The little tuffets for ladies’ bags, the selection of steak knives to choose from, the waiters who put on white gloves to trim fresh herbs tableside. The fucking water cart. The even more painful array of Montblanc pens to choose from so that one might more elegantly sign one’s check. The dark, hideous, and pretentious dining room. All of it conspired to smother any possibility of a good time stone-dead in a long, dreary dirge. Nothing could live in this temple of hubris. The generally excellent food was no match for the forces aligned against it. And it just wasn’t, in the end, excellent enough to prevail against the ludicrousness of what surrounded it.

Like watching Bonfire of the Vanities or Heaven’s Gate—or one of the other great examples of ego gone wild in the movie business—there were so many miscalculations, large and small, that the whole wrong-headed mess added up to something that wasn’t just bad but insulting. You left ADNY angry and offended—that anyone, much less this out-of-touch French guy, would think you were so stupid.

New Yorkers don’t like to be treated like rubes. Tends to leave a bad taste. And the bad taste one left with after ADNY metastasized into something larger—feelings of doubt about the desirability—and even the morality—of that kind of luxury. Few in the hermetic world of Francophile New York foodies had ever really asked those questions before. Now, they were asking.

There’s been no sign since, by the way, that Ducasse has gotten much smarter. Other than having the wisdom to close ADNY. After initial reviews of a new “brasserie” concept were negative, he suggested publicly that New Yorkers were unfamiliar with this kind of food and that it was up to critics to educate them to the complexities of exotica like blanquette de veau and choucroute. Which came as news, I’m sure, to the many, many distinguished French chefs who’d been doing exactly that—to great acclaim—for decades.

For being an arrogant fuckwit who nearly ruined it for all of us, Alain Ducasse is a villain.

Terrance Drennan is a hero because, back in the Stone Age, he was the only guy around who loved cheese enough to lose money on it. For years. Brennan, the chef/owner of Picholine and Artisanal in New York City, was the first American chef to get really serious about the French-style cheese course. It’s not like anybody was asking. It wasn’t like there’d been a popular outcry for soft, runny, prohibitively expensive cheeses with which few Americans were familiar—and even fewer inclined to ever like. Even today, mention “stinky cheese” and relatively few are they who will respond positively.

Sure, heroic cheesemongers like Robert Kaufelt at Murray’s Cheese Shop had been making a good living selling an impressive variety of the world’s great cheeses for ages. But making a go of cheese in a restaurant situation was a very different matter.

Back in the day, the cheese board was, at restaurants of a certain type, an obligatory exercise at best. At the kind of fine-dining Frog ponds where the waiters spoke with French or Italian accents, and the crystal and linens were of good quality, the flowers freshly cut, the menu French or “continental,” cheese was something you offered because that was the sort of thing your customers expected. They’d been to Europe—many times. They knew that after the main courses, cheese is offered. Nobody actually ordered the shit. And had they tried, they would often find a perfunctory display of usual suspects: unripe (or too ripe) Brie, maybe a Camembert (usually in even worse shape), a sad disk of undistinguished chèvre, something hard and vaguely Swiss—and a lonely and unloved wedge of something blue. Probably the same Roquefort used elsewhere on the menu. In fact, the key to offering a cheese course and getting away with it was to make sure that everything on the cheeseboard was used elsewhere on the menu.

Cheese is expensive. Very expensive. And perishable. And delicate. Properly aged, stored, served, and handled cheese is even more expensive. Every time you cut into an intact cheese, its time on this earth becomes limited. Every time you pull one out of the special refrigerated cave it lives in, you are killing it slowly. Every time you return it, partially served, back to the refrigerator, you are also killing it. Whichever employee is serving your cheese? Every uneven cut, every pilfered slice or smear can pretty much end any possibility of a return on your investment. In fact, to properly serve a reasonably excellent selection of cheeses—always at their peak ripenesses and at proper temperatures—one almost must accept the imperative of throwing a lot of it out sooner or later, or find a way to use it elsewhere. And the more varieties of cheese you offer, the less likely you will be able to merchandise all of the remnants as ingenious appetizers.

It is very rare, even in the best of circumstances, that a customer will order a separate cheese course—prior to and distinct from—dessert. The arrival of cheeses on a cart tableside presents a potentially awkward situation for a large party: should we wait for the asshole here—who insisted on ordering a few reeking blues and some port—or should we just go ahead and order desserts?

So, cheese is not exactly a “loss leader”—meaning, an expensive or cumbersome item that does not in itself make money but which somehow inspires others to order things that will make money. If people do decide to have cheese as a dessert course, there’s no way you’re making more money on a nicely aged Stilton than you would be had everybody simply ordered crème brûlée or ice cream, which cost much less to produce.

You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese. And that’s a very dangerous thing to be in the restaurant business. One of the great suicidal expressions has always been “educate the customer.” You hear that kind of talk from your business partner, it’s usually way too late to roll your eyes at the ceiling and plead for sanity.

But Terrance Brennan actually did—and continues to—“educate” his customers. And somehow to get away with it—even succeed and expand. After introducing the cheese concept at Picholine, he built a whole additional business around it at Artisanal—so far in front of everybody else he’s still out front, years later. He not only heroically defied the conventional wisdom of the times, he helped change the conventional wisdom. Where there was no market at all, he created one.

The dining public may not have known that it needed a selection of over a hundred cheeses. They certainly didn’t know they needed to know about small-production American cheeses from previously unknown cheese-makers in Maine, Oregon, and even New Jersey. Brennan, by taking a chance on cheese, helped create not just a market to sell cheese—but an emerging sector dedicated to making cheese. Finally, for all those lonely would-be cheese-makers pondering the possibilities of great, homegrown American cheese, there was a chef/restaurateur out there who might buy them, promote them, dedicate himself and his business to hand-selling them to the public.

Terrance Brennan is a hero. By taking a series of mad risks, he’s raised all boats—made things better for all of us.

Jim Harrison is a hero.

Because there’s nobody, nobody left like him. The last of the true gourmands—the last connection to the kind of writing about food that A. J. Liebling used to do. Passionate, knowledgeable, but utterly without snobbery—as likely to gush over an ugly but delicious tripe à la mode or order of roasted kidneys as a once-in-a-lifetime meal at a triple-starred Michelin. Harrison, author of many fine books and even more fine poems, has done everything cool with everybody who’s ever been cool dating back to when they invented the fucking word. He knows how to cook. He has impeccable taste in wine. He knows how to eat.