The Man Who Ate the World (29 page)

Food historians like to describe Carême as the father of haute cuisine, but for the Prince, the Elvis Presley of his day (in the deep-fried
peanut butter sandwich stage), Carême was just a means by which to make an ostentatious display of his wealth. The chef would create menus of a hundred dishes and set the table with food carvings made from pastry, spun sugar, and lard. What better symbol of the British failure to understand the importance of food is there than the way the Prince and his court would celebrate the arrival at table of a scale model of the ruins of Antioch made entirely from carved animal fats?

A century later Auguste Escoffier landed at London’s Savoy Hotel and again served the same purpose to the aristocracy, and it continued on down the decades, until relatively recently. Today, the Roux brothers, Albert and Michel, are known in London as the founders of Britain’s first restaurant to win three Michelin stars—Le Gavroche—but when they arrived in the 1960s, it was as chefs to the aristocracy. I once asked Albert Roux the gastronomic difference between France and Britain. “In France,” he said solemnly, “every taxi driver would know the price of black truffles and would save up to eat them at the Tour d’Argent.” By contrast, in Britain, he said, every taxi driver would know the price of a box of Black Magic chocolates and would save up for a bag of chips. That made me very sad indeed.

What now troubled me, as I sat at the Waverly Inn, in New York, surrounded by nightmarish people, was that I had come to assume that this situation was entirely unique to Britain; that it was purely a function of my country’s peculiar historical circumstance. Up to a point I was sure that was the case, but if my journey around the world had taught me anything, it was this: That every night, in the great food cities of the new millennium, there were terrific restaurants, filled with horrible people who were there because they could afford them or, through status, gain access to them, and who were having a much nicer time than they could possibly ever deserve.

I
decided the time had come to pay another call on Mario Batali, not least because it was his fault that I had embarked on this journey in the
first place. I had wanted to test his claim that three Michelin stars had merely become a guarantee for rich people that they could eat the same food wherever they happened to be in the world.

We met again at Otto, his pizzeria at the southern end of Fifth Avenue. It was too early for food. He had no pieces of ham to wave at me this time to emphasize his points. Instead, we perched our large arses on his tiny bar stools, sipped coffee, and talked about the business. When last we met, Batali had been a New York chef with New York restaurants, but the lure of the famous sweetheart deals had proved irresistible.

“We’ve now got two restaurants in Vegas,” he said, with an air of inevitability. “At the Venetian.” One was a high-end Italian, like Babbo, the other a version of Otto.

I was surprised. Batali had always been so big on using local ingredients. There aren’t any ingredients in Las Vegas. He shrugged. “I just pretend the restaurants are on the coast in California because that’s where all the ingredients come from. We drive it overland for four hours from the farmer’s markets in Santa Monica.”

And then, with a slow shake of his huge head, he said, “Vegas! It’s a weird place.”

Had he eaten well there? “Oh yeah, I had a great meal at Robuchon. It was every bit as good as the meal I had in 1987 at Robuchon’s restaurant in Paris, right down to the menu items.” He said this with a wry smile. “The question you have to ask these multi-starred chefs is how important is place and how important is innovation. Take Ramsay. He thought he could simply wow people here with showmanship. Ramsay’s guys didn’t know anything about ingredients here. They didn’t realize how important ingredients are here.”

Shortly after it opened in New York, Batali went to eat at Ramsay’s. “But nothing’s changed with his food since his second year at Aubergine,” he said, referencing the restaurant in London’s Chelsea where the chef first made his name. I pointed out that Ramsay was at Aubergine way back in the midnineties.

“Yeah,” Batali said. “I know.”

What about the bloggers, which I had heard he so disliked? He was on such a roll, that asking the obviously provocative questions was irresistible. Now he spat out the words. “It’s just people who hate things. But you know what? If they don’t like my beef cheek ravioli and the rock-and-roll we play on the sound system at Babbo, they can suck my dick. I don’t care.”

I barely needed to ask the next question. I already knew the answer, but I asked it, anyway. Had he at all revised his view that Michelin stars were just a symbol of a certain kind of consistency for rich people? No, he said. He hadn’t. “All Michelin does is reward luxury ingredients. It’s the only way these high-end restaurants can justify charging $400 a head, because you can’t charge that for spaghetti and clams or a salad.”

The last time he had said this, or a version of this, I had been resistant to the idea. I had wanted to believe that a high price tag generally meant a good experience. I now looked back upon myself as almost sweetly naïve. Sure, I had eaten very well at times: at Robuchon in Vegas and Al Mahara in Dubai, at Yukimura and Okei Sushi in Tokyo, and at all the places on our restaurant crawl here in New York City. But I had also traveled too far and eaten far too many mediocre meals for far too much money, to mount a serious defense to Batalai’s argument.

I had one last request. Where should I go, I asked him, for the quintessential New York restaurant experience? Batali didn’t hesitate. A big grin came across his face. “You should go to Katz’s Deli on Houston Street and order a pastrami sandwich. But be warned. If you’re doing dinner tonight, don’t eat the whole thing.”

I did as I was told. I got on the subway and went to Katz’s, a landmark famed for its menu of New York Jewish classics, like its Reuben sandwich and its salt beef and its pickles. Katz’s is the place where Meg Ryan faked her orgasm in
When Harry Met Sally
, and the spot where the
scene was filmed is marked by a sign hanging from the ceiling that reads, “Hope you had what she had.” The place is a barn, a cluttered, scuffed, old-time cafeteria that smells indecently of food, its walls hung with fading photographs of New York celebrities that meant nothing to me, and the occasional piece of neon signage. There must have been 300 people in there and it was still only half full. I fell in love with it immediately.

The counter runs the entire length of one wall and, while there is waiter service, it was clear to me that I should order directly from the guys with the knives and the big forearms on sandwich-making duty. My man fetched a lump of soft, fibrous pastrami from the boiler and brought it back to his chopping board. He took off three slices and threw them onto a plate on the counter for me to try while he went to work. This, I could, see was a Katz’s tradition. All of the slicers were doing it. So I stood there and ate the meat while he sliced up another pound of the stuff and piled it between two slices of rye bread like he was trying to hide a rhino in a jewelry box.

It didn’t matter what Batali had said. The idea that I should leave any of this sandwich uneaten was ludicrous. The meat was too rich, too savory, just too damn good to be abandoned to the plate. It occurred to me that this food had its roots in all the Russian menus that had so disturbed me while I had been in Moscow. But this, I decided, was Eastern European food as cooked by people who had been blessed with the gumption to get the hell out of there. It was émigré’s food and all the better for it.

I realized I was profoundly happy here in this room with this sandwich. In a very neurotic, needy and, yes, Jewish way, that bothered me. When I had set out on this journey, determined to map what was going on at the top end of the restaurant world, it hadn’t for a moment occurred to me that what I would eat would make me sad or angry. I had only envisaged various degrees of happiness. Instead, a lot of it had made me very angry indeed. It troubled me that my emotional responses
were so governed by what I ate. I wondered what sort of a person I was, what sort of an eater I had become that I could be influenced in such a way by the plate in front of me.

Of course, there was only one place where I was likely to find the answers to questions like that: home.

M
ost Christmases when I was growing up, my mother made chopped liver in the Jewish Ashkenazi style, to be eaten on shards of crisp matzo before the roast turkey lunch. This outbreak of ecumenical feasting made a lot of sense. Almost all the people in our house on Christmas Day were Jewish, and the terrine of rich, gray chicken livers scattered with crumbled hard-boiled egg gave us a shared, if unconscious, reference point. It provided a necessary culinary grounding before my mother, Claire, assaulted us with the roast bird. And the sausages. And the bacon. And the potatoes. And the pickled red cabbage. And the Brussels sprouts mined with chestnut shrapnel. And the bread sauce and the gravy and the Christmas pudding and the jelly and the fruit salad and the cream. If anybody pointed out that chopped liver followed by Christmas roast turkey was a culinary non sequitur, we would always roll out the same lame joke: Jesus was a nice Jewish boy, and what better way to mark his birthday?

Our Christmases were never for extended family. My father was an only child, my mother’s siblings lived in Canada or the U.S., and she had long ago broken off all contact with her own parents after a miserable childhood she was determined not to revisit. The only relatives were my
father’s parents, and my mother disliked them intensely. Later, Claire told me that the enormous Christmases she threw—one year, twenty-eight of us sat down to be fed from a turkey the size of a small horse—were designed specifically to hide her mother-in-law away in a crowd. This, I understood. I didn’t much like my paternal grandmother, either.

But it was also, I think, a function of my mother’s habit of collecting people. She had a fascination for those who, unconnected by blood, nevertheless created networks that mimicked family just as she had done when she was a nurse, hence many of the Jews who joined us for lunch were also either gay men or actors. Or gay Jewish actors.

They were all keen to be collected. By the midseventies Claire was famous as one of Britain’s leading agony aunts. She had a weekly problem page in Britain’s biggest-selling daily newspaper and a slot answering viewers’ queries on a BBC daytime television program, among other things. She had made her name offering up no-nonsense advice on health worries and sexual dysfunction by insisting that there was no problem, however personal, that could not be discussed, and many of her friends took her at her word.

I remember during one of those long Christmas lunches my mother telling the story of Larry, a neurotic New Yorker, who telephoned after midnight in much anguish. “Claire,” he said, “one of my testicles is missing,” as if she were so blessed with wisdom, she might instinctively know where to lay her hand upon it. She sighed deeply, told him she was sure it would be back in place come the morning—it was—and went back to sleep.

Looking back, I see now that, however random it might have appeared at the time, there was nothing happenstance about the cast list at these Christmas lunches; like my family, the guests were all regulars of a particular London restaurant, merely relocated to the suburbs for the one day of the year when it was closed. The restaurant was called Joe Allen, and it was where I fell in love with eating out.

There had been other places of course: the Alice In
Wonderland–
themed Mad Hatter, not far from where we lived, where I always ordered the croque monsieur and wondered at the swirly, glittery bits in the liquid soap dispensed in the toilets; the Great Gatsby, a U.S.–style burger joint in Mayfair, which served an ice-cream sundae that could harden an artery at twenty paces, and Stones Chophouse, where I ate frogs legs for the first time.

Joe Allen was in a different league. It opened in January of 1977, on the sort of grim, narrow lane just back from London’s Strand that you might visit if you specifically hankered after being mugged, and was marked by its ostentatious lack of ostentation. The doorway, in a street with no other shops or restaurants, was indicated only by a small brass plaque. You had to know it was there to know it was there, and even some of London’s cabbies didn’t. It also demanded insider knowledge once you sat down. Newcomers were easily spotted. They were the ones asking the white-aproned waiters—usually unemployed dancers—for a menu, before being directed to the blackboards hung high on the walls above the half-open kitchen (a standard feature of gastro-pub Britain today, a revelation back then). Then there was the Joe Allen burger, one of the best in the city. It was never listed on the menu, but regulars knew it was available if wanted. In short, Joe Allen had all the qualities of a members-only club, but without the fee.

Like the original in New York, which opened not long before its British sibling, the London Joe Allen had quickly become a favorite with theater people. The bare brick walls were hung with framed theater posters from both sides of the Atlantic, and late at night, after the curtains had come down across the West End, it was common to see the very people given star billing in those posters sitting beneath them eating supper and pretending to be nobody. Everybody from Elizabeth Taylor to Al Pacino, Laurence Olivier, Elaine Stritch, and Princess Margaret had eaten there over the years, and it was soon regarded as the place for celebrity spotting, though the restaurant had a way to make sure its starry clientele went unmolested. The space was divided in two by an
arched wall. If you were a regular or a face (or both), you got to sit on the left-hand side, nearest the kitchen. Everybody else went to the right and had to gawp through the arches.