The Critic at Large
I recognized him instantly. I just couldn’t recall his name, or what he did, or why I recognized him.
He stood out in a crowd, big and boxy, with a neat white beard and a linen scally cap that almost certainly hid a comb-over. His voice was a languorous growl, like the sound of a basking lion telling a lesser male to quit blocking his view. In conversation with three others at the table, only his voice could be heard across the room, giving the impression that he held court while the others listened attentively even when he paused for ten or fifteen seconds at a stretch, which might well have been the case. When he laughed, the beard broke open and revealed two wide rows of yellow teeth half as big as dominos. He laughed way too much.
“Does he look familiar to you?” I asked Amy, the waitress.
“No. Should he?”
“I feel like I’ve seen him before. Not in person. On TV maybe.”
She considered him again. “Was he Zack’s uncle on Saved by the Bell?”
“I don’t think that’s it.”
He got the check, naturally. When Amy arrived at the terminal with his credit card, I was waiting for her. She pulled the card from the check presenter and squinted at it. “Tom Whalen,” she said. “Who’s that?”
I felt a commotion inside my ribcage, like someone frantically rearranging furniture in a studio apartment. Tom Whalen was a restaurant critic. At one time he’d had a column in a glossy lifestyle monthly. He might have had it still, but I hadn’t seen the magazine in a few years. He also appeared regularly on the midday news broadcast of a local network affiliate. I recognized him from that.
“Dessert’s on us,” I told Amy.
We’d been open for a month. Business was where it needed to be and moving in the right direction. The feedback we received from guests was overwhelmingly positive. The locals welcomed a new addition to their neighborhood dining options, and they wanted us to stick around. They were encouraging, practically all of them.
But I knew we were still in the honeymoon phase, when people would overlook our faults. It wouldn’t last forever. The reputation we gained in our first months might be indelible. We needed to rid ourselves of those faults before they drew wider attention – the sort of attention enjoyed by, for instance, a local television news broadcast. Unlike the friendly folks from the neighborhood, a professional food critic wasn’t apt to spare our feelings.
I stationed myself by the front door, knitting my brow to look absorbed in the reservation book as the party rose and put on coats. Tom Whalen was truly commanding. He stood about six-foot-four in a flower-print guayabera that draped over a considerable paunch. His wife was pretty solid herself, and the winter coat he helped her into gave her the look of a chipmunk on the eve of hibernation. The other couple were around the same age as the Whalens but by appearance were poised to outlive their hosts by twenty years.
I decided not to let Whalen know he’d been made. I worried it might offend his sense of critical propriety and force him to be harsher in his review than he’d otherwise be inclined. Better he left with the idea that free desserts and the schmoozing he was about to endure were courtesies we extended to everyone. As they reached the front door I put on my most confident smile.
“How was everything tonight, folks?”
“Good,” Tom Whalen proclaimed, rattling china on nearby tables. “You’re the owner?”
“Charlie Pym.” I offered my hand and he seized it emphatically.
“Tom Whalen,” he said. “How’s it going so far?”
“So far so good," I said, idiotically. "Still ironing out the wrinkles.” It had become a sort of mantra.
“Well, best of luck. It’s a tough business to be in.”
“I’m starting to learn that,” I said, my eyebrows raised to emphasize just how astonished I was to find that owning a restaurant wasn’t a simple matter. I have a terrible habit of playing the rube for people when I know it gratifies them. I only do it with people I’m hoping to get something from, but that doesn’t make me any less disgusted with myself when I think of it afterward.
“Hang in there,” Tom Whalen reassured me. “It’s a tough business, but I think you’ve got something good here.”
“Well, thanks, Tom. I really appreciate that.”
When the staff had gone home, I sat alone at the bar in my grasping, lurching, shaky-legged toddler of a restaurant and learned more about Tom Whalen online. He had a website, which surprised me a bit, considering his age. It was full of photos of Tom and friends at a variety of local eateries. He seemed to travel in a crowd of middle-aged couples, all of them jockeying to get closest to him.
More relevantly, he hosted a Saturday radio show on a very popular station. Every Saturday. Over the past couple of hours, I’d managed to quiet the panicked voice in my head – the one that kept saying, over and over again, But we’re not ready to be reviewed yet! – by reminding myself that he wasn’t necessarily there to review us. Even critics have social lives. Sometimes dinner and drinks with friends is just that.
But now I realized that every goddamn Saturday Tom Whalen took to the radio and discussed the local restaurant scene. How on earth could he not talk about the place he’d just been to, a place that opened last month and occasionally undercooked the flatiron steak and overseasoned the mushroom risotto? The man had three hours of airtime to fill. Of course he’d review us.
For the next few days, the impending judgment of Tom Whalen was never far from my mind. He’d come in on a Tuesday. By Friday I was trying to convince myself his review wouldn’t matter. How many listeners could he have anyway? A few thousand? Who listens to AM radio on a Saturday afternoon?
I had no idea. I only knew I didn’t. It could be millions.
But hey, I told myself, any publicity is good, right? At least people will hear about us.
And what will they hear? He could savage us. Do you seriously imagine his listeners will disregard every brutal critique he levels and remember only the name of the restaurant?
What brutal critique? He said he liked us! He said we’ve got something good here!
Of course he did, you fool. He was out with friends. Do you think he’d tell you to your face if they all hated it? And besides, who knows what happened after they left? Maybe he spent the rest of the night on the toilet with his insides wrestling some vicious amberjack parasite as he pounded the wall and roared, “Charlie Pym, I will fucking destroy you!”
I clearly wasn’t ready to relax. I also wasn’t ready to stop dwelling on it, and so I resorted to a sort of fatalistic acceptance of the worst case scenario, and then I set about getting the restaurant ready for what might turn out to be our last busy night.
Calls were coming in steadily. I’d just finished taking one reservation when the second line rang. I switched over and gave the new caller our standard greeting.
“Is this Charlie?” the caller said, with a purr I could feel in my hand. This time I knew exactly who it was, although again I didn’t let on.
“Tom Whalen here. I was wondering if you had some time next week to sit down and talk.”
(Continued in "The Lion's Share")
