Food Whore

by Jessica Tom

  I racked my brain for ways I could double down. Maybe send something to his editors? Or stake him out at a new restaurant with his inevitable new “protégée”? Or maybe I could work for him again, and take him down from the inside? I’d build up more evidence and post it online. I’d have to live in the shadows again.

  Or perhaps I could let him win. What good would it do me to speak up? He’d just deny it and drill me into the ground.

  “Listen,” Carey said. “Let’s just get this out in the open. We know you were the one who posted that recording on the Wiki.”

  Of course she would know. I felt a surge of resistance, but before I could make any excuses for myself, Carey spoke up again. “I own the site and know who posts what.”

  Jake stepped closer. “And this morning, I checked Michael Saltz’s bill. I saw that he didn’t order the pork with ras el hanout, as he had said in the review. Is that what you were talking about in the basement?”

  I clenched my jaw and instinctively wanted to deny everything. I had been doing it for so long, thinking that playing dumb and keeping silent would protect me.

  “You must be incognito, discreet.” The words panged in my head.

  But if I didn’t come clean now, with ­people who were offering compassion—­and maybe even understanding—­then when would I? I didn’t want to be alone anymore.

  I had to accept their help, but before that, I had to accept that I had failed, too. Lied, cheated, deceived. I had done it all and I had to own up to it. I didn’t want to drag myself and my name into this, but if I wanted to bring him down, I had to take the stand.

  “Yes,” I confessed, feeling my body rebelling against my words. “I was the one who loaded that recording on the Wiki. And I spoke to Michael Saltz about his dinner. It started off innocently. He asked me what I thought of some dishes. I never should have told him—­”

  Jake stopped me right there. “You’re entitled to your opinions, though I wish you had channeled them differently. But let’s focus on Michael Saltz, the real bad guy here.”

  Angel crossed his hands over his chest and said, “He’s not the only bad one. Today I heard what happened at Room 113. I wasn’t sure what to think of it, but now it’s clear. I always thought Chef Pascal was an upstanding man, but not anymore.”

  I heaved and tried to control my shaking body. Lunch ser­vice was getting a bit sloppy. ­People were sitting up from their chairs, looking for help. ­People were standing in the foyer, waiting for tables. And yet Carey, Jake, and Angel stayed with me.

  I had been “made,” and it felt great.

  I looked them each in the eyes, wondering how I could thank them for believing in me and sticking up for me, even when I’d done Madison Park Tavern harm.

  In his expert maître d’ way, Jake read my mind.

  “I know you’re no angel,” he said. “I cannot fathom the lies you had to tell to get in this position. But I’m sure you’ve paid the price personally and we all agree . . .”

  Carey grabbed Angel’s sleeve so we all stood in one tight circle. “We all deserve second chances,” she said with a swift and certain nod.

  “Right,” Jake said, smiling. “And now we’ll help you get yours.”

  “A second chance?” I asked, bewildered. That was the best I could have asked for. A do-­over.

  Jake pressed his palms together. “Yes. Come back in an hour so we can finish up lunch ser­vice. And then it’s on.”

  That gave me just enough time to talk to one more person who I thought could help. I rushed back to the apartment, and thankfully, Emerald was there.

  “Hey,” I said, catching my breath.

  “Hey,” she said curiously, because we still weren’t quite sure how to interact with each other after her confession about her mother.

  “Emerald . . . I need to tell you something.”

  I told her everything. My heart beat faster after every sentence. Showing her myself wasn’t easy—­I cringed at every word—­but I wanted to do it.

  I had never spoken so much to Emerald. She stayed quiet until I finally said, “And I’m sorry our friendship got off on the wrong foot. I’m glad you were a good friend to Elliott. Better than I was. Can we give us another shot?”

  Emerald chuckled darkly, and I realized that maybe the friendship boat had already passed us by. “It’s funny,” she said. “I’ve thought about why we were never friends, even after you found out about my family. ­People think secrets bring them together, like they’ve made some sort of promise to one another. But that’s not true, is it?”

  “Yeah,” I said, staring at the wall. “I guess not.” I tried to smile, but it was hard in the face of rejection. “Okay, see you later, then,” I said, sorry and resigned. I couldn’t blame her for not wanting to get involved.

  I turned around to go back to the restaurant, then felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned into Emerald’s hug. For a split second, I resisted. But then I couldn’t hold it anymore.

  I hugged her back and started to cry, not individual tears but a steady sheet that washed everything away.

  “You’ll be okay,” she said, and her voice was that same Emerald honey, soothing and sweet. “I’ll help you out because I know how it is. You think you’re the one who keeps the secret, but really it’s the secret that keeps you.”

  Chapter 33

  AFTER SOME PLANNING, JAKE, CAREY, ANGEL, EMERALD, and I went to the New York Times office the next Monday. Jake had a connection to the food editor, Jay Garvey, and all he needed to say was that he had information about the Michael Saltz incident.

  Jay took our meeting right away. I had never stepped inside the New York Times building, and as I walked through the doors, I felt my college self clinging to every wonder: the bold New York Times logo over the front desk, the hallway lined with more than five hundred little screens displaying snippets of the day’s news. My heart gripped itself just as it had when I’d first seen my name on the front page of the Food section almost three years ago.

  We rode the elevator to the sixth floor, where the Food, Home, and Style sections had their offices. I saw cubicles filled with nothing but pillows, candles, and huge coffee table books. Over on the left, a team of stylish, animated ­people argued over a fashion spread.

  Jake led the way to Jay Garvey’s office. He had floor-­to-­ceiling windows that made it seem like you could walk right into the air. You were at the perfect height for Times Square: close enough to see ­people’s faces, and yet far enough to view the patterns in their movements.

  We sat and I briefly introduced myself and explained my relationship to Michael Saltz. I said that I was Guest 59.

  Jake spoke about how odd it was that I had been placed in the Madison Park Tavern NYU internship. I had expressed no interest in it, and so many others had. After discussing with Dean Chang, he believed Michael Saltz had altered and resubmitted my application materials under a false email address so I’d be placed there and he could “accidentally” bump into me. Then, he described the basement tapes and the wrong pork, how the restaurant didn’t get a fair review. He didn’t say it explicitly, but he implied that the New York Times had already lost some credibility among restaurateurs. If they didn’t take action against Michael Saltz, they’d lose it all.

  Then Carey explained her Wiki and showed a graph of Michael’s irregular patterns. Usually critics wouldn’t select a restaurant that had been reviewed in the last four years, but Michael Saltz did, likely because he was relying on his previous visits. She had also asked for private Wiki access to all the restaurants reviewed by Michael Saltz in the past eight months. Besides Bakushan, every single restaurant surmised they had only served Michael Saltz once—­a clear departure from previous critics, who would each go at least three times in order to deliver a well-­considered review. The Times hadn’t seen the clues in his expense reports, but Carey’s data didn’t lie.
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br />   Angel spoke of the stories circulating about Room 113, where a waiter had turned on me and called me—­he said this in a whisper—­a slut. A pocket of the industry already knew that Michael Saltz had a female companion. Some, like Pascal and Felix, had attempted underhanded means to use that to their advantage. But as Angel said, restaurant ­people protect their own, and that’s exactly what he was doing.

  Finally, Emerald spoke up. She talked about seeing me with a personal shopper at Bergdorf Goodman, after she had personally witnessed my nonexistent fashion IQ at Trina. She said when we had first corresponded, I was cheery and bright, but once I moved to New York, I had gotten furtive, holing myself up deep into the night, disappearing without telling anyone where I went. She said my ex-­boyfriend Elliott used to call her to find out where I was and she’d never known what to say.

  I looked at everyone as they spoke about me. Flickers of pride and shame and embarrassment flashed inside me, but I tried not to flinch.

  Jay listened to everything with little reaction: a true unbiased newsman. He was a tall, middle-­aged man with thick, wavy blond hair. He wore a stiff powder-­blue dress shirt, opened at the collar and at the sleeves. The light from outside gave him a golden glow, and he looked like a decent family man, the opposite of Michael Saltz.

  Everything Jake, Carey, Angel, and Emerald had said was true. A painful, blinding truth that humiliated and condemned me. But my heart was filled with gratitude and love. Michael Saltz could never bring me down, not when I had friends like these.

  “Mr. Garvey,” I said finally, “that’s my story.”

  He shook his head. “Okay, thank you all for coming. I’ll need to process this, but I’ll be in touch if I have questions.”

  We thanked him and put on our coats, but not before Jay asked me one last question. He had just heard the story from every angle, from a range of trustworthy ­people, but he questioned one small detail.

  “Why did you call yourself Guest 59? Why not ‘Jane Doe’?”

  I did it, of course, because Elliott had once told me fifty-­nine reasons he loved me, and I had given him fifty-­nine reasons back. It was a real number, solid and true.

  If things had turned out differently, he would have been here at the New York Times office with all of us. But I had betrayed him—­plain and simple. Not because I was tricked or intimidated. I did it on my own. It was my way of having him there: his love and his support, his essential Elliottness.

  “Oh, no reason,” I said. Some things were better kept private.

  Chapter 34

  FIVE MONTHS LATER, I WAS STILL WORKING IN A RESTAURANT.

  “Right this way, sir,” I said to a man standing in line at Reststop. He slung his tweed jacket over his arm. It was too warm and beautiful a day for cold-­weather fabrics. Memorial Day had just passed and the wait for brunch was more than an hour and a half. Brooklyn had officially shifted into summer. I brought out some lemonade and iced tea to those waiting and bowls of water and bones for their dogs.

  Reststop had started as an experiment in January. Jake, tired of being harangued by Gary Oscars, had quit. He’d wanted to test a new restaurant concept before trying to get investors for a full-­time place and opened a temporary spot in a Brooklyn restaurant that had gone out of business, but still had some months left in its lease. By February, the place was packed.

  At first, Reststop hadn’t gotten the greatest reviews. ­People had said the food was too simple, or too greasy, or the ser­vice was too friendly or absent-­minded. Of course, Jake had freaked out and started rethinking the whole concept. But eventually, he’d realized that the reviews meant nothing, not to the neighborhood ­people who brought their family, friends, and business partners and considered the restaurant an extension of their home. After a ­couple of months, investors were pushing to open a permanent location as soon as possible.

  I had decided to take spring semester off and wasn’t sure I’d return to grad school at all. I don’t think they would have taken me if I’d wanted to, though. Because of me, the program had been shamed in the most public way possible. Dean Chang stopped talking to me altogether and corresponded only through her assistant. She didn’t want to stick her neck out for me, and I didn’t blame her.

  After our visit to Jay Garvey, the New York Times had published a short update to the allegations and the press jumped on me. I released one statement that confirmed everything and tried to suggest that was the last I ever wanted to talk about it.

  But that didn’t stop the blogs and food pundits. Pictures of me at various restaurants surfaced. Some ­people called me a slut or a spineless opportunist. Others came to my defense and said that they would have done the same in my situation or that Michael Saltz had brainwashed me and I was lucky to have made it out alive. After a while, I stopped reading the articles. I had already spent my fair share of time obsessing over Internet chatter.

  Jake had suggested I get a publicist for the short term, and I even interviewed a ­couple. But they were interested in the spin, casting me as a naïve victim, the talented ingenue run over roughshod by the greedy and impotent older man. I could see why the story had appeal, but I didn’t want to take that way out. I had done enough spin on my own and now I just wanted to take what was coming.

  The New York Times hired an outside investigator who spoke to me for an entire afternoon. I thought she’d come with some agenda to protect the Times, but she was more pleasant and curious than judgmental. She even told me, off the record, that Michael Saltz had always been a polarizing figure at the Times office. Even when he’d allegedly had his sense of taste, he was always getting ­people to do things for him, preying, she said with downturned eyes, on the vanity of newbies.

  Michael Saltz, of course, was fired.

  Two weeks after, a full debrief was published on the front page of the A section, which included action steps the paper was taking. They would revisit all the restaurants that had been reviewed while Michael Saltz was incapacitated: Madison Park Tavern, Le Brittane, even Bakushan. The whole lot of them. Part of me was sad that all my work was being undone, but I also knew that it was the right and fair thing to do.

  Pascal had texted me:

  A RE-­REVIEW? I COULD USE YOUR HELP BRAINSTORMING IN THE KITCHEN. ;)

  I deleted our chat history, then blocked his number.

  My name was finally in the New York Times again, but not for the reasons I wanted. The article had said I was his “unwilling accomplice” and that I had been coerced with “bribes and intimidation.” There was truth to that, but even the New York Times couldn’t get to the heart of the matter: that coercion had only gotten me halfway. The article didn’t delve into ambiguities, preferring to neatly pack everything in black-­and-­white so the scandal could be easily buried. I got away, while the public cast Michael Saltz as the pariah. He became the villain, and I the clueless victim. In the end, I didn’t even need a publicist.

  I knew it was unfair, but I had already confessed to the ­people who mattered. My parents took it hard and had a difficult time wrapping their heads around my double life. They never would have expected that from me. I tried to ban them from ever googling my name, but it didn’t work and I had to spend a lot of time on the phone trying to convince them, at the very least, not to read the comments.

  The paper named an interim critic, the woman who had been doing the excellent “$25 and Under” column for five years. Eventually, she officially got the job.

  It took about six weeks for things to settle down. The moment that happened, Jake emailed me and asked what I was up to. I would have thought I’d be the last person he’d want working at his restaurant again, but he was having a hard time getting competent waitstaff at a temporary restaurant.

  So I helped out. Finally I was done hiding, done explaining. Now I could just work.

  I worked with Jake to develop the full Reststop concept in addition to
playing hostess, coat check attendant, waitress, and sometimes sommelier. I worked in the weeds with everyone else, and also got to take a bird’s-­eye view of the business itself. I liked throwing myself into restaurant life, though it didn’t satisfy my desire to write.

  Still, it was a totally different place and had totally different clientele than Madison Park Tavern or any of the other places I had been to with Michael Saltz, and I liked working there. Eventually Jake had let go of any hesitations about me and became a mentor and a friend.

  Just as brunch was slowing down, Carey dropped by, hung up her coat, and started making herself a latte, as if she worked there. Jake had tried to poach her from Gary Oscars, but she’d stayed on and was now working on Gary’s business development team.

  “Here,” she said, and handed me a thin book decorated with small green flowers. The only words I could understand on the cover were Angel Martinez.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “It’s Angel’s self-­published collection of poetry. It’s in Spanish but I wrote in some translations for you.” She opened to a random page and I saw she had written, in purple pen, every single line for me. “It was fun. A good break from restaurant stuff.”

  “Hey!” Jake called from the kitchen doorway. “No moles in the restaurant!”

  “I come in peace,” Carey said.

  “Does Gary know that?” Jake said under his breath, but loud enough that we could hear.

  Carey and I giggled to each other.

  “I get off at three, then we can go,” I said. Carey gave me a thumbs-­up and went back to her coffee and book. That afternoon, we planned to make and photograph a peach tart for my new blog. It covered recipes, restaurants, New York, and writing. Barely anyone read it, but I did it anyway.