by Jay Rayner
A printed menu is no longer enough. Now brigades of diners go out armed with digital cameras, determined to collect their experiences much like butterfly collectors with their nets and killing jars. They photograph each plate of food as it arrives and, within an hour of returning home, can post on the Web a fully illustrated account of their evening out. Any chef who once thought they could get away with copying a few dishes because they happen to be thousands of miles from the restaurant that created them is now mistaken. It doesn’t matter whether you are in Melbourne or Tokyo, and it certainly doesn’t matter whether nobody else in Tokyo has ever cooked crispy beets before, or shoved beef in a tube with nitrous oxide. If somebody else somewhere else has already done the same thing, the butterfly collectors will spot it.
It seemed to me that being a young chef trying to forge a reputation—being a Jeff Ramsey—had become a very tricky business indeed. Later he took me for breakfast at one of the steamy cafés that ring the market and tried as best he could to answer my questions about Japanese culinary culture, but it was clear that, by raising the plagiarism row, I had trampled onto delicate territory. I felt sorry for ever having mentioned it. All I wanted to do was resume my search for the perfect dinner.
It was when I saw the dining room that I realized I was about to experience something special. I had asked Hide Yamamoto to make sure that one of my bookings was in a sushi restaurant, and expected him to tell me that he had secured a seat at one of the big-name joints—Kyubei, perhaps, or Mizutani or Jiro. Instead, he booked me into somewhere called Okei-Sushi, and I became increasingly suspicious he had sent me for white-boys’ sushi. The restaurant boasted a Web site, for god’s sake, on which was proclaimed: We are really happy when customers are amazed by our unique ways of preparing sushi and go, “Wow, it is delicious!!” Those two exclamation marks worried me.
But now I was here and everything was fine. It was better than fine. It was as good as it could be. When I knocked on the door, a young man dressed in white had stuck his head out, grinned, and nodded while intoning the name of my hotel. When I nodded back, he pointed me to the next building. There was a sliding door that, like something in Alice in Wonderland after she had swallowed the cake marked “Eat Me” and begun to grow, was only two thirds of my height. I bent over to get inside and found myself in a small, coir-matted anteroom, where another young man was waiting for me, kneeling down, his back perfectly straight. Beside him was a pair of slippers and I understood I should remove my shoes. Obviously he wanted me to put on the slippers but we could both see they would barely fit over my big toes, so we ignored them. Instead he led me in stockinged feet to the dining room, where there was a beautiful blond-wood counter. The floor stood at roughly the same level as the counter, save for just in front of it, where there was a rectangular well into which I was to fit my legs.
I could see that normally this counter had space for five or six people. Not tonight. There were no other diners. Instead, tonight, it was set for just one, and that one person was me. I had found my way to the smallest and most exclusive high-end restaurant in the world.
Standing behind the counter was sushi master Masashi Suzuki, a stocky, round-headed, middle-aged man with gently bulging eyes who looked a little like a Japanese Peter Lorre. He had on a white, short-sleeved jacket and around his completely shaved head he wore a red coil of material called a hachimaki. He bowed deeply to me and I bowed back. He indicated that I should sit, and I crammed myself into the space, dead center of the counter.
Neither of us spoke each other’s language, save for a little shared food vocabulary. I could say uni for sea urchin and otoro for belly tuna; bar the odd catchphrase, he could say only mackerel and cuttlefish (or almost, for the L sound really does present the Japanese with problems). None of this mattered. Here in this restaurant for one, there were always ways that we could make ourselves understood, even if occasionally we had to resort to the infantile gesture of belly rubbing to indicate pleasure. In any case, not that much was required of me. My job was to eat what I was given and coo when what I had been given was lovely to eat, which demanded no acting on my part, as it had when Robuchon watched me eat his food in Las Vegas. Save for one noxious dish of sliced sea cucumber—which felt like it had been thrown in to remind me how fabulous Asami hadn’t been and how marvelous this was—the food here was extraordinary.
When I looked later at my notebook I counted thirty-two different stages to the meal and noticed that relatively few had been traditional nigiri or maki sushi. There was sashimi of red snapper, sprinkled with lime juice, and pieces of marinated cuttlefish, which I was instructed to eat with cold sake sipped from a tiny glazed saucer. Mr. Suzuki made a bowl of bright orange salmon eggs mixed with wasabi and more sweetened sake, which was dense and intense. He gave me the crisp roasted bones of tiny fish to chew on, which were crunchy and savory, and made a simple salad of pickled sliced onion and the sweetest of tomatoes.
Like a children’s entertainer, he pulled from underneath the counter his box of tricks, an open cabinet filled with perfect cuts of raw fish. One corner was taken up with sea urchin. There was bream and octopus and a sizeable chunk of otoro. He took this from the box, sliced it up, and pressed the pieces onto a hibachi grill for a few seconds. He indicated that I should eat them immediately and I did as I was told. The layers of fat had just begun to melt and my mouth filled with an outrageously rich and perfumed fresh fishiness.
He took some pieces of clam from the box and threw them down onto the counter as hard as he could, to watch them curl back on themselves, which I understood to be his way of proving their freshness. He seemed satisfied with the degree of curl and put the pieces in a bowl with a little soy, ponzu, and pepper. These, too, went onto the hibachi for a moment to seal them. This time the clam didn’t get stuck in my throat as it had done at Asami. Instead, it was gone from my mouth too soon.
He tipped the box toward me and invited me to choose, so I had some sea urchin, which he shaped onto a lozenge of rice, without the aid of the seaweed collar usually used to keep it in place. I had some freshwater prawn and then a tartar of the otoro mixed with the wasabi. Next he pulled out a long banana leaf and began to form pieces of nigiri sushi, each one a delicate little sculpture. He painted them with a slick of soy—heaven forbid I should dredge them clumsily through a bowl of sauce myself—and when I lifted my chopsticks to begin eating, he raised his hand to stop me.
He wanted to show me how sushi should be eaten: the way each piece should be rolled onto its back by the middle finger, and then picked up between thumb and index finger. Now I am told to tip my head back and place the sushi on my tongue, fish side down. Of course at first I got it wrong. I tried to do the roll with my index finger and my digits ended up in an uncomfortable muddle, a confusing game of twister. But the second time, I got it right and I felt the warm glow of Mr. Suzuki’s approval. He was the master, and I was his student. He made more and more nigiri, eager now to see me eat, working his knife with ever more delicate strokes through the bream and the eel and the mackerel.
We had become friends, and to prove it he performed party tricks. He took a length of cucumber and, lying it flat on the counter, flicked his blade across it so fast, it disappeared into a blur of shiny metal.
“Showtime!” he whispered as the cucumber fell apart into delicate fronds. He made a maki roll with the pieces, and then slapped one down on the counter so it stood upright, the lengths of cucumber sticking up high above the rice. “Tokyo Tower!” he said with a big grin, referencing the city’s landmark telecommunications array that can be seen from almost anywhere in the capital.
At the end he gave me the sweetest of marinated cherries, which was the size of a plum, and then a little bitter jelly of grapefruit. Finally, to secure our fellowship, he produced from under the counter a large glass flagon of clear liquor with, coiled around the bottom, a slender three-foot snake, its jaws wide open so I could see its fangs. He poured two glasses and we toasted each other a
nd drained them in one, so that I was left only with the heat and the burn of raw alcohol, which I took to be the snake’s revenge.
The young man who had overseen the removal of my shoes now appeared at my side with a slip of paper upon which was written a number. That number was 50,000. Any attempt to calculate the value of this meal in terms of the ingredients used was, I knew, deeply silly. I had been given nearly three hours of the sushi master’s time and that was what I was being asked to pay £230 ($475) for, the most I had ever paid for a single meal, though in my state of rapture, it seemed irrelevant. This was what I had come for. This was what Tokyo had been all about. I threw down my credit card and waved it on its way.
After Tokyo I would be going to New York, which I regard as one of the most exciting food cities in the world. After that I would be spending time back in London, examining the flavors of home for clues about my own history, before heading off for what felt like an inevitable engagement with the grand food opera of Paris. But it seemed to me, as I eyed the jug of hooch and felt the alcoholic burn work its way down my insides, that wherever I now went, wherever next I ate, a part of me would always remain here in this Spartan room with the sushi and the snake and the force of nature that is Mr. Suzuki.
FIVE
NEW YORK
Morning in Manhattan. I stumble from my bed on the thirty-sixth floor of the London Hotel. My room looks north over the Upper West Side, with just a glimpse of Central Park between the shadow-locked buildings, and today, beneath an early summer sun, the view is magnificent. Or at least it would be if I could be bothered to look at it. I have been here a couple of days and already I am bored of the view. In any case, I have more important things to do today. I slump down at the desk, spark up my laptop, launch the Internet browser, and go straight to a food discussion board called Opinionated About.
The thread I want, the one I have been waiting for, for these past twenty-four hours, is finally there. It’s located exactly where it should be: in the “Formal Dining” part of the Web site, under “New York” in the “U.S. & North America” section. The first post had gone up about an hour before and is by a man called Steve Plotnicki. There are a couple of dozen photographs, all of them of plated food: an egg in an egg cup with a turban of cream piled high with shiny black caviar; slices of fish, fanned across the plate and drizzled with a sauce in a funky shade of yellow. There is a duck dish and a foie gras dish, and a whole bunch of other things besides. Plotnicki has invited the members of this site to identify where the meal that these dishes were a part of, was taken. He is giving no clues.
The first response, from a woman in London who goes by the online name SamanthaF—short for Samantha Friar—had been posted just twenty-four minutes after the original.
Her message says simply “Per Se,” naming Thomas Keller’s place, which is inside the Time Warner Building just a few blocks from where I am sitting. Per Se is one of only five restaurants in the city to have four stars from the New York Times, and one of only three to have three Michelin stars—for what that accolade is worth to New Yorkers, which isn’t very much. I note that Samantha hasn’t bothered with a question mark. She is certain she is right.
She is. “That was one of the places we ate at,” Plotnicki replies.
A few minutes later someone called Ian chips in. “Eleven Madison Park and WD-50.” Both have three stars from the New York Times. Again, no question mark. Ian is telling, not asking.
“That makes three,” Plotnicki says. “Two to go.”
Ian is on a roll. “Jean-Georges,” he says, naming the flagship restaurant of Alsatian chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Again, four New York Times stars, and three from Michelin. From my window I can just about see the ludicrous golden building on the southwest corner of the park that Jean-Georges calls home.
“You’re a clever lad,” Plotnicki says. “One left.”
Now the first note of disbelief creeps in, from a poster called Scotty.
“Five dinners in one night? Respect.” Just for good measure, he adds an emoticon of a smiley face. The Opinionated About crew are clearly enjoying this.
One woman tries to identify the remaining restaurant from the type of place mats pictured. Another recognizes a particular plating of desserts but is confused because, he says, the pastry chef responsible cooks in Chicago. A few minutes and some feverish Internet searching later, he’s back to say that he now understands the pastry chef concerned is cooking in New York, which would explain it.
“Did you have reservations at these places, or did you just show up?” asks one.
“How does one logistically eat that many meals @ dinner?” asks another. “Or does this include lunch too?”
“Some serious eating there chaps,” says a third. “I applaud your bravery and your gluttony.”
Finally Plotnicki explains: that these dishes were part of a restaurant crawl taking in five of the very best restaurants in the city—no more than two or three small, tasting-menu-sized courses in each place—that it was prearranged and that the two diners involved weren’t always served the same dish at each course, which explains the large number of dishes he had to photograph. Not that any of this is news to me. I know all the details. I know all the dishes. As he has already said, Plotnicki was not alone on this adventure. He had an accomplice. That accomplice was me.
I had eaten at Jean-Georges only once before, and what I remembered most from that day was the man in the corner attached to the oxygen tank. The lunch, back in November 2005, was hosted by the publishers of the Michelin Guide, to celebrate the release of the first star ratings for New York. I should have been absorbed by the pasta with its blizzard of white truffle shavings. I should have been swooning over the sashimi of Nantucket scallops on the vivid red cranberry jelly. Instead I couldn’t take my eyes off the elderly Japanese couple, seated at a table by the door, and the delicate transparent tubes that ran from a tank on the floor, over both of the gentleman’s impeccably tailored shoulders only to disappear up his nostrils.
I was impressed. The man’s life was ebbing away. His vital organs could barely keep him going without support. And yet here he was in one of the city’s best restaurants, enjoying a good lunch. The high-ceilinged room was flooded with light that day from the tall windows, and this, combined with the sight of the intubated man, only added to the sense that we were eating at altitude.
There is nobody on any kind of life-support machine this evening as we arrive for the first leg of our dinner, but there is a notable mood of excitement. Or perhaps that’s just what happens when you accompany wealthy men out to restaurants. Perhaps Steve Plotnicki is always received like this, with huge snow-field grins of recognition and bold, vigorous handshakes. I may be paying the bill, but he’s the sugar daddy, the one everybody is interested in. Bizarrely, this makes me the arm candy.
Certainly it convinces me I am with the right guy. I want to see New York through the eyes of the high-end food bloggers; the butterfly collectors, the ones who photograph their dinner, and Steve Plotnicki has done an awful lot of that. He has eaten everything from one side of America to the other side of Europe and has digitally photographed almost all of it. He has both his own blog, Opinionated About Dining, and the discussion forum, Opinionated About, which is known to its members as OA. I have been one of those members since it launched in 2003.
The son of a Brooklyn kosher butcher, Plotnicki, who is approaching his midfifties, made his original fortune in the music business and later from the ownership of Robot Wars, a hugely successful television show, versions of which aired in a number of international territories. And then there were the lawsuits, from which he also made serious money. Plotnicki was famously litigious, which stroppiness he attributed to being the child of a survivor of the Holocaust who had been forced to hide from the Nazis in the forests of Poland.
“I think because my dad was a Holocaust survivor, I’m fiercely protective of what’s mine,” Plotnicki said. “Perhaps overly protective.”
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br /> His revenge for his father’s experiences was to live well. After all, what better contrast was there with the privations of the old man than to turn a matter of survival—food—into a hobby? Now he had made his money, he was determined to pursue his hobby with as much seriousness as possible.
My idea was that I should live well with him, if only for one evening. I proposed that he choose his perfect location for a meal. We would eat, he would blog it, and I would pick up the bill.
“Can we do a crawl?” he said.
We started talking restaurants. He made some ambitious, completely unachievable suggestions. I told him to see if he could make it work. I didn’t for a moment think it would come off.
Of course, I was wrong, meaning that, tonight, I am back at Jean-Georges playing arm candy.
Everybody here seems to know what we are up to this evening. They appear genuinely pumped up to be the first leg. It is just after 6:30 p.m., as we are shown to a table in the middle of the outside wall with a perfect view of the room, which is already full.
“This is the table that Tim Zagat always sits at,” Plotnicki says in a stage whisper, naming the publisher of the hugely influential Zagat guides, whose reviews are compiled from those of diners across New York.
The Asian waiter who is in charge of us for our Jean-Georges hour approaches the table. “And so,” says Jin, “to get you started, we have a little champagne.”
He pours us a glass and announces it as a Tattinger 1996. I shudder. Plotnicki has told me not to worry about money, that he’s happy to chip in; he would prefer to eat well and pay for everyone than be denied the chance of a good night out. Still, I want to pay my way. Then again, a Tattinger ’96! That’s not a loose-change champagne. That’s a remortgage-the-house champagne. That’s a sell-the-kids-into-slavery champagne. Mentally I rehearse an explanation for my long-suffering wife as to why we’ll be feeding the children on the supermarket’s “value” range for the foreseeable future.
