Garlic and Sapphires

by Ruth Reichl

  She was happy to enlighten me. “People are scandalized that you have given that little noodle joint three stars. Three stars! They are saying that you will never last.” She paused for a moment and then added her final thought. “And just wait until they realize that the restaurant is on the second floor and lacks such modern amenities as elevators!”

  RESTAURANTS

  by Ruth Reichl

  IN JAPAN an expensive object is prized because of its price. This explains why people actually buy those $100 melons you sometimes see in Tokyo. It also helps explain why all my Japanese friends are so taken with Honmura An. “Very expensive soba?” they ask when they hear of the SoHo noodle parlor. “They must be good.”

  They are. The buckwheat noodles known as soba have been eaten in Japan for 400 years. As soba restaurants multiplied, the Japanese urge for perfection set in, and soba masters began competing to see who could make the purest soba. This is not easy. Buckwheat is extremely nutritious, but it resists turning into malleable dough. Ordinary soba noodles are made mostly of wheat: to make pure buckwheat noodles that do not shatter and crack apart requires the hand of a true master. The Japanese say it takes a year just to learn to mix the dough, another year to learn to roll it, a third to learn the correct cut. The soba chefs at Honmura An have clearly put in their time.

  Knowing this can put you in the proper spirit. The room will certainly put you in the mood: it is a spare, almost severe, quietly soothing space. It is so peaceful that just walking in the door makes you slow down and lower your voice. Even the air seems purer here, and when you look around, you see that every object has been carefully chosen to harmonize with the rest. From up here on the second floor, you find yourself looking down with amused detachment at the people scurrying along the frantic streets of SoHo.

  A good beginning. Then there are warm towels to help you wipe away the outside world, and the perfect drink, cold sake in a cedar box with salt along the edge. The icy alcohol picks up the sweetness of the wood, the salt offsets it, and the flavor of the sake comes singing through, cold and pure.

  With the sake I like a little bowl of edamame—fresh soybeans—slightly salted and still in the pod. You pick them up and pop the beans into your mouth. (If you try to eat the pods, you will find that they are rather tough.) At first taste, they are slightly salty, and then the buttery richness of the beans comes through. If you think of soybeans as boring, these will change your mind.

  Other appetizers worth trying include tori dango, lightly fried balls of ground chicken that are crisp outside, soft inside and intriguingly flavorful. There are fine small bowls of marinated wild greens and seaweed that give new meaning to the word salad. And iso age: shrimp that are rolled in noodles, topped with prickly leaves of pungent shiso, wrapped in seaweed and deep-fried. There is also tempura, which is good. But nothing is remotely on a par with the noodles.

  To really appreciate how fine these noodles are, you must eat them cold. Seiro soba come on a square lacquered tray, the beige noodles arrayed across a bamboo mat. On the side is a bowl of dashi, a dipping sauce made of soy sauce, rice wine, kelp, dried bonito flakes and sugar. In ordinary restaurants this is a salty bore; here it is mellow, rich, slightly smoky and incredibly delicious. Next to it are condiments—grated daikon, scallions, wasabi—to mix into the dashi according to your own taste. Now you pick some strands of soba off the mat with your chopsticks, dip them into the dashi, and inhale them as noisily as possible. (Slurping is de rigueur.) The noodles are earthy and elastic, soft and slightly firm to the tooth, and when you dip them into the briny bowl of dashi it is as if land and sea were coming, briefly, together.

  You can also order soba with various toppings: seaweed, mushrooms, even giant fried prawns. And you can get them hot, the noodles submerged in a bowl of soup with chicken, seafood or greens floating on the top. In the version called kamonan, the strands of soba luxuriate in an intensely fragrant duck stock, with slices of duck covering the top of the bowl, making this one of the restaurant’s more substantial dishes. It is an immensely satisfying bowl of food, but the true soba aficionado eats soba plain and cold, especially in the late fall, when buckwheat is harvested and tastes especially fine.

  Honmura An also makes its own extraordinary udon, the fat wheat noodles that, in ordinary noodle shops, are about as exciting as slugs. Not nearly so difficult to make, and therefore not nearly so prized by the true cognoscenti, udon are easy to overlook. But the udon at Honmura An are the best I’ve ever eaten. Served cold with a sesame dipping sauce, they are so resilient that they seem to snap when you bite into them. Served hot, in the dish called nabeyaki (a staple of cheap noodle shops), they virtually redefine the dish.

  You can have dessert here if you insist. On the other hand, if you’re still hungry, you could always have another tray of noodles.

  HONMURAAN

  I had known that many readers would be upset by the review; after nine years of Bryan’s frankly French sensibility, three stars to a Japanese soba restaurant was a big change. But I began to notice that Bryan himself seemed offended. Almost overnight his attitude toward me changed.

  On my first day at the paper Bryan had come strolling by my desk to tell me how glad he was that I had accepted the job. He was the best-looking man at the paper, and as I watched him walk, I knew that he knew it. His thick gray hair somehow emphasized the boyishness of his face and the lankiness of his body; in any room he would turn heads, and looking at him, I wondered how he had managed to be anonymous.

  “I wish you luck,” he’d said, smiling down on me with an avuncular air. “It can be rocky at the beginning, and if there’s anything I can do to help, just say the word.”

  I had not availed myself of this offer, which may be why he became so

  distant. As time went on he grew colder and colder, and before long he stopped talking to me altogether.

  “What have I done to offend Bryan?” I asked Carol Shaw. She fiddled with the pencils on her desk, reluctant to meet my eye. “It’s not you,” she finally replied, looking up at me. “But Bryan is having a hard time adjusting to ordinary life. He just can’t believe that he’s turned back into a frog.”

  “Excuse me?” I said, not understanding.

  “He got used to being the Prince of New York,” she said. “Sixty Minutes was on the phone. Gérard Depardieu wanted to play him in the movies. After nine years he thought it was all about him, that the paper was holding him back. When he gave up the beat, he thought the offers would come pouring in.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Le Roi est mort,” she said, her face crinkling into a smile. “Vive la Reine.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “He’s not the critic anymore,” she said. “You are. The offers stopped.” Her eyes locked onto mine, and I could see that she was weighing whether or not to say what was on her mind. I stared back, willing her to say it. “It’s not your fault,” she said finally, “but he’s never going to forgive you. He was a nice man when he was a critic, but he made a stupid move, and now it’s too late.”

  Carol hesitated again, and I sensed that there was something more she wanted to tell me. I waited for her to continue. She pointed over to the desk where Bryan’s head was just visible above the partition of the pod he shared with Frank Prial. “Watch your back,” she said. “And later, when everyone’s telling you how wonderful you are, don’t forget this. Remember that no matter how well you do the job, the power is not yours. It all, every scrap of it, belongs to this institution. You’re just a byline. Take a good look. The minute you give up the job, you become a nobody. Like him.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I waited for her to say more; I could feel that there was something else, something she still had to say. But she remained silent and after a moment, not knowing what else to do, I said, “I think that’s my phone ringing,” and retreated.

  “I have the Secretary of State for you,” said a faraway voice when I picked up the receiver. I
t was, indeed, Warren Christopher calling from Washington. He was on his way to New York and wanted advice on where to eat. We chatted about restaurants for a while and then the other line begin to ring. I picked it up to hear Gregory Peck’s unmistakable voice. He wanted to discuss steak. Then Mike Nichols called in urgent need of a vegetarian cook. No wonder Bryan was sorry he had given up the job, I thought; these calls once came to him.

  But Bryan was not alone in wishing he was still the critic. The city was filled with people who did not think that Shanghai dumpling parlors, Korean barbecue places, and sushi bars merited serious consideration. They did not want these restaurants taking up the space that properly belonged to the French, Italian, and Continental establishments they were accustomed to seeing reviewed in their Friday morning paper. “Bring back Bryan Miller!” they howled in their letters to the editor.

  But I was determined to give Asian, Indian, and Latino restaurants the respect that they deserved. I would certainly not be the first New York Times critic to do so. Mimi Sheraton had not reserved her stars for fancy restaurants, and I had once heard rumors that Raymond Sokolov, who had been the food editor of the Times in the early seventies, had been pushed out because of his excessive fondness for ethnic food. He was now the culture editor of the Wall Street Journal, and I decided to ask him about it.

  “Of course I’ll have lunch with you,” he said when I reached him on the phone. “Why don’t we go to my favorite Korean restaurant? It’s just a few blocks from your office.”

  I walked through the depressing ghost of Times Square, the dreariest section of Manhattan. The renaissance of the area was still a few years off, and when you exited the Times building and navigated the grimy streets it did not seem possible that this unlovely part of the city could ever be brought back to life. The movie theaters sat empty and disconsolate, and the boarded-up girlie parlors shouted out ancient invitations. Occasionally I’d pass a broken-down bar that burped alcohol into the street when the door swung open, or a cheap deli redolent of old grease and garlic. Grim shops selling bogus electronic equipment stood on every corner. The streets felt raw and dangerous, and I clutched my purse each time a person shuffled past.

  Things got better below Forty-second Street, where the boutiques overflowed with discount dresses and the coffee shops were filled with the people who sewed them. The city’s pulse quickened even more as I approached Macy’s. By the time I reached Thirty-fourth Street, Manhattan had changed back into the city it wanted to be.

  And then I turned onto Thirty-second Street and found myself transported to a completely foreign place, a teeming Asian metropolis where all the signs bellowed incomprehensible phrases. It was as if an entire Korean city—barbers, butchers, florists, pharmacies, and accountants—had been picked up by a tornado, swirled halfway around the world, and restacked into a single crowded block.

  Entranced, I walked slowly from Sixth Avenue to Fifth, following the seductive aroma of beef grilling on charcoal. The scent pulled me along, past shops displaying beautiful little pastries and herb emporiums whose windows were forests of twisted ginseng and reindeer horns. I crossed the street and doubled back, losing myself among the kiosks selling newspapers with indecipherable letters and the restaurants offering homemade tofu and big bowls of milky white soup.

  In this vertical city every inch was made to count; looking up, I saw signs offering massages, spiritualism, translation, and twenty-four-hour doctors. This compact little enclave offered everything you could possibly need. How had I missed it all these years?

  I found Ray near Sixth Avenue, standing in front of a restaurant called Kang Suh, tapping a rolled-up paper against his palm. He would have been hard to miss even if he hadn’t been the only other Caucasian on the block. An elfin man with a head slightly too large for his body, he seemed perpetually amused, as if life were a private joke that the rest of us don’t get. “Wonderful, isn’t it?” he said, waving his arms proprietarily up the street as if he had just conjured it up.

  We went inside, passed a dark sushi bar, and climbed the stairs. On the second floor the air was thick with smoke as young men scurried about with buckets of glowing coals to fuel the braziers at each table. Slim, dark-eyed women carrying platters of marinated raw meat and little dishes of mysterious condiments pushed brusquely past us.

  I slid into a booth as a waitress set six little bowls of panchan, the cold dishes that Korean restaurants offer free with every meal, on our table. I picked up pointed steel chopsticks that looked like knitting needles and took a bite of marinated cucumber; it was cool and delicate, shimmering with sesame oil. I held it in my mouth for a moment, savoring its musky, familiar flavor. “I thought that you had to go to Flushing if you wanted Korean food in New York,” I said. Now my mouth was on fire from the cabbage kimchi laced with red chilies.

  “Strange, isn’t it?” said Ray, spearing a bit of marinated watercress. “It’s right here, right in midtown. The food is wonderful and cheap, and you’d think there would be lines of people out the door. But you never see anyone here but Koreans.”

  I picked up the menu, which went on for pages offering fiery stews and rich soups and half a dozen different kinds of grilled beef. “Americans should love this food,” I said. “It’s got every flavor we most admire. The meat is beef, it’s salty and sweet at the same time, and you get to cook it right at the table. I don’t understand why Korean barbecue doesn’t have a huge following.”

  Ray shrugged. “You could change that,” he said. “You’re the restaurant critic of the New York Times. At least you could try.”

  This was my opening. “Ask him what happened when he was at the Times,” I urged myself, but I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth. It seemed so impertinent. Instead I said, “It might help if they translated the menu. Especially if they played with the language a little. You know, they could call gul pajun ‘our version of Hangtown Fry.’”

  “‘Try our omelet,’” he intoned. “‘Made of farm-fresh eggs and tender oysters from Blue Point, Long Island, it is the Korean version of the San Francisco classic. Ours, however, replaces the bacon with sprightly just-picked spring onions from the Union Square Greenmarket.’ Who could resist?”

  “Bulgoki,” I said, getting into it, “the barbecued beef of the Far East. Our highly trained chefs cut prime steak into strips, marinate them in an irresistible mixture of soy sauce, sugar, garlic, and chilies, and bring them to your table where they are seared to perfection over glowing coals.”

  “Jap chae,” he said, “intriguingly transparent strands of spaghetti in a light and lively meat sauce.”

  “Jo gae tang.” My turn now. “Clams from the shores of New England steamed in a crystal clear broth.” I studied the menu for another minute and then asked, “Do you think we could come up with any euphemism that would make grilled tripe enticing to an American audience?”

  Ray shook his head. “That,” he said, “would be asking the impossible.”

  He was a champion eater, matching me bite for bite, and we sat for hours drinking Korean sweet potato vodka and languidly eating the fiery food. Ray spent a long time telling me what was wrong with the paper’s cultural coverage, which offended his ferocious intellect. I nodded, slightly sleepy from the heat of the coals still glowing in front of me, as I munched on the last crisp bits of meat from the grill.

  It was time for the check and I still hadn’t worked up the courage to ask Ray why he had left the Times. I had a sudden, vivid memory of my mother reading his review of Sammy’s Roumanian in the early seventies and deciding to try it. When we got there, she was horrified by everything: the gritty Lower East Side location, the bottles of schmaltz on the table, the coarseness of the food. “To think that the New York Times is endorsing this,” she said, looking disdainfully down at the length of tough skirt steak on her plate. “They should sell this meat by the yard. I’ll never believe another word that paper writes.”

  And then I realized that I didn’t need to ask Ray why he’d l
eft. Twenty-five years later, nothing had changed.

  My first caller on the morning my review of Kang Suh ran was Claudia. Her voice was dramatic as she began to read it out loud. “‘The sweet smell of garlic and sugar and chilies still clinging to your hair . . .’ How extremely unappetizing. My darling, are you determined to lose this job? What can you possibly be thinking?”

  Claudia went on and on, appalled by what she insisted on calling my “reckless disregard for people’s true feelings about food.”

  “Just come with me, once,” I cried. “I’m sure you’d like it.”

  “Absolutely not!” she said.

  “But the food’s wonderful,” I protested.

  “Fine,” she said. “I am certain that you have many friends who will enjoy it. But I am not among them.”

  “Look,” I said, desperate, “I make this really great Americanized version of Thai noodles. Everyone loves it. Will you come to our house and at least try it?”

  “No!” cried Claudia. “Thai food is filled with garlic. It is not for me. Please, my darling, let me be. After all, it is only food.”

  I was suddenly angry. “It is not ‘only’ food,” I said heatedly. “There’s meaning hidden underneath each dish. Why do you think politicians go around munching on pizza, knishes, and egg rolls on the campaign trail? We all understand the subtext; with each bite they’re trying to tell us how much they like Italians, Jews, and Chinese people. Maybe New Yorkers really won’t like bulgoki and chicken mole and sushi, but how are they going to find out if they don’t at least try them?”

  Claudia drew a deep breath, and even through the phone I could sense her standing up very straight. “You will never get me to eat raw fish!” she declared. “Never! No matter how hard you try.”