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

by Unknown

  If the roof was a welcome sanctuary during the war, it is even more of one today. It is a place to escape the relentless begging on the streets.

  Walking along Dong Khoi and Le Loi, I came to recognize them all: the lady with the head-lolling drugged baby, the man with no face, the maimed kid who walked on his hands. Once I barely outran a footless man who dashed across the street to head me off. The rotten little-boy pickpockets are ruthless and the nasty little-girl postcard hawkers pinch if you don’t buy. I learned to say, “No postcard, no stamp, no change money, no girl, no beer, no want nothing.” Late in the afternoon, Ron and I would take the elevator to the roof for beer and an order of Imperial Rolls Saigon style. It became my favorite tourist food.

  To the table would come a jack-o’-lantern carved from a pineapple.

  Stuck on toothpicks and protruding from the face were myriad crisp, two-bite-sized spring rolls. The normal accoutrements for wrapping—

  lettuce, mint, and a vinegar-based dipping sauce—were served alongside. On one occasion, when the hotel’s usually overworked kitchen wasn’t too busy, the presentation included the word REX and a crown, both carved from carrots. The cost: $2.34. Food prices tend to be low and not rounded off at government-sponsored restaurants.

  The most famous hotel in Saigon, now and probably forever, is the Continental, constructed in the late nineteenth century and situated in splendor across from the Rex and the Municipal Theatre. I was never an admirer of the hotel’s terrace, made famous by Graham Greene in The Quiet American and by Somerset Maugham in The Gentleman in the Parlour. To me, the place was too crowded with the kind of people who read Greene and Maugham. The hotel was taken over by the Socialist Republic in 1975, just after the fall of Saigon, and used as a government guest house until 1987, when it closed for two years of renovations. When it reopened, it was clear that the government felt the same way about the terrace that I did. It was no longer there.

  Today the space is occupied by an oversize Italian restaurant called Chez Guido, which is the most dispirited eating establishment in the F O R K I T O V E R

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  city. The room is high-ceilinged and filled with pillars and chandeliers, which makes it look more like a cavernous meeting hall than a restaurant. There’s so much space between tables that the place feels empty even when it’s full, and there’s no music, just eerie silence. In a city of terrible service, Chez Guido offers some of the worst, inasmuch as the waiters tend to congregate in the back room and read magazines.

  I started my meal with a carpaccio of fish the waiter claimed was tuna. It wasn’t like any tuna I’d ever eaten, not in texture, taste, or appearance. It was pale, a ghost of seafood past. A risotto was gummy but the scaloppini “chez Guido” was absolutely first-rate. The noodles were fresh, the scallops of pork the best meat I ate in Saigon, and the tomato sauce not bad at all. I sniffed and skipped the grated cheese.

  Prewar, perhaps?

  The Caravelle, the third in a lineup of top-notch hotels surrounding the theater building, was a favorite spot for American journalists during the war and is remembered as the home of the Caravelle Man-ifesto—in 1960, a few enlightened Vietnamese politicians met there to draw up a document calling for civil rights reforms. They were promptly jailed. During the war, I liked the restaurant on the top floor.

  My unit held farewell dinners there for officers about to return home.

  Now there’s a restaurant serving Japanese food on the tenth floor and one with a menu of French, Vietnamese, and Chinese dishes on the ninth. That’s where Ron and I ate, mostly because I was taken with the decor: huge overhead fans that resembled propellers on WW II fighter planes; bizarre, spidery chandeliers; badly tended plants; and a brightly lit advertisement for Ken Y ice cream over the cashier’s desk. Nothing on the menu cost more than three dollars, and while the food wasn’t exceptional, it was worth the price.

  The two most famous restaurants in Saigon are Maxim’s, which has a cabaret downstairs and a girlie bar upstairs, and Madame Dai’s Bib-liothèque, where guests dine in the library of a beautiful home. At least the fortunate ones do. When Ron and I arrived, we were shown to a table in the garage, right next to Madame Dai’s motorscooter.

  We declined, to the surprise of Madame Dai, and moved on to 9 8

  A L A N R I C H M A N

  Maxim’s, lured by the famous name. The downstairs cabaret and restaurant offer a lot for your money: an amateurish but enjoyable floor show, a bathroom attendant eager to shpritz customers with an evil-smelling cologne, and reasonably priced French and Chinese food. As soon as we sat down, we received complimentary snacks, including cashews in airline-type packets. We ordered Chinese mushrooms with shrimp stuffing, baked squab with rock salt, fried shrimp on toast, steamed fish with ginger, and braised spinach with crab meat. Every dish was bland.

  Our check, including the meal, the floor show, the tip, and two beers, was less than $35.

  The entertainment highlight was a young woman in what looked like a prom dress—do Communists have proms?—holding a rose and singing “Unchained Melody.” Men flushed with ardor jumped from their chairs to press carnations into her hands. As soon as she finished her performance, everybody got up and left. Everybody but us. Only Ron and I remained to applaud the tenacious young lady who performed a less-than-haunting “Ave Maria” on her cello.

  For dessert, I ordered a mocha soufflé. Ron had crêpes Suzette.

  Extravagant? Perhaps, but where else in the world can you get two luxurious French desserts in a place called Maxim’s for $1.44.

  As I sat there on my final night in Saigon, eating my slightly collapsed soufflé, the seven-piece orchestra broke into a lush arrangement of

  “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” I glanced up and realized that the eyes I was looking into were my dentist’s. And you thought the Vietnam War ended badly.

  GQ, september 1994

  M I A M I W E I S S

  Early Bird humor, overheard outside the Publix supermarket, Coconut Creek, Florida.

  FIRST MAN: I can prove Jesus wasn’t Jewish.

  SECOND MAN: How?

  FIRST MAN: If he was Jewish, he wouldn’t have been at the Last Supper. He’d have been at an Early Bird.

  I’ve come to south Florida to explore one of the nation’s oddest food trends, the Early Bird Special. If you’ve never had an Early Bird, it means you are too rich, too thin, or too Christian. I’ve found my way to the city of Coconut Creek, which is ground zero for the Early Bird phenomenon—nearly a fifth of its population is both elderly and Jewish.

  At the moment, I’m sitting in the kitchen of the world’s absolute authority on the Early Bird. (The Formica, incidentally, is spotless.) The authority is a woman of more than seventy-five years who reacts to a few dollars off the price of a stuffed-flounder dinner the way others react to a winning Lotto ticket. The woman is my mother.

  I know what you’re thinking: pretty cushy work. Fly to Florida, see Mom, take a few notes, fly home with a slab of brisket packed in ice.

  You don’t know my mother. Food she gives you. Editorial cooperation is something else. This is what happens when Norman, my father, suggests to Ida, my mother, that we begin our explorations at Love’s, a legendary Fort Lauderdale Early Bird eatery.

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  A L A N R I C H M A N

  IDA: Don’t tell him to go there. Nobody goes there.

  NORMAN: What do you mean, nobody goes there? It’s been in business five years. When we went, there were lines. Everybody goes there.

  IDA: When we went there, it was called something else.

  NORMAN: It used to be called Belaire. You have to say, for the price it wasn’t bad.

  IDA: Anyplace where the meal is four dollars and fifty cents, what can they give you? A blintz is four-fifty. When I make a blintz, it costs more than that.

  Debating my mother is slippery business. My father is more straightforward, but I’m afraid he orders too much bad veal parmigiana, the kind where the meat is
chopped and the cheese solidified, to rate serious consideration as a food authority. However, he is something of a grassroots cultural anthropologist—that’s a nice way of saying he gossips around the pool. I’m fascinated by the depth of his Early Bird lore.

  He tells me the Early Bird is a meal served before peak dinner hours, one at which patrons are rewarded with discounts or with complimentary courses. It is good for retirees who like to get dinner finished early so they can take advantage of community activities. It is good for elderly persons who have difficulty driving at night, because they can return home before sundown. Mostly, it’s a good deal. Early Bird devotees eat as much as they can, and then they take home everything left on the table. My father tells me they even clean out the bread basket, a suggestion that incenses my mother, who does not wish to be thought of as a character out of Les Misérables.

  IDA: When have we ever taken bread home? Except at the Rascal House, of course.

  NORMAN: Talk to Thelma. She’s always taking bread home.

  IDA: Oh, her. She takes everything home.

  Thelma isn’t her real name, by the way. Some journalists change names to protect the innocent. I’ve done it to protect the bridge club.

  Between having to assign an alias to “Thelma” and surviving the bread blowup, I realize that probing my mother and father for Early Bird inside information might not be such a good idea. I decide I will wait until I F O R K I T O V E R

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  return to New York to seek an answer to the most delicate question of all: Why are there always so many Jews at Early Birds? I eventually ask this of comedian Jackie Mason, a leading authority on Jewish folkways.

  “It’s simple,” he says. “Jews have one thing on their mind: food. At five o’clock, when gentiles are thinking, ‘I want a drink,’ Jews are thinking, ‘I want to eat.’ Gentiles go to a bar. Jews go to an Early Bird Special. It’s the cocktail hour for Jews.” That’s a neat explanation of why Jews eat early. I think I already know why Jews eat cheap. It has to do with a historic fear of being overcharged.

  Take my mother. Sometimes I tell her about my favorite foods in New York, like the chicken with whipped potatoes and sweet garlic sauce at Montrachet. The price is $24. She’s never had it, but according to her, you can find just as good in Florida for much less.

  “We go to this kosher place, get a plate of soup, a half-chicken—

  that’s half a kosher chicken—one vegetable, tea, four dollars and fifty cents.”

  I reply, “I thought you said nothing for four-fifty could be any good.” She looks at me scornfully. “This is lunch. I’m talking about lunch.

  Lunch is different.”

  What can I do but apologize?

  At this point, I shut up and let her take charge. I say we’ll go anywhere she wants to check out her Early Bird favorites, but lunches don’t count. Lunches aren’t Early Birds. I tell her that breakfast doesn’t count, either, even if you can get two eggs, a bagel, and coffee for ninety-nine cents at Ann & Vince’s Southgate Bagel & Deli, in North Lauderdale.

  By the way, you’d think this would constitute the ultimate breakfast experience for my mother, but she is not as predictable as that. She prefers Bageland of Margate, even though the breakfast specials there start at $1.39.

  “At Bageland,” she says, “I can send back the bagels to be toasted twice.”

  “So send them back twice at Southgate,” I say.

  “For ninety-nine cents, I haven’t got the nerve.” 1 0 2

  A L A N R I C H M A N

  I ask her if we could please stop with the bagels and get on with business, the Early Bird dinners. This gets her a little miffed. She informs me the food won’t be fancy like I get at my big-shot New York restaurants. This is an important point. When you’re talking Early Bird, you’re not talking new wave Floribbean cuisine, the “seared citrus-crusted yellowfin tuna with a macedoine of papaya, mango and yellow pepper” we read about in Time magazine while I was down there. To be deprived of such dishes does not constitute a loss to my mother.

  “I don’t eat anything seared,” she says.

  The first stop on her restaurant itinerary is the Fifteenth Street Fisheries, in Fort Lauderdale, which offers an Early Bird from 5:00 p.m.

  to 5:15 p.m., a dangerously narrow window of opportunity. My father tells me that just before 5:00 p.m., everybody lines up outside. When the doors open, they race for the dining room, up on the second floor.

  It’s sort of a Geriatric Olympics, everybody hitting the stairs like an Edwin Moses with varicose veins. Alas, we go on a slow night, so I do not witness this spectacle.

  The Early Bird here is simple: $5 off any entrée except specials. My mother, who rates the place “pretty good,” has harsh words for the salads, although I find them imaginative. “There isn’t even a tomato,” she says. “I wouldn’t call that a salad, no tomato.” I praise the intermezzo, a tiny dish of tropical-fruit sorbet.

  “Very classy,” I say.

  “My appetizer was one little piece of fish,” she says. “After that I need an intermezzo?”

  Also scoring high with me is Kelly, the bread girl. A girl that cute, I wouldn’t take to an Early Bird. I don’t ask an opinion of my mother.

  When the girl isn’t Jewish, you don’t bring her up.

  Our next stop is a Margate seafood restaurant named Mr. G’s. I’m told it’s named for the owner, a fellow named Margolin. Naturally, I don’t quite understand, so I ask for an explanation.

  “It’s for his first name,” the waitress says. “It’s Joe.” Service at most Early Bird establishments is friendly but not intellectual.

  F O R K I T O V E R

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  My mother declares that Mr. G’s has the best Early Bird seafood in south Florida. She has the Canadian sea scallops casa, which I guess means casserole, since that’s what it is. It comes with pasta, salad, coffee, and dessert, and it costs $10.95.

  “Quite a bargain,” I say.

  “Eleven dollars isn’t so cheap,” Ida replies.

  Our next stop is Raindancer, in Fort Lauderdale, her top-rated Early Bird establishment. I’m astonished by the portions, so huge I understand why retirees wear elasticized pants. The Early Bird includes entree, soup, salad bar, coffee, and “a choice of selected desserts” (that’s a euphemism for “we’re saving our best desserts for better-paying customers”). My mother is excited about the salad bar because it offers unlimited anchovies, the forbidden fruit of her low-salt diet. I warn her that her doctor is going to read about all the anchovy fillets on her plate. She says, “I don’t ask my doctor what to eat.” By now, I’m feeling like a sport, having taken my parents out for three dinners. Perhaps you think otherwise, that I’m some sort of cheap-skate son who won’t spend more than eleven bucks on his mother. Let me tell you how generous I am. Because she is celebrating a birthday during this visit, I invite her to dinner at the Forge, a Miami Beach restaurant with more objets d’art than a Las Vegas shopping arcade. To me, the decor is excessive, but to my mother, who has always wanted to eat there, it is beautiful.

  We go for the Early Bird, of course, although the Forge doesn’t call it an Early Bird. It’s Twilight Dining Service, three courses for $19.95.

  Ida, tempted by the steak Rosanne, asks the captain for an explanation of the dish. He begins, “It’s a ten-ounce steak, pounded—” She interrupts.

  “I don’t eat anything pounded.”

  I ask for the free-range Wisconsin duck.

  “Terrible,” my mother says. “The last time I couldn’t eat it. I should have sent it back. It was tough and stringy and—” I stop her.

  “I thought you said you’d never been here,” I say.

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  A L A N R I C H M A N

  “Oh,” she says, “it wasn’t here.”

  I have the duck. I give her a taste. “Now that’s what I call duck,” she says. She has the Forge special sirloin. Perfection. Dinner is accompanied by a bottle of slightly sweet Mo
sel wine, magnificently suited to the palate of a Jewish mother.

  Service is exquisite, helped along by my father, who assists the busboy in piling up our plates. Coffee costs extra, which is known to cause food riots among Early Birders, but my mother so loves the Forge that she shrugs when I mention the extra $1.95 involved. “I got money,” she says, implying that if a son won’t buy a mother a cup of coffee, what good is he?

  “You know,” she says, transferring her affections, “I like the wine steward.”

  She decides to tip him. On the way out she slips him three bucks, quite proper for a twenty-one-dollar bottle of wine. The wine steward tells me it is the first time in his thirteen years at the Forge that a woman

  “of that age” ever tipped him.

  “What age is that?” I innocently ask.

  “Oh, sixty-five or seventy,” he says.

  I catch up with Ida and Norman outside. When I tell her the wine steward’s estimate of her age, I expect her to simper with happiness.

  Instead, she looks at me the way she did so many years ago, when I came home with a C on my report card.

  “I gave him a tip,” she says. “What do you think he’s going to do, say I’m eighty?”

  GQ, november 1991

  T H E L O N G A L O H A

  When I look back to my college days, what I remember most is my first dinner date and the Pub-Tiki’s Sesame Chicken Aku-Aku. Let me tell you about this dish. Boneless white meat in a cream sauce as velvety as a warm tropical rain. Egg noodles as soft as twilight shadows. Sesame seeds, the most exotic seasoning I had ever tasted, sprinkled across the top. It was the very definition of alluring.

  The woman was lovely, too. She was a raven-haired wordsmith who worked with me on the University of Pennsylvania student newspaper, and she always wore a formfitting, tightly belted black vinyl raincoat. I had no idea what I was doing out with a girl like her, a knockout even under deadline pressure, but for that matter, I had no idea what I was eating, either. All I knew about Polynesian food was that it deserved to be described in the words of the great philosophers. Now, thirty years later, I can no longer recall those words. For that matter, I seldom recalled them on exam days, either.