The Man Who Ate the World (39 page)

Still, a lot of the moaning struck me as an unattractive brand of piety in a business that was entirely unworthy of it. If there was the money to pay for these experiences, why shouldn’t people elsewhere in the world get the chance to try them, without the expense of having to fly to London, New York, or Paris—even if these knockoffs weren’t quite as good as the originals? By the same token, the often-heard accusation that big-name chefs were merely cashing in on their reputations struck me as unreasonable. For decades restaurant cookery, even at the highest level, was about as well paid as a life in the clergy, only with much longer hours and no promise of eternal salvation at the end. These complaints seemed all the more unreasonable as, unsurprisingly, they tended to come from the very people who were already wealthy enough to eat in the restaurants they were complaining about. It was okay, apparently, to have the money to afford dinner in these places, but not okay for the chefs themselves to make serious cash from them.

What was discussed far less was what was happening to the food on the plate. The general assumption was that high-end dining still meant French dining and, in the restaurants of Gordon Ramsay, Alain Ducasse or, over in Las Vegas, at Guy Savoy, it was an argument easily made. But if my year on the road—and in the air, and at the table—had taught me anything, it was that these pure French neoclassicists were now becoming the exception, not the rule; that a new culinary Esperanto had developed, which, like the language, drew on the traditions of France but was not mortgaged to them.

Not long ago I was rightly chastised by a reader of my column in
The Observer
for describing a menu in this way—as culinary Esperanto—and for inferring that I meant this in a derogatory sense for a set of dishes that were rootless and lacking in coherence. As my dutiful reader pointed out, Esperanto isn’t mere babble. It is a fully developed language with its own vocabulary and grammar.

So is the new cookery, as practiced by the likes of Pierre Gagnaire, Joël Robuchon, and many of the lesser-known chefs whose food I tried in London, say, or Dubai and Tokyo. It is a full and proper fusion of the French and Japanese aesthetics and method, with the occasional nod to Spain and Italy. Think multicourse menus. Think miniaturism rather than grand platters. Think the use of seaweed extract jellies, of foams stiffened with industrial emulsifiers like lecithin, of long, slow cookery under vacuum. Then apply much of that to dishes with flavor profiles that even Auguste Escoffier would recognize.

There was one school of thought that this was all smoke and mirrors, the use of all these modern, or even ancient, Japanese techniques—a mere sleight of hand. And sure, some of it is. (Literally so, in the case of the famed Fat Duck in Bray just outside London. There the chef, Heston Blumenthal, had employed a close-up magician to train his front of house team in a few tricks—turning a rose petal into an egg tableside before it is cracked into a bowl of liquid nitrogen to be whisked up into smoky bacon ice cream—purely as a way of augmenting the experience.) But the assumption that followed from this, that it was used to disguise a lack of classical cooking knowledge and skill, seems to me entirely
wrong. Chefs like Blumenthal, Gagnaire, and Robuchon are not inventing cookery from scratch. They are reinventing it from a classical base.

More to the point, the whole argument seems to me redundant. If my journey around the world had taught me anything, it is that there is only one way to decide whether cooking is good or bad and it is this: Does it taste nice? Some of what I ate tasted very nice indeed. Sadly, for me at least, a lot of what I ate did not.

And that perfect meal? There were moments when I felt I came close to it, and always those experiences were in the one-off restaurants of vivid personalities. My lunch at Pascal Barbot’s L’Astrance was almost perfect. So, too, were my dinners at Yukimura and at Okei-Sushi with Mr. Suzuki and his flashing blade. But the wonderful thing about perfection is that it is, of course, unobtainable. That didn’t stop me searching for it. That hasn’t stopped me wondering about it. All I need is the appetite. There is only one problem. I’m no longer sure I have one.

T
he aesthetic arguments aside, there is one aspect of the world’s new high-end restaurants that is indefensible: their environmental impact. The problem is not the ingredients themselves. It is in the nature of what they do that chefs want the best, and the best can only be achieved using the most virtuous methods. There is no doubt that the meat and vegetables served in the world’s great restaurants are, for the most part, produced in the most environmentally sound manner possible.

The problem is the way in which those ingredients reach those restaurants. I will never forget the moment Joël Robuchon told me that the lobster I was eating in Las Vegas had flown there from Brittany. Everything served in Las Vegas came from somewhere else; the lobster just happened to have come from a lot farther away than the rest of it. In Dubai, the situation was even worse. Absolutely nothing came from there. It all arrived by air, and the sight of another lobster, the glorious seventy-year-old specimen dragged from the cold waters off the New England coast to be the
centerpiece of a New Year’s Eve banquet—in spite of the fact that it would be terribly poor eating—depressed me greatly.

On my return from Dubai I decided to do something about it. I sent an e-mail to Chris Hutcheson, who is Gordon Ramsay’s father-in-law and the man who runs Gordon Ramsay Holdings, the parent company for his growing range of commercial ventures. I wanted to encourage him to offset the carbon emissions produced by the airfreighting of ingredients to all their restaurants about their world. I told him it made commercial sense to do so.

“As I’m sure you’ll agree all the best business decisions come with a cast-iron narrative, and this has one,” I wrote. “Gordon is a top-flight chef and therefore loves top-quality ingredients. Those ingredients depend upon a healthy environment, therefore it is natural that he should want to do something to protect it.” I pointed out that the amount they airfreighted compared to, say, Nobu or Robuchon was relatively small, that any payments they made would be tax deductible, and that they could easily introduce a £1 a head carbon offset levy for each customer.

“It is such a live issue that I would be genuinely staggered if any punters felt able to object,” I said.

My motives for this were not pure. Although it would make me feel a little better if I was able to encourage Gordon Ramsay Holdings to play ball, I was also thinking like a journalist. “Gordon goes green,” would be a fabulous story, all the more so for me if I was the one responsible for making it happen. I explained to Hutcheson that it would be a story that would run and run, and that therefore any costs they did incur could be thought of as a marketing expense. I really did feel that I had it all worked out. My intention was that, once the Ramsay group said yes—and I couldn’t see how they would not—I would go to work on Robuchon, Nobu, and Ducasse. I would single-handedly green the global high-end restaurant business.

Hutcheson said it was an interesting proposition and that he would think about it. A couple of months later, in response to a nudge from me, he said he had recently seen a television documentary that had described the thesis that global warming was a man-made phenomenon as “a load of bunk and that I can carry on driving a big car.” I pointed out that the
documentary he had watched—
The Great Global Warming Swindle
—had been roundly discredited by vast swathes of the scientific community, but I could already tell it was no use. I was not surprised when he told me, in the summer of 2007, that carbon-offsetting was not something the company would be pursuing. Gordon Ramsay would not be going green.

I was disappointed. Clearly there was only one thing for it. I went online, found a carbon offsetting charity—Global Cool—and paid to offset the emissions of all the flights I had taken. It was, literally, the very least I could do.

T
he day after my return from Paris, my forty-first birthday, I went to see Sarah Burnett again, and lay on the couch while she ran another scan of my liver.

“Well, it’s certainly fattier,” she said, studying the mottled white object on the screen. I felt strangely proud. I hadn’t just emasculated my credit card in the past week. I had also fattened up one of my vital organs.

“I still don’t think it’s ready for Ramsay’s pan, though,” she added.

This was believable because, my liver aside, it turned out that the impact of my week in Paris had been negligible. Granted, I had done three workouts while I had been there, and eaten very few meals other than those in the three-stars. I had been too full to do otherwise. But I had still expected to see some result. Instead, my weight had remained exactly the same as, bizarrely, had both my cholesterol and blood-glucose levels. It looked like I had devised the most luxurious—for which read most expensive—weight-maintenance diet in the history of modern nutrition. I thought that was rather impressive even when Sarah suggested to me that I really hadn’t been trying hard enough.

“You didn’t drink, did you?” she said as she wiped the water-based jelly off the ultrasound scanner.

“I had a few glasses with each meal.”

She shook her head. “Call yourself a restaurant critic?” I was, apparently, a disgrace to my profession.

I had not eaten anything the evening we got back from Paris after our meal at L’Arpège. The cholesterol test also demanded that I did not eat anything that morning, either. In short, by the lunchtime I had not eaten in twenty-four hours. Now I was in the center of London with an hour or two to kill before a meeting, and yet it seemed preposterous to me that I should go and sit in yet another restaurant and get something to eat. Eventually I realized I was getting light-headed from lack of food. However absurd this seemed, it was undeniable. I went to a café and ordered a tuna sandwich. It was fine.

My questions about the pleasure of restaurants remained. It wasn’t exactly that I had fallen out of love with them. It just seemed to me odd that I could somehow maintain my interest, having eaten my way through some of the greatest, and certainly some of the most exclusive establishments on the planet. By that point I had been The
Observer’s
restaurant critic for over eight years and I was fully aware that there was a limit to how long one could stay in the job. I didn’t want to end up like a former rival who had been a British newspaper restaurant critic for fifteen years, after a long career writing about anything and everything that wasn’t to do with food. By the time he stepped down, nobody could remember that he used to write about other things, and nobody was particularly interested in what he had to say about those other things now. His career had withered and he had all but left journalism. It seemed a terrible waste, and not one I wanted to repeat.

I told Pat that I wasn’t sure how much longer I could continue in the job.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You love it.”

“Maybe I
loved
it. In the past tense.”

I had a meeting coming up with the editor of the magazine supplement where my reviews appeared. Naturally, we were going to get together over lunch.

“Go to the meeting,” Pat said. “You’ll know what to do when you get there.”

So we went to lunch, the editor and I, at St. John, the famed British
restaurant in London’s Clerkenwell, where chef Fergus Henderson serves roasted bone marrow with parsley salad, and makes a virtue of the cheap cuts of offal that too many other restaurants reject. I ate the bone marrow on sour dough toast and told my editor all about my travels. He listened politely.

Later that afternoon I went home. Pat was in the kitchen at the sink, doing the washing up from the kids’ tea. I sat down at the table and watched her, in the way spouses often watch each other.

“How did it go?”

“Fine.”

She looked at me, and slowly began to smile. “You didn’t quit the column, did you?”

I looked at the floor. “Well . . .”

“I knew it. I knew you couldn’t give it up.”

“I told him I’d do it for a bit longer. Not indefinitely. Just for a while.”

“You don’t have to make excuses to me.”

“I just feel I have a bit more to say.”

“Really, love. You just do what makes you happy.”

I agreed that I would. Doing what made me happy was something I knew a lot about. It was something I had a lot of experience in. I got up and, casually, opened the fridge and looked inside. It was late in the week and, as ever, at this point, the pickings were meager.

I said, “What do you fancy for dinner? I could do a pasta thing, the one with the peas and bacon that you like.” I hesitated. “Or, you know . . . we could go out.”

Pat looked at me in silence for a moment. “You really are a lost cause, aren’t you.”

I looked up from the open fridge door and tried to manufacture an expression that conveyed how hurtful I found that comment, but my heart wasn’t in it. Whatever I said now in mitigation I knew the truth. I was guilty as charged.

A small element of this book started life elsewhere, albeit in a different form. The passages in defense of expensive meals, on the cult of authenticity, the pursuit of the perfect vinegar, and why expensive meals are wasted on the people who can afford them all first appeared in
Arena
magazine; the section on my mother’s career as a vegetarian TV chef appeared in
Gourmet.
I am grateful, respectively, to Matt Smith at Arena, and Ruth Reichl and Jocelyn Zuckerman at
Gourmet
for those commissions.

Obviously the entirety of this book is underpinned by knowledge and experience gained while serving as restaurant critic for the Observer. I would like to thank Sheryl Garrett for first giving me the gig, as well as Allan Jenkins, the current editor of the
Observer Magazine
and Nicola Jeal of
Observer Food Monthly
for their constant support and editorial wisdom—and for continuing to sign my expenses. I would also like to record my gratitude to Roger Alton, former editor of
The Observer,
for allowing me to continue in the job, despite his better judgment.