After 22 years and one zillion meals, plattypants is signing off as our restaurant critic
A sampling of Platt’s diet, as seen through his iPhone. Photo: Adam Platt/Instagram This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
During my time on the job, the restaurant and dining world, which once occupied its own eccentric corner of the culture conversation, moved to the very center of things, then simply became part of the mainstream.
Years ago, when I took this job, Gael invited me to lunch at a now-vanished French restaurant to talk about the routine of reviewing: Yes, this was a real job, she explained. Yes, you should refrain from gobbling everything in sight, and no, you won’t get tired of it, she said, taking a notepad from her handbag and scrawling some scathing observation about our truffled noodles: “I think you’ll find as the days go by that your appetite only increases.
You’ll quickly grow weary of uni and caviar as well as the adjectives you might use to describe the same mind-numbing progression of dishes again and again. The wine lists are always too expensive, the dining rooms are always too loud, and the sushi bros at the next stool over are always yammering about their $30,000 watches.
But you’ll always have an excuse to check on the quality of the Dover sole at La Grenouille, or the wonton soup at Great N.Y. Noodletown down on the corner of Bayard and Bowery, the way your colleague Jerry Saltz checks up on the old-master paintings at the Met.
… and the Worst “Anyone who won’t listen to what you say. You need them to order certain dishes, and you don’t want them to respond, ‘I don’t like that, and I don’t like that.’ It used to be vegans, but that’s changed over time, and these days vegans are quite useful. The absolute worst are people who treat the meal as a party instead of the professional event that it is. I remember a young French gentleman in from Paris; he was somebody’s friend. He just drank all the way through dinner.
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