Zagat No. 1 meal . . . ever
ZAGAT survey gurus TimandNina Zagat recalled the best meal they ever had in a panel discussion on Tuesday — and one audience member was so swept up she asked them to recite the entire menu from the meal. The foodie couple’s unexpected No. 1 meal took place 40 years ago in France, but the Zagats, married since 1965, could not exactly agree on whether it was on a beach in Burgundy (said Tim) or Normandy (Nina chimed in). “Wedisagree on everything,” Tim joked during a Q&A with Deborah Norville at the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children’s annual Food & Wine Gala. (It turns out husband and wife both misremembered. Nina and Tim later told us in agreement the spot was in fact in Brittany — the town of Le Pont Neuf, to be exact — and the eatery was called Lorand Barre.) Either way, they’d been schlepping hungrily along a French beach in the ’70s, when they happened upon an out-of-the-way eatery that served the best food ever and turned out to be a Michelin two-star restaurant. That’s when one womanat the swanky Metropolitan Club event called out to ask what they ate, and Tim ran through all the many courses. Google paid a reported $151 million to acquire their Zagat guides in 2011, but when the Zagats first hatched the venture in 1979, no publisher would put out the guide. “They all turned it down,” Nina told the crowd, which included Hilary Geary Ross, chef
Michael Ferraro, MaryL. Pulido and Kimberly Guilfoyle, one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the charity. The Zagats instead released the publication themselves and earned more from the food guide than from their salaries as attorneys at the time. The inspiring gala was to support the NYSPCC’s Trauma Recovery Program.