What do you get when you cross restaurants, media, death, and satire? The Lemon.
If you read one book this month, it should be this sly and sensational caper by S.E. Boyd
As some of you may already know, I do three things with alarming regularity (though thankfully not all at the same time): restaurants (regularly), reading (voraciously), and running (slowly). And while the focus of my career has been writing about the first of these, I’ve also written about running, but never really written about a book. This is not to say I haven’t read books that I probably could have written about; or at least had something to say about. I’ve written little captions on Instagram, like this one about Catherine Newman’s spectacular novel, “We All Want Impossible Things,” but it wasn’t until I read The Lemon, by S.E. Boyd, that I felt I needed to write about it.
That’s because The Lemon is a brilliant satire that takes aim squarely at the worlds of food and media, so it was basically written for me (and maybe you too?). Also, it made me laugh out loud on the F train, and take photos of pages and passages of the book and text them to my restaurant and writer friends. It’s ridiculously accurate and brilliant and so fucking funny. If you thought The Menu took a good shot at the industry, you’re in for a hell of a lot better with The Lemon.
The story starts out with John Doe, a revered and acclaimed Anthony Bourdain-ish former bartender-turned-author-turned-food-travel-show-host. Shortly after we meet him, Doe ends up dying under rather embarssing circumstances in a Belfast Hotel room, circumstances that could be misread as auto-erotic asphyxiation or suicide (or both), which would be rather fatal to his acclaimed legacy. The book traces the madcap caper coverup that follows and expands over chapters told from the point of view of the book's priceless cast of characters.
There’s his agent and confidant Nia, and his best friend, the chef Paolo, who are both desperate to keep the circumstance of his death out of the papers. There is Katie Horatio, a promising 20-something down-on-her-luck journalist who is withering into a dissociative personality disorder at a clickbait website and lives in a cockroach infested overpriced East Village apartment the authors have coined “The Tomb-for-Youth,” who writes a fabricated story about Doe as her ticket to fame.
Then there is Charlie, the hapless, clueless, potentially malevolent hotel porter who finds Doe’s body, and sets out to (maybe) blackmail the keepers of Doe’s legacy. We also meet Patrick Wheelan, Doe’s first boss and now a washed up celebrity chef living in Vegas, who is dating a sommelier 25 years his junior who writes him a wine list full of funky orange natural yeasty wines and refuses to entertain the thought of serving Gruner, and who brings him to orgies full of jeweled genitals, to which he brings a fancy Murray’s cheese plate. So yeah. It’s that kind of book.
S.E. Boyd, the book’s author, is actually not one person, it’s three. Three brilliant writers. S.E. Boyd is a pseudonym for a trio of friends (and lightly damaged Catholics) who have together authored four books between them and work in the media space: Kevin Alexander, a James Beard Award winning writer for Esquire, GQ, Thrillist, and more; Joe Keohane, a lifestyle and political writer who has worked at Medium, Esquire, Entrepreneur, and Hemispheres, and Alessandra Lusardi, a writer and book editor whose family has been in the restaurant business in the city for decades.
I’m not the only one who liked the book, which is meant to be the first in a three-part series. The writers are adapting it for television for the independent studio Wiip, producers of The Mare of Easttown and The Summer I Turned Pretty.
After reading the book, I reached out to the trio on Instagram and asked if they’d talk to me and to my utter delight they said yes. So last week, over zoom (and after Joe had dealt with a rat infestation in his basement), the three of us chatted for 40 minutes, until my free Zoom app booted us off. Here’s an edited version of our conversation.
Andrea: I loved this book so much. Your collective writing is hilarious, razor sharp and an amazing commentary on so much of the food and media world that we all live in. I laughed out loud so many times while reading it and have dog-eared many pages that I come back to and re-read. And it was a page-turner. What more is there?!
So, let’s start with a little background stuff. How did you all meet and tell me a bit about each of your careers. (Don’t worry Kevin, we know you have an MFA and the James Beard Award 😉).
Joe: Kevin and I came up at Boston Magazine and we worked together at a bunch of different places. I am more of a general interest journalist with pieces for Esquire and Medium, covering politics, crime, urban planning, business and tech.
Kevin: I’ve been a journalist for a long time, mostly focusing on food, and Joe was my editor at Thrillist where I wrote the piece on Pete Wells (which won the Beard Award). The problem was that Pete wouldn’t talk to me, because apparently The New Yorker was also profiling him, and he chose them instead of us. But that actually made the story a lot better because I would just follow him around and try to find him at restaurants across the city. I also wrote a couple of books including Burn the Ice, which tells the story of the last 12 years of eating and drinking in America after 2006, and how the “good food” revival evangelized food. Before that I was a bartender and a bouncer, and that gave me the baseline knowledge for this book.
Alessandra: I am a book editor, and I come from a restaurant family in New York City. (Alessandra’s family owns Lusardi’s). I met Kevin at a wedding, and then some years later when Kevin was starting to put together Burn the Ice, our mutual friend connected us. I was at Penguin and we met and talked and loved the book. I was a freelance editor at that point and having seen the change in the NY food scene first hand, I really clicked with a lot of what he was saying about the trajectory of what was going on in restaurants.
Then I formally edited Kevin’s next book, California Soul, the memoir with chef Keith Corbin. At this point I had met Joe already because when Kevin would come into town from California, he would gather all those who would rejoice in his arrival, and we would all meet for dinners and drinks. When we were working on California Soul, Kevin kept talking about this idea for a novel he was talking about with Joe. And then they started putting stuff down on paper and Kevin was like, read this. And then he said, how about the three of us do this? And then S.E. Boyd was born.
Where did you come up with the name S.E. Boyd?
Alessandra: We were thinking we needed a pseudonym because three names were too many for the cover of one book. Kevin and Joe are from Boston and they were looking at a Red Sox roster from 1988, and they were like, What about Oil Can Boyd? O.C. Boyd? And I said, No, that reads too much like a man. It wreaks of testosterone. So I came back with S.E. Harper, a mashup of two women: S.E. Hinton and Harper Lee. Then we came to settle on S.E. Boyd, and Boyd in Scottish means yellow like a lemon, so there you go.
What was the writing process like?
Joe: We did it like a writers room where we would each write our scenes and then we went through it and we ferreted out what hit. We had a meeting every Friday and did a lot over text and email and constant communication and one-upmanship. It was written in a dark time, and we didn't maybe set out to make it funny, but it was so much fun. We were laughing our asses off in the middle of January 2021. It was sheer pleasure.
What was the original spark for the idea — the kernel of inspiration to write the book and this particular story?
Joe: I think for Kevin it was procrastination. He was working on California Soul and it was the COVID winter of 2020-21, and he needed to be writing it, but also wanted to be doing something else. We all had kids and were all exhausted and needed something fun to do. Kevin was like, What about a book where somebody like Bourdain dies under vaguely unseemly circumstances, and then there is a cover up and everything goes sideways?
When Bourdain died, we saw a sincere effusion of sadness and also an ocean of bullshit, with so much purple prose and all these people maneuvering to get a piece of it, and we liked the feeding frenzy and everyone taking control to benefit themselves. Some of them are trying to protect him, but there were some sharks. It was this celebrity death industrial complex: shock, sorrow, then sharing memories, and then this person is a post mortem god, then they take shots at them, and then icon is taken down. We liked the idea of how contradictory it is for a person to be famous for being authentic, and the push and pull to serve an audience and to be true to yourself. We thought that was a good catalyst for a story. That’s the starting gun, and then it goes in different directions.
Alessandra: It was Bourdain because he’s someone we all really liked. We were in that genuine fan base, but then his image was being used and reused and twisted to suit other people's desires.
Kevin: The book is a commentary not on Bourdain, but on the people that circle, whether it's to protect him, or take a piece of his crown, or the one who gets run over in it.
You call the Bourdain character John Doe. Why’s that?
Kevin: I wrote it first as a placeholder and then we kept it, because he is anonymous. He is a screen where everyone projects their own shit. It started out as laziness, but then you’re like: Oooh, actually that’s deep.
Tell us about Paolo, the chef of The French Restaurant with the French Name. You describe him like this in the opening chapter about his character:
“There were three chefs in the world more famous than Paolo Cabrini, all of whom were French and two of whom were dead. Paolo had cooked for five presidents, four kings, three prime ministers, two chancellors, and One Direction, which he learned was a pop band. He spoke six languages fluently, personally oversaw a staff of 200, and had once both officiated and cooked for a billionaire friend’s wedding on an active volcano.”
Paolo’s restaurant, what is referred to only as “The French Restaurant with the French Name,” has these secret rooms unfolding almost like those Russian Matryoshka dolls. Was that inspired by one restaurant or is it sort of an amalgam of many?
Kevin: For his character and the restaurant we were cherry picking elements from 11 Madison, Le Bernardin, and the craziness of Noma. But of course we elaborated, like the thing we made up where people could email the restaurant and pitch a menu item and then Paolo would make it. So everyone’s menu would be slightly different, which is insanity. We took the secret lounge from 11 Madison where they needed to clear the tables, so now you go to the lounge, and you do the brandy and sit here as long as you want. So then we took that one step farther so there was a secret bar but then we added yet another secret bar behind the secret bar.
Let’s talk about Charlie. He drove me nuts. He adds this extra element of aggravation and exacerbation, and amazingness to the book.
Joe: Yes, Charlie is the agent of chaos. He is the devil. He is the axis of the story. If you have planet reality (Paolo), versus planet bullshit (Katie), Charlie is just insane. He’s bananas. Paolo is so tightly wound and such a master at controlling chaos, and then he is completely undone by this fun-loving Irish porter who shows up one day, and takes everything apart. Everything. Charlie’s intentions are never fully revealed. You don’t quite know if he’s the most evil person in the world, or a complete idiot, and that is truly terrifying. Charlie is just having the best time.
The character Patrick Whelan is a washed up chef working in Vegas who at one point locks himself in his hotel room, “in a cocoon of dejection,” where he:
“gives the bellhop $200 cash to get him the same items every day: four Gray’s Papaya franks with ketchup, mustard, sauerkraut, onions, relish, and a medium papaya tropical drink; a falafel from Mamoun’s; banana pudding from Magnolia; three dollars’ worth of pizza from a specific dollar slice joint on 23rd Street; a coffee soda from the nearest deli; and two frozen hot chocolates from Serendipity.”
That’s such a fantastic list, and it comes from a true New Yorker for sure. Patrick tries to use Doe’s death to reignite his deflated career. Who is Patrick to you all?
Kevin: Patrick is a combination of many chefs of that early 2000s, a time when we all celebrated the young white male chef, where everyone was like: What can’t these guys do? Fusion was a big deal then, which is also hilarious because it jumped the shark and you got the weirdest combinations like warm kiwi?! But we wanted to have that sort of a celebrity chef who was big, but who is now in the sad Vegas stage where they can’t figure out who they are. We loved Patrick, and you’ll all see if there is any redemption there.
I saw The Menu which I thought was a sub-par parody satire of our industry — your book hits much smarter and better. What did you all think of The Menu?
Kevin: We all saw it together, I think there are elements of it, for people in the food world where you recognize how silly it all is. It was too obvious, but we thought it was entertaining. We had a couple beers and ate some chili dogs.
Alessandra: It was fun because of the ridiculous levels it went to. And it came out after The Bear, and then it was announced that Noma would be closing, so it seemed to be a convenient joining of things to try to write about the fate of dining as a whole. It took the closing of Noma for people to be brave enough to say how ridiculous fine dining had become.
I think about how media has changed since I first started writing over 20 years ago, when I used to be able to make a decent salary and write a good long story, and now neither of those is possible. All of that is embodied in the Katie Horatio character.
I love the opening scene where we meet her in her apartment, what you call the “Tomb-for-Youth,” and all the cockroaches she seems to treat almost as legit roommates, and the amount of clothing she wears to protect herself from the world, even on a blistering summer day. And of course, her boss, River, who weighs his shit on a scale in the bathroom every day. And then she writes a completely made up story about John Doe and then out comes New Katie! BAM, the naked cigar smoking boss bitch! So, let’s discuss Katie, and the media, and the struggle for journalism and journalists.
Joe: We came out of print journalism and there was a lot of care in print, and finite material, and writers were compensated. And then came the internet and panic and vast numbers of things for free and paying everyone nothing. We had a front row seat to that collapse and the destruction of the way to make a living in print and the total exploitation that we now have.
River, the “editor in chief” at SWVLL where Katie works, is a type and Kevin and I worked with at Thrillist. I ran digital, and we had a chart and a big screen showing how the stories performed, and you’d sit there and sweat blood. But you have no time to write anything well, and your editor is like 14 years old, and then your position becomes more tenuous and it's a miserable sweatshop. That’s content production; it’s this low protein gruel. So we wanted to extrapolate from that, and the sense of maximum panic, that you can barely make rent and you have no trust fund and your story has to perform. All that pressure is on Katie, who is a reasonably talented person. She has a dissociative event and then becomes horrible and then, well you’ll see.
Kevin: After the book came out, people said that it should come with a trigger warning. A lot of people were like, Was this about me? Collectively it was about all of us.