Green of New York Magazine (cont'd.)

I focus uptown for 20 minutes before a voice to my south calls my name. I put the face with the photograph immediately. Gael Greene, restaurant critic for New York Magazine and a graduate of the Class of '55, is dressed in black with a red foulard and no trademark hat.

How we happen to be here is the serendipitous result of one anonymous Mexican man's emergence from a Mexican church on 14th Street one recent Sunday morning. When asked about traditional Mexican food, he recommended this place.

Greene examines the large menu, then, in a voice just a shade higher than Lauren Bacall's, orders lunch for us and two imaginary companions. "May we have a frozen margarita and a margarita on the rocks, and empanadas, side of gucamole, and a pozole, some beef fajitas very rare? Is it possible to get some soft tacos? Some of those, ooooh, pollo mole, and we'll also have some shrimp, salza verde and cheese quesadillas.' The waitress records it all with diligence. Offering a rationale for the size of our order, Greene adds, "My friend has never had Mexican before.' The waitress seems satisfied. Back to me. "Would you like an iced tea and a Pepto Bismol before we start?"

Remarkably, Greene is not overweight, even though she orders like this every day--lunch and dinner. In busy weeks she'll occasionally squeeze in extra lunches or dinners. Working out with a personal trainer and being careful not to overindulge keep her healthy enough to perform her job, one she's maintained for 26 years.

September has been particularly hectic. After taking July and August off, an arrangement she's had with the magazine since 1974, to relax and work on her latest novel (a children's book about a young restaurant critic named Julia Greene), Greene has hit the ground eating. Normally no important restaurants open over the summer, Greene explains, but 1994 was an exception. Moreover, her colleague, competitor and fellow U-M graduate Ruth Reichl (see accompanying story) at The New York Times hasn't taken time off. "I'm struggling to keep up," Greene laments. "I wish Ruth would go on vacation for a month."

Greene's weekly column in New York Magazine is called "The Insatiable Critic," and insatiable she is; she likes all foods but cottage cheese. Her idea of heaven is tasting each of the different oysters at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central. She hopes her last words echo those of the sister of the great chef Brillat Savarin: "Bring on dessert, I'm about to die."

But eating is easy. Writing is hard. It's the only drawback to an otherwise perfect job, says Greene, who has just met her Monday 10 a.m. deadline by four minutes. She has been meeting deadlines ever since leaving the Michigan Daily in 1955. A succession of journalism jobs eventually led to a position at the New York Post. Then in 1968, Clay Felker launched New York Magazine and asked Greene to become the restaurant critic. She hesitated at first, thinking she might have to pay for her own meals. A funny thought in hindsight. Greene has carte blanche. No budget. She estimates she's spent $5,000 in the past month. Only once did the magazine balk, and that was after she'd spent $26,000 for a series on Italian restaurants before submitting a single article.

The waitress delivers our appetizers: petite empanadas, pozole, guacamole. Pozole is a soup of hominy and pork, Greene explains. This one is very good. The other dishes are accompanied by plenty of sour cream. "What's interesting is that in authentic Mexican cooking they don't use a lot of sour cream," Greene says. "This is very American."

When Greene reviews a restaurant, she usually gives it three passes. If it's an important one, she'll go four times. She invites her friends out regularly, but being among her regulars has its perils. Not every restaurant is a winner. Of the one we're in now she says, "I would never send anybody here; what could I possibly eat that would change my mind?" She reads off several dishes but in the end settles on dessert, three of them. "I'm afraid that person coming out of church was just too Americanized," she says. "The only thing I really liked was that soup. Then she allows that the fajitas were "not bad" and the chicken mole was "kind of wonderful."

She partitions the remains, then asks the waitress to package it all. The recipient will be whoever Greene sees first on her way home, although James, a man at 73rd and Broadway, is a frequent beneficiary.

Her good impulses extend beyond a West Side street corner. Greene and the late cook book author James Beard inaugurated a fundraiser for Meals on Wheels, a program that feeds the homebound elderly. The annual event became the model for similar fund-raisers around the country. In 1992, Greene received James Beard Foundation Humanitarian of the Year Award.

You would think after 26 years on the job, Greene would have tasted it all. Not so. In a city of 16,000 restaurants with an average life span of five years, according to the New York Restaurant Association, Greene would have had to take in eight of them a day to keep apace.

Since 1968, Greene has witnessed an incredible evolution in American cooking. Once she ranked her favorite cuisines as French, Italian, Chinese and Moroccan, in that order. Now American tops her list. "I think the great American chefs may be as creative as the great chefs of France, using French technique with the best American ingredients," she says.

Greene also rhapsodizes about the abundance of fresh produce year round and the abundance of seafood available: scallops flown in from Maine, stone crab transported truck from Miami, kiwi shrimp in Chinatown. "This is the wonderful thing about food in America at the moment. When I started it didn't exist; it's a very different world, which is why I don't feel like I have to go to France anymore for epiphany."

Greene pays the $70 check with a credit card that bears a different name. She goes to great lengths to preserve her identity. Reservations are made in the names of friends, including their respective phone numbers. For television or photographs she wears big floppy hats to hide or alter her features. "I also wear a chicken feather hat with giant sunglasses that really doesn't look like me at all. And I have a red Ann-Margaret wig that I've worn on TV."

Assessing her own reputation, Greene says she may be too soft. "It's more fun when you're vicious" she says. "From time to time, I do get angry enough to be really bitchy, but if it's a small restaurant that isn't good, I don't bother, because there is no point in killing it.'

Lunch concludes. We head up Sixth Avenue in a cab. Although she already has a compendium of three single-spaced pages of Mexican eateries, she's off on the lookout for more. A truck blocks the name of yet another Mexican restaurant near 16th Street. She cranes her neck backward, then asks, "Was that 'Tortilla' or 'Tamales?"'

Steve Rosoff '87 MA, an Ann Arbor freelancer, frequently writes about food and wine, and recently spent a week in La Varenne cooking school in Burgundy.