Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite

Introduction

I got the phone call in early January 2004, as I looked out over the uncertain expanse of a new year.

I was in my office in Rome, and I was probably drinking an espresso. I was almost always drinking an espresso. The newspaper’s Rome bureau, like any self-respecting Italian workplace, had a proper espresso machine, and my assistant, Paola, like any self-respecting Italian, knew how to make a proper espresso. So whenever she said, "Ti serve un espresso? I said, Sì! Sì!" even if she’d last served me one just forty-five minutes earlier. An espresso allowed me to consume something without consuming anything of caloric consequence, to finagle a pleasure along the lines of eating without actually eating. And the acids and caffeine in it revved up my metabolism. I had read that somewhere. Or maybe I had simply made it up and then, as with so many of the greater and lesser food lies I’d told myself, made the executive decision to believe it.

On the other end of the line was an editor in charge of a department of the newspaper different from mine. I worked for the Foreign News desk, keeping one eye on a sinking Venice, the other on a flagging Pope. She supervised several soft sections: the Style pages, the Home pages and—the reason for her call—the Dining pages. I assessed prime ministers; she, prime beef.

But she had a thought about that. She had an idea.

Restaurant critic, she said.

I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right.

Restaurant critic, she repeated, in the middle of a sentence explaining that the job was open, that there were people at the newspaper who thought I might be right for it, and that she happened to be one of them.

She wanted my reaction. She wanted to know: How did I feel about eating for a living?

Eating for a living?

Without meaning to, I laughed.

She didn’t appreciate the robust absurdity of what she was asking, the big, fat irony of whom she was asking.

Because she had stayed put in New York while I’d moved frequently and traveled widely for the newspaper, she hadn’t laid eyes on me for the better part of a decade. She wasn’t clued in to what had happened to me during that time: the way I’d given in to my crazy hungers and crazier habits; how large I’d grown; how long I’d been trapped at that size, in that sadness; how determinedly I’d slogged my way back to a leaner, better place.

The Rome assignment had presented itself toward the end of that slog, in mid-2002, when I was living in Washington, D.C., and part of what it promised and then delivered was a clean break, a new beginning. In Rome I made friends who hadn’t known me at either my fattest or my fittest, hadn’t watched me ricochet between the two, back and forth, up and down, never at rest, never at peace. They saw me afresh: a fairly average guy in his late thirties, maybe fifteen to eighteen pounds over the strict medical ideal for someone just under five feet, eleven inches tall, certainly chunkier than the Italian norm, but broad-shouldered and attractive nonetheless. Nothing unusual. Nothing humiliating.

In Rome I ate relatively ordinary meals and I ran or went to the gym at least three times a week and I wore jeans again—I finally wore jeans again, not worrying about how much more snugly than chinos they fit. I had a serious romantic relationship, my first in more than seven almost entirely celibate years. At the beach I took my T-shirt off. Not right when I got there, and not all the time. But some of the time: if there weren’t too many narrower people around; if I was standing up or stretched out; if I’d done a decent run or workout that morning or the night before; if I was feeling light and good.

Was this how I’d be from now on? Was I finally safe?

I couldn’t know.

But some sort of confidence—maybe even courage—had apparently taken hold.

I didn’t cut the editor’s call short. With welling interest I listened as she made a case that I was a quick enough learner, a self-assured enough thinker and a nimble enough writer to set off in an unanticipated direction and try my hand at something wildly different.

And then I told her I’d consider it.

It wasn’t likely to go anywhere, anyway. In my nine years at the newspaper, I’d written about politics, religion, crime, immigration, movies, books and the Miss America pageant. I’d never written about food, not unless you counted stray paragraphs about George W. Bush’s fondness for peanut butter and Cheez Doodles, not unless you factored in a feature story about Las Vegas residents larding themselves at all-you-can-eat buffets. (That was one from the heart.)

I knew more about papal encyclicals than about Peking duck, and had little more reason to believe I’d get this restaurant-critic job than to believe I’d be anointed the next Pope. But why not revel in the compliment of being thought capable of such a stretch? Why not let the idea bounce around my head, imagine the miter on my head? It was a harmless fantasy.

And then it wasn’t.

Just weeks after that first call from the editor in New York came another: the job was mine if I wanted it.

Did I?

Saying yes would mean leaving Rome about midway through what was typically a four-year stint, and that gave me pause. While I had made my way to Sicily for stories on three occasions and had managed four trips to Florence, I was still trying to find a justification for Capri and Positano, and in time I was sure I would. And my Italian had finally progressed from deducible to out-and-out discernible. Serviceable was right around the bend.

Saying yes would also mean putting myself in the path of sometimes withering scrutiny in New York, where the newspaper’s restaurant critic had a significant effect on the fortunes of chefs and restaurateurs, who sporadically (and understandably) fought back. I didn’t long for that.

But there was, of course, an even more compelling reason not to say yes, and it came up during one more call, this one from an editor higher up the newspaper’s chain of command, an editor who had seen me over the past decade.

She wanted some reassurance, but not about my confidence in tackling this new subject matter or my comfort in switching from correspondent to critic. And not about whether I had made peace with leaving Italy, when living there had been a lifelong dream.

Speaking as a friend more than a boss, she pressed me on a different issue altogether: whether an agenda of eight to ten major meals a week in serious restaurants—a mandatory program of night after night of ambitious and sometimes excellent food—was a risk I really wanted to take. Something I could really handle.

Are you sure, she asked me, that you’re willing to sacrifice the good shape you’ve gotten into?

I was sure I wasn’t. And for reasons I was still working out in my head, I’d come to believe I wouldn’t have to. I told her that, and we agreed that I would set off on this strange adventure, in spite of a past in which appetite and circumstance had combined to such neurotic and sometimes pitiable effect.

Maybe, I thought, this decision is insane. But it was also irresistible, even poetic, the kind of ultimate dare or dead reckoning that a good narrative called for.

My life-defining relationship, after all, wasn’t with a parent, a sibling, a teacher, a mate. It was with my stomach. And among all the doubts, insecurities and second-guessing that had so often shadowed me, there was one certainty, one constant. I could eat.

Me in early 2001 (left) and more than four years later, after becoming a restaurant critic, with my sister, Adelle.

·ONE·

I’m Eating as Fast as I Can

One

I have neither a therapist’s diagnosis nor any scientific literature to support the following claim, and I can’t back it up with more than a cursory level of detail. So you’re just going to have to go with me on this: I was a baby bulimic. I

Maybe not baby—toddler bulimic is more like it, though I didn’t so much toddle as wobble, given the roundness of my expanding form. I had been a plump infant and was on my way to becoming an even plumper child, a ravenous machine determined to devour anything in its sights. My parents would later tell me, my friends and anyone else willing to listen that they’d never seen a kid eat the way I ate or react the way I reacted whenever I was denied more food. What I did in those circumstances was throw up.

I have no independent memory of this. But according to my mother, it began when I was about eighteen months old. It went on for no more than a year. And I’d congratulate myself here for stopping such an evidently compulsive behavior without the benefit of an intervention or the ability to read a self-help book except that I wasn’t so much stopping as pausing. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

A hamburger dinner sounded the first alarm. My mother had cooked and served me one big burger, which would be enough for most carnivores still in diapers. I polished it off and pleaded for a second. So she cooked and served me another big burger, confident that I’d never get through it. It was the last time she underestimated my appetite.

The way Mom told the tale, I plowed through that second burger as quickly as I had the first. Then I looked up from my high chair with lips covered in hamburger juice, a chin flecked with hamburger bun and hamburger ecstasy in my wide brown eyes. I started banging my balled little fists on the high chair’s tray.

I wanted a third.

Mom thought about giving it to me. She was tempted. For her it was a point of pride to cook and serve more food than anybody could eat, and the normal course of things was to shove food at people, not to withhold it.

But she looked at me then, with my balloon cheeks and ham-hock legs, and thought: Enough. No way. He can’t fit in another six ounces of ground chuck. He shouldn’t fit in another six ounces of ground chuck. A third burger isn’t good mothering. A third burger is child abuse.

I cried. I cried so hard that my face turned the color of a vine-ripened tomato and my breathing grew labored and a pitiful strangled noise escaped my lips, along with something else. Up came the remnants of Burger No. 2, and up came the remnants of Burger No. 1. Mom figured she had witnessed an unusually histrionic tantrum with an unusually messy aftermath. But I’ve always wondered, in retrospect and not entirely in jest, if what she had witnessed was the beginning of a cunning strategy, an intuitive design for gluttonous living. Maybe I was making room for more burger. Look, Ma, empty stomach!

It became a pattern. No fourth cookie? I threw up. No midafternoon meal between lunch and dinner? Same deal. I had a bizarre facility for it, and Mom had a sponge or paper towels at hand whenever she was about to disappoint me.

As I grew older and developed more dexterity, stealth and say, I could and did work around Mom, opening a cupboard or pantry door when neither she nor anyone else was looking, or furtively shuttling some of the contents of a sibling’s trick-or-treat bag into my own, which always emptied out more quickly.

Mark (left) and me.

I wasn’t merely fond of candy bars. I was fascinated by them and determined to catalog them in my head, where I kept an ever-shifting, continually updated list of the best of them, ranked in order of preference. Snickers always beat out 3 Musketeers, which didn’t have the benefit of nuts. Baby Ruth beat out Snickers, because it had even more nuts. But nuts weren’t crucial: one of my greatest joys was the KitKat bar, and I couldn’t imagine any geometry more perfect than the parallel lines of its chocolate-covered sections. I couldn’t imagine any color more beautiful than the iridescent orange of the wrapping for a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.

And the sweetest sound in the world? The most gorgeous music?

The bells of a Good Humor truck.

Every summer evening, just before sundown, one of these trucks would come tinkling down Oak Avenue, a narrow road near the shoreline in Madison, Connecticut, just north of New Haven, where my father’s parents owned an extremely modest summer house. Mom and Dad would frequently bring my older brother, Mark, my younger brother, Harry, and me to visit Grandma and Grandpa there, and they would later bring my sister, Adelle, the youngest of the brood by more than four years, too. We would splash in the water, slaloming between the jellyfish, and dig in the sand. And after a dinner too big to leave room for anything more, we would run from the house to the street at the first, faintest whisper of those bells.

Me, on a plump trajectory.

I knew the options by heart. There was the Strawberry Shortcake bar, coated with sweet nibs and striped with pink and white. There was the cone with vanilla ice cream and a semihard hood of nut-flecked chocolate over that, and an argument in its favor was the way the eating of it had discrete chapters: hood first, ice cream second, lower half of the cone after that.

And then there was the Candy Center Crunch bar, which was vanilla ice cream in a crackling chocolate shell, with an additional, concealed element, a bit of buried treasure. When you got to the middle of the bar, you bumped up against a hard slab of nearly frozen dark chocolate, clumped around the wooden stick. You had to chisel away at it in focused bites, so that chunks didn’t tumble to the ground—lost, wasted. The eating of the Candy Center Crunch bar lasted longest of all. Almost without fail, that’s the bar I got.

I remember almost everything about my childhood in terms of food. In terms of favorite foods, to be more accurate, or even favorite parts of favorite foods.

Age six: homemade chocolate sauce over Breyers vanilla ice cream. Mom used squares of semisweet chocolate, along with butter and milk, and as the chocolate melted in a saucepan in the galley kitchen, it perfumed the entire first floor of our Cape Cod on Manitou Trail in northern White Plains, a forty-five-minute train ride from Manhattan, where Dad worked. Mom made chocolate sauce every Sunday night, as a special weekend treat, and Mark and Harry and I got to eat our bowls of ice cream (three scoops each) and chocolate sauce in front of the TV set while watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Sundays were for sundaes and lion kills in the Serengeti. I always volunteered to carry the empty bowls back into the kitchen, because Mark’s and Harry’s were never entirely empty. There was always some neglected sauce hardening—like fudge!—at the bottom. I would sweep it up with a finger en route to the dishwasher.

Age seven: I discovered quiche. Quiche Lorraine. Mom baked it in the upper of the double ovens on the south wall of the eat-in kitchen in our Tudor on Soundview Avenue in a section of White Plains that made believe it was part of ritzier Scarsdale, which it bordered. The quiche needed to cool for about forty-five minutes before it could be eaten; I knew because I’d often kept count. The crust annoyed me. This pastry didn’t have the opulence or lusciousness of the custardy, cheesy quiche itself. Whenever Mom made her quiche, I rooted for her to cut the round pie in a crosshatched fashion, so that there would be square pieces from the center that didn’t have any pastry rim—that had almost no crust, just a thin sheet of it on the bottom. I took only those pieces, and I reached for them before anybody else could.

Age eight: lamb chops. Musky, gamy lamb chops. Mom served them to us for dinner at the table in the Soundview kitchen about once every three weeks. I ate not just the meat but also the marrow inside the sectioned bone in some chops and—best of all—the curls and strips of fat at the edges of the meat. Mark and Harry winced when I did that and merely picked at their own chops, wishing aloud that it were steak night or hamburger night or pork chop night. We were a meaty family, the chops, strips, patties and roasts filling a separate freezer in the garage. Wherever we lived, we had a separate freezer in the garage. Mom was puzzled by, and censorious of, families who didn’t. How could they be sure to have enough kinds and cuts of meat on hand, enough varieties of ice cream to choose from? Was that really any way to live?

She got that thinking from Dad, the firstborn son of Italian immigrants who arrived in the United States just before the Depression, struggled to make ends meet, and when they’d finally attained some success, held on to a sense of wonder at how far they’d traveled from the sun-scorched olive and almond groves of their southern Italian homeland. Dad grew up in a cramped apartment in a gritty section of White Plains, and the language in which he communicated with his parents was different from the one his schoolmates spoke.

Those schoolmates had nicer homes, nicer clothes. But they didn’t eat any better than he did. The Brunis never skimped on food. A well-stocked icebox and a table whose surface all but disappeared under contiguous or overlapping platters of meat, fish, pasta and vegetables gave them their sense of security in the world. The bigger the feasts, the better the times.

Even decades later, with no real cause, that thinking lived in Dad. For him a house brimming with tubs of Breyers and boxes of his beloved Mallomars was as reassuring as his diploma from Dartmouth College, which he’d attended on a full scholarship, or his master’s degree from Tuck, the business school there, which he’d paid for with ROTC money and a brief service in the Navy. It meant as much as his rapid promotions within the large accounting firm for which he worked. It was the best and clearest sign that he’d made it.

Although Mom, like Dad, had grown up in White Plains, she’d belonged to the leafier, quieter, paler part of the city: Cheever territory. Her father, Harry Wendell Frier, worked as an advertising executive on Madison Avenue; her mother, Kathryn Chapman Owen Frier, dropped him off at the White Plains train station every morning and picked him up every night. The couple would shoo their two children, Leslie Jane and Bruce, upstairs during cocktail hour, so that they could have their martinis in peace. The dinners that followed were prim, contained affairs. Harry would get eight ounces of steak. Everyone else would get four to five ounces apiece. And everyone would chew it slowly, with firmly closed mouths.

There were no such limits and no such calm at Dad’s family dinners, which were more like gastronomic rugby matches, dishes colliding, tomato sauce splattering, cutlets flying. As soon as Mom made contact with this violent, thrilling sport, she took it up, her WASP reserve crumbling in the face of Grandma Bruni’s spicy, fatty Italian sausages—fried with slivers of green pepper that soon shimmered with sausage grease—and Grandma’s fervent belief that you had to make and serve enough of every dish to guarantee plenty of untouched, extra food on the table at the end of an endless dinner. If there wasn’t some of every kind of food you’d served left over, it meant that you had perhaps run out of something before someone had gotten his or her fill of it. There was no shame greater than that.

My parents on their wedding day.

Mom was incessantly feeding people: friends who’d dropped by for a hello, not a ham and cheese omelet; whole second-grade classes, to which she’d deliver four or five batches of brownies she had made, on a whim, the midnight before; people she’d hired to do work around the house. She’d carry broad trays of tuna and egg salad sandwiches, along with deep pitchers of lemonade and iced tea, to men raking leaves in the Soundview yard. She’d insist that the cleaning woman who came once a week stop what she was doing around lunchtime and sit down to a bowl of homemade clam chowder, a plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies and, if the timing worked out just right, an episode of All My Children. Food was how she showed people the amount of time she was willing to spare for them, the sorts of sacrifices she was willing to make for them.

But while it was part courtesy, it was also part boast. She wanted to demonstrate what she could pull off. She’d chosen full-time motherhood over a formal profession, so she channeled all of the ambitions, vanities and competitive impulses that might have been satisfied by a career into the way she raised us and ran the house. Cooking was at the center of it all.

She cooked with a ferocity that belied her gentle appearance—lightly freckled skin, hair that was an age-darkened echo of her strawberry blond youth—and with an ethnic bent that also contradicted it. Apart from that once-monthly quiche Lorraine, the occasional coquilles St. Jacques and a twice-yearly beef Wellington, she focused on Italian food, and pumped it out in a volume that would have done any Mario Batali restaurant proud. She could make lasagna for eighty as easily as for eight—and, in fact, preferred the grander gesture. She put together mammoth pasta dishes for neighborhood Fourth of July parties, massive pasta dishes for PTA meetings, monumental pasta dishes for events at the YMCA. The planning and execution required many hours over many days, but they were redeemed, at the end, by the second helpings people took, the moaning they did about being too full, the sauce stains on their shirts: Mom’s version of applause.

All of us could eat, but Dad and I could eat the most. I took after him that way.

I’m told that in high school and college he was trim, and I can see that in pictures. But I remember him always carrying around extra weight. The amount varied—sometimes it was as little as ten pounds, sometimes as much as thirty, which wasn’t insignificant on a man just under five feet, nine inches tall. He’d grouse about it. From time to time he’d even diet. But he loved his lasagna and relished his Mallomars, especially after a twelve-hour day at the office. He worked many twelve-and fourteen- and even sixteen-hour days. And food was how he rewarded himself.

Before he left for work in the morning, he’d ask Mom what she planned to cook for dinner that night. He wanted to start thinking about it and to be sure that whatever he had for lunch wouldn’t make it redundant—wouldn’t spoil his appetite for it or dim his enjoyment of it. If Mom didn’t have the answer just then, he’d call her midday for an update. And if she promised meat loaf and he came home to beef Stroganoff, his whole face collapsed. Then he grumbled through the meal and maybe even skipped seconds. But that only meant he snacked more later.

At nine p.m. or so I’d often see him trudge into the kitchen or into the garage in his pajamas, on the hunt for ice cream bars or ice cream sandwiches. He’d reach into the freezer, grab two Eskimo Pies or two Flying Saucers and then, sometimes, after a moment’s hesitation, grab a third. I once went to talk to him in his and my mother’s bedroom, where he had an enormous leather recliner situated just opposite the television set, and spotted four Eskimo Pies stacked up on the table next to the chair. He had settled in for a long Yankees game, and didn’t want to take any chances that he’d need to rouse himself for another trip to the freezer.

During the Soundview years, he frequently took Mark, Harry and me into the city to watch the Yankees play baseball, the Knicks play basketball or the Rangers play hockey. Mark and Harry loved those games. I loved the peanuts, pretzels, hot dogs and ice cream bars with which vendors roamed the aisles, looking for takers.

You’re getting another hot dog? Dad would ask when he saw me waving down one of these vendors. He wouldn’t be opposed—just surprised. Mark and Harry would still be on their first hot dogs. Dad, too. The game seemed to distract them.

I was only a year and a half in age behind Mark. Harry trailed me by just two and a half years. And as in so many families with children of the same sex clustered so closely together, the three of us defined ourselves—and were defined by Mom and Dad—in relation to one another. We competed fiercely against one another, each of us looking for distinction.

Mark was the charismatic and confident one, most at ease with his peers, able to waltz into a new classroom and instantly find himself at the epicenter of the in crowd. Had there been fraternities in elementary school, he would have pledged the most desirable one, and might well have ended up its president. There were many years—in elementary school, middle school and, to a lesser extent, high school—when my social life was an auxiliary of his, dependent on his and his friends’ good graces. More often than not he put up with that. I loved him for it, and sometimes hated him for it, too.

He was also the agile one, adept at just about any sport Dad foisted upon us. Little League baseball? Mark could play the infield positions that required swift movements and a slingshot arm: shortstop, second base. Beginners’ football? He could play not only running back but also linebacker, less hampered by his size—he lagged a good three to four inches in height behind most of his peers, and always would—than he should have been. He swung a tennis racket with authority, even grace. And he hit a golf ball on the first try, not whiffing repeatedly, the way a certain envious younger brother did.

As for food, he didn’t share my curiosity about it. He ate steadily but boringly: plain bagels with butter, cheeseburgers with ketchup but no other adornments, slices of cheese pizza instead of the pizza with sausage, peppers and onion that Mom and Dad preferred. I ate both kinds of pizza and I ate Big Macs and I ate pumpernickel bagels with cream cheese. And for every bagel Mark ate, I ate a bagel and a half.

Harry was the space cadet, a phrase I first heard in relation to him. I thought Dad and Mom had coined it just to describe him. It spoke, correctly, to the way he often zoned out from the interactions and physical circumstances immediately around him, deaf to Mom’s exhortations that he turn off the TV in the family room or to Dad’s bellowing that he come out of his bedroom and take a seat at the breakfast table.

But it also carried the erroneous suggestion that Harry was floating, adrift. Hardly. What he had was an extraordinary ability to focus on one task or thought to the exclusion of all others. He could spend whole days putting together the most intricate models, whole weekends building the most ambitious backyard forts.

That ability, coupled with an innate physical coordination that rivaled Mark’s, aided him in certain athletic pursuits. Not the team sports that Mark was good at—they didn’t hold the same appeal for him. But he was the smoothest and most acrobatic of any of us on a skateboard and, later on, the fastest and most agile on skis. Golf, too, came naturally to him. He seldom got mired for three or four strokes in a sand trap, the way a certain envious older brother did.

As an eater, too, he fixated on a single object of interest and lost sight of much else. For a while his fixation was French fries, and if Dad was working late and Mom took us to Howard Johnson’s or Friendly’s, he would get two orders of fries for dinner, then a third for dessert. He’d still be eating fries while I’d be eating the most rococo sundae or banana split on the menu. During another phase his fixation was bacon. In a restaurant at breakfast time he’d order an extra side of bacon to go with his bacon and eggs, and he’d leave the eggs untouched.

But if none of his special foods were around, he merely picked at what was in front of him, not so much disappointed as disinterested, never complaining of hunger or, as best as I could tell, experiencing it. If the meal Mom served wasn’t to his liking, he just left three-quarters of it on his plate, even as she idly threatened to put the peas he had passed over in a sandwich for lunch the next day. If the meal Mom served wasn’t to my liking—a rare event—I ate all of it anyway. Food that was only marginally appealing beat no food at all.

I was the most avid reader of the bunch, intent at one point on working my way through every children’s novel that had recently won the Newbery Medal: Island of the Blue Dolphins, Sounder, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I had more vanity about schoolwork and grades, lording my report cards over Mark and Harry, even though theirs were nearly as good. I was also the skeptical one, first to question the tooth fairy, God and the rest of it, in a manner Mom and Dad always recalled as equal parts endearing and obnoxious.

Is there really a Santa Claus? I supposedly asked Mom at the dinner table one night when I was six.

Frankie, she responded, not wanting to lie but not wanting to upset Mark and Harry, who had definitely perked up, I would like to believe there is.

I didn’t ask what you’d like to believe, I corrected her. I asked whether there is or isn’t.

Above all I was the physically lazy one. Mom and Dad would later remind me of this, too, citing the first time Dad had recruited Mark, Harry and me to help him rake autumn leaves in the yard. This was on Manitou Trail, before we had gardeners, before Dad had climbed higher up the corporate ladder. He figured it was time that we boys started learning to pitch in a little, even though we were still too young to be much real help.

Here’s our plan, Dad said, outlining what lay ahead and trying to ease us into it. Every hour we’ll rake for forty minutes, and we’ll rest for twenty minutes. OK?

We nodded.

So if someone needs to go to the bathroom or if someone needs a drink, there’s a twenty-minute break for that, he said. Twenty minutes out of every hour. Forty minutes on and twenty minutes off.

We nodded again. It was all very clear.

Any questions? Dad asked.

I had one.

What is it, Frankie? he asked.

Can I begin, I asked, with the twenty-minute break?

On my Little League team, I was always given the positions that required the least running: third base, maybe, or right field. Tennis balls whizzed past me as I swung hard but spastically at the air. Golf—well, I’ve covered that. If forced onto the fairway, I begged to drive the electric cart and just watch Dad, Mark and