Medium Raw

14 Alan Richman Is a Douchebag

The intersection where chefs, writers, restaurant reviewers, publicists, and journalists meet has always been a swamp, an ethical quagmire where the lines between right and wrong are, by unarticulated consensus, kept deliberately permeable. It’s like a neverending hillbilly joke: we’ve all fucked each other’s sisters. Everybody in the family is aware of it—but we delicately avoid the subject.

The New York Times struggles mightily to remain above the orgy of pride, vanity, greed, gluttony, and other sinful behaviors around it—traditionally by keeping its critic as anonymous as possible. False identities, wigs, and other disguises are employed in an effort to keep their writer from being recognized. It doesn’t always work, of course. Any restaurant with serious four-star aspirations always has someone on staff who can pick out Frank Bruni or Sam Sifton from across a crowded room. To what degree that helps, however, is debatable. To the Times’ credit, I’ve never heard of anyone “reaching” a full-time reviewer, influencing the review through favors, special access, or things of value. From what I’ve heard, lavishing extra attention on them is risky—and not necessarily rewarding. Knowing the Times guy by sight is useful mostly for making extra-sure you don’t fuck up—rather than providing you with a real edge. Those chef-players who do dare to send extras are very careful to do the same for all the surrounding tables as well. Anonymity does not provide 100 percent protection from special treatment. But it’s an extra layer, an added degree of difficulty—the ethical version of a wet suit or hazmat garment, keeping the Times man (or woman) safe from contamination in the primordial soup of free food, bodily fluids, and slow-festering morals they must swim in.

Journalists who write about food and chefs are in the business of providing punchy, entertaining prose—hopefully with a good human-interest story attached, and some good quotes. More important, they want and need an angle or perspective different from what every other food or dining writer is doing. They would greatly prefer it if a Web site or food blogger has not already comprehensively covered the same subject. This is, to be fair, extraordinarily difficult. People who write professionally about food—to the exclusion of all other topics—are painfully aware of the limitations of the form. There are only so many ways to describe a slow-roasted pork belly before you run into the word “unctuous”—again. Trying to conjure a descriptive for salad must be like one’s tenth year writing “Penthouse Letters”: the words “crunchy,” “zing,” “tart,” and “rich” are as bad as “poon,” “cooter,” “cooz,” and “snatch” when scrolling across the brain in predictable, dreary procession. Worse, while your editor has just asked for an overview of “Queens ethnic” in a week, some lonely food nerd has been methodically eating his way, block by block, across the entire borough and blogging about it for years.

Pity, too, the poor chefs. One of their new jobs in this brave new world of dining is co-opting, corrupting, and otherwise compromising food writers whenever possible. The care and feeding of the Fourth Estate—and their bastard offspring, food bloggers—has become an important skill set for any chef looking to hit the Big Time. It’s no longer enough to cook well, to be able to run a kitchen. You have to be able to identify and evaluate all the people who might hurt you—and (as best as possible) neutralize them ahead of time. One memorably bad review can punch a hole in a restaurant’s painstakingly acquired reputation, letting the air out of one’s public profile in a way that’s often hard to put back. One snarky Web site, early in a restaurant’s life, can hobble it in ways that might well prove fatal in the long run.

When you are repeatedly made to look ridiculous, lowbrow, or déclassé, on Grub Street or Eater, it’s very hard to get your mojo back—as operators like Jeffrey Chodorow have found, to their displeasure. Nowadays, the professional snarkologist will confidently imply that a Chodorow place will surely suck even before it opens. In a business where something as nebulous and unmeasurable as “buzz” is seen as a vital factor for the bottom line, everybody with a keyboard is a potential enemy.

But, traditionally at least, “turning” a journo is usually a pretty simple matter. Just feed them for free. You’ll never have to remind them about it later. Believe me. They’ll remember. It’s like giving a bent cop a Christmas turkey. They may not be able to help you directly—but they’ll at least make an effort to not hurt you. And if you can make a journalist or a Webmaster your “special friend,” you have a powerful ally. In addition to singing your praise early and often from the rooftops, they can act as your proxy, shouting down those who might question your magnificence.

Every time a restaurant opens, the joint’s PR firm sits down with the chef and the owner and starts running down the list of usual suspects, wanting to know who are the “friendlies” and who are not. Most restaurants have one version or another of the same list. They are all, presumably, the sort of people who want to come to a special pre-opening “tasting” at your restaurant. They will not be reviewing you—yet, which lets them off the ethical hook, so to speak.

Few are the people who, when passing the smiling woman with the clipboard from the restaurant’s PR agency, want to find themselves off that list the next time a restaurant opens—particularly if it’s a high-end, high-prestige operator, or if there’s a hotshot chef involved. The thinking is: “Okay, I hate this place. But if I take too ferocious a dump on it, I won’t be welcome at the next place—which might be really good!” Or…“I really enjoy being able to get a table on short notice at X (an existing, hard-to-get-into, fine-dining restaurant). I don’t want to fuck that up!”

When it comes to yours truly, I confess to being hopelessly mobbed up. While I do not claim to “review” restaurants—or even write about them for magazines much anymore—I cannot be trusted or relied on to give readers anywhere near the truth, the whole truth, or anything like it.

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?

It’s the old “I can’t hurt you—but I can surely hurt someone you love” strategy, made more egregious and pathetic by the simple fact that Richman, douchebag or not, is a fairly erudite guy, fully trained in the manly art of the insult. He could have nailed me directly. An option whose possibilities are only hinted at in his review when he makes a most excellent (and painfully funny) comparison of me to beefy, direct-to-video action star Steven Seagal. That was what you’d call a palpable hit. That hurt.

In order to better understand Richman’s inappropriate and unethical coldcocking of my blameless former comrades, you need to go back, to examine what moved me to accuse this beloved titan of food journalism of epic douchebaggery in the first place—and ponder if even that description is adequate. Was it, perhaps, part of a larger pattern of behavior?

A year after the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States, New Orleans was a city still on its knees—1,836 people dead; 100 billion dollars in damages; untold thousands of its citizens dispersed, dislocated, traumatized; lifetimes of accumulated possessions, photographs, mementos gone forever. Worse, still, there was the realization by the residents of an entire major American city that their government, when push came to shove, just didn’t give a fuck about them. The city was still in shock, whole neighborhoods stood empty, one hospital was fully functioning, and the restaurant industry—which had been among the first to return after the flooding and was desperately trying to hold on to its staffs—was down 40 percent in business. Or more.

And that is when Alan Richman comes along, having decided in his wisdom that now is the time for a snarky reevaluation of the New Orleans dining scene. He’d already determined that New Orleans pretty much deserved what it got. Inspired, perhaps, by the Tyson defense team, he launches right away into a key component of his argument. That “the bitch was asking for it”:

It was never the best idea, building a subterranean city on a defenseless coastline…residents could have responded to that miscalculation in any number of conscientious ways, but they chose endless revelry…becoming a festival of narcissism, indolence and corruption. Tragedy could not have come to a place more incapable of dealing with it.

He suggests that bad character and loose morals have led directly to what happened to New Orleans. For one thing, they like food too much, he goes on to say. This from a man who, for decades, has made a living shoving food into his crumb-flecked maw—then writing about it in a way calculated to make us feel like we should care. And we did care. So it’s monstrously disingenuous of Richman to now claim that, perhaps, we care too much:

It might sound harmless for a civilization to focus on food, but it’s enormously indulgent. Name a society that cherishes tasting menus and I’ll show you a people too portly to mount up and repel invaders.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but, here, is Richman really saying, “If only these fat fucks had laid off the dessert cart they could have outrun the flood?”

Having blamed the victims for the carnage—a direct result, he proposes, of their immoral and ungodly behavior—he seems to depict Katrina and the perfect storm of incompetence and neglect that followed as some kind of divine retribution, a punishment for libertinism.

Not yet done, he goes on to question if the food was ever any good in the first place—if New Orleans’s famous Creole cuisine (or Creoles themselves, for that matter) ever existed. Not only is New Orleans not worth visiting now, but perhaps—perhaps—it sucked all along!

Supposedly, Creoles can be found in and around New Orleans. I have never met one and suspect they are a faerie folk, like leprechauns, rather than an indigenous race. The idea that you might today eat an authentic Creole dish is a fantasy…

What the fuck does “authentic” mean, anyway? Creole, by definition, is a cuisine and a culture undergoing slow but constant change since its beginnings, a result of a gradual, natural fusion—like Singaporean or Malaysian flavors and ingredients changing along with who’s making babies with whom, and for how long. The term “authentic”—as Richman surely knows—whether discussing Indian curries or Brazilian feijoada, is essentially meaningless. “Authentic” when? “Authentic” to whom? But it sounds good and wise, doesn’t it?

In the days following Katrina, chef Donald Link of the restaurant Herbsaint was one of the very first business owners to return to the city, the flood waters still barely receded, to slop out the ruins of his existing restaurant, and to—rather heroically and against all odds—open a new one. He staffed his place with anyone he could find, took on volunteers, and served food—whatever he could—in the streets, sending a timely and important message that New Orleans was still alive and worth returning to. Richman chose his restaurant to trash.

I should mention that I visited New Orleans a year after Richman’s article. It was a city still struggling to get up off its knees. The vast dining rooms and banquet spaces of Antoine’s, the beloved institution in the French Quarter, were mostly empty—and yet the restaurant soldiered on with nearly a full staff, unwilling to fire people who’d worked for the company for decades. Everyone I spoke to, at one point or another, would still tear up and start to cry, remembering lost friends, lost neighborhoods, whole lives swept away. It seemed sometimes like all New Orleans had had a collective nervous breakdown, their psyches shattered by first the disaster itself—and then, later, by a pervasive sense of betrayal. How could a country—their country—have let this happen, their neighbors left to huddle like cattle in a fetid, reeking stadium, or bloat and rot, day after day, in full view of the world?

It’s the kind of scenario, the kind of special circumstances, one would think, where even the most hardened journalist would ask himself, “Do I really want to kick them when they’re down?” Richman was not reporting on Watergate, after all—he wasn’t uncovering a secret Iranian nuclear program. He was writing an overview of restaurants. About a restaurant town that survives largely on its service economy. At its lowest, most vulnerable point—right after a disaster unprecedented in American history. And not for the Washington Post, either, mind you. For a magazine about ties and grooming accessories and choosing the right pair of slacks.

But no matter. The truth must be served. Alan Richman knows what “authentic” Creole cuisine means. And he damn sure wants you to know it.

This, alone, was surely reason enough to qualify as a finalist for Douchebag of the Year, but there was also this—another column: Richman’s “restaurant commandments,” in which he imperiously (if rather wittily) laid out a compendium of things which He found annoying and which those restaurants hoping to stay in His good graces should probably take to heart. This kind of article is much loved by writers in the field of restaurants, particularly recognizable ones, like Richman, whose lives are no doubt made easier in their daily rounds once their likes and dislikes have been communicated to their eager-to-please victims ahead of time. Under commandment #19, Richman lists:

Show Us the Chef:

If dinner for two is costing $200, you have every right to expect the chef to be at work. Restaurants where the famous celebrity chef has taken the night off should post a notice, similar to the ones seen in Broadway theaters: “The role of our highly publicized head chef will be played tonight by sous-chef Willie Norkin, who took one semester of home economics and can’t cook.”

As an example of lazy, disingenuous food journalism, one could scarcely hope for a better example. And this kind of cheap populism is particularly galling coming from Richman, because he knows better. If anyone knows the chef is not in, is not likely to be in, and can’t reasonably be expected to be in anytime soon—it’s Richman. He doesn’t live and work in a vacuum. He doesn’t write from a cork-lined room. Like others of his ilk, he moves in a demimonde of writers, journalists, bloggers, “foodies,” freeloaders, and publicists, all of whom know each other by sight: a large, ever-migrating school of fish involved—to one degree or another—in a symbiotic relationship with chefs. For years, he has observed his subjects being shaken down by every charity, foundation, “professional association,” civic booster, and magazine symposium—as well as by some of his colleagues. Many times, no doubt, they have complained to him (off the record) directly. Countless times, I’m sure, Richman has gazed wearily across the latest Fiji water–sponsored chef clusterfuck, over the same tuna tartare hors d’oeuvres (provided by some poor chef who’s been squeezed into service by whatever the concern of the moment is), seen the chef or chefs dutifully doing their dog-and-pony act. He also well understands, one would think, the economics of maintaining the kinds of operations he’s talking about.

Yet he demands, and expects us to believe, that every time a table of customers plunks down $200 at one of Bobby Flay’s restaurants, that Bobby himself should rush on over to personally wrap their tamales—then maybe swing by, give them a little face time over dessert. Thomas Keller, according to Richman’s thesis, should be burning up the air miles, commuting between coasts for every service at the French Laundry and Per Se. Particularly if Richman is in the house.

The whole suggestion is predicated on a damnable fucking lie—the BIG lie, actually—one which Richman himself happily helped create and which he works hard, on a daily basis, to keep alive. See…it makes for a better article when you associate the food with a personality. Richman, along with the best and worst of his peers, built up these names, helped make them celebrities by promoting the illusion that they cook—that if you walk into one of dozens of Jean-Georges’s restaurants, he’s somehow back there on the line, personally sweating over your halibut, measuring freshly chopped herbs between thumb and forefinger. Every time someone writes “Mr. Batali is fond of strong, assertive flavors” (however true that might be) or “Jean Georges has a way with herbs” and implies or suggests that it was Mr. Batali or Mr. Vongerichten who actually cooked the dish, it ignores the reality, if not the whole history, of command and control and the creative process in restaurant kitchens. While helpful to chefs, on the one hand, in that the Big Lie builds interest and helps create an identifiable brand, it also denies the truth of what is great about them: that there are plenty of great cooks in this world—but not that many great chefs.

The word “chef” means “chief.” A chef is simply a cook who leads other cooks. That quality—leadership, the ability to successfully command, inspire, and delegate work to others—is the very essence of what chefs are about. As Richman knows. But it makes better reading (and easier writing) to first propagate a lie—then, later, react with entirely feigned outrage at the reality.

Underlying Richman’s argument, one suspects, is his real exasperation. Who are these grubby little cooks to dare open more restaurants? How could they be so…presumptuous as to try to move up and beyond their stations? Surely it is the writers of sentences, the storytellers—so close to poets—upon whom praise and riches and clandestine blow jobs should be lavished! Not these brutish, un-washed, and undereducated men whose names are known only because he, Richman, once deigned to write them down!

The line about “sous-chef Willie Norkin, who took one semester of home economics and can’t cook,” while entertaining from an ignoramus, is unpardonable coming from Richman.

The whole system of fine dining, the whole brigade system—since Escoffier’s time—is designed so that the chef might have a day off. The French Laundry, Per Se—ANY top-flight restaurant’s whole command-and-training organization—is built around the ideal of consistency, the necessity for the food and service to be exactly the same every time, whether the chef (famous or otherwise) is in or out. Richman knows full well that the chef, by the time his name is well-known enough to profitably write about, is more likely to be in the full reclining position on a Cathay Pacific flight to Shanghai than in the kitchen, when Richman next parks his wrinkled haunches into a chair in said chef ’s dining room. In any great restaurant, the food is going to be just as good without the chef as with—otherwise it wouldn’t be great in the first place.

Richman’s Commandment #19 is a fucking insult to the very people who’ve been cooking and creating dishes for him for years. What’s worse is that, once again, this uniquely gas-engorged douche knows better. But rest assured that while he has no problem giving the stiff middle finger to the people who actually prepare his food, he will be sure to remain in good odor with the “celebrity” chefs he claims—on our behalf, no doubt—to be outraged by. He needs that access, you see. He likes the little kitchen tours, the advance looks at next season’s menus, the “friends and family” invites to restaurants that have yet to open to the public, the occasional scrap of strategically leaked gossip, the free hors d’oeuvres, the swag bags, the extra courses, the attention, the flattering ministrations of the few remaining chefs who still pretend that what Alan Richman writes is in any way relevant.

Not to single out Richman.

Using his position as a critic to settle personal hash puts him in the same self-interested swamp as those of his peers who use their power for personal gain. Take John Mariani, the professional junketeer over at Esquire, whose “likes and dislikes” (shower cap in his comped hotel, attractive waitresses, car service) are mysteriously communicated, as if telepathically, to chefs before his arrival. (Motherfucker hands out pre-printed recipe cards on arrival, with instructions on how to prepare his cocktail of choice—a daiquiri.) This guy has been a one-man schnorrer for decades. He’s been caught red-handed on numerous occasions—but his employers continue to dissemble on his behalf. What his editors fail to understand is that all the denials in the world don’t change what everybody—and I mean everybody—in the restaurant business knows. Among his subjects, people don’t wonder about this guy—and whether he’s bent or not. They know.

Simply stated, this allows savvy restaurants in Cleveland or Chicago to essentially “buy” a good review—and national coverage. Just don’t blow the gaff—as chef Homaro Cantu found out, to his displeasure. It’ll only fuck things up for everybody. After Cantu complained publicly of the way he had been treated by Mariani, making mention of the legendary wish list that preceded his arrival, Esquire editors made assurances that Mr. Mariani is directly responsible for no such list but artfully avoided the fact that a list most surely emanates from someone associated with him (a PR firm, perhaps?). But then the same delicate parsing of words is employed when Mariani is described as always paying for the meals that he reviews. Leaving to dangle the question of who pays for all the other meals, his transportation, lodging, and shower caps.

Over at the financial magazine Crane’s, longtime reviewer Bob Lape was known to one and all in the industry as “Sponge Bob.” It was not a term of endearment. He earned it—with hijinks like jacking up “friendly” chefs to provide food for his wedding. On the subject of the critic referred to as “Sgt. Pepper,” I’ll abstain. Let her go gentle into that good night. Like Richman, she did good work in her day. Maybe it helped to buy the boyfriend’s pictures, maybe not. Maybe all of Jerry Kretchmer’s restaurants really were that good. She was always, to her credit, an enthusiast first.

Richman, unlike many of his peers, generally knows what he’s talking about. As a writer, he has all God’s gifts: experience, knowledge of subject matter, a vocabulary—and the ability to put words together in entertaining and incisive fashion. Unlike the grifters, freeloaders, and pushovers who make up the majority of the food-and-dining press, Richman’s is a discerning palate. But dumping on a place because you have a personal beef with the chef (past, present, or otherwise)?

Hell, the Times would fire your ass for that (or, at least, “promote” you to the “T” section).

In the film Sexy Beast, Sir Ben Kingsley’s terrifyingly believable English gangster character frequently uses a pejorative common to the British Isles, a term that Americans must circumspectly refer to as the “c-word.” The English and Irish bandy it about often—as, in their manner of usage and in their context, it does not refer hatefully or disparagingly to a part of the female anatomy. On the contrary, it is an unflattering (even, sometimes, an affectionately unflattering) noun describing a male person—often used in conjunction with the adjective “silly.”

It implies someone slightly more odious than a twit, older and more substantial than a shithead, yet without the gravitas required to be called an asshole.

So, maybe I got it wrong.

Alan Richman is not a douchebag. He’s a cunt.