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Personal Days

by Ed Park
(Random House)

This comic and creepy début novel takes place in a Manhattan office depopulated by “the Firings,” where one can “wander vast tracts of lunar workscape before seeing a window.” The downsized staff huddle like the crew of a doomed spaceship, picked off one by one by an invisible predator. Crippled by computer crashes (one worker suggests that the machines are “trying to tell us about the limits of the human”), the survivors eddy in a spiritual inertia; when one of them is banished to “Siberia”—a lone desk on another floor—no one can muster the energy even to reply to her increasingly anguished e-mails, until, one day, she is simply no longer there. Park transforms the banal into the eerie, rendering ominous the familiar request “Does anyone want anything from the outside world?”

The New Yorker, June 30, 2008

Bar Q

308-310 Bleecker St.
(212-206-7817)

The middle “B” missing from Bar Q’s name is a warning: you’re not in hill country anymore. There’s no tang of char in the air, no smoke pit seething in a back alley, no long-legged waitresses in denim cutoffs and cowboy boots. Those who come seeking barbecue—the eatery’s ostensible raison d’être—should know that, first and foremost, this is an Anita Lo restaurant, which means elegance, intelligence, and wit. Lo, who presides over the kitchen at the consistently great Annisa, earlier lent her expertise to fast food (Rickshaw Dumpling Bar), and here she seems to be striving for a middle ground. While the décor echoes Annisa’s (white walls, blond wood, swaddling leather booths), the decibel level is decidedly higher, the lighting bright and unmoody. The staff, despite their black uniforms, are almost disconcertingly enthusiastic (“I like your watch!”). One night, you might be served by a former contortionist, the next by a graduate student in clinical psychology.

When it comes to food, however, balancing the innovative and the crowd-pleasing is tricky. Early reports were not encouraging: diners, perhaps expecting sticky kalbi and rolls of paper towels, expressed dismay at the portion sizes, the prices, and the general culinary weirdness. But, to a Lo fan, the most exciting dishes here are precisely those which play havoc with tradition. Tuna ribs—a part of the fish commonly discarded—turn out to be talonlike bones with a thin, dissolvingly tender layer of meat, given subtle snap by yuzu and green chile. Unagi-and-scallion fritters simultaneously evoke the comfort of hush puppies and the delicacy of sushi. Best of all is the grass-fed Australian lamb, lean yet juicy, paired with wedges of cornstarch-thickened, garlic-infused fried milk that riff on creamy tofu, crisp on the outside and oozy on the inside. More conventional offerings are less successful, such as the pork “wings,” served with a ketchupy Asian sauce, and the tea-smoked duck, pulpy and uncomfortably reminiscent of a heart. And, while the short ribs are ably executed—the meat does indeed fall off the bone—the unusual accoutrements (a smear of spicy red-black sauce, a scattering of goji berries, a dollop of chestnut purée) fail to elevate them above the ordinary.

At intervals, Lo emerges from the kitchen, head wrapped in a pink bandanna, to take the temperature of the room. The refinement of the cuisine doesn’t prevent a sense of free-for-all—couples dabble wantonly in each other’s entrées, groups squabble over prospective Vice-Presidential candidates while knocking back shiso juleps. It appears that the experiment is working: nobody seems troubled by a contradiction between dress-up and finger-licking good. (Open Mondays through Saturdays for dinner. Entrées $18-$29.)

The New Yorker, June 30, 2008

(Photograph: Honore Brown)

Attachment

by Isabel Fonseca
(Knopf)

A cultured British couple who pride themselves on unconventionality decamp to an island in the Indian Ocean, intending to continue their careers (his, advertising; hers, a women’s-health column) via the Internet. Then the wife opens a smutty letter to her husband, apparently from a lover. Rather than endure this affair, after twenty-three years of marriage, she goes online masquerading as her husband, and initiates an X-rated e-mail relationship with her rival. The plot strains credulity, but Fonseca’s vivisection of matrimony and desire is cruelly exacting. She likens pornography to a bullfight, at first “mesmerizing, upsetting, with scattered moments of surprising grace,” yet ultimately disappointing. “How in the world,” she wonders, “could it be boring and arousing at the same time?”

The New Yorker, June 23, 2008

The Lost Daughter

by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
(Europa)

In this brutally frank novel of maternal ambivalence, the narrator, a forty-seven-year-old divorcée summering alone on the Ionian coast, becomes obsessed with a beautiful young mother who seems ill at ease with her husband’s rowdy, slightly menacing Neapolitan clan. When this woman’s daughter loses her doll, the older woman commits a small crime that she can’t explain even to herself. Although much of the drama takes place in her head, Ferrante’s gift for psychological horror renders it immediate and visceral, as when the narrator recalls the “animal opacity” with which she first longed for a child, before she was devoured by pregnancy.

The New Yorker, June 9, 2008

Apples and Oranges

by Marie Brenner
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

In this elegiac memoir, the author, a reporter, applies the same investigative skills that led to her exposés of the tobacco industry and Enron to a more intimate subject: her contentious relationship with her late brother, Carl. From an eccentric Jewish Texan family of compulsive record keepers—their father maintained a four-page list of his life’s achievements—Marie became a New York liberal, Carl a diehard conservative who abandoned a legal career to farm apples. As a teen-ager, he smashed his sister’s Joan Baez records; as an adult, given a diagnosis of terminal cancer, he informed her via FedEx. Her attempts to smooth over their differences by mastering the language of fruit (Carl often started conversations, “I am going to give you a quiz”) are at once comic and tinged with regret.

The New Yorker, June 2, 2008

Bright Shiny Morning

by James Frey
(Harper)

Two years after Frey’s memoir “A Million Little Pieces” was outed as part fiction, the publicly chastised writer resurfaces with a novel much of which purports to be fact. Set in a Los Angeles populated by miniature-golf moguls, ex-beauty queens, gun-shop owners, debauched child actors, meth dealers, and yoginis in thongs, this gargantuan book is seeded, Melville-like, with chapters cataloguing the city’s snarled highways and quirky innovations (e.g., the world’s first video graveyard). The characters are relentlessly stock: two lovesick kids from the heartland (“nowhere anywhere everywhere”); a bulimic, closeted movie star with a “MEGAWATT!!!!!” smile; a Mexican-American maid with an abusive employer. Frey strives for incantatory but winds up with banal; when it comes to emotion, the best he can muster is “It’s deep, it’s true, and it’s real real real.”

The New Yorker, May 26, 2008

The Invention of Everything Else

by Samantha Hunt
(Houghton Mifflin)

In this surreal historical novel, the aged and forgotten scientist Nikola Tesla is eking out his last days at the Hotel New Yorker in 1943, communing with pigeons and the ghost of Mark Twain. His ruminations on his career (he was exploited by Edison, cheated by Marconi) and on an unrealized love intersect with the inchoate aspirations of a chambermaid whose father wants to use a time machine to be reunited with his dead wife. Hunt is adept at entering the mind of a rudderless young woman, but she is less convincing with the brilliant and possibly crazed eighty-six-year-old Tesla. Still, her vision of punch-drunk, teetering-on-modernity Manhattan dazzles in the details: a vast hotel with its own hospital and ice-skating rink; a Poverty Ball attended by millionaires in rags.

The New Yorker, May 19, 2008

South Gate

154 Central Park S., near Seventh Ave.
(212-484-5120)

There’s something resolutely male about South Gate, the new restaurant at the Jumeirah Essex House, the historic Art Deco hotel across from Central Park. Designed by Tony Chi as part of a ninety-million-dollar renovation, it’s a bachelor pad writ large: walls of mirrors, divided into angled grids, like the peel of a disco ball; leather everywhere, even on the tabletops, in various shades of latte; and, flanked by half-stocked bookshelves, a minimalist gas fireplace in which a long ripple of flame seems to leap straight from stone. All that’s missing is a bearskin rug.

But if the goal here is sly seduction, the service is slightly off-kilter. When asked which dishes best showcased the chef’s style, a waiter proclaimed, “All of them. It is like nothing you have tasted before.” Further details were not forthcoming: a pavé cut was described with karate-chop hand gestures (it turned out to be a square); the word “Lillet” drew a blank; and any question about an entrée was answered with a rearrangement of the ingredients already listed on the menu. (Of the spice-roasted cod with mustard greens: “We take the cod. We roast it with spice. There are mustard greens.”)

The exaggeration does injustice to the chef, Kerry Heffernan, formerly of Eleven Madison Park. There are no pyrotechnics here: the food is straightforward (if highly refined) American, with a gracious nod to the season, and, for the most part, it’s quite good. Tender rings of flash-seared calamari in a lobster-coriander sauce are balanced against the delicate but unmistakable earthiness of a cauliflower custard; edamame-and-ricotta cannelloni, strewn with hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, stand out as a rarity: a truly inventive vegetarian dish. Other offerings suffer slightly in execution. The wild-mushroom Martini, for instance, would be better if simply presented as a soup—its flavors are foresty and deep—rather than poured muddily into a glass, with a ghostly poached egg bobbing to the brown surface and a swampy mass of “spinach fondue” sunk below. Perhaps sensing something amiss, a waiter on a recent evening attempted to spark a conversation between two neighboring tables: “Look! Everyone is ordering the mushroom Martini!” The couples addressed looked over at each other, aghast, and then without a word turned back to their private whispers. (Open Mondays through Saturdays for lunch and dinner, and Sundays for brunch and dinner. Entrées $24-$39.)

(Photograph: Sarah Mangerson)

The New Yorker, May 5, 2008

Pravda

by Edward Docx
(Mariner)

This telescopic tale, sweeping from London to St. Petersburg, has elements of the thriller—the discovery of a dead body in the first chapter; a threatening drug dealer; a disaffected long-lost son with a claim on the family fortune—but it’s primarily a novel of ideas. The overeducated editor of a self-help magazine finds himself paralyzed by the “complete and utter evaporation of all possible belief, or consistency, or any good way for the intelligent man to live”; an aging latter-day Dorian Gray fondly remembers his life of “sexual chaos,” while recognizing that his romanticization of the past is “the true sign of a monster.” Docx has a gift for assessing “the exact shape and weight of other people’s inner selves, the architecture of their spirit,” and although the book teems with characters—the cast reaches nearly Dickensian proportions—even the most ancillary flare into being, vital and insistent.

The New Yorker, May 5, 2008

Death by a Thousand Cuts

by Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, and Gregory Blue
(Harvard)

In 1904, a French photographer documented the Chinese practice of lingchi, a form of execution that involved slicing off limbs and pieces of flesh. Europeans recoiled from what appeared to be a gruesome, lingering death, citing it as evidence of a uniquely Oriental ruthlessness. This fascinating study argues, however, that lingchi was not entirely about physical suffering—the victim was typically sedated with opium, and killed early in the process—but about a “loss of somatic integrity,” the posthumous shame of having been reduced to body parts. Crimes that merited lingchi ranged from killing a paternal grandparent to, in at least one case, cheating on taxes. Throughout, the authors do their best to downplay the exoticism of their subject, pointing to such Western practices as drawing (disembowelling) and quartering (dismembering): “It is hard to see much distinction in degrees of cruelty.”

The New Yorker, May 5, 2008

National Anthem

by Kevin Prufer
(Four Way)

The America of Prufer’s fourth collection is an empire in decline, a medicated landscape (“snow / like little tranquilizers all over the yard”) peopled by pilgrims to shopping malls. The book opens with a panoramic vision of the aftermath of apocalypse—“expired” cars, silenced TVs, coffins “unmoored and happy with the storm”—but ends intimately, with a child’s memory of his first encounter with death; the thin wire between political failure and personal grief runs taut throughout. In the eerie centerpiece poem, the suburbs are sealed under an enormous parachute, its nylon shimmering; icicles line the seams and crash into the streets, and the narrator walks for days, never finding the edge.

The New Yorker, April 28, 2008

Light Years

by Susanna Moore
(Grove)

When Moore, a novelist, was growing up in Hawaii, in the early fifties, it still took five days to reach the islands by sea from San Francisco. Yet life there for haoles (foreigners) was not unlike that of bluebloods summering in Maine: Moore and her four siblings roamed the landscape at will, while their mother, prone to nervous breakdowns, attempted to outfit them in seersucker shorts. Moore’s recollections are faithful to a child’s purview; she was shocked to learn, later, that “only haoles were allowed to live in the most desirable neighborhoods.” Interwoven in the text are excerpts from Darwin and Woolf, among others, although the most memorable line comes from an early-twentieth-century visitor to Hawaii, who reported that nearly no one was left alive who could play the nose flute “as it should be played, to the excruciation of every nerve in a Caucasian body.”

The New Yorker, April 21, 2008

Dandy in the Underworld

by Sebastian Horsley
(Harper Perennial)

Horsley, a British dandy and putative artist notorious for having undergone a crucifixion, turns a grim childhood into cocktail-party fodder in this compulsively fizzy memoir. He spins tales of his wealthy father’s infidelities and his alcoholic mother’s crashed Jaguars, suicide attempts, sojourns in a mental hospital, and second marriage to a cult member clad entirely in orange. The glee for destructive behavior is less charming in Horsley’s subsequent misadventures with drugs and sex, which, he claims, include sleeping with “more than 1,000 prostitutes, at a cost of £100,000,” and later turning tricks himself. His saving grace is an utter lack of self-pity; instead, he never fails to find himself adorable. The book’s most loving passages detail his quest for sartorial splendor: he shows up for a shark-research expedition carrying a pink lace parasol, and, in the throes of heroin addiction, has his tailor customize his suits to hold hidden syringes.

The New Yorker, April 14, 2008

Chop Suey

714 Seventh Ave., at 48th St., 2nd fl. (212) 261-5200

Chop Suey is not a Chinese restaurant. That’s fitting, since the dish it is named after was invented in America. The food served here is, instead, vaguely Korean, as filtered through the mind and the taste buds of Chop Suey’s consulting chef, Zak Pelaccio. The term “consulting chef” is a kind of warning: don’t expect to see Pelaccio in the kitchen on a nightly basis. He’s likely busy with one of his other consultant gigs (230 Fifth, Borough Food and Drink) or collaborating with a fellow star chef on a side project (rumored to be in the works: a Southeast Asian barbecue spot and a European gastropub).

A sense of absence permeates Chop Suey, which is semi-hidden on the second floor of the Renaissance hotel in Times Square. On recent visits, the dining room was barely a quarter full, which made it feel like a private aerie, perched above the neon ripple of Broadway and Seventh Avenue. The interior is refreshingly free of Asian kitsch, although the décor comes across as more designy than designed: biomorphic lipstick-orange leather chairs, ceiling fixtures that resemble giant toothbrush heads, china and cups with angles that are aggressively askew.

The menu is, alas, similarly wayward. The scallion pancake, a dependable Chinatown staple, was either too salty or too bland, depending on the mouthful. A slow-poached egg, stirred into a stone pot of rice that had been (theoretically) spiked with chile, was a tasteless take on Korean bi bim bop. Ginger chicken, cooked sous vide, appeared déshabillé—a pale huddle of flesh that, if not in fact underdone, was suggestive of underdoneness. The kitchen fared better when it fell back on European technique, as with a lobster omelette, which gained body from a decidedly French beurre blanc.

Just as Pelaccio’s ghost is glimpsed only in passing, so, too, is that of the pastry chef called in to “consult” on the dessert menu, the downtown radical Will Goldfarb, famed for using squid ink and pancetta in his concoctions. A flourless chocolate cake was perfectly serviceable, and forgettable, while “Vietnamese Iced Coffee” was Culinary Deconstruction 101: a condensed-milk sponge layered with chocolate Chantilly cream and espresso granite. The only hint of weirdness came with the pomegranate-poached pear: the fruit, stained violently incarnadine, sat in an unfortunate chartreuse soup, speared with what resembled, in texture, a dog biscuit. It looked awful. It tasted delicious. (Open daily for dinner. Entrées $18-$32.) 

(Photograph: Honore Brown)

The New Yorker, March 24, 2008

Sharp Teeth

by Toby Barlow
(Harper)

In a cheeky nod to epic poetry, Barlow’s début novel is written entirely in free verse and concerns a metamorphosis, of humans into wolves, in Los Angeles. No slaves to the moon, these postmodern lycanthropes do a thousand situps at a time and choose when to “self-ignite.” (There are lapses: a grease-sensitive type inadvertently commits a massacre at Popeye’s.) The story involves a white-collar pack run by a Sun Tzu-style strategist that operates like a cross between a ruthless law firm and the Lakers; a plot to infiltrate animal shelters and high-end bridge tournaments; and a dog catcher who unknowingly falls in love with a werewolfess. Barlow deftly sketches the L.A. landscape—stucco, sun beating through smog, tract-home meth labs, fresh-cut lawns that “hiss with wealth,” freeways that devour hours of life—and metes out his tale in noirish koans: “Watch any man’s eyes / at the bounce of a ball. / His head tilts slightly sideways, just a hair, / as a primitive focus / comes to life.” 

The New Yorker, March 17, 2008

Ravens in the Storm

by Carl Oglesby
(Scribner)

Writing this memoir, Oglesby was able to draw on more than four thousand pages of government intelligence about himself, gathered in the nineteen-sixties during his time as the president of the protest group Students for a Democratic Society. A former defense-industry employee with a high-security clearance, Oglesby became a prominent antiwar figure—he served on an international war-crimes tribunal with Jean-Paul Sartre and was asked to be the Vice-Presidential running mate of the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver—but he always saw himself as a voice for moderation. This centrist perspective alienated S.D.S.’s militants, including a future leader of the Weathermen, who warned him, “We are not frustrated liberals, Carl. We are enemies of the state.” In the end, Oglesby recounts, he was forced out of S.D.S. on charges of rejecting Marxism-Leninism and possibly being a federal agent. His book is a mournful tribute to the spirit of an age gone awry.

The New Yorker, March 17, 2008

Animal’s People

by Indra Sinha
(Simon & Schuster)

The Web site of Khaufpur, India, makes much of the city’s scenery and sparkling lakes, even its quaint institutions. One such, the Lazies Club, is dedicated to the art of inertia: seated members take precedence over those standing, who are “obliged to pay for the drinks.” Aside from a brief reference to an unspecified past calamity, there’s no hint that life in Khaufpur is anything less than blissful. Or that Khaufpur does not, in fact, exist.

Khaufpur—and its very convincing Web site—is the creation of Indra Sinha, a former advertising copywriter, who uses it as a stand-in for Bhopal, the site of one of the worst industrial accidents in history, the 1984 gas leak from a Union Carbide chemical plant that caused the deaths of thousands of people and sickened hundreds of thousands more. It is also the setting for his fiercely polemical—and unexpectedly bawdy—novel “Animal’s People,” a finalist for the 2007 Man Booker Prize that reveals not a paradise but a blighted city.

Sinha’s narrator is a 19-year-old orphan, born a few days before the disaster, whose spine has become so twisted that he must walk on all fours. Known to everyone simply as Animal, he rejects sympathy, spouts profanity and obsesses about sex.

Styling himself a hard-boiled realist, Animal embraces his cruel nickname, claiming he has “no wish” to be a human being. It’s all bravado, of course. Although he says grimly, “I do not know what name you could give to the things I have done,” he’s really just a small-time scam artist, doing what he can to survive on the streets.

Fittingly, Animal’s lust, not his desire for justice, initially drives the plot. Animal pines for a girl whose boyfriend is campaigning against the company responsible for the gas leak. When a beautiful American doctor opens a clinic offering free medical treatment, these two activists, suspecting the American is secretly gathering information to discredit the company’s opponents, easily persuade Animal to spy on her.

Sinha is an effervescent writer, but he endows his characters with quirks rather than fully realized interior lives. And his forays into surrealism can be more disorienting than enlightening: Animal’s caretaker is a demented French nun who hears anything other than her native language only as grunts; among Animal’s acquaintances is a two-headed fetus in a jar, who begs Animal to free him. The American doctor is a caricature, a supposed idealist who has taken the time to learn fluent Hindi yet seems oblivious to the customs and strictures of local society—she wears skin-tight jeans and curses in casual conversation.

Writing about devastation without sinking to sentimentality is a treacherous task. Early on, Animal sneers at a journalist, accusing him of coming to Khaufpur “to suck our stories from us, so strangers in far-off countries can marvel there’s so much pain in the world.” Later an Indian doctor, describing the disaster to his American colleague, confides: “On that night the moon was two-thirds full. It was shaped like a tear and as it appeared through the clouds of gas, it was the color of blood.” The American’s response is equally hackneyed: “I sat there drinking his whiskey listening to him reduce the terror of dying people to a moon in a second-rate poem.”

Sinha veers between comedy and tragedy, awkwardly stuffing his story with improbable high jinks. Yet every now and then his prose achieves a plainspoken lyricism that brings his subject into sudden focus. At night, Animal retreats to his improvised home in the abandoned factory. “Listen, how quiet,” he remarks. “No bird song. No hoppers in the grass. No bee hum. Insects can’t survive here.”

The company made “wonderful poisons, . . . so good it’s impossible to get rid of them, after all these years they’re still doing their work.”

The New York Times Book Review, March 9, 2008

The Commoner

by John Burnham Schwartz
(Nan A. Talese / Doubleday)

In 1959, the Crown Prince of Japan broke with centuries of tradition by taking a commoner as his wife. Schwartz’s novel imagines the perspective of the bride, who gives up “the jumbled, striving, visceral world” for a life of airless ritual. Surrounded by viper-tongued ladies-in-waiting appointed by her disapproving mother-in-law and excoriated for such crimes as walking ahead of her husband and breastfeeding her newborn son, she literally loses her voice. Decades later, she is helpless to prevent her son’s wife, also a commoner, from “an endless reproductive Olympics” and a public life in which “nothing of consequence would ever be said.” Schwartz delivers his tale in unadorned prose, to suit the interiority of his subject—and perhaps to imitate the pared-down elegance of such Japanese writers as Kawabata and Tanizaki—but at times this restraint edges into banality. 

The New Yorker, February 25, 2008

Speakeasy Restaurants

They say that in the early 1990s there was a secret restaurant in Manhattan, in an apartment on the 31st floor of a Hell's Kitchen building whose lobby was accessible only through a porn video store. The makeshift eatery—no license, no health inspection—specialized in authentic Sri Lankan cuisine and had all the allure of urban myth: grungy milieu; a whiff of the illicit; the cachet of an address divulged to few.

In other countries, secret restaurants have flourished for years: In Cuba, mom-and-pop paladares are an alternative to state-run eateries; in Hong Kong, si fang cai offer elaborate home-cooked meals. Recently the phenomenon has taken off in America, with under-the-radar establishments popping up in San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and Boston. Operated out of people's homes, by enthusiasts with no professional cooking experience or by chefs moonlighting from their regular gigs, these secret restaurants aren't terribly secret. A bit of creative googling will lead you quickly to outposts like Underground Inc. in Des Moines, Iowa, or Shady's Cafe in Penland, North Carolina. Still, they form a rapidly expanding and important ad hoc culinary underground.

Not too long ago, I ventured to a former factory on the Williamsburg waterfront, in Brooklyn, to check out the Whisk and Ladle, a "supper club" founded in 2006 by an eclectic group of roommates with day jobs—a lawyer, a college instructor, a bartender, and someone who works at Google. Once a week, they open their loft to about 20 guests for a classic five-course meal: appetizers, soup, entrée, salad, dessert. Arriving at 8 o'clock, as instructed, I was greeted cheerfully by my hosts, then plied with liquor, including a startling shot of homemade peanut-infused vodka. (No tab—the meal was all-inclusive.) An hour or so later, when the food appeared, most of the guests were pleasantly buzzed, comfortable sitting so close to one another at the communal tables.

In the same way that punk and indie rock emerged as a response to the corporate-driven homogenization of popular music in the 1980s, secret restaurants prefer the unique to the ubiquitous, the rough edges of the handmade over the polish of the commercial. Speakeasies helmed by untrained, self-taught chefs celebrate a democratic D.I.Y. ethic espousing the idea that anyone can cook. The fare being served is hardly cutting-edge—ingredients like liquid nitrogen and agar remain the province of truly high-end restaurants; instead, the emphasis tends to be on authenticity and bold, hearty flavors.

When I spoke to Mark, one of the chefs behind the Whisk and Ladle who requested anonymity in the interest of preserving his mystique, he was up front about his intent: "This is not about the food. I can tell you lots of places with better food." And while the meal itself—carrot-ginger soup, maple pulled pork with lemon-thyme risotto, heirloom-tomato salad, cayenne chocolate cake—was satisfying, the signal achievement of such places is the mix of people they attract. These days, too many good restaurants have become notches on the belts of conspicuous consumers, and the best speakeasy restaurants succeed in presenting an attitude, ambience, and total experience that's refreshingly low-key.

Given that speakeasies violate numerous health codes and zoning laws, it's not surprising that the people who run them are leery of letting in just anybody. (The Chowhound website won't even allow discussions of secret restaurants on its message boards, for fear of getting them shut down.) Mark is more likely to offer a seat to the person who emails about fears of a life doomed to eating boxed macaroni and cheese than to someone who simply requests a reservation for two; the online application for Studiofeast, another Brooklyn-based speakeasy, asks applicants to describe their ideal last meal. Through word of mouth and aggressive filtration of potential diners, these hidden kitchens strive to create the perfect dinner party.

Because it's far from an organized movement, the scene varies across the country. Pacific Northwest speakeasies appear to be in the vanguard, dishing up artsy clandestine dinners staged in glass-blowing studios while videos are projected on the walls. A Duke University senior's experiments in molecular gastronomy, conducted for students and curious diners in his campus apartment, have been chronicled in The New York Times and earned him the unwanted attention of the local Durham authorities. But even on the foodie end of the spectrum, the impulse is essentially indie: Like movie stars seeking more challenging roles in low-budget films, name chefs pursue projects on the side, looking for the opportunity to cook whatever they want, for whomever they want.

Michael Hebberoy is a chef who started out hosting secret dinners in Portland, Oregon, moved into the legal restaurant business, went bust, and is now back to his old tricks, serving off-the-books meals in Seattle. Lately, he's been working on a manifesto with the title "Kill the Restaurant." The danger in such enterprises is always that a cooler-than-thou mentality threatens to take over; but if, at their worst, speakeasies replicate the kind of velvet-rope exclusionism of annoying nightclubs, at best they can offer a genuine respite from the anonymity, rigidity, and expense of dining out; a chance to pause and savor the old-time pleasures of slow cooking and talking late into the night, long after dinner is over.

Five (sort of) secret restaurants revealed:

4 Course Vegan
Brooklyn, New York
4coursevegan.com
A menu from last December offered winter vegetable chowder, blood-orange-and-fennel salad, black-eyed pea fritters with collard greens and smoked carrot purée, and Mexican chocolate torte with white chocolate anglaise and raspberry coulis—all for 40 bucks.

Caché
Seattle
cacheseattle.com
This Sunday-night happening—launched by an architect and a food writer who met and fell in love on the food-discussion website eGullet—offers seats for 12 guests. Theme menus have included a "Yes, we’re trying to kill you" dinner: bacon-wrapped pork belly, foie-gras custard with truffled wild mushrooms, and duck-confit pie.

One Pot
Seattle
onepot.org
Chef Michael Hebberoy heads up a dinner series staged in rock clubs and dive bars, with musical performances and readings. Designed as an open-source franchise, One Pot events are reportedly spreading as far as Mexico and Slovenia.

Mamasan's Bistro
San Francisco
no website
One of the country's oldest speakeasies, Mamasan's was started eight years ago by a DJ-vocalist and her mother who specialize in a fusion cuisine (accompanied by hip-hop beats), inspired by their native country, Guam.

Ghetto Gourmet
Nationwide
theghet.com
Originally a basement-apartment operation in Oakland, California, Ghetto Gourmet is now a nomadic series of one-night-only food events, often with live entertainment (belly dancers, fire eaters). Offerings include black-eyed-pea falafel with house-made smoked catfish, Gulf prawns with organic grits, quail with butternut squash, and homemade tasso hash.

(Illustration: Nicole Kenney)

Good, February, 2008

The Voyage of the Short Serpent

by Bernard du Boucheron
translated from the French by Hester Velmans
(Overlook Duckworth)

Can a novel that features cannibalism, amputations, burning at the stake and the devouring of children by wolves be a comedy? Tackling the gruesome and the grotesque with gleeful abandon, “The Voyage of the Short Serpent” is an eccentric, slightly maddened and often brutally funny tale of a colony of Roman Catholics marooned in medieval Greenland by the encroachment of a new ice age. Much has been made in France of the fact that its author, Bernard du Boucheron, was 76 years old when “Voyage,” his first novel, was published, and there’s something oddly triumphal about the way the narrative takes direct aim at death — which, despite its omnipresence (the bodies pile up rapidly) is never entirely conceded to.

It’s not clear if the letter of instruction that opens the novel — from a Norwegian cardinal-archbishop to the abbot Insulomontanus, appointing him the new bishop of Gardar, “at the Northernmost reach of the world” — constitutes a reward or a punishment. Although the priest has what sound like sterling qualifications (including a diploma in exorcism and hands-on experience in “the pursuit and extermination of heresy, witchcraft and apostasy”), he’s also a bit of a maverick, aiding children orphaned by the Inquisition and dipping into church revenues to build an infirmary for lepers (“for which We rebuke you but mildly”). Worse, he’s acquired a certain worldliness, sampling culinary delights “other than the barley soup and salted herring so dear to Our flock” and reading books outside the sanctioned realm of religious manuscripts.

This imaginary ecclesiastical document is a tour de force of bureaucratic desiccation. In Hester Velmans’s translation, you can practically hear the creak of its author’s thin, querulous voice warning against hiring Germans as shipbuilders (due to their “lumpish skills” and tendency to “bark out orders harshly, in the military manner”) and muttering against the infiltration of spies from the Hanseatic League. The cardinal’s primary concern is for Insulomontanus to assess the wealth of the Gardar See and collect tithes accordingly. Within certain boundaries, he is also instructed to address the state of the settlers’ souls. (“You will investigate if wives are faithful to their husbands, and whether the husbands stay within the bounds of acceptable debauchery.”) The cardinal is particularly concerned with the various methods Insulomontanus will employ to put sinners to death, including “the stake, the wheel, the head vise, drawing and quartering, the slow hanging, suspension from the feet or carnal parts (only for men, since the female constitution does not lend itself to it), immersion in boiling oil, or stoning.” Again, however, there are limits:

“You will disdain, as too expeditious or indeed too gentle, the use of poison, fit only for politics; the sword, which turns the criminal into a gentleman; drowning, which, in those climes, will cause the condemned to expire of the cold ere he can experience the suffocation; or the beer funnel, for not only will intoxication muffle the pain, but it is also a waste of a scarce commodity and abases the executioner to the vile office of a common innkeeper.”

The chapters that follow form a report on his voyage by the new bishop, who proves an increasingly suspect narrator. (His account is interrupted by two italicized sections in the third person, which may or may not represent the “true” story.) During the sea voyage to Greenland, his sailors’ teeth fall out and their skin peels. When he forbids his men to eat their frostbitten limbs, “one of them replied that the season was not Lent, and proceeded to devour his own toes.” These horrors are just a prelude to the desperate poverty and near starvation that await in Gardar, where the colony’s gaunt survivors wear “the haunted air of people on intimate terms with their own death.”

Although the bishop professes sympathy for their plight, he immediately begins ferreting out fornicators. But executing them by the preferred method, burning at the stake, is tricky, owing to a lack of firewood. Still, the bishop soldiers on, substituting peat and seal oil, and deciding to punish child sinners not by amputation but by gouging out an eye, “preserving the abilities they would need (with the exception, perhaps, of archery) for hunting, fishing, herding or plowing.”

Inevitably, the bishop himself strays from righteousness, and his oblique account of his downfall — a halfbreed girl accuses him of fathering her child — maintains a perfect pitch of cruelty and farce. (Claiming a need to get the facts straight, he asks her to elaborate exactly “in what position, illicit or lawful, she had had amorous encounters ... upon the understanding that when performed out of wedlock, even the lawful positions are a crime.”)

Throughout, du Boucheron steers clear of overpsychologizing, staying true to the medieval worldview even as he slyly creates a modern morality tale. The result is a portrait of a society destroyed by its inflexibility, by its obstinate faith in its superiority. History tells us how the story ends: by the year 1500, the Norsemen of Gardar had vanished. Perhaps they abandoned the site for warmer shores or were slaughtered by the more adaptable Inuit. Or else they simply starved to death, having eaten their livestock down to their hooves.

The New York Times Book Review, February 3, 2008