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- [00:00]
Dan Kennedy
As we approach the end of the year, I'm thinking about the next Next year is the year I finally make my Spanish better than my 9 year olds. Rosetta Stone is the most trusted language learning program available on desktop or as an app, and it truly immerses you in the language that you want to learn. I can't wait to use Rosetta Stone and finally speak better than my 9 year old who's been learning Spanish in his own way. Rosetta Stone is the trusted expert for 30 years. With millions of users and 25 languages offered. Spanish, French, Italian, Korean, I could go on fast language acquisition. Rosetta Stone immerses you in many ways. There are no English translations, so you can really learn to speak, listen and think in that language. Start the new year off with a resolution you can reach today. The Moth listeners can take advantage of this Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership for 50% off, visit rosettastone.com moth the that's 50% off. Unlimited access to 25 language courses for the rest of your Life. Redeem your 50% off at Rosetta Stone.com moth today the Apple Watch Series 10 is here.
- [01:11]
Apple Representative
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- [01:40]
Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy, and today on our show, two Stories from the Food World. Our first story this week is from storyteller Steve Barnes, and the theme of the night was Lost and Found. And this is from a show that we did live up in Albany. Here's Steve.
- [02:01]
Steve Barnes
I write about restaurants here in the Capital Region, and one night I was with my friend Josh and we were leaving the restaurant Creo in Stuyvesant Plaza after having dinner. We were walking across the parking lot in Stuyvesant Plaza and I vaguely registered that there were a couple of men coming toward us. But it's a mall parking lot. You don't think anything of it? I did when it became clear they were walking toward us fast. One of them was bald and muscular and he was tightening a strap on the wrist of the fingerless gloves he was wearing. Without a word, his fist crashed into my temple. I turned to get away and he tripped me and shoved me and I Went face first into the pavement. Even in the middle of it, I remember thinking, he's done this before and I'm going to need new glasses. He came down on top of me, pounding the back of my head with his fists. He still hadn't said anything, and I was reduced to little more than stop and fuck you and ouch. I heard Josh shouting, and I felt him jump on top of the guy. The guy got Josh in a headlock, and then he paused, seemingly unsure of what he was supposed to do. By that time, some people in the parking lot had gathered and were shouting for him to stop. And he did. He stood up. He shook off Josh as if he were a blanket or a cat, and he just walked away, around the side of Creole, toward the corner of the big intersection behind the restaurant. Josh and I looked at one another. What the fuck had just happened? And we also thought, who the fuck gets beat up in the parking lot of Stuyvesant Plaza? I mean, Rotterdam Square, maybe. I could see that. But Stuyvesant Plaza is posh. It has stores like Circles Boutique and Joseph A Bank and Peaches Cafe. Josh told me the guy that came after him had just popped him a couple of times, seemingly as a distraction. And then he walked away, also without ever saying anything. Just walked around the side of Creo toward the corner of Western and Fuller. The cops found nothing that night. The only cameras at the time that were covering the parking lot were in bank ATMs, and they wouldn't have picked up anything from that distance. We learned as much from the geriatric security guard at Stuyvesant Plaza, who showed up eight minutes after. The Gilderland cops, they have the entire town to patrol. All 57.8 square miles. I googled it. And yet they got there way before he did. Josh and I told the cops we were pretty sure it was random, but. But they pointed out many details that suggested it wasn't. There'd been no robbery attempt. They'd said nothing. The obvious intent had been to separate us. And since I'd gotten so much the worse of it, it looked like I'd been targeted. I couldn't imagine for what. Later, some people would try to politicize it and say that it had been a hate crime. But if the guy is not saying, fuck you, faggot, while he's punching you in the face, or for that matter, fuck you, journalist, while he's punching you in the face, it's really hard to prove a hate crime. Others suggested it had to be in retaliation for Something I'd written, but I couldn't imagine what. I mean, I cover food and restaurants and the arts. People don't get attacked for that up here at least. My colleague Fred Lebrun, once in the 1970s, wrote a nasty restaurant review and got a dead fish fish sent to him in the mail. And as for me, an actor I'd once panned in a play came up to me at a bar and threw a drink in my face. But that was the extent of it. That night after the attack, I went home and wrote a long account for my table hopping blog. And I published it, complete with a picture of my bloody face. Because I. I was writing it and publishing it on my blog. It was my story to tell, I was in control. But then a colleague wrote a news story about it for the Times Union and it got published on the front page with that photo of my face under the headline Times Union Writer Beaten. I felt shamed. I'd been beaten. I was a victim. It only got worse when I got to work and my bosses, meaning very well, asked if I wanted the security guard to escort me to my car after work. Now they meant well, but inside I was seething because the security guard, very nice guy. The security guard was about 60 years old, all of 145 pounds. And sometimes he carried a flashlight. How pathetic was I if I needed him to keep me Safe on a 90 second walk across a lighted parking lot? But the truth was, and this really bothered me, the truth was that in those first few days I would have welcomed some company walking across that lot at night. I'd lost my sense of security. It was profoundly gone. And there were times when I was genuinely afraid because I didn't know what had happened. I couldn't know that it wouldn't happen again. And so there were moments where I was truly scared and feeling like that was so alien to me that I couldn't even really identify what it was. At first, months went by with no developments. And then one day, I remember it was December 24th. The detectives handling the case showed up with a photo array. Very clearly there was the guy that was the bald guy that had attacked me. Absolutely no question about it. The cops thanked me, didn't say anything more, and they left. A few hours later, a colleague of mine who covers crime came over to my desk. He'd apparently gotten a tip similar to the one that the cops got and he had me pull up a profile page on a website for professional mixed martial arts fighters. There he was, the same guy, absolutely no question about it. The name meant nothing to me, but it was the guy. I was flabbergasted. A professional MMA fighter had attacked me. I mean, me, come on. While I'm skilled at verbal combat, I mean, I'm really good at arguing and I love to do it, but physical violence I have almost no experience with. I mean, prior to the night of that attack, the last time I'd been hit in the face in anger was 28 years before in gym class in sixth grade. And so here's a tip for you. If you want to beat me up and you're going to use a surprise attack to do it, you don't need to be a professional mixed martial arts fighter to beat me up. It's just talk about being overqualified for a job. After the fighter was arrested, the press had a field day with it. I even made Gawker. That snarky Manhattan based news site Gawker, had previously picked up on a story I'd written about two Albany bar owners who hated one another so much they decided to take their differences out in the boxing ring. Gawker connected that earlier story to the story of the fighter attacking me and said, the Albany food world is all about punching people in the face. The MMA press covered the story as well. They criticized the fighter for making the profession look bad. And they also noted that his nickname in the ring was the punching bag and that he had a record of three wins and 30 losses. Well, I guess that would be four wins and 30 losses. They said the punching bag finally found somebody he could beat up. An out of shape, middle aged food critic. I was indignant. Middle aged? This was five years ago, so I was less middle aged then. The fighter's brother was identified as the other attacker and he was arrested because the woman in his life was pregnant and he wanted to put the whole thing behind him as quickly as he could. He took a plea deal to a lesser charge and was sentenced to community service. But the assistant district attorney handling the case against the fighter screwed up the paperwork so badly, the judge threw out the case against him. He could never be prosecuted for attacking me. Embarrassed, the district attorney changed tactics. He appointed a senior ada, someone who normally prosecuted murders, to try to develop a case against a restaurant owner whom they believed had hired the MMA fighter to attack me. Now, this had been rumored all along, and in fact, the day after the attack, the chef at the owner's restaurant had called me and she, crying, sobbing, apologizing, said she'd heard him threaten me, but she figured he'd never do anything about it. She was so sure he was responsible that she quit her job. I mean, I knew the guy, and he was clearly scum, but he'd always been civil to me, so it seemed preposterous that he would actually do this. But embarrassed by their screw up, the DA went after him. And they investigated. They empanelled a grand jury, and they got an indictment. An indictment for a misdemeanor assault case. I get the unfairness here. Every week in the Capital Region, people are assaulted far worse than I was. And some of their cases lapse or fall apart completely. I know I talked to some of them. They emailed me, and they called me. They said, get the DA to pay attention to us again. But because my case was prominent and because they'd screwed it up so badly, they were determined to get that indictment. And they did. Two years after the attack, the restaurant owner went on trial for criminal conspiracy. It turned out he was pissed off about something I'd written, but it wasn't a review. I'd always been completely complimentary about his restaurant's food. Now he was mad about a completely accurate short news item about the fact that his restaurant had closed temporarily for just a couple of days because he'd forgotten to renew the liquor license. He was embarrassed, but when I and he told the staff that it was because of a water main break. But when I published the truth, he thought I'd humiliated him in front of his employees. And witnesses described him as sitting in meetings saying things like, we know where Barnes lives, right? And punching his fist into the palm of his other hand. Now, this is pathetic stuff, even for a wannabe kingpin in Albany. But it was also a direct affront to the First Amendment. I had told the truth and gotten punched in the face for it by a hired goon. I felt vindicated. You know, I was no longer a victim. They had tons of evidence against the restaurant owner, but all of it was circumstantial. And so the jury acquitted him. Jurors emailed me afterwards, called me. They said it was clear the guy was an asshole. We have no doubt he did it. But the way they were charged to consider the case, they had to acquit, and they did. I understand and respect that. And I knew that it was important that at least I knew why it had happened, because I developed a tremendous sense of empathy for people of random or anonymous crimes who can never say I know why this happened to me. Last summer, about three years after the trial, I was driving home very late one night and had to slow down for highway construction. And there wearing a hard hat and waving a little safety flag was the former restaurant owner. A guy who'd been this high living entrepreneur. A guy who had dated 20 year old women and driven fancy sports cars. A guy who had bragged to me about snorting cocaine off the ass of a 20 year old woman while driving a fancy sports car. There he was waving a safety flag around highway construction at 2:30am on a weekend. It had turned out that weeks after he'd been acquitted in my trial, he'd been convicted of tax evasion by a federal jury and sent to prison. The last I heard, he lives with his mother. Thank you.
- [15:47]
Dan Kennedy
Our next story is from Drew Naporent and it was told live here in New York City at Joe's Pub in 1999. So a quick warning, the audio is a little bit rough in terms of quality. So bear with the audio for this great story from Drew Naport.
- [16:06]
Drew Naporent
Okay? Last night at Tribeca Grill, a woman is checking a big fur coat. And a woman who's watching her says, do you know how many animals had to be killed to make that coat? And the woman looked back at her and said, do you know how many animals I had to sleep with to get this coat? Was it cold night? I was in Florida yesterday, so that was completely felicious. But everyone's basically taken all the stories. I was going to talk about Oregon Meats and I was going to talk about how Robert De Niro eats sushi with a fork, but Harvey Weinstein's table manners. But this is boring shit. So I'd rather tell stuff. I actually gonna just tell a story. And I think it's a good story because it's about food critics and it's about a lucky break more or less because we have about 15 restaurants now and they're in lots of different places. Most of them are in Trendec, of course, but there was a time when we didn't have a fucking thing. And I was reading the. I live on 8th street and 5th Avenue. I was reading the New York Times. Times every Sunday. Business opportunities. Because I wanted to open my own restaurant. But it's very hard to do. It might seem easy, but it's not. It takes a lot of money. Takes a lot of guts in some cases. But I saw this classified, it said 1500 square feet for $1500 a month. West Broadway location. West Broadway has become, I mean this hot soho thoroughfare. And I checked it out, little did I know it was on the Wrong side of Canal street in this very clandestine block. But we made the deal. And we made the deal and signed this lease before we had a cent of money raised to build the restaurant. Because when I was working for other people, whether it was Warner Leroy at Tavern on the Green or some of the French restaurants I worked in, there were so many people saying, you know, Drew, whenever you're ready to do your own place, we'd like to do it with you. And so, you know, we draw up these plans and we hand them to these people. And then it was a lot of lip service. And it was very difficult because at the time I was working in a place called La Grenouille, 52nd in Madison. If you imagine, I weighed 150 pounds and looked great in a tuxedo. But. And it was a very interesting time in the early 80s because there was a woman by the name of Mimi Sheridan. And if the New York Times was known for the Butcher of Broadway, Frank Rich, Mimi was the power that ate. And every Friday we'd look at the New York Times and we'd say, who did she fuck over this week? Here was a system where you could give four stars to the best restaurants, of course, and no stars to the worst. And she was continually giving no stars to people. And it was really frightening. And at the time, there weren't that. The scene wasn't that big, it wasn't that expansive. It was pretty easy to understand. You could look at New York if you grew up here like I did and say, this is kind of what New York could use or needs. And this woman had this inordinate amount of power. So I was obsessed a little bit by it. And I sort of studied the whole situation. And the minute that I was able to sign the lease for my own restaurant, she got fired, which was interesting. But the new guy by the name of Brian Miller, nobody knew. And so we were all curious because nobody knew who this guy was. In one of his earliest reviews, he really kill the place. It was a Vienna park, which had been a four star restaurant. I gave it two stars. So I was worried. I was building my own restaurant. It was going to be called Montrachet. And every single cent that I'd ever saved was in this restaurant. And I was still working at La Grenouille as a captain, but very, you know, on a part time basis. And then suddenly one day they called me from La Grenouille. Brian Miller just had lunch here. He said, really? How did you know it was Brian Teller? They said, well, he came in with Pierre Frenet. He was obviously a very famous chef, cookbook writer. And he paid with his own credit card. I said, really? I said, you know, what name do they make the reservation under? Benson? So I said, listen, you got to do me a big favor. The next time there's a Benson on the reservations, you gotta call me. I take my tuxedo to the construction site and a week later, Drew Benson for two. At 12:30, I put on the tuxedo. I take the E train. It stops on 54th street in Madison. I'm up in the tuxedo. The subway is a cool thing to do, by the way. And there. And I walk in the library. I'm not even working, but I'm like, you know, walking around. Now, there he is on the red banquette, this young guy. He would never have picked him out of a crowd where the girl's obviously not his wife. And I'm walking back and forth and I'm looking at him and let me see the check. What did he eat? And he's paying the check. And I run outside, it's the wintertime, and I get on my knee and I have this little camera. And as he's coming out of the restaurant, I'm like, taking a picture. And then as they turn to go back to the New York Times On Fifth Avenue, I'm running up the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral, taking shot after shot. I'm behind him on 47th street as they go down Rockefeller Center. And finally at 43rd street, they lose me. I developed the film. 18 shots of his fucking back. I didn't have one shot of his face, honestly. But a strange thing happened. We opened the restaurant. I'm answering the phones, I'm ordering the wine, I'm ordering the food. I'm doing the schedules. What has to be done when you own your own restaurant and the phone rings and we would never take an 8:00 reservation. You know, nobody takes 8:00 reservations in New York, right? This is something you just don't do. But that's another story. But anyway. Hi, I'd like to come for two at eight. And I said, I'm sorry, I'm very sorry, but we could take you at 6, 6:15, 6:30, or later at 9:00. Oh, gee, you know, that's just not going to do. What's the name, sir? Benson. Oh, could you hold on just one moment? Of course we have an account.
- [23:13]
Steve Barnes
No problem.
- [23:14]
Drew Naporent
2 and 8. No problem. Very good. Now we have them. We have them. And of course, they get lost coming to the restaurants because it's, you know, the restaurant's in the middle of no place on this clandestine street. So I'm looking at my watch and it's past eight, but it's okay. Cause I know where I'm gonna see them. And then this is the town where it's not what you eat, it's where you sit. And I've got my mother planted right next to him on the left. I got my girlfriend on the right. And of course, they're going to be saying things like, my, isn't this place better than Lutece? Mr. Benson, how are you, sir? It's Brian Miller. It's him. It's him. I seat them on the banquette. Side by side, they begin to order their food. And one of the dishes they order is a rabbit salad. And I don't know what it is about Oregon Meats and the food critics, but that night I went in the kitchen, turned to my chef, who will remain nameless because I can't stand the guy, and I said, I think you should put a kidney on that rabbit salad. And he looked at me rather strangely. But they started to saute that kidney. We served the first course. You had to go up to go to the bathroom. They cleared the plates and the napkin was crumbled in front of them. And of course, every little gesture in a restaurant that's trying to distinguish itself is important. So we took up the napkin to refold it. And as we lifted the napkin, out came a flying piece of fucking kidney that had been chewed and gnarled. There it is. I fucked it. It doesn't matter that my mother's been, you know, kveling at the next table. As my girlfriend leaves, I run outside.
- [25:15]
Dan Kennedy
What did they say?
- [25:16]
Drew Naporent
I have no idea. They're speaking French the whole night. It's true. So we get the phone call to fact check, and, you know, we're real depressed the whole week because, you know, that kidney that was chewed and spit out, it's very significant. But the bottom line, the review came out New French and downtown, three stars. So the guy was cool. He didn't fuck us over on the kidney. He didn't even mention the Kidney. That was 14 years ago. But one little sidebar to the story, which is very interesting, is when people. When you get something like a three star review, and back then it was very significant. It's become a little more commonplace now, but you have to understand every person's life savings in the place. And you know you're charging, by the way, we were charging $16 for a complete dinner and that included the coffee because we had this crazy Eddie mentality of we will not be under salt. We didn't have any air conditioning, but the food was good. One of the guys who had employed me in a French restaurant that I worked in called me up to congratulate me and he said, did you know that the food critic was there? I said, george, I'm not going to say one way or the other, but what I'm going to tell you is if you ever get the name Benson, just take good care of him. So about three months later, New York Times on Friday, this guy's restaurant got three stars. I call him up, I said, george, did you know that? He said, drew, it was like you were whispering in my ear. Vincent, thank you very much.
- [27:08]
Dan Kennedy
Drew Nipparent is a restaurateur. He's the owner of Tribeca Grill and Nobu, among many others. That's it for this time. Thanks for listening and we hope you have a story worthy week.
- [27:19]
Dan Kennedy is the author of the books Loser Goes First, Rock on An American Spirit. He's also a regular host and performer.
- [27:27]
With the Moth Podcast, production by Mooj Zaidie. Moth events are recorded by Argo Studios in New York City, supervised by Paul Rue West. The Moth podcast is presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public@prx.org.