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

by Unknown

  Not one of them was in his or her restaurant when I showed up.

  There was a time when cooking was a calling, and chefs believed they should be nowhere but in their restaurants. André Soltner, chef-owner 2 2 6

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  of Lutèce, lived above his and missed five nights of work in thirty-four years. These days, chefs are more likely to be out taping a show, getting photographed, or preening at a food festival. Yet truancy has done nothing to diminish their popularity. It wasn’t easy making a reservation at any of the restaurants, and when I finally did (under a false name), it was rarely at the time I would have wanted to eat. Finding one of these chefs behind a stove is hard, but dining in one of their restaurants at eight p.m. is even more difficult.

  In this country, celebrity dining has three interpretations. (The French and Italians may think they’re superior to us in culinary matters, but they’re way behind in celebrity cuisine.) We have celebrity-owned restaurants, which boast some sort of financial or promotional involvement by a well-publicized figure and are generally short-lived.

  Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Schatzi on Main in Santa Monica is one that has endured, although once he became governor it changed from celebrity-owned to politician-owned. We have celebrity-patronized restaurants, which are dining spots where famous people go to reaf-firm their right to occupy the best tables, even if ordinary people have begged for them weeks in advance. Le Cirque 2000 in New York is one such restaurant, as is The Ivy in L.A.

  Unlike the other celebrity-dining phenomena, the celebrity-chef restaurant is mainstream, a melding of food and fame directed at the common man. Because of franchising, it is enormously influential—

  at last count, English was a partner in seventeen restaurants. And thanks to your local supermarket, you need never deny yourself the pleasure of dining on celebrity-chef food, even if you’re merely opening a jar of Lagasse’s pasta sauce or heating up one of Puck’s famous pizzas. Due to television, celebrity chefs are more recognizable than news anchors.

  The six chefs whose restaurants I visited are certifiable stars, although not all in the same way. At age sixty, Waters is above it all, a celebrity with a cause, that being “sustainable agriculture.” More than any other chef-owner, she has forged bonds between restaurant and farmer. Her good work started with the opening of Chez Panisse more F O R K I T O V E R

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  than thirty years ago and continues with the Chez Panisse Foundation.

  DiSpirito, thirty-seven, had embarked on a conventional career path, concentrating on running the kitchen at Union Pacific in New York, when he signed up for the NBC reality show The Restaurant and opened Rocco’s on 22nd. In doing so, he provided a rapt American viewing public with an unlikely adventure, a red-sauce Italian restaurant careening out of control. No man before him has ever looked so bad in a television series in which he starred.

  English, forty-four, almost single-handedly altered the moribund Boston restaurant scene with his inexplicably tasty, pile-it-on presentations, more heap o’ cuisine than haute cuisine. With a cooking style perfectly suited to the ever-expanding tastes (and waistlines) of American diners, he has emerged as the most entrepreneurial of the celebrity chefs, with restaurants in hotels and airports and on the Queen Mary 2.

  Batali, forty-four, is the most successful interpreter of Italian food ever to work in this country and the host of three (at last count) Food Network shows, the most beloved being Molto Mario. He is sure-handed in all things except his short-pants-in-winter wardrobe. Puck, fifty-five, is the man behind Spago, the most renowned American restaurant west of New York. He introduced designer pizza, recast American food as casually chic, and established California cuisine as a benchmark of fine dining. Finally there’s Lagasse, forty-five, host of The Essence of Emeril and Emeril Live and the most triumphant television cook since Julia Child. Lagasse is as warmhearted as his television image, and, despite a penchant for pork fat, far more gifted at the stove than is generally believed.

  The problem with celebrity chefs is not their skill; every one of them has created praiseworthy, crowd-pleasing food. What is worrisome about the trend toward idolization of chefs is that the more beloved they become, the less likely they are to be found in the establishments that benefit from using their names. To me, dining in a restaurant where the chef never shows up can be more discouraging than dining in a restaurant where the green beans are canned. For some of these chefs, a bad day is one when they aren’t on the road opening another bistro.

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  The original Spago, in West Hollywood, transformed fine dining into A-list entertainment. That Spago is gone. The new Spago, in Beverly Hills, is a California-European-Asian fusion restaurant with a few Austro-Hungarian items, such as goulash, from Wolfgang Puck’s past.

  When I arrived, I was immediately shown to the sort of table I always get—the worst in the house. There is something about me, perhaps a look of passivity, that tells maître d’s I have come to be abused.

  Spago has a number of convivial dining areas, but I was seated in the gloom of a passageway leading to the men’s room. When I expressed dismay, I was told my table was the favorite of Academy Award–winning actor Red Buttons, the fourth-funniest man named Red (behind Skel-ton, Foxx, and Auerbach). I can only surmise that Red enjoys reliving the misery of the dining room scene from The Poseidon Adventure, one of his more memorable movies. I asked to be moved and was immediately seated among my betters, at a table near the open kitchen, where I could watch cooks in white doo-rags bustling about. I didn’t see Puck, but I noticed executive chef Lee Hefter and executive pastry chef Sherry Yard, well-known culinary figures in their own right.

  Hefter was supervising the kitchen staff, while Yard was doing the rounds of the dining room, greeting regulars, at the moment seated in a booth with friends. When a plate of steamed mussels arrived, she clapped her hands gleefully and waved the aroma their way. For my friends and me, no applauding chefs. Still, the standard complimentary amuse-gueules, spicy tuna tartare in a miso-infused cone followed by foie gras over chopped figs, were remarkable.

  Then Yard recognized me, or at least suspected she did. She utilized a very clever find-the-food-critic maneuver. She stood in front of me, stuck out her hand, and introduced herself. What else could I do except confess? That’s when I got the kind of treatment Red Buttons could only dream about: out came enough food to satisfy the midnight buffet line on a cruise ship. Our waiter asked if we had enough room, and offered to expand our table if we felt cramped. I could have had it all.

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  I was tempted to demand the removal of the lowlifes at the table adjoining ours—their clinking silverware was annoying me—but I took pity on them. I could have insisted on Sinatra instead of the grating techno-rock, but then I came to my senses. I had become a celebrity food writer for a moment, giving me a glimpse of the corruption inherent in fame.

  Between courses, I asked Yard why Puck wasn’t in the restaurant.

  She said he was usually around. Actually, it hardly mattered. Hefter, a Jersey guy, is such a masterful chef that to me Spago doesn’t suffer when Puck takes a night off. I can’t think of another celebrity-chef restaurant with a deputy as talented as Hefter.

  I asked Yard what influence Puck has on her desserts, and she went into mimicry mode. She puffed up her cheeks, and said in a very inept Austrian accent, “Make it bigger. Bigger!” Her reply to him? “Wolf, this isn’t a diner.” For dessert, I had Persian mulberries that Yard found at a farmer’s market. I didn’t know there were mulberries in Persia. I didn’t even know there was a Persia. I always thought mulberries were underachieving blackberries, but these were explosively sweet. With perfect mulberries, who needs a celebrity chef? Who even needs a chef?

  Up north, just outside San Francisco, is the long-running restaurant of Alice Waters,
a celebrity chef against her will. She has done little to exploit her reputation as one of the pioneers of new American cuisine except put out cookbooks. She has one restaurant, one vision. What Puck did for pizza, she did for produce. She is a consecrated figure, a hearty helping of Julia Child with a pinch of Mahatma Gandhi.

  Obtaining a reservation downstairs at Chez Panisse is nearly impossible. I did it by accepting a table upstairs (where more casual food is offered) and asking to be placed on the downstairs waiting list. The menu there is straightforward: one set meal at one set price is served each evening. What I’d heard is that people with downstairs reservations check the Chez Panisse website to learn if they like what’s being served the night they’ve booked. If it’s Tunisian night, or something like that, they cancel. The night I went, it wasn’t something like that. It was Tunisian night.

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  That has to be how I got my table. Everybody read that they had to pay fifty dollars for Tunisian short ribs plus salad and pie and decided pizza at home sounded great. I got a 9:15 p.m. slot, late for California but probably very chic for Tunisia.

  I was thrilled. Finally I was to eat at a restaurant I’d admired from afar for decades. I admit that I wasn’t entirely open to the idea of eating food from a country that doesn’t have any good restaurants. And I’m pretty sure the last time Tunisian short ribs appeared on a menu was during the Second Punic War. Short ribs are profoundly heavy fare, a cut of beef favored by folks who enter pie-eating contests at state fairs.

  Chez Panisse—the word chez, with its snazzy French connotations, is misleading—looked nothing like what I expected. The exterior is cluttered with vines on overhead trestles, making the restaurant resemble some cheesy Italian red-sauce spot. There was also a peace sign fabricated from garlic bulbs left over from a Bastille Day celebration.

  My first impression after walking inside was that the place needed some serious livening up, the sort that could be provided by the presence of a spirited celebrity chef. I asked the sommelier when Waters would be arriving, and he said, matter-of-factly, “She has a lot of projects going on.” I glanced into the open kitchen. The cook doing most of the work had a funny beard and could well have been Amish. I told the waitress I was hoping for Waters, not some dour-looking guy specializing in funnel cake. She told me that Waters “never cooks here.

  She’s hired chefs who she trusts. She might come in and taste, but the restaurant runs itself.”

  Chez Panisse is not a conventional restaurant. It’s an ideology, a way of life. It’s not about idle pleasure. It is about proper nourishment.

  It teaches you what is good for you. Do Americans need such lessons?

  Sure. Do we appreciate such lessons? Not often, but once in a while we listen, especially when Waters is preaching to us.

  The three little salads that made up my first course were better than the three little salads I invariably sample when I make my first pass through a Sunday buffet line, but that’s as much praise as I can muster. The short rib was a mere morsel, an Eve-sized portion consist-F O R K I T O V E R

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  ing of one rib. It was tender, meaty, and fatty, so I suppose a single rib was Waters’ way of saying that fatty meat is fine if you don’t eat too much of it. It came with a mild green sauce that reminded me of South American chimichurri. For all I know about Tunisia, it might be in South America. The pie—okay, it was a tart—had a nice, buttery crust.

  I didn’t leave happy. Or full. I had eaten a perfectly satisfactory but oddly perfunctory meal, one brimming with rationality but devoid of entertainment. I understand that Waters has become a mother figure to all of us, a voice of responsibility, but even meals at home with Mom had more laughs than this one.

  “Where’s Todd?” I asked the waiter as he led me to my table.

  By saying only his first name, I hoped to present myself as an intimate friend, a confidant of the chef. I’ll do anything to get waiters to talk.

  “He was in earlier,” the waiter replied.

  I was surprised. English has so many restaurants, I figured there wasn’t much chance of him being at this particular one.

  “Why did he leave?” I asked.

  I already knew the answer. Celebrity chefs don’t mind being in their restaurants, providing they don’t have to stay long. For them it’s like stopping in at a book-signing or a charity event.

  “I don’t know,” was the reply. “He came in, yelled at all of us, and left.” Olives, in the Charlestown section of Boston, a few blocks from Bunker Hill, is English’s flagship restaurant. The original opened in 1989, a block from its current site, with a no-reservation policy. It was such an immediate sensation that lines formed, filled with outsiders who would not ordinarily have been welcomed on the mean streets of what was then America’s most racist community. I always believed Olives was a significant influence in altering Charlestown from the redneck ghetto it was into the yuppie enclave it has become. Say what you will about yuppies, at least they’re friendly. These days Olives accepts reservations, charges $15 for valet parking, has doubled in size, and presents an elegant countrified ambiance. The clientele, being from Boston, tends to dress in shorts and flip-flops.

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  My meal was a mess. The famous black-truffle-and-foie-gras flan was ice cold in the middle. The accompanying sauce was warm. This caused my innocent dinner guest to ask if English was trying to make a point by contrasting hot and cold. The only point this dish made was that the hot-appetizer station wasn’t very skilled at reheating food. Obviously, English hadn’t yelled quite enough.

  Black olive dumplings stuffed with creamy goat cheese were wickedly rich, as the food here so often is. Two of us couldn’t finish a half order, which led me to ask the waiter if any person had ever downed a full order by himself. He said, “It’s insane to try.” Absolutely disastrous were the “handcut pappardelle noodles,” a puddle of flour and goo.

  Roast pork, cleverly accompanied by fig jam, was unbelievably overcooked, a few degrees from dust.

  As bad as Olives turned out to be, it left me rapturous compared with dinner at Rocco’s on 22nd, of The Restaurant fame. This was the series that turned waiters into household names and made a cult figure out of Rocco DiSpirito’s mother, Nicolina. She threw her heart, her love, and her frail little body into the labor of making meatballs for her son’s restaurant, which would have been wonderful except they weren’t very good. They’re more like underspiced miniature meat loaves.

  Four of us went on a Saturday night in August, just after the final episode of the first season was aired. Because DiSpirito knows me, I sent my three friends in first to see if he was there.

  Number one said, “I didn’t see Rocco.” Number two said, “I didn’t see anybody working there I recognized from the TV show.”

  Number three said, “I didn’t see anybody I’ve ever seen in New York before. Everybody is from out of town.” I asked our waitress, a small black woman wearing an oversize belt buckle that read goomba, why Rocco wasn’t in the kitchen. “He’s busy doing press because of the show,” she replied.

  She told us he stops in a few times a week to “check things out.” Clearly, food preparation is not on his checklist. In a city where the standards of Bronx-Italian cooking aren’t particularly high to begin with, F O R K I T O V E R

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  Rocco’s on 22nd served some of the worst red-sauce dishes I’ve ever encountered. After tasting the strip steak alla pizzaiola, absolutely unrecognizable as beef, I swore I’d never eat meat in an Italian restaurant again.

  That vow lasted less than a week. Soon I was lurking outside Mario Batali’s Babbo, awaiting the arrival of friends. I planned to repeat the scouting mission so successful at Rocco’s on 22nd, send them in as forward observers. My scheme failed when the restaurant’s wine director, David Lynch, spotted me and came outside to ask what I was doing aimlessly walking up and down. I made
some feeble excuse about loving fresh air, which I don’t, and asked him if Batali was in the kitchen.

  “He won’t be here tonight.Too bad. It’s his day off,” Lynch said.

  Critics are almost always given complimentary dishes once they’re spotted, and mine was pig’s-foot milanese. Snicker if you will, but Italian oddities that almost never find their way onto American menus are what Batali does incredibly well. The pig’s foot was a thin, crisp cutlet, all crunchiness and fat. I liked it a lot.

  During dinner, I got into a conversation with a Los Angeles couple at the next table, and I asked them if they were disappointed that Batali wasn’t cooking. The answer, I thought, was a compliment to the food.

  “Is he the chef?” the woman asked. They came to the restaurant whenever they were in the city not to see a chubby man with a red face running around in implausible clothing but because they admired the cuisine. They didn’t care who was preparing it. “It’s wonderful,” she said.

  She was almost 100 percent right. I enjoyed every dish except the breast of veal, a special of the day. I remember how wonderfully well my mother made her breast of veal, and this dish wasn’t nearly as tender, moist, or luscious. For the second time, a celebrity-chef meal had reminded me of dinner with Mom. This was not how I expected this adventure to work out.

  Getting a table at Emeril’s isn’t as difficult as it used to be, but satisfying the reservation clerk is demanding. She wanted the number of my hotel (I hadn’t booked one) or my cell phone (I don’t own one). She told me 2 3 4

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  when to reconfirm and how to dress. Although it isn’t expressed explicitly, the idea behind the dress code at Emeril’s is that restaurant patrons not resemble the studio audience at Emeril Live.

  Somehow I got through the qualifying tests. Although I had made a reservation for two, I came alone. (A beautiful young blond prostitute solicited me on the streets of New Orleans while I was walking to Emeril’s, but unfortunately it was a guy.) The hostess said, “I’ve got a great spot for you at the chef ’s food bar, overlooking the entire kitchen.” I’d purposely asked for a table, not the so-called food bar—I don’t like perching on a stool while I eat. I decided not to argue. The open kitchen at Emeril’s is supposedly a laugh riot, every night remindful of Mardi Gras.