Death in Four Courses: A Key West Food Critic Mystery (3 page)

“Mom, stop,” I hissed.

“Mr. Barrows was a restaurant critic for the highly esteemed
Guide Bouchée
for his first four years out of Columbia. No one—I repeat, no one—lands that job as a twenty-two-year-old. At twenty-six, he co-owned
and managed the three-star restaurant
Manger Bien
in Los Angeles before he was lured to the
New York Times
to write their food column for the young at heart, ‘See and Be Scene.’ And his memoir,
You Must Try the Skate … and Other Utterly Foolish Things Foodies Say
, has gone to its third printing, even though it went on sale only today!
People
magazine named him a national culinary treasure, a wunderkind who will shape the way Americans eat for decades. The
Washington Post
called him the most frightening man to scorch the food scene since Michael Pollan. Without further ado, I ask you to welcome Jonah Barrows.”

Then the stage curtains swept open, revealing a facsimile of the interior of an old diner—cracked red-and-black leather booths, Formica tabletops balanced on steel posts, fake carnations drooping from cheap cut-glass vases. All we needed was big floppy menus stained with tomato sauce and a worn-faced waitress asking, “What’ll it be, hon?”

Jonah strode across the stage, waving a graceful hand at the crowd, grinning broadly, clad in tight black trousers, cowboy boots, and a gorgeous orange linen shirt. The other panelists for the weekend trickled along in his wake, taking seats at the booths and tables of the faux diner. When they were settled, Jonah clasped the director in a bear hug and maneuvered him toward the wings in a fluid two-step. Then he blew a kiss to the audience, who clapped vigorously, finally working itself into a standing ovation.

Jonah waved us down. “I am honored to kick off this weekend. It’s hard to know where to begin—it’s
customary, I believe, to be positive in a speech like this.” He flashed a lopsided, regretful grin, teeth eggshell white against his tan. Then he turned to face the food writers seated behind him.

“But I have decided instead to opt for honesty. We have traveled so far from the basics of food and food writing where I feel we belong. We have competitive cooking shows featuring chefs oozing testosterone. We have food critics getting outed by disgruntled restaurateurs using a rush of Twitter posts and Facebook photos.” He bounced across the stage to clasp the shoulder of an impish man and ruffle his dark hair.

“I think that’s the food critic Frank Bruni,” my mother said under her breath.

Jonah moved on to buss the cheek of a heavyset woman in a flowered silk dress who had squeezed into the booth beside Bruni. Mom paged through the head shots in her program. “That has to be the novelist Sigrid Gustafson,” Mom whispered, tapping the page. “She must have used ‘an early photo.’ LOL.”

“Mom, behave!” I whispered back.

Jonah continued to wind through the seated panelists, gallantly kissing the hand of a petite Asian woman, massaging the shoulders of a stunning woman in black with a grand sweep of white-gold hair. Finally he returned to the lectern.

“We have message boards brimming with blustering amateurs and unsuspecting diners following them like rats after Pied Pipers into the bowels of dreadful eateries. We have ridiculous modernism overtaking plain good food. Let’s face facts.” He pounded on the
podium, his voice soaring several decibels with each word. “This is one hell of a challenging time to write about food—or even to choose a restaurant meal! We can’t afford a fluffy weekend seminar focused on extolling recipes and patting the backs of our illustrious guest writers. They must be held accountable for every word they write.”

The audience lurched into a second ragged standing ovation. Several of the panelists seated in the diner whispered to one another. Dustin hovered in the wings, just off stage left, looking as though he might explode into the spotlight and drag Jonah off. Or explode, period.

“Please sit,” Jonah begged us. He strode to the center of the stage, his own golden hair glinting in the stage lights. Too perfect to be natural, I thought. “I promise, you’ll be exhausted by the end of the night. And you must save some energy for the awesome opening party. And there’s so much more coming this weekend.”

As we took our seats again, he headed back to the podium and adjusted his notes.

“In my opinion, today’s food writers are listing toward endorsing the esoteric and precious and superexpensive. Of course, if we wait long enough, the trends will circle back around. We’ll be reading about mountains of creamy mashed potatoes and pot roast that melts into its gravy instead of musk ox sprinkled with elderberries and served on twigs. But while we wait, isn’t it our job to call the emperor on his nakedness? Must we endure, or even encourage, the bizarre and the inedible?”

He pivoted to the panelists behind him and opened his arms. The food writers squirmed, their smiles frozen in place.

“He’s absolutely right,” said the woman in front of us.

Jonah clicked one leather-clad heel against the other and spun back to the audience. “I say no. Which is why I feel I must address the ‘best of’ restaurant lists. My God, what does it mean when a meal in the number one restaurant in the world costs in the neighborhood of six hundred dollars and is gathered from the woods nearby?
The woods
, people. And can someone spare us from Twitter-driven hyperbole in restaurants’ popularity? Since when do untrained palates get to tell us what’s good? Since when is everyone a critic?”

He paused, for what seemed like minutes, the auditorium deathly silent. He was asking for trouble—the hoi polloi loved to wax on about what they ate. And many of them were warming the seats of this auditorium. And the writers who produced the reviews he was criticizing sat right on the stage with him. Except for me, of course. I was too new and too green to get invited.

“Here’s what I think. Critics must push forward to take their territory back from the amateurs. We professionals cannot abandon this job to the Chowhounds and Yelp boarders.”

“What the heck’s a Yelp boarder?” asked the lady in front of us.

“It’s a restaurant review Web site,” Mom said. “Shhhh.” The lady turned around and looked dagger death eyes at us as Jonah continued.

“Because A, many of these people have no training. And B, they have all kinds of agendas aside from criticizing food. People are making money by posting reviews. And others are being discouraged from telling the truth by chefs and owners. So we—the professionals in this business—must be excruciatingly honest. If we shy away from criticizing bad or ridiculous food, if we only publish positive reviews, do our words not become worthless?”

Jonah tapped his notes on the podium and frowned.

“From the restaurant perspective—and as Dustin mentioned, I’ve walked a mile in those moccasins too—when an establishment chooses to open, they must take the chance of negative publicity. It’s like publishing a book—reviews ensue. When a meal leaves the kitchen, the chef leaves himself open for criticism.”

Onstage behind Jonah, the heavyset woman who had Frank Bruni pinned to a corner of one of the booths harrumphed loudly and muttered something to the lady across the table.

“I can sum the problem up quickly. Honesty is lacking from public figures,” said Jonah. “I can’t fix national politics.” He clapped his hand to his heart and heaved a sigh.

“You can say that again,” said the woman in front of Mom.

“But we can start right here in the food world. I’ve learned this as I’ve prepared to tour the country with my new book—telling the truth and encouraging my colleagues to do the same has freed me up in ways I never imagined.”

He ran a hand over his chin, the blond stubble of a new beard glinting in the spotlight. “You people—our public—deserve the curtains pulled back, not only on the food you eat and the professionals who prepare it, but also on the people who criticize and write about it.” He wheeled around again to face the faux diner. “Writers and critics—and you know who you are—you must step up to a higher standard. Food is not just about eating. Food is the very soul of our country.”

His voice grew softer. “I am
so
looking forward to the panel discussions and to all my conversations over this fabulous weekend. Caveat emptor—my policy of utter transparency will be in full effect.”

I finally took a breath.

Like all of the other four-hundred-plus attendees at the opening, I was dying for a drink by the time Jonah Barrows finished his lecture. I suspected some of them were thirsty for blood as well, and I hated to miss one second of the fireworks. But Mom had other ideas: a leisurely stroll down the busiest blocks of Duval Street with her camera in action on the way over to the reception at the Audubon House. She chattered nonstop the whole way.

Had I seen the woman with the mop of curly hair in the back row of the onstage diner? That had to be Ruth Reichl. And the small adorable man with dimples and dark hair? Definitely Frank Bruni, another
former restaurant critic for the
New York Times
. No one seemed to last long in that position. Maybe criticizing restaurants ruined eating for them? What a shame it would be if that same thing happened to me! Anyway, she’d recognize him anywhere—except he was smaller than she’d imagined for a man with such a grand writing voice. She loved him sight unseen for the way he loved his mother. And Billy Collins, former poet laureate, he looked—well, just like a real person. She could not wait to get books signed by each of them. And she could not wait to see how Jonah challenged each of those writers. From the grimacing and rustling on the stage behind him, it sure looked like it was going to be a lively weekend.

And she was thrilled with the weather—maybe seventy degrees with a breeze just strong enough to rattle the palms overhead. And a full moon that would have cast lovely shadows, had we not been walking down brightly lit Duval Street. She stopped to take a photo of the moon centered exactly above the cross that topped the white concrete of St. Paul’s Church.

“Did I tell you we’re expecting our first snow in New Jersey this weekend?” she asked. “Not just a dusting either.”

“You did, Mom,” I said.

I listened to her with one ear while trying to formulate a pithy summary of Jonah Barrows’s remarks and then a worthy journalistic response. Wally would expect something, if not tonight, certainly by tomorrow morning. And it couldn’t be first-draft gibberish either. Not with Ava looking over his shoulder.

Jonah had sacrificed a lot of sacred cows: amateurs on food boards and their Twitter-driven hysteria, endorsement of precious foodie trends, lack of transparency and fortitude from chefs and the writers following them. In forty-five minutes, he’d managed to spurn most of the cutting-edge trends in the food world. And some of them well deserved it. What could I possibly add to his brilliant dissection? And would I have a strong enough stomach anyway? And whom exactly did he plan to wrestle to the mud over the next two days? And how could I summarize it in a way that would beat back the threat of getting canned by Ava Faulkner?

“Do you think we’ll get a chance to meet Jonah in person?” Mom asked.

“I e-mailed him and tried to set up an interview, but he’s got a very busy weekend,” I said. “He told me to look out for him at the party. Fingers and toes crossed he has a spare minute.” I held up my crossed digits and laughed.

She crossed her fingers too and smiled, then grabbed my elbow. “Hayley, wait! Isn’t this the bar Hemingway used to drink in after he finished writing for the day?”

My mom stopped in front of Sloppy Joe’s, where the noise roared out onto the street. Sunburned customers clustered around the tables covered with plastic tankards of beer and baskets of french fries and burgers. My stomach growled and I thought wistfully of Eric’s rhubarb crumb cake. More people spilled onto the sidewalk to smoke and drink more beer. A trio of ponytailed men in tropical shirts played aggressive, pulse-pounding
rock music on electric guitars at the far end of the bar. I’d never set foot in this place and I doubted that Hemingway would have enjoyed it either.

“Let me get your picture here,” Mom said, pushing me toward the painted sign that read “Established in 1933” and sighting through her viewfinder. “Now smile!” She snapped four quick photos.

“Hey, what’s that?” She pointed to a camera fastened to the underside of the roof overhanging the sidewalk.

“It’s the Duval Street webcam, Mom,” I said. “They have it mounted on their Web site so people who aren’t in town can see what they’re missing. Remember when I first moved here last fall, I wanted you to watch it but it wouldn’t load on your computer? Let’s get moving. I have a lot people I’d like to meet. And wouldn’t it be awful if they ran out of wine?”

“Or food,” said my mother, tucking her camera into her handbag and trotting ahead of me up the street.

By the time we reached the Audubon House, a long line of hungry people snaked out of the gated white picket fence onto the Whitehead Street sidewalk. The ladies Mom had chastised in the auditorium—twice—were just ahead of us.

“What is this a line for anyway?” asked the woman with the helmet of silver hair.

“The bar,” answered the other. “You would think they could plan better. This is not relaxing.”

A waiter in a white shirt passed by with a platter of shrimp toast.

“Smile!” said Mom to the waiter as she took his picture. I managed to snag two pieces just before the plate was snatched clean by the unhappy woman in front of us. Mom nibbled at hers and pronounced it delicious.

“I think they used fresh dill. And the mayo is definitely homemade. Oh, Hayley”—she learned over to kiss my cheek, her hazel eyes bright with sudden tears—“I’m having so much fun already.”

I looked up from the notes on my smartphone and smiled. “I’m glad.” I felt a needle of regret that I wasn’t enjoying having her as much as she was enjoying being here. I swore to myself that I’d try harder not to allow my nerves or my reactions to her well-intentioned motherly ministrations ruin the visit. As we inched forward toward the bar, the pressure on my bladder grew intense.