My News and Thoughts
What to Do with a Ravenous Kid?
A mother who is apparently familiar with my story, perhaps because she read "Born Round," recently wrote:
"My seven-year-old son eats constantly. He is growing (out as well as up) but, to be honest, he just loves food. I dont want to give him a complex but what do you do when he is begging for a snack 30 minutes after supper? What could your mom have done differently, if anything, to ward off your eating?"
Because a lot of parents face the challenge of a child who eats too much and is gaining weight in a way that's unhealthy and could wind up causing the child unhappiness, I thought I'd share much of my response to her:
"I don't know that one answer fits all, or what would have been better for me . . . You could tell him that you feel bad that he's hungry so soon after dinner, and suggest he eat a bigger dinner to avoid that, and then make the expanded portion of the dinner something relatively healthier and lower in calories than the snack would be.
"You could tell him in a very non-appearance-related, non-judgmental, flat tone that you think that so much snacking isn't 'healthy,' without using the word 'fat,' and say that in your interest to encourage healthier eating, you'd like to strike a deal with him whereby if he wants a snack within two hours of the end of a meal, it has to be x, y or z: stuff that doesn't include ice cream, cookies, etc.
"What I think you must NOT do is ban those things from his life entirely and demonize them. You can try to make clear that this isn't about the intrinsic evil of those foods or about their caloric load; it's about the importance of balanced, healthy eating. I think language is key, and it's vital to frame the goal as healthier eating, not eating that will avoid excess pounds and help him look better per se.
"We're such an appearance-conscious society that whenever anything gets framed in terms of staying slim or staying attractive, then the impulses prodding us toward actions in conflict with thinness and conventional physical beauty get suffused with so much anxiety that we can go off the rails.
"Beyond all of that, are you setting an example for him by not snacking a lot yourself, by exercising with apparent enthusiasm and enjoyment, etc? And, without making your home an ascetic, fraught environment that makes him crave 'forbidden' foods even MORE, are you making sure there's a preponderance of healthy alternatives around? It stands to reason--and experts say--that children emulate their parents' eating and dieting and exercising behavior as they do so much else. My story suggests that: Mom's eating adjustments were often odd rituals and fad diets. And thus mine were too."
I want to add a few quick things that, in my hurry to make sure I sent her a response before getting sidetracked by other tasks, I didn't put in.
She notes that at 7, he clearly loves food, really loves it. I'm assuming she means in part that he has a big appetite, but also that food exerts a sort of special pull on him. If that's so, I wonder--an open question--if making food a BIGGER part of his life, and not in terms of quantity, might be constructive. Let me explain: I found that when I started writing about food as a critic and hunting down the best this, that and the other, it was a bit easier (though still not easy!) to restrain the sheer volume of my eating than in the past, because I'd channeled my food obsessions in a different direction. I was fixated on food quality, food adventures, etc. Discernment replaced a purer, more banal gluttony, and in that way, I think I moved a bit closer to the Western European attitude about, and approach to, food. As I describe in "Born Round," it helped that I turned this corner in large part while living in Italy and observing how quality trumped quantity there.
Can that logic and dynamic be applied to a child? If a food-fixated kid is encouraged to help shop for the food and cook the food and try this and that and the other, can the "one more cookie please please please" requests be diminished?
The Lure of Food TV
At drinks with a friend the other night, the subject of "Top Chef" and other food television came up, and he remarked that his early twentysomething sons watch more than a few cooking programs, as do many of their friends. He'd overheard the discussions that attested to that. But none of these young men, he said, were home cooks. Nor did they seem to aspire to be. They just like the programs, and not solely the ones, like "Top Chef" and its imitators, that have elimination-competition suspense built into them. They like more straightforward cooking demonstrations, too.
That shouldn't really be surprising. The proliferation of food television suggests that its audience is not only huge but also varied; otherwise, there wouldn't be such a vigorous push to conceive and distribute so many food-related programs on the Food Network and on its relatively new spawn, the Cooking Channel, and on Fox (Gordon Ramsay screams some more!) and on Bravo and, well, I could keep going like this for several paragraphs. It now seems that at any hour on any day, you can choose between a half dozen shows that will let you admire (or gasp) at someone's culinary efforts and ogle the food he or she produces.
But how many of the people doing the admiring, gasping and ogling like to cook, dream of cooking or want to know more about the mechanics of cooking?
Even if it's a majority, that still leaves a lot of non-cooks in the audience. What prompts THEM to tune into food television?
My friend has a theory I find interesting. He wonders if there's a sort of broad cultural nostalgia at work. By that he means: as fewer and fewer young people know the much-talked-about ideal of home-cooked meals and of families gathering at the table at night to eat them, do the glossy, dreamy culinary demonstrations on TV tap into, and satisfy, a kind of curiosity and longing? For these young people, does the televised cooking have the appeal of a missive from a lost Utopia? Is it like an artifact from a bygone era?
The lifestyle porn of food television is more often discussed in terms of aspiration: would-be home cooks with limited budgets and time watch Martha and Ina and Giada go through their fluid, calm, dexterous paces and fantasize that they can or someday will do the same. But for younger viewers, is this same lifestyle porn more of a "Little House on the Prarie" or "Leave it to Beaver" experience?
As my friend was laying out this theory for me, I remembered a conversation a year ago with a recent college grad working for a glossy men's magazine. He wasn't a big home cook. He wasn't a big restaurant goer. He didn't have the money to make those things happen, and beyond that, his culinary curiosity wasn't all that keen.
But he was a committed fan of "The Barefoot Contessa" on TV. Why? He just loved Ina's kitchen. He just loved the idea that he was in there, with her, watching her cook, presumably for him. It pleased him. Lulled him.
This leads me to one of my own theories about the popularity of food television among those who don't cook. When many people turn on the television set, as opposed to picking up a book or doing something more interactive, they're looking for a passive, mind-resting experience. They want something that doesn't require close attention, the way a twisty plot might. Something akin to visual music. Something ambient, in a way.
Much food television gives them that. It's a banquet of colorful, seductive and familiar images, presented rhythmically, with a soundtrack of oohs and aahs.
I don't watch a lot of it, but when I do happen to turn to a cooking program and then get distracted, I sometimes lose any active awareness of it and don't even remember, for hours, that it or the cooking programs that follow it are on. I don't change the channel. I sit at the nearby computer while, just 12 feet away, chops are being grilled and vegetables sauteed and potatoes mashed. Is this footage not so much exhorting me to the stove or priming my appetite but, in some corner of my brain, simply putting me at peace?
Weekend Reading, Weekend Eating
Did you catch the front page story in the New York Times on Saturday about Thomas' English muffins?
On the surface, it was a tale of corporate secrets and intrigue, and a good tale at that. But what I loved about it--and why I bring it up--is that it was also an affirmation that a very particular aspect of an otherwise ordinary food can make it magical, irresistible, addictive. It showed how much the details count, and how specifically and painstakingly the details are sometimes achieved: exact dough composition, exact baking temperature, etc., etc.
In other words it was a tribute to food obsessiveness, in terms of both the making and the eating. (Here's a link to the story, by the way, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/07/business/07muffin.html)
I've always liked Thomas' muffins, and I've liked them for those very nooks and crannies that their maker lords over rival muffin manufacturers. (The Times story was about how carefully the Thomas' folks guard the recipe that gives rise to the nooks and crannies.) Can the topography of a muffin half really matter so much? Oh yes. It makes the textural experience of a toasted Thomas' unique, but more than that it governs an uneven butter distribution that's the real clincher. Butter spread on a hot Thomas' muffin slides down a jagged edge and gathers in what looks like a minuscule tidal pool, and when your bite takes in that pool, you get a rush of liquid richness more intense than you'd expected. The decadence takes you by delicious surprise.
Am I mooning too much over a mass-market muffin? Maybe. But it's probably good to remember, at a time when we're exalting all things artisanal, that "mass-market" isn't always and necessarily awful. At least not from a gustatory (as opposed to ethical) perspective. Like Hellman's mayo and Heinz ketchup, Thomas' muffins are mighty impressive for what they are. And like Hellman's and Heinz, they engender fierce, fierce loyalty. That was one of my thoughts as I read the Times piece, and it was another prompt for this post.
The tight lid that the makers of Thomas' muffins keep over the recipe and production process reflects the tight allegiances that we as eaters form with our preferred foods. When I was a kid, if one of my brothers or my sister or my father opened the bread drawer in the morning to discover that my mother had for some reason purchased an English muffin other than Thomas', a groan went up. Maybe even a wail. A hope had been dashed; an anticipation of a particular and dependable pleasure had gone unrewarded. And in the Bruni family, no letdown was as painful as a food letdown.
Speaking of letdowns, I had a lobster roll over the weekend. I was by the sea, and there were seafood shacks lining the road, and it seemed criminal not to stop at one at some point and have both a lobster roll and some fried clams.
The fried clams were fine, mainly because they weren't strips, but rather whole clams, bellies included. Belly inclusion is crucial. (Can I get that stitched onto a throw pillow?)
The lobster roll, though, was a bust. Instead of chunks of lobster meat, there were thin, stringy strands of it: it had been shredded, more or less, before being mixed with similarly shredded cabbage and celery and the like. The result was a braid-cum-mash that made it impossible, visually, to see exactly how much lobster was there. (That was the goal and point, I think.)
As I registered the lobster roll's general blandness, I realized that two out of three times, I regret getting a lobster roll, and that the lobster roll, like the street-vendor pretzel, is one of those foods that's usually more pleasurable in theory than in practice. The idea of the lobster roll most often trumps the reality of the lobster roll.
Those of us who love great lobster and have tried at least a few dozen lobster rolls in our lives have eaten some sublime ones, with tender HUNKS of flavorful lobster meat that weren't diluted with too much dressing, too many sidekicks. We got lobster, glorious lobster, without work, in big mouthfuls. And the memory of that keeps us going back for more.
But the serendipitous lobster roll, ordered and chosen at a random place, without prior research or reliable recommendations from discerning friends, typically disappoints. And it disappoints at a high price point: insult upon injury. It's as if many purveyors of lobster rolls figure that a smattering of lobster, a buttery roll/bun and an iconic phrase are enough. No real effort or merit necessary.
The fried clam, in contrast, never bums me out as much. It's cheaper. And whatever else it does or doesn't have going for it, it's fried.
Basket Case
At lunch today in a run-of-the-mill Midtown restaurant, a bread basket was placed on the table, as a bread basket so often is. It wasn't especially tempting: maybe six objects in all, most in the focaccia family.
I laid waste to four of them.
When will I learn? I've advised fellow weight watchers to send the bread basket away, unless it truly seems to be one of the restaurant's points of pride and labors of love. I'm all for making an exception when there's a promise of extraordinary pleasure.
But most bread baskets are pretty ordinary. And they're magnets for absent-minded, gratuitous, nutritionally negligible eating. Like the kind I did at lunch.
For some of us, such eating is all but unavoidable, unless we construct and manipulate the circumstances around us so that it's indeed impossible. If there's no bread basket there's no reaching . . . no reaching again . . . no reaching again.
The bread basket is like the bowl of nuts on a bar: we dive into it, push it away, forgot we pushed it away, and the cycle repeats itself, ad infinitum. How familiar is this ritual? And how counterproductive? It's the essence of eating on auto pilot, without even wringing much enjoyment from the act. And eating without enjoyment is a spectacularly wasted opportunity.
In the wake of lunch I had to remind myself of that, as I have to remind myself all the time of the lessons learned during a life of intermittently compulsive eating. A lesson learned is not necessarily a correction made, not unless the lesson is remembered and revisited time and again.
Why did I lunge for the bread basket in the first place? Because I erred in another way I too often do: I ate nothing between 7 a.m., when I woke up, and 12:30 p.m. By the time food was in front of me, I was hungrier for it than I should have been.
I still skip breakfast too often, as was noted by several friends and strangers who emailed me after the New York magazine online food blog, Grub Street, published an account of six days of my eating. The link, which I think I also provided in an earlier post, is here: http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2010/07/frank_bruni_succumbs_to_heat-i.html.
I read it and thought: my eating over a day isn't as paced and measured as it should be.
The effort continues.
The Pull of Family
Usually I use this site and these posts to talk about food-related or weight-related matters.
But why not talk about family here?
The book is, in large measure, about that. Uh-oh. Should I use the words "large measure" in connection with "Born Round?" Is it a phrase too freighted and, um, weighty? Let's say the book is "in significant part" about family. That's better, safer.
I spent much of last weekend in Sunapee, N.H., where my older brother, Mark, and his wife, Lisa, have a house in the woods near the big lake. Lovely. But the setting wasn't the best part. The best part was, really, getting to know his three kids even better than I already do. They're 13, 11 and 9: little adults, almost. And I find myself pulled toward and invested in and protective of them in ways I can't even explain.
It's amazing, isn't it, the sort of primal tug one can feel toward family, at least--or especially--if one's experience of family has been a relatively positive one? It makes me understand tribalism, tribes being extra-large families of a kind.
The tug I'm talking about seems almost to be encoded in my genes or something. It feels that fundamental and visceral and automatic. I love the three little people my brother and his wife have produced, and I want the best for them. And, yes, maybe a big part of that is because I've been taught and conditioned to feel these feelings, by the rituals and the articulated values of my family through time. But that doesn't fully explain my sense of connection to them.
I certainly see their weaknesses, their faults. Sometimes they're very entertaining, but sometimes much less so. None of that shakes my commitment to them, which runs deeper than any of that, and which isn't, I'll shamefully admit, expressed through time spent with them. Six months can go by between our visits, though four is more likely. Doesn't matter. I'd be with them in an instant if one of them really needed that.
Where does that come from? And why does simply looking over at them as they watch the end of a Yankees game or as they take their last bites of dinner provide such gentle contentment?
I don't want or mean to romanticize family, which can make demands, be inconvenient, be disappointing. In a family acrimony bubbles up quickly and comes easily to a boil; injustices are perpetrated, feelings overlooked, insults inflicted.
Even so, there's a peace and a sense of belonging. There's a bond that transcends a moment's circumstances, and that doesn't even need to be nurtured much by physical contact or frequent communication.
The other day a cousin came over to my apartment for what was supposed to be a brief visit and for a specific purpose. She ended up staying for 90 minutes as we chatted, wine glasses in hand, with an ease and candor that suggested that these chats of ours happened all the time. In truth we hadn't talked like that in many, many years.
But she was family. I felt that in my very bones.
Asked and Answered, Part 2
When I meet restaurant lovers, New York Times readers and people familiar with my memoir, certain questions come up time and again. As I did in a post earlier this week, I'm reproducing some of those questions, along with my usual answers, so that they're more easily and widely accessible to anyone curious about these topics.
Q: In an era when critics are frequently recognized, are restaurant reviews as valid?
A: Yes, I think so. First off, critics have long been recognized. In big and sophisticated cities where the economic stakes are high and where restaurateurs are savvy, the major critics quickly become visually known. Restaurateurs will find a way. I remember, in my first months as the Times's critic, being gawked at by industry people who would walk into a place where I was dining, stand in the vestibule for a few minutes just for the purpose of laying eyes on me, and then leave. I learned through the grapevine that they had been alerted and summoned by the staff where I was eating, and they wanted to give themselves a better shot at spotting me should I ever walk through their front doors.
Bloggers' and industry people's ability to post and share photos on the Internet---and to take pictures surreptitiously with cell-phone cameras---have made it harder for critics to keep a low physical profile. That's certainly true. But critics can still, with pseudonyms and fake phone numbers and such, keep restaurants guessing about when they might come. And restaurants suddenly faced with a critic in the dining room can't change the menu instantly. They can't go shopping right then for better ingredients. They can't get a better service staff, or re-train the line cooks, etc., etc. While a recognized critic's portions may be slightly different from another person's, and while the kitchen may take special care with the order going to a critic's table, the fundamentals that make the restaurant great or mediocre remain in place. And while the service can get better for a critic, it can also get worse: hyper-solicitous, nervous, intrusive.
At the end of the night, a recognized critic still has plenty of insight into the merits of a restaurant. And the only way to have truly physically anonymous critics would be for publications to change critics every three to six months. There'd be no benefit to that. Readers wouldn't be able to figure out how a given critic mirrors or departs from their tastes, and the critic wouldn't develop the long-term frame of reference that helps him or her judge merit in the context of what has and hasn't been achieved in a given city.
Q: Where are you eating tonight?
A: In every city I visit, several people ask me this question, and it always makes me smile, because there's usually such a local-pride sweetness embedded in it. The questioner wants to hear that there's a local establishment I'm dying to try, or wants to know what about his or her city caught an outsider's eye.
But my answer, usually, is, "I don't know." Or, "Nowhere, really." And I mention that for the following reason: too often, those of us who swim deeply in the food culture of the moment give the impression that every dining choice made is a deeply considered one, that life is a series of carefully researched, freighted judgment calls about the content, and destination, of every single meal. But is life really lived that way? Can it ever be? Do any of us really have the time or energy (or budget) for that?
I know I don't. And as often as not, when I wrap up a day on the road around 9 p.m., I'm tired enough or eager enough for a solitary moment or interested enough in NOT thinking so hard about eating and food that I just get room service, or plop myself on a bar stool at a restaurant that I select spur-of-the-moment, or do something along those lines. I make a deliberate decision NOT to deliberate too much. I eat incidentally, serendipitously, in the service of basic nourishment, not epicurean enlightenment. I've never had a room-service burger I hated, maybe because I could never hate the indulgence of eating something in bed, with a bad TV rerun of some kind playing a few feet away, and with the knowledge that someone else has cleanup duties.
In fact, the reality of incidental, catch-as-catch-can eating was underscored for me when, at the request of the New York magazine Grub Street web site, I kept track of six days of eating. They debriefed me at the end of it. The results were published recently as part of their New York Diet series. Here they are: http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2010/07/frank_bruni_succumbs_to_heat-i.html
And they show a mix of thoughtful and thoughtless eating. Which is the mix I think most of us have in our lives.
That said, I tripped across a few memorable meals on the road. The relatively new restaurant Frances, in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco, is an American bistro of sorts that's cozy, that has a succinct and appealing menu of small and larger plates, that spotlights a very talented chef (Melissa Perello), and that has the best chickpea fritters I've ever tasted. In fact, I never loved chickpea fritters before: they always seemed to me like ostensibly virtuous but less satisfying alternatives to the thick-cut French fry. But the Frances fritters are somehow custardy on the inside, providing a textural contrast that no French fry could. Wow.
I was also struck anew by how much and how wonderfully coffee culture in this country has advanced over recent years, and by how the West Coast has led the way. In Portland, all around, were coffee alternatives to the big chains, places that had individual spirits, like Heart, where I had coffee between appointments one morning. And in San Francisco, the individually made cup of drip coffee I had at Blue Bottle was, seriously, one of the best cups of coffee I've ever had. I grew sad as I reached the bottom of the cup, the way I do when my dinner plate is almost clean. I didn't want the pleasure to end.
Q: Did you get a lot of interesting feedback, after "Born Round" was initially published, about being a man talking about disordered eating, which people more often associate with women?
A: All in all, the many book readers who sent me emails telling me they recognized their own troubled relationships with food in my story were more often women than men. But it wasn't a big disparity. And I did notice this: the men who wrote did so in a much more emotional vein, saying expressly that they have long felt isolated, in terms of how few men talk openly about their food and body-image problems.
But the more interesting---and, quite honestly, upsetting---reaction I got was from some people in the therapeutic community, who initially, upon hearing about the book, reached out to me, excited about the prospect of a new spokesperson for eating-disorder awareness. (Something, incidentally, I was neither volunteering, nor refusing, to be.) Once some of these people read the book, they pulled quickly back, upset that my story was of someone who got past the worst of his disordered behavior on his own, without a prolonged struggle and without therapy, and upset that I didn't write the words "eating disorder." One even said to me: "I'm worried about you. I don't think you've dealt with your issues at all." Another warned me of the hostile reaction I could count on getting from mental health professionals.
I was stunned. I hadn't been reaching out to, nor running away from, any particular group or orthodoxy. I hadn't consciously tried to use or tried NOT to use any particular language. I had written a memoir, a personal story, in the most personal and logical and (I hoped) compelling and readable language I could. And I could only portray and relate my own experience and truth; if that story didn't gibe with approved messages and lessons, then it simply didn't. It wasn't an attempt to contradict or challenge such messages and lessons. In fact, I think I probably SHOULD have spent some time in therapy earlier in my life. It might have saved me some grief. But the fact that I didn't undergo extensive therapy doesn't necessarily mean I haven't made progress and am in a dangerous place because of the omission.
Two Reader Responses I Wanted to Share
These both came in recently, both from other gay men who have struggled, and still struggle, with disordered eating and related issues. I got permission to share them, with identifying information stripped out.
One of these men wrote:
"I too am a gay male with an eating disorder and I too work in the food industry. I often wonder about the connection between those 3 aspects of my life? I lost about 95 lbs seven years ago and since then I have struggled with anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder and combinations of all three. On the surface I appear a healthy weight, successful, accomplished and very much 'in control,' but no one could possibly understand the demons I have around food and how it affects every facet of my life."
He added, during a subsequent exchange:
"There is no doubt in my mind that my choice of profession and industry are linked to my eating disorder. In fact I sometimes even wonder if in order to overcome my unhealthy relationship with food I need to change careers?"
To his last question, I'd answer: maybe not. I'm not any kind of mental health authority, and I don't know him well, so I can't make any strong recommendation. I can only say what was true for me. And for me, it seemed that the food paradise of Italy and then the task of restaurant criticism and related food writing allowed me to channel a food obsession in the direction of quality and not just quantity. Can obsessions be re-channeled? Is that one solution to them? My gut tells me that worked, to SOME extent, for me. I say to some extent because I don't think I have my problem licked, really, and because other elements helped me get healthier, too.
As to whether being gay has had an impact on his problem, I do think that gay men and straight women, because they seek the romantic favor of MEN, get messages from the media and society that looks are their best weapon and the ultimate currency in that particular pursuit. So gay men and straight women probably fall prey disproportionately to anxiety about appearance, and that anxiety can take the form of body-image issues and disordered eating. I explore this a bit in the book, but not too much, because I don't pretend to have a therapeutic background, and because I'm ultimately telling a story, my story, not delving into matters of psychology from an academic or scientific viewpoint.
Anyway, the other reader I referred to wrote:
"I've lost 93 pounds, and a disproportionate amount of my life is spent making sure that one ounce never comes back on. It's almost a full time job. Some days I succeed, other days I don't. My hope is that one day I come to a place of peace about it all. From my childhood days of wrapping myself up in garbage bags and running around the back yard at night time trying to sweat off pounds before a doctor's appointment the next day, to my adult life today . . . well, somedays I wonder if I'm still running around the back yard!"
He later added:
"You know, the problem with going from a size 38 inch waist to a 28 inch waist is twofold: 1.) Everyone thinks I'm NATURALLY this thin, and I hate that anyone would admire this and; 2) Slipping up and going from 28 to 29 will surely mean 30 can't be far behind, and then 31 and the next week 41 inches! And so it goes, the 360-degree hell!"
I'm guessing a lot of you out there can relate to that sort of vigilance and fear, even if it's more extreme for him, as it was for me, than it is for you. Ours is a culture that fills us with apprehension about our bodies, and simultaneously bombards us with advertisements and other enticements to treat our bodies in ways that aren't healthy, and certainly aren't skinny-making. And so we struggle, too many of us to count.
The Working Life Through Google-Colored Glasses
During a very brief West Coast swing of appearances timed to the paperback publication of "Born Round," I visited the Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Google, among its riot of perks for employees, invites authors in to give lunchtime readings/talks/Q-and-A sessions.
Perks upon perks: you have to visit Google and see it all with your own eyes to absorb it fully. The Google "campus" is like a "Truman Show" fantasia of corporate life. And it's unlike anything I'd seen before. I feel enormously blessed to work at the New York Times, and the coffee options improved markedly with our move into a new building a few years back. But last I checked, we didn't have common areas with company-provided billiards and Scrabble equipment. Google does!
I had a publisher-provided escort driving me around the Bay Area on the day I stopped by Google, and as we pulled into one of the Google parking lots, I asked her whether there was some special event going on, because so many very young people were riding very colorful bicycles to and fro. She'd taken authors to Google before, and so she knew the score: this was Google as usual. Apparently Google leaves these bikes all around, outside of the various buildings on the campus, so that workers shuttling from one building to another for a meeting or such can just grab a bike, pedal over, and leave it for someone else to grab and do the same. (N.B.: throughout this post, I am repeating what I saw or was told by my escort and then by the Google workers who hosted and guided me; this is not the fruit of formal interviews and fact checking with, say, Google executives.)
All around the campus were patches of green and even what looked like little sculpture gardens: places for Google workers to take and have lunch, or just to chill out. Beside the patches of green and the tidily marked outdoor paths were plastic-bag dispensers for poop scooping and receptacles for the poop: Google, I was told, is a "dog-friendly workplace." Dogs were indeed in abundance. One even wandered up to my podium mid-talk, but did not ask a question or purchase a book for me to sign. Cheapskate pooch.
I poked my head into the corporate gym, which was as vast as many a New York Sports Club. And for gym users who don't want to keep sweaty clothes in their bags, there are washers and dryers on the campus.
But it's the eating that really blows you away. Everywhere I turned, it seemed, there was another small cafeteria or snack bar, each conspicuously missing anything resembling a checkout line or cash register. Google workers eat for free. They can get breakfast, lunch, dinner. They can pass by a refrigerator case, open the door, grab a huge container of Odwalla carrot juice and fill up a glass plucked from nearby. They can take third and fourth trips down a buffet line with meaty wedges of hanger steak and with freshly prepared chicken. Guacamole? Check. Chocolate pudding? You betcha.
As I wandered down one hallway in search of a bathroom, I tripped across three workers taking a break in a Google common area with a Google-provided pool table. Billiards for all! I can't swear to it, but I may have espied backgammon board, too.
I was told that most of the younger workers -- and, I should add, the median worker age seemed quite, quite young -- commute from San Francisco, which can easily take an hour and would be a real slog except that Google provides shuttles. With wireless. So you don't have to drive yourself, and you can stay online. So you can Google courtesy of Google on your way to Google, with no fear of traffic violations and little angst about your carbon footprint.
Asked and Answered
While I haven't been doing nearly as many bookstore appearances and such for the "Born Round" paperback as I did for the hardcover, I recently hit Boston and Portland and last night was in San Francisco, and I'm struck by how frequently some of the same questions come up: by how many people are curious and inquisitive about the exact same things.
So I thought it might make sense, beginning with this post, to share some of those questions, along with my usual answers, in the easily accessed format of this web site.
Q: Are sites like Yelp making newspaper restaurant reviews obsolete?
A: No, not if restaurant consumers are smart. While I think more information is, in a broad sense, a good thing, and thus applaud the existence of Yelp and its siblings, I think people need to understand and be realistic about the quality and reliability of the information they're getting. When you're reading a rhapsodic customer review on a site with user-generated content, how do you know it's not the chef's aunt or the restaurateur's next-door neighbor doing the raving? Or if you're reading a hit job, how do you know it's not by a former employee with a grudge? If the rave is authentic and unbiased, is it based on multiple entrees and multiple visits, or on one dish on one charmed night? You can't always be sure, and while a restaurant whose 500 customer reviews are 90 percent positive is probably indeed a safer bet than a restaurant whose 200 reviews are 80 percent negative, you probably can't and shouldn't come to conclusions and judgments a whole lot more specific than that. In contrast, when you're reading a review by Sam Sifton in the New York Times, you know: a.) he paid for his meal independently and isn't indebted to the restaurant; b.) he visited the restaurant multiple times and worked his way across the menu; c.) he has no economic stake in the restaurant or the review; d.) he brings to his assessment the context and authority of nightly forays into the New York restaurant world and real knowledge of what's possible, achievement-wise, in restaurant food.
Q: Is classic formal dining over? Or dying? And is that upsetting?
A: Clearly, the number of restaurants offering the white linens, the majestic floral sprays and all of that has decreased significantly. It's an idiom of dining less broadly valued than it used to be; it entails a price tag that turns many diners off. But it hasn't gone away and won't disappear soon, because it's a kind of traditional, archetypal experience that diners in a particular mood, on particular occasions, will seek. It has a merit and logic all its own--no other idiom communicates a sense of pampering and coddling any more effectively--and it connects diners to the past. In any case, the proliferation of more casual alternatives isn't really a threat to "fine dining" that signals less regard for the restaurant experience. Quite the opposite: what we're seeing is a reconceptualization of fine dining and proof that more people, straddling more age groups and more income levels, are sophisticated about food, adventurous in their appetites and insistent on participating in food culture. That culture has evolved to accommodate them. Chefs of enormous ambition and skill strut their stuff in cosmetically humble theaters that don't demand a certain code of dress, a platinum card or for that matter a two-hour commitment to a four-course meal. That's easily as exciting as the ebb of white linens is upsetting.
Q: How have your restaurant experiences changed since you turned in your critic credentials?
A: When I head out to eat, I get to respond to my own whims and wants and moods, and I can repeat experiences I like instead of moving on to the next new place, and then the next new place, and then . . . There's a downside: the absence of obligation means I haven't made it yet to restaurants I am truly curious about and want very much to try: Colicchio & Sons. Ma Peche. Those two come to mind right away. The upside is that I can be a regular again, and establish steady, comfortable, intimate relationships with restaurants in a way that a critic, for a whole host of reasons, can't. One of the shortcomings of restaurant criticism--and there's no way around it--is that the criteria and method that a critic necessarily uses aren't able to factor in fully how well a restaurant works for its regulars. A regular doesn't assess the aggregate or median quality of all 10 appetizers and all 8 entrees; a regular gets the few things that he or she has come to love and trust the most. A regular operates in a glorious self-determined rut. I go frequently now to some restaurants that, if I were forced to review them, I might not be as high on or kind to. But I'm using just a sliver of the menu. I'm dropping in at what I know will be the least frantic, most pleasant times. I'm interacting in an unloaded fashion with proprietors and staff who have a special talent for such interactions. I'm not a critic, I'm a regular.
A Soon-to-Be Parent Contemplates Kids and Food Issues
No, that's not an announcement. No kids for me. I can barely take care of myself.
But someone who read one of the most recent posts here contacted me to say the following about her imminent motherhood (and gave me permission to share it).
From here on I'm quoting her:
"I've been a loyal reader since my husband and I moved to the NYC area a few years ago. Last summer I chewed through an advance copy of Born Round on vacation and saw myself in so many of your wonderfully painful stories, especially the ones involving your grandmother and not-so-delicate balance of being a food writer with addiction issues.
But what's finally sat me down at my computer to write to you today is your blog post about children learning eating and exercising habits from their parents. I learned plenty from mine, in fact, my mother recently sent me a little flipbook called "My Personal Thoughts" that I filled out when I was about 10 years old. My three favorite things to do?
1. Singing.
2. Swimming.
3. Sneaking Food.
Today I'm seven months pregnant and have thought often about how important it is to not pass this behavior on, but have doubted my ability to do so: bingeing has been a part of my life for so long. When I read your post it felt like you were standing behind me with a boombox playing the 'Rocky' theme, cheering me on. It was just what I needed to hear, just when I needed to hear it. Thanks so much."
