Food Whore (9 page)

 

Chapter 7

T
HE NEXT NIGH
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R, GARY
Oscars, was dining at the restaurant with a laptop. We never would have allowed guests to do that, but of course he was an exception. He owned six restaurants across the city and typically only tended to the new ones because they got the most press. But tonight, Madison Park Tavern had his full attention. Chef Darling and his cooks could hide in the kitchen, but Jake and the waitstaff had to bear the brunt of Gary's manic energy.

I poked into the dining room a ­couple of times and saw him calling for poor Jake, who had to run over while still looking calm in front of the guests. Angel, Chad, and Henri checked their phones compulsively. Chef Darling left the kitchen more often than usual, especially given that Gary was in the house. He kept checking in with the hostess, who would shake her head and tap her foot, sharing whatever anxiety he had. I saw Carey run up to Chef Darling, nod, then check her phone, too.

“What's going on? Why aren't ­people at their stations?” I asked Carey.

Carey shot me an incredulous look. “The
New York Times
review? It comes out tonight.”

“But it's Tuesday. Aren't the reviews published on Wednesdays?”

“Yeah, in the paper. But it'll be posted online sometime tonight,” she said, eyeing Chef Darling through a small window in the kitchen door.

We spent the night totally distracted. Everyone wore a look of worry, from the dishwashers to the line cooks to the hostess with her perma-­smile. I heard some guests mumble that the ser­vice had gone downhill. But if only they knew the
Times
review was upon us. Even Jake had turned his attention away from ser­vice and toward the final judgment. Everything was out of our hands.

But I didn't let on. To the extent that I could—­which wasn't very much—­I tried to make up wherever the ser­vice was lacking. I grinned extra wide. I took the hands of ­people who wanted to be touched and demurred respectfully from the ones who preferred to be left alone. I did my small part so I didn't have to see the restaurant slide so slipshod. But even I knew it was too little, too late.

I left at eleven and walked slowly back to the apartment. It was the perfect fall night: air that refreshed, leaves that lullabied, weather in which everyone was comfortable. Except me. I didn't know what the review would say, but I knew what I had done and said. I couldn't take it back. All I could do was wait and see, just like everyone else.

Emerald and Melinda weren't home, to my relief. I opened my laptop and saw an email from Carey, subject line:
SHIT
.

I clicked the link to nytimes.com and read.

Famous Farmhouse Goes to Pasture

by MICHAEL SALTZ

If you are in possession of a coatrack, you might want to give it to Madison Park Tavern. The Flatiron mainstay is in need of a fresh concept and a place to hang its hat.

When my predecessor reviewed this restaurant four years ago, the establishment had a dynamite idea. The brash young chef Anthony Tate had the groundbreaking insight to use fresh, local produce in his cooking. He wouldn't veil these ingredients with words like “rustic” or “home-­style.” The menu put no qualifications around its products and made no apologies for serving them in a high-­end atmosphere. The idea spread through Manhattan like organic dandelion greens, and soon our fair city of asphalt and car exhaust turned a little bit country.

But that was four years, and four stars, ago. The Madison Park Tavern of today has a new chef, Matthew Darling, formerly of Vrai, and the idea of “local ingredients” can no longer carry a restaurant. What was so revolutionary about Madison Park Tavern yesterday is a given today, if not a total cliché. There are a host of innovative restaurants—­Bakushan, Alltop Peaks, Yop Factory—­that use local, fresh ingredients, employing them with abandon and excitement, not reverent tiptoeing.

Indeed, there are some lovely, delicious moments at Darling's Madison Park Tavern. One night, I had a delightful amuse-­bouche of edamame puree, clementines, and endives. It took my breath away with its notes of bright and bitter, soulful and singing. This is daring food that transcends seasons, something that comes all too infrequently. Matthew Darling has a very popular, very seasonal restaurant to lose, so transgressions are relegated to one bite. Most dishes seem to beat you over the head with their capital-­C Concept. Even the dining room could double as a movie set for a “market-­to-­table restaurant,” so obvious, so caricature-­like is its premise.

I liked the roast chicken with potatoes six ways, a clever way to dress up a classic. While the potato morphs in every which rich, fried, and gratinéed way, the chicken works its own special magic. Chew carefully and you will taste a slight herbaciousness in the meat. This is a chicken who has eaten well, and here the tranquility of the farm is spun into fireworks on the plate. The rabbit cassoulet approaches the tongue with unexpected freshness. It is not the familiar mush, but another toothsome thing.

Yet much of the menu ranges from not-­so-­bad to what's the point? The pork loin with ras el hanout, a special one night, was alarmingly off-­balance. The spices wicked the moisture out of my mouth, and imparted little of their beautiful bouquet of flavor.

Yet the biggest slight of all is the short-rib dish. Short ribs have always been a standard at Madison Park Tavern, ever since the days of Anthony Tate. But Matthew Darling doesn't seem interested in using them to articulate his own vision. In the days of Chef Tate, the short ribs spoke volumes about the transformative powers of well-­aimed and well-­executed technique, and Tate was like an athlete at the top of his game. Five years ago, I couldn't get enough of his interpretations. There was the unctuous, exotic beauty that was the short ribs glazed with hoisin and beer and served atop a chervil-­leek puree. And another masterpiece: short ribs wrapped in savoy cabbage and paper-­thin disks of turnip and pancetta.

The short ribs of today's Madison Park Tavern feel like a halfhearted remake. The current kale and black-­eyed pea preparation is flawed at the most fundamental level. The black-­eyed peas, darling little things that they are, add a discordant whiff of dirt. They are the mud to the short ribs' soft and smooth vanilla, a combination that hits you in the gut in the worst possible way.

Of the desserts, the sweet potato–cassava cake with praline crunch is a pleasant surprise. The sweet potato offers sweetness, while kabocha provides an unusual, almost souffléed dimension and structure. Yet the berry-­walnut strudel with thyme-­infused rice gelato suffered from too-­tart fruits and too-­sweet walnut brittle.

The ser­vice is, like at all of Gary Oscars's restaurants, impeccable. The dining room is a masterpiece of good-­looking staff conducting elaborate choreography.

One danger of passing the torch is that the newest torch-­bearer is burdened with the agenda of his predecessor. Matthew Darling is a fine chef, but one who appears to be driving the restaurant down a road to irrelevance. Madison Park Tavern used to be a transcendent experience, one of the best. Now it's just one of the good.

TWO out of FOUR stars

Once I finished, I started again. I lapped it up over and over. I couldn't believe it. Two stars? That was one thing—­a shocking thing.

But even more shocking—­Michael Saltz had used my exact words. Reading the article, I heard my own voice talking back.

I thought for a second that this was a joke. Maybe someone had created a fake website to fool me. I clicked around and got to other
New York Times
articles. Tomorrow, these words would be distributed in printed papers all over the country. The whole world could reach this page. These words. These thoughts. Mine.

But as much as I liked seeing my words in the paper, the truth was that he had stolen them right out of my mouth. There was no other way to look at it. He had lured me into the basement with that note, solicited my opinions, and pawned them off as his own. He had a lot of explaining to do, and I was ready to confront him when I saw a new email. From Michael Saltz. I opened it with trepidation, a cliffjumper's look over the edge.

SUBJECT:
Let's Talk

I assume you've seen the review by now. You have a special talent. Come to my apartment, 257 Central Park West. Tomorrow we will discuss everything.

Damn right we would. I had seen my words in the
New York Times
once before, and that time I hadn't made the most of it. Now I knew the value of my voice, and I wouldn't let someone else take it without a fight.

 

Chapter 8

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internship seminar.

“I bet everyone
freaked,
” said Rachel, a thirty-­year-­old former banker interning at a sustainable fishing advocacy group.

“Reviews are over, anyway. Do ­people still care about those?” Geo asked. He was working at a kitchen incubator geared toward low-­income immigrant women.

Even our seminar leader, a Food Studies postdoc researching the link between obesity and methamphetamine use, weighed in. “Authority will never die. It may change platforms, it may shift voices, but there will always be room for the guru,” she said, with a doleful nod. “And Tia, what do you think?” she asked.

My classmates looked at me with disinterest. I'd be skeptical about my insight, too. From what I'd heard about the internships, the early weeks were about busy work. Students came in with these ideas and directions for the future, only to have them squashed by protocol, status quo, and moody staffers who made sure the grad student didn't feel too privileged.

“Well . . .” I said. “It'll be tough to recover, I'm sure. I was there when it happened and I saw him.” I stopped and watched them slip to the edges of their seats. Just for kicks, I waited a beat longer to see their eyes widen even more. “We even talked.”

“You
talked
to Michael Saltz?” Rachel squawked. “About
what
?”

“Oh,” I said, slow and easy, knowing that all ten of them at the seminar table were hanging on my every word. On some level, they must have known they were merely gossiping earlier. Idle academic chatter.

But I couldn't tell them about my real role, not until Michael Saltz gave me an explanation. “I just gave his table their palate cleansers,” I said reluctantly.

And then the spell broke. Rachel leaned back. Geo rolled his eyes. Even our seminar leader sighed audibly.

“Okay,” she snapped. “Let's talk about our actual work.”

Easy come, easy go. I opened my notebook, a journal of my internship experience. Already the words were reading like a farce, a sanitized shell of intellectualized blabber. Just like this seminar. Just like grad school. A play-­area separated from what mattered.
Who
mattered.

A
FTER SEMINAR,
I rode the C train to Michael Saltz's Upper West Side apartment, a beautiful high-­rise with a fountain and a rounded driveway in the front, like a hotel.

“I'm here to see Michael Saltz, please,” I said to the man at the front desk. The lobby dripped baroque—­marbles and golds and heavy drapery—­and I felt too young and poor and disheveled for the surroundings. Why hadn't I worn my Jil Sander suit?

The man at the front desk had a long face and boxy chin and eyed me through wire-­rimmed glasses. “And your name is?”

“Tia Monroe. He's expecting me.”

Without hiding his grimace, he dialed a number, then turned away and whispered in the phone. He spun around. “Thirty-­five Q. Elevators are over there,” he said, without showing me where “there” was. I took the elevator up and stood in front of 35Q for a split second, clenched my jaw, and knocked. I vowed that whatever he said, I'd hold my ground. He'd stolen my words, and I needed to find out why.

Michael Saltz opened his door slowly at first, then swung it wide open.

“Come in, come in,” he insisted. He grabbed my elbow so tightly, I was sure he couldn't know his own strength. Strangers don't touch other strangers like this. I swallowed hard as he pulled me into his living room.

As expected, his thirty-­fifth-­floor apartment had a stunning view of Central Park. But what I didn't expect was the smell. I picked out smoke and meat, spices and herbs. Eggs and bananas and cheese. Not bad separately—­delicious, even—­but the combined vile stink of everything meant I spent the first five minutes trying to figure out how to will my nostrils shut.

Michael Saltz looked like a different man from the one I had seen on the street and at the restaurant. Sober and in the light, he looked sharp and intimidating, despite the oppressive stench. He was quite tall and slinked onto his long, white leather couch with a calm, collected fluidity. I knew he was a very important man. I knew I was alone with him in his apartment. But I didn't know what he wanted from me, and that was the gravelly grind inside my throat.

I sat down on another couch. In front of us stood a coffee table topped with various jars. In fact, jars covered every surface of the apartment, all of them closed except for a few by a laptop on the dining room table.

I leaned back on the couch and my cardigan slipped down at the shoulder, revealing my tank top and a little bit of my bra strap. I yanked it back up.

“Don't worry about that.” Michael Saltz laughed. “I'm flaming.”

“Oh,” I said. That relaxed me, but only a little. I wanted to confront him about stealing my words, but already I felt scared.

“You're not here for a booty call, that's for sure. But I'll tell you why I invited you in a moment, I just want to get one thing.” He picked up a beige-­gray ceramic jar from the far corner of the coffee table. He circled his fingertips around the lid gingerly, as if the jar held a tiny animal that needed to be coaxed out.

Was he going to drug me? Show me something disgusting? It seemed like he was taunting me, flaunting how much control he had.

Finally he revealed a brilliant tangle of saffron. I could tell it was excellent quality by the long, elegant strands and the way it had stained the unglazed jar its same shade of burnt red.

He swirled the jar in front of his nose. “But before I go into that whole mess, isn't this magnificent?” He poked his finger inside the saffron, mashing the valuable threads, and brought the jar up to his nose. ­“People forget that saffron is the backbone of a flower,” he said, still sniffing. “They get so preoccupied with saffron's cost that they forget what saffron really is.”

“My boyfriend used to study crocuses in college,” I said, unsure where the conversation was going, but determined to set it on stable ground. “He harvested the strands for a pilot dining hall program, but gave me the best ones to cook with.”

“A match made in heaven.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He's great . . .” But we weren't here to discuss my love life. What
were
we here to discuss?

“And what did you make with the saffron?” Michael Saltz asked.

“My specialty is a rice stew with ginger and flounder.” He had brought the conversation back to food and I felt more at ease.

“Like a paella?”

“No, not like a paella. I don't use shellfish, because . . .”

“Oh, right, allergic! Yes, how could I forget?”

He had an excellent memory. Or maybe just for me.

“It has an Asian flair,” I continued. “The saffron adds a taste of the sun. You have the pillowy sea element of the flounder and the earthiness of the rice, and I think the farminess of the saffron—­that rustic, rough flavor—­brings the dish together.”

“That sounds wonderful,” Michael Saltz said. “Simply wonderful. Will you excuse me for a moment?”

“Fine, but I wanted to talk to you about—­” But he wasn't listening.

He walked to a cabinet underneath his wide expanse of windows. “I bought this from an old library in Paris,” he said, running his fingers across the labeled drawers until he came across the one he wanted. He opened it and plucked out a lined white card. He brought it back to the table, and wrote in slow, tortured script:

Saffron rice with ginger and flounder: haylike, sea, land.

He put the card back on the coffee table and looked at me blankly, as if he hadn't just sucked the words right out of my mouth.

“Wait a second,” I said. I was willing to hear him out by coming to his apartment, and was even willing to let him delay his explanation. But I wouldn't let him make a habit of stealing everything I uttered.

“Tell me what you want from me,” I said. “I'm not talking about food until I get some answers.”

“Answers!” he said, as if they were at the tip of his tongue all along. “Yes, that's what we're here for. I'm quoting your words for my archives.”

“Archives . . . so you have dishes to refer to when you try new things?”

Michael Saltz laughed a long, disturbing laugh. He turned bright red and said, with tears in his eyes, “No. Wouldn't that be nice. Actually, that's why I've asked you here.”

Finally—­this was the moment. Maybe he had some news about Helen? Or he wanted to apologize for not securing her internship for me?

“There are no new dishes to me,” Michael Saltz continued. “That card catalog of tastes, that's all I have. My memories, and the memories of others.”

“Oh . . . because you forget flavor combinations?” I guessed. I thought of the ras el hanout pork. He had clearly forgotten what that tasted like, or else he wouldn't have mistaken it for the regular salt-­and-­pepper version.

“You can't forget what you've never had,” he said. “But here, let me demonstrate.” He opened a drawer in the coffee table and handed me a bottle of red liquid wrapped at the base with aluminum foil. The bottle looked like it belonged in a lab more than in a living room.

“See this? This is made from one of the hottest chilis in the world, bhut jolokia. There are some farmers who say they've grown a hotter pepper, but the bhut is the most natural—the gentleman's hot pepper, I'd say. Open it.”

I twisted the small cap, and immediately my hands burned and my eyes teared.

He snatched the bottle away from me, tilted his head back, and shook the bottle into his mouth until a sinister-­looking pool of sauce collected on his tongue.

He closed his mouth and sucked his cheeks in. After about thirty seconds of what felt like a private freak show, he stuck his tongue out and revealed a quarter-­sized welt that pulsed with anger.

“This is my favorite ‘taste.' But it's not really a taste. I can only feel the burn. These are volatile, violent oils. But that's all.”

Suddenly, I understood. His apartment's funk, his skeletal frame, his inability to differentiate those two porks.

“It's gone,” he said. “All gone. Sweet, spicy, sour, bitter . . . the flavors mean nothing. The most finely calibrated soups taste like sewer water, an elegant filet is cardboard. I'm the unluckiest man in the world, or so I thought . . . until I found you. I need your help and your exquisite palate.”

My eyes were still tearing from the tiny whiff of bhut jolokia I'd caught, and I was sure the sauce had singed a hole in my cardigan, but I didn't care. This was huge. Michael Saltz, the world's most powerful food critic, couldn't
taste
. He couldn't do his job at the most basic level, and now, for some reason, he wanted my help.

“I'm just a shell of what I used to be, robbed of what I loved most in life,” he said. But then his eyes lit up. “But my grief is your opportunity. I want your assistance. You are a true food mind, someone who understands flavors and honors the craft enough to pursue it at all costs. I want you to become my sense of taste. You will be my protégée and accompany me on my meals—­the best and newest places. You will know about them all, experience them all . . . rule on them all. If you're up to the challenge.”

My mouth dropped as I struggled to understand. “You want me . . . to eat meals with you . . . and write about them? Me?” I thought he had invited me to his home to apologize. But he'd done something even better.

Michael Saltz opened his hands, palms up, as if to say,
Of course you.
“And there are perks,” he quickly added. “I have a personal account with Bergdorf Goodman, unrelated to the
New York Times
. I want you to go there. You can use my personal shopper, Giada. She will take good care of you.”

Bergdorf: the grand mecca of designer clothing. This was going a bit too fast and all I could do was repeat what he was saying, even though the words were fantastical and strange coming out of my mouth. “So . . . I get to go with you to these restaurants?
And
pick out my own outfit at Bergdorf Goodman?”

“Not an outfit. A whole wardrobe! Giada will help you. This will be a wonderful change for you.”