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The first time we meet is in New York, at the enduringly fashionable SoHo restaurant Balthazar, where he arrives unaccompanied, a baseball cap in his hand...He browses the menu. "Today is what day, is it?" he asks. It is Wednesday. He checks the daily special. "Rabbit," he reads aloud, mutters to himself, "No, thank you," and orders a salad, some chicken, and a glass of wine. He is clean-shaven, having finally abandoned his familiar beard six months ago. "I had been sort of hacking it down, and it had become very much like designer stubble," he says. "And I just thought, Let's go the whole hog." He tells me most people feel it makes him look younger but that it took him a while to get used to how much his chin and jaw had aged over the sixteen years he'd hidden them away.

GQ Magazine profiles Salman Rushdie.