Medium Raw

13 Heroes and Villains

Fergus Henderson is a hero.

In the best heroic tradition, he’d be mortified to hear this. He’s English, for one—and painfully modest about all the adulation. His restaurant, St. John, was intended as an equally modest venture: a plain white room in a former smokehouse, where a few like-minded Englishmen could eat traditional English food and drink French claret. I am quite sure that his aspirations for the book Nose to Tail Eating (aka The Whole Beast in the United States), a collection of recipes and related musings, were even more limited.

Yet Nose to Tail is now considered one of the classic cookbooks of All Time, a collector’s item, a must-have for any chef anywhere in the world wanting cred from his peers, the Bible for the ever-growing “guts mafia,” the opening shot in an ongoing (if slow-motion) battle that’s still, even today, changing the whole world of food. St. John the restaurant, an undecorated white room serving barely garnished English country fare, continues to be lavishly (and, at times, ludicrously) over-praised: frequently named “one of the best restaurants in the world”—ahead of temples of haute gastronomy that are (technically) far more deserving of those kinds of official honors. I believe Fergus has even been honored by the Queen—for his service to the Crown—which is also crazy, if you think about it, for a one-time architect who dropped out and started cooking bistro grub, soon after to specialize in the kind of country-ass stuff his grandmother used to cook.

But he is a hero. That he’s my hero is well documented. Since my first meal at St. John, when I flopped onto my knees in the kitchen, babbling something spectacularly idiotic but heartfelt, like “You RAWK!!!” (Fergus wasn’t even there that evening), I’ve shamelessly basked in his reflected glory at every opportunity. I am a supporter, an acolyte, a devotee, an advocate for all things Henderson. I am a True Believer.

I believe that Fergus Henderson, in a way that very few chefs have ever been, is good for society as a whole. Because, unlike any chef I’ve ever heard of, he has influenced people who’ve never been to St. John, never eaten his food, certainly never read his book, and don’t have any idea who the fuck this Fergus Henderson guy might be. He has, however unwittingly, given permission to generations of chefs and cooks to follow their hearts in ways that were unthinkable only a few years ago. Simply by doing what he’s doing, he’s inspired others to put things on their menus and look at ingredients they might never have thought of had he not done it first—and, as the word spreads, minds and menus change, and no one even knows where it all might have started.

Mario Batali, Chris Cosentino, Martin Picard, April Bloomfield, Gabrielle Hamilton are obvious examples of chefs who felt liberated by Fergus’s early example. I say “obvious,” because they’d be the first to tell you. But it’s all the others…the lone chefs and cooks out there, in the Heartland of America, England, and Australia, who yearned for a Fergus to come along and inspire them, give them courage, long before he actually appeared.

I will never forget the smell of the rooms, years ago, tiny venues in rural England, in working-class cities where Fergus was on book tour. All the kids came out, still stinking of the deep fryer, the chip shop, whatever crappy pub, depressing and wrongheaded “lounge/restaurant” they might have been working at at the time. Many of them had never even been to London. But they knew who Fergus was alright—and what he was all about. And the look on their faces—of ambition and hope—was inspiring.

My most treasured Fergus-related memory—and one of the most moving goddamn things I’ve ever seen—was when he accompanied me to my old alma mater, the CIA.

I was concerned. I knew that the three-hundred-seat auditorium would fill with my fans. It had been my school, after all, the home team—and twenty-year-old slacker male culinary students, freshly tattooed with “Cook Free or Die,” are usually not a tough crowd for me. But I was worried about the reception Fergus might get. He was English—with the kind of upper-class speech patterns filled with Britishisms one would expect of an eccentric country squire. He spoke faintly—and with a pronounced stammer. He was sick. Very sick. He had not yet had the experimental surgery that would help mitigate the symptoms of his Parkinson’s, and his body jerked around at times, robotically, sending an arm straight out into space. He was funny-looking in the best of circumstances; often described as “owlish” behind round glasses.

Would any of these young louts know who he was, I wondered? More important, would they listen, would they pay attention during his talk—would they give this man the respect he was due—or would they, after a few minutes, start staring off into space, or dribbling off to the exits?

I ended my litany of war stories and dick jokes and handed the floor over to Fergus.

He began to speak, faintly, worryingly flushed, arm wonky…And every fucking kid in that room leaned forward in their seat and held their breath.

For forty-five minutes, no one made a sound. They listened—absolutely rapt—to the master. They knew who he was, alright. Fuckin’-A they did. And at the end of the talk, they asked questions—bright, incisive, enthusiastic ones, too. I stood silently in the rear, trying not to start blubbering like a fucking baby. It was like the end of Pride of the Yankees (and I do start weeping when I see that shit).

I’d never seen anything so…encouraging…in my life.

Which is why I’m putting Gael Greene on my list of villains. Not because she deserves to be vilified for her writing, which was once very important, and is still, more often than not—when she’s not talking about boning Elvis—quite good. I probably couldn’t be doing what I’m doing if she hadn’t done it first. Or for any of the obvious reasons why one would want to make fun of the woman referred to by chefs as Sgt. Pepper for her bizarre, look-at-me, Peter Frampton/Michael Jackson/Gopher-from-Love Boat outfits. Hell—in another context, she’d probably be a hero.

But no. Gael joins the ranks of the damned because she moderated a panel discussion at the 92nd Street Y in New York City a while back—and she was lucky enough to have Fergus Henderson on her panel and she barely acknowledged him. She kept getting his name wrong. She blathered on and on about her favorite subject (herself) while ignoring the most influential chef of the last ten years sitting a few feet away. For abusing this opportunity, for paying insufficient respect to my friend, for treating the Great Man as any less than the titan he is—for this alone—let her join the ranks of the damned.

Jonathan Gold, the food writer for LA Weekly, is a hero.

I’m hardly the first to notice. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his dedicated and pioneering coverage of all those places in the LA area that nobody had ever covered before. (His award was the first for a food writer.) He gave them respect, treating little mom-and-pop noodle shops in strip malls with a degree of importance they hadn’t enjoyed before. He helped give a “legitimacy” to serious critical analyses of Thai, Vietnamese, inexpensive Mexican, and less appreciated regional cuisines, which hadn’t really existed before. He put them on a par with fine dining and wrote about them with as much—if not more—enthusiasm, helping to usher in a (very useful) kind of reverse snobbism, a skepticism about fine dining that has only been helpful and a good thing in the long run.

And the motherfucker can write. Oh, can he write. Good, original sentences on the subject of food are an all-too-rare thing—and Gold pretty much owns his territory. As a writer, as a force for good, as a guy who upped the ante for anyone daring to write about food or simply looking for food to eat, he’s a hero. By writing about food, he’s helped change how and where people eat it. In a near unbroken field of mediocrity, here is a man who makes just about anything or any place he cares to talk about seem like someplace you should care about.

Since we’re in LA, allow me to take the opportunity to put Wolfgang Puck on the villains list. Puck goes on the list precisely because he’s one of the biggest, best, and most important chefs of the last few decades. What you think of his airport pizza is completely beside the point. Puck long ago did enough important, world-changing work to ensure his status as one of the Greats. He was a vital part of the American food revolution. He made serious contributions to changing the whole popular notion of who and what a chef even was—part of the whole tectonic shift away from the idea of the maître d’ being the star—to the new idea: that it was the chef who was important. The chefs and cooks who came up with and graduated from Puck’s kitchens (so many of them) make for a breathtaking lineup. His is a major tree trunk in the genealogy of American cooking.

With God knows how many restaurants and the merch line and everything else going on in PuckLand, presumably, Wolfgang has plenty of money. He is, inarguably, BIG. Maybe the Big Tuna—in a town of big fishes. He is a powerful, influential, and deservedly respected chef and one of the most recognizable names in the business.

So, I was really disappointed, felt…betrayed, when he knuckled under to the anti–foie gras people and announced he’d take it off all his menus in all his businesses.

When more vulnerable, less well-capitalized, less famous peers were standing up—when some chefs were being threatened, their families terrorized, why did Puck go over to the other side? It seemed that of all the chefs in the country, he was best situated to simply say “Fuck you!” to the Forces of Darkness, and tough it through.

Here, I assumed, was a wealthy, powerful, influential man with—one would imagine—many powerful friends.

I figured he looked at the situation and calculated that it would be easier to just give the assholes what they wanted. At the time, I believe, I called it treason. But I’m told the story was a little more complicated than that—and the pressures on Puck more severe than a few protesters out front. He was getting it from all sides, from within and without his organization, it is said. His partners and allies, squeezed themselves, in turn squeezed Puck. Wolfgang is not the only shareholder of Wolfgang Puck Worldwide, Inc., and, apparently, his partners made things very, very hot for him.

So maybe “victim” and “villain” would be more appropriate. I’m not as pissed off as I was. Just really disappointed. Because if not Puck—then who?

Jamie Oliver is a hero.

Before you spit up your gnocchi, turn back to the cover of this book, and make sure you’re reading the right author, let me explain. I hated The Naked Chef, too. And all that matey, mockney bullshit. And the Sainsbury’s business…and the band…and the scooter—all that shit that made Jamie a star.

But I don’t know what I would do if I Googled “I Hate Anthony Bourdain” and saw a million or so hits, like Jamie would find if he Googled the same phrase but with his name. I don’t know what I would do if I woke up one morning, and, like Jamie, found a Web site dedicated to me named FatTonguedCunt.com, where hundreds, if not thousands, of people appeared to be spending half their working hours—and maybe all their leisure time—Photoshopping movie posters and twisting titles to refer, as disparagingly as possible, to me. I’d be afraid to leave the house—seeing that kind of ferocity and loathing.

I do have a pretty good idea what I’d do, however, if I had the kind of big money Jamie’s got. And it would not be the same as what he’s doing with it.

Say what you will about how well, how attractively or advisably, but Jamie Oliver puts his money where his mouth is. The sincerity with which he’s focused on school lunches, educating kids on how to cook—and even how to eat—is largely, I gather, unwelcomed, and, relative to potentially more purely profit-oriented exercises, maybe not the best of options.

Jamie would clearly prefer to be an annoying nag, reminding us that we’re fat and unhealthy, than make more money. You have to admire that. Sure, he’s still bringing down plenty of dough—but you gotta respect a guy who manages to embarrass the whole British government with a show about what their schoolkids are actually eating. That kind of talk will eventually make you unpopular. It’s very rarely a good career move to have a conscience.

If experience teaches us anything, it’s that the very last thing a television audience wants to hear or be reminded of is how bad things are, how unhealthy or how doomed—that we’re heading off a cliff and dragging our kids after us. (Unless it’s accompanied by bombastic accusations of conspiracy—and a suitable candidate to blame for the problem.) It’s bad business to be saying all sorts of awful, alarmist shit like that—particularly when it’s true. It is much better business, always, to tell people, over and over again, in a reassuring voice (or, better yet, a loud, annoying one) that everything is just fine. It’ll all work out. The kids can keep jamming soda and chips into their neckless maws. They’ll be okay. No need to worry. You’re great! You’re awesome! And here’s a recipe for deep-fried potato pizza!

Jamie Oliver is a hero for doing the harder thing—when he surely doesn’t have to do anything at all. Most chefs I know, were they where Jamie is on the Success-O-Meter? They’d be holed up at a Four Seasons somewhere, shades drawn, watching four tranny hookers snort cocaine off each other.

Brooke Johnson, the head honcho at Food Network, is a villain. That’s an easy one.

But she’s a villain for being right—not for the cynical, fake-ass, soul-destroying, lowest-common-denominator shit-shows she’s nurtured and supported since taking the helm. She’s a villain for being, clearly and demonstrably, right about everything.

On her watch, the network’s audience share has exploded. The number of male viewers most treasured by advertisers expands exponentially every year, demographics of viewers watching Food Network tilting to the good in ways that are the envy of every other network—that prime-quality cut of big-spending, ever-younger male viewers getting larger and larger with each financial quarter. Every clunky, bogus, critically vilified clusterfuck that drops from FN’s hindquarters, still steaming and seemingly dead on arrival, turns out to be an unprecedented ratings success.

Even the FN-branded magazines are doing monster business: nearly alone in an otherwise bleak field littered with the dead, they have thrived, becoming plump and then plumper with ad pages.

There is an unimpeachable logic to your argument when no matter what one may say about what you do—or even how true their observations might be—you can respond with two words: “It works.”

Whatever Brooke Johnson has done, it is working. That success ensures that whoever complains about “quality” sounds quaint—even deranged—like some sad Old Hollywood shrunken head, talking about Ford and Lubitsch, Selznick and Thalberg—to an interviewer who has no idea who or what they’re talking about.

And for that, and the fact that she couldn’t and probably shouldn’t give a shit whether she’s a villain or not—she’s a villain.

Wylie Dufresne is a hero.

Because he’s made a life’s work of doing exactly the opposite of what Brooke Johnson does. At his restaurant, WD-50, where you’re likely to actually find him most nights, he doesn’t care if you don’t understand the food. He will not be moved from his plan if people hate an occasional dish. It doesn’t matter to Wylie if, on balance, most of you would rather have a steak—that he would surely struggle less, and make a lot more money, please more of the dining public, if he only made some compromises. He knows that even if you love everything on his menu, his is not the kind of meal that people come back for every week.

Wylie Dufresne is a fucking hero because he’s got amazing skills, a restless mind—and balls the size of pontoons. He’s decided to do the hard thing—whatever the cost—rather than following the much easier path that has always been readily available to a chef of his considerable advantages. He could have been anybody he wanted—had whatever kind of restaurant, whatever kind of career. And he chose…this. To his constant peril, he experiments, pushes boundaries, explores what is possible, what might be possible. In doing so, he develops techniques and ideas that, after he’s done all the work and taken the time and risk, are promptly ripped off by chefs all over the world—usually without any acknowledgment.

For exactly the same reasons, Grant Achatz is a hero. Only more so—because he not only put what is perhaps the most impressive résumé a chef could have at the service of innovation, experimentation, and the investigation of those things about which he is curious, but he also risked his life in order to continue doing so. When you’re talking about commitment to one’s craft—about rigorously and inflexibly sticking with one’s goals and the highest possible standards—there’s really no one who’s demonstrated that so consistently, or been willing to sacrifice so much.

Alain Ducasse, on the other hand, is a villain. Because he almost singlehandedly brought down fine dining in America with his absurdly pretentious restaurant Alain Ducasse New York (or ADNY, as it was known). While total destruction might narrowly have been avoided, public perception—even among friendlies—of the kind of European-style, Michelin-star place that he aspired to took a serious hit, causing the beginnings of a slow bleed that continues to this day.

Walking into ADNY, I loved the idea of haute cuisine unconditionally. I left, a heretic, the seeds of doubt planted in my heart—like the first toxic pangs of jealousy in a lover. And it wasn’t just me. ADNY damaged, in many minds, the whole idea of luxurious dining rooms and service, made those things dangerously uncool, features you almost have to explain or apologize for these days, something to be overcome by the food.

To use an egregiously overused expression, ADNY was where fine dining jumped the shark. Ducasse revved up the engine of his bike, released his hand from the brake, and took the whole concept hurtling heedlessly across the shark tank, where, unlike in Fonzi’s case, it was doubtful in the extreme that Pinky Tuscadero would be waiting for him.

When he rolled into New York with his bad attitude, ungracious proclamations of how exclusive his new place would be, how unwelcome New Yorkers might be—if they were not already acquainted with Himself via Monaco or Paris—Ducasse did nothing so much as drop a gigantic Cleveland Steamer into a small pond previously occupied by his much smarter and savvier compatriots. And you can bet they saw it for what it was.

Previously, you’d never heard members of the old French guard talking shit about one of their own—not publicly, anyway—but this was different. This guy was fucking it up for everybody.

The little tuffets for ladies’ bags, the selection of steak knives to choose from, the waiters who put on white gloves to trim fresh herbs tableside. The fucking water cart. The even more painful array of Montblanc pens to choose from so that one might more elegantly sign one’s check. The dark, hideous, and pretentious dining room. All of it conspired to smother any possibility of a good time stone-dead in a long, dreary dirge. Nothing could live in this temple of hubris. The generally excellent food was no match for the forces aligned against it. And it just wasn’t, in the end, excellent enough to prevail against the ludicrousness of what surrounded it.

Like watching Bonfire of the Vanities or Heaven’s Gate—or one of the other great examples of ego gone wild in the movie business—there were so many miscalculations, large and small, that the whole wrong-headed mess added up to something that wasn’t just bad but insulting. You left ADNY angry and offended—that anyone, much less this out-of-touch French guy, would think you were so stupid.

New Yorkers don’t like to be treated like rubes. Tends to leave a bad taste. And the bad taste one left with after ADNY metastasized into something larger—feelings of doubt about the desirability—and even the morality—of that kind of luxury. Few in the hermetic world of Francophile New York foodies had ever really asked those questions before. Now, they were asking.

There’s been no sign since, by the way, that Ducasse has gotten much smarter. Other than having the wisdom to close ADNY. After initial reviews of a new “brasserie” concept were negative, he suggested publicly that New Yorkers were unfamiliar with this kind of food and that it was up to critics to educate them to the complexities of exotica like blanquette de veau and choucroute. Which came as news, I’m sure, to the many, many distinguished French chefs who’d been doing exactly that—to great acclaim—for decades.

For being an arrogant fuckwit who nearly ruined it for all of us, Alain Ducasse is a villain.

Terrance Drennan is a hero because, back in the Stone Age, he was the only guy around who loved cheese enough to lose money on it. For years. Brennan, the chef/owner of Picholine and Artisanal in New York City, was the first American chef to get really serious about the French-style cheese course. It’s not like anybody was asking. It wasn’t like there’d been a popular outcry for soft, runny, prohibitively expensive cheeses with which few Americans were familiar—and even fewer inclined to ever like. Even today, mention “stinky cheese” and relatively few are they who will respond positively.

Sure, heroic cheesemongers like Robert Kaufelt at Murray’s Cheese Shop had been making a good living selling an impressive variety of the world’s great cheeses for ages. But making a go of cheese in a restaurant situation was a very different matter.

Back in the day, the cheese board was, at restaurants of a certain type, an obligatory exercise at best. At the kind of fine-dining Frog ponds where the waiters spoke with French or Italian accents, and the crystal and linens were of good quality, the flowers freshly cut, the menu French or “continental,” cheese was something you offered because that was the sort of thing your customers expected. They’d been to Europe—many times. They knew that after the main courses, cheese is offered. Nobody actually ordered the shit. And had they tried, they would often find a perfunctory display of usual suspects: unripe (or too ripe) Brie, maybe a Camembert (usually in even worse shape), a sad disk of undistinguished chèvre, something hard and vaguely Swiss—and a lonely and unloved wedge of something blue. Probably the same Roquefort used elsewhere on the menu. In fact, the key to offering a cheese course and getting away with it was to make sure that everything on the cheeseboard was used elsewhere on the menu.

Cheese is expensive. Very expensive. And perishable. And delicate. Properly aged, stored, served, and handled cheese is even more expensive. Every time you cut into an intact cheese, its time on this earth becomes limited. Every time you pull one out of the special refrigerated cave it lives in, you are killing it slowly. Every time you return it, partially served, back to the refrigerator, you are also killing it. Whichever employee is serving your cheese? Every uneven cut, every pilfered slice or smear can pretty much end any possibility of a return on your investment. In fact, to properly serve a reasonably excellent selection of cheeses—always at their peak ripenesses and at proper temperatures—one almost must accept the imperative of throwing a lot of it out sooner or later, or find a way to use it elsewhere. And the more varieties of cheese you offer, the less likely you will be able to merchandise all of the remnants as ingenious appetizers.

It is very rare, even in the best of circumstances, that a customer will order a separate cheese course—prior to and distinct from—dessert. The arrival of cheeses on a cart tableside presents a potentially awkward situation for a large party: should we wait for the asshole here—who insisted on ordering a few reeking blues and some port—or should we just go ahead and order desserts?

So, cheese is not exactly a “loss leader”—meaning, an expensive or cumbersome item that does not in itself make money but which somehow inspires others to order things that will make money. If people do decide to have cheese as a dessert course, there’s no way you’re making more money on a nicely aged Stilton than you would be had everybody simply ordered crème brûlée or ice cream, which cost much less to produce.

You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese. And that’s a very dangerous thing to be in the restaurant business. One of the great suicidal expressions has always been “educate the customer.” You hear that kind of talk from your business partner, it’s usually way too late to roll your eyes at the ceiling and plead for sanity.

But Terrance Brennan actually did—and continues to—“educate” his customers. And somehow to get away with it—even succeed and expand. After introducing the cheese concept at Picholine, he built a whole additional business around it at Artisanal—so far in front of everybody else he’s still out front, years later. He not only heroically defied the conventional wisdom of the times, he helped change the conventional wisdom. Where there was no market at all, he created one.

The dining public may not have known that it needed a selection of over a hundred cheeses. They certainly didn’t know they needed to know about small-production American cheeses from previously unknown cheese-makers in Maine, Oregon, and even New Jersey. Brennan, by taking a chance on cheese, helped create not just a market to sell cheese—but an emerging sector dedicated to making cheese. Finally, for all those lonely would-be cheese-makers pondering the possibilities of great, homegrown American cheese, there was a chef/restaurateur out there who might buy them, promote them, dedicate himself and his business to hand-selling them to the public.

Terrance Brennan is a hero. By taking a series of mad risks, he’s raised all boats—made things better for all of us.

Jim Harrison is a hero.

Because there’s nobody, nobody left like him. The last of the true gourmands—the last connection to the kind of writing about food that A. J. Liebling used to do. Passionate, knowledgeable, but utterly without snobbery—as likely to gush over an ugly but delicious tripe à la mode or order of roasted kidneys as a once-in-a-lifetime meal at a triple-starred Michelin. Harrison, author of many fine books and even more fine poems, has done everything cool with everybody who’s ever been cool dating back to when they invented the fucking word. He knows how to cook. He has impeccable taste in wine. He knows how to eat.

At his own book party in New York City a while back, Harrison, whom I’d met previously only once, spent the entire evening standing outside with me, whom he hardly knew, chain-smoking and talking about food, ignoring the rich, the powerful, the famous, and the smart who waited for him inside. At the grizzled age of seventy-two, suffering variously from gout and many other complaints, he is a rock star in France—barely able to walk down the street without being mobbed—and he lives like one. The French understand the greatness of such men immediately.

The lazy and the foolish compare him to Hemingway—which is a terrible injustice, as Jim is both a better writer and a better man.

I don’t know many people who could be called “great.” But Jim would be one of them. He smokes, he drinks—and regularly attempts frottage with an impunity and a style that will disappear after him.

Speaking of Old Fuckers: the James Beard House goes on the villain list—because it harbors and gives safe haven to villains. It gives them somewhere to go. It provides comfort and succor and the illusion of importance to a bunch of supremely irrelevant old fucks who have nothing to do and nothing to say of any significance to the restaurant business they claim to support and love. It’s a private dining society for the soon-to-be-incontinent—like the Friars Club for old mummies who never themselves told a joke but like to hang around comedians.

When the president of the Beard Foundation got pinched for embezzlement a while back, it should have come as a surprise to no one. For years, even the casual observer could watch as “money goes in—nothing comes out,” but nobody gave a shit. After the news went public that this nobody, this nebbish from nowhere, had been feathering his nest, everybody was shocked! shocked! and rushed to separate themselves from the wreckage with unseemly speed and appropriate expressions of outrage. But that was the purpose of the whole enterprise. To give jobs and power to the otherwise powerless and unemployable.

I’ll never forget my friend, chef Matt Moran’s experience. Matt is a Big Cheese in Sydney; his restaurant, ARIA, one of the best in the country. Invited to cook a meal at the Beard House, he packed the best of his kitchen staff, all his ingredients and his bags, and flew them all, at great expense, to New York. Having heard of the notoriously impossible-to-work-in kitchen at the House (why would an institution honoring the work of chefs actually have a kitchen they could cook in?), he managed to arm-twist every chef friend he had in New York to make use of their busy restaurants’ kitchens to prepare. I agreed to help finish and serve the meal.

We managed to crank out the meal—a very ambitious, very modern menu featuring the best of Australian seafood, meat, cheese, and wines—and afterward, when the chef was summoned to the dining room to take a bow, receive much deserved kudos, and answer a few questions, I watched.

He walked into the room expecting the “cream” or at least “some” of New York’s food media. There was none. There rarely is. He would surely have settled, I’m guessing, for what could optimistically be called a complement of the town’s “influential” diners—or “foodie elite.” No. Not at all.

One look at the clueless duffers blinking up at him uncomprehendingly from their tables, and it was clear he’d been snookered. How much had he spent on this exercise in futility? To fly all that food, all those cooks, all those miles from the other side of the world? Put them up in hotels? Ten, fifteen, twenty thousand dollars? All that work? And here comes the first question from the floor—yes, the gentleman over there, who looks like he just limped away from the shrimp buffet at a suburban golf club.

The man fixes Moran in his blurry gaze, leans back in his chair, pats his belly for effect, and asks, “So, chef. You’re from Australia, right? How come we didn’t have any kangaroo—or like…koala on the menu?”

Somewhere inside Moran, I saw something die. He knew now. He had the information.

Beard House. Evil.

Ariane Daguin is a hero.

Twenty-five or twenty-six years ago, Ariane, who had been working for a purveyor/manufacturer of French-style charcuterie, started up a small business dedicated to producing and providing to local chefs New York State foie gras, as well as other products and preparations that French chefs of the time wanted, needed, and had not previously been able to get. She started out with one truck and a dream.

A quarter century later, her business, D’Artagnan, has become very successful. But at great personal and financial cost. She’s had to wage a constant and very expensive war—both legal and for the hearts and minds of the public—to protect her right to sell this traditional product. Yet she has gone way, way beyond protecting her own interests and her own business. Almost alone, she has been there for chefs and purveyors across the country who have run afoul of the at-times dangerous anti-foie activists. She was a prime mover in the counterattack after foie gras was banned in Chicago. She is there to offer support when individual chefs are terrorized or their businesses targeted for vandalism or disruption. She has put her money at the service of people who will never buy her products or know her name. Nearly alone, she defends a culinary tradition dating back to Roman times: the right to hand-feed ducks and geese, who live in far better conditions than any chicken ever sold at the Colonel’s, until their livers become plump and delicious.

She has shown far, far more courage on this issue than any chef I know.

Mario Batali and Eric Ripert and José Andrés are heroes because they raise more money for charity—and put in more time doing it—than movie stars and CEOs fifty times wealthier than they are.

José Andrés is also a hero because (I strongly suspect) he’s secretly an agent for some ultra-classified and very cool department of the Spanish Foreign Ministry. He’s the unofficial food ambassador for Spain, Spanish products, and Spanish chefs. You can’t talk to the motherfucker for five minutes without him gently slipping mention of Spanish ham or Spanish cheese or Spanish olive oil into the conversation. When José’s lips move, you never know who’s actually talking: Ferran Adrià? Juan Mari Arzak? Andoni Aduriz? Or the nation itself? Somebody is sending you a message—you can just never be sure who. At the end of the day, all you can be sure of is that the message will be delicious.

Regina Schrambling is both hero and villain. My favorite villain, actually.

The former New York Times and LA Times food writer and blogger is easily the Angriest Person Writing About Food. Her weekly blog entries at gastropoda.com are a deeply felt, episodic unburdening, a venting of all her bitterness, rage, contempt, and disappointment with a world that never seems to live up to her expectations. She hates nearly everything—and everybody—and when she doesn’t, she hates herself for allowing such a thing to happen. She never lets an old injury, a long-ago slight, go. She proofreads her former employer, the New York Times, with an eye for detail—every typo, any evidence of further diminution of quality—and when she can latch on to something (as, let’s face it, she always can), she unleashes a withering torrent of ridicule and contempt.

She hates Alice Waters. She hates George Bush. (She’ll still be writing about him with the same blind rage long after he’s dead of old age.) She hates Ruth Reichl, Mario Batali, Frank Bruni, Mark Bittman…me. She hates the whole rotten, corrupt, self-interested sea in which she must swim: a daily ordeal, which, at the same time, she feels compelled to chronicle. She hates hypocrisy, silliness, mendacity. She is immaculate in the consistency and regularity of her loathing.

She is also very funny—and, frequently, right about things. And always, even when I strongly disagree with her, worth reading. She rarely if ever commits the first and most common sin of food writing—being boring.

For inventing cute names for her targets, though, and not having the stones to simply say what everybody knows she is saying, she’s a villain. If you’re going to piss on Mario every other week, say “Mario Batali.” Not “Molto Ego.” Stand up fucking proud and tell us why you hate Mario Batali and everything he touches. Which also makes her a villain in my book: because it’s all fine and good to loathe Mario in person and in principle, but to deny any value at all in any of his enterprises is criminally disingenuous—particularly for a food writer.

His name is “Frank Bruni,” not the funny name “Panchito” she refers to him by. And for the unpardonable act of being insufficiently critical of George W. Bush in the run-up to the election (a transgression Bruni was hardly alone in committing), his every word as the eventual Times dining critic was (for Ms. Schrambling, anyway) utterly worthless—or worse.

I think Alan Richman is a douchebag. Writing the chapter about him in this book felt really good. Regina should try to be as specific as possible and clearly identify the targets of her derision.

Hero/villain, with Regina Schrambling it doesn’t matter. She is—even at her crankiest, most unfair, and most vindictive—good for the world of food and dining: a useful emetic, a periodic scourging, the person shouting “Fire!” repeatedly in a too-crowded room. You have to respect the depth and duration of her scorn. I do.

She is, unfortunately, a return to that vanishing breed of food writer and “gourmet” who claims to love food yet secretly loathes the people who actually cook it.

While this might, if you think about it, be an indicator of good instincts on her part, it is unlovely, to be sure. But somebody has to call “bullshit”—regularly—on those of us who cook or write about food or talk about it. Even when wrong. There needs to be someone out there, constantly watching. It may as well be Regina.

I can’t wait to read her next blog entry.