The Man Who Ate the World (23 page)

“This is the first sight they’ll get of the otoro,” Ramsey said, referring to the most highly prized fat-marbled belly cut, the quality and quantity of which would justify the money spent. A single long cut had already been made down the middle of one side of the fish, from head to tail. Now, without lifting it out, they turned the blade ninety degrees and moved down toward the underbelly of the fish. The hunk of deep purple muscle, shading to pink and then the white and pink stripes of the otoro, came away in one piece.

“It’s looking good,” Ramsey said, with a slow nod of his head. He was a very happy man, standing here amid these lumps of the world’s freshest fish.

Ramsey was a good person to have as my guide. He is half American, half Japanese—his mother was born in Hiroshima only a few months after the atom bomb was detonated—and was classically trained as a sushi chef in Washington, D.C. Later, like so many other young chefs, he became intrigued by the modernist cookery of Ferran Adria at El Bulli. A few nights earlier I had eaten at his restaurant at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

At the Tapas Molecular Bar he served me a dish of crispy beetroot shaped like a ball of frizzy pink wool, and another of clear jelly noodles with the exact flavor profile of Parmesan linguine, and a bowl of gazpacho sprinkled with shards of olive oil flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen. There had been a tiny and delicious fillet of wagyu beef cooked under vacuum for six hours and then shoved in a canister of nitrous gas so that, for reasons that escaped me, it came out fizzing, and a jelly of miso soup
on a spoon. It was an entertaining meal and, while not every dish had worked, I admired the effort. Still, this was not what interested me most about the Tapas Molecular Bar or Jeff Ramsey.

As we watched the tuna being quartered I said to the chef, as casually as I could, “Tell me about the accusations of plagiarism that were made against you.”

Ramsey looked at me wearily, took a deep breath, and said, “The lawyers tell me I can’t talk about that.”

I
n April 2006, a detailed post about Jeff Ramsey and the Molecular Tapas Bar appeared on
egullet.com
, arguably the most established and influential of the online food-discussion boards, with over 15,000 registered members and more than 1.3 million posts on every aspect of the international food scene, from the latest restaurant openings to the fundamentals of Thai cooking. It is the place for people who think the next most important decision they will make is what to have for lunch. Naturally, I hang out there a lot.

This particular post carried extra weight, as it was made by Steven Shaw, a former lawyer turned food writer who was one of the site’s founders back in 2001. Shaw had been contacted by José Andrés, the El Bulli–trained chef at a restaurant called Minibar in Washington D.C., where Jeff Ramsey had worked for more than a year before moving to Tokyo. At Minibar, two sittings of six diners at a time eat at a counter and enjoy a multicourse tasting menu of modernist fancies. Andrés had come across a blogger’s account of their meal at the Tapas Molecular Bar in Tokyo and had been struck by the similarities: two sittings, seven diners at a time, all at a counter and with a list of dishes that looked familiar.

“All told,” wrote Steven Shaw, having reviewed the menus of the restaurants side by side, “15 courses of the Tapas Molecular Bar menu turn out to be near exact copies of Minibar dishes. Some have minor plating variations, but they are fundamentally copies.” Andrés served “beet tumbleweed.” Ramsey served those “crispy beets.” Andrés served
“pineapple and salmon ravioli.” So did Ramsey. Andrés served “hot and cold foie gras soup.” Ramsey served “foie gras soup—chaud froid.” The similarities went beyond names. Shaw also posted photographs of dishes from both restaurants and, as he said, it was hard to distinguish between them. Andrés was so furious that he consulted lawyers who in turn approached the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, demanding they pay him to license his dishes.

Though Ramsey had been ordered not to discuss the issue, friends of his said he was distraught about the controversy. They pointed out that he had been allowed just three weeks in which to launch the Tapas Molecular Bar and said that, understandably, he had fallen back on dishes he already knew. Ramsey also told friends that he had openly announced to diners that some of the dishes on his menu had come from Minibar but that this had gone unreported.

The charges levelled at the Tapas Molecular Bar were not isolated. Another egullet member called Sam Mason, the pastry chef at the highly regarded avant-garde New York restaurant WD-50, also noted similarities between dishes being served there and those at another restaurant called Interlude, 10,000 miles way in Melbourne, Australia. For example, WD-50 served a dish of “pasta” made with minced prawns, reconstituted using transglutaminase, an enzyme that works like an adhesive on proteins. Interlude served exactly the same dish. Other dishes at Interlude appeared to have been lifted both from Minibar and from Alinea in Chicago, which had just been named best restaurant in America by
Gourmet
magazine. Interlude’s chef, Robin Wickens, had worked unpaid at Alinea for a week.

Wickens responded to accusations of plagiarism by arguing on egullet that he had never said the dishes were his own, and that he was simply picking up ideas he had come across elsewhere and evolving them.

“The evolution part might be where you are coming up short,” responded Mason sharply.

Apart from being the kind of intense, bruising, fetishistic row that the food world loves, it also points up an intriguing development in haute
gastronomy. For most of the twentieth century Europe’s great chefs had not competed against one another to create new dishes, but to produce the best possible versions of old ones. The great French chef Auguste Escoffier had established the repertoire at the beginning of the twentieth century and everybody who came after was intent only on keeping it alive. It was about who could cook the best Sole Veronique or Tournedos Rossini.

Places like El Bulli and those that followed have changed all of that. These restaurants want to confound your expectations, an increasingly difficult trick to pull off, as diners specifically go there to have their expectations confounded. Customers want to be shocked, or amused or disconcerted. They want foamed palate cleansers “cooked” in liquid nitrogen that disappear into a cloud of ice-cold vapor as they hit the tongue, or a dish of caviar that turns out to be tiny beads of a porcini-flavored jelly. Nobody goes to these places looking for better versions of the same. They don’t want comfort food. They want
discomfort
food.

The result is a huge market in innovation, and one that certain chefs are determined to protect. They see their creations not merely as things that might be nice to eat, but as both their Unique Selling Point and as independent revenue streams that could secure their pension. Homaro Cantu, the award-winning chef at Moto in Chicago, has devised a piece of edible paper bearing the image of cotton candy, which tastes of candyfloss. The paper also carries the following message: “
Confidential Property of and © H. Cantu. Patent Pending. No further use or disclosure is permitted without prior approval of H. Cantu.
” As the journalist Pete Wells pointed out in
Food & Wine
magazine, this meant that Cantu was claiming ownership of the food you had paid for even as you were eating it. (God knows what he would do if you were unfortunate enough to later throw up; might this not be regarded as the unauthorized release of commercially sensitive information?) The chef is apparently attempting to copyright or patent more than a dozen of his food ideas even though patent attorneys are divided over whether it’s possible to do so.

To meet this feverish market, a new kind of customer has developed,
aided by new technologies. In the old days the committed eater would visit a grand restaurant and perhaps bring back a copy of the menu. If they were really fanatical they might hang that menu on the living room wall and then bore the tits off anybody stupid enough to ask them whether they’d enjoyed their dinner there.

A printed menu is no longer enough. Now brigades of diners go out armed with digital cameras, determined to collect their experiences much like butterfly collectors with their nets and killing jars. They photograph each plate of food as it arrives and, within an hour of returning home, can post on the Web a fully illustrated account of their evening out. Any chef who once thought they could get away with copying a few dishes because they happen to be thousands of miles from the restaurant that created them is now mistaken. It doesn’t matter whether you are in Melbourne or Tokyo, and it certainly doesn’t matter whether nobody else in Tokyo has ever cooked crispy beets before, or shoved beef in a tube with nitrous oxide. If somebody else somewhere else has already done the same thing, the butterfly collectors will spot it.

It seemed to me that being a young chef trying to forge a reputation—being a Jeff Ramsey—had become a very tricky business indeed. Later he took me for breakfast at one of the steamy cafés that ring the market and tried as best he could to answer my questions about Japanese culinary culture, but it was clear that, by raising the plagiarism row, I had trampled onto delicate territory. I felt sorry for ever having mentioned it. All I wanted to do was resume my search for the perfect dinner.

I
t was when I saw the dining room that I realized I was about to experience something special. I had asked Hide Yamamoto to make sure that one of my bookings was in a sushi restaurant, and expected him to tell me that he had secured a seat at one of the big-name joints—Kyubei, perhaps, or Mizutani or Jiro. Instead, he booked me into somewhere called Okei-Sushi, and I became increasingly suspicious he had sent me for white-boys’ sushi. The restaurant boasted a Web site, for god’s sake,
on which was proclaimed: We are really happy when customers are amazed by our unique ways of preparing sushi and go, “Wow, it is delicious!!” Those two exclamation marks worried me.

But now I was here and everything was fine. It was better than fine. It was as good as it could be. When I knocked on the door, a young man dressed in white had stuck his head out, grinned, and nodded while intoning the name of my hotel. When I nodded back, he pointed me to the next building. There was a sliding door that, like something in
Alice in Wonderland
after she had swallowed the cake marked “Eat Me” and begun to grow, was only two thirds of my height. I bent over to get inside and found myself in a small, coir-matted anteroom, where another young man was waiting for me, kneeling down, his back perfectly straight. Beside him was a pair of slippers and I understood I should remove my shoes. Obviously he wanted me to put on the slippers but we could both see they would barely fit over my big toes, so we ignored them. Instead he led me in stockinged feet to the dining room, where there was a beautiful blond-wood counter. The floor stood at roughly the same level as the counter, save for just in front of it, where there was a rectangular well into which I was to fit my legs.

I could see that normally this counter had space for five or six people. Not tonight. There were no other diners. Instead, tonight, it was set for just one, and that one person was me. I had found my way to the smallest and most exclusive high-end restaurant in the world.

Standing behind the counter was sushi master Masashi Suzuki, a stocky, round-headed, middle-aged man with gently bulging eyes who looked a little like a Japanese Peter Lorre. He had on a white, short-sleeved jacket and around his completely shaved head he wore a red coil of material called a
hachimaki.
He bowed deeply to me and I bowed back. He indicated that I should sit, and I crammed myself into the space, dead center of the counter.

Neither of us spoke each other’s language, save for a little shared food vocabulary. I could say uni for sea urchin and otoro for belly tuna; bar the odd catchphrase, he could say only mackerel and cuttlefish (or
almost, for the L sound really does present the Japanese with problems). None of this mattered. Here in this restaurant for one, there were always ways that we could make ourselves understood, even if occasionally we had to resort to the infantile gesture of belly rubbing to indicate pleasure. In any case, not that much was required of me. My job was to eat what I was given and coo when what I had been given was lovely to eat, which demanded no acting on my part, as it had when Robuchon watched me eat his food in Las Vegas. Save for one noxious dish of sliced sea cucumber—which felt like it had been thrown in to remind me how fabulous Asami hadn’t been and how marvelous this was—the food here was extraordinary.

When I looked later at my notebook I counted thirty-two different stages to the meal and noticed that relatively few had been traditional nigiri or maki sushi. There was sashimi of red snapper, sprinkled with lime juice, and pieces of marinated cuttlefish, which I was instructed to eat with cold sake sipped from a tiny glazed saucer. Mr. Suzuki made a bowl of bright orange salmon eggs mixed with wasabi and more sweetened sake, which was dense and intense. He gave me the crisp roasted bones of tiny fish to chew on, which were crunchy and savory, and made a simple salad of pickled sliced onion and the sweetest of tomatoes.

Like a children’s entertainer, he pulled from underneath the counter his box of tricks, an open cabinet filled with perfect cuts of raw fish. One corner was taken up with sea urchin. There was bream and octopus and a sizeable chunk of otoro. He took this from the box, sliced it up, and pressed the pieces onto a hibachi grill for a few seconds. He indicated that I should eat them immediately and I did as I was told. The layers of fat had just begun to melt and my mouth filled with an outrageously rich and perfumed fresh fishiness.

He took some pieces of clam from the box and threw them down onto the counter as hard as he could, to watch them curl back on themselves, which I understood to be his way of proving their freshness. He seemed satisfied with the degree of curl and put the pieces in a bowl with a little soy, ponzu, and pepper. These, too, went onto the hibachi for a moment
to seal them. This time the clam didn’t get stuck in my throat as it had done at Asami. Instead, it was gone from my mouth too soon.