Hardly Innocent

When it comes to the relentlessly self-regarding, one never knows how much credit to give. Many are the preeners, the believers, the suckers. Narcissism is not insight.Gael Greene was the restaurant critic for New York magazine for 30 years – and what a 30 years. When she hit the scene there was no Le Cirque, no Dean & DeLuca, and no California wine for anyone east of the Gallo property line. Of course, like all things connected to Clay Felker and New York magazine, the new wasn’t quite as new as they wanted us to think. There have always been cheese shops; there have always been eaters. There are just too many shops in New York that were founded at the turn of the century to believe otherwise. Bridge Kitchenware opened its doors in 1946, and since the shop is still open, I imagine it sold something to someone even before Craig Claiborne (who wrote for the New York Times and is very much a part of Ms. Greene’s book) “discovered” it in the 1960s. While Ms. Greene’s sensual angle was fresh, and her insistence that food was a point on the matrix of city culture rather than a specialization was rare, one need only recall M.F.K. Fisher’s first oyster – she was at Miss Huntington’s School for Girls, and a very sexy experience it was – to realize that it was not virgin territory.Still, there is no doubt that something happened in the 1970s, and shortly thereafter, mesclun replaced iceberg on the American table and goat cheese became ubiquitous. This opening of American cuisine happened on Ms. Greene’s watch, and she was one of the central documenters of the naissance. She had a seat at the table and recounts it in “Insatiable: Tales From a Life of Delicious Excess” (Warner Books, 352 pages, $25.95).For many, the American culinary revolution was about food. For Ms. Greene,a whirlwind of celebrisociety was emerging in Manhattan, churned up by Clay, with the magazine as its weekly locomotive … I seemed to have become a boldface name myself, a minor league star, invited everywhere, indulged by the restaurants I’d come to love once they recognized me, suffered grimly by those I’d panned, and indulged anyway. … I’d not set out to be a power of the food world, but that seemed to be what I had become. So quickly. And it was fun. I fell for it totally.This kind of breathless auto-inflation, followed by a line like “I fell for it totally,” sets up an expectation. We imagine we have entered a moral universe in which hubris leads to lapse, and lapse paves the way for redemption. We expect, from that moment, that Ms. Greene is headed toward a cleaner second renaissance. That she’ll discover slow food, perhaps, or roasted chicken.But she won’t, because for Ms. Greene, it’s not about food.For me, that realization hit on page 167. She’s eating at the famous restaurant run by the Troisgros family in Roanne, France (unbelievably important, this place, astonishingly brilliant – in 1998, the restaurant had held three Michelin stars for 30 years). The cheese cart comes and Pierre Troisgros “supervised my choice of cheese, adding a wonderfully smelly Epoisse steeped in marc and a chevre wrapped in cinders – new, ‘from the neighborhood goat lady.'” That’s it.I’m left twisting in the wind. Pierre Troisgros ran over to your table and plucked a neighborhood chevre off the cart, insisting that you add it to your plate, and you’re not going to tell me what it is!? It was as if the book fell apart in my hands.As I began to reflect, I realized that many, many were the references to brands. Gael Greene almost can’t stop mentioning Chateau Lafite Rothschild, but when someone turns her on to Barolo, it’s nameless and dateless. When she and her then husband, Don Forst, began buying wine, they went to “Macy’s wine shop and brought home Chateau Margaux, Lafite, and Mouton Rothschild at $225 a case. That was a wanton extravagance then, but they were the only names we knew.” And so, in a sense, it remained.One of the few, if not the only, purveyors mentioned in the book is Moet & Chandon. The champagne giant financed much of a whirlwind tour that Ms. Greene went on with some writers (including, hilariously, Al Goldstein), and the group gulps Dom Perignon and rhapsodizes about it. I’m quite sure that Ms. Greene, in her privileged position, has had a thousand champagnes pass her lips. But the only one I saw mentioned by name was the one being brought to idiotic gum-chewing pop tarts lounging around behind a velvet rope. Don’t get me wrong; I have nothing against the old DP – it’s an astonishing wine. It’s just no surprise. And by the end of “Insatiable” she’s dropping names faster than she can type; fly-by mentions of restaurants litter the text and never a morsel mentioned. I began to wonder if eating at and writing about restaurants actually teaches one anything about food at all.Consider the first chapter of the book, in which Ms. Greene is a young reporter in Detroit and goes to cover a concert; “Elvis Presley was coming to town.” She talks her way in. She lingers. She gets to watch the show very close, standing on the rise of the aisle. She goes back to the hotel and has sex with Elvis.As a critic, I am filled with pride. Ms. Greene has elevated the profession: Newspaper writers get to sleep with the King? Fantastic. But where was the show? Nowhere. She doesn’t devote a single word to the concert. She was “trying for a journalist’s cool,” she says, while she “watched the fans, mostly teenage girls with bobbing ponytails, leaping out off the seats, reaching out to him, screaming and weeping.” But over what? We don’t know.The aesthetic of the moment, the art of it, is utterly ignored. She’s watching Elvis perform half an hour before she sleeps with him, and I don’t know what song he played.Mr. Watman’s weekly coverage of the horse-racing season begins this Friday.

Hardly Innocent

Hardly Innocent

More from the New York Sun

How Dallas Cowboys Undrafted Rookie Shiyazh Pete United the Navajo Nation at Phoenix

Postal Service Awaits Supreme Court Ruling Ahead of New Mail Voting Requirements, Federal Access to State Voter Rolls

Billy Idol Still Has Some Rebel Yell To Give

Jaguar Still Can’t Seem To Turn the Corner

‘10 Kilos’ Gets Weighed Down by Familiar Genre Fare

‘The Marching Band’ Plays a Familiar Tune, But With Spirit and Social Awareness

USS Doris Miller

Johnson Warns Kushner Not To ‘Bet Against’ House Republicans After President’s Son-in-Law Meets With Jeffries

More from the New York Sun

How Dallas Cowboys Undrafted Rookie Shiyazh Pete United the Navajo Nation at Phoenix

Postal Service Awaits Supreme Court Ruling Ahead of New Mail Voting Requirements, Federal Access to State Voter Rolls

Billy Idol Still Has Some Rebel Yell To Give

Jaguar Still Can’t Seem To Turn the Corner

‘10 Kilos’ Gets Weighed Down by Familiar Genre Fare

‘The Marching Band’ Plays a Familiar Tune, But With Spirit and Social Awareness

USS Doris Miller

Johnson Warns Kushner Not To ‘Bet Against’ House Republicans After President’s Son-in-Law Meets With Jeffries