The Best Damn Job In The World

You can eat like a king, if it doesn’t kill you first. After a decade of sublime meals, Esquire’s Food & Drinks Editor puts down his plate one last time.

- By Jeff Gordinier

If you’ve been stuck in a Netflix feedback loop for the duration of the pandemic, you may’ve seen me on TV. I appear in the Montreal episode of Somebody Feed Phil. At some point in the fall of 2019, my friend Phil Rosenthal, the host of the show, sent an email asking whether I wanted to fly up to Canada and eat a ridiculous amount of food. Naturally I said yes.

But even as a professional food writer, even as a hearty eater, even as someone who once watched a TV episode in which Anthony Bourdain crawls through a veritable decathlon of foie gras in Quebec, I wasn’t prepared for what was about to happen. I met Rosenthal at the Cabane à Sucre Au Pied de Cochon. This sugar shack, overseen by the stout and feral Canadian chef Martin Picard, is like a spa resort cooked up by the Marquis de Sade. I had never seen so much food in my life. The ascending levels of gluttony, the churning oceans of calories, the steaming platters of organ meats—I’m pretty sure you can identify the moment in the episode when my complexion shifts from the ruddiness of appetite to a clammy, chartreuse sheen of nausea and fear. I remember thinking, They’re trying to kill me.