The Man Who Ate the World (5 page)

It is a different place, filled with corridors of shops and restaurants, and it is blisteringly expensive. Exploring the hotel I come across the Pinot Brasserie serving a surf and turf of filet mignon and Maine lobster for $65. There’s a big-ticket fish joint called Aquaknox offering a $68 dish of whole lobster stuffed with crab, which strikes me as indulgence squared. There’s a Chinese place specializing in “six hour” spareribs, and Emeril Lagasse’s Delmonico, where a New York strip steak will cost $42, which in this setting is a bargain. Curiously, in this Venetian-themed hotel, it takes me half an hour to find a restaurant serving anything approaching Italian food. Finally, on the square, I come across the Canalleto Ristorante Veneto.

The first dish on the menu that catches my eye reads “hormone-free chicken roasted on the rotisserie.” I know the reference to hormones is meant to sound like a good thing. I know they want me to think well of this chicken and the blameless life it has led, so far from the medicine cabinet. But the truth is I don’t want to hear about hormones on a menu, even if the reference is in the negative.

So I head upstairs to Bouchon. I suck those sweet oysters off their shells and taste the sea. I try their snails in garlic butter and this time, without a burner, I put nobody’s life at risk. Instead of shells they come with tiny, crisp puff pastry hats, which is a shockingly good idea. One of the reasons I have always loved escargot is that, at the end, you get to slurp the remaining garlic butter from the shells. I always find myself trying to get my tongue into every nook and cranny to remove the last crisp, salty bits of parsley. As the dish is carried away, I am haunted by the fear
that somewhere, lurking at the bottom of a shell, is the mother lode, a fantastic explosion of garlicky, buttery flavor that I hadn’t made enough of an effort to find. The puff pastry thing gets around that. You use them to soak up all the sauce. Yes, it removes some of the fun, and the commitment, but the rewards are greater. I make a mental note to tell a London chef friend about the idea so he can steal it.

I eat long-braised beef short ribs, in a rich bourguignon sauce with lardons and wild mushrooms, and finish with a crème brûlée which is let down by the burnt-sugar topping. It is soft rather than crisp. Still, there is a floor show to make up for it: At the table across the aisle is a large, bearded man accompanied by a Japanese girl with the sort of cleavage small children could get lost in. He has ordered the caviar at a breezy $125 and is showing her how to eat it, not off the ball of the hand, but from small blinis and with a little chopped onion.

I am intrigued by her body language. Maybe I’m just traditional, but I don’t expect women to put all that embonpoint on display on a first date, and yet, over the caviar, she behaves as if she has only just met him. She watches him studiously, almost respectfully and pays attention. There is nothing giddy about it, as there should be when $125’ worth of ebony fish eggs are about to be licked up in just a few seconds. For her, it is a serious business, which seems a shame.

The gray-haired Australian man sitting on the banquette next to me—collar, tie, brass-buttoned blazer—who is also eating alone, has seen me watching them. He says, “By the hour.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Those two.” He nods across the aisle. “She’s his date for the evening, if you get what I’m saying.”

“You mean . . .?”

He nods. After all, in Nevada prostitution is legal. “I always stop in Vegas for a few days to get a little R&R when I come on a business trip,” he says. And then, “Isn’t Las Vegas a great city?” He doesn’t wink at me, conspiratorially, but I get the message. He could be that guy over there and tomorrow night he probably will be.

My instinct is to dismiss his take on the matter, not least because of his enthusiasm for it. Just because a woman is wearing a low-cut dress doesn’t mean she’s available to anybody by the hour. And yet it makes a kind of sense. I had watched her laugh at his jokes just a little too keenly and then seen her face fall dead as she stared off into a corner of the restaurant, as if distracted by an unrelated thought. I am comforted by the notion that if she is a hooker, the sex, almost inevitably mediocre, will at least have been preceded by good food; that, long after she has showered to remove his smell, she will still be remembering the way those salty little eggs burst against the roof of her mouth to release their rich, oily taste with its ghost of fishiness.

Because, that brûlée aside, the food has been good. Even so, I’m not entirely convinced by the experience. Bouchon looks out over a carefully tended courtyard garden. Adolescent cypress trees spear the sky, and there is a studied elegance and maturity about the view. This room is about as far away from the Vegas of slot machines and blackjack tables as it is possible to be. That—combined with jet lag and four glasses of good Californian wine—has, I think, created in me a sense of dislocation. I don’t entirely know where I am. Or, to put it another way, I could be anywhere, which may be their intention. What I want is a Vegas experience. I want the kind of experience I couldn’t have anywhere else in the world. Happily, I have a reservation for just such a place the following night.

I
n 1996 Joël Robuchon turned fifty and, as he had always said he would, he retired. That year he was named chef of the century by the (then) highly regarded French guide Gault Millau. He is a small, odd-looking man with a squashed face, as if somebody has inadvertently folded away the middle. He favors black, collarless shirts and has a monkish air, as if a part of his personality has also been folded away. Anybody who meets him will not be surprised to discover that, as a boy, he trained for the priesthood until he was forced to leave the seminary by lack of funds, only to take a job in a hotel kitchen.

Those British chefs I know who have worked for him—Gordon Ramsay, Richard Neat—attribute to him the qualities of the mystic, and those who work with him now also often resemble members of a priesthood. A couple of years ago Robuchon was hired to cook a one-off dinner at the Connaught Hotel in London. A small advance team of his cooks was to bring a van of ingredients through the Channel tunnel, because they did not trust any of the ingredients available in Britain. The French cooks insisted that they be met at the British end of the Channel tunnel in Kent by cooks from the Connaught who would then drive the van up to London. None of Robuchon’s team was used to driving on the left-hand side of the road and they believed the effort would destroy their zen state of concentration for the cooking of the meal to come. Naturally, the British cooks thought this was the funniest, and the most precious thing they had ever heard, but complied with their wishes.

Fans of Robuchon refer to his extraordinary palate and his innate ability to know when a flavor combination is absolutely right. Ask them to name a perfect Robuchon dish and they may well mention his cauliflower panna cotta with caviar en gelée. They might talk about his black truffle tart. But there is one creation they will all mention: his mashed potato.

Joël Robuchon revolutionized the making of mashed potatoes. He did this by putting less potato in it. Instead, he made it with half its own weight in butter. The result is a dish so rich, so luxurious, so completely outrageous, it ought to be illegal. I had eaten it just once—at that Connaught dinner—and my arteries are still complaining. The method has been so regularly copied since he introduced it to his menu in the 1980s that it has essentially become the accepted modern method for making pommes purée in top-end restaurants. To change the approach to something so basic and so simple as mashed potato seems to me as good a test of greatness in the chef world as any other.

Tragically, after 1996, the chance to eat it as made by Robuchon himself was reduced almost to nothing. Then, in 2003, came the announcement that had high-end foodies beating their poulet de Bresse
with feverish anticipation: The chef was returning to the stove. Former colleagues of Robuchon wanted to open a restaurant of their own, but the banks had refused them money. They asked him if he would join the venture and he agreed, as long as the restaurant that resulted was not the classic three-star, high-end, gastronomic temple that he had left behind. He wanted to do something more casual. He wanted to do the kind of place where diners would sit around an open kitchen at a bar.

There would be simple plates of the best Spanish hams as well as more complex dishes reminiscent of Robuchon in his prime, a tiny langoustine ravioli with black truffle, for example, or the sweetest chops of Pyrenean milk-fed lamb with thyme. It would be the kind of place you could come to for just one or two plates, as well as a full meal. The emphasis was on informality. The first L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon opened that year on rue de Montalembert in Paris. It was followed by another in Tokyo, the beginning of what would turn out to be a chain.

Then came the big surprise. For years Gamal Aziz, now president of the MGM Grand, the biggest hotel in the world, had been trying to lure Robuchon to Las Vegas. Thing is, he didn’t want a branch of L’Atelier. At least not at first. The MGM Grand had launched a new, upscale wing to the hotel, the Mansion, and for that he wanted the full-on Robuchon. The big-ticket Robuchon. He wanted every bell and whistle in the marching band. “I said no,” Robuchon told me, when I met him in London in the spring of 2006. “The problem is Gamal Aziz is a very charming man. He was just too persuasive. Plus he said I could have anything I wanted. He never talked about profitability. He just wanted the best.” In October 2005, Joël Robuchon at the Mansion duly opened inside the MGM Grand. And now I was going to eat there.

Unlike with Bouchon, there is no attempt to hide Joël Robuchon’s restaurant. Or restaurants, for it was eventually decided that there should also be a branch of L’Atelier and the two sit side-by-side, next to the entrance to the Mansion, but still on the gaming floor of the hotel. The entrance to the high-end restaurant—two huge, floor-to-ceiling curving doors—is just twelve paces from the last slot machine. Inside,
though, every part of the restaurant has been so heavily engineered that you cannot hear any of the noise from outside.

Inside the dining room, which seats just forty people, there is a $28,000 chandelier by Swarovski. There are vases by Lalique and an outside “garden” that isn’t outside at all, but that takes $8,000’ worth of plants a month to maintain. There is a trolley with twelve different types of bread at the beginning, and another with twenty-five different types of petit fours at the end, plus a wine list as thick as a paperback book. Everything is dressed in “regal” shades of purple and a specially commissioned interlocking pattern is repeated from the handles on the cutlery to the carpet to the curtains.

Although there is a standard menu, Joël Robuchon at the Mansion specializes in multicourse tasting menus. I sat down at the table. I was handed a folder made of a thick glossy card, which I opened. I began reading. The sixteen-course tasting menu, the one I wanted, the one I was determined to try, was listed at $350 a head. Before drinks. Before tax. Before service.

I blinked.

A few years ago I spent £49 ($98) on wine in a restaurant. Not impressed? You should be. It wasn’t for a bottle (let alone for two). Nor was it for some fancy-pants champagne. It was for a single glass, and not a very big glass at that. I know what you’re thinking. If you’re polite you’re thinking “more money than sense”; if you’re not polite you’re swearing at the page. It’s okay. I can deal with it. Because the honeyed amber fluid in that glass, served to me at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in London’s Chelsea, came from a bottle of Château d’Yquem, the greatest white wine on the face of the planet, and it was worth every penny. Or, at least, it was to me, which is the same thing.

The fact is I have no problem with the notion of spending large
amounts of money on hugely expensive restaurant experiences. I make no apologies for this, even though our puritanical culture so often demands it. £200 ($400)
^*
a head for lunch? Yes, please. £50 ($100) for a starter? Seems fair enough to me. £75 ($150) for a main course? Bring it on. In France I would not need to explain myself. There, spending serious volumes of cash on dinner is a national spectator sport.

Elsewhere, behavior like this puts you in the same grim league as politicians and muggers. It’s regarded as an obscenity; an experiment in excess as filthy and reprehensible as snorting cocaine off the flattened bellies of supermodels or slaughtering white Bengal tigers to provide the fur trim for your panda-skin gloves.

There is one reason for this and one reason only: We need food to survive. Therefore it is a necessity, and to crash the plastic until it smolders on a necessity—one that some people don’t have enough of—is regarded as wrong. That is to completely misunderstand the point of restaurants and high-end gastronomy. For a start, modern famines are not generally caused by a capricious Mother Nature, denying food to some people here while others over there have plenty. As aid organizations have long said—and continue to say—they have man-made, political causes, such as the ill-considered land reclamation policies in Robert Mugabe’s corrupt Zimbabwe, that have pushed its population to the brink of starvation. You foregoing dinner in a restaurant will not resolve that problem

By the same token, nobody goes to restaurants for nutritional reasons. Nobody eats hot smoked foie gras with caramelized onion purée to stave off rickets. They go for experiences, and what price a really top experience?

Let’s put it another way. How much would you be willing to pay to see your football team play in the Super Bowl? $200 a ticket? $400 a ticket? $1,000 for a really good seat? You wouldn’t think twice about it. A place in the front row for Robert De Niro on the stage? A few hun
dred dollars, easy. The chance to see Sinatra in his prime? Hell, you name the price.

What does that money buy you? Nothing but memories, and the right to say you were there. Serious gastronomy is no different. An example: A little while ago I was invited to eat at the Auberge de L’Ill in Alsace. Restaurants don’t come much more haute than the Auberge. It has been owned, and the kitchen run, by the same family, the Haeberlins, since 1884. It has had three Michelin stars since 1967 and some of the dishes have been on the menu for more than forty years. Among them is a black truffle the size of a golf ball—not shavings; the whole thing—wrapped in foie gras, bound in a buttery pastry, baked and served on a rich meaty truffle jus. Yours, back then, for 125 euros (about $183; it costs more now).