Medium Raw

I’ve been swimming in those blood-warm waters for a long time now. I’m friends with a lot of chefs. Others, whom I’m not friends with, I often identify with, or respect to a degree that would prevent me from being frank with a reader—or anyone outside the business. After all those years inside the business, I’m still too sympathetic to anybody who works hard in a kitchen to be a trustworthy reviewer. I’m three degrees separated from a lot of chefs in this world. I get a lot of meals comped. If I were to walk into one of Mario Batali’s places, for instance, and see something unspeakable going on in the kitchen—animal sacrifice or satanic rituals, or something unhygienic or deeply disturbing, I’d never write about it.

I’ve been on both sides of the fence. Eager chef, looking to make “friends” out of journos or bloggers. And a bent, compromised writer—whose interests are way too commingled with his subjects for him to ever be truly trusted.

But for all the awful things I’ve seen and done, I’ve never stooped to…well…let’s begin at the beginning…with a food writer, critic, and journalist who could, on balance, be considered among the very best: a lion among the trolls, an excellent writer of sentences, with remarkably good taste in restaurants, a refined palate, and decades of experience. But I digress. Let’s get to the action.

I called Alan Richman a douchebag.

So, Richman, respected elder statesman of restaurant criticism, winner of an armload of James Beard Awards, and writer-reviewer for GQ, responded in keeping with his position as the “dean” of food journalism and in the time-honored tradition of his craft.

He reviewed the restaurant I worked at.

Actually, it was somewhat worse than that. He reviewed the restaurant I used to work at.

Though he acknowledged, by paragraph two of the gleeful take-down that followed, that he knew I hadn’t worked at Les Halles in nearly a decade, he forged on, absolutely savaging everything from upholstery to lighting, service, and food. He did mention a dessert favorably, attributing its lack of awfulness to the probability that I had not contaminated it. It was a thorough critical disembowelment: the words “grubby,” “acrid,” “flavorless,” “surly,” “greasy,” and “inedible” all making appearances in the same few paragraphs.

It’s the customary practice of major media to devote their very limited restaurant review space to three categories of restaurant: (1) new endeavors brought to us by already critically acclaimed chefs, (2) the rarer discovery of a new chef ’s debut effort, or (3) a change of guard or concept at a well-known, already well-reviewed restaurant. Les Halles did not, by any stretch of the imagination, meet any of these criteria. At no time did Richman suggest why he might be reviewing a sixteen-year-old restaurant of limited aspirations. Whatever its virtues, Les Halles was not “hot” or particularly relevant to today’s trends. The menu certainly hadn’t changed in years—and there had been no change in chefs.

Nor did he mention anywhere in his scorching review what was surely the most cogent point: that only weeks earlier, I’d repeatedly called him a douchebag. In fact, I’d nominated him for “Douchebag of the Year” in front of a hooting audience of half-drunk foodies at the South Beach Food and Wine Festival (an award Richman won handily, I might add).

The award, only one of many honors handed out in a silly, half-assed faux ceremony (presenters wore shorts and flip-flops), was widely reported on the Internet. And I guess Richman’s feelings were hurt.

Enough so that he was inspired to remove his bathrobe, brush the cat hair off his jacket, and head into Manhattan to review—after all these years—Les Halles. A steak frites joint.

Now, let me ask you a question: If I were to call you, say…an asshole? You’d probably call me an asshole right back. Or maybe you’d go me one better. You’d call me a fucking asshole. Or, better yet, get really personal: “A loud, egotistical, one-note asshole who’s been cruising on the reputation of one obnoxious, over-testosteroned book for way too long and who should just shut the fuck up.”

This would be entirely fair and appropriate, one would think. I call you a schoolyard name. You respond in kind. You acknowledge the insult and reply with a pithy riposte.

But not Richman. He is, after all, an impeccably credentialed journalist, critic, educator, and arbiter of taste. Not for him a public pissing contest with some semi-educated journeyman who called him a dirty name.

No. What this utterly bent, gutless punk does, metaphorically speaking, is track down my old girlfriend from junior high—whom I haven’t seen in years—sneak up behind her, and deliver a vicious sucker punch.

That’ll teach me, right?