The Man Who Ate the World (30 page)

My mother’s notoriety, and my parents’ regular custom, guaranteed our family a table on the left-hand side, plus a welcome from pianist Jimmy Hardwick, who had been hired simply to play the live music necessary to secure a late-drink license, but who had become a feature of the restaurant. He had a talent for segueing seamlessly from whatever he was playing at the time to the big number for whichever musical star had just walked through the door or, in my mother’s case, “Clair,” by Gilbert O’Sullivan. My parents table-hopped or else we were joined for coffee by the perma-tanned stars of daytime television my mother had met on the celebrity circuit. It was glamorous, cheesy, and very, very camp.

As an eleven-year-old boy, I loved it all.

More than anything else, I loved the menu of American bistro food: the buffalo chicken wings, with their cayenne-boosted spicy marinade that made my lips tingle alongside a cooling wave of sour cream; the spareribs with the corn bread, rice, and black-eyed beans; the garlicky Caesar salad dressed with freshly grated Parmesan rather than the dusty old ground stuff that tasted of vomit, which was what passed for Parmesan in the rest of Britain at the time.

I liked this food too much and eventually it was my undoing. My parents took us to Joe’s so regularly that, by the time I was sixteen, I felt relaxed enough to go without them. I liked the fact that there was a restaurant in the center of London where I could phone up and get a precious, hard-to-land table at short notice; that, when I walked in, I would be recognized by the maître d’ and the piano player. I must have been a truly repulsive adolescent. Certainly, I was convinced that if I were to take girls there, they would be so impressed by my uncommon maturity and sophistication, they would immediately want to snog me.

And perhaps they would have done so were it not for the fact that appetite would then take over. I would do the bit with the maître d’ and the hearty hellos with the piano player. Then I would sit down and order the
spareribs, and when they arrived would grab them with both hands until sauce was smeared across my fat cheeks and dripping off my ears so that no girl, however desperate or impressed, was going to shake my hand, let alone kiss me. My wife later told me that, in my early twenties, I did exactly the same with her.

“But by then, I’d already snogged you, so it wasn’t such an issue. Luckily for you.”

Joe Allen remained a regular haunt into adulthood, but fashion moved on and so did I. There were other places to eat now, other places to be seen, in a city that was often better at doing restaurants designed for being seen in than for eating in. Jeremy King, who had worked front-of-house at Joe Allen from the late seventies, left in the early eighties to open Le Caprice with his business partner Chris Corbin, and did the same as Joe Allen—the smart American bistro food, the zippy service, the all-important buzz—only they did it better. Much of the celebrity clientele followed, and stayed with them as they oversaw The Ivy, J Sheekey, and, later, The Wolesely. Those were the places stalked by the London paparazzi now.

Joe Allen has endured. It is now into its fourth decade, a serious achievement in the capricious restaurant business. Still, it has been forced to face up to its fading status by flagging up its entrance with a striped awning so that passing trade might find it, much like a middle-aged hooker hitching her skirt just a little higher above the knee. The blackboards have also gone to be replaced by standard menus (though the hamburger remains unlisted).

In time I became a professional eater, and worked my way about the tables of my hometown with the enthusiasm of an experienced lover, grateful to the woman who took my virginity but with no incentive to visit her again. Why would I eat at Joe Allen now? What would be the point of that, when I could secure a booking at any number of other places?

Now it made sense that I should go back. If I really did want to understand why being at a table in a restaurant—or even just the prospect
of being at a table in a restaurant—should make me feel more content, so very much more myself, I had to return. In undertaking this journey, I had a secret weapon: my eldest son, Eddie. He had eaten with me in Michelin-starred restaurants, could tell good Chinese food from bad and liked his steak rare. He was mini-me, if you discounted the blond hair, the perfect whip-thin physique, and his absolute refusal to take either himself or his parents too seriously. His birthday was coming and that presented the opportunity. Perhaps I could get to see what the restaurant looked like through the eyes of the child I had once been. And so on the day he turned eight we took Eddie to Joe Allen for dinner.

This was a mistake, as attempts to revisit the past invariably are. For a start he was not the child I had once been, thank god. He was also with me, rather than with my mother. Thus the reception we received, while friendly enough, was hardly Louis Armstrong and Barbra Streisand in
Hello Dolly.
No marching bands, no dancing waiters and nipple tassels, not even a tune on the piano that rested silently beneath its canvas cover, our reservation having been so early in the evening that Jimmy had not yet arrived. Many of the tables were also empty, though I had come to understand that this was often how it was at Joe Allen these days. There were no famous faces to look at, and the only person we knew was a friend of my parents called Mike, a suburban solicitor with an interest in the theater. He had been eating at Joe’s in the late seventies and was doing so still—which was one long dinner. A very nice chap, but low wattage when it came to the flash of glamour, as even he would have agreed. Seeing him here just made me feel old. God knows how old it made him feel.

No matter. There was the food. Though there wasn’t, not in the way there once had been, because there never is. Flavors are embedded into the fabric of the time and space they occupy—as Einstein would doubtless have pointed out if he’d been a big eater—and cannot simply be wrenched from them.

Eddie ordered the fillet steak—“rare, please”—but it came smeared in a gloopy-looking béarnaise sauce that he hadn’t expected and his bot
tom lip twitched with disappointment. He swapped it with his mother’s duck breast, which was cooked to a shameful shade of brown, beneath a dense fruity sauce. Eddie tackled this with muted enthusiasm, and though I tried to tempt him with one of my spareribs—with a taste of my youth—he wisely declined. Even the Caesar salad was a disappointment. It was dusty and underdressed. There was a moment, when the lights dimmed and the chatter at the tables seemed to increase, that I thought I caught an echo of the old Joe’s, of that buzz that had so intoxicated me. Then it was gone, and we were in the present, many miles from the past.

We looked at Eddie, his long hair hanging loose over his eyes, his shoulders sagging. He had been up since six that morning opening presents and playing with them and now he was so exhausted that he couldn’t even be enticed to try the chocolate brownie with ice cream and hot fudge sauce, a refusal that, on any other day, might have warranted a trip to the doctor.

I said, “What do you think of this restaurant?”

Eddie looked around and, eager not to sound ungrateful, said, “It’s good . . . but I’ve been to some that are better.”

He was right. He had, and so had I. It was time to visit one of those instead.

A
nother glossy international hotel room, complete with thirty-two channels of cable television, the gentle whirr of air-conditioning, and an “intelligent” minibar that knows when I’ve been at the overpriced pistachios. This, I find sinister. I don’t like it when machines watch my snack habits.

Give or take a few lushly carpeted square meters and the deplorable lack of a butler, this hotel room at the London Intercontinental is exactly the same as all the other hotel rooms I have occupied on my journey save in one important regard: There is a woman here, too. She is lying on the bed in her hotel-issue toweling dressing gown, punching her way from
one television channel to the next on the remote, while muttering, “Crap . . . crap . . . crap . . . crap . . . It’s all bloody crap,” under her breath. My wife has never been convinced of the value of cable television, and the selection here is only re-enforcing her opinions.

It’s true that Eddie, through no fault of his own, was less useful than I had hoped in my voyage of self-discovery, but I am convinced that Pat will do the business. Although I have been slow to admit it, even to myself, I have finally recognized that my pursuit of the perfect meal was doomed to failure because I had been conducting it in entirely the wrong company, which is to say, my own. I was never going to have a perfect meal, or frankly, even a good one, unless I was with the woman who knew me best, and who somehow still liked me in spite of that.

So the kids have been sent to stay for the night with their beloved aunt and uncle, and we have booked into a hotel at Hyde Park Corner only a couple of miles from our South London home. We have played tourist in our own city for the afternoon and now we are going out to dinner at The Square, a highly regarded restaurant in Mayfair with two Michelin stars, one of only five in the city. It has a reputation for serving delicious but unpretentious high-class food, and to lots of people at the same time. The Square isn’t some small boutique restaurant. It’s big and glossy, with seating for 100 or more, the high walls hung with huge gashes of vibrant modern art. I have eaten there only once before, but I remember that meal fondly for its light, modern way with French classicism. I am sure Pat will love it. The truth is, I am desperate for her to do so. Because I only will if she does.

There is one problem. There’s no doubt Pat likes eating out. She loves well-prepared food and good ingredients. I have seen her genuine, satisfied smile when friends have congratulated her on having lucked out as a restaurant critic’s moll: all the food without the bore of having to write anything about it. How good is that?

But she doesn’t like all of it, and what she likes least of all is the flummery and corporate frottage of the kind of big-ticket restaurant that we are sitting in right now. I know that if she never has to eat another
amuse
bouche,
it will be too soon, and when the junior sommelier attempts some blatant upselling by trying to get us to order glasses of the ferociously expensive vintage champagne by not mentioning there is a cheaper house option, she sighs and rolls her eyes.

I know how she feels about all this stuff. I have known about it for a very long time, and yet for some perverse, twisted reason, I keep trying to convert her, like a desperate missionary convinced he can get the godless to see the light.

Pat settles down behind the menu, which is of a size small children could bivouac under in a storm, and I watch as she picks at the canapés. I am so keen for her to like the food here that right now I am not even paying attention to whether I do as well. I note the way she scoffs a tiny cornet of foie gras parfait, and her gentle nod at the goat cheese sable, which she says is interesting. But there is also my disappointment when she dispatches a tiny stuffed mushroom and asks, quite reasonably, what the point of it is. Who bothers to stuff a mushroom?

She orders a langoustine dish to start, and then the lamb. This is no surprise. Pat almost always orders the lamb.

We settle back to wait and I ask her what she thinks of the room.

She looks around, at the plate-glass windows onto the black London night; at the tasteful lighting, and the dark suits and the glint and flash from delicately handled cutlery. “This will never do it for me,” she says. “It’s hermetically sealed. No contact with the world. I would rather eat at that place in Soho, which does the really good cassoulet. That’s part of its environment. Here, you could be anywhere in the world.”

I ask her if she thinks I am strange for being so interested.

“I don’t think you’re strange, but I also don’t understand what you’re hoping to get out of it. The first time you try high-end food, it’s astounding. But after that, you are just grading your experiences against themselves.”

“I’m still interested to see what comes out of the kitchen.”

“Why? It’s not going to surprise you.”

“Maybe it will,” I say sullenly.

While we are talking we have been served an
amuse-bouche:
a little watercress jelly, some salmon rilettes, scrambled eggs, potato foam, and chives in a tiny glass.

Against all expectation, I watch Pat clean the bowl down to the last smear. She lays down her spoon. “If this was the first time I had tried something like that, you could have cleaned me off the ceiling. But, now . . .” She shrugs and looks around the room again. “Can you see a single person you want to know? Does anyone look interesting? Do we look interesting? We probably look as boring as the rest of them.” Oh, God. There was I arguing that expensive restaurants were wasted on the people who could afford them, and now my own wife is telling me that I am one of those people.

Thankfully our starters arrive and, praise be, they are terrific. I have a bowl of silky soft puréed potato, in the Robuchon style, with rich pungent Monks Beard cheese, snails, sautéed wild mushrooms, and dolls-house beignet of frogs’ legs. I nibble on the tiny frogs’ legs and then dig down with my spoon to get a little of the mushroom duxelle at the bottom and then some of the potato and a snail and a whole mushroom and it is all rich and luscious, and the complete opposite of food designed to be looked at. This is food to be eaten. Pat’s huge roast langoustine with Parmesan gnocchi and a potato and black truffle emulsion also has her saying positive things. I feel we are making progress. This meal is going my way. We have eaten good food in a nice place, and Pat may just be forced to admit she is having a good time.

Perhaps she would have done so if the fire alarms had gone off, or somebody had phoned in a bomb threat, or the river Thames had fortuitously broken its banks in magnificent fashion and swept us all away so that we had not been able to eat another thing. For after that, the meal was a disaster.

“You see! That’s what happens,” Pat says as she works her way through her main course of lamb with an herb crust. I can see that she is bored of chewing, that the dish has become a trial. I know what she means because my veal—a little sweetbread here, a bit of the rump
there, some celeriac purée—is exactly the same. It is just so much protein on a plate, food as sedative.