Am I Too Picky?

The other night, Jean and I had dinner at the home of our friends J. and P. It was excellent: a rich and smooth gumbo with fat shrimp and slabs of smoked turkey from Texas; melty-sweet collard greens; a creamy macaroni and cheese topped with crunchy croutons; bananas Foster with vanilla ice cream, which I now need to learn to make myself. As the kids these days say, 10/10 no notes. Loved it.

But I know the hosts were nervous, and that’s because J. told me herself. They were intimidated to cook for me, she said. I don’t know if that’s because I regularly take on ambitious cooking projects myself, or because I used to write about food for the likes of the New York Times and Bon Appétit. I guess maybe if I were the restaurant critic for the Times, I might be intimidating. But this felt a little ridiculous: I’m just a guy! This was just a dinner party! I don’t need seven forks, tweezed herbs, and an exotic wine list at a friend’s house. All I need is some pretty good cooking and pretty good people to talk to, and this dinner party was more than pretty good on both counts. I ate a ton—a Thanksgiving-style plate, as Jean described it.

Still, I recognize I have a reputation as, what, a stickler? An elitist? A world traveler with impossibly high standards? I love that people might—might—want to impress me, but that feels unreal. In my mind, I’m just a dude who is fine with cheap beer and mediocre pizza, who brings buckets of Popeyes to picnics, who loves the Princess Switch movies and will watch anything on Amazon Prime that’s labeled post-apocalyptic. I long ago adjusted my critical criteria in order to separate good from bad from like from hate, so that I can be easier to please. So why do people think I’m picky?

Maybe it’s because my sense of a cheap beer is Radeberger Pils or Bitburger Pils, which both cost way less, here in Brooklyn, than most other beers: say, as little as $6 for a four-pack of tallboys, which probably still isn’t quite as inexpensive as Coors or MGD. Likewise for Popeyes, because it’s better than KFC (and Crown and Kennedy). I suppose even in the lower end of things, I remain a snob.

Where I am truly picky, truly snobbish, though, is in the world of writing, especially books. Typos, I can forgive—imprints are rushed, and mistakes get made. Occasionally, they’re amusing: One friend’s novel mistakenly referred to an “ontology nurse” rather than “oncology nurse,” and I do like the idea of hospitals having ontological nurses on call. Can you please help me with this bedpan, and also explain my very existence?

Other errors—how shall I put this appropriately?—bother the fuck out of me. Dangling or misplaced modifiers are sins; when I encounter them, I choose to read them as written rather than as intended, just for my own amusement. Clichés are turn-offs: too many and I will drop a book as if it has transformed into a hot turd in my hand.

Anachronisms and other factual errors are understandable but also hard to forgive. In Jennifer Egan’s second novel, Look at Me (2001), she refers to a skateboard trick as a “switchdance 180” when she should have called it a “switchstance 180.” So I get it: She (mis)heard the name and never bothered to check it with, like, anyone who skateboards. These things happen. But Egan is such a talented writer that the oversight bothers me even more: I expect better from her. Worse, it makes me mistrust her. If she didn’t fact-check “switchdance,” then what else did she not fact-check? I loved her novel Manhattan Beach, about a diver at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II and her quest to understand her father’s disappearance, but a part of me wonders whether I read it too credulously. Perhaps someone with deeper knowledge of midcentury New York would find switchdances all over the book.

Right now I’m reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, the best-selling novel by Gabrielle Zevin about three video-game-designing friends that stretches from the mid-1980s to today (more or less). And I’m finding maddening errors and inconsistencies. When Zevin mentions games and pop culture from the various eras, they seem appropriate but always feel a little too early, like she desperately wants to get the callout in, even if it’s inaccurate: Doom is referenced early in the fall of 1993 (it was released in December), and a 25-year-old woman says she’s reading Harry Potter novels in 1999, a year before Pottermania fully struck the United States. I can almost let those slide, but not this: One of the main characters has had his left foot amputated, and soon after he freaks out driving when he can’t feel the brake pedal under his prosthetic—but don’t we all, at least those of us who learned to drive properly, use our right foot for both accelerator and brake¹? Maybe this character, a native Angeleno, didn’t learn to drive correctly, but if so, nothing is made of that in the book. Did the writer forget which of her main character’s feet he lost? Does Zevin, New York born but now living in Los Angeles, not know how to drive herself²? If she can’t keep her details straight, why should I invest so much time in this book? Still, I’m continuing to read the novel, mostly to find out if it the ending is as obvious and predictable as the previous 396 pages.

This is not to say I never make mistakes. Because I make them. Oh boy do I make them! I get things wrong³. The correction on this 2008 article still bothers the hell out of me—what was I thinking? In journalism, especially for high-profile outlets, I expect to be corrected, and I understand the loss of trust such mistakes incur. Elsewhere, in other genres and activities, errors survive, rarely if ever discussed.

The reason I’m so hard on Egan, Zevin, and many other writers, filmmakers, restaurants, artists, and public figures is that I have an unbreakable rule for criticism: Measure execution against ambition. What is the work—whether it’s a dense 500-page novel or a breezy comic book, whether it’s an elaborate seafood tasting menu or a bucket of fried chicken—trying to achieve, and how well does it meet that goal? I don’t think this is a particularly revolutionary schema, but while it requires discipline (and pickiness), it’s also freeing. When you are able to recognize a song, a sandwich, a country for what it wants to be, you can accept it for what it is, and learn to appreciate the moments when it’s pitchy, soggy, or otherwise difficult. When we love things how they want to be loved, the work has succeeded. It may be good, it may be bad, but we like it.

If I am indeed too picky, it’s because I try to see the ambition in everything, to guess at a burger’s hopes, a documentary’s dreams, and I may—I may—see the world as trying harder than it actually is, and evaluate it on a sharper scale than it, or anyone, expected. But I would rather live in a world that I see as trying hard and failing harder than in one that isn’t trying much at all.

For dinner last night, I seared a couple of steaks—the Paisanos “butcher’s special” cut—and baked russet potatoes that were originally supposed to be Hanukkah latkes and made the New York Times’ pickleback slaw and sliced an English cucumber and dressed it with lemon juice and salt. Basic stuff, no elaborate techniques or hours of prep or chichi ingredients. It went over fairly well, and toward the end of the meal my 16-year-old daughter, Sasha, proclaimed: “Your cooking is right angles,” she said, whereas other people’s cooking is “rounder.”

Whatever that means, I’ll take it. And I’ll take it to mean my cooking is precise and direct, with strong flavors and little trickery. There may be complexity, but not often subtlety. That’s what I’m going for—my ambition, you’d say—in cooking, writing, and everything else: My angles may not always be correct, but I’m hoping they’re right. And I’m hoping, whether you like them or not, you’ll judge them accordingly. 🪨🪨🪨