The Man Who Ate the World (35 page)

I had returned to Le Gavroche many times after that, and thrilled at the work of the maître d’, Silvano Giraldin, who, in a masterful piece of theatrical misdirection, would receive your order without taking a single note, leaving that to the boy positioned ten feet away just in earshot. I loved the soufflé Swiss with its ballast of Gruyère cheese, and the sweet indulgence of the omelette Rothschild. Mostly I loved the set-price lunch that included half a bottle of seriously good wine per person, all of it at a smaller charge than the cost of just the food at many lesser places.

In my head there was a map of London, of
my
London, described entirely by its restaurants: Covent Garden was for Rules and Joe Allen. Over in Smithfield was St. John and Comptoir Gascon. In Mayfair was The Square; in Kensington, Petrus; and here, on Upper Brook Street, in a basement decorated in antiquated shades of red and green, the tables heavy with garish animal sculptures fashioned from silver cutlery, was Le Gavroche, where nothing bad ever happened.

So I came here now to eat their impeccable duck terrine, and their lamb chops and their own ice creams from the ice-cream trolley, the oval scoops arranged on the plate like the petals of a flower, and regretted for a moment the loss of innocence that repetition of experiences entailed. For nothing would ever match the arrival of that woodcock at the table.

It struck me now that in the days before a visit to an apparently classy restaurant, we fictionalize ourselves. We imagine ourselves at the table as the wittiest, most tasteful and, of course, happiest version of ourselves that it is possible to be. The problem was that few restaurants can ever deliver on that anticipation, and even if it could, like heroin or crack, the buzz is never as good the second or third time around.

It was inevitable, really. Traveling the world through its greatest restaurants, in search of the perfect meal, had made me question the very point of them. It wasn’t that I was sated. It is one of the glories of
the human condition that we are made to be addicted to food. If we don’t get a fix at least once or twice a day we are mad, bad, and dangerous to know, and a little after that, we are dead. It was more to do with the whole process of the restaurant meal. It suddenly seemed so feeble, so ephemeral when examined so closely. I felt like a straight man doubting his sexuality, like a priest questioning his vocation. Was I really losing my religion?

I decided there was only one way to find out: I had to test the high-end restaurant experience to destruction, take the once in a lifetime and make it everyday, make it ordinary. Only once it was stripped of all notions of specialness, I decided, could I truly understand what it was all about.

It would not be a simple venture. It would demand a certain commitment, not to mention shedding loads of cash, but I knew exactly how to do it. I also knew exactly where to go.

I
t is the day before my trip to Paris and I am lying on an examination table in a consulting room at one of London’s most expensive hospitals, my shirt hitched up to just below my ribs. My friend Sarah Burnett, a highly regarded doctor, is running a sensor coated in water-based jelly across my stomach and studying an image on a monitor beside me. She is managing to do this without looking appalled, which is kind.

“When we consume excess calories,” Sarah says casually as she sweeps from one side of my rippling belly to the other, “they are stored as fat, obviously beneath the skin but also within our organs and particularly the liver. That’s how foie gras is made. The geese are overfed so their livers blow up with fat. So, now,” she says with a little too much enthusiasm, “let’s have a look at yours.”

She throws me a sympathetic glance. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was fattier than normal in the first place, given what you do—even before the week you’ve got coming.”

She tells me that fat shows up white on an ultrasound, and I turn to the screen expecting to see something akin to the polar ice cap emerge out of the fuzzy image.

“Well, well,” Sarah says. “You are not particularly fatty there at all. I
think we can safely say that Gordon Ramsay would reject your liver for being gritty and unpalatable.”

As I button up my shirt I ask her if she thinks what I am about to do is madness. She laughs. “No, not at all. I’d do it, given half the chance.”

“But then you are not as other doctors.”

“That’s true. I am not as other doctors.”

We became friends because Sarah was a contestant on the pilot for a BBC television food show called
Eating with the Enemy,
in which home cooks would cook for and be judged by restaurant critics, of which I was one. She had done something very nice with chorizo, followed that with a pork belly dish, and easily trounced the opposition. As well as being a doctor she gave cookery classes and was pursuing an interest in food writing. When I decided I would be going to Paris and that a doctor should be involved, she was the obvious choice. Sarah quickly volunteered her medical services for free, in return for a nice meal somewhere. That was fine by me. I was always good for a nice meal somewhere.

My idea was simple. I wanted to do the high-end
Super Size
Me. In the original documentary, released in 2004, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock investigated the fast-food industry and its effect on American life by eating nothing but McDonald’s, three times a day for thirty days. And if he was invited to Super Size his meal—to increase the portion size for a limited increase in price—he had to do so.

The high-end version would require me to eat in a Michelin three-star restaurant in Paris every day for a week, and if I was invited to take the tasting menu, I would have to say yes. Partly I wanted to see how my attitude to these “treat” restaurants, which were meant to be enjoyed only rarely, would change if I visited them once every twenty-four hours. But I was also curious about the impact on my physical well-being. Was high-end food any better for you than McDonald’s just because it cost one hundred times more? As a result of the Super Size Me experiment, Spurlock put on 11 kilograms (25 pounds), developed symptoms of sugar
addiction and depression, and turned his liver into paté. What would happen to my body if I traipsed from three-star to three-star?

Admittedly my body would be starting in a very different place to Spurlock’s. At the beginning he was a perfect physical specimen. I too was a specimen, but only of the sort that would be found stowed away in a bottle somewhere in a laboratory to be brought out and laughed at during the Christmas party. Our experiments would also, by necessity, be different. For one, Spurlock had eaten three meals a day in McDonald’s. I could only eat one of mine in a three-star, not least because it cost too bloody much to do otherwise. For the same reason I would only be doing this for seven days rather than for thirty. At the point when I made what I regarded as the selfless decision to eat in the French capital, there were ten three-stars located there, more than in any other city in the world. Two were closed for renovation, leaving eight, and one of those—L’Ambrosie—proved impossible to visit, no matter how willing I was to degrade myself to get a booking. And, anyway, a week felt neater to me.

Also, Spurlock reduced his physical activity to better match that of the average American during the process. He dropped from walking around three miles a day to 1.5 miles a day. Then again, he didn’t have the responsibility of being a father of two small children and, with that in mind, I was clear that I would continue my workouts—although I believed it brought a certain consistency to the experiment. I would simply be behaving normally throughout.

I was already pleased to see that the efforts I had made over the previous few months on my elliptical Cross Tracker had born results. No one could pretend I looked like a fit man; I looked like a fit man’s degenerate brother. But when my blood pressure was taken, my underlying resting rate—the diastolic—was 66, considerably better than the average of 80. My systolic, the peak pressure, was way up at 160 as against 120, but Sarah kindly ascribed that to anxiety, brought on by me having just seen my weight.

I had told Sarah I was the wrong side of 115 kilograms (253
pounds), which was really only a guess because I never weighed myself. I judged where I was by the fit of my clothes. Sarah now saw the scales, laughed, and said, “Oh, yes, that is on the wrong side of 115 kilograms.” (Don’t expect me to give you the number; I may be a journalist, but even I have limits when it comes to the invasion of my own privacy.) Certainly it was a disappointment. I had been working out especially hard in recent months and had even dropped a trouser size. Sarah said a few soothing things about muscle mass weighing more than fat, and I told myself that had to be the explanation: I wasn’t actually fatter. I was just more muscular.

Yeah, right.

I also told Sarah that I had developed certain strategies to get through the week in Paris. For a start, other than the two I would eat at the weekend, I would be taking most of the meals at lunchtime because I hoped that would allow me more time to digest the food. Also, I wouldn’t be drinking. I imagined that boozing for seven days straight would be a complete killer, especially as I wasn’t much of a drinker.

Sarah said, “I think that’s cheating.”

“Hang on. You’re a doctor, and you’re telling me to drink heavily?”

“I’m just pointing out the parameters of the experiment. And it’s only for a week.”

“I might have a glass or two.”

She said she would call me later that same day with the results of various blood tests, and I made an appointment to see her immediately after my return so she could have another look at my liver, to find out whether it was any more ready for Ramsay’s pan.

When she telephoned that afternoon she said she had both good news and some that was less so. The good news was that my cholesterol score was just below the average, which was probably the result of all the exercise. I also had a very positive ratio of good-to-bad cholesterol. On paper I should have been a cholesterol disaster; in reality I was a paragon of virtue.

The bad news concerned my blood glucose. She told me that a score
of 7 or above indicates type 2 diabetes, the variety brought on by a combination of genetic predisposition and piss-poor lifestyle (or what I liked to call “my job”). Anything over 6 was into the danger zone.

Mine, she said, was at 5.9.

“It has to be said if you put on any more weight, you really could be at risk of tipping into type 2, and that’s something you need to think about.”

I did think about it, a lot. In the days before I became a food writer, some of the stories I had covered, particularly those concerning the security services, had involved a modicum of risk, which Pat had not liked at all. I talked to strange men in shadowy places. I suspected my telephone was bugged. The usual. Eventually she asked me to stop doing those stories and, believing I had a responsibility to the woman I had married, I said I would. For the same reason, and the more so when our boys arrived, I turned down major commissions to go to Rwanda, Iraq, Kurdistan, and the Laotian-Cambodian border. I could still cover tough subjects, but essentially I believed in living safely.

Yet here I was, apparently teetering on the edge of type 2 diabetes, a manageable but debilitating disease with explicit consequences for life expectancy. Did not exactly the same conditions apply as to the threat of gunshot or bomb in a war zone?

Well yes, I told myself, but this was different. This was a chronic situation, not an acute one. And I was sure I could lessen the impact of my behavior through exercise and by modifying my diet on my return. Of course, I was just making excuses to myself. I was convinced my journey in search of the perfect meal would not be complete unless I went to Paris, and god knows the effort, the begging, the shameless pleading it had taken me to get the consecutive bookings in seven of the world’s greatest restaurants. I couldn’t just cancel the trip after all that.

Okay. I didn’t want to.

And so, for the very last time, I pulled down the suitcase and began packing.

It was when the maître d’ overruled my choice of first course in my very first Parisian three-star that I realized just how challenging this experiment might be. Admittedly I had tried to order a dish which was, by anybody’s standards, girls’ food:
legumes et fruits cuits/crus, marmelade tomato/truffe.
In short, and in English, a plate of vegetables. But was that really such a crime?

The man in the gray suit thought so. “Let me bring you something else,” he said with a pained expression. “It’s nice, of course, but it is just . . . vegetables.” Well, yes, that’s why I ordered it. Sure, I was usually the paté guy or the spider crab guy, but I had a long way to go here, so I thought . . .

“I bring you this,” he said, pointing to something else on the menu. “It is cockscomb, lobster, truffle, pasta. You’ll like it.”