The Man Who Ate the World (6 page)

It was served to me with a 1994 Cos D’estournel, a big-fisted Bordeaux listed on the menu at 330 euros. A total cost of 450 euros, or around $660 for the ten minutes it took me to eat the dish. That’s $66 a minute ($1 a second; can I stop now?). It was ear-poppingly expensive. It was also sublime: There was the heady, dense aroma of the truffle as I cut in—a smell that I tasted, it was so intense—and the back kick of the sauce, and then the red wine reminding me of the soil. True, I wasn’t paying for this myself. But would I have done so? Happily. And could I justify the price? Of course. This wasn’t simply about sitting down at a well-laid table and being served a set of ingredients cooked in a particular fashion. It was the Auberge de L’Ill truffle dish, cooked by one of the Haeberlins, eaten overlooking the river Ill. It was about the moment, one I’ll never forget.

That’s the thing about expensive restaurant experiences: They have to be worth it. A couple of years ago there was media outrage when a new restaurant opened in London called Sketch where dinner would cost £500 ($1,000) for two. The pundits were right to be outraged, but for the wrong reasons. It wasn’t the price that mattered; the problem was the person setting it. The fact is you have to earn the right to charge top dollar. The overseeing chef at Sketch is a Frenchman called Pierre Gagnaire. In Paris he is a superstar. There, they queue to give him their
money. In London (where he isn’t even at the stove), none but the obsessives like me had a clue who he is. You have to be a legend—a Frank Sinatra, a Robert De Niro—before you can start squeezing wallets dry.

France is littered with culinary De Niros and Sinatras: At Alain Ducasse’s restaurant in the Plaza Athénée Hotel in Paris, he serves a caviar and langoustine dish costing just over £100 ($200); the late Bernard Loiseau’s restaurant, Le Côte d’Or, in Burgundy, serves a chicken dish costing £175 ($358); and uber-chef Marc Veyrat will sell you a chocolate pudding for £50 ($100). I’d willingly shell out for them all, if I had the cash to hand.

In Britain the choices are more limited. For example, at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay at Royal Hospital Road, the top-rated restaurant in London, the basic menu is still a mere £85 ($175) for three courses: for the tortellini of lobster with herb velouté and the sautéed loin of venison with a bitter chocolate sauce and a gravity-defying coffee soufflé. No worries: There’s always the Château d’Yquem by the glass to help you top up the bill. The thing is, a whole bottle of Yquem will set you back hundreds of pounds at the very least. A big vintage—a 1928, say or an 1880—can cost as much as £30,000 ($61,375) on a restaurant list, and while I may be keen on big-ticket dinners, there are limits to what I can afford. Frankly I’d given up all hope of ever getting to taste the stuff. So that Château d’Yquem by the glass was practically a social service on Gordon Ramsay’s part. Indeed at £49 ($100) a pop it should really have been regarded as a bargain. And I never could resist one of those.

Except that, when I went to Joël Robuchon at the Mansion, just as when I went to the Auberge de L’Ill in Alsace, I wasn’t the one picking up the bill. In fact, I wasn’t expected to pay for anything much in Las Vegas. It was all on the house.

It is not always like this. Whenever I review restaurants for
The
Observer,
the newspaper reimburses me for all the meals I eat. I book tables under a pseudonym and, while I have never gone as far as Ruth Reichl, who used to review for the
New York Times
disguised as her own dead mother, I try not to draw attention to myself. We never accept freebies for review.

Meals eaten for features have always been a different matter, however. At
The Observer
we are allowed to accept “hospitality,” where the experience would inform what we are writing about, and that pretty much covers all eventualities, including gluttony. Within hours of contacting the Las Vegas tourist authority, which has offices around the world, I was being pelted with offers of hospitality. I was being hosed down with them, assaulted by them. My e-mail in-box filled up with suggestions for meals I could eat, and places that would love to have me, and ones that would be mortally offended if I didn’t at least drop by for cocktails and canapés. (The most worrying was the offer direct from Freddie Glusman at Piero’s, but only because he is a known associate of convicted killers.) I could have survived in town with an empty wallet for a fortnight on the offers I had received. Instead all I had was a few nights and an appetite, which, while enthusiastic, had its limits. Choices had to be made. Selflessly I had chosen Joël Robuchon at the Mansion to be among those restaurants where I ate for free.

At first I was a little uncomfortable about this, not least because I wasn’t entirely sure what category my efforts at the table would be falling under. No, I wasn’t reviewing for the paper. Some of my experiences would end up in its pages, but not all of them. I just wanted to pursue my perfect meal, and that meant eating in a whole bunch of really good and improbably expensive places, as cheaply as possible. As ambitions go, it’s hardly up there with “cure the world of all known diseases” and “usher in an era of global peace.” When I ate the £300 ($600) truffle-wine combo at the Auberge de L’Ill my wife had told me that the only thing that mitigated what would otherwise have been morally reprehensible behavior was the fact that I
hadn’t
paid for it. There was, she said, a smear of virtue in freeloading. I wasn’t convinced.

But within a day or so of arriving in Vegas it became clear to me that freeloading really was the only way to go here. So much money washes through the city, courtesy of the casinos, that
not
adding to the cash pile seemed to me to be a genuinely responsible thing to do. After all, it wasn’t like I was hurting the chefs. They were on such sweetheart deals that one meal to a journalist on the take was neither here nor there.

Anyway, everybody was doing it. The night I ate at Joël Robuchon at the Mansion, one table was occupied by a group of journalists from San Francisco who were hardly fighting to protect their anonymity—they kept posing for photographs—and another was being hosted by Gamal Aziz, who certainly wasn’t expecting a bill. The next day a group of seventeen other freeloading hacks was due in, and none of them would be paying, either. And it’s not just the media that gets the treatment. A few weeks before my visit, a Chinese businessman had lost $7 million in the casino at the MGM Grand. As a courtesy, the sort of courtesy offered to all high rollers in Vegas, the hotel had then invited him to eat for “free” at Joël Robuchon. It struck me that I was actually being smarter than that guy because I was getting a free $600-a-head dinner without, up to that point, having lost a single cent. I concluded that I really didn’t have anything to feel guilty about. I had beaten the house, and in Las Vegas, that is something worth boasting about.

A
nd so, accompanied by the public relations executive for the MGM Grand (a committed, valiant, and remarkably slender woman called Jennifer who would do all sixteen courses again the following night with that party of seventeen), I ate.

At the start there were crunchy pearls of green apple, with a vodka granita to cleanse the palate. There was the famed caviar en gelée beneath a musky cauliflower panna cotta, the surface of which was decorated with tiny dots of a deep green herb purée (applied from a pipette, we were told proudly; there were exactly the same number on every
dish). We had a mille-feuille of unagi—glazed savory eel, Japanese style—and foie gras, the flavors of these two ultrarich ingredients playing tag with each other in the mouth. There was, as there was at almost every restaurant I visited in Las Vegas, a tuna tartar followed, as there wasn’t anywhere else, by a coin-sized langoustine ravioli, with a little sautéed cabbage. We were served a bowl of a soft, luscious sweet-onion custard onto which was ladled an intense lettuce soup. And then a sausage fashioned from a scallop mousseline, encased beneath tiny slivers of raw scallop, which tasted tantalizingly of the sea.

While we were awaiting the arrival of course eight, the halfway mark, a waiter brought another chair to our table. We looked quizzically at him, and he nodded to the back corner of the restaurant, to where a small, gray-haired man in a black collarless shirt was standing talking to Gamal Aziz. Jöel Robuchon was in town and he wanted to join our table.

I had eaten food in front of the chefs who had cooked it for me before, but none had been of Robuchon’s caliber. I regarded the man as a legend and, even having interviewed him once already, I remained in awe of him. This was the chef of the century, the guy who revolutionized mashed potatoes! Plus there was the language barrier. My French is atrocious, his English not much better. In London we had communicated through a translator. Here, there was none. Now, as he sat down at our table, his face fixed in a crooked grin, I couldn’t think of anything to say other than “mmmm” and “lovely . . .” and “How do you do it!”

He smiled.

I smiled.

I told him in dysfunctional French that the food had been “
fantastique
,” and hated myself for not coming up with anything better. The next dish arrived and he indicated that we should eat. In the middle of the plate, sitting on its sawn-off end, was a hollowed-out bone. It came, he told us casually, from a Wagyu; Wagyu is the most expensive breed of cattle in the world. Inside the hollow was a mixture of crisp green fava
beans and wild mushrooms, in this case, girolles, bound by a fava bean purée. Perched on the top was a jewel of bone marrow.

We had our forks raised and were about to begin, when Robuchon announced proudly that this was a new dish. He was keen to see what we thought of it. So, no pressure then. He watched me eat. He watched me more intently than I have ever been watched before. He watched me like a cat watches a mouse. I knew now what it was like to be stalked; all pleasure was leaking out of this meal very quickly. Naturally we said “mmm” and “lovely.”

I turned to my companion and said, “How does he do it!”

I wanted to savor the forest flavors of the mushrooms and the beans but I was too intimidated to do so. I just wanted to finish the dish and get it off the table.

He watched as we tried the abalone, in a viscous broth of ginger and artichoke, a symbol of his growing love affair with Japan. He watched as we attacked a piece of Japanese snapper that had been flash-seared with the scales in place so that they were crispy. He watched as we studied a lobster claw, in a saffron and seafood bouillon. Desperate now to make conversation, to do something, anything to stop him staring, I said, “Maine lobster?” This hardly required great connoisseurship. All the lobster served in Las Vegas was from Maine.

“
Non, non.
Bretagne.”

“Brittany?”

“
Oui
. Bretagne.” He thought for a moment, summoning the vocabulary. “It is better.”

I stared at the plate. My dinner had traveled farther to be here than I had.

This single dish represented the one great argument against restaurants in Las Vegas: that, while there may be a lot of places to eat in the city, not a single thing they serve comes from nearby. Everything has to come from elsewhere—a tiny minority by road from Los Angeles, over four hours away, but most of it by air. In London, when I had mentioned my coming adventures in Las Vegas, friends of mine hadn’t even tried to
hide their disdain. How could Las Vegas be regarded as a great restaurant city when it had no local food culture upon which to draw?

I see the appeal of the cult of locality, the idea that for a restaurant to be any good, it must draw its produce from nearby. I cannot deny that, over the years, I have eaten some fantastic meals that took their ingredients from as close by as possible. I remember once eating a plate of shellfish at a restaurant in Scotland, while outside, just a few feet from my table, the small boat that had landed them bobbed on the ebb and flow of the tide. There is no doubt that the location added to the experience. And location was all at the Auberge de L’Ill. But a commitment to locality, to what in its truest form the French refer to as
le terroir
—the soil—can also lead to an ossified gastronomic culture. Visit Toulouse and every restaurant will offer cassoulet. In Marseilles it will be an endless list of expensive but mostly indifferent bouillabaisses, and in Strasbourg you can eat anything you like, as long as it is choucroute. It is provincial pride, for pride’s sake.

The definition of local also seems to be surprisingly elastic. The country inns of France might well get their ingredients from within a five-mile radius. Chez Pannise, in Berkeley, California, which, for more than thirty years, has noisily pursued a doctrine of organic produce, grown by local suppliers, expands the concept of local to include the Chino Ranch, in San Diego, 500 miles away. The fact is, most of us in the developed world live in cities, and the ingredients we eat are always going to have to come from somewhere else.

Very early one morning, during my stay in Las Vegas, I went out to see the cargo operation at the city’s airport, which is housed in a set of steel sheds off a dusty avenue on the edge of town. In the cold rooms of the cargo handlers I saw boxes of prime fish from the Pierless Fish Corp in Brooklyn. There was meat from Hawaii, and oysters and clams from Boston. There were boxes of tuna and sea bass. There was food from everywhere. And every few days or so, a box would arrive containing lobsters from Brittany because the man once named the chef of the century thinks they are better than the ones from Maine. As he sees it, once the
lobsters are in the air, it doesn’t matter how far they fly, so he might as well have the best. That, it seemed to me, was the most important thing about restaurants in Las Vegas. All the ingredients might come from elsewhere, but they are of the highest quality available. It’s all the best non-intensively reared, free-range, and organic fruit, vegetables, meat, and fish.

Alongside this admirable commitment to quality is another concern, however, about the impact of all that airfreighting on the environment. I want to say it’s something that doesn’t bear thinking about but, of course, it does, and at some point I will have to think about it.