The Man Who Ate the World (38 page)

At the end, after a succession of equally perfect desserts, there is not some cumbersome platter of lead-heavy chocolates or costume-jewelry tartlets. There are four tiny madeleines, an eggshell each full of light eggnog flavored with orange water, and a platter of fresh-cut fruit, generously sprinkled with the tiny special joy that is wild strawberries. Nothing expressed to me the self-confidence of this restaurant and its chef more than that final gesture: Finish with a plate of fruit, Barbot was saying; at this point in the meal I can do nothing to improve upon that which nature has already prepared for you.

What struck me most was the way in which the quality shone through, despite the fact that it was my fifth three-star restaurant in five days. Yesterday I had become jaded, and following pretty little plateful after pretty little plateful in myriad gastro-palaces I had concluded I would not now be able to tell the difference between one and another. There was no doubt in my mind that a lot of the effect achieved by the Parisian three-star—and by high-end restaurants in general—has little to do with the food itself and everything to do with the supplementaries. Chuck enough gold at the walls, hang enough crystal off the ceiling, employ enough pretty twentysomethings to care for your every need and follow you to the toilet and, if it’s done with the requisite professionalism, most people will regard it as a good night out before they have eaten a thing. By setting the Paris restaurants up in sequence, I had cut through all that. There was now nothing a waitress could do for me, short of administering a little light fellatio under the table without any of the other guests noticing, which would have surprised or impressed me. To my mind it was now all about the food. On that score, L’Astrance and Pascal Barbot had won hands down.

Or did I already make that clear?

Oh, god. I don’t know. Another Parisian three-star. Doormen in peaked caps. Claw-foot chairs. Side tables for the ladies to put their handbags on. The food was standard three-star stuff: langoustines on sticks wrapped in sea-water foam, beetroot meringues, yeast ice cream decorated with silver leaf. You know the score by now.

It has all left me feeling tired and irritable, and poor. I keep looking at the bill, all the bills, and blinking. I’m going for a lie-down. Or a workout.

Probably a lie-down.

It has always been the plan that Pat should come out to Paris to meet me for the last meal, and this morning I am waiting for her when she arrives off the Eurostar at Gare du Nord. Before my week here I had joked that she didn’t need to bring much, just a defibrillator and a bucket of Gaviscon. The joke doesn’t feel very funny anymore. I ask her how I look. I quickly realize that I am asking her to tell me I look awful. Partly this is because I really do feel sluggish and dulled by the week’s events.

Mostly, I quickly conclude, it’s because of my gnawing guilt. If she does indeed tell me I look like crap, then I genuinely will have made some form of sacrifice and not simply been out here having a high old time of it. There is also my guilt as a parent. I have left Pat to deal with the kids by herself while I have spent what will eventually amount to more than twenty-four hours of the past week, sitting in comfortable chairs at expensive tables eating ludicrous food.

Of course she tells me I look just like me, no different at all, and isn’t it great to be here in Paris in the sunshine, for lunch. How naughty! What a treat! That’s when the reversal strikes me. Usually I’m the one thrilled by the notion of a meal in a high-end restaurant, and Pat is the one with the long-suffering look on her face. Today, I’m the one who wants to be somewhere else and Pat is the bundle of excitement and anticipation.

Then again I have chosen this last restaurant carefully to suit her tastes. L’Arpège is not one of the gold-leaf and chinoiserie nightmares that she so hates. It is a simple room, paneled in smooth, curving wood that is even, in places, slightly down at heel. The carpet is scuffed. There are a few marks on the walls. The chairs are made from tubular aluminum. By the end of our lunch, this modern but lived-in simplicity will strike me as an affectation, for there is no doubting the seriousness of this restaurant. Friends of mine have described L’Arpège and its chef, Alain Passard, as the greatest in all of Paris and, therefore, by associa
tion, the world. They have venerated the simplicity of his food, the intensity of his flavors, and the manner in which his cooking serves the ingredients. Mostly they have talked about his way with vegetables.

In 2001, five years after winning his third Michelin star, Passard shocked Paris by announcing that he was removing red meat from his menu. “I believe I have come far in the areas of poultry and meat-based cuisine,” he said. “Today I aspire to another exploration based in vegetables. I voluntarily erase, without regret, twelve signature dishes of the house. I sense a fabulous adventure.” Fish stayed on the menu, and over the years a little duck and lamb has crept on there, too, but today L’Arpège is regarded as a restaurant that specializes in that which grows from the ground. In 2002, he even opened a farm, on a site 150 miles to the southwest of Paris, which supplies every single grown thing served here, all of it delivered daily.

Obviously this costs, and when we open the menu and see the price of the tasting menu, we discover just how much. Pat makes a small involuntary noise and points, like someone catching sight for the first time of a meteor that is heading straight for them. I nod solemnly, having taken many tiny steps toward this moment. I observe that this is not merely the last meal of my trip to Paris, but also of my entire journey in search of the perfect meal. Yes, there might be cheaper options (though the term is only relative) but I owe it to myself to ignore them. We close the menu and declare we will have the tasting menu. It will, I realize, be the most expensive lunch I have ever eaten and I am expecting great things.

Some of them are. It is a thrill, for example, to eat the Arpège egg, a dish I had heard a lot about over the years, the yolk sweetened with a little maple syrup, the white foamed. There is a truly stunning gazpacho that tastes of the sunshine that has nurtured the vegetables, and in the middle a scoop of grain mustard ice cream, the tiny seeds bursting in the mouth. At the end of the meal there is the Arpège tomato, a dish designed to make a point about the vitality of the fruit and vegetables served here. It is stuffed with twelve different flavorings—curls of citrus
zest, spices, herbs—then cooked table side in a bubbling, sweet-sour caramel, and served with a scoop of a wildflower ice cream. It is summer on a plate. It is one of the greatest dishes I have ever eaten.

Other things are less thrilling. There is a plate of lightly dressed vegetables, focusing on beetroots and turnips with a little couscous, which is again attempting to make you worship the ingredients, but turns out to be merely tiresome. We are shown a long slow-grilled whole turbot, smelling marvelously of rosemary, but when it is served to us, the flavor is so subtle, so understated, as to be dull. Rounds of lobster come in a cloying gelatinous honey-mustard dressing, which obscures its beauty, and a dish of mussels in a saffron broth has some lovely seafood but tastes of saffron not at all.

The point of the restaurant is made to me by the presentation of a dish at the next table: a huge silver platter bearing half a dozen large beetroots that have been baked under a small child’s weight of gravellike gray salt. It looks like a moonscape and when, with much ceremony, they chip away at the salt to reveal the beetroot, it doesn’t look a whole lot prettier. I suddenly understand that this isn’t simply a restaurant, which is to say a place serving nice stuff to eat in return for a big wedge of your cash. It is an intellectual exercise, an introduction to a particular aesthetic that takes the ingredient-led approach to its ultimate. At L’Arpège you are not merely paying the usual costs of a restaurant: ingredients, staff, overheads. You are paying to run a farm, created solely in your service. The dishes are meant to be admired even before you eat them. And if, on eating them, they do not deliver, then you have missed the point. Here, lunch is political, which can be a real pain in the arse if you just happen to be hungry and in search of something nice to eat.

After the lovely Arpège tomato and a cup of mint tea each, they bring the bill. We have not drunk much, a glass of champagne each, and a couple of other wines by the glass. Nevertheless, we are staring at a piece of paper bearing the legend 855 euros ($1,250). This is because the tasting menu is 340 euros ($500) a head.

Pat is silent for a moment. “You know, if I came to Paris for the day and sat on the banks of the Seine and ate a salade Niçoise, I would be equally as happy.”

“It’s an unequal comparison.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s yours, not mine. You have to be interested in this sort of experience in the first place to accept the expense, and I am.”

“So you’re happy with that bill?”

No, I say. I am not. I can see how some people might be. I can see how Passard, a nice-looking chap in a blue cheesecloth shirt and crisp white ankle-length apron, could engender that sort of respect and devotion. But today his meal hasn’t done it for me. My willingness to pay big money for a great restaurant experience still stands, but today hasn’t justified the expense.

“At least,” Pat says, “we can think of it as an investment.”

On this she has a point, though to pursue it, we—and by we, I mean you the reader and I—must allow the conceit of a book like this to slip for a moment. Because obviously I would not be sitting here in this restaurant on the left bank of the Seine, with a bill for 855 euros in my hands, were I not writing a book about restaurants around the world. If you have bought my book, therefore, you have justified my decision to have the tasting menu and also, inevitably, helped me to pay for it. What can I say, but thank you. I really do appreciate being given the chance to visit L’Arpège, regardless of my disappointment in it.

If, on the other hand, you have borrowed this book or, worse still, stolen it either from a friend’s house or a bookshop—and I know it does happen—then you are of no use to me whatsoever. I’m still sitting here with this monstrous restaurant bill to which you have contributed nothing. How does that make you feel? After all, if you’ve read this far, presumably you’ve enjoyed it. Would it be too much to ask that you now go out and buy a copy, if only to give as a gift to a friend? Come on. This is big money we’re talking. 855 euros ($1,250). I need all the help I can get.

There is a last rhubarb macaroon sitting on the petits fours plate. I ask Pat if she wants it, but she declines. I pick it up, pop it into my mouth, and feel the sweet-and-sour meringue with its soft fruity center collapse between my teeth. I realize it is the very last thing that I will eat on this journey, and I feel no regret about this at all.

“Sweetheart,” Pat says, “I think it’s time I took you home.”

I slip my credit card from my wallet, place it on the plate next to the bill, and together we sit and wait for it to burst spontaneously into flames.

CHECK, PLEASE

I
n the year or so that I had been traveling from Las Vegas to Moscow, from Dubai to Tokyo and beyond, Alain Ducasse closed his flagship restaurant at the Essex House in New York and announced that he would be replacing it with two others, a new venture at the St. Regis Hotel and a version of the Paris brasserie Benoit in Midtown Manhattan. Alan Yau, the consultant on Turandot in Moscow, announced plans for new restaurants in Kuala Lumpur and Abu Dhabi, plus a number of others in London. Nobu opened new outposts in Hong Kong and Melbourne, with others to come in Cape Town, Moscow, and Dubai.

Pierre Gagnaire, encouraged by the success of his venture in Tokyo, announced restaurants in Dubai—clearly now the gastronomic capital of Asia—South Korea, and in the French Alps (though only for the skiing season). Joël Robuchon continued rolling out the L’Atelier brand with further restaurants in New York, London, and Hong Kong, and opened up negotiations for other ventures in the U.S. In the autumn of 2007, Gordon Ramsay embarked upon a reorganization of his portfolio in London with the announcement that Angela Hartnett would be pulling out of the Connaught Hotel, but would be reopening elsewhere in Mayfair. Meanwhile he pushed ahead with those openings in Los
Angeles, Dublin, Prague, Amsterdam, and Paris, despite reports in the press that he was now spreading himself too thin and that his customers were losing faith in the brand. Despite the low-key response from local media, his restaurant in New York received two Michelin stars when its first rating was published in the autumn of 2007, placing it among the best nine in the city.

Many of the hardcore restaurant-goers on the Internet food forums that I spent far too much of my time on expressed regret at what was happening in the business, with the sort of death-of-civilization hyperbole usually reserved for terrorist acts. As one of them said to me, echoing Mario Batali’s comments, “The food coming out of these kitchens looks the same wherever it happens to be in the world.” I knew what she meant. There were times on my journey, when I was sitting in a Gordon Ramsay restaurant wondering how all the other English people had got there or experiencing some young chef’s peculiar take on foams and jellies in Dubai, when I really would have been hard pushed to identify exactly which city I was in. That had nothing to do with either the amount of alcohol I had consumed or the jet lag.