The Man Who Ate the World (22 page)

Though only for now. I know what’s going on, even if I don’t know what’s caused it. My suspicion is nothing in particular and everything in general: jet lag, travel, meals, life, the shameful business of being me. No matter. I am clear that this episode isn’t over yet and that I really need to get back to my hotel room. So I thank Robb and jump in a cab and he’s probably delighted to see the back of me. But of course this is Tokyo, a city so obscure, the hotel hands out laminated cards with a map of where they are for guests to show to cab drivers. I show the driver mine and he sits staring at it for what feels like minutes but which is probably just a few seconds.

Finally we set off, but slowly, slowly, slowly. We are stopped at every traffic light, every junction. When we get close to the hotel, the driver pulls over to ask a policeman for directions. Now, of course, I really do need the sanctuary of my hotel room, and I have not the subtle nuance of the Japanese language with which to explain this.

At last we get there but I have to wait for change, because in Tokyo it’s terribly impolite to tip (though probably less impolite, it occurs to me as I tense my buttocks against the leatherette seat, than to crap inside his cab).

I get my change and make for the lift. This hotel has a curious design. Reception is on the thirty-eighth floor of the tower block, the rooms on the seven floors below. So I must take one lift up, and then another down. The lift goes straight from the ground floor to the thirty-eighth, with only a possible stop on the third floor, which has been a rare occurrence during my stay. Not this time. This time it stops on floor three. A hotel porter holds the door as he stares down the corridor at something he can see but I can’t. Then the party arrives: a bride in yards of ivory taffeta, her groom in impeccable tailoring, holding white gloves. Plus the cameraman and the soundman there to record the event. And the makeup lady, and a couple of others. All of us crammed tightly into this tiny lift.

It is the bride’s big day, the most important day of her life, and pushed back into the corner of the lift is a man with a rebellious bowel. She is sharing the space with a human time bomb. Up we go to thirty-eight and, because I am at the back, I have to wait while they all process out, in a stately fashion for the camera. Finally I can escape, out across the lobby. Into the second lift, down six floors, dodging the hotel staff who are grinning and bowing at me as they always do, and into my room.

I click the privacy button and I am safe. Sweating, shaking, I throw myself into the bathroom. The emergency is over. It is, however, a reminder of something very important. It doesn’t matter how expensive a restaurant is. It doesn’t matter how difficult the reservations are to get, or how exquisite the food.

Eventually, it all ends up the same way.

I
t is 4:45 in the morning and I am in a brightly lit shed at the Tsukiji Fish Market in central Tokyo watching a man stick a spike into the tail end of a 400-pound tuna. Dozens of fish like this, each at least five feet long, are lined up in rows. Men step gingerly between them, shining their torches into the belly cavity, prodding at the silver-black skin to see how
taut it is, hoping the few clues they are allowed will tell them ahead of the auction which is the fish worth paying up to $20,000 for and which is not. I watch, fascinated.

Standing here, dry ice curling around my ankles, I am reminded of a London bookshop event about food writing that I once took part in, alongside Anthony Bourdain, author of the abrasive cook’s memoir,
Kitchen Confidential.
A member of the audience had asked a question about Japanese food, and Bourdain, who had pronounced himself a devotee, said that most people misunderstood it. For example, he said, “Sushi, is not about the fish. It’s all about the rice.” I nodded sagely when he said this, looking out at the crowd of tattooed, bed-haired, leather-clad maniacs who seem to follow Bourdain wherever he goes. They were hanging on his every word. Disagreeing with him didn’t seem like a good idea, not in front of this crowd, so I mumbled “all about the rice” and nodded again.

As I watch this curious ritual, this silent adoration of the tuna, the truth strikes me. Sure, good rice is important. Good rice is vital, but only as a minimum qualifying standard. As far as I can see, it really is all about the fish. Indeed here, in this shed, I feel as if I am seeing the very essence of Japanese food laid bare. It is about what the chef started with, not what appears at the end. If the ingredients aren’t good enough, the food won’t work. This might seem like a truism, applicable to all culinary traditions, but it isn’t. There are whole categories of dishes in French cookery, for example—big stews like coq au vin or a daube or cassoulet—specifically designed to make something magical from the most veteran and uninspiring of ingredients: the pensioned-off cockerel, the tough, overworked part of the cow, the saggy, fat-bound belly of the retired pig.

Japanese cookery, on the other hand, is simply about the quality of the fish on the market shed floor. It’s about the cult of the ingredient, which is something I always felt I understood. And I felt I understood it because of the vinegar.

I need to explain this, and to do so we will have to go back around six
decades, to the period immediately after the Second World War, when a young woman called Denise de Choudens came to Britain from the town of La Chaux-de-Fonds, near Neuchatel, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. She worked as an au pair and, in time, married, had children, and became my mother-in-law. It is possible that the latter was not part of the original game plan.

Denise lives now in the West Midlands, where my wife, Pat, grew up, but there has always been a bit of her family’s sensibility—involving the stomach, mainly—located in Switzerland. It was by meeting Pat that I came to understand, for example, that a cheese fondue is not just some kitsch cliché from the seventies. I discovered the joys of viande des Grisons, wafer-thin slices of air-dried beef that could put a carpaccio to shame, and of rich cheeses and silky chocolates.

Then there was the vinegar. There is nothing special about Kressi vinegar with fine herbs, which is to say, it is neither rare nor exotic, at least not in Switzerland. Kressi is a mass-market brand. It is on the shelves of every supermarket in the land. But it does have a special taste. Forget about other white wine vinegars with their numbing, metallic acidity that forces you, involuntarily, to expose your gums when you taste it. Kressi has a relatively low acidity (about 5 percent compared to the standard 6 or 7 percent). It is salty and has a light herby lift at the end. There is no better salad dressing than olive oil, a crunch of sea salt, and a modest splash of Kressi.

Naturally my mother-in-law introduced her family to the joys of Kressi, for it was as much a part of her landscape as the wildflowers in the meadow above the house. When Pat was growing up they would visit her mother’s family in Switzerland once every two years and, on return, the boot of the car would contain a good few bottles; enough, they always hoped, to see them through until the next trip. But, of course, they would run out, for the true number of bottles needed to cover their consumption seemed absurd, and they could never bring themselves to dedicate that much space in the car to the pursuit of the perfect salad.

Thus after a year, or perhaps fifteen months, disaster would strike Pat’s
childhood home. The Kressi would be finished and they would have to go cold turkey. For this is the tragedy of Kressi: No one in Britain sells it and they would never find a suitable replacement, because there was none.

I met Pat in the 1980s, and I was welcomed into her family. This meant I inherited the Kressi obsession. Is it really that good? Yes, I think it is, but then most of us have a specific taste or flavor that roots us or reminds us of who we are. The British obsession with Heinz tomato ketchup or Hellmann’s mayonnaise is barely the half of it. I know someone who has to have her fridge at a particular temperature, so that the milk is cold enough to remind her of childhood. For others it is not just English mustard but Colman’s English mustard. It must be Bird’s Custard, McVite’s Digestives, a dinky bottle of Tabasco. A store cupboard without one of these small objects of culinary necessity is an empty cupboard. This is how I feel about Kressi. When it runs out I feel like a bit of my life is missing.

One day a few years ago we finished the last bottle of Kressi, a souvenir from a work trip to Gstaad. This time, however, I was determined to do something about it. I contacted the commercial department of the Swiss Embassy, which confirmed that no, nobody imported Kressi. I telephoned a very good Swiss restaurant in London called St. Moritz to see if they had any, but they didn’t. I felt like an addict trying to score my next fix.

That didn’t stop me. If we couldn’t get it brought into the country, we’d just have to make an effort to find a replacement here. Over two weeks we tasted seventeen different white wine vinegars. Some were as rough as a gravel track. Others were passable, but no Kressi. A chardonnay vinegar made my teeth ache. From a high-class food emporium in central London, I bought a “vinaigre de vin blanc grand cru” because it sounded smart, but it wasn’t. It hurt to taste it. I went to the famed Selfridges food hall and bought organic vinegars and vinegars made with champagne because it sounded classy and one flavored with bog myrtle because I was desperate. There was a Moscatel vinegar that was okay and a supermarket’s own label that wasn’t.

That’s when I had the notion. We now live in the age of budget air travel. How much could a ticket to Geneva cost? Could it be cheap enough to justify a day trip to buy vinegar? I decided it could. The turnaround time on the ground would be only three hours but that, I was sure, was more than enough time. Taxi to the supermarket, stock up, and return. I emptied my sports bag in preparation and imagined myself being stopped at customs with two dozen bottles and having to plead innocence on the grounds of gastronomic imperative.

And maybe I would have been stopped at customs were it not for one small problem. The day I went to Geneva, it was closed. Completely and utterly closed. It was a bank holiday. I had done my research on the net. For example, I had noted that I shouldn’t go in the same week as the G8 meeting because of potential violence in the city. But nowhere—not on the Web sites I looked at, not in my diary, which usually carries this vital intelligence—did it mention a bank holiday. When Geneva observes a bank holiday, it does so properly. The city was like something out of one of those sci-fi movies where everybody has been struck down by a mystery virus. The only thing that moved in the neat and tidy streets was a hot wind off the lake.

Still, I wandered, hoping against hope that I would find one shop that could sell me Kressi. I felt like the least intrepid journalist in the world. For months my colleagues had been risking life and limb covering a desert war in Iraq. And me? What was I doing? Looking for vinegar in a closed city.

“If your plane crashes on the way home,” my wife said, when I telephoned her for moral support, “no one will say your death was in a good cause.”

I went into a restaurant in the hope that I might be able to buy their stock, but they had none to sell. There was, however, one supermarket in the city that was open, the maître d’ said, at the train station next to the airport. I jumped in a cab and yes, indeed, there in the station was the supermarket and yes, it was open—and packed. The entire population of Geneva appeared to be in there, trying to pick up those vital items that
the antiquated Swiss commitment to religious holidays had contrived to deny them. I fought my way through the crowds, feverishly checking each aisle for my blessed Kressi until I reached the correct shelf, the vinegar shelf, and discovered—they were sold out.

I ended up sitting in the departures lounge of Geneva’s airport, at the end of a long, hot day, with an empty sports bag at my feet, cursing my wife because I didn’t have the heart to curse myself. If I had never met Pat, if I had never married her, if she had never made me a bloody salad, none of this would ever have happened. It’s all her fault. As the time passed, I became more philosophical. Perhaps this was the way it was meant to be. Kressi vinegar had spent the past forty years being elusive. It had always been out of reach and it had decided to remain so.

A
t the time, of course, I felt foolish. No man who has flown to another country simply to secure a limitless supply of a good taste, only to come back empty-handed, can feel otherwise. Here in the Tokyo fish market, however, I begin to feel better about the whole thing. These men with their spikes have been up all night, and are standing in a freezing shed eyeing up fish both the size and cost of a small car, all because people like the way it tastes, and they do this every day. By comparison, my vinegar trip feels like the effort of a rank amateur, which is exactly what it was.

A
s dawn broke over Tokyo, the daily auctions began and the tuna sheds filled with the ringing of handbells and the shouts of men bidding against one another. I was there with Jeff Ramsey, a chef from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. He suggested we follow a fish back from its place on the floor, to the purchaser’s stand in the main market hall. We chose a huge hunk of sashimi on the bone, which the new owner said he had just paid around $10,000 for, and watched as it was heaved onto a wooden trolley and guided away through the clatter and noise of the market at its busiest. We crossed the jammed avenue between the tuna
auction sheds and the main covered market, made our way past stalls of octopus and squid and bubbling tanks with huge penile molluscs of a sort I had never seen before, to a small stand in the center of the hall.

Three middle-aged Japanese men gathered around the fish, which, in one deft action, they had slipped from trolley to slab. They looked again inside the belly cavity, then fetched a thin, seven-foot blade and set to work quartering the animal, one man holding the tail, another the head as if, in this last moment, it might finally try to get away.