Review: Cover-Up

Hersh talked to a lot of people to get tips that led to stories

Journalism students idolise people like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate scandal in 1972. 

But there's another journalist they should look up to too -- Seymour Hersh.

Poitras and Obenhaus who directed Cover-Up

His life and career is covered in the fascinating 117-minute documentary, Cover-Up, by directors Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus. She is best known for her documentaries on Edward Snowden and the Sackler family.

In 2005 Poitras approached Hersh about doing a documentary about him, but it took him 20 years to finally agree.

He's a prickly character, and Hersh is filmed in his office, with piles of files all around him, files filled with faded yellow note pads filled with illegible handwriting, and a Rolodex on his desk. But hey, he uses an iPhone and Macbook to keep reporting.

During the Vietnam War Hersh was a freelancer -- a freelancer(!) when he uncovered American soldiers had shot and killed up to 500 civilian men, women, children and babies in a remote Vietnamese village.

Hersh says the US military officials were angry their soldiers were being killed and to up the numbers of Vietnamese deaths, they randomly killed innocent people. He managed to get a tip on the soldier charged with killing 109 people, tracked him down and spoke to him.

He then managed to interview other soldiers who were eyewitnesses or participated in the massacre. 

Hersh's reporting gave more ammunition to those opposed to the war.

Hersh is still his prickly self, trusting no one

It was his ability to track down and talk to people that made Hersh either praised or feared. US President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were caught on tape calling the journalist "a son of a bitch", angered that he was able to find out so much information.

Is it no wonder Hersh was either praised or feared.

After Woodward and Bernstein broke the Watergate story, Hersh, who was then at the New York Times, was told to go find stories, and he managed to find out the burglars who broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters were still being paid hush money. 

This story helped keep the story alive and bring more information to the public about the scandal, that eventually led to Nixon's resignation. Hersh wrote over 40 stories about Watergate, that were mostly published on the front page.

Hersh also reported on how the CIA spent millions to destabilise the socialist government of Chilean President Salvador Allende and after a coup d'etat, installed a military dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet.

The documentary also gets Hersh to talk about his father, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania who played the violin. He says his family was very short on words and he never knew his father had escaped the horrors of the Nazis and wished he had known before so he could ask.

He still has lots of files all over his office

His family had two sets of twins -- Hersh had two twin older sisters, and he and his brother were twins too. His father had a dry cleaning business, and expected Hersh to take over. He didn't like the work but did what was expected of him. He had to quit school to look after his ailing father and on the side Hersh read a lot of books. But when his father died of cancer, this gives Hersh the opportunity to get a college education and the instructor felt he was more qualified for university and got him enrolled into the University of Chicago.

He randomly met a reporter and thought the job was so exciting that he started as a copyboy and a month later became a crime reporter.

Cover-Up also recounts the torture in the prisoners in Abu Ghraib in Iraq from 2004-2007. When he was able to get the photographs of prisoners tortured by US soldiers, and obtained a report by a general that listed all the things that were done to prisoners, Hersh was able to write the story that put Secretary for Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the hot seat.

Rumsfeld even tried to explain the difference between abuse and torture in a bid to disclaim the article.

But Hersh didn't get everything right. When he was researching into US President John F Kennedy's alleged romance with Marilyn Monroe, he claimed to have letters between the two, but they turned out to be fabricated by a known forger. That put a big dent into Hersh's reputation, but he looks back at it as dodging a bullet, as those so-called letters did not make it into his book, The Dark Side of Camelot.

Strangely he also felt Syrian President Bashir al-Assad couldn't have used chemical warfare on his own people...

Nevertheless, Hersh is still kicking and writing on his Substack account. During the filming he is shown talking to a source on the phone, getting information about Israeli attacks on Gaza.

Cover-Up was intense to watch, with a few sarcastic moments sprinkled throughout, but also eye-opening for someone like myself who is not familiar with Hersh's work. It's people like him who inspire younger journalists to try to find the truth. What he did was just talk to people and you never know -- they might just slip some information that could lead to something big.

Cover-Up

Directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus

117 minutes

Review: Zachary's Pizza

Stuffed spinach and mushroom pizza with sausage

Five years ago we tried Zachary's Chicago Pizza for the first time and were overwhelmed by this deep-dish concept, where it's more like a pie than a pizza.

But we liked it so much we requested to try it again and went to the north Berkeley location for lunch.

More like a pie than typical pizza

We liked the decorations on the wall -- amateur paintings that plug Zachary's, from Garfield dreaming about it, to a riff on the Johannes Vermeer painting, Girl with the Pearl Earring, and having her biting into a slice of deep-dish pizza.

We ordered a stuffed pizza with spinach and mushroom that has three cheeses in it and added sausage, which took about 30 minutes to make; so we had a side of garden salad to munch on before the pizza arrived.

The fresh vegetable produce in California is delicious -- the lettuce is crisp and tastes sweeter, in particular the tomatoes, which are incredible. In Vancouver we are stuck with ones that were picked when they were green and have hardly any flavour. 

When the pizza arrived, it was more like a pie and our server helped us dish out the pizza. It was definitely gooey from the generous amounts of melted cheese, but the richness was balanced by the sweet acidity of the delicious fresh tomato sauce!

Not only was the filling good, but also the crust! It was thick but not rock hard; it held the pizza together, but crunchy enough for texture.

Funny pizza-themed artwork on the wall

In the end I managed to eat one and a half slices; a medium-sized pizza for four of us resulted in two slices left which we brought with us.

Good thing I did a bit of walking afterwards to digest that filling pizza!

Zachary's Chicago Pizza

1853 Solano Avenue, Berkeley, CA

(510) 525 5950

Instagram Eats First

Instagrammers focused on getting cool shots at the bar preview

The other night I attended a media preview of a bar opening in the basement of the Rosewood Hotel Georgia in downtown Vancouver.

The bar is cryptically called Prophecy, opened by some guys at At Home Hospitality. When they got this space, they immediately decided they wanted it to be sophisticated like New York and Chicago, so they went there to do their research... as if it was a prophecy... get it?

Inside it's a bit on the dark side, but the space is classy, not pretentious, and comfortable. It's nice to know there's live music in the evenings too -- and in our case we were treated to some jazz.

Three of the people seated with me were Instagrammers. They brought a lot of equipment with them, in particular hand-held lights to ensure they took good pictures and videos of the cocktails and food. They spent a lot of time doing this, so a guy seated at our table and I had to patiently wait until they were done before we could sip our libations and tuck into the dishes (some good, some were disappointing like the wagyu sando where they scrimped on the wagyu).

But I am grateful we had to wait because that guy and I struck a fun conversation and he was pleased to meet another writer and talk about what stories we've written, what we like to read; I even encouraged him speak to his editor if he didn't like how she edited his pieces.

As I don't go to these press events often, it made me realise how tedious they can be with Instagrammers, as they aren't critical about anything and are more focused on getting cool shots just for likes from their followers...

Review: Love, Charlie: The Rise and Fall of Chef Charlie Trotter

An unflinching portrait of Trotter, and a peek into a chef's life

I had only heard of the name Charlie Trotter and how he was one of the top chefs in the United States. While Wolfgang Puck is the celebrity chef to the stars, Trotter was the serious gourmet chef in Chicago.

It was a shock to hear he died in 2013, as I thought he died only a few years ago -- but it's almost a decade ago.

Love, Charlie, The Rise and Fall of Chef Charlie Trotter is a very good documentary that explores every aspect of his life from childhood to when he died at the age of 54 of a stroke.

Trotter wrote many letters to his first wife Lisa

Director Rebecca Halpern deftly weaves together super 8 films, previous interviews of Trotter, as well as interviews with his mother, sister, ex-wife and celebrity chefs like Puck, Emeril Lagasse, and Grant Achatz.

They tell the story of a guy named Chuck Trotter who seemed happy-go-lucky, but if he did something he was quite passionate, a bit eccentric and cocky. His ex-wife Lisa has wonderful memories of Trotter when they met in college and she kept all his letters and postcards he sent to her.

He decided to become a cook, and threw all his energy into it, interning in many places, moving on to the next if he felt he wasn't learning anymore. Then he decided to go to Europe with the goal of opening his own place, and that's when he met Lisa again who happened to be in Paris. They critiqued restaurants they went to, and sketched out his ideal place, which would be modelled after Fredy Girardet's eponymous restaurant in Switzerland.

Chuck became Charlie Trotter, which meant becoming more serious when he opened the restaurant in 1987. He wanted to prove to his father, who was financing the restaurant, that he could pull this off. His father was supportive, but also critical, constantly putting Trotter and Lisa, now his wife and manager on their toes, with restaurant consultants telling them what to do.

Bourdain with Trotter and Lagasse

That led to Trotter becoming more difficult to work for in the kitchen, which led to him having a cameo in My Best Friend's Wedding, where the documentary shows the clip of him screaming in the kitchen, "I will kill your whole family if you don't get this right! I need this perfect!" He was confident enough to parody himself on film.

However, his father also warned him to listen to his staff and look after them; they would complain to his father about how they were treated. The film shows a typewritten letter that his father gave him in 1993 -- but it doesn't seem like Trotter listened to the advice as the same problems were still festering 10 years later.

Meanwhile Trotter would eat, breathe, live and sleep in the restaurant, causing his marriage to fall apart. Lisa wanted out, and soon he married another woman who gave birth to his son, Dylan.

But when it came to his cuisine, Trotter was a genius -- Puck says Trotter was championing vegetables at a time when they were secondary elements on the plate. A food journalist pointed out Trotter was using quinoa before anyone else knew what it was. And he was keen on using micro greens, which made one farmer's produce famous. 

He was also willing to take risks -- going from a la carte and set menu to just set menu, and then not offering cocktails, only wine. As he says himself in an interview, he wanted to control the entire dining experience from beginning to end because he knows the food better than his guests.

Trotter influenced numerous young chefs 

The documentary even interviews Trotter's best customer, Ray Harris, who ate there at least once a week if not more, and claims he never ate the same thing twice. He basically made Trotter's chefs go crazy trying to figure out a new set menu for him. But Harris loved everything Trotter put in front of him.

Perfection was everything for Trotter. Achatz -- a top chef in his own right, recalls how he once prepared food on dishes that were dusty and got chewed out for it by Trotter. Achatz wanted to quit, but Trotter laid a guilt trip on him that he would let the rest of the team down if he left.

When Michelin finally came to Chicago in 2010, Achatz had his own restaurant, Alinea, and it was given three stars, while Trotter received two. He was angry at Michelin for not knowing what is good food, but others in the film point out Trotter had lost his touch, hadn't changed things up in the restaurant, and the second year also received two stars.

The financial crisis in 2008-09 caused Trotter's restaurant empire to crumble; his various restaurants in Los Cabos, Las Vegas and a takeaway eatery in Chicago all closed.

In 2012 he decided to close his restaurant after an impressive 25-year-run, claiming he would travel and do a master's degree. By this time he was already suffering mini strokes, but he refused to see a doctor after being traumatised when he was six years old. 

His sister recalls at Trotter's funeral how so many people came up to her and her mother, telling them how Trotter had made them the chefs they were today, or how he profoundly affected their careers.

It's a bitter sweet end for Trotter, who affected so many people, but died so young. Love, Charlie is unflinching in its portrayal of Trotter, both the good and bad, and gives an insight into how chefs are under a lot of pressure everyday. Their food has to be top notch all the time, because one bad meal and that guest will never return, and will tell all their friends about their bad experience.

And he relies on his brigade, his team to execute these dishes perfectly every time, which is why they are under a lot of stress too. But some people thrive on this pressure, while many others cave in. That said, the days of screaming chefs is pretty much over -- no one will take that kind of verbal abuse anymore. 

Nevertheless Trotter represents a certain period in American fine dining and will forever be remembered for his contribution in putting Chicago on the culinary map.

Love, Charlie: The Rise and Fall of Chef Charlie Trotter

Directed by Rebecca Halpern

96 minutes