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

by Unknown

  He grew up on a farm a few miles inland from Nice, went off to hotel cooking school, and eventually began working in hotel kitchens, preparing those fraudulent French luxury dishes that sound more interesting than they ever taste—dishes with the surnames of courte-sans, like lamb pompadour; dishes that take on the names of regions, like sole normande; dishes that have names meant to impress tourists, where the peas are Saint-Germain and the asparagus is Argenteuil. “I was getting bored,” he said. “I felt that if this was what cooking was all about, I would change jobs.” Then he met, in succession, Jacques Maximin, of the Hotel Negresco in Nice, and the younger and even more brilliant Ducasse. Cerutti kept going back and forth between the two, working for one and then the other. Ducasse found the situation amusing but Maximin hated it, always saying to him, “I never want to see you again.” He cooked in Florence, and he had that restaurant in Nice, and when Ducasse asked him to work in Monte Carlo, he accepted. Ducasse says of his second-in-command, the man who executes the recipes that have made him the most famous chef in the world, “Franck would be unable to cook the kind of food we have in Paris, but he is the best interpreter of Mediterranean food there is. There is a strong relationship between what he is and what he does. He is a Latin. He must touch the products before he cooks them. He has olive oil instead of blood.” Although Monaco has no noticeable native cuisine, one evening Cerutti sent out an amuse-bouche called a Barbajuan, a fried puff pastry filled with Swiss chard, ricotta cheese, and leeks. It is a specialty of the principality. Because it was served in this restaurant, I found it tasty, but I can see how it might remind me of a frozen pizza 7 8

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  roll somewhere else. Monaco does not have much of a native population, either, most of the locals having fled to escape the income-tax refugees pouring over the border in their Rolls-Royces. That same evening, a true Monegasque and his wife entered the dining room, moving with the elegance and pride of an endangered species. They were both in their heavy-spending years.

  They set their handbags on the tiny settee placed beside every cushioned armchair for that purpose. She wore the sort of jewels Harry Winston lends out to starlets who try not to return them. He wore a diamond-studded pin on his velvet jacket and a pinkie ring with a sap-phire so large it caught my eye from two tables away. Everything about him sparkled, including his hair. He bent to read the wine list with the aid of a lorgnette, reading glasses that come on a stem. They seemed happy together. If he was one of those men who keep mistresses, he loved his wife as much as any of them. They had beluga caviar and Gos-set Rosé Champagne, and then he ordered 1983 La Mission Haut-Brion, a very nice wine, not too showy, just right.

  I was eating alone, as I often do, and their mutual devotion caused me a moment of melancholy. I got over it quickly. There were decisions to be made: Which Champagne-by-the-glass would I have to begin?

  Which of the seven breads would I select? Did I desire the salted butter from Normandy in the gold dish or the unsalted butter from Normandy in the cute little basket? (What a relief not to have to dip my bread in olive oil, mandatory in the Mediterranean restaurants of New York.) I find that the more culinary dilemmas I face in the course of a meal, the happier I am to be sitting by myself. Without conversation, there is nothing to get in the way of the food.

  When I am dining alone, I do not take out a paperback novel. I find that restaurants provide all the visual entertainment I need. I find I must occasionally resist the impulse to engage sommeliers in tedious, one-sided discourses on the greatness of the wines I have had back home, a particular Pinot Noir from the Russian River Valley, for example. I know I have gone too far when the sommelier is shaking with impatience, desperate to break away.

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  To my knowledge, I did that only once at Le Louis XV, when the chief sommelier, Noel Bajor, served a 1988 Coulée de Serrant and I tried to express my gratitude with a heartfelt discourse on the superiority of French Chenin Blanc over California Chenin Blanc. While I was speaking, I believe several customers fell from their chairs, fatally parched.

  Cerutti and I settled into an agreeable if quarrelsome pattern. I would inform him that he was giving me too much to eat, and he would dis-pute this, claiming that it was my fault for eating too fast or eating too much bread or eating too many petits fours. Occasionally he would waggle a finger at me and say, “No cheese!” The maître d’ of the restaurant was continually trying to brighten my mood, announcing cheerily, “Very light today, only two courses.” Then out would come food on plates so large they appeared seaworthy. One of the “very light today” meals started with the signature dish of the restaurant: zucchini, turnips, fennel, carrots, and cabbage cooked with olive oil and black truffles. The baby vegetables in this assemblage were soft and impossibly succulent, bound up with the chopped truffles and olive oil. The dish was so savory I could imagine never needing meat again. It was also so oversize I could imagine never eating again.

  Next came veal, and never before had I tasted veal this tender and yet this flavorful, slice after slice of delicately pink loin, so many slices this was no mere dish of veal. This was a vista of veal, veal that seemed to go on forever, fading into the horizon, and surrounding the veal were spinach-flecked potato gnocchi in a black truffle sauce. Cerutti came out and applied the coup de grâce, shaving black truffles over the dish. I ate every bite of the best vegetables I’d ever had in my life, and then I ate every bite of the best veal I’d ever had in my life, and then I stumbled into the kitchen, barely able to remain upright.

  This was the showdown. With whatever formality I was able to muster, I informed Cerutti that he had let me down. Much to my surprise, he expressed his regret. He said the veal had to be cooked for two, and what else was he to do inasmuch as I was eating alone but give me both portions.

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  This did not prevent him from presenting me with dessert. Out came mascarpone sorbet with wild strawberries. I counted the strawberries, and there were forty-six of them. I let Cerutti know about this, too, and he walked away, shaking his head, muttering, “Forty-six, forty-six,” as though I were the one who had lost his senses, not he. I ate every one of the barely warmed berries with the cooling sorbet. I did it to prove to Cerutti that he could not get the better of me.

  What I did not want him to know, for it would have altered our quarrelsome relationship, was that never had I experienced food of such clarity prepared so exquisitely. There were no tomatoes, except a few that had been sun-dried, and barely any olives. I could have done with fewer artichokes, but Cerutti explained that I had come during the season of the wonderful Sardinian artichokes, and nobody could have too many of those.

  He served Mediterranean fish soup at one meal. It smelled sweetly of the sea, and accompanying it was rouille, which is the traditional spicy, garlicky, reddish sauce. I was relieved when Cerutti told me I need not stir the rouille into the broth. All my life I have been ruining perfectly good fish soup out of an obligation to add ridiculous amounts of sauce to it, and now I don’t ever have to do that again. I had turbot on a layer of crabmeat, and accompanying the fish were grilled endive and raw endive stuffed with crabmeat, an example of the reiteration of flavors that is characteristic of Ducasse’s style. The simplest food served to me was spit-roasted leg of lamb, the best I’ve ever tasted. The most unexpected was the stomach of a codfish, prepared like tripe, a daring dish for a three-star restaurant. The only food I truly disliked were the marshmallows, a part of the petit four collection. They smelled like dried flowers in the drawing room of a widowed aunt. I told Cerutti they’d only please me if he built a campfire in the center of the dining room and allowed me to roast them on sticks.

  I was right about the limitations of Mediterranean restaurants in America. Ducasse sided with me on this point, if on no other. He said Mediterranean food becomes less authentic the farther it moves from the F O R K I T O V E R

 
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  Mediterranean, which makes it “enormously difficult” to do in Paris and

  “a caricature” in the United States. I was surprised to discover that Le Louis XV is actually a regional restaurant—not a humble one, but a regional restaurant nonetheless. Eating the Mediterranean food there gave me the same good feeling I might have experienced had I stumbled upon an unknown bistro in Nice with a genius for a cook.

  As for Cerutti, I owe him an apology. After leaving Monte Carlo, I flew to Paris for the promised dinner at Alain Ducasse, where the style of food is less homey but otherwise similar to that of Le Louis XV.

  Nothing seemed very different until the dishes were cleared away and it came time for the petits fours.

  They did not arrive, as they did at Le Louis XV, on an assortment of splendid plates. They came on a polished cart the size of a resupply wagon. On this conveyance were vanilla ice cream, strawberry sorbet, roasted almonds dipped in chocolate powder, sugar tarts, Paris-Brest (an exquisite pastry honoring an old bicycle race), apricots dipped in sugar, raspberries dipped in sugar, preserved orange dipped in chocolate, chocolates with nuts and dried fruit, marshmallows, two kinds of macaroons, four kinds of bonbons, and warm madeleines.

  I do not forgive Cerutti his indifference to portion control, but in the matter of petits fours, I realize that he is not such an unreasonable fellow after all.

  GQ, may 1999

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  I’m going to be honest with you. Where war is concerned, few people are. I’m going to tell you a story about Vietnam unlike any you’ve read before.

  Nobody dies in my story. I served in the Republic of South Vietnam a quarter-century ago as the executive officer of a U.S. Army boat company, and I don’t know anybody who was killed in the war. Whenever I think that life hasn’t given me a break, I remember that.

  There’s something else I should confess about my year in Vietnam: I gained weight while I was there.

  I was a captain, a deskbound Transportation Corps officer assigned to the U.S. Army Harbor Craft Company (Provisional) in Saigon. At the time, it was the largest boat company in the army. Yes, the army has boats, lots of them: tugs, floating cranes, tankers, landing craft, barges, and more.

  You hear a lot these days about “good” wars and “bad” wars, but I’ve always suspected mine was the third kind, an unexceptional war.

  When I went to the Washington National Records Center, in Maryland, to look for information about my unit, nobody could find any evidence in the 300,000 square feet of paper stored there that it had even existed. A clerk said to me, “The record-keeping over there was pathetic, at best. When somebody does a history of Vietnam based on what we have here, anything that is close to accurate will be purely accidental.”

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  I was there, all right, and so was the harborcraft company, even if the government refuses to admit it. Almost every morning, one of our tug-boats would head up the Dong Nai River to Long Binh Post, making about two knots against the current, towing a barge wallowing under a massive load of fuel or ammunition. It was the ammunition, the tons of assorted explosives, that troubled those of us who rode along. The riverbanks were dense with foliage, plenty of cover for an overly ambitious Vietcong armed with an RPG launcher and willing to fire a round that would blow up the barge, the tug, and probably himself.

  Most mornings, the tug left without me. That’s because I was an REMF, the unofficial designation given to soldiers who never went into the field by the men who actually fought. I didn’t ask to be an REMF, nor did I volunteer for more demanding duty when I became one. I took what the army gave me. REMF stands for “rear echelon motherfucker.” There were a lot of us.

  I didn’t endure many hardships, except when the mess hall ran out of ice cream, my customary late-afternoon snack. I’ve heard that only about 15 percent of U.S. forces sent to Vietnam were actually in combat, which means that about 85 percent of all the soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen (only members of the Salvation Army see less combat than the modern airman) were pretty much like me. Not long ago I called my former boss, who was the best officer I ever knew and is now retired in Phoenix. I asked him what he thought of me as a soldier. “I was always impressed by your cheerfulness,” said Victor Largesse, then a major and the company commander. I figured that for a euphemism, and I was right. “I always thought you were on a lark, never took it seriously.”

  When people talk about the turning point of the Vietnam War, they always bring up the Tet Offensive of 1968, when the Vietcong achieved tremendous psychological victories, even capturing the U.S. Embassy in Saigon for a few hours. I always thought the turning point came in 1969. When I arrived early that year, Saigon still felt like a combat zone.

  By the time I left, my unit was marching in parades. The REMFs had taken control.

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  Once or twice a month, I got out of my swivel chair and went to war. I didn’t have to, but I did. It was guilt, not patriotism or heroism, that inspired me. I was always ashamed that the only time I regularly went on the water was for dinner on our hundred-ton floating crane, the one with the recently naturalized cook who had mastered his Italian mother’s recipes. To this day I don’t recall many meals I enjoyed more than his lobster fra diavalo, made with pilfered lobster tails.

  I would grab my helmet and flak jacket and jump on one of the tugs heading up the Dong Nai. Once I was aboard, my mission was not to get in the way. No shot was ever fired at a boat while I was on it, and while I like to think my steadfast presence behind a machine gun made a difference, I know it was luck. The trip took hours, and standing for that long with that much clothing on in the intense heat of a country that is almost always hot and wet builds a thirst.

  By the time we docked, I’d be hungry and dehydrated, and I’d head for the Chinese restaurant on post for sweet-and-sour pork with three or four Cokes. I don’t eat much sweet-and-sour pork anymore, but when I do, I recall those rides upriver and immediately need a Coke. You’ve heard about Vietnam flashbacks. That’s mine.

  “Where are you staying?” asked Tony Newman, chief of the Saigon office of the International Organization for Migration. Officially, Saigon is now Ho Chi Minh City, but only people who don’t live there call it that.

  “The Majestic,” I replied.

  “Which room?”

  “Five-oh-one.”

  “I think Westmoreland stayed there.”

  In defense of William C. Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam throughout most of the sixties, I would like to say this: he was an uninspiring general, but he had standards. He would not have found room 501 of the Majestic acceptable.

  Don’t get me wrong. When I returned to Saigon a few months ago, I made sure I stayed there. The Majestic once offered the grandest 8 6

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  lodgings in a city once called “the Paris of the Orient,” and the Saigon of decades past is what I hoped to find.

  It wasn’t difficult. Saigon doesn’t look much like Paris anymore, but for that matter, it didn’t look much like Paris back in 1969. The city does look remarkably like it did a quarter-century ago, which cannot be said of Bangkok, Singapore, Tokyo, and most of the other met-ropolitan centers of Asia. Credit for this time warp goes to the economic boycott imposed by the United States and to the less-than-innovative development strategies implemented by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam under the leadership of the former U.S.S.R. Saigon is a city that has stood still.

  Camp Davies, where I was stationed, was an obscure chunk of dock space on the fringe of the city in 1969. The docks, warehouses, and even the Quonset hut where I slept are still there, looking more insignificant than ever, although nobody seems to remember it was an American military installation named Camp Davies.

  Astonishingly, the monetary system remains almost exactly as it was during the war: back then the standard currencies were
American dollars (or American military scrip) and Vietnam piastres. Today they are American dollars and Vietnamese dong.

  The famous Bun Ho Hue soup, a thin scallion-flavored meat broth sold at stands everywhere for a few cents, is still sold at stands everywhere for a few cents. As it did then, it fills me with awe and respect for a people who relish hot soup in ninety-five-degree heat. One newfangled idea that has taken hold is the emergence of pizza delivery. I ordered a large pie from Annie’s Pizza—“Annie is the long form of Ann, which is an Americanization of “Anh”—and it was delivered to my hotel in a cardboard box bearing the catchy slogan “When the taste of home beats ya, call for Annie’s Pizza.” I didn’t return to see Vietnam. I didn’t see much of it during the war.

  I went back to see Saigon. Almost every night during my tour of duty, while most officers hung out at Camp Davies’ sorry excuse for an officers’ club and watched a movie projected on a bedsheet, I got in my jeep and went to town. I loved Saigon, especially the women, exquisitely F O R K I T O V E R

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  dressed in the traditional flowing, high-necked ao dai. I ate out almost every night, and I learned to say “No nuoc mam [fermented fish sauce], please.” I survived the heat, which was so intense I had difficulty writing home—the perspiration would pour down my arm and smear the ink.

  This time, I made certain I had air-conditioning. The Majestic did, and that’s all I needed to know. I wasn’t concerned that it once had a reputation as “the CIA hotel,” or that it served as a Japanese barracks during World War II. For $65 a night, single occupancy, I got a platform bed as hard as a tank turret, a couch covered in an oilcloth-like bright-yellow fabric, a telephone made of red-and-white Lucite, and red wall-to-wall carpeting accented with a lime-green throw rug. The TV received three stations, all providing the same in-depth coverage of foreign dig-nitaries arriving to discuss the industrial development of Vietnam. A warning sign posted on the inside of the door gave the rules: No cooking, ironing, weapons, toxics, explosives, inflammables, pets, or prostitutes. (I cheated and brought a travel iron.) The night attendant on my floor was a former UH-1B (Huey) helicopter pilot for our ally, the Republic of South Vietnam.