The Man Who Ate the World (32 page)

I
discovered all of this for myself in the early nineties when I was robbed at a Central London hotel. What I had thought I was doing was having dinner at Marco Pierre White’s relocated restaurant at the Hyde Park Hotel, where he had finally won his third Michelin star. Instead, it felt like the sort of incident that really ought to have been settled in the courts, or at least by a fight.

White was the first British-born chef and the youngest anywhere in the world to win that precious third star. Legend had it that, every morning, he was roasting thirty-six chickens not for the meat, but just to make the best jus possible. Once squeezed, the chickens were thrown away. This, of course, was a disgrace and an obscenity and beneath contempt. Naturally I found it intriguing.

In those days I was consuming restaurant reviews rather than writing them, and had read breathless accounts of his food, describing meals that were, according to these writers, the best they had ever eaten.

I wanted to know what the best tasted like.

I wanted to know what three stars meant.

I
needed
to know.

Sure, it would cost. White was charging £75 ($150) per head (during a recession, mind you) for three courses, a price tag it would take Gordon Ramsay another ten years to reach, even at his flagship restaurant in Chelsea. But I was an optimist. I assumed it would be worth it.

You can see where this is going. The room was gloomy and shrouded in a morbid silence that was broken only by the halfhearted scrape of silver on porcelain. The food—pretty little scribbles of this and that across the plate—was, as far as I can recall, dull and soulless. It speaks volumes that while it was, at the time, the most expensive meal I had ever paid for, I can only access my emotional responses. Of what we ate, I remember almost nothing. All Pat could talk about afterward was the
young waitress with the cold, expressionless face whose one job appeared to be showing women to the toilet and back again, and who can blame her for being a little on the dour side with that gig? There had been no attempt to help us toward having a good time, either in the service or on the plate, and it had left me in a depression for a week, at the end of which I swore I would never allow a bad restaurant experience to upset me like that ever again.

Obviously it was a promise to myself that I had failed to keep. That was what made me so cross about our dinner at The Square. It had been more than a dozen years since that meal at Marco Pierre White’s restaurant—or the scene of the crime, as I now like to call it—and yet visiting The Square had made me feel exactly the same way. I had begun to suspect that I really should get out less.

T
he attention of London restaurant critics can make chefs behave in strange ways. In 2003, a chef called Marcus Wareing suddenly began behaving very strangely indeed. That year, Wareing, who is a protégé of Gordon Ramsay, moved his one-Michelin-star restaurant Petrus from a site in St. James’s to a space in Kensington’s Berkeley Hotel. I had very much liked Petrus when it was in St. James’s and, like many others, had been surprised when it had not been awarded its second Michelin star. Wareing was a gifted and unashamedly bourgeois chef who was not scared of big flavors. I still held intense memories of his dishes there: of seared scallops in a lobster bisque, or his sweet, glazed round of pork belly. There were many who believed he was laying down a serious challenge to his mentor.

The move to the Berkeley was supposed to provide him with the platform from which to achieve that second star and there was no doubting the money that had been spent. The old Petrus had been a coffin-like chamber of silt-colored walls and gloomy spotlights. It always felt as if there were a table of constipated bishops eating somewhere in its depths. In tribute to the grand wine from which it took its name, the new
Petrus had fabric-covered walls the rich color of claret, uplifted by twiddly chrome and silver bits. There were highly polished trolleys that glided about the room dispensing champagne, cheese, and sweeties, and a wine list heavy not merely with some of the greatest bottles known to man, but some serious bargains as well, to attract the big-ticket restaurant virgins.

But mostly there was the new menu that was—and this is a highly refined and very technical restaurant reviewing term—completely tonto. It is, for example, a curious fish dish that encourages a maître d’, on hearing you order it, to announce, “I am Belgian and in Belgium, this is not how we cook turbot.”

Good grief, I thought to myself at the time, this is not how they cook turbot anywhere.

The menu description said: “Braised turbot with Welsh rarebit glaze, smoked cod roe with aubergine caviar, and sautéed baby gem lettuce, lemon grass velouté.” The maître d’ described the dish to me, just as it was written. He said something like, “I wanted you to know how complex it is,” and wandered away. Pat was eating with me. She watched him go and said, “That sounded like he was trying to dissuade you from ordering it.”

Perhaps so. Certainly I wasn’t ordering it because I wanted to eat it. I was ordering it because it read like a car crash, and I can rubberneck with the best of them. It tasted as it read—a grossly over-seasoned cacophony of flavors. It was certainly a terrible thing to do to an innocent piece of fish. In my review, I said so.

A few weeks after it was published, while on a family holiday abroad, I received a message on my mobile from a senior member of the egullet.com team, an auditor for a British telecoms company with ambitions to become a professional food writer. He believed he had a scoop, told me on my voice mail that he was preparing to publish his story but that he wanted my response first. It turned out that I was not the first critic to have ordered the turbot dish. Almost every one of us had done so. Wareing, who had spotted me in the dining room, had become so enraged, so
frustrated when I had done so, that he decided to completely change the dish on service. Out went the Welsh rarebit crust to be replaced with a herb crust. Out went the lemon grass velouté to be replaced by a cepe sauce.

The gastronomic scoop of the century was that, apparently, I hadn’t noticed, and Wareing was telling anyone who would listen.

I was intrigued. Looking back at my review I saw that, while I had been clear that the dish was a mess of flavors and too salty, I genuinely hadn’t identified what those flavors were. Perhaps there was something interesting to be said about the connection between what we are told we are eating and what we therefore taste. It struck me that it couldn’t have been much of a cepe sauce, or I would have jumped up and shouted, “Who put all the mushrooms in the lemon grass velouté?”

What intrigued me most was the lengths to which a British chef might be prepared to go, when confronted by a British restaurant critic. There had been a deliberate attempt at deception, which would have been bizarre in any restaurant, let alone one at this level. Then again, it seemed Wareing was going through a curious period of his life. Asked in a newspaper questionnaire around that time how he wanted to be remembered, he said, without a hint of irony, “As a gastronomic legend,” as if the little voice inside his head that was getting him through the long and brutal working days had somehow escaped his mouth.

Many of the reviews of the new Petrus were negative and it did not achieve its second Michelin star, not that year nor for the two that followed. Finally, however, in 2007, Michelin decided the restaurant was right. In January it was awarded its second star. I had not eaten there since the turbot incident, though I had bumped into Wareing on the tight, intimate London restaurant circuit and he had told me that much of his menu had changed. He said he had returned to many of the virtues of the old Petrus.

Certainly if I was looking for a great meal, for an experience that would right the wrongs of The Square and place my world back on its rightful axis, it had to be one of the restaurants I should visit. I told Pat
she had to come, too. She sighed deeply and dragged the shiny heels back out of the wardrobe again.

T
he sleek Belgian maître d’, Jean-Philippe Susilovic, was still in place, though he was a little more recognizable now. He had played the role of maître d’ for Gordon Ramsay on both the British and the U.S. versions of the television reality cooking show
Hell’s Kitchen
, which essentially meant being abused by Ramsay for a month at a time. After each shoot, Jean-Philippe said, returning to the challenges of his restaurant, where the occasional customer might get cross but nobody told him to cut off his own testicles and eat them, as Ramsay once did, was a pleasure. He handed us the menus and, as we opened them, said, “Are you looking for the turbot with Welsh rarebit? It’s not there.”

“You remember?”

“This, we don’t forget. You don’t mess with turbot. I told him this, but you have to learn from your mistakes.”

The turbot really wasn’t there, but lots of other good things were. There was a simple and clean-tasting salad of lobster with pickled vegetables and powerful black pepper jelly that reminded me of the best of Jean-Georges in New York. We ate a dish of the freshest crab and langoustine with tiny brown shrimps from Wareing’s hometown of Southport, in Lancashire. There was a faultless fillet of Angus beef with truffles, and a plate of sweet suckling pig—loin, cutlets, crackling—whose infancy at slaughter didn’t bear thinking about. We were served extras of scallops with an orange foam and foie gras with precisely acidulated rhubarb, and at the end a parfait of peanuts with an intense chocolate mousse, salt caramel jelly, and a raspberry crème. It was a dessert of the sort created by someone who understands the imperative of sweetness, and not simply because he knows there has to be something sugared to end with.

But mostly there was just the gentle hum of things done right. Pat attempted to whine—“at the end, all that will remain is the memory of
good food in a red room surrounded by people I don’t like the look of”—but I could tell her heart really wasn’t in it; that she was having too good a time. As we sipped our coffee, Wareing appeared at our table and thanked us for coming. None of the critics had returned, he said. Then, unbidden, he said, “I got it wrong at the beginning. I went from driving an old banger to a Ferrari and lost control.”

Emboldened by Wareing’s declaration, Pat began talking about her problem with the sort of people who came to this sort of restaurant. Wareing looked baffled. Of course there were customers for whom money was no object, he said. There were always a few of those. But no business like his could survive on that trade alone.

“An awful lot of the people who come here have saved up to do so.”

Pat nodded slowly and said, “Oh!” I knew what she was thinking, because it was what I was thinking: that it was in the nature of what I did for a living that we really hadn’t had to save up at all. We both felt foolish and humbled.

We went out into the night with boxes of Petrus chocolates and a signed copy of Wareing’s new cookbook, and the gently giddy feeling of an evening well spent.

A couple of weeks later, at the end of a long day, I walked into the bedroom. I had been rereading the Petrus menu, not to remind myself of what I had eaten—those dishes I could still taste—but to remind myself of what I had not eaten, of all the things that were still there to be tried: the breast of quail with the onion fondue and fresh almonds, say, or the Cumbrian lamb roasted with saffron and cumin. It was my version of window-shopping.

Pat was already in bed, reading a novel. I said, “Did you have a nice time at Petrus?”

She looked up at me and grinned as if suddenly surprised by the memory. “Yes,” she said. “I did. It was lovely. Really, really good.”

“What did you have to eat?”

There was silence in the room. She blinked, pursed her lips and said, “Nope. Can’t remember. No idea. Not a thing.” And then, as if she felt
she might be insulting me personally, said, “Sorry.” She shrugged, and returned to reading her book.

I
n 1976, my mother was invited to present a new cookery program for national British television. That was the year family mealtimes became unreliable. The thirty-minute show went out on ITV, one of only three channels then available to British viewers, and was called
Kitchen Garden
. In the first half, a gardener gave the viewers tips on how to grow that week’s chosen vegetables. In the second half, Claire demonstrated how to cook them.

It must have been curious for the Great British public to witness my mother’s sudden reinvention as a celebrity chef. Of course she was already famous by then, but more for her tips on sexual health than great ideas for dinner. Now, in addition, she was going to be supplying Britain with handy recipes for ratatouille.

I turned ten that year and at the time, none of this seemed particularly odd. My two older siblings and I were used to our mother taking on new challenges. She had started her career as a nurse in the 1940s, an escape from that miserable childhood, and risen to the level of sister before trying her hand at freelance print journalism while on maternity leave to have my sister. She never went back to nursing. One-off articles led to offers of health columns. She became a consultant to a BBC television medical drama,
Emergency Ward 10
, and then a pundit on television in her own right. Contracts for nonfiction books about health and motherhood led to the suggestion that she try her hand at fiction, and she eventually became a best-selling novelist, too, both in Britain, the U.S., and elsewhere.

Now she was going to be a TV chef. I well remember coming into the kitchen one weekday afternoon, in our house in the cherry blossom suburbs of northwest London, to find her standing over a cardboard box full of vegetables, peering at its contents suspiciously. It was not particularly odd to find her at home. Although she was a working mother, one of the
first of her breed, almost all her work could be done at the old, clacking typewriter that was located in her narrow office just off the front hall, which she shared with the family gerbil. To find her here in the kitchen at such an early hour, however, was peculiar. The only other times I had seen her cooking during the day were on Christmas Eve or, in the years when we still observed it, just before Passover, when she would be preparing to feed a houseful.