Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh

by Unknown

  8. Never Order the House Wine

  Anything is better: lager brewed from the toxic waters of America’s Great Lakes. Flat tonic water from the bartender’s soda gun. No matter F O R K I T O V E R

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  what beverage you request, it’s going to be better than the house wine, which often comes from a box. If there are two of you having dinner, order the cheapest bottle on the list, even if you know you won’t be able to finish it. And, please, whatever you do, don’t sniff the cork—you’ll learn nothing and only smudge your nose.

  9. Never Eat a Dish Credited to the Chef ’s Mother Honestly, do you really think Mom is back there at the stove? Maybe, just maybe, if you’re driving through Italy and stop for lunch in The Piemonte region you might find a sweet old lady chained to a chair in the kitchen, forced to make a few thousand agnolotti before lunch.

  This doesn’t happen in America. Any restaurant dish called “Mama’s” was cooked up by some ungrateful son who probably hasn’t called home in two and a half years.

  10. Even Worse Is a Dish Invented by the Chef ’s Father Because dads can’t cook.

  E N T R E E S

  T O O M U C H I S N E V E R E N O U G H

  I came to Monte Carlo to eat, and to do so in a manner so ambitious that all who learned of my plan labeled me insane, except for the few who thought me blessed. My itinerary: book a room for five days at the Hôtel de Paris, home of Alain Ducasse’s restaurant Le Louis XV, and while in residence eat all my meals in the hotel dining room. I thought it elegant and traditional, to say nothing of convenient, inasmuch as the hotel has a garage and on-street parking has always been problematic along the Mediterranean.

  The reason for the intemperate reaction to my dining plan was that Le Louis XV is no ordinary hotel restaurant. It has three Michelin stars, and no restaurants are more illustrious—or more dedicated to over-indulgence—than those. They epitomize the glories of French dining, the pinnacle of culture in a country obsessed with good taste. While many persons, myself included, are horrified at the cost of three-star dining—to pay less than $150 per person is a boon, to pay more than $300 per person commonplace—the financial price of eating in these gastronomic temples is not as daunting as the physiological one. After one such meal—amuse-bouche, appetizer, fish course, meat course, dessert, and petits fours, unless the diner selects a tasting menu, which entails much more—the process of digestion is inadequate. What is required is decompression. And I was planning on ten meals in five days.

  Others have attempted similar feats of gourmandise, generally fool-hardy travelers who make their way across France wolfing down 7 0

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  prodigious repasts in as many three-star establishments as they can reach in as short a period of time as possible, lurching from meal to meal in the same béarnaise-flecked tie and Burgundy-stained suit, setting records for the most courses eaten without doing laundry. I wished no part of such buffoonery.

  Before I set off for Monte Carlo, the business and tourism center of the principality of Monaco, I announced my intentions to Ducasse. I let him know that something was amiss about three-star dining if a man couldn’t get off the elevator in his hotel lobby and get a little something to eat without a subsequent visit to a gastroenterologist.

  He nodded, for that is his tight-lipped way, and I took that for agree-ment. His only stipulation was that I stop at his restaurant, Alain Ducasse, in Paris, on the way home. He wished me to compare the two styles of three-star cuisine. It was not the most odious of provisos, although not many people who eat ten three-star meals in a row are lining up for number eleven.

  I set off believing all that was required of me upon arrival in Monte Carlo was a good appetite. Thus I was fortunate to have business before-hand in Milan, for this northern Italian city offers only two significant dishes, one of them veal Milanese, which is bland meat flattened, fried, and served with nothing to detract from its essential bleakness, and the other osso buco, which is the bony part of the veal that remains after most of the meat has been flattened and fried. Having quickly tired of those dishes, I was ravenous when I boarded the Milan-to-Monaco train, a local that proceeded halfway south in a conventional manner, then pulled into a small Alpine village station where it had no choice but to back out. Once the backing up began, it never ceased. We continued in this unsettling manner for hours, until the train finally backed into the station at Monte Carlo. It was a good reason to travel on an empty stomach.

  I checked into the Hôtel de Paris, one of those imperial sanctuar-ies that deserves to stand on a square dominated by a statue of some long-forgotten grand marshal of the army of the emperor. Here, in deference to the needs and tastes of guests, the square outside the hotel F O R K I T O V E R

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  is given over to Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and Bentleys. The microwheeled vehicle I arrived in, constructed from the same materials as lawn furniture, was snatched from sight so quickly I was nearly dragged away before I could release the handle of the door.

  I had requested the kind of room that we Americans call, with some hilarity, a junior suite, as though it were proportioned for undersized executives. I cared only that the room had something other than a bed to rest upon, and such suites always have couches perfect for napping between meals. In the bathroom, I was distressed to note, was a scale, which I vowed never to step on, even though it was thoughtfully accessorized with a doily that averted an untoward situation, bare feet touching cold metal. I knew what would come to pass were I to place my weight upon the scale, the needle jiggling and trembling and finally settling on the wrong number, in much the same way the steel ball of a roulette wheel always comes deliciously close to dropping into my number before leaping away at the last moment. Monte Carlo has a famous casino that I had no intention of patronizing, for casinos and scales are much the same to me. With neither do I have luck.

  What I had not told Ducasse, and I don’t believe anybody in his right mind would have made this admission, was that the primary reason I wanted to spend my five days in Monte Carlo and not at his three-star Paris restaurant, is that I wished to evaluate the Mediterranean cuisine served at Le Louis XV. Ducasse is always referring to the food cooked in his Paris place as “northern cuisine,” so much so that I have at times imagined him dishing up a Scandinavian smorgasbord, whereas it is actually the food we commonly associate with France, food lavished with butter and cream, exactly what I love.

  Mediterranean food has always displeased me, but that might be because the only place I have eaten it regularly is the United States.

  Restaurants that specialize in American-style Mediterranean cuisine tend to feature out-of-season tomatoes, relentless quantities of zucchini and red peppers, and an alarming eagerness to bond tapenade, the anchovy-caper-olive paste, to anything to which it will stick. I also find that whenever I dine in the Mediterranean restaurants of New 7 2

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  York, I am always calling over waiters and complaining that I have found olives in my bread.

  While my primary challenge to Ducasse was to determine if three-star dining could be an exercise in civility rather than gluttony, I also hoped to learn something that would diminish the apprehension I feel whenever I enter a restaurant offering Mediterranean cuisine.

  Le Louis XV, for all its fame and pedigree, is a room of modest dimensions, except vertically. The ceiling is so high that if all the soufflés ever cooked in France were stacked one atop the other, they would barely reach the naked ladies gamboling in the fresco up there. Closer to earth are fifteen tables set with gold-rimmed Limoges china and gold-tone silver flatware, a marble grandfather clock that might be a hand-me-down from Versailles, busts of haughty French women (are there other kinds?), and all the accoutrements of a lavish eighteenth-century lifestyle: gilded and beveled mirrors, heavy draperies with tasseled tiebacks, looming chandeliers.

  The waiters, dressed in a variety of formal wear representing a service hi
erarchy too complex for a visitor not of royal blood to compre-hend, weave among the tables like a corps de ballet. They are mostly tall young men with black hair and fabulous dispositions. I induced polite chuckles from them whenever they began their routine of resetting the table for dessert, at which time I would threaten to go upstairs and change my shirt and tie. A regular Jerry Lewis, that’s me.

  My first meal, planned and executed by Ducasse’s chef de cuisine, Franck Cerutti, was a culinary triumph that left me apprehensive. The amuse-bouche was a luscious curlicue of pure white Italian lard, not a product that has entered the mainstream of three-star dining but admirable for its agrarian ancestry. From there I proceeded to lentil-and-pheasant bouillon topped with ricotta-cheese gnocchi so light they failed to break the surface tension of the soup, sea scallops slathered with black truffles, and bass roasted to unparalleled richness. The truffles were a bonus I hadn’t anticipated. I had forgotten that during black-truffle season, December through March, three-star F O R K I T O V E R

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  restaurants employ them much as midwestern housewives use Shake

  ’n Bake.

  Dessert was baba au rhum, the rum-soaked, cream-topped sponge cake I have always considered the French equivalent of our cream-filled Twinkies. Both are mass-produced sweets that satisfy innate societal cravings, ours for calories and theirs for alcohol. The baba au rhum at Le Louis XV brought enlightenment. The cake was fresh, conveyed to the table in a highly polished brass dish that cast back the golden highlights in the cake while twinkling a merry pastry greeting all its own.

  Offered a choice of five rums to be poured over the top, I selected the dark 1984 vintage Rhum JM from Martinique. Then the waiter held aloft a gigantic dollop of whipped cream and asked if I wished it or not.

  When my delighted laugh rose to a near-cackle, he said, “It was only a question.”

  Following the dessert course came the petits fours, pastries, and candies. There were thirty-five. I ate ten or twelve, hoping my inadequate consumption would not be perceived by the kitchen staff as an insult. I shoved a few of the wrapped caramels in my pocket to eat later.

  I have never been certain what purpose petits fours serve, for at this point in the meal no further nutrition is required. In fact, the presentation of these tiny sweets depresses me, because I feel I must consume every one of them or be responsible for havoc in the notoriously demanding French kitchen—some junior member of the pastry brigade de-toqued and banished to a bakery in the Massif Central to make cupcakes for the rest of his life.

  Petits fours have yet another drawback. Although they are ostensi-bly complimentary, they increase the cost of a three-star meal, because serving them calls for an enormous investment in trays, bowls, baskets, jars, urns, tureens, and pots for transporting all the chocolates, caramels, marshmallows, madeleines, macaroons, and bonbons. I am certain the price of eighteenth-century sterling silver has been driven up by three-star chefs bidding against one another at auction houses just so hard-candy can be brought to the table with proper ceremony.

  After the meal, I informed Cerutti that he had not lived up to 7 4

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  Ducasse’s promise to feed me prudently. He replied that he considered the meal light, for he had given me only a small portion of the fish and one dessert instead of two. He used my selfless petit four consumption against me, claiming they were the reason I felt so full. He shook his finger at me and said from then on I could have only a single petit four with every meal, and he ignored my reasonable protest that a chef who wished a customer to have only one petit four would not serve thirty-five of them.

  With dinner only four hours away, I returned to my room to nap, which I find the only civilized restoration between meals. I do not understand people who walk after eating, which is not all that different from swimming, which is considered suicidal. Anyway, why walk at a time when you have no interest in peering into the windows of charcuteries and patisseries?

  I fell asleep on my couch, but I had eaten too much to rest well.

  Were I French, I would have had no problems, for overeating comes naturally to them. They even have an imaginary ailment to blame whenever they feel uncomfortable after the courses have mounted up, an imaginary malady they call une crise de foie, a liver attack. Having denounced a perfectly innocent internal organ—J’accuse, as they like to say—the crisis is over and they move on to their next meal. Americans don’t get away with overeating so easily. I tossed and turned, and my nightmare brought a prophecy that proved all too true: I dreamed I was gaining weight.

  “So,” said Ducasse, “which do you prefer, the sea bass from Chile or the black bass from America?”

  Little did I know when I signed up for this trip that a pop quiz would be involved. Ducasse, who flies back and forth between his two restaurants each week, amassing Michelin stars and frequent flyer miles, invited me to eat with him in the tiny chef ’s room off the kitchen.

  It contains a table that seats four as well as six grainy TV monitors for watching the cooks at work.

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  This Saturday lunch was my fifth meal at Le Louis XV, and it was an opportunity to complain to Ducasse about portion sizes. I felt that Cerutti was airlifting in supplies so my meals would be large enough.

  When I spoke of this too openly to Ducasse, Cerutti took me aside and informed me that he would get even if I kept up the complaints to his boss, so I said no more. Our main course was a piece of lightly salted cod, the salt adding flavor and substance to what is essentially a bland fish with a slithery texture. I complained mildly about the mille-feuille that we were served for dessert, whether the layers of pastry were perhaps too dense and too buttery, and whether the pastry cream should be so preemptively rich, so overwhelming that it drove out all thoughts of petits fours. Ducasse tasted his, declared it “the epitome of vanilla and carmelization,” and informed me of his dessert philosophy: “You shouldn’t eat dessert. Dessert is a sin. So if you are going to sin, do it freely. Having one dessert is like having one mistress, ridiculous. You must have two or three, once you get started.”

  He does not cook while in residence at Le Louis XV, nor does the public require that he do so. Whereas famous chefs in American restaurants must occasionally pretend they adore standing in front of a stove in order to satisfy the demands of critics and customers, French chefs at Ducasse’s level of eminence are permitted to be businessmen. He runs an organization that includes the two three-star restaurants, a well-regarded inn in Provence, and a national hotel association. He enjoys challenging those around him, and in my case he was checking out my level of discernment when he asked whether I preferred the Chilean or the American bass.

  “The black bass from America,” I said, which was the wrong answer.

  His eyes shifted almost imperceptibly as I went from promising gourmet to irreparable jingoist in his estimation.

  One morning, Cerutti met me at the outdoor market of Nice. Both Monte Carlo and Nice remain celebrated Riviera destinations, but they have grown apart over the years. Monte Carlo has become a 7 6

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  whitewashed tax shelter of gleaming hillside condominiums populated by wealthy Europeans who earn too much to want to part with any of it. Nice continues to exude Gallic conventionality.

  For a while, we walked from stall to stall. He kissed all the pretty girls, insisting that he was merely saying good morning in the French manner. He wore jeans, a sweater, and a backpack, and he was very much the celebrity—not, he explained, because of Le Louis XV but because years earlier he had operated his own restaurant only a few blocks away. It was midwinter and so freezing cold that whenever possible I sneaked off and stood in front of an outdoor rotisserie, trying to steal some of the heat from the chickens on the spit.

  Cerutti showed me vegetables grown locally in the winter months: tiny broccoli called brocoletti romano being sold by a farmer wearing layers of unw
ashed clothes; herbs from a pretty girl (kissed); tiny winter apples from a middle-aged woman in a cardigan (not kissed). It is contrary to my urban nature to believe anything can grow in this kind of cold except lichen. Where I see tundra, Cerutti sees farmland. He said the Mediterranean cuisine is at its least interesting during the summer months, “when there are the worst products, the red pepper and tomato and zucchini,” but now there were the small artichokes with the sharp pointed leaves and soon would come morels and green peas and the best baby broad beans in the world.

  I saw beautiful goat cheeses, and I asked him why there were none on the cart at Le Louis XV. He explained that at this time of year the milk from the goats was needed to feed the babies, and the farmers who made goat cheese killed the babies to have more of the milk. This was the most compassionate statement about food I had ever heard from a Frenchman, and when I expressed my admiration, he said the business about saving the baby goats was all very nice but the real reason he didn’t serve the cheeses was that the goats were kept indoors this time of year. Thus they could not roam the mountains, eating the wild herbs that gave their milk a special taste.

  By now I was shaking. I had dressed in a T-shirt and a light jacket, thinking I would be warm enough, a misconception I blame on Ameri-F O R K I T O V E R

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  can restaurants that serve the same warm-weather Mediterranean food throughout the year. I had packed for this trip convinced it was always tomato-growing season along the Mediterranean. Cerutti took me to a small café so deteriorated I would have thought it abandoned had there not been so many people in it. He bought me a huge bowl of café au lait and told me a little of his life.