OK, I do frequently, but finally I did so at length for Tasting Table.

You never dine alone in New York. There may be a single place setting, one napkin, a solitary fork trailing through the rustic berry crumble, but there is always a ghost next to you at the table. It’s a small city of infinite souls, constantly writing, erasing and rescribbling its history on top of itself.

As you take a bite of grass-fed steak tartare, you think to yourself, Didn’t this restaurant used to be called something else? I think that’s the chef who worked downtown at . . . where was that? I could have sworn this used to be the bar where . . . remember? Remember?

The details fade. The addresses change. The names get hazy. For two all-too-brief decades, self-appointed restaurant critic Seymour Britchky made it his mission to capture it all in shockingly astute, hilarious, quotable prose before disappearing in his own right to become one of the city’s best-fed (and, essentially, forgotten) ghosts.

Read “Suddenly Seymour Disappeared” at Tasting Table.