The Book of Eating by Adam Platt

Author:Adam Platt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-09-29T16:00:00+00:00

10

“Adam Platt Is a Miserable Fuck,” Part 1

The harried, hardworking chefs and restaurateurs who find themselves on the wrong end of a harsh review are under no obligation to believe that the overfed critic in the corner is just doing his or her job, of course. There’s a scene in Jon Favreau’s movie Chef where Favreau’s character, a talented, beleaguered cook named Carl Casper, emerges from the kitchen in a rage to confront the glowering, all-powerful restaurant critic, who happens to be played, with a kind of delicious, charismatic menace, by my brother Oliver. I’ve taken my brother out to restaurants many times in the real world, although, like me, he’s sometimes on a diet, and having him sitting at the table of a popular, just-opened restaurant in New York is a little like posting a large sign above us on the wall announcing in giant letters that ADAM PLATT DINES HERE. Sometimes chefs who recognize his face from the movies and television will send out complimentary side dishes and slices of pie, and as a creative soul who sympathizes much more with the talent in the kitchen than with appraising, nitpicking critics like his older brother, he’ll often accept these illicit gifts happily and gobble them down whole.

Like all great theater, Jon Favreau’s movie is filled with moments of hyperbole and also moments of absolute truth. When the director was working on his script, trying to summon up the most horrible things a critic could possibly write about a restaurant chef’s cooking, Oliver asked me to send lines from my own most viciously negative reviews and from other inspired takedowns, like A. A. Gill’s famous carpet-bombing in Vanity Fair of Johnny Apple’s favorite Parisian bistro L’Ami Louis, with its “dung brown” walls and livery, vein-covered lobes of foie gras, which Gill described as tasting “faintly of gut-scented butter or pressed liposuction.” My pathetic efforts didn’t sound vicious at all compared to Gill’s, of course, but even his were tame compared to the thunderbolts that Oliver’s Ramsey Michel ended up letting loose on the unfortunate Carl Casper in the movie, which, as the title indicates, is written from the cook’s point of view.

In the excellent showdown scene between critic and chef, which takes place early in the film, the glowering, imperious Ramsey Michel is tracked by the camera from behind as he makes his slow, grand entrance into the comically named “Gauloise” restaurant like a villainous professional wrestler entering the ring. Never mind that this villain critic’s stylish, tailored brown silk jacket isn’t rumpled or stained with streaks of A.1. sauce the way mine often is, or that Mr. Michel is dining alone this evening, which most working critics don’t do very often. Never mind that the owner of the restaurant, a fevered, slightly overblown caricature culled from the collective kitchen slave imagination and played by Dustin Hoffman, has unaccountably commanded the chef to scrap that night’s trendy, cutting-edge tasting menu in favor, among other things, of a tired molten

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