In his nearly 20 years writing for New York, restaurant critic Adam Platt has visited hundreds of restaurants and reviewed thousands of dishes.

If you didn’t work here, why would you subscribe to New York Magazine?
I’m a New Yorker. C’mon. I’ve actually vaguely never considered myself a New Yorker, but I’ve been living here long enough now that I’m a New Yorker. So there are certain things you do. You eat a bagel at your favorite bagel place, you have your slice guy. As far as consuming different media, you read the Post for the crazy Zeitgeist of that day. You read the Times for, really, I don’t know what any more, but just out of habit. You read The New Yorker for a sense of loftiness. And you read New York for the meta-Zeitgest, like what’s happening. What’s in the air. And if you don’t do that, you’re less of a New Yorker.

There are a lot of people who don’t give a crap about New York, which that’s fine, but if you do — if you live here or you’re missing New York or you want to live in New York, it’s a crucial product to digest and ingest. The websites are fabulous, but they’re not so much New York. The magazine is still New York: It’s still that codified Zeitgeist you can hold in your hands and read. It’s the purest expression of what this publication is supposed to be and the sort of weird energy this city gives off. So that’s why you read it.

It’s your last meal on Earth. What are you having?
Well, for years I would always say Peking duck, because Peking duck (a) had Proustian connotations for me because I actually was privileged enough to eat it when I was a 5-year-old and (b) because it’s an ancient dish. It goes back to the emperor’s imperial courts in Beijing 200 years ago; it’s a communal dish because you eat it in groups. It’s a very fancy dish, but it’s also…it’s like a taco; there’s a casualness to it. The combination of casual and elegant, and also it’s delicious.

So I always used to say that, but now the more I think about it, I’d like a bottle of bourbon. Really good bourbon. And then I pretty much eat anything. But really, in my last meal, it’s probably gonna be a lot of bourbon and maybe a cheeseburger. But I’ll still take Peking duck.

What’s the craziest thing you’ve done in pursuit of a story?
In 2008, I traveled to Japan to do a big piece on the food crazes in Tokyo for CN Traveler. I was just about to leave when I got a call from Jon Gluck, who was my editor at New York for a long time. He goes, “Why don’t you do a story about that poisonous fugu blowfish — the one that can kill you.” I’m like, “Really?” I was literally leaving the next day. He made some calls, and in two hours we ended up at this weird fugu restaurant in the middle of nowhere on a rainy Sunday night.

Blowfish is so poisonous that chefs have to have licenses to serve it. By Japanese law, the innards must be collected in a metal hazmat box and taken to the fish markets every week to be destroyed. If you eat the poison by mistake, it shuts down your whole nervous system and you become paralyzed. Eventually it goes to your heart and lungs and you die, but it takes like four days. So this horrible, horrible death. The chef was somewhat incompetent-seeming and there was no one in the restaurant. There’s this numbing quality, which some of the chefs believe in and some don’t. It comes from the just sort of faint traces of the poison in the meat. The delicacy that evening, because it was springtime, was the engorged milk sack of the male fish. It just looks like a giant plastic bag filled with watery cocaine that’s like snow white. I dutifully ate it, and then I started feeling this numbing around my lips and I panicked.