Brigid Bergin: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergin, filling in for Brian today. You're in a restaurant, white tablecloths, the sound of dishes, silverware, the low hum of conversation, and wafting from the kitchen, brown butter and wood smoke. Your meal comes, you take a bite, and boom, it's packed with flavor. Here's the thing. Odds are, the flavor you tasted in that dish at many restaurants across the city, it's salt, and we mean a lot of salt. You probably couldn't even guess how much salt. Now, is that a bad thing? Joining us to answer that question is Adam Platt, features writer and former restaurant critic at New York Magazine. His new article, published in the magazine, posing a question of its own is titled Is All This Salt Killing Us? Adam, welcome to WNYC.

Adam Platt: Thank you so much for having me.

Brigid Bergin: Now, your article is all about the hidden excess of salt at restaurants. You end it with a tale of two birds. Two chickens at Cafe Commerce. One roasted for home eating, the other for the restaurant. Can you tell us that story?

Adam Platt: Yes. There's a very talented chef named Harold Moore who runs Cafe Commerce. He kindly invited me into his kitchen to see how the sausage was made, the proverbial sausage. His signature dish for many years has been a version of poulet roti, which is roast chicken, which he started cooking at a restaurant called Montrachet downtown. The story is that he ordered too many birds in the morning, and in order to sell them, he decided to create this sort of devilishly delicious mash of butter and croutons, and herbs, and inject it under the skin.

Brigid Bergin: Oh, my goodness.

Adam Platt: Then he baked it, and then he sold out. Ever since then, it's been his signature dish. I visited him, watched him, and his sous chef scatter salt all over the place. I asked him to cook both versions of the chicken, one as he would do it at home. All right. The other, as he would do it in his-- With all the stuff injected into it. He did it, and the home, they're the same chickens. They come from Pennsylvania, Amish chickens raised, and all the good things. The home chicken is salted liberally. I took a video of it. It's really quite amazing how vigorously it's salted. It's salt on the outside, it's salted on the inside, salted on the outside again, and the inside, and they're cooked for 45 minutes at 500 degrees. Then the stuffed chicken, the poulet rôti, the special is injected with this mixture of butter and stuff like that. Then, for good measure, it's finished with drippings which are again, more salty butter drippings and nuggets of foie gras, and-

Brigid Bergin: Oh my gosh.

Adam Platt: -little croutons.

Brigid Bergin: How bad was it? How much more salt was in the [crosstalk].

Adam Platt: There's a lot more salt, but it's delicious. I think what I said is that I preferred the regular home-cooked version, but as one ate, invariably, your attention is drawn to these salty add-ons, in particular the foie gras and the croutons. Then you finish it, and then you sit there sort of digesting it with a slightly addled look on your face.

Brigid Bergin: Well, listeners, we have time for a couple of calls, so get on the phones quick. We want to hear your restaurant stories. Maybe you've been dining out and you've noticed the hidden salt or you've noticed maybe the not so hidden salt in how your food tastes, how you feel. Any chefs out there who want to give us a call and say, "Yes, this is why we have to do it." Why do you have to do it in this moment? Is it a food issue, or is it an attention economy issue? The number 212433 WNYC. That's 212-433-9692.

Adam, I want to put this all in context for our listeners. I think in your piece you wrote that your colleagues at New York mag went out, you tested dishes around the city for their salt content, and it came back showing that eating a meal at some nice restaurants could be equivalent to an entire day's worth of sodium in one sitting. Now, that's a lot.

Adam Platt: That's a lot.

Brigid Bergin: How much of the problem is that people don't know how much salt they're eating? This is just disproportionate because when they're cooking at home, they're not using as much. Are there real health risks of this overly salty diet?

Adam Platt: I think there are probably health risks if you-- The argument that the chefs will make, and in fact I would make, is that we're not eating in restaurants all the time. I think if you were eating in a restaurant day and night, breakfast, lunch, and dinner,r and eating a lot. I think over time, yes, there are all sorts of health risks. Excess salt increases your blood pressure. It can lead to all sorts of other diseases, which you don't want. Diabetes, inflammation of every organ you have, gout, general dyspepsia.

It's not necessarily a good thing, but on the other hand, you need salt to survive. The argument that the chefs make, and it's not really an argument, I mean, first of all, they'll say, "Well, we've been doing this forever. What's the big deal?"

Brigid Bergin: Right.

Adam Platt: Really Fair question. The second thing. The point of my piece, and this piece has been written before by other writers, but the point of my piece was that in this day and age, in this era of what one chef called it, the era of maximum flavor, and it's really because in restaurants where everything is competing for your attention, everybody's addled by TikTok. Everybody's-- It's noisy, it's clamorous. The food on the plate is being amped up more and more to get your attention. Harold Moore made this good point, which I actually hadn't thought of. He said, literally, the key bite is the first one or maybe the second one.

That's when you sort of have your diner's attention. Because after that, they start talking, they start yammering, they start drinking, they're attention drifts away, so you have to pop that first bite.

Brigid Bergin: Let's get one-- I'm going to jump in with one quick caller because there are a lot of people who are interested in this. Barbara in Queens. You have about 30 seconds.

Barbara: Okay, just relating. I was at a cooking demonstration by a pretty famous chef, and as he was cooking, he was just throwing handfuls of salt into everything, and people were actually gasping. He said, "What are you gasping about?" He said, "Why do you think food from a restaurant tastes so much better than you eat at home?" Because we're just throwing handfuls of salt into everything.

Adam Platt: Yes.

Brigid Bergin: Barbara, thanks so much for that. [crosstalk] Is this salt covering for bad cooking in some places?

Adam Platt: Sort of. Maybe. Part of it is just a reflex. There's a writer that I quote in the piece, Andrew Friedman is one of the very prominent cookbook writer, and he talks about an instructor he had at one of the cooking schools. Frenchman. Andrew suffers from congestive heart failure, so his doctor said, "Don't go to restaurants." What are you doing? It's under control, so he can go to these restaurants. It had an instructor, and I think they're making pasta. Who knows what they're making?

If you're making pasta, you have the boiling water, and you're just dumping handfuls of salt in it. His instructor would scream out over the. I don't think he'd scream, but he was emphasizing. He goes, "This water has to taste like Coney Island. It's as salty as you can get it. Don't even think about it. Just keep throwing it on." That's sort of the mentality, and the thing is that once you-- If you're used to salt, you get inured to the taste, you don't really notice it. This happened to me when I was a restaurant critic. I really didn't notice it. Then you don't notice a lot of things, and so you go home and you--

Brigid Bergin: You try to cook for yourself.

Adam Platt: Yes, you salt things. I generally don't. When I started being a restaurant critic, I wasn't a fan of sugar. I really wasn't. I didn't salt my food either.

Brigid Bergin: That has been my guest, Adam Platt, features writer and former restaurant critic at New York Magazine. His new article, published in the magazine, is titled Is all this Salt Killing Us? Adams, thank you so much for joining us today.

Adam Platt: Thank you for having me.

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