The Man Who Ate the World (37 page)

Instead I had to comfort myself with dinner at another one of those bloody Parisian three-stars—and in this case, one I specifically hadn’t wanted to visit. I felt I had got to grips with Pierre Gagnaire’s food in Tokyo, come to understand what it was all about. I didn’t want to go there again and certainly not in Paris, where there was the serious risk
that Gagnaire himself might be cooking and therefore might go off menu and “Create.” I knew where that could get me. There was just one problem. Gagnaire was the only three-star open in Paris on a Sunday night. If I was going to manage seven consecutive three-star meals in seven days then I had to eat there.

So I went that night and sat alone in the beautiful dining room, with its shimmering deep-varnished wood-paneled walls, and its elegant art, and admired the cooking of a restless mind, the intent of which was so far from that of Guy Savoy’s simplicity. I was hugely impressed by the way he combined the flavors of oysters with a lightly acidulated beetroot purée and some beef jelly, the whole overlaid by the very thinnest slice of melted Beaufort cheese on toast. This could have been the edible equivalent of an orchestra tuning up, but it worked and allowed the oysters to sing their song. I liked salty char-grilled shrimps with a sauce flavored with bitter grapefruit and a cooling cone of crab mousse, and another dish that paired blue lobster with ultra-chickeny chicken. I also adored the service, the way the waiters seemed to communicate with one another by the raise of an eyebrow or the arch of a back. What I needed was anticipated before I was entirely aware I needed it, by the waiter in charge of my table who had tiny feet and a tidy mustache waxed each side to a curling point.

The problem was that, despite the great act of willpower in the market that had enabled me not to eat anything, I still wasn’t really hungry. Two three-star meals in two days had already blunted my appetite. I was like the short sighted man in the cinema who has left his glasses at home, the opera buff in a muffled world because of an ear infection. I could be impressed by what Gagnaire was doing. I could marvel at the technique, but without the imperative of at least a modicum of hunger the exercise felt sterile and self-defeating.

Naturally, as the meal went on I became fuller and fuller. My response to this, like the driver who discovers they are running out of petrol and so drives faster in the hope of getting to the petrol station sooner, was to clear my plate as quickly as possible. The quicker I ate,
the sooner the food went away. This led to inquiries as to whether I would like more. Dear god no, please! No more. Not that.

Already during my stay in Paris I had done two workouts, battering away on the machine in the basement gym of my achingly hip hotel as if my life depended upon it, which, of course, it did (though not as much as I’d thought the other day). It seemed to me I needed to do more. A lot more.

There are just fourteen hours between the end of my dinner at Pierre Gagnaire and the beginning of my lunch at Le Grand Vefour, and the moment I awake, this strikes me as appalling. I don’t want lunch. I don’t want breakfast. I don’t want to eat at all and I can’t imagine wanting to eat again until there’s at least a new digit on the end of the year.

I know that I am meant to be doing more than just eat. I have to concentrate. I have to be able to observe every plateful of food, examine every flavor profile, in an attempt to discern the chef’s intention and decide whether he has achieved it. I am meant to be forensic in my dining. But I am spent, and in the taxi on my way to lunch, my attention is elsewhere: on the Parisian street life passing by, the waters of the Seine shining in the noonday sunlight, the plane trees and the statuary and the thought of being able to walk among them.

I do at least feel guilty about this. My friend Val has come from London to join me and she deserves a little enthusiasm from her dining partner, but I am finding it hard to muster any. Lunch in a three-star no longer strikes me as a pleasure. To me, it seems to be a cruel and unusual punishment.

And perhaps I might have continued to feel distracted and inattentive, even while I was at the table, were it not for one thing: Le Grand Vefour was not like any of the other restaurants I had visited, which is to
say a slick, professional gastro-palace, serving food of exquisite beauty, utilizing the best ingredients known to humanity. Le Grand Vefour was different. Le Grand Vefour was bad, and there is nothing better calculated to catch my attention or focus my thoughts than a really, really bad restaurant.

It was not what I expected. Le Grand Vefour isn’t just a restaurant. It’s an institution. (Mind you, so is a secure psychiatric hospital and no one would choose to go there for lunch.) There has been a restaurant on the site of the Le Grand Vefour since 1784, when it opened as the fashionable Café de Chartres, by the Palais Royal. It is situated in a colonnaded gallery that looks out over the Palais Royal Gardens. Inside it is all red velvet banquettes, antique mirrors, and ornately painted ceramic panels in the grand style. No one with a hangover should ever be forced to sit in this room.

It is a child’s picture book version of a grand Parisian restaurant, a museum piece that demands a good ten-minute gawp before you can even turn to the menu, and the waiters wear this history about as lightly as a Park Avenue heiress in a $50,000 mink. Boy, are they pleased with themselves. As we were being seated the waiter pointed out the plaques celebrating the previous custom of Balzac, Victor Hugo, Jean Cocteau, and Napoleon, as if by making a booking we had joined their ranks. I understood immediately that people didn’t just come here to eat. They came here to worship.

That is its problem. Le Grand Vefour is so very pleased with itself, so very self-satisfied, that it no longer cares about its basic function. If ever you wondered why French waiters have a reputation for being haughty and pompous, go book a table at Le Grand Vefour. Even a Buddhist monk who has committed himself to sparing the life of the tiniest ant would soon want to take this lot down a dark alley for a good kicking. Bread rolls were dropped onto side plates from on high as though it were target practice. Canapés were plonked onto the table without any explanation of what they might be. Glasses of wine weren’t brought until after the food had arrived. We even had to ask if we might, perhaps, be allowed some water.

Okay, so now you think I’ve turned into a princess, a prissy demanding prima donna who can only find happiness in the subservience of others, and perhaps I have, but that’s what the three-star game is all about: It is about being offered water when you sit down, about being told what the canapés are, about being given bread with a certain grace and style. What the hell else do you think people spend 250 euros ($370) a head for?

That’s before I had tried any of the food. My starter was a rectangle of shellfish jelly, encasing crayfish. It was topped with a line of curious jellied balls containing a center of a chilled seafood sauce. Those in turn were topped with dollops of caviar and gold leaf. This wasn’t food to be eaten. It was food as status symbol. I could admire the technique required to create it. I just didn’t like putting it in my mouth, which, where food is concerned, is not a good thing. On the tongue it became a jellied fishy mess, and I didn’t like the way the jelly balls popped on the tongue. Yours for 92 euros ($135).

For my main course I ordered one of their classics, an oxtail parmentier. I knew this dish well because I had eaten two other versions of it in the previous year. The strands of oxtail should be dark and luscious and sticky, so that you are unsure where meat ends and sauce begins. Here it was dull and salty rather than flavorsome. The mashed potato on top should be silky and smooth and rich. Here it was loose and watery, as if scooped from the bottom of the pan when the good stuff had gone. Both of the other versions I had eaten—the first at a one-Michelin-star restaurant in London called Chez Bruce, the second at Galvin (the place where I went with my parents for lunch), which has no stars—were better than this. Both were a quarter of the 88 euros ($129) I was charged at Le Grand Vefour.

But the real disaster was the dessert. Granted, it did look odd on the menu. You would have to think long and hard before willingly ordering a crème brûlée with artichokes, and you would have to think particularly long and hard before doing so if you are me. I am firmly of the view that there is nothing you can introduce to a crème brûlée that will
improve it, and certainly not a thistle from the family
Asteraceae.
You might as well put a dead hamster in it, for all the difference it would make to me. But by now I was agog. It read appallingly and I needed to know the scale of the atrocity. I wanted to eat it so you wouldn’t have to.

As a result I may now require therapy. It was not simply that sweetened artichoke and the light custard of a crème brûlée are the worst partnership since Stalin decided to sign his non-aggression pact with Hitler. It was that the crème had split. Instead of a lightly set custard, there was sweet scrambled egg, a basic mistake in a corner bistro, truly staggering in a Michelin three-star.

I shoved the uneaten plate of food to the side of the table. In the other restaurants I had visited this would have been noted within seconds. Here it took ten minutes for a young waiter to amble across and ask if there was a problem. I explained. He told me I was wrong, that it was a crème Catalane.

“Then it’s a split crème Catalane.”

Finally the maître d’ came across, took one look, muttered about the water from the artichokes, and whisked the dish away as if it were vermin that needed to be exterminated.

At least it meant I didn’t have to eat it. Anything I now didn’t have to eat was okay by me. We settled the bill—my share was 293 euros ($430)—and queasily I left the restaurant. To be fair, Val had eaten better than me: an interesting vegetarian starter, a solid cod dish in which the fish came roasted with a rust-colored overcoat of paprika, but none of this excused the lackluster meal I had suffered. There has long been the suspicion in foodie circles that certain restaurants retain high scores from Michelin because they are such landmarks that, to remove their stars would actually undermine the authority of the guide itself; that the guide has to include these places as much for reasons of politics as culture. Such speculation had always seemed a little silly to me, but walking away now from the taudry Grand Vefour, I began to wonder if there might not be something to it.

Suddenly, beneath the midafternoon sun, the high-end Super Size Me notion didn’t seem like such a good idea after all. Michelin three-star restaurants? Day after day after day? How grotesque. How bloody stupid. After lunch at Le Grand Vefour, how very very unpleasant. I disliked myself. I disliked high-end restaurants. Mostly I disliked my liver, which I was now convinced had the consistency of foie gras.

And then, praise be, a truly great restaurant comes along and everything is all right again. I stop worrying about the fact that I am sleeping badly, that I think my complexion is deteriorating, that my energy levels are shot and my suit jacket feels tighter than when I arrived. I am interested only in the food on my plate, which is exactly what L’Astrance is about.

L’Astrance, I quickly realize, is not like other three-stars in Paris and it is easier to explain why that is so by describing the things it does not have than those it does. It does not have liveried doormen. It does not have walls splattered with gold leaf like King Midas has had a nosebleed. There are no brigades of waiters, nobody to fuss over your napkin if you drop it and nobody to follow you to the toilet and back again, should you choose to go. There is just a simple, rather attractive room with elegant gray-painted walls, which seats no more than twenty-five people, overseen by fewer than half a dozen nice chaps in suits. Their answer machine doesn’t take messages so people can’t bombard the place with requests for reservations, which in any case can’t be taken more than a month in advance. As a result many people end up going there in person to book a table (or, if they are me, call on a friend who has a friend who knows the young chef, Pascal Barbot).

Among the things there aren’t is a proper menu. Instead there is just a list of tasting menus, from the 88 euro ($129) lunch choice, to the 170 euro ($250) top-of-the-range option that is still more than 70 euros
($103) cheaper than those offered by most of the competition. Mostly there is the food, which is light and vibrant and shocking both in its good taste and in the way it does not rely upon cream, butter, and salt to make its point.

I am there with a Parisian friend from one of the Internet discussion boards, a French food writer and translator of cookbooks called Sophie Brissaud, and I am delighted to have her here on the other side of the table. My original companion had dropped out at the last minute and Sophie had offered both her company and her credit card as an emergency replacement. The two of us are anticipating great things.

We start with a chilled, lightly acidic tomato soup topped with a cooling milk foam. Next a gâteau made of thinly sliced leaves of white mushroom layered with foie gras and served with a touch of confit lemon and a puddle of hazelnut oil. There is a dish with two glorious langoustine in a clear langoustine bouillon with single leaves of fresh herbs and vivid purple flower petals, looking like a Monet watercolor, and the tiniest quenelle of a lightly spiced satay sauce, so that the dish is both about the flavors of Southeast Asia and of the coast that gave us the shellfish.

We are served a perfectly seared tranche of arctic char with carmelized new-season cepes on a Parmesan cream; a little bowl of white beans, soya beans, corn kernels, and the sweetest tomatoes in a sprightly broth that looks complicated but eats so simply; some of the best roast pigeon I have ever tasted, the skin crisp, the meat pink and gamey, the liver spread on a sliver of toast to remind you that this was an animal from the inside out.