Another old-fashioned idea is our towns blend of elegance and energy. For all the honking of horns and the purported braying of the locals, poise still counts here. You can find it — at least, I did — in a restaurant critics prose, in the lift a Broadway show can give to Generation Z, in the legendary grace embodied by a Manhattan baby of the Golden Age.
In three short columns, Ill be writing about people you should know, impulses worth celebrating.
A NICHE FOR BRITCHKY
Few names could be less elegant than Seymour Britchky. It should belong to the rotten smart kid in third grade, or the accountant who just smiled as he told you you were bankrupt. In fact, it IDs one of the most perceptive and cutting writers of modern American prose.
Britchky, who died last month at 73, was nominally a food critic. So far as Im aware, he wrote no fiction, history or autobiography; yet his culinary critiques were all of the above. For 20 years, starting in 1971, he published newsletters (The Restaurant Reporter and Seymour Britchkys Restaurant Letter) whose pieces were collected in 16 annual editions of The Restaurants of New York. Granted, those are museum pieces by now; most of the places he wrote about are closed or changed management. And, anyway, I hear you saying, you dont live in New York, and you attend only those restaurants whose policies include doggy-bagging and supersizing.
I acknowledge, dear naysayers from the outlands, that you will not benefit from the utility of Britchkys reviews. But anyone, in any city, can learn an enlightened skepticism from, for example, the last paragraph in his devastating review of the Upper East Side boite Elaines: Invariably, it seems, the 8.25% sales tax is miscalculated. Not only that, you will be astonished to learn, but it is miscalculated upward. Since many innocents simply double the tax to compute the tip, this means extra money in the waiters pockets.... But if the enlarged tip goes to the waiters, where, you wonder, does the extra tax go? Britchky dares to remind you that a night out eating is an act of commerce, and the diner deserves value for money.
Non-New Yorkers will also profit from the short introductory essay, Ten Sensible Rules About Going to, Eating in, Paying at and Departing from New York Restaurants. Of course, they must also be willing to act like New Yorkers. Its a good idea to complain about something early on. People who complain are people who seem to know what they want... If you dont like something you ordered, tell the waiter it tastes terrible and send it back. When the bill comes, Review it. Its wrong about one time in ten; in your favor about one time in a hundred. ... Check the addition. And finally, Leave when you are good and ready.... Enjoy possession of a table that others are waiting in line for. Later they will.
Britchkys food sense was both adventurous and reliable, leading readers to good meals in a city whose middle class was just learning a devotion to food. But his real and enduring value is as a superb writer: a crafter of succulent sentences, savory asides, tart witticisms (and other easy food metaphors he would never have condescended to use). As I can recommend David Thomsons A Biographical Dictionary of Film to people who dont care much for movies but do treasure writing that consistently confounds clich (and astutely avoids alliteration — Davids standards, too, are much sterner than mine), so I urge you to find, buy and consume any of the Britchky Restaurants books. Honestly, reading him beats eating.
One of Britchkys mots appears on several quotation sites: Some of the waiters discuss the menu with you as if they were sharing wisdom picked up in the Himalayas. But every review strews gems before the readers eye. Or grenades in the restaurateurs face. On a famous 44th Street hangout: Sardis most famous dish is its cannelloni, cat food wrapped in noodle and welded to the steel ashtray in which it was reheated under its glutinous pink sauce. Makes your mouth parch, doesnt it?
I learned from the New York Times obit that Britchky had been an advertising executive who, at the age of 40, created a second career out of his passion for food and thought. He used to say his main qualification as a restaurant critic was eating three meals a day, his widow, the photographer Nancy Crampton told the Times. He just hung out his shingle and did it.
I first heard of Britchky through Elliott Stein, the gifted film critic and so much more. In 1975 Elliott showed my wife Mary and me Britchkys three-star review of an unpretentious Chinatown restaurant called Phoenix Garden. (The place looks like the inside of a refrigerator with the light on.) Britchky awarded the restaurant three stars, and one holiday we gave it a try. It was the first time we had an entire meal without talking; the food —Pepper and Salty Shrimp, Phoenix Special Roast Squab, lemon chicken — literally left us speechless in awe and delight. We were Phoenix Garden regulars, and Britchky addicts, from then on.
A few years later, when I came to work at TIME, you could walk directly from the lobby to the United States Steakhouse Company, our house diner. Here is Britchky, circa 1982, on the restaurants barroom, to which lots of the guys from upstairs in the Time-Life Building repair. They stand around the huge circular counter-height oak tables that bear giant bowls of unshelled peanuts, and they light their cigarette lighters, hoist long cold ones and crack peanuts, all without looking. They drop the peanut hulls at their feet, toss the seeds between their teeth and slowly grind them with their huge molars, their jaws rippling. After a while, they are ankle-deep in peanut shells, and by seven oclock this place looks like the elephant house. I cant say I noticed that TIME staffers had huge molars, but all else is on target. Britchkys arrow pierces the restaurants soul, fatally. The place must have died of shame; it closed a few years later.
A CRITICAL CRITIC
At a memorial service for the critic, a telling remark was made by Andre Soltner, the owner of Lutce (one of two four-star restaurants in the 1986 edition) and the co-author with Britchky of The Lutce Cookbook. According to New York food writer Regina Schrambling, Soltner said, I look around and I dont see any chefs here. Their absence could be explained by the reviewers presumed adversarial relationship to his subject. The chefs might guess his favorite dish was broiled baby in Britchky bile.
He apparently could be as sardonic at a party as at P.J. Clarkes (which serves, spread across the bottom of dog bowls, so-called tartar steaks that are brown and dry from long, warm storage...; steaks so pallid they need salt and pepper the way a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich needs peanut butter and jelly; spinach salads that should be returned to the laundry for more starch... — you get the idea). The one Britchky anecdote that is immortalized on the Internet has him conversing with a terrible bore at some soiree. How are you? the man asks. Exactly the same, Britchky replies.
Restaurant critics typically do their work in the company of three or more friends, so as to be able to taste a range of dishes. I know nothing of his methods, but in my mind, Britchky dined alone. (His detractors would say: hes so mean, who would eat with him?) I imagine him reclining on a banquette, quiet as a viper, sharp-eyed and sharp-toothed, devouring not just the food on his plate but the people in his view, as a threshing machine bites off grain and spit out the chaff.
A reader consults other reviewers to find what to eat at four-star restaurants. You read Britchky for that, too, but also for acute descriptions of the decor, the posture and attitude of the staff, the plumage of the clientele. Dining, for Britchky, was not simply, perhaps not even even primarily, the exercise of filling your stomach to sweet satiety. It was a social ritual that defined the diner, the restaurant and the city they inhabited.
A bit of Britchky on my local restaurant, The Odeon, which in the 30s was a cafeteria: Not surprisingly, Odeon is about as big as a medium-size cafeteria. On a terrazzo floor — in the old days mopped three times daily, between meals — the white-linened tables are set with inverted tumblers rather than goblets, and with water pitchers that you yourself may fill at spigots affixed to one of the pillars that rise through the height of this two-story room. That pillar also accommodates stainless-steel shelves, bottles of mustard and ketchup thereon, and a magazine rack, complete with literature, a reminder, if not a relic, of the days when a 5c. cup of coffee, a 3c. daily and a warm cafeteria were the foundations of a calm afternoon out of the weather. Perhaps you sat in one of these very chairs of pastel plastic and chrome tubing — they were high style then. Where the hot table was, the bar is now, mirrors on the wall behind it.... The place is dominated by big white globes that hang from the ceiling and shine softly. And the Odeon air is filled with period music of the twenties and thirties — Harlem on My Mind, If I Had a Talking Picture of You, Therell Be Some Changes Made &c. ... You are attended by capable young people in white aprons, white shirts and neckties. The food they deliver is pretty nifty.
A world, of the 30s and the 80s, alchemized in a few words. A deft picture of an institution. Decades from now, any movie production designer needing the perfect blueprint for an old restaurants decor — any screenwriter looking for cues to how people behaved in public in the late 20th century— will find them in Britchkys prose.
Attend this sketch of the customers at the theater-district eatery Cafe Un Deux Trois: A slightly out-of-place crowd stands at the bar: posing dancers who raise glasses to their lips with the kind of sweeping gesture that usually accompanies a florid toast; hysterical young women wearing frizzled hair and little else; and ordinary pathetic singles. The bartender is your basic hip cynic. When he needs both hands he sticks his cigarettes between his teeth.
At this point Britchky must have heard, and been displeased by, the rumble of a disapproving demeanor. So he adds, as if in a melancholy reverie: Most of the people who come here are gracious and friended... [T]hey have in common that optimistic enthusiasm you just may be able to recall.
As I reread these essays, decades after they were written, decades after they served any practical function, I feel the customers enthusiasm, and Britchkys nostalgia. I glow with admiration at the care taken to compose them, the high standards that made his jokes seem severe. Britchky loved food, words and his version of the truth. As a social observer, both serious and comic, he was Proust mated to Perelman — our Jane Austen, spiked with Celine.
TOMORROW: Broadway Babies