Zim’s little ruse was soon uncovered, and he made his way to Sydney in the early seventies, where there were enough restaurants to preclude him from actually inventing them. That’s where I met Zimmy, in a tacky South Korean chophouse in Chinatown one evening. When I say I met him there, I should be more precise. We were in fact conducting a fairly routine drug raid, and Zim was soon lined up against the wall with the other startled customers. Our guns were drawn. ‘I’m not a suspect!’ Zim shouted, his hands trembling. ‘I’m a restaurant reviewer!’ (Oh, how many times have I quoted that luscious line back at him?) It was lucky we were there. Zim had given the chophouse half a star only the year before, and just as we quietly entered, our hands on our holsters, the restaurant manager had shrieked, raced across the room and tried to throttle a startled Zim. It was deliciously chaotic. The lobsters in their tanks had a front-row seat. In my official report later that night, I wrote that we’d conducted a successful raid, and additionally had prevented a murder.
That’s how Zim and I had got to know each other, and he would often give me insider knowledge on the best places to eat across town. ‘Zimmy,’ I’d say to him on the phone, ‘I feel like something Turkish, and it’s the wife’s birthday.’ And, sure enough, we’d arrive at his recommendation and be made a fuss of. Even Zim muttered in Turkish still sounds like Zim.
He was ahead of his time, Westchester. He was, he said, born to review restaurants. It’s the way his head worked. It was how he saw the world. He reviewed everything as he experienced it — a bus ride to work (‘The driver was firm but courteous, the transport itself clean and without frills’), watching men mowing in the Botanic Gardens (‘The grass was left unattractive near the harbour rocks, thus ruining the overall aesthetics’), even having a bath (‘Once again, I found the Sydney water harsh and not conducive to a good lather, but altogether splendid compared to the amnionic headiness of Brisbane water’). He’d been a fussy eater as a child, and had quite literally put his mother in an asylum for six months when he was a toddler. He’d stayed with his aunt during her convalescence. ‘A chance,’ he said many times, ‘to expand my developing palate.’ I cannot blame Zim here. I once ate at his mother’s house near the end of her life, and her boiled brisket made me dry retch.
He could, as you might have already guessed, be a little off-putting with his verbose manner. Strangely, the way he spoke — full of pomp and wind — was the opposite to his printed prose. His reviews were sharp and crisp, without an ounce of fat. I, and most certainly the restaurant owners, will never forget his classic review of a Tibetan eatery called The Sound of One Hand Clapping. The entire review was just six words: ‘The sound of no hands clapping.’
Zimmy was perhaps a decade older than me, and I was not surprised that he finally left Sydney and returned to his hometown of Brisbane to semi-retire. What he found, after a thirty-year absence, was a culinary transformation. Brisbane was no longer a place where the year’s gastronomic highlight was the arrival of the frozen dim sim. He was like an old horse that had returned to a magical orchard, and in his excitement he went back to full-time reviewing, becoming, in the process, something of a celebrity around town. Zim and the age of the celebrity chef-reviewer collided. He was a man to be feared. He could close a restaurant overnight, such was his power.
You would think, with all that professional eating, that Zim would be a man of formidable proportions. But he was the opposite. Zim had hollow legs, as his mother had always told him. It was a phrase, in fact, that he had usurped as the title for his perennially incomplete autobiography. He was sensationally thin, and too tall for his weight. Clothes dangled off the wire of him. His hair, too, though thick and white, defied the teeth of a comb and grew into a sort of edifice of spun sugar. Zim had the top knot all his life. His enemies called him Pigeon.
When I, too, retired to the Gold Coast, he invited me up for the odd meal, and if I drank too much, which I always did with Zim, we’d return to his inner-city apartment overlooking the river, its walls heavy with art, and he’d read to me passages from his favourite restaurant critics from around the world. He loved the internet, did Zim, because he could raid newspaper and magazine websites for great food writing.
In this last year of his life, he’d been fanatical about the British critic A. A. Gill, even memorising the Londoner’s best passages. With the muddy brown Brisbane River oozing past behind him, he’d recite them to me like some amateur Shakespearean actor.
‘“I sat down, touched the stickiness of a table that had been wiped with a dirty cloth, and knew instantly that you should never eat the same thing twice,”‘ pronounced Zim, quoting Gill. He continued: ‘“Like history, food repeats itself — once is comedy, twice is vomit. The ribs and that barbecue flavour — such a cosmopolitan, grown-up Hollywood version of home-grown brown sauce — tasted as if they’d been boiled in an ashtray ... This is bad from a bad place where the bad people live. This is a glutinously awful pig-swamp bad, out all on its own in the badlands. This is, to put it simply, just so you don’t forget, terribly bad food.’”
At this Zim would have to sit down to compose himself. ‘He’s brilliant, this Gill,’ he’d say. ‘So daring. So fresh. I wish I had his courage. And his country’s more lenient defamation laws. Here, get a load of this: “‘Next, my milk-fed lamb was three squiggly, munchkin bits of nascent sheep. You rarely get this in England, and I can’t think why — the place is lousy with the sodden, limping, maggoty things, with farmers always complaining that they can’t give them away at car-boot sales. The Easter milk-fed lamb has a serious premium. A drunk man with a stocking on his head has to grab the teeny-weeny, gambolling, gamine-eyed, plaintively bleating baby from its mother’s nipple, then shoot it in the face with a nail gun while mumsy runs in circles. I can’t imagine why you can’t get it at Tesco ... it is utterly delicious and worth every soft, sentimental bleat.’”
‘Now that’s good,’ I said.
‘Now that’s brilliant,’ he replied.
I miss Zim. They said he’d had a heart attack at some new and trendy restaurant/vineyard in the Gold Coast hinterland. Dropped stone dead while taking a stroll through the trellises and vines.
Only later would I find out he’d been murdered.
At his funeral, I read out his favourite A. A. Gill passage: “‘I started with a complimentary shot glass of insemination-temperature cauliflower soup, with a cold cream cappuccino top and a grey, slimy nose-blow of truffle oil as a garnish. You can sip it like espresso, the waiter said helpfully. Liquidised cauliflower tastes like fat boy’s farts. Effluent cauliflower with added truffle oil tastes like corpse bloat. I didn’t ask for it, I didn’t want it and I don’t care to be quizzed about why I didn’t enjoy it.’”
This was, of course, an allusion to death itself. Everyone laughed. Except the expensively dressed man with blond, gelled hair in the back pew. Our eyes locked for a moment. I jotted a mental note. I thought later — how might Zim have reviewed him?
‘Potentially fatal to a good palate.’ How right he would have been.
~ * ~
3
A day after Westchester Zim’s funeral, I was shocked to receive a call from his solicitor, asking — no, begging — me, to take charge of his affairs.