FEATURED CONTRIBUTOR OF THE MONTH

We have no idea what featured contributor Todd Kliman looks like. As the food and wine editor and dining critic for THE WASHINGTONIAN magazine, Kliman does not publicly share photographs of himself, in order to maintain anonymity at the restaurants he reviews and writes about. Despite the mask, we immediately felt a connection with the author upon reading his personal, passionate feature in our Southern food issue. (Click here to read “The Perfect Chef”) We couldn’t resist the chance to get to know Kliman better by interviewing him once the issue wrapped. Despite the perceived glitz of a big-city food critic’s job and lifestyle, Kliman himself is honest, thoughtful, down-to-earth, and genuinely adventurous when it comes to seeking out the culinary delights of our nation’s capital.

As perceptive as his food writing is, we were surprised to learn that Kliman became a critic almost by accident after exploring a variety of journalistic and literary specialties: his essays and reviews have appeared in HARPER’S, THE NEW YORKER, the WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD, and elsewhere; and he taught college English for a decade. (At Howard, he briefly advised a student humor publication funded by the comedian Chris Rock.) Before joining the staff of THE WASHINGTONIAN, Kliman’s body of work for the WASHINGTON CITY PAPER won a James Beard Award in 2005 for best newspaper food column. Despite his prominence, Kliman has actively eschewed the foodie-elitist trap to which some critics fall prey, relying instead on his own curiosities and passions—culinary, intellectual, and cultural. Here, in addition to demystifying his job, Kliman tells us where in Europe to avoid Tex-Mex food (hint: stick with crepes instead of nachos), why D.C. is gaining ground as a city for food lovers, and what it’s like to be served kebab by an Iraqi spy.  

Kliman's first book, THE WILD VINE, is forthcoming from Crown in May 2010.

THE OXFORD AMERICAN: How and why did you decide to become a food critic?

TODD KLIMAN: It’s funny: I hear all the time from young kids—thirteen, fourteen years old—who, because of food shows and the glamour they perceive the food world to be, have decided to become food critics when they grow up. As if it’s an actual career path.

I don’t think you can decide something like this. In my case, and in most cases I know, it just sort of happens. You fall into it. I’d written about pretty much everything before I wrote my first piece about food—media, culture, politics, sports. I did a lot of book reviews. I wrote a lot of stories in which I immersed myself in a subculture and tried to write from within—going back to high school for a month; hanging out with straightedge punk rockers who lived in a group house and earnestly worked out their values. I never thought about writing about food, and then a friend of mine, an editor at a magazine, asked me to do a piece for him. And something just clicked for me when I wrote that—clicked in a way, for instance, that it never did when I wrote about politics.

I get a lot of e-mail from would-be freelancers who want to write about food because they love food and love going to restaurants and have a great palate blah blah blah—but what I like about food writing is the chance to write about neighborhoods and cultures, to tell stories about people through the foods they love and need, and to write in a way that is rooted in the actual, but is not purely journalistic—to write in a way that is personal and intimate, or in a way that allows for a kind of lyrical, Romantic expression. Ways, in other words, that are not permitted, generally, if you are a quote-unquote journalist.

THE OA: Do you ever wear disguises when you are “undercover” at a restaurant?

TK: I never have. And most critics don’t, either—I think it’s a myth that this is more than just an occasional thing. Although I understand why critics would want to perpetuate it.

The problem with going in disguise, for me, is that it’s a logistical/practical problem. It takes an hour or two to get into makeup (I've looked into what it would take to pull off), plus an hour to get out of it. Then there’s the three hours that you’re at dinner, plus the half hour to get there and the half hour back. So, basically: Your entire day is taken up with eating dinner.

THE OA: Why has food become such a popular subject on TV? Does the closing of GOURMET magazine signal that the foodie craze is waning?

TK: I’ve wondered about this for a while now— why food is so popular on TV. I used to think that it was in large part because it’s something everybody does— everybody eats, and a lot of people like food, and some of those people have an interest in how to make it, etc. But what’s interesting, now, is that cooking shows are not the shows that people most want to watch. The best cooking shows are on PBS, and they attract a comparatively small audience. There are cooking shows on the Food Network, but they’re on in the afternoon, and they’re all variations of the same thing—how to cook without cooking! At one time, the Food Network had itself a very potent lineup of accomplished and celebrated chefs, and you could watch a program and learn a good deal about how to conduct yourself in a kitchen. But apparently this was intimidating to a lot of the home audience, and so the chefs have been mostly dispensed with—replaced by “real” people, with limited skills and knowledge but plenty of sass and (of course) high-wattage smiles. Which is a win-win, as they say, for the network: good, consistent ratings from really, really cheap programming.

The shows that are most popular now are not the cooking shows, though; they’re the shows that depict people going to extremes—eating lamb testicles, traveling to Alaska to ingest whale blubber, etc. TV is an ideal medium for that sort of exotica. Actually, it’s an ideal medium for educational programming, too, but the network suits would sooner put up a test pattern in prime time.

As for GOURMET, I think that its demise says something mostly about GOURMET, or about Condé Nast. I don’t think the food revolution is waning at all.

My hope, though, is that it becomes something more mainstream, to the point that more of the public learns about the awful things being done to the food supply in the name of efficiency; and processed foods become stigmatized; and fast food in this country becomes better, tastier and more wholesome. Can it happen? Maybe. But the elites who are driving the food revolution are going to have to realize that they have been pretty much just talking to themselves. Thoughtful tomes on how to live as locavores—or on how to return to a simpler, more civilized way of life, with leisurely meals around the communal table—are just bourgeois liberal fantasies. This isn’t 1850, and this isn’t Europe. Working to create urban gardens for “underprivileged youth”? A laudable thing, I guess—but it just feels like grandstanding charity to me. If you want to see change, real change, in how we eat and what we eat, then take on the supermarket chains. Take on the fast food operations….

THE OA: Are there any “rules” for writing well about food?

TK: Never use the word “delicious” to describe something delicious—?

I think the best rule, or at least the one that works best for me, is to try to write from the outside. A lot of food writers are eager to be insiders, because they think that that provides you with the latest, most up-to-the-minute information and a perspective that a lot of editors will want. There are so many private dinners held in big cities every day for editors and writers and bloggers that are designed to feed this insider approach—not only dinners, but also press trips and foodie events. I like operating on the margins. I like the perspective of looking in. In my reviews, I strive to write for the reader who is never going to set foot in the restaurant, as crazy as that sounds. I want that person to have a vicarious experience, to apprehend the restaurant through my words and images. It’s not easy, but that’s what I strive for. I’m not writing for the foodie.

THE OA: Do you ever get angry letters from people (customers or chefs/restaurateurs) who disagree with your reviews?

TK: All the time. Surprisingly, though, more of the hate mail comes from diners than from chefs or restaurateurs.

People take it personally when a meal goes bad, and I almost think they blame me more for an awful or disappointing night than the restaurant—because, as they see it, I’m the one who’s supposed to save them from a bad experience.

What I think they fail to understand—or, not fail, because that would mean trying—is that, unlike a theater critic or a book critic or a film critic, I’m not writing about something that is immutable. I remember writing a piece about shad roe a few years ago, and I took a friend with me to a restaurant that I knew had a shad roe dish on its menu. The dish was amazingly good—so good that we devoured it and then ordered another, just to have that taste all over again. Well, guess what? Ten minutes later, same restaurant, same dish—and it was just okay.

This was a staggering revelation to me! How could this be? I wondered.

But great cooking is about precision, which is about timing. Thirty seconds too long on the heat, say, and a dish that was rave-worthy is reduced to something ordinary. That’s all it takes. And consider just how many times that can happen at a busy restaurant if a cook isn’t vigilant.

THE OA: Do you have any funny stories about dining disasters?

TK: I was once strong-armed into believing that catfish was salmon. I witnessed a customer send back a steak four times without apologizing once. I saw a restaurant’s drapes go up in flames one night. I watched a waitress being fired before my eyes. I wrote glowingly about a kebab house and its affable, helpful owner—only to learn later that he was a spy for the Iraqi government. One day, I was spotted by a chef at his upscale Mexican restaurant—and was promptly “rewarded” by a fleet of dishes, including a couple of grasshopper tacos; when the chef swung by the table later to ask how everything was, he noticed a half-eaten taco. He plucked a critter from the leftovers and popped it into his mouth: “Hm. They used the B-grade.”

THE OA: Are there any cuisines you just plain dislike? How do you avoid or address taste bias in your reviews?

TK: No, there’s no cuisine that I dislike. My tastes and interests are very wide.

I have to say, I’m lucky to be writing about restaurants in the Washington, D.C., area, because the variety of cultures is astonishing. Vietnamese, Thai, Afghan, Bolivian, Ethiopian, Salvadoran, Japanese, Peruvian, Korean, Mexican…and I could probably name two dozen more. It keeps things fresh and interesting for me. I never feel as though I’ve gotten into a rut.

And actually, back to the idea of disliking a cuisine for a second…. One of the things I try to tell people who say they don't like a certain dish or a certain style of food is: You’ve probably never had a superlative version of that dish or cuisine. What you’re responding to, I say, more often than not, is a subpar version of that dish.

THE OA: How does D.C. rate as a food lover’s town?  

TK: It’s really come into its own in the past five years. It’s no longer just a place for expense-account dining. There’s a real scene taking shape.

The truth is that for years and years, the ethnic-dining scene was far more interesting than the fine-dining scene. The ethnic-dining scene was what made eating out in D.C. interesting. But you didn’t hear a lot about that, and that’s because it exists far from the corridors of official Washington. There have always been two cities, the government town—full of transplants and transients—and the real city: D.C. And now, finally, the real city is where most of the action is—both culinarily and culturally.

I’m a big believer that culture doesn’t happen from the top down; it grows from the ground up. A real scene is never a top-down scene, which is why I don’t think Vegas is really a great food town, for all of its phenomenal restaurants. Chicago is. LA is. And D.C. now has the makings of something special. There’s been a flood, of late, of good mid-level restaurants, and a food-cart scene is beginning to emerge. Together with the city’s ethnic-food scene and its high-end destinations, that’s a lot of richness.

THE OA: What food/restaurant trend would you like to see go away and never come back?

TK: OK, so I don’t dislike cuisines, as I said—but I do dislike restaurants that I perceive to be “concepts.” Restaurants that are focus-grouped within an inch of their lives. That seem to be the products of powerful publicity machines. That conduct months and months of research in an effort to nail every detail of an experience—but forget about soul.

Trend I would like to see: upscale Pennsylvania Dutch, or Amish fusion. Now that’s a concept I would like some restaurateur to pursue!

THE OA: If you could take anyone with you on a restaurant reviewing trip, who would it be and why?

TK: When I was teaching, there was a question along these lines that I used to pose to my students on the first day of class—I wanted to see where their minds were, what they valued.

Without fail, the best students invariably looked to the past for their dinner guests, while the worst students seemed to be locked into the present.

Anyway, I’m going to be a good student, I hope, and reach back into history for my dinner party: Moses, Caravaggio, Faulkner, John Coltrane, Martin Luther King, Jr., Sartre.

The food? Who cares! The conversation would be amazing. (Well, for however long it lasted: I imagine Faulkner getting drunk, and getting into a fight with Caravaggio. I imagine King and Moses playing peacemaker, and Coltrane nodding along to his own private music, oblivious to everything. Sartre would be taking notes.)

If I could take just one person along with me, it would be my father, who passed away last year. He was a food-adventurer, thought nothing of driving an hour and a half for barbecue at some backwoods hut, and had an intensity for living that nobody I have ever known or met has matched. To sit down to just one more meal with him….

THE OA: What is your favorite culinary travel destination?

TK: Paris!

Restaurants where people linger for hours and hours. The idea of strolling the streets and eating amazing cheeses and breads and chocolates. Simple, sublime dinners that in the States would end up being two hundred dollars for two—but that set you back half of that, if you’re lucky.

The only thing that’s disappointing is the Tex-Mex. They just don’t get what it’s supposed to be. They keep putting Gruyère on their nachos and enchiladas, for one thing. You can imagine what they're thinking: “Thees yellow goo? Non! We have something better!” But it’s not better; it doesn’t go. I remember watching a guy go to work on his pile of Gruyère-topped nachos with a knife and fork. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed harder.

And how wonderful it was to sit there and watch as an American and feel, for once (and probably for ever), culturally superior to the French.

THE OA: Are you a good cook?

TK: I think I am. I’ve been told that I am. In fact, I’ve been told many, many times I should open my own restaurant. Years ago, I entertained that idea—a sort of what-if notion in the back of my head. But no longer. I write about restaurants—I know better.

Now, if someone were to come along and ask to partner with me, and put up a lot of dough...well, I could listen.

THE OA: Have you ever waited tables, tended bar, or cooked in a restaurant?

TK: I haven’t tended bar, but I have waited tables—I was bad at my first stint, which lasted two weeks, and worse at my second, which I left after one night, in shame: I served andouille sausage gumbo to a vegetarian, and sprayed coffee from the cappuccino maker all over the counter. I greatly admire those waiters and waitresses who understand what their job is—which is to take care of people and to send them away feeling better than when they walked in. The best ones do that, and make it look easy—and are worth tipping twenty-five percent at the very least.

I’ve cooked in a restaurant, but only in limited duty and never over a period of weeks or months. It’s very adrenalized, high-stress work, and what you may not realize is that the job is not just about making good food; it’s about making good food quickly, and at high volume. It’s one thing to cook a good dish at home, but try cooking that good dish twenty-five times in three hours with a martinet barking at you to “hurry up, dammit!” (well, okay—worse) and little room to maneuver and no one to bail you out if you should fall behind.

THE OA: We don't like to call pleasures “guilty,” but what is your favorite lowbrow food indulgence...one that a critic might be reluctant to reveal?

TK: No pleasure is guilty, agreed. I don’t go in for all that Puritanical b.s.

And I happen to like a lot of so-called lowbrow food. Smothered enchiladas and sunken burritos, for instance—love ’em. I have cravings for bowls of chili mac with grated cheese, chopped onions, and sour cream. Fritos and Frito pie. Twenty minutes from my house, there’s the famed Tommy Marcos’s Ledo Restaurant (now in its fifty-fifth year), with its distinctive version of pizza, a rectangular-shaped pie that tastes like a biscuit, topped with a sweet tomato sauce and smoked provolone—I love it. MoonPies. Corn Pops out of the box. Pop-Tarts fresh from the toaster.

I could go on and on….

THE OA TEN

1. What superstitions do you have?

I don’t like to talk about what I’m working on. I tend to believe that if you talk about it too much, you dissipate the need, the urgency, to put it into words.

I also think that to talk about something you hope for—dream about—is to invite the gods to smack you down. And that every unquestionably wonderful thing that happens to you is succeeded by something…. I’m not going to finish that statement.

I chalk these attitudes up to my (becoming more pronounced) Jewish fatalism.

2. What would you like to change about yourself?

I would like to not be a worrier. I hate being a worrier. I worry about being a worrier.

That, and I would like to be taller.

3. What are you still trying to accomplish in your professional career?

Many, many things. I am perpetually unsatisfied and restless. I want to write a novel, a great novel. I won’t be satisfied until I do.

4. What is your hidden talent?

I can parallel park a car like nobody’s business.

5. What subject causes you to rant?

Rants, both private and public:

Entitlement. People and their class blindness. Inequalities, little and big. Close-mindedness. Complacency. No-talents being held up as important or culturally representative. People buying into the system. “American exceptionalism.”

I guess maybe the better question would have been, “What subject doesn’t cause you to rant?”

6. What is the biggest mistake you ever made in your professional life?

Oh, wow: Too many too mention…; The one that sticks out, right now, is not leaving my teaching job at Howard University earlier.

7. What is one thing that you used to dislike but that you now like?

I used to dislike cocktails and mixed drinks. I used to think they were an expression of WASP certitude and privilege. That was callow and ignorant. They’re expressions of WASP certitude and privilege—AND damn good ways to unwind with friends.

8. What profoundly underrated book, album, or movie would you like to champion for us?

I’d like to champion an album and a book:

The Kid Creole and the Coconuts trilogy, a pop parody of THE ODYSSEY (in this case, the search for “Addy, dear Addy”) that includes the album DOPPELGANGER, which I think is one of the best pop records I’ve ever heard. The frontman and songwriter, August Darnell, has an MA and taught Shakespeare, and has been compared to Cole Porter. I think in a different era—and/or with a less segregated, less pigeonholing recording industry—he would be regarded as a quote-unquote national treasure.

And A DIFFERENT DRUMMER, by William Melvin Kelley. A brilliant satire, written at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. The premise is hilarious and provocative—in a small, unnamed town in the Deep South, all the black residents one day just up and leave, following their enigmatic Pied Piper of a leader—but the book is unsettling and profound. What’s interesting is that Kelley’s focus is not on the blacks who leave, but the on whites who remain. Bereft of the opposition that consumes them—bereft of an identity—they are left to grapple with their odd new reality. This is the kind of book that stays with you forever.

9. What is your favorite line from a song?

It’s more a stanza than a single line: Get up offa that thing, and shake ’till you feel better, / Get up offa that thing, and try to release that pressure! / Get up off! / Ha! / Good God! / So good! / Ha!

10. What was your favorite childhood toy?

Pussycat—that was my name for him: a kitty cat made out of molded plastic, yellow, with a sweet face and winsome expression, poking out of a boot. I took him everywhere. Once, on a family vacation, we were about a third of the way home when I realized I had left Pussycat behind; my father turned right around and never complained. When my son was born, two years ago, I gave Pussycat a good scrubdown and passed him on down the line.

(Photograph of Pussycat courtesy of Todd Kliman.)