The Man Who Ate the World (26 page)

The paper, which went on to survey the late-seventies New York dining scene, reads like a restaurant guide for members of the APSA, whose annual conference was to take place in Manhattan that year. And yet, even three decades later, it still makes an intriguing point. Every major city has a few restaurants that are favored by figures in public life: the politicians and media big wheels, the singers, actors, hookers, and hangers-on who give everybody else something to look at.

As Chambers described it, New York’s restaurant industry was different. There weren’t just a few of these joints. There were dozens of them. They were not just restaurants people visited for reasons of status or even, heaven forbid, dinner. They were gladiatorial arenas in which a whole strata of public life was acted out. They were debating chambers or offices, only ones with nice napery, shiny glassware, and a good line in fettuccini.

According to Chambers, the Kennedy clan could be found in the grand French restaurants of the East Side, places like Lutece on East Fiftieth, or La Goulue on East Seventieth. Ed Koch, then the city’s mayor, usually had lunch at Charley O’s Bar & Grill on West Forty-eighth or the United States Steak House, also in Midtown. Moving up (or down) the political food chain, the disgraced former Vice President Spiro Agnew liked to eat at Frank Sinatra’s favorite Neapolitan restaurant, Patsy’s, while his former boss Richard Nixon—and just about everyone else—went to Le Cirque, where the infamous Sirio Maccioni presided over the highest-scoring A-list in the city. It was said that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had enjoyed their reconciliation lunch at Le Cirque, and that Brian Mulroney, after stepping down as Canadian Prime Minister, even had his post delivered there for want of anywhere else.

It was around the time of Chamber’s publication that I first became aware of New York, though, not like most kids my age would, as a place with a bunch of tall buildings, but more as an eating opportunity. I read
an interview with Woody Allen, in which he said that he never ate at home, but instead went to restaurants every night. As a twelve-year-old, with an enthusiastic appetite, this sounded impossibly glamorous. Considering the cost of this lifestyle it also suggested that there might well be profit in being a smart-arse Jewish boy.

It took me another decade to get to New York, though it was not for dinner. It was to find out stuff about famous people that they didn’t want anybody to know, or to flatter myself that I might be capable of doing so. I was twenty-two years old and the gossip columnist for a now-defunct London supplement of
The Observer.
I had been sent to America to write a column to mark the inauguration of George Herbert Walker Bush as president, though obviously I was in entirely the wrong city. I should have been in Washington D.C., snuffling out truffles of delicious political intrigue, but my editor took pity on me and my meager journalistic experience. He sent me instead to Manhattan, where only an idiot could fail to find a story. On my first night at the Algonquin Hotel, I ordered room service—a perfect hamburger made from crudely ground beef that, unexpectedly, tasted of something—and plotted my assault on the city’s glitterati.

I never did find out anything that anybody wanted kept secret, though I did have fun. At a warehouse party on the Lower East Side I met Quentin Crisp, the self-styled “stately homo” of old England, then in his eighty-first year, who had made a fine life for himself in New York. Later, I gate-crashed a crew-only party for a rarely remembered movie called
Tap,
and watched Gregory Hines, Savion Glover, and Sammy Davis, Jr. dance off against one another.

And, of course, I ate. I hummed Supertramp’s most famous song to myself, over breakfasts of pancakes, crisp bacon, maple syrup, and butter. I ate caramelized nuts from the shiny chrome food wagons that seemed to occupy every city block corner and filled the streets with the smell of hot sugar. I fell in love with the honey-roasted spare ribs at Ollie’s, a cavernous Chinese place just off Times Square. It was noisy and
bustling and just the spot for a young man a long way from home who was looking to disappear into the crowd.

I had just the one proper restaurant experience, and it was a disappointment. I was invited to lunch by the late Jack Kroll, the highly regarded film critic of
Newsweek,
who was a friend of my parents. He told me he would take me to a media hangout for our lunch, and I imagined a corner table at one of those restaurants you could be on first-name terms with—Elaine’s, perhaps, or Michael’s Pub—where smart men
talked in italics
and women drank martinis and wore dresses cut on the bias. In the lift down from his office Jack told me the restaurant we were to visit was a cause of much excitement because nothing like it had opened in New York before.

When I got there, I found out why: It was an Indian restaurant, complete with flocked wallpaper, the pluck of sitars on the sound system, and a menu of chicken tikka masala and pilau rice. Indian food was literally the one thing New York had never, and still does not, do well. London does it well. London is possibly the best place for Indian food outside India. I had traveled 3,500 miles to be fed the only meal I could be certain of getting back home. I picked morosely at my seekh kebab as Jack entertained me with stories of the old days in movies before
Jaws
and
Star Wars.

I returned to New York many times after that, to cover many different kinds of stories, but somehow all of them managed to lead me to food. In the early nineties, for example, I went to Brooklyn to write a long report about the Crown Heights riots between the African-American and Hasidic communities, and in a small bakery off Eastern Parkway, discovered the best bagels it had ever been my pleasure to eat. On another occasion I ate huge muffins with the enormously fat porn baron Al Goldstein while we discussed his battle with the TV companies who wanted to stop him from filling public-access television with hardcore porn. Later, on the same trip, I went to hear Woody Allen play clarinet to a half-deserted room, for a $40 cover charge, and marveled at how poor
the food was at the Midtown bar he had chosen for his residency. He might eat out every night, I concluded, but the man had no taste.

The odd lackluster meal aside, I came to realize the one thing about New York that everybody else had already clocked: It regards itself as the greatest city in the world. Not just one of them. Not merely in the premier league. The Greatest. And New Yorkers don’t mind saying this out loud. In my room at the London Hotel I would watch television adverts for a bond issue, to raise money for investment in New York’s government. They finished with a voice-over imploring residents to help keep it “the greatest city in the world.”

Further, I realized, New Yorkers regard its restaurants as an expression of that self-confidence. The city’s residents would not have been at all surprised that some academic had been able to create a map of power in Manhattan simply through its eating houses. Where else would important people go when they needed to be seen?

It has never mattered that Paris might lay claim to the greatest number of great gastro-palaces. From the opening of Le Pavillon on East Fifty-fifth Street in 1941, seen as the city’s first formal, luxury restaurant, through the arrival of Lutece in 1961, to the transplanting of Le Bernardin from Paris to West Fifty-first in 1986, and the opening in 2004 of Thomas Keller’s Per Se at the Time Warner Center, New Yorkers have happily convinced themselves that they have restaurants that can compete with anything anywhere. It was summed up for me by an article in the magazine
Vanity Fair
in the spring of 2007. It was about the global spread of sushi and discussed the Japanese restaurant Masa, where the tasting menu could cost $450 a head, depending on the available ingredients, before tax and service. The writer described it, quite reasonably, as the best sushi restaurant “in America” and then added, quite unreasonably, that it was possibly “the best in the world.” Only a New York–based magazine could have the arrogance to suggest that the best sushi restaurant in the world might be in their city rather than in Japan.

Naturally, I found the pugnacious certainty of most New Yorkers—both professional critics and eaters alike—that their city was better than
any other deeply annoying. After all, I lived in London, a world city in its own right, and one that also had a bunch of really good restaurants, thank you very much. But there was, if I’m honest, one thing in particular that bugged me about the way these people talked up New York, the way they shamelessly called it the greatest city on earth: I suspected they were right.

I
am standing outside an Italian restaurant opposite the Time Warner Center and I am having a John Whiteclay Chambers moment. Parked up alongside the curb in front of Gabriel’s are a dozen shiny black limos. One of them has the number plate NY05.

“That’s someone seriously high up at City Hall,” says Tim Zagat, publisher of the guides that carry his name, who wants me to check out this restaurant that the politicians clearly love. “If it was NY01, it would mean the mayor was in there.”

Zagat and his wife, Nina, two former lawyers now in their sixties, have invited me on a tour of Manhattan restaurants. It is something Tim Zagat does regularly: He hires a limo and sets off with a pocket full of Zagat product, to cast an eye over a section of the city’s eateries. He says there are months when he does it every other night, and that people have bid up to $20,000 at charity auctions to join him on the tour. There is no sense of wonder in his voice when he tells me this. He makes it sound entirely reasonable that people should value his company so highly. Zagat is a large, jowly man, as befits a guy who eats out eight times a week, and he appears less to wear clothes than to have made an accommodation with them. His shirttails keep escaping from his waistband and by the end of the night his suit jacket will look as though it is trying to get off his shoulders and back into the closet unaided.

I have asked if I might join the two of them on a tour to gain an insight into the New York restaurant scene. For me it is a great opportunity, but I can’t for the life of me work out why Tim Zagat bothers. It’s not as if the Zagats actually review restaurants. They simply publish the guides,
which started nearly thirty years ago as a restaurant tip sheet circulated among their friends. People were asked to score restaurants out of 30 on food, service, and ambience. By the third year of the exercise more than 500 people were providing information on more than 300 restaurants and 10,000 copies were circulating for free. As Tim Zagat once put it, their hobby “had blossomed into a $10,000 after-tax expense.”

It was in 1982 that they turned it into a business. More than twenty years and many dinners later, the New York guide sells over 600,000 copies a year and the law career is a distant memory. There are editions covering more than forty U.S. cities, as well as London, Paris, and Tokyo, all using information supplied by over 100,000 individual restaurant surveyors. There is now
Zagat.com
, a Web site providing information on restaurants worldwide, and Zagat for the PalmPilot.

In the Zagat guide for New York, Gabriel’s has a solid score of 22 out of 30 for its modern Tuscan food, though as Tim says, it is more famous for the famous people who eat there than what they eat. As we walk through the door, the small stocky maître d’ falls on Zagat as if he were a long-lost son. It is 8:30 p.m. and the room, which is lined with curved booths, is full. The NY05 limo, we are told in a whisper, belongs to the New York City director of finance.

Paul Wolfowitz, who had only just resigned in disgrace from the presidency of the World Bank, had been and gone, as had the billionaire Herb Allen. Toward the back is a CNN reporter and
Vanity Fair
writer called Jeffrey Toobin, having dinner with his wife, who used to work for Zagat. So we stop by the table for a dose of chat so small, you would need a microscope to spot it. This is the shape the evening will take: We will walk into a restaurant, look at people eating, exchange words with someone senior in front of house, and maybe stop by a table of Zagat’s friends.

I quickly note that Nina is staying out of it. She remains in the limo, or slumps down on a sofa by the door with a magazine until we are done, as though she is merely tolerating her husband’s need to tour the tables.

We move on to the Time Warner Center. He wants to show me
Porterhouse, which he says is a great new steak house, but really he wants me to meet Michael Lomonaco, the head chef. Lomonaco was head chef at Windows on the World at the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. He only survived 9/11 because he went to ground level to get his glasses fixed. Almost his entire staff died. Now he is back, with a big, butch American steak house, and Zagat clearly regards the man’s return to the stove as a sign of renewal in the city. Lomonaco comes out of the kitchen to glad-hand Zagat, as if he has nothing better to do right in the middle of the dinner rush.

Ten minutes—a long stay, by Zagat standards—and we’re done. Now he wants me to see Café Gray, a New York take on a Parisian brasserie that he tells me is flawed “because the menu never changes.” Still, he says, the interior is pretty with all its glossy wood, and shiny metal bits, and he’s right. The open kitchen is by the windows and looks out over the star field of Manhattan. Zagat tells me I must have a look at the private dining room.

“Aren’t there people eating in there?” I ask.

“Sure, but it’s not like we’re going to sit down with them. We’re just going to look.”

That’s what we do. We walk into someone’s private party, look at people eating, who look back at us, startled, as if we’re the scary drunks from the bar, and then we leave. I clench my buttocks in embarrassment.

It only gets worse. He insists we go across the way to Masa. People in this Japanese restaurant are paying at least $500 a head for dinner here. They are having a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and Zagat wants to look at them having it. As we approach the door, carved from a single piece of 2,000-year-old wood, he announces theatrically that we should be quiet, but then he strides in, stands at the end of the beautiful blond-wood bar, and hails the chef, Masayoshi Takayama, with a big hearty country club wave.