Sept. 20 - A friend of mine lives in Chappaqua, New York, a suburb of New York City that used to be known, if it was known at all, for good schools, beautiful homes and frequent visits from tourists who confused it with Chappaquiddick.
Until Bill and Hillary moved in.

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That made big news at the time, of course—and for a while, the satellite trucks jammed Bedford Road hoping to catch Bill jogging to the local Starbucks or into a neighbor’s house. The commotion didn’t bother my friend too much; he lived on the other side of town. Besides, soon enough, the satellite trucks left and everything got back to normal.

Of course, a little while later, Bill’s dog Buddy got run over (by an SUV!) on Bedford Road and the satellite trucks were back. Again, this didn’t bother my friend, who was not much of a dog lover. And, sure enough, things got back to normal.
And then Bill had quadruple bypass surgery. Finally, something bothered my friend. See, even though my friend and Bill Clinton had grown up in different circumstances, ended up on different sides of town, had different notions about animal companionship and completely different interpretations of the meanings of marital vows, my friend and Bill Clinton did have something in common: a love of hamburgers.

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Oh, my friends, you may have your God, your Allah, your Buddha or your Jove – the Almighty to which you swear your faith. But my friend and Bill Clinton seek their strength from the simplicity of a perfect mound of grilled chopped beef.

And not just any hamburger, of course, but the hamburger served at a cozy little French restaurant in Chappaqua, New York named Le Jardin de Roi (which, roughly translated means, “Bill Clinton Eats Here!”).

My friend has seen the former president here on at least four occasions. Once, when he had the chance to be sitting near the former president, he even managed to hold up his burger in a kind of beefy salute. Bill nodded knowingly and gestured affectionately with a French fry.

My friend knew that he shared something with Bill Clinton. Bill ate the burger. My friend ate the burger. So by the transitive property of medicine, my friend is Bill Clinton. So given my friend’s culinary predilections and Bill’s coronary predicament, my friend headed for his doctor the same day that Bill underwent heart surgery. And, sure enough, my friend’s cholesterol had jumped from a relatively healthy 171 to an unhealthy 217.

It had to be the burger. The evidence was too clear: My friend was living in the nation’s first documented cholesterol cluster. Clearly, I was the only reporter in the country willing to put my arteries on the line to get this story.

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Just to remind you of my Bill bona-fides, permit me a small (OK, who am I kidding) digression: I have been covering Bill Clinton since he was just an obscure saxophone-playing governor with a penchant for women with oversized hair and meals with supersized fries. In those days, I was working for a small newspaper on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (then known, not entirely sarcastically, as “The People’s Republic of Zabars”), a neighborhood so liberal that you could be excommunicated if you so much as suggested that solar power probably won’t meet 90 percent of America’s energy needs by the year 2008.

In March, 1992, Clinton was trying to win the New York primary, but the Upper West Side political organizations refused to endorse him because he was too conservative—they went with Jerry “Governor Moonbeam” Brown instead. To me—a proud young liberal—this spelled the death knell for Clinton, which I captured on our front page: “West Side to Clinton: Drop Dead.” You know the rest of the story: Clinton went on to become the 42nd president, Jerry Brown returned to being that weird guy who hangs out with that guy with the beret, and I found myself unemployed for several years.

But I kept up with Bill Clinton. You may not remember this, but I was the first journalist to report that even English teachers don’t always know what the definition of “is” is. I was the first journalist to report, exclusively, that Buddy was suffering from clinical depression during the impeachment saga. And I was the guy who broke the story about the uncomfortable couch that Bill slept on after Hillary kicked him out of their bedroom during the Lewinsky mess. (It’s all archived on my clinically depressed, uncomfortable website, http://www.gersh.tv/).

So clearly, there was no better reporter to head into the belly of the beast (or, in this case, the beast of the belly) and eat a hamburger at Le Jardin de Roi in Chappaqua.

I told my waiter I wanted my burger “the way Bill orders his.” He recommended a bacon and Brie burger, which I considered a nice Clintonian mix of good old political pork with an internationalist flair. Having ordered, I checked out the menu and found that this is no mere burger joint, but a fancy French restaurant. There was no shortage of healthy options Bill or my friend could have enjoyed. They had “les poissons,” “les garnitures” and even “les salades.” But did Bill Clinton order poached salmon with haricots verts? No, he had to have that burger.

And what a burger this is. Biting into it gave me a new appreciation for all of Bill’s appetites. Indeed, this is the Monica Lewinsky of burgers: oversized, juicy, a little messy, a burger that you know you should resist, but you simply can’t. I’m sure Bill heard the voice in his head—“Just this once, order the langoustines, for Pete’s sake!”—but when the burger is this good, your brain isn’t the only organ making decisions for you.

Afterwards, I chatted up the restaurant’s owner, a nice guy named Joe. I needed to know more about Bill Clinton—how often he came in, how he liked his burger and what the hell he was thinking when he pardoned Marc Rich—but Joe wasn’t talking.

“I don’t discuss the president,” he said. So I tried that old journalist’s trick: “Well, you know, he’s not the president anymore.” No use. “I don’t talk about Mr. Clinton.”

Fine. Play that old game if you like. But when my blood work comes back, I’m sure my cholesterol will be over 210—definitive proof of the cholesterol cluster of Chappaqua, New York. Don’t rush to give me a Pulitzer, though; I’d rather have one of those burgers.

Gersh Kuntzman is also a reporter at The New York Post. Check out that famous Clinton headline at http://gershkuntzman.homestead.com/clinton.html

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