During his astonishing 22 year run as New York magazine’s restaurant critic, @plattypants and I rarely sat down to a meal. “I think the sight of two critics eating together is weird,” he said once. But last month @marinagpoloughlin and I prevailed on him to have lunch. Maybe three critics together are less weird than two but I doubt it. Anyway he proceeded to order half the menu while telling us that the gig was destroying his health. Here we have a man who can hold two seemingly opposed ideas in his head at one time, especially if one of those ideas leads to his eating a dozen oysters, truffled eggs and a pistachio Paris-Brest. His eye for such paradoxes, not to mention ironies, contradictions and flat-out absurdities, was one of the traits that made his column pure pleasure to read, week after week. There is nobody better at describing the preposterous lengths to which restaurant obsessed New Yorkers will go in search of some fresh high, and nobody better at keeping his sanity when the rest of the food-writing pack was baying at the moon. I will miss his war-weary but humane dispatches from the trenches and his heroic effort to make sense of a scene that is stubbornly determined to stay senseless.