almost an emblem of parsimony.

In early October last year he published an emotional eulogy to Per Se, “the best restaurant in New York City,” located in the Time-Life building at Lincoln Center. A photo disclosed no less than six Per Se employees mustered round a dish being plated for some expectant customer.

“Per Se’s signature starter course is Oysters and Pearls,” wrote Sifton. “It combines a sabayon of pearl tapioca with Island Creek oysters (small, marble-shaped, from Duxbury, south of Boston, fantastic) and a fat clump of sturgeon caviar from Northern California. These arrive in a bowl of the finest porcelain from Limoges. Paired with a glass of golden semillon from Elderton, they make a fine argument for the metaphor of transubstantiation.”

After this rather laconic reference to the Eucharist, an editorial note disclosed that this was Sifton’s last review. I’ve no idea whether
Sifton’s liver couldn’t take the pace any more (“I have eaten in restaurants five or more nights a week for the last two years”) or whether the
Times
simply felt things were getting a little out of hand, and the paper was becoming a stand-in for
Gourmet
magazine. Either way it seemed we’d got to the end of an era. The day it announced the closing of Charlie Trotter’s, an article counseled
Times
readers on how to use leftovers.

The readers seemed to be getting testy too, though they are by nature on food sites, saving for the post mortem all the things they didn’t dare tell the waiter. Oliver Gardener from Florida wrote: “Ate there one time in 2006. Was awful. Paid $400 for a bottle of wine that retailed for $60. Ridiculous mark up. A couple of the courses were very good, but each consisted of about two bites of food. It was over before you knew it. Attitude like I’ve never seen. Snooty snooty snooty. Would not return. Better meal, by far, at Momofuku Noodle Shop.”

When I first came to New York in 1972 the high-end gastro-porn industry was barely in motion. If you wanted to have a fancy French meal, you went to Lutèce, which closed down in 2004. Domestic kitchens were wreathed in smoke from burned offerings to Julia Child. Fiery Hunan cooking was all the rage, followed by a pallid style of cooking known as cuisine minceur, where tasteful dollops of steamed chard held sway.

Then, in 1975, Craig Claiborne reported on the front page of the
New York Times
that he and Pierre Franey had blown $4,000 on a thirty-one-course, nine-wine dinner at Chez Denis in Paris, a feast offered by American Express at a charity auction.

In those post-Vietnam days, columnists kept whole stables of moral high horses pawing the ground in their stalls. Espying the $4,000 binge, Harriet Van Horne stabbed furiously at her typewriter: “This calculated evening of high-class piggery offends an average American’s sense of decency. It seems wrong, morally, esthetically and in every other way.” Above the column I remember an editor ran the head “Edunt et Vomant” (they eat and they vomit).

People were shocked but Claiborne had put down a marker. Thirty years later, you didn’t need to eat your way through thirty-one courses
to run up a tab of $4,000. The wine alone could cost that. These days several restaurants offer food clad in gold. New York’s Serendipity, for example, advertises “the Golden Opulence Sundae, a chocolate sundae covered in 23-karat gold leaf, suffused with gold dragets, and served with an 18-karat gold spoon that diners can keep.” The price? $1,000. (Don’t eat the spoon. Any gold of less than 23 karats may contain other, possibly harmful, metals.)

Mannerism began to creep onto the food pages. In 2010 bugs were suddenly all the rage. “A five-course Mexican feast at the Brooklyn Kitchen in Williamsburg last Saturday night [was] engineered to introduce New Yorkers to the succulent wonders of edible insects,” the
New York Times
reported. “The first couple of courses [offered] yucca frites dotted with mealworms, a smoked corn custard sprinkled with crispy moth larvae … at some point during dinner a bowl of squirming wax moth larvae was passed around.”

Good restaurants are still cooking excellent food. Restaurants establishing direct relationships with small farm suppliers is surely a good thing, though often the menu in such places begins to look like a gazetteer, and one does ask oneself, is the “Niman ranch” really all that it claims to be? Overall the standard, domestic as well as professional, of American cuisine has never been higher. It’s just that one doesn’t pick up that crackle of excitement, that rush to get a table at that new place down the block.

Also, there have been unpleasing stories of the darker side of the profession, with the owners or managers of restaurants, such as Mario Battali, stealing the tip income of their miserably underpaid waiters. In a recent story in the
Guardian
by Moira Herbst, three Manhattan bartenders accuse the owners of downtown wine/tapas spots Bar Veloce and Bar Carrera of skimming up to 30 percent of their tips, along with failing to pay proper wages and overtime.

Lists of America’s best restaurants these days have a somewhat haphazard look, which may be no bad thing. One site,
The Daily Meal
, lists Le Bernardin in New York as its top pick. Le Bernardin is indeed a very fine restaurant, but scarcely evidence of exciting novelty. My brother Andrew and I went there in the early 1980s, pockets stuffed
with expense money from
House and Garden
with which to track down America’s best of that era. We had plates of flaked salt cod followed by oxtail stew—just about the simplest, cheapest ingredients money could buy. Both were unbeatable, with faddism kept at bay by Italian cooking at its simple best.

April 20

SCENE ONE

Antechamber to Heaven, a large reception room in the Baroque style. A door opens and an angel ushers in Christopher Hitchens, dressed in hospital clothing. The angel gestures for CH to take a seat. He is about to do so when he espies a familiar figure reading some newspapers
.

CH: Dr. Kissinger! The very last person I would have expected to encounter here. All the more so, since I don’t recall any recent reports of your demise.

HK: You will no doubt be cast down by the news that I am indeed alive. This is a secret trip, to spy out the terrain diplomatically, assess the odds.

CH: You think you have the slightest chance of entering the celestial sphere?

HK: Everything is open to negotiation.

CH: Have you threatened to bomb Heaven—secretly of course?

HK: Very funny. As a matter of fact, Wojtyla—Pope John Paul II, I should say—has kindly offered to intercede at the highest level. And talking of negotiation, perhaps we could have a quiet word.

CH: What about?

HK: That worthless book you wrote about me—
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
. John Paul says that the prosecutors here have been using it in drawing up preliminary drafts of their case against me. Now, he also says it would be extraordinarily helpful if you would sign
this affidavit—my lawyers have already prepared it—saying that you unconditionally withdraw the slurs and allegations, the baseless charges of war criminality, and attest under eternal pain of perjury that these were forced on you by your
Harper
’s editors.

CH: Dr Kissinger! Your idea is outrageous. I stand behind every word I wrote!

HK: Hmm. Too bad. After all, you certainly have experience in, how shall we say, adjusting sworn affidavits to changing circumstance. I believe Mr. Sidney Blumenthal could comment harshly on the matter.

CH: Dr. Kissinger, let me reiterate—

HK: My dear fellow, spare me your protestations. Let us consider the matter as mature adults—both of us, if I may say, now in potentially challenging circumstances.

CH: Speak for yourself, Dr. Kissinger. I do not recognize this as Heaven’s gate, or you as a genuine physical presence. I do not believe in the afterlife and therefore regard this as some last-second hallucination engendered in my brain in my room in M.D. Anderson hospital in Houston, Texas. I may be dying, but I am not dead yet. I have not dropped off the perch.

HK: Off the perch … How very English. You will dismiss these as a mere last-second hallucination, a terminal orgy of self-flattery on your part, but (
flourishes bundle of newspapers
) the
New York Times
certainly thinks you’re dead. The
Washington Post
thinks you’re dead.

CH: Let me look at those … (
snatches the papers from HK’s hand; skims them intently
)

HK: Rather too flattering, if I may be frank. But, of course, as you say, all fantasy.

CH: They’re very concrete. Far more amiable than I would have dared to imagine … I … I … (
passes hand over brow
). Is it possible to get a drink in this anteroom?

HK: Ah, after the soaring eagle of certainty, the fluttering magpie of
doubt. I think we can bend the sumptuary laws a little (
pulls a large flask from his pocket
). Some schnapps?

CH: I would have preferred Johnnie Walker Black, but any port in a storm (
drinks
).

HK: Bishop Berkeley, a philosopher, claimed, like you, that the world could be all in one’s imagination. It was your Doctor Samuel Johnson who sought to rebut Berkeley’s idealist theories by kicking a stone. And what did Dr. Johnson say when he kicked that stone?

CH: He said, “Sir, I refute it thus.”

HK: Precisely. Let the schnapps be your empirical stone. Now, if I may, let me continue with my proposition. As you know, you wrote another pamphlet, equally stuffed with lies and foul abuse, called
The Missionary Position
.

CH: Yes, a fine piece of work about that old slag, Mother Teresa.

HK: The “old slag,” as you ungallantly term the woman, is now part of an extremely influential faction in Heaven, including Pope John Paul II. Mother Teresa remains vexed by your portrait. She says it is in libraries and all over the internet. She, like me, would dearly love to see you make an unqualified retraction of your slurs.

CH: And that, of course, I will not do!

HK: You’re aware of the fate of Giordano Bruno?

CH: Certainly. One of reason’s noblest martyrs. Burned at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiore in Rome in 1600 for heresy. He insisted, with Copernicus, that the earth revolves around the sun and that the universe is infinite.

HK: Quite so. A noble end, but an extremely painful one. Perhaps, with Satanic assistance, I can remind you of it.

He claps his hands, and two fallen angels in black robes draw open a pair of heavy red velvet curtains at the far end of the room. HK makes a theatrical bow and motions CH forward. The latter edges near the
space are now suffused with leaping flames. For a brief moment there’s a ghastly wailing, and CH leaps back into the room
.