Anything That Moves

by Dana Goodyear

  • • •

  The morning of the dinner, Quenioux walked into Starry Kitchen with a plastic tub filled with carefully washed marijuana leaves separated by layers of paper towel. He had just clipped them from his friend’s patch. “Where’s my soup?” he said, and dumped a twelve-gallon bin into a pot on the CookTek induction oven. “I always said I would never do consommé in this kitchen, ever. But I got pushed.” This one was made in the European way, with a clarif of wild boar, partridge, carrots, leeks, egg white, and onion, and, for the purposes of experimentation, ginseng (a blood-cleanser, in Chinese medicine) and Angelica sinesis (a woodsy, licorice-scented stalk, which is traditionally used as a uterine tonic). “These tastes are not recognized in people’s brains,” he said. “They haven’t developed the taste for it, and so we added kaffir and galangal to get people happy.”

  Quenioux poured a handful of apricot kernels from the Chinese apothecary into a saucepan and covered them with consommé. They would confer a fresh, almondy flavor, but too many, Thi warned, might induce vomiting. “Date! I need date!” he said, and dropped nine red jujubes (for anemia) into the pan. The potential legal entanglements of the night ahead nagged at him. Nguyen, he said, had become nervous enough to get a medical marijuana card the day before, from “Doc 420,” a pot doctor with her own bikini calendar. “I say, ‘Well, Nguyen, are you concerned? Should I be concerned about something?’” Quenioux muttered, adding chunks of papaya to the soup.

  A security guard with a walkie-talkie poked his head in the restaurant door, and everyone in the kitchen froze. A tall cook with glasses and a goatee, who was roasting a tray of partridge skins in cannabis butter, crouched down and peered through the pass-through. Daniel glanced up from a sheet of pastry he was basting, also with cannabis butter. Quenioux composed himself and went to talk to the guard. A moment later, he returned, giggling: someone had dumped trash in the wrong bin.

  Quenioux melted more coconut oil on the stove, filling the kitchen with a rank, dizzying smell, and put a bowl of it on the counter. Out came the tapioca maltodextrin, a powder for making powder. He added it to the oil bit by bit, and slowly the substance in the bowl clumped. Passed through a fine sieve, it turned into a fluffy, flaky heap—pot snow, at room temperature. Daniel spooned it up and tasted it. “That’s sexy,” he pronounced. “That’s fucking cool.” Over the snow, he shook a little jar: the reserved crystals. “You have to treat it like a lady,” he said, tossing it gently with a fork.

  That evening, it was clear and windy in Encino. A film of pollen swirled in the pool, and the birds-of-paradise bobbed like oil derricks. The hostess had on a black dress and straw-soled wedge sandals. Her husband, who had clients in from China, had decided to entertain them at the country club instead. In the kitchen, an Irish bartender, red-bearded and thin, with pointy shoes, stood at the stove stirring a cauldron of garam masala, ginger, cardamom, hashish, and milk, which he was going to serve with dark rum. “I used to do this in Ireland as a kid,” he said. “I’d take butter and hashish on a spoon and heat it up and dump it in yogurt.” He opened a jar of vodka, which he had infused with marijuana using a PolyScience Smoking Gun and then mixed with a marijuana-vanilla tincture. He called the drink a Medicated Gibson. To me it smelled exactly like Dorm Room Couch.

  Daniel checked the time on his phone. Instead of a picture of a girlfriend or a pet, the background image was a lobe of foie, searing in a pan. Soon the guests, shuttled by minivan, for security reasons, from the parking lot of a nearby Gelson’s supermarket, started to arrive: foodies in their twenties; a porn editor; a prominent libertarian attorney and his wife, a Broadway producer; a Cal Tech neuroscientist in his seventies who had never tried marijuana before. “There’s Jonathan Gold!” said a twenty-five-year-old Yelper sitting at my table. Alex and Alex, a young married couple—she a student of applied physics, he a tunneling engineer—stared at him over their pêche lambic, before he-Alex summoned the nerve to go meet him. “He’s a really big fan,” his wife said.

  Nguyen came out from the kitchen. “Mr. J. Gold, you are not special here!” he announced to the room, proving that, in fact, he was. “You get to sit down and eat like everyone else.” He went on to describe his idea of a plausible legal loophole. “Technically, you are here for a $150 gift and you can stay for dinner,” he said.

  “As a lawyer, is this legal?” someone asked the libertarian attorney. “No,” he said, and smiled. He went on, “Free minds and free markets. The government says you can’t eat the kinds of ingredients you want at a dinner like this, and we think you should be able to.”

  The soup came out—clear and musky, with a sweet, strong almond-extract flavor from the apricot kernels, and a suggestion of slipperiness from some nameko mushrooms. When the monkfish congee was served, the hostess took a delicate bite. “It’s a little tingly,” she said. “Otherwise it’s delicious.”

  “I’d describe it as billowy,” her tablemate said.

  The atmosphere was billowy, too, the guests high on the promise of getting high—but not actually, some complained, getting all that high. The neuroscientist said he felt sleepy, like he had drunk a bottle of beer. A woman in a green beret scratched her back with a fork. But everyone perked up for dessert. Quenioux had scrapped the osmanthus cake in favor of an osmanthus panna cotta—creamy, with the light, floral sweetness of elderflower—which was served with rhubarb gelée and blood-orange sorbet. The plate was decorated with kumquats, tomatoes, an asparagus spear, a swish of frozen cream, and the pot snow. “What an extraordinary druggy joke!” an art historian with a pierced brow said. “It tastes like cannabis, but it looks like cocaine.” On the way out, Quenioux handed each guest the “gift” that had inspired the meal, a glass apothecary jar containing two truffles and a gasp of marijuana smoke.

  Food, in the foodie movement, is often treated like a controlled substance. With the Weed Dinner, Quenioux took the conceit a step further, but that was not even his point. All he wanted was to investigate a virgin flavor. He left the dinner with several dishes and ingredients to add to his repertoire: the congee and the osmanthus panna cotta, the marijuana powder, the apricot kernels. “These were phenomenal,” he said. He recently made “dust” from the kernels, and served it on a dish of duck gizzards, hearts, and tongues. He told me he has no qualms about serving pot food in a more public forum, like at a pop-up. Quenioux is the avant-garde of the avant-garde; consistently, though, his peculiar fixations—ants, hearts, stolen flowers, hare—have become part of the culinary vocabulary. “I want to appreciate the marijuana, and the Chinese herbs, as a culinary device,” he said. “In ten years, marijuana will be the new oregano.”

  PART III

  DISCOMFORT FOOD

  Seven

  GUTS

  In the early 1940s, Maurice C. Dreicer, born on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, heir to a jewelry fortune, embarked on a quest to find the perfect steak. The meat, he determined, had to come from a happy, corn-fed, four-year-old steer. It should be cut to a two-pound steak—less than that he considered an hors d’oeuvre—at least three inches thick, and aged for four to six weeks. It should be cooked to 120 degrees—a temperature he called “extra blood-rare”—over charcoal, and be served, without seasoning, on oak not porcelain.

  Dreicer’s restaurant ritual was extreme. He prowled cities with a pair of binoculars fitted with a camera, which he used to photograph diners through restaurant windows, and he devised his own system of merit: to restaurants that served good steak he awarded a silver butter knife; those with “superlatively fine steak” got one in gold. When his food was served, he produced from his pockets or from the black doctor’s case he sometimes carried with him a scale to weigh a raw steak, a ruler to measure its thickness, a magnifying glass to inspect the marbling, a thermometer to verify the temperature, and a silver butter knife; meat that did not yield to it would get sent back. Sometimes he brought a homemade device with two probes and a dial, which he cl
aimed tested acidity. In later years, he added a pair of white gloves and a monocle. Waiters often thought he was from the health department. He committed wholly to the role; once, in San Francisco, he visited twenty-three restaurants in one night, tasting the specialties of every house.

  His rules for consumption were, as you might expect, specific. Steak, he believed, was best eaten after an appetizer of shrimp cocktail (he mixed his own sauce from a quarter of a lemon, a teaspoon of French mustard powder, a dab of English mustard, a touch of hot sauce, and three turns of a pepper mill). Tomatoes were the only acceptable accompaniment. And, if possible, steak should be eaten alone. “Women talk too much. A steak eater should not be distracted, so he can receive the utmost enjoyment from the steak,” he said. “The only way to enjoy a steak is to concentrate on it, and exclude everything else from your mind.”

  By 1949, Dreicer claimed to have already eaten steak in a thousand restaurants. By 1969, he had spent more than $600,000 on the project. A decade later, the restaurant count was ten thousand, in eighty-two countries. A manuscript, “My 27-Year Search for the Perfect Steak—Still Looking,” at last materialized, but failed to find a publisher. Evidence suggests that Dreicer did not want his quest to end. By the late sixties, he and his “traveling secretary”—a young woman named Brigitte, who spoke English, French, German, and some Spanish; acted as his chauffeur, as he did not drive; and at some point became his wife—had relocated from New York to the Canary Islands. They spent months on end visiting fine hotels and eating delicacies, grading charts in hand. She kept thin by limiting the amount of liquid she consumed. He was the kind of man who lit his cigar with two matches at once to intensify the flavor. He once joked that if he ever did find the perfect steak, he’d be out of a job.

  The figure of the modern gourmet was still taking shape in Dreicer’s time. A 1961 Los Angeles Times piece on the emerging business posed the question “But who is a gourmet?” and said, “No clear portrait has yet been drawn.” The reporter then cited Max Ries, of Reese Finer Foods, who told her that the “average gourmet customer” was forty to fifty-five years old, of moderate earning power, and preferred “to entertain at home with cocktail parties, little dinners or backyard barbecues. And for the most part these fancy food shoppers do their own cooking.” What was noteworthy was that American gourmets did not employ cooks.

  A student of restaurants, Dreicer longed to professionalize his obsession—and argued before the tax court that his deductions, far in excess of his earnings, did not constitute a lifestyle but culinary research. The twentieth century didn’t know what to make of him. Newspapers identified him as a “professional gourmet” or as a “gastronomical authority” or as a “fellow of infinite zest and tireless intake.” The tax court, which ruled against him, referred to his “epicurism” and called his manuscript a “sybaritic swan song.” He was an amateur expert, a food-nerd savant, in a world that did not yet recognize this category of being. Today, we know exactly what to call him: America’s first foodie.

  • • •

  Steak was the lingua franca of mid-century American dining and the common denominator Dreicer thought would allow him to compare the quality of food in different regions of the country and around the world. Beef consumption in this country hit its peak in the seventies. Since then, it has declined nearly forty pounds per capita a year. In the past five years, while still eating much more meat than any other country in the world, we have also cut back on chicken and pork. As meat has become a less important part of the American diet, the rituals around eating it have grown increasingly primitive. The white gloves have come off; contemporary foodies want an unmediated experience.

  “It’s not Bacchanalian, it’s Caligulan!” the woman to my left exclaimed one night at Totoraku, an invitation-only, all-beef restaurant in Los Angeles, as course after course of raw beef came to the table. She was a member of a dining group that calls itself the Hedonists. On my right, another Hedonist, a Totoraku regular who had invited me along, was photographing each dish with a macrolens and macroflash. I felt obliged to gulp down as much raw beef throat as I could, and made sure that I was seen doing it.

  In its first issue, in 2007, Meatpaper, a San Francisco journal devoted to exploring meat as a metaphor, identified a “fleischgeist”: a “growing cultural trend of meat consciousness, a new curiosity about not just what’s inside that hotdog, but how it got there, and what it means to be eating it.” One of Meatpaper’s founders told me that at their early public events people almost came to blows over access to corn dogs. “I’m still wrapping my mind around what happened,” she said. “There was a certain kind of urgency and aggressiveness around consumption. It was a savage meat party—frenzied and visceral.” She meant “visceral” literally: to a striking degree, the meat movement is about organs.

  More than other kinds of foods, meat forces a confrontation with our animal natures. In his classic 1941 paper on disgust, the Hungarian-born psychiatrist Andras Angyal observed that, because it comes from a dead animal, one would expect meat to be universally repulsive, yet almost every culture on earth has found ways of accommodating it psychologically. In America, extracting the muscle and selling it apart from the animal has been very effective. “Beefsteak does not involve for us the meaning that it is part of a dead animal,” Angyal writes. Cooking is another essential part of the transformation—raw meat evokes the animal more perfectly, and is therefore unappealing to many. But some animals, no matter how you slice or cook them, never make the leap from dead body to food. “This failure is best shown by the fact that in any given culture only the meat of a limited variety of animals is eaten, while that of many others is avoided as disgusting,” he writes. The disgusting proposition of the fleischgeist is to remind the eater at every turn that the thing on his plate once lived, and to suggest that just about any animal is fair game.

  Offal—the parts that “fall off” when you hang a piece of meat—generally occupies a dubious space in modern Anglo food culture. In Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery, the English food expert Jane Grigson wrote, “Before the war I remember hearing ‘Ai never eat Offal’, spoken with emphasis and pride, a brave flicker of light in a crude waste of offal-gobblers, yet another pea felt through twenty mattresses. War shortages taught better sense. Nutritive values were proclaimed and prejudices fell, at least as far as kidneys, liver and hearts went.”

  In 1995, Fergus Henderson opened St. John, in London, an expensive restaurant for offal-gobblers, which made offcuts fashionable. Henderson, who thinks eating should involve what he calls a “hands-on grappling with bones,” has become a hero to certain American chefs. In addition to marrow bones, he serves pluck: the heart, lungs, windpipe, liver, and intestines. According to Anthony Bourdain, Henderson’s cookbook The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating is “a cult masterpiece . . . a historic document that flew in the face of accepted culinary doctrine . . . [a] proud proclamation of the true glories of pork, offal, and the neglected bits of animals we love to eat.” In the book, Henderson comes across as a nutty old nanny, blood-spattered glasses askew, clucking away about fat chunks and blood, and about how “soothing” and “reassuring” innards are. He applauds the “amazing ducky quality of Duck Hearts on Toast.”

  “Fergus’s little book influenced an entire generation of cooks to think outside steaks and chops,” Tom Mylan, who runs The Meat Hook, a butcher shop in Brooklyn, told me. Diners were drawn to its realness, the antithesis of foam. “What is more authentic than eating heart and marrow bones?” he said. “It made for an experience exclusively based on adventurousness. Only certain people could muster up the courage. Serving offal is one of the very few authentic experiences where people are going to respond with their full attention. Either you have their fascination or their complete disgust and revulsion.”

  • • •

  A year into the declared fleischgeist, Animal opened. A small, spare restaurant decorated with a framed lamb’s skull
and a Muppets lunchbox, in an old Jewish district of Los Angeles, it celebrates the indelicate, messy, uncivilized side of meat. At first, until the din of meat-eating grew deafening, it had no soundproofing. There are still no tablecloths, no centerpieces, and no candles; it is a restaurant broken down, blowing it out before the demolition crew arrives. Animal’s co-owners and co-chefs, Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo, are in their thirties and used to have a show on Food Network called Two Dudes Catering. They cook an elevated version of what Gold calls “Boy Food”: loco moco—a Hawaiian surfer meal, which they make from artisanal Anson Mills rice, a Niman Ranch beef patty, a quail egg, a slab of Spam, and (historically) a brick of foie—and poutine, covered with cheddar and an oxtail topping that has the texture of chaw. The place invites transgression—in fact, it commits it alongside you. Its landlord, next door, is Schwartz Bakery, and the lease stipulates that, for competitive reasons, the chefs cannot advertise as kosher. Schwartz has nothing to fear. Animal uses three kinds of bacon and manages to incorporate pork into just about everything, including the bar of dense dark-chocolate mousse that is its signature dessert, and which customers often order with a glass of milk. Shook’s parents are Lubavitchers. Shook and Dotolo embraced whole-animal cookery with gusto. Grappling with the product in its least-processed form appealed to them on an aesthetic level; the economics of using every part spoke to their thrift. Nate Appleman, a proponent of offcuts and charcuterie, who by his mid-twenties was part owner of a restaurant in San Francisco, says that the only way he could afford to serve the same meat as Thomas Keller—the highly esteemed chef at The French Laundry, in the Napa Valley, and at Per Se, in New York, considered among the finest restaurants in the country—was to buy the entire beast and cook it all. Shook and Dotolo have served lamb tongue ravioli, lamb heart paprikás, deviled lamb kidneys, veal brains à la grénobloise. “What they do at Animal is use the cuts nobody wants,” Appleman says. “They’re really pushing the limits. They had a dish on the menu that was thirty duck hearts in curry. It was hard even for me to get through.”