The Man Who Ate the World (25 page)

I eat. The combination of yolk and black eggs, bursting on the roof of my mouth, with the crunch of the toast, is both luxuriously adult and a trip to the nursery. It is both comforting and filthy rude. Next, for me, massive sea urchins—twice the size of anything I ate in Japan—laid on slices of black bread spread with cold, salted butter and decorated with discs of jalapeño pepper. Plotnicki has a wheat intolerance, a reaction to antibiotics taken for pneumonia many years ago, so he gets slices of hamachi, dressed with a bright yellow purée of Meyer lemons—the most vibrant, lemony lemons I have ever tasted—and sprinkled with Iranian rose petals.

It was at this point that I realized I had turned into a true food nerd. The room had disappeared. All that remained were me and the plates and the delicious things on them. And if you think it’s going to get any better than this, if you think I might maintain even the slightest grip on reality, dream on. Food bloggers are true obsessives, and tonight so am I. I am one of them.

Perhaps you find this all too rich for your blood, too exhausting, simply too bloody much. I understand. You’re welcome to flick ahead seven pages to a whole new passage on power-eating in New York, and why my first ever restaurant meal in the city was also one of the most disappointing. Feel free to do so. Go ahead. Flick. It’s good stuff. Of course, I’ll be disappointed if you do. This, after all, is what we came for. This is what
I
came for.

We were supposed to get only two courses at Jean-Georges. We were also supposed to have been served the same thing, but they have decided to have some fun with us here tonight and so they throw out an extra dish: tuna sashimi in a vibrant, spicy but light soy broth spiked with ginger for Plotnicki, and for me a riff on sea trout, involving sashimi, roe,
and crisped skin. Jin fills our glasses. To our right, society ladies in sunglasses the size of hubcaps, the social X-rays of Tom Wolfe’s
Bonfire of the Vanities,
air-kiss each other like the 1980s never ended.

We ask for the bill. Jin spreads his arms wide. “There is no charge tonight, gentlemen. It is our pleasure to be a part of this great experiment.” They behave as if they are genuinely grateful that we should have included them in our night out.

“Told you,” Plotnicki says as we stride down the steps. He is purring now. Setting this up was a struggle, and the fact that he is getting it for free has cheered him hugely. We turn and walk the short distance to the Time Warner Center, the building with the highest number of Michelin stars in the world: situated inside this high-end shopping center, this gilded food court, is Café Gray, with one star, the hyper-expensive Japanese restaurant Masa, with two, and the place we are going to, Per Se, with three. The restaurant is designed in grays and blacks and chrome, reminiscent of the ballroom of an ocean liner.

This time we are not to eat in the dining room. Instead we will sit at a low coffee table in the bar area, but it suits the purpose perfectly. We are a restaurant hit squad now: in and out, light on our feet, grabbing dishes as we go. For us it is a night of overtures, of culinary foreplay. None of these meals will be consummated in and of themselves, and that suits us fine. Personally I love beginnings and endings far more than middles. Tonight there should be no saggy middles.

It is dusk, and laid out before us is Central Park, turning an emerald green in the falling light. We sip our champagne, which is a non-vintage something or other, and take this demotion from the heights of Tattinger ’96 across the road manfully. Now they present us with Thomas Keller’s trademark savory cornets: for me, a tartar of salmon with a little red onion. For my sugar daddy, a cornet made from a curl of crisp potato topped with a tartar of Wagyu beef, seasoned with chives and horseradish.

Here, though, we have come for one dish in particular, and Plotnicki already has his camera out on the table ready for it: Keller’s oysters and
pearls. Later, when he comes to write an account of our meal on his blog, Plotnicki will describe this solemnly as “the first dish created by an American-born chef that can compete with the best of what Europe has created.” The oysters are poached and are sweet rather than salty. They sit in a chive-flavored sabayon, at the bottom of which is a little tapioca. On the top is a spoonful of caviar. (More caviar? Oh, well. If I must.) The dish is, as it was the first time I tried it, a fearsomely good combination of flavors and textures, the tapioca and the caviar playing tag with each other in the mouth. There is a lobster dish each after that—something light and soupy with artichokes and lemon verbena for him; for me, a combination of applewood smoked bacon and tomato, so that it has the flavor profile of a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich.

We are led into the kitchen to meet the monkish head chef, Jonathan Benno. In the kitchen of Per Se, nobody shouts. Nobody hectors. It is calm, quiet, industrious. At Keller’s restaurants there aren’t brigades of chefs; there is a brotherhood. Benno has his shaven head bowed over the pass.

He looks up and, misremembering the title of the book that Plotnicki has told the restaurant I am writing, says, “You must be the man who ate everything.” I give a goofy “gee-shucks” kind of shrug and thank him for the food.

Benno turns to Plotnicki. “And you must be the man who
complains
about everything.” Plotnicki loves the abuse. It proves they know him here, and that’s what matters.

We ask for the bill, and again we are told there isn’t one. Plotnicki grins. He has spent a lot of money at Per Se since it opened in 2004. It’s nice to get something for nothing. It would, he says, be “inappropriate” to argue. So I don’t.

Downtown we head in a cab, bouncing through the neon shimmer of Times Square, toward Bouley in TriBeCa on the Lower West Side. There is one other top joint in town, Le Bernardin—four
New York Times
stars, three from Michelin—but Plotnicki says he had a dismal meal there a few weeks ago and he refuses to return. So we’re making do with
a mere Michelin two-star, though one which, Plotnicki says, is responsible for some of New York’s best fish cookery.

The change in status is notable the moment we walk through the door. We had come from the very top end of New York eating where everybody knew why we were there. In the homely, vaulted dining room at Bouley, the dinner service is in full swing, and only one guy seems to know about the arrangement. Our waiter keeps trying to offer us cocktails and menus, and wants to recite the specials as if we’re bedding in for the evening.

“Here, they’ll charge us,” Plotnicki says simply, once we’ve got rid of him.

Still, the kitchen knows what’s going on and sends out two plates of pearly Chatham cod in a light broth flavored with dashi—a Japanese stock made from a reduction of kelp and shavings of dried, fermented, and smoked tuna—with artichokes, salsify, and bok choy. Though our stay at Bouley feels rushed, hesitant, a distraction from the restaurant’s usual business (which is what it is), Plotnicki will eventually declare this his dish of the night. I can see what he means. It has a clarity and a simplicity that allows the quality of the fish to shine through. For me, though, it has to be the sea urchins at Jean-Georges, on their bed of dark bread and cold, salty butter.

We are served a plate of seared foie gras, with a purée of this and a little of that but, courtesy of the champagne and the glasses of Nuits-St-Georges, my attention is wandering. I pay the $170 bill—Plotnicki was right—and grab another cab.

Just two restaurants left. First, Eleven Madison Park, a big, busy, urban bistro in a grand, high-ceilinged landmark dining room run by the Union Square Café group. There we are served far too much crispy skinned duck from a whole roasted bird presented to us at the table first, bunches of lavender sticking out of its bum. After that there is a plate of suckling pig. We also hit what Plotnicki calls our “first bump in the road,” two mediocre little mid courses: for him a shot glass of dull asparagus mousse with morels, and a quail’s egg and for me, something
described as a strawberry gazpacho. It tastes of under-powered gazpacho. It doesn’t taste of strawberries. I can’t work out whether this is a good or bad thing.

I can’t work out much any more because I am very, very full. It should have been fine. It should have been easy. After all, the plan was to do a standard high-end tasting menu—twelve to fourteen courses, perhaps—just in a bunch of different places. The time taken to get to each restaurant would also help. The problem is, firstly, that these damned chefs have insisted on sending out extras. We are beginning to feel besieged by food, chastised by it. Secondly, Eleven Madison doesn’t really do the itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny plates thing. Its food is accomplished but it is also robust. For god’s sake, they showed us the whole damn duck. We do our best to clear our plates, pretty certain now that we won’t be charged here, either (we aren’t), but we’re clearly flagging. Plotnicki appears to be making more effort to shoot pictures than eat, as if the recording of the meal, the knowledge of it, has now taken precedence over its consumption. He needs to turn this dinner into content, so that his readers can also consume it. I push slices of duck around the plate and wonder whether I can get away with eating just the fantastic skin. Plotnicki does exactly that.

I fear we have reached the saggy middle. The issue may be the whole premise upon which the evening is built. Plotnicki is trying to establish whether it is possible for a perfect restaurant experience to be constructed from a set of mini-restaurant experiences. Certainly it is one evening out, with its own dynamic of highs and lows, but I can’t yet decide whether it really is amounting to a single meal. It strikes me that my search for the perfect dinner has now become a little desperate.

No matter: Dessert is on the way. Arriving at WD-50 we feel like athletes scrambling across the finishing line, though of course we are nothing of the sort. We are two middle-aged men attempting to conquer the city in the only way we know how: with our stomachs. WD-50 is an interesting choice. It is as far from the understated luxury of Jean-Georges as you can get. This is industrial chic, all moody lighting,
concrete, and rough-hewn wood. Then there is the food, prepared by chef Wylie Dufresne, who has long, lank, reddish hair to the jawline, killer sideburns, and steel-framed glasses. He looks like a cross between an Alabama backwoods man limbering up to shout “squeal, little piggy” and a computer nerd.

His food has a touch of the nerd about it, too. He is pretty much the only chef in New York experimenting on the outer shores of El Bulliesque gastronomy.

It is late now, close to 11 p.m., and there is a wired, kinetic schools-out feel about the place. Dufresne comes out to greet us and insists on a blow-by-blow account of our evening.

Plotnicki says, “It’s all gone smoothly. The food hasn’t jarred at all.”

“That’s my job,” Dufresne says. “To throw everything out of kilter, to make everything uneven. To screw everything up.” He attempts to do so by announcing that before dessert he plans to give us a couple of savory dishes—a tiny piece of fish, a small serving of beef short rib—and I groan.

“It’s small,” he says, sounding wounded and, not wanting to offend him, we accept. The fish, seasoned with musky nigella seeds, is odd rather than pleasant. The short rib, cooked under vacuum for hours and served with a witty take on one of those mass-produced cheese-whipped sauces, is much better.

Dufresne asks us what we would like from the dessert menu, and Plotnicki, after a moment’s thought, says, “Bring everything.”

My cholesterol-basted heart drops. “Steve! For god’s sake!” I sense that he’s bought in to the giddy mood here.

He looks at me as though I’m a lightweight. “We don’t have to eat it all.”

“But if they serve it . . .”

He pulls the menu toward him and swiftly narrows it down to just five desserts and shortly afterward it begins, the table filling up with parades of little plates: a guava-flavored parfait with a liquid center and a crush of peanuts that makes the dish taste like a peanut butter and jam sandwich; something with white chocolate, black sesame seeds, and the
strange vegetal sweetness of carrot; a mousse of coconut with cashew nuts, cucumber, and the tang of coriander.

These and the others that follow are all good, but none is as diverting as what happens next. There is a shout from the front of the restaurant. Apparently some drunk Wall Street bankers, who had been sent out gently into the night by the sommelier a few minutes before, are now trying to restart the argument. A barman has sounded the alarm and the entire brigade of cooks has come running out of the kitchen, led by Dufresne, his long hair trailing behind him. The sheer weight of numbers frightens off the bankers, who retreat, and the cooks saunter back to their kitchen, towels shoved in their apron strings, to make our last desserts and clean up.

It is nearly 12:30 a.m. We have been eating for six hours. It occurs to me that in one night in New York I had managed to experience as much of this city’s restaurant scene as I had in a week in all the other places I had visited. This, it seemed to me, was down to the nature of the trade here. It was adversarial, a battle of wills. Clearly, once Plotnicki had got Jean-Georges and Per Se on board, the others had felt duty bound to play ball. And then, with the enthusiasm of New Yorkers, they had all bought into it fully, accepted it more as a happening than dinner.

Steve Plotnicki, king of the food bloggers, had turned eating out into a competitive sport. Our only opponent had been ordinariness, and it seemed to me that we had won.

I
n the spring of 1978 the journal of the American Political Science Association published a short paper that proposed what the author called a whole new “subfield for political science.” The grandly titled John Whiteclay Chambers II, a professor at Columbia University, suggested that social scientists had focused too much on what politicians thought when, instead, they should be looking at what they ate. “The possibilities are tantalizing,” he wrote. “Is there a correlation between gastronomical and political style and success? Does digestion determine decision
making? What in fact, is the connection between a politician’s head and stomach?”