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Wednesday, March 24, 2004

Amanda Hesser

"Poor Amanda Hesser" has got to be in my Top Five list of Food-Related Things I Never Thought I'd Say, along with "Ken Friedman's music policy is beloved of both the New York Times and Charlie Rose" and "soy products can replicate to an uncanny degree the experience of eating meat" (from this month's Atlantic).

I still don't think anything of soy products. They make my teeth want to vomit. But I can certainly second Eric Asimov's rave review of the Spotted Pig, while remaining surprised that he also saw fit to write an entire separate article on Ken's prowess with an iPod and a volume knob.

And watching various bloggers pile on to Amanda Hesser today, I have to admit to feeling a certain amount of sympathy for the author of "Cooking for Mr. Latte: A Food Lover's Courtship, with Recipes". (How anybody can even get past the title of that book without their teeth wanting to vomit, I have no idea.)

The line about teeth and vomit, in case you're not hooked in to the New York blogosphere, comes from Eurotrash, who eviscerated Hesser's latest restaurant review today, calling it an "unspeakable piece of codswallop" before getting really nasty. It's something of a baptism of fire for Hesser, who recently took over the job of chief New York Times restaurant reviewer – a very powerful position with a legendary expense account.

It's not just Eurotrash, either. Gawker snarked at Hesser before linking to Eurotrash, and Lockhart Steele inserted his own stiletto into Hesser as well, starting off a restaurant review with a sly parody of her opening sentences. Clearly, Hesser has an uncanny ability to rub people up the wrong way.

And making fun of Hesser is almost comically easy. "Howard Stern and a girlfriend amble by. You are in a James Bond movie, a high-end bar in Bangkok, a Vong to the 10th power." Rarely can Howard Stern have reminded people of James Bond, but I suppose that food writers' minds move in mysterious ways. Mysterious enough, at least, to cow Hesser's editor into leaving in that "Vong to the 10th power" line, despite its evident meaninglessness. Maybe it's what you get if you raise Vong to the 5th power and then square it by mentioning the headwaiter's t-shirt twice.

Still, it's clear what's going on here, and there's a clue, actually, in the fact, noted on Gawker, that Hesser is far from anonymous when she goes to these places. Historically, restaurant reviews have been just like any other kind of review: someone who knows what they're talking about telling the rest of us how good or bad the thing in question is. A great review can make a restaurant, as New Yorkers decide en masse to try it out; it can even change food culture more generally, as when Asian restaurants started receiving four-star reviews, placing them on an equal footing with the grand old temples of French gastronomy.

Rarely, however, have the New York Times's restaurant reviews been remotely interesting to read. By far the most important thing about them was the number of stars at the bottom: will Le Bernadin keep its fourth star, or, like Chanterelle, will it get downgraded from four to three? That sort of thing. The list of four-star restaurants is short indeed (just five, at the moment), and the first time that Hesser fiddles with it, she will attract huge amounts of attention.

But the fact is that these reviews don't always make for great copy. That's fine if they're simply service journalism: a reporter going out and basically telling you which restaurants to go to. But check out William Grimes's rave review of Alain Ducasse: after mentioning the $300 truffle menu, available to anybody who walks in the door, he then spends most of the rest of the review talking about dishes from "a tasting menu offered in the chef's room, a small private room just off the kitchen that regular customers can book". These include one pastry dish which includes not only four huge black truffles, but also "large coins of black truffle" in addition. The proportion of New York Times readers which will ever so much as see this dish, let alone afford it, is so tiny that they can't possibly provide the main reason for writing about it.

And now that the Times is branching out, trying to position itself as a national newspaper, service journalism is even less useful for its readers. Restaurant reviews have to do more than just help people decide if they want to try the new place that just opened up around the corner: they have to be interesting to a much broader cross-section of the national population.

This is something that UK newspapers have struggled with for years. They're based in London, but are distributed nationally, and it's very unlikely that a schoolteacher in south Wales really cares much about the quality of the coffee at the latest trendy bistro in Clapham. So they've turned restaurant reviewing into something of a spectator sport, helped on their way by novelist Will Self.

Self more or less started the ball rolling on the phenomenon of the modern British restaurant review. There's the lethal take-down, since perfected by AA Gill, where a restaurant is simply demolished with choice epithets. That hasn't made it to the US yet (one Vanity Fair review by Gill notwithstanding), and is certainly unlikely to appear in the New York Times any time soon.

But Self also realised that if his readers weren't going to eat at the restaurant in question, he didn't need to go into much, if any, detail when it came to the food. He could write 1,500-word reviews whose sole description of the food was "nice"; and, since he's a talented chap, he could do so in a wickedly entertaining way. Now, Hesser's not going to go down that path: most of her review is, indeed, about the food. But she's following in Self's footsteps in a different way: she's trying to sparkle up her prose a little, so that the review is more than a list of dishes with a star-rating at the end.

At this point, it's worth noting Adam Moss's comment in the New York Observer today, when he talks about a long tradition of mobility between magazines, newspapers "and things in between". Moss used to edit the New York Times magazine, before being promoted to an ill-defined "features czar" role overseeing the fluffier content in the newspaper, including the Dining Out section. Moss is a magazine guy, and the advertising-driven extra sections of the New York Times are very much in that grey area between newspaper and magazine journalism. They're feature-driven, rarely break news, and often read much more like magazine pieces than like old-fashioned reported stories.

And what Hesser is doing in this review is definitely close to magazine journalism. She writes in the second person, present tense: "A maître d'hôtel with carefully rumpled hair wearing a "Late Night With David Letterman" T-shirt and a sports coat takes your name at the door." If this appeared in the Metro section, an editor would have jumped on that, turning it into "took diners' names" instead. Third person, past tense, objective, reported.

The food editor at the New York Times is Sam Sifton, who certainly understands the need to sex up service journalism. He arrived at the newspaper from New York magazine, but he started out at the New York Press, writing annoying first-person-plural reviews which always referred to oysters as "bivalves" on second mention. The Press's reviews were closer in spirit to Will Self than the New York Times: they were anecdotal, often touched only glancingly on the food, and served to showcase the author's writing chops more than they served to help people decide where to have their Wednesday-night meal. I'm sure that when he sent Hesser to Spice Market, Sifton told her to come back with something evocative of the scene, rather than an objective, just-the-facts-ma'am report.

I think it's a bit unfair, then, to go after Hesser for spending the first part of her review not talking about the food. "What's the fucking food like?" asks Eurotrash: "Nice? Who fucking knows?" Well, we do, after a while: Hesser spends quite a few column inches on it. But especially when you're reviewing a hot new Meatpacking District restaurant, the general scene is at least as important as the quality of the food.

Still, Eurotrash does have a point: the writing simply isn't very good. A large chunk of the review basically consists of little more than concatenations of ingredients – here's one passage, verbatim.

...fat tapioca pearls loom large. They are simmered with Thai chilies, Sichuan peppercorns, cinnamon and chipotle, then paired with slivers of raw tuna in a cool coconut broth sharpened with kaffir lime. The dish is eaten with a spoon.
Fried squid is piled atop a salad of papaya, water chestnut and cashews. Sweet shrimp fritters are dotted with crunchy bits of long bean and tempered by a relish of peanut and cucumber cut into minuscule cubes.
Thai chicken wings are lined up on a plate, coated in a hot, sticky sauce, fragrant with chilies, soy, lime and fish sauce...

I count 21 ingredients there, in six sentences. The mind simply can't process all that information: it's hard to imagine what just a couple of things taste like, let alone a long list like this. And the whole thing is in a stultifying passive voice: pearls "are simmered", the dish "is eaten", squid "is pulled", fritters "are dotted", wings "are lined up". Nobody does any of this: it just magically happens. Eleven year-olds are taught that "the dish is eaten with a spoon" is horrible English, but somehow, again, star writers (and Hesser is certainly one of them) can get away with that sort of thing.

Hesser's review, coincidentally enough, was printed on the same day that New York media types were emailing each other the full 20,000-word text of Howell Raines's forthcoming Atlantic article. In it, he talks about how he wanted to "strip away the New York parochialism" of the paper; he also says that back of the book in general was underfunded and unimaginative.

Raines is long gone, thank god. Reading his article, you start by thinking "what an arsehole", then think "Christ what an arsehole", and then just throw up your hands when you come across insufferably pompous and self-serving drivel like this (you'll forgive me for digressing a bit from the restaurant beat, here):

I worked alongside James B. "Scotty" Reston in Washington, and came to know him well as an avuncular figure who was as tough as goat guts in his analysis of staff weaknesses. When a correspondent who had clerked for Scotty and later boasted of their closeness left the paper to protest a reassignment, Scotty dropped by my office. I was then the Washington editor, and I assumed he was going to chide me for not giving the fellow the prestige beat he thought he deserved. Instead Scotty blew out a cloud of pipe smoke and said, He never had it, did he? At its highest levels the Times operates by that kind of brutal managerial shorthand.

My favourite bit, though, is when Jodi Kantor is hired to take over a section of the Sunday paper: "Arts & Leisure readers definitely knew there was a new sheriff in town when Jodi beat New York's hip publications to the punch with a lead story on the rock group White Stripes."

I guess I'm saying that Hesser is a bit like Kantor: a talented journalist who somehow persuades stodgier, older editors that she's doing amazing stuff even when she's doing nothing special. I'm sure that Hesser focus-grouped well: she's popular among the kind of wealthy female demographic that advertisers adore. Go check out the cover of her book, here, and tell me if you can ever imagine a male walking out of a bookstore with it.

What I think happened is that the editors of the New York Times wanted a restaurant reviewer who would (a) be advertiser- and women-friendly, just like their star columnist Nigella Lawson; and (b) have a more discursive style than New York Times readers might expect. A foodie Selena Roberts, basically. It helped that Hesser had name recognition: Raines complains that the paper has "not had a dominating national voice in any area of cultural coverage since Frank Rich retired as theater critic", over 10 years ago. Parachuting Hesser in from the world of best-sellerdom could help punch up the food section somewhat.

Now that Hesser's in place, she's got a certain amount of tenure, and pretty soon, I hope, she's going to relax a little. She doesn't have the writing chops to pull a Will Self, even if the Times would allow such a thing. She started by showing off:

One-name restaurants took hold with a vengeance five years ago, after Babbo was a hit. Then followed Otto, Ilo, Tappo, Beppe, Gonzo, Pazo, Pico and Crispo. And, of course, Bread, Butter, Salt, Good, Taste, Fresh, Supper, Grocery, Canteen, Commune, District, Town, Craft and — how could New York be complete without it? — Therapy.

And she'll probably have to let off a little more steam ("order a Pattaya if you are feeling the need for discipline") before she settles into a voice of her own.What she really needs is a good editor, who can trim the excesses and tell Hesser that she should start bringing more of herself to her reviews. It was the autobiographical elements which made her previous columns such a success.

Hesser knows this, actually: in an interview last year, she said that "when you are writing personally, people, negatively and positively, make these connections and relate, because they have experienced these things in their own lives and feel strongly about them."

Then again, in the same interview, she actually said she didn't want the job she now has. Maybe it's just not going to work out:

The natural path that people try to follow at the Times is they become a reporter and eventually a critic. I never wanted to be a critic. I love eating and love dining, but I love cooking at home and being at home. I find that I have done stories where I have to go out four nights a week or to two or three restaurants a night. It's kind of grueling and unpleasant. You get jaded. You find yourself being super critical about what really is just a meal. There is definitely a foodie culture that's very competitive, and there are people who really just love going out every night. You know, good for them. I don't want to do it myself... I realized shortly after I arrived at the Times that I would like to eventually write about wine. Although, I still love writing about food. I knew that I didn't want to become a restaurant reviewer.

Tell us, Amanda! Why did you take this gig? Do you feel under pressure to deliver something you're not sure you want to be doing? 'Cos that could explain the missteps.

Posted by Felix at 21:14 EST

Comments

Nice, Felix. Hesser, though, is just on the review beat until they name a permanent replacement for Grimes. In February, they said the announcement would be made in "late winter." So we may not have her to kick around much longer.

Posted by: Lock at 10:08 EST, March 25, 2004

yeah, lock's point kind of makes the preceding blowharding even more useless than the normal crap posted in this blog. some people like just like to hear their own electronic text too much.

Posted by: efg at 17:54 EST, March 25, 2004

Very insightful

Posted by: jen h. at 13:16 EST, March 26, 2004

this is a great read. well done.

Posted by: foodie at 17:47 EST, March 26, 2004

"Soy products"?
Do you mean tofu? When you say "I don't think anything" do you mean that you have no opinion? or that you do not like them?

"Teeth vomit" :)
How do you do that?

Posted by: David Sucher at 19:03 EST, March 26, 2004

Have people not read the work Ruth Reichl, the pre-William Grimes food critic? Both while at the Times and afterward? Ruth wielded an iron ladle and did rule the NY restaurant world. While Amanda might be on some odder flights of fancy, it really doesn't seem that bad. She wrote this crazy and amazing article eviscerating Emeril a couple years ago. While I'm the first to make fun of anyone so cute and tiny, I think she's great - in person, she's humble and interesting and genuinesly passionate about food.

Posted by: Jen at 16:41 EST, March 29, 2004

See the Editor's Note in today's NYT about the Hesser review in question. Guess what? The chef she praised wrote an effusive blurb for her book.

Posted by: Melissa at 12:45 EST, March 31, 2004

The editorial comparison between a theater critic as " dominating national voice in any area of cultural coverage" and a food critic seems odd. People don't just go to NY for Broadway and dinner, but shows go on the road. And get turned into movies. A theater critic, even one writing about local productions, has a kind of *possible* application to my-life-outside-NYC that a restaurant reviewer can't have, except by setting a national tone for restaurant reviewers (the UK effect you point out).

A side note on your Raines digression -- since when is working for a journalist "clerking"? Isn't that what young lawyers do for judges? Puh-lease! I may actually buy the issue of the Atlantic so I can throw it across the room occasionally while I read; that's hell on laptops.

Posted by: Michael Tinkler at 8:08 EST, April 01, 2004

Amanda Hesser is marvelous. I can't believe all these bitter, sour would-bes that are so critical of her. She has a style and voice of her own and I look forward with pleasure to every thing she writes.

Posted by: L B BOTTONE at 5:31 EST, June 04, 2007

Posted by: L B BOTTONE at 5:34 EST, June 04, 2007

I am sorry to disagree. I just finished reading Amanda's book and I thought it was wonderful. I loved the recipes and I loved the way she savored her friends and family. I loved the way she saw the good in all the people in her life.
Her cooking style is not exactly mine but everyone is different.
The people who are negitive and hurt others for no reason are the people who make this world a sad place.
I thank Amanda for a book that renewed my passion for cooking and enjoying the people in my life!
Amy, Atlanta, GA

Posted by: Amy at 20:07 EST, June 25, 2007

Just want to make a remark on the recipes published in the New York Times. I find it frustrating that the salt used is qualified 'kosher salt'. I use sea sall or any other ans never failed a recipe. My frustration increased when I realized that 80% of the food in my pantry was labelled Kosher. My reaearch informed me that the Jewish community throughout the world collect billions $ annually from this operation. These monies being distributed to rabbies and jewish activities where some could be related to war. So, is there a possiblity to refrain from using this word from your recipies, as it not only makes me mad but a lot of people who are aware of this fact. LP

Posted by: Lise Pinard at 9:16 EST, July 23, 2007