The Man Who Ate the World (3 page)

I was in New York City the day the stars were announced and the next morning went to see Mario Batali, the Italian-American celebrity chef made famous in the U.S. by his television cookery show
Molto
Mario
, and renowned as the owner of a crop of generally well-regarded restaurants across the city. We met at his casual Italian place, Otto, down at the southern end of Fifth Avenue, and he arrived wearing cutoff chinos that dangled just below the knee.

Batali is not like most modern chefs who tend to be lean and bony and pale-skinned from too much time spent in their windowless kitchens. Batali is soft and round. His arms and legs are built of long, fleshy ovals, and he has big, flat hands and a huge head, made to look larger still by the pasture of closely cropped beard and the way his sandy hair is permanently styled into a ponytail. We both perched on the bar stools, bits of us overflowing, and ate silky pieces of prosciutto with our hands. We ate sweet rock shrimps with a sprinkling of red chilies and marinated artichokes and slices of his famous thin-crust pizza.

Batali ate angrily and waved bits of food at me as he spoke. He had acquired two Michelin stars in the results announced the day before and he was not happy about it. Everybody knew that his pride and joy was the high-end Italian restaurant Babbo, down in the West Village. Babbo had been awarded just one star when he had hoped for two. The second of his stars had gone instead to The Spotted Pig, a New York take on the British gastro-pub, of which he was co-owner.

“I love the Spotted Pig,” he said. “I adore the Spotted Pig. But a Michelin star? Geddouta here.”

I asked him what he thought of the awards in general. He shrugged. “What you have to understand is that in the late eighties, three Michelin stars became nothing more than a guarantee that the ultrarich could eat the same food anywhere in the world.”

I liked Batali. I particularly liked the smooth olive oil gelato he now served me. But I didn’t want to believe him. Surely this was just sour grapes? Surely the revolution in high-end gastronomy that was sweeping the world was about more than merely satisfying a particular clientele’s hunger for nothing more interesting than consistency. It had to have produced some truly fantastic restaurants. Didn’t it? Why would those chefs go to all the trouble of opening all those restaurants and sourcing all those ingredients and taking all the time it required to run a kitchen if it was just to serve safe food? There had to be more to it than that.

That was when it struck me. Somebody needed to chronicle what was going on by mapping this revolution. I had to find out for myself, and in doing so, I realized, I might well find the perfect meal I had dreamed about. This wasn’t the only reason for going out there. There was another motivation, one that, if I’m honest, it had taken me a while to face up to. I had just turned forty and, reaching life’s midpoint, I had begun to wonder seriously whether being paid to eat was a proper way for a grown man to make a living. If I had found the job even occasionally onerous, I could have convinced myself that the thing from which I took so much pleasure also involved sacrifices. But the truth was my job had never been a burden. I enjoyed all of it, even the really bad restaurant experiences. They gave me great things to write about. Occasionally I was asked if there were any downsides to being a restaurant critic and I would reply that anybody who moaned about doing my job deserved a smack in the teeth. I meant it with perhaps a little too much vehemence. The puritanical part of me, the part that had worn down shoe leather as a reporter covering the evil that men do, wanted to be the one to do the smacking.

In the task I had set myself I sensed a certain redemption. By setting out to investigate the burgeoning new restaurant world I could stop
being an itinerant eater merely pleasuring his taste buds and become something else: an explorer, the one to record an entire movement. That had to be a virtue. Didn’t it? Plus I could try to answer a few questions about high-end dining. For example, is cookery a craft or an art? How much can we really learn about the world in which we live from the food that arrives on our plate? Is it moral to eat well while others starve? And is globalization, as Mario Batali claimed, threatening to extinguish the flame of unique creativity that has for so long burned in the hearts of the world’s great chefs?

Justifications aside, I couldn’t think of a better person for the job. At six I had picketed the family home over a lackluster meal. At eleven my enthusiasm for snails had almost led me to burn down a hotel. I had spent my entire life campaigning for proper dinner. I was the ideal candidate.

What I needed now, though, was a starting point. I wanted to begin somewhere that encapsulated the modern age. It had to be vibrant, innovative, and open to gastronomic ideas. It had to be a city of appetite. It had to be a town that really, really loved restaurants.

There was only one candidate. It had to be Las Vegas.

T
he first time I visited Las Vegas it was to interview a man who was famous because his wife had cut off his penis. It says much for the shape of my career back in the midnineties that I regarded the assignment as light relief. For the previous week I had been in Toronto investigating a particularly grisly set of murders. A young, middle-class couple—all white teeth and glossy hair—had dragged young women to their pastel-colored house down by Lake Ontario, videoed each other sexually assaulting them, then chopped up their bodies and set them in concrete.

The court cases were still ongoing when I visited Canada in February of 1995 to report the story and, because the accused were being tried separately, there was a lockdown on the reporting of the details until both trials were concluded. Nobody in Canada was meant to know anything about what had been dubbed the Ken and Barbie murders and, if they did know anything, they certainly weren’t meant to talk to reporters like me about it. This forced silence only added to my gloom. Everywhere I went the ground was crusted with ice. Snow blew against my cheeks like so much grit on the wind, and in a restaurant in the city’s theater district I acquired food poisoning courtesy of some spareribs, which
hadn’t been particularly good on the way down and were much worse on the way up. I couldn’t wait to escape Canada for the sudden sunshine and warmth of Vegas, even if it was to interview a wife beater called John Wayne Bobbitt, who had achieved notoriety only because, one muggy summer’s night, he and his penis had managed to arrive at the hospital in different vehicles.

Bobbitt had gone to Vegas in search of an honest man to manage his career, because he felt he had been deceived by his previous manager. While it might seem odd that anybody should go to Vegas—a place long famous for its store of shysters, con men, and career hoods—in search of honesty, it was no more peculiar than that Bobbitt should have been in need of a manager at all. By then he had parlayed the knife attack on him by his then-wife Lorena into a thriving career. On my first full day in the city, enthroned at the huge black glass pyramid that is the Luxor Hotel at the north end of The Strip, I got to witness that career for myself. Bobbitt had starred in a video called
John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut,
which was, depending on your taste for euphemism, either an adult movie or a desperate skin flick.

The tag line on the cover said it all: “Ever since this whole thing happened all everybody wants to see is my penis . . . now you can.” Indeed I could. It was a living monument to the powers of cutting-edge microsurgery, and looked not unlike a tree that had been doctored by a tree surgeon or as if it were wearing a tiny life belt. It also functioned pretty well, as the video let me see in more detail than could ever be necessary.

This was the image that was burned into my mind when I went off to meet Bobbitt and his new manager for dinner, which may explain why I cannot for the life of me recall a single thing I ate that night. I know we discussed Bobbitt’s plans for a range of branded merchandise including a “penis protector”—an autographed hollow tube—because you don’t forget that sort of thing in a hurry.

I do remember that he came across as spectacularly stupid, and grunted his words rather than spoke them. I also recall that outside, in
Caesars Forum, the covered shopping arcade where the restaurant was located, dusk fell every half hour courtesy of some clever lighting effects. Of the meal itself I can tell you nothing at all. This is something I regret, for the dinner took place at a seminal restaurant in the history of modern Las Vegas dining: the branch of Wolfgang Puck’s Spago, which opened at Caesars Palace in 1992.

Before Spago opened (and for a good few years afterward), food in the big casino hotels of Vegas was regarded only as an amenity, something the gamblers needed to keep them going while they emptied their pockets at the blackjack tables. It was the city of the all-you-can-eat $4.99 buffet and very little else. It’s true that, in the midnineties, enterprising hoteliers were beginning to experiment with the notion that there might be sources of income in Vegas other than gaming. Hotels like the Luxor and the Arthurian-themed Excalibur, complete with amusement park rides for the kids, had been put up with the self-declared aim of rebranding the city as a family resort.

It was, however, a halfhearted project, which would eventually be abandoned in favor of a strategy aimed solely at adults (complete with advertising slogan “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”). Certainly in 1995 it was still the sort of place where an emerging porn star like John Wayne Bobbitt, with no discernable talent for anything, could get a table at Spago without a reservation, despite a queue out the door.

It is really no surprise that Wolfgang Puck should have been the first into town. He has long displayed an uncanny nose for the next big thing. I had met him for the first time a few months before my return to Vegas and now that I was here, gawping at the mammoth hotels and the hard-jewel lights, it struck me that he was very much like the city itself: on the surface frivolous, light, apparently obsessed with the ephemeral. But beneath that was a core of steel.

Puck was famous because he decided to put smoked salmon and cream cheese on a pizza. He was seriously rich because he had worked out how to sell that pizza again and again. Likewise, Vegas plays the good-time girl, apparently obsessed only with the here and now, but at heart it’s
a dollars-and-cents town. Pleasure—like the smoked salmon pizza—is simply its product.

Puck—Austrian born, Michelin trained—knows how to market pleasure. In Los Angeles, at the original Spago on Sunset Strip, he created an environment where movie stars could feel at ease while eating Joe-Schmo food. Then he replicated the experience time and again so now Joe-Schmos could eat the same Joe-Schmo food and feel like movie stars. Some of his food was interesting. Though he did not invent it, Puck can reasonably claim to have popularized Californian-Italian cuisine, and his fusion of Asian and European flavors at Chinois ushered in an era when it became a crime to cook a piece of fish all the way through.

His real talent lay elsewhere: firstly, in his ability to replicate his good ideas, and secondly, in having absolutely no shame. Long before other big names of American cooking—Emeril Lagasse, Bobby Flay, Mario Batali—had cottoned onto the notion of themselves as brands, Puck was selling himself remorselessly. He published books, starred in his own TV series, and opened a chain of expresses at airports that serves one of the worst Caesar salads it has ever been my misfortune to eat. It is the second of these characteristics, this willingness to plunge so far down-market so fast, it’s a miracle he didn’t get a nosebleed, that is the most important; it was that instinct that enabled him to take on Vegas.

In 1992 only the corporations wanted to be there. No self-respecting chef or restaurateur would go near the place, unless they had a sideline as a high roller. Apart from Puck. As America rose out of the recession of the early nineties, he recognized the growing power of the leisure dollar. For many years, though, he had the city to himself. Then, in October 1998, the Vegas hotelier Steve Wynn opened the $1.7 billion, 3,000-room Bellagio Hotel on the former site of the legendary Dunes Hotel and Golf Course, and everything changed. The city had never seen anything like it, which is saying something for a town that has seen most everything.

Inspired by the Lake Como resort of the same name, it was at the
time the most expensive hotel ever built, only later to be trumped in cost by other hotels built by Steve Wynn. It came complete with a multimillion-dollar fountain display out front that danced to piped music. There was an art gallery bulging with works by the great Impressionists from Gauguin and Monet to van Gogh and Renoir. It also happened to have eleven new restaurants.

Although Wynn paid the bills it was the then food and beverage manager of the Bellagio, an Egyptian called Gamal Aziz, who came up with the idea. He had worked in grand hotels all over the world and, when he arrived, was shocked to discover just how lousy the food in Vegas could be. He had stumbled across those buffets and realized that this was where ingredients went to die. “I wanted to signal a change,” he told me. “To say there was something new and different about Las Vegas.”