"The Book of Eating," by Adam Platt

Again with the restaurant memoirs, you might be thinking! Longtime readers of this blog know that I love restaurants and I love restaurant memoirs. I have read at least a couple of dozen of these over the years, starting with the late Anthony Bourdain’s notorious and wildly popular “Kitchen Confidential,” and most recently our own San Francisco chef Dominique Crenn’s “Rebel Chef” and New York’s David Chang’s “Eat a Peach.” In between, the food world memoirs I have read include those by Bianca Bosker, Frank Bruni, Phoebe Damrosch, Betty Fussell, Gabrielle Hamilton, David Kamp, Danny Meyer, Ruth Reichl, Eric Ripert, Marcus Samuelsson, and Kim Severson. I just finished restaurant critic Adam Platt’s “The Book of Eating” (Ecco, 2019). For many years I have subscribed to New York Magazine, and read Platt’s restaurant column there. Although I do not live in New York, I enjoy keeping up a bit with the restaurant scene there. And I have always liked Platt’s down-to-earth persona and style in his reviews and articles. This memoir completely comports with his magazine pieces. In addition, I was fascinated with his stories of his upbringing in Asia (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, China) as the son of a U.S. diplomat. Most of his stories of those days, besides showing a very happy family, are about his family’s eating adventures in those countries, sometimes with the whole family and sometimes with his two brothers roaming the cities and trying every kind of food available. Perhaps one reason for my being so intrigued by these stories was the way they resonated with my own upbringing in Asia, in my case in South India. As I started thinking about this connection, food memories came to life, and I became quite nostalgic. In my case some of the foods were basmati rice, biryani, pilau, all kinds of curries, dosa, idli, mulligatawny, papadams, patchidi, perigoo, chaat, pulaharam, guavas, mangos, custard apples, saportas, and more. I remember feasts with food served on stitched together waxy palm leaves. I remember vacations on the beach when we would buy fish straight from the returning fisherman and cook them immediately. I remember going with my friends to the bazaar near our boarding school in the Palni Hills and eating all kinds of food, and drinking tea tossed in the air between two containers. I also, more mundanely but also pleasurably, remember “food parcels” from Canada, including American goodies of various sorts, especially candy bars. Back to Platt’s memoir: He writes of his various jobs as a journalist, his travels, and his gradual focus on becoming a restaurant reviewer/critic. He tells some amusing stories about the process of reviewing, as well as about various people in the food world, some very famous, with whom he interacted along the way. He obviously loves his work. But not all of being a critic is exciting and glamorous; he also tells of eating hundreds of mediocre meals in cookie-cutter restaurants, and of dealing with much criticism of his criticism. He also tells of how things have changed since everyone can now be a critic on the Internet, on Eater and such sites, as well as on Yelp. Readership of newspapers and magazines is dwindling (alas!) and there are fewer and fewer print food writers. Platt also struggles with his weight, and writes about various diets he has been on. A throughline in the memoir is his loved and loving family of origin (fun fact, by the way: one of his brothers is the actor Oliver Platt) and his own equally loving family of his wife and two daughters. Some endearingly candid photos are included. Because some of the chapters are revised versions of already-published pieces, there is some (very minor) repetition from one chapter to another. And there are a couple of sections that drag just a bit. But overall, this is a thoroughly enjoyable memoir by a writer who is companionable, down-to-earth, wry and funny, and a wonderful guide to his adventures and life in the world of food and restaurants.