Merrill Shindler

Nation's Restaurant News, Oct 14, 1996 by Richard Martin

A New Yorker magazine cartoon once exposed the secret life of restaurant critics by depicting some mundane realities that fail to jibe with popular conceptions of reviewers' endless epicurean exploits.

The cartoon showed a glum, deskbound drone on deadline poised to ingest a prosaic Big Mac, fries and canned cola as he typed, "The homard aux champignons Antoinette was acceptable, but our Chateau Noir 196,3 seemed to lack body ..."

Although parallels to that wry portrayal exist in the professional life of Merrill Shindler, it is the Los Angeles-based critic's own survival instincts that dictate the dichotomy between his workaday routine and his investigative indulgences.

"I only eat fruits and vegetables around the house, or I'd weigh a ton," says Shindler, whose home-office computer modem and manuscript printer link him to readers throughout Southern California and beyond.

Best known for his nine-year-long stint as talk-radio host of KABC's weekly "Dining out with Merrill Shindler," the veteran reviewer spends most of his days toiling over a hot word processor while recouping his appetite through self-denial. A former restaurant critic for the old Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and Los Angeles magazine, Shindler now reviews restaurants for the LA Reader, the Thomson group of newspapers in the San Gabriel Valley northeast of Los Angeles and the Copley-owned papers in suburbs from Santa Monica to San Pedro.

Fueled by little more than crudites, he also labors in his home office as co-editor of the Zagat Survey's Los Angeles edition, whose No. 1-best-selling-paperback status has kept Shindler's name atop the local book charts most of the year.

The versatile and prolific Bronx native--who holds degrees in mythic studies from City College of New York and in film criticism and aesthetics from New York University and who once served as music editor of Rolling Stone-some days defers his caloric binges while writing top-of-the-pops radio scripts for Casey Kasem.

"After a whole day of chewing on carrots, I'm hungry enough to eat my Reeboks," says Shindler, who begins planning his daily dining-out itinerary during the hour-long jog and walk he takes each morning around a neighboring golf course. With family dog Jeb in tow, Shindler departs on that outing after reading his bathroom scale "to see how much damage I did the night before." Despite his austere regimen at home, Shindler is known as an energetic eater with a capacious curiosity about food. That curiosity is well served in the countless cafes, bistros, dining palaces and dives that dot the gastronomic landscape of Greater Los Angeles. Shindler has missed few of those eateries, if one judges by the encyclopedic range he displays each Saturday afternoon while he fields on-air phone queries from his hungry radio audience, which followed his move this month to sister station KMPC.

But at 8 a.m. on a recent weekday morning he starts his workday at the computer and on the phone after showering, reading the paper, taking his vitamins and breakfasting on fruit from the Santa Monica Farmers Market. He first downloads and answers his e-mail and then calls Zagat editors and others in New York to catch them before they break for lunch.

By 8:30 he has begun prioritizing his various deadlines. After a few minutes of nonstop writing and editing, he wanders into the kitchen for some iced tea. Distracted by a televised interview on the "Today" show, he later finds himself spending an hour with Regis and Kathie Lee before returning to the office.

Although some writing and editing does get done between phone calls during the next hour and a half, Shindler sums up that time with a satirical chronicle that must ring true with other restaurant writers:

"My deadlines are getting more desperate by the hour. Unfortunately, 87 publicists call to make sure I've received their press releases or to make sure I'm going to the opening party at their restaurant. I inform them that I don't go to opening parties since they have nothing to do with anything I do. But, they say, several unspeakably vile restaurant ad sales people will be there, and they'd all love to meet me. I pretend the other line is ringing to get them off the phone."

By quarter to noon Shindler is again able to work without interruption. He writes for five minutes and decides he must head out for lunch to catch the optimal flow of traffic. After 45 minutes of intermittent gridlock, he and a companion arrive at a new Cal-Asian place in the mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles. They find themselves the only customers in the place, an establishment bearing the name of a local chef who is known nearly as much for handing out autographed pictures of himself as for the many trendy restaurants whose kitchens he has passed through.

It is at this point in his day that Shindler begins the bread-and-butter research he hopes will yield yet another column or radio report. But things go awry. When he asks for a description of the "Three Course Executive Lunch Special," the unprepared waiter scurries off to consult with the chef, returning nearly 10 minutes later to announce succinctly that the item consists of "soup, salad and entree."