by Kristen Tauer
Guests always asked me what they were supposed to do with the eyeball. By that point, most diners had eaten around it—I always recommend they approach the miso-maple glazed salmon head by starting with the cheek, that little juicy pocket below the eye—leaving behind a plate of mushy skin and bones and that gelatinous little dotted globe. My answer was always the same: “Well, you can eat it.”
One person at the table always nodded, validated in the same conclusion they’d drawn for themselves.
Sometimes I lied and said that I myself had eaten the eye (ugh). I certainly had witnessed plenty of other people eat the fish eyeball, many of whom claimed to enjoy the experience. That knowledge was usually enough to persuade at least one person at the table to give it a try but if there was sexual tension at the table, the eyeball was a goner. Nothing impresses a date more than an ocular culinary adventure.
Profit margins are notoriously slim for restaurants, but the margins were spectacular for the miso-maple glazed fish head at Chez Sardine: The head cost about ten cents to purchase, because the market stateside for just heads, typically discarded as waste, is quite limited. At the other restaurants I worked, diners were often surprised when they ordered the whole fish from the menu (typically a branzino) and it arrived at the table with its skin and head on. It’s called a whole fish for a reason.
The fish head was a messy dish, a lot of work to eat, and gimmicky—not the sort of dish that garnered regulars, although it did entice people.The head was a particularly popular order in the wake of Pete Wells’s review of Chez Sardine for The New York Times. Wells loved his experience with the head—a “terrific satisfaction.” He also spoke highly of the hamachi collar. We only had a few to serve each night, but after Wells’s first pre-review visit to the restaurant, our executive chef Mehdi kept a smoked hamachi collar on reserve for the next time he came in.
Wells barely made eye contact with me during his second pre-review visit at the restaurant, but plenty of eyeballs were on him throughout his dinner: there was Chad, the anxious manager on duty; Gabe, the restaurant owner, who had materialized by the the host stand to keep watch over Wells’ meal; and the kitchen staff, who looked out on the 34-seat jewel box of a dining room through the open kitchen. The rest of the dining room, at full capacity, was oblivious to his presence.
And then there was me, hair in a side braid draped over a hot pink zebra-print top, asking if Wells was ready to order.
I never told Wells my name, and he never told me his, but I knew it; everyone knew it. Wells was practically a myth. His photo hung in the locker room of every New York City restaurant I had worked in like a Most Wanted sign. I’d read his work and even read another person’s account of what he was like. There were VIPs (Julianne Moore, Malcolm Gladwell, Lindsay Lohan), there were VVIPs (they usually paid with an Amex Black Card), and then there was just P: Pete. I was prepared.
People rarely match the internal story I piece together from their online persona. This time, though, Wells was pretty much exactly how I imagined him. Already caught in the slick flow of dinner service, I didn’t see him walk in with his dining companion. But our maitre ‘d did, so I had time to collect myself, however briefly, before walking over to the corner booth to greet Wells. Chad, our manager, pulled me aside for a pep talk by the POS station in the kitchen. I nodded along, only half listening as he offered guidance. Be upbeat, be knowledgeable, be hospitable. Be yourself, too. Approach it like any other table—but better.
I had no doubt I was going to wow Wells with my service, just as I assumed he’d be as impressed with the cuisine as the countless tables that had rotated through the restaurant before him. Chez Sardine had already earned positive reviews from other publications. The Times was the last major one still to weigh in, and it was the most important critique of all.
Well’s gaze lifted up from the menu as I approached, and he smiled. Or maybe I was projecting, wanting him to be as open and friendly as one of our regulars. It was probably more of a grimace.
“Hi! How’s it going?” I said, a recycled Pelegrino bottle filled with tap water nestled in the crook of my arm. “Is tap water fine?”
Wells gave a slight nod, and I reached over to fill the short glass tumbler set in front of him. I placed the bottle in the middle of the table with not so much as a soft clink and retreated back to the kitchen where Mehdi and several line cooks were gathered in a huddle.
“Go over his order with me before you put it in, OK?” said Mehdi, already settling into a meditative state of razor focus. This is the moment he’d been waiting for, ever since he’d moved from Montreal to open his own micro-restaurant in New York’s West Village, a Québécois take on an izakaya. “And we have one smoked hamachi collar to sell him,” he added. I meandered back over to Table 6, and Wells raised his glance ever so slightly from the beige cardstock menu on the table, while his tablemate (it must be a strange dining experience to go out to eat with The New York Times’s restaurant critic) countered his aloofness by giving me his full attention.
“So, we have a few specials tonight,” I said, launching into my usual script. “First, we have fried smelt with smoked aioli, a little bit of roe sprinkled in there, super delicious. Second, we have a smoked hamachi collar with spicy aioli. Do you have any questions about the menu, or do you need a little bit more time?”
“No, we’re ready to order,” said Wells, reciting a list of dishes, which unfortunately included the fried chicken balls. I couldn’t tell him this, but it was my least favorite dish on the menu.
Turning back towards the kitchen, I locked eyes with Gabe. He looked nervous. Having no chill whatsoever, the owner had appeared to watch over the critic and critique how things were going. Just as we knew who Wells was, Wells knew who Gabe was, and Wells also knew that we knew who he was and that we would all be watching each other.
How can a restaurant meal be anything other than a contrived performance under those conditions? We passed out shots of sake to a table nearby, just because. We led the room in a sing-along to Hall & Oates’s “Private Eyes.” We did all of these things normally, but now we turned it into theater. Dinner and a show, for one.
Wells was poker-faced throughout the meal—a skill honed over countless meals all around New York: be inscrutable. Reading people was something I had grown very good at, at least in the very specific context of a restaurant. I could very quickly suss out whether a table would be down for a funky bottle of Jura or floral bottle of Junmai Daiginjo sake. Or a $15 fish head.
Mehdi, anxious behind the pass, wanted to know if Wells had remarked about the Hamachi collar; he hadn’t. It was a fairly innocuous dining experience: smooth, straightforward, and relatively silent. I ran my lines and the audience kept their reaction to themselves as they left. In any other circumstance, I would sum it up as a good dining experience.
When he named The Dutch his best restaurant of the year in 2011 just months after it opened, I was still jotting down overpriced egg orders for the Midtown power breakfast crowd at Brasserie, dressed head to toe to wrist in black. I’d been there for over a year, and I was starting to resent everything around me: the six a.m. call time, cutthroat coworkers forever angling to get the best section, the “Sex and the City” tourists awed by visiting a restaurant once featured on their favorite show, the architecture students gawking at the Scofidio + Renfro–designed dining room, and the suited patrons, who saw me only as a means to a goblet of Arnold Palmer or a coffee refill.
After a year spent sweating over brunch shifts at The Dutch—some customers literally printed out Wells’s review of the restaurant and ordered exactly what he recommended—another two-star review sent me in the direction of Perla, an intimate Italian restaurant in the West Village, tucked in an alley next to a row of comedy clubs. There wasn’t a spot for me at Perla, but there was an opening on the service team of a new restaurant the owner was opening later that fall. I was sitting on the floor of Barnes and Noble on 86th Street during Hurricane Sandy when I got the call from Matt, one of the restaurant’s partners, offering me the job.
I’d only ever worked for restaurants that were clearly defined, their reviews and history already etched. This was my chance to be part of the story.
Wells’s review went up on a Tuesday morning a few weeks after his third visit. By the time I clocked in that afternoon for the dinner shift, everyone on staff at the restaurant had read it: one star. I didn’t have to even ask; the optimism in the air had been sucked dry. After four months of constantly packing the thirty-four-seat restaurant full and a few glowing reviews from other publications, everything had come unhinged with one man’s experience, megaphoned through The New York Times. His job was to write an entertaining review; our job was to provide the fodder.
Our pre-service meeting was somber. It certainly wasn’t the review that Mehdi had dreamt of ever since decamping to New York.
Chez Sardine was fat-on-fat dining with an Asian flair and while Wells’s review wasn’t bad, the criticism read louder on the page. The cuisine—a passion project, the culmination of a promising chef’s career—had been reduced to “Asian stoner food.” Which, to be fair, had some truth to it. There was a fois gras grilled cheese sandwich on the menu and a bite of sushi consisting of beef tartare topped with uni. But when I think stoner food, I think dollar pizza or fried mozzarella sticks from a late night hole-in-the-wall or a bag of Cheetos and the stain of neon orange dust. I definitely don’t think $18-a-piece sushi, like the beef tartare and uni sushi on our menu, or mini pancakes topped with salmon sashimi and globes of orange roe.
In his review, Wells compared the service to “a Hannah Montana movie set in Bushwick.” Maybe he picked up on the only front-of-house uniform requirement: red canvas shoes, any brand. Maybe he picked up that we were all playing a role.
Despite the snub, diners kept coming. Thanks to the review, some walked in for the first time like they already knew us. While other diners walked in looking to make a judgement of their own.
One year after Wells’s review, Chez Sardine shed its skin and morphed into a gastropub: Bar Sardine. Wells never returned to write a new review.
Even now, seven years later, it’s hard for me to see Chez Sardine for what it was. I knew that Chez Sardine wasn’t a three-star restaurant. A framed photo of R. Kelly hung above the toilet, and the pineapple propped in the corner of the chef’s counter wore a pair of sunglasses. Maybe two stars, though. Two stars was the golden ticket in the New York City dining ecosystem where new places crop up just as fast as old—and sometimes still new—ones shutter. Bad reviews close restaurants and good reviews don’t keep a restaurant open, though they certainly help.
Pandemics close restaurants too, reviews and stars be damned.
News of Bar Sardine’s impending closure arrived in early August. Outdoor dining and delivery were unable to fill the absence of a packed dining room. This time, there would be no third act; by the end of the month the restaurant closed its doors for good, six years after it emerged from Chez Sardine.
The restaurant has gone silent, and so has Wells; he hasn’t doled out new stars to a restaurant since March. There’s too much else at stake.
I always assumed I’d be able to go back to the restaurant, that it would always be there waiting in one form or another. I can still hear it all so clearly: the soundtrack of Hall & Oates and Nineties rap, the clash of voices competing to be heard at each table, the sharp ding of the bell in the kitchen announcing that a dish is ready to be served. In my mind I’m there, standing before Wells at table six, optimistic he’ll have a good time, optimistic the stars will follow.
Kristen Tauer is a writer, arts and culture journalist, and beekeeper based in Queens, NY. In 2016, she helped launch the independent food publication Counter Service. She’s originally from Ithaca, NY and graduated from Cornell University.