The Man Who Ate the World: In Search of the Perfect Dinner

by Jay Rayner

  He smiled.

  I smiled.

  I told him in dysfunctional French that the food had been “fantastique,” and hated myself for not coming up with anything better. The next dish arrived and he indicated that we should eat. In the middle of the plate, sitting on its sawn-off end, was a hollowed-out bone. It came, he told us casually, from a Wagyu; Wagyu is the most expensive breed of cattle in the world. Inside the hollow was a mixture of crisp green fava beans and wild mushrooms, in this case, girolles, bound by a fava bean purée. Perched on the top was a jewel of bone marrow.

  We had our forks raised and were about to begin, when Robuchon announced proudly that this was a new dish. He was keen to see what we thought of it. So, no pressure then. He watched me eat. He watched me more intently than I have ever been watched before. He watched me like a cat watches a mouse. I knew now what it was like to be stalked; all pleasure was leaking out of this meal very quickly. Naturally we said “mmm” and “lovely.”

  I turned to my companion and said, “How does he do it!”

  I wanted to savor the forest flavors of the mushrooms and the beans but I was too intimidated to do so. I just wanted to finish the dish and get it off the table.

  He watched as we tried the abalone, in a viscous broth of ginger and artichoke, a symbol of his growing love affair with Japan. He watched as we attacked a piece of Japanese snapper that had been flash-seared with the scales in place so that they were crispy. He watched as we studied a lobster claw, in a saffron and seafood bouillon. Desperate now to make conversation, to do something, anything to stop him staring, I said, “Maine lobster?” This hardly required great connoisseurship. All the lobster served in Las Vegas was from Maine.

  “Non, non. Bretagne.”

  “Brittany?”

  “Oui. Bretagne.” He thought for a moment, summoning the vocabulary. “It is better.”

  I stared at the plate. My dinner had traveled farther to be here than I had.

  This single dish represented the one great argument against restaurants in Las Vegas: that, while there may be a lot of places to eat in the city, not a single thing they serve comes from nearby. Everything has to come from elsewhere—a tiny minority by road from Los Angeles, over four hours away, but most of it by air. In London, when I had mentioned my coming adventures in Las Vegas, friends of mine hadn’t even tried to hide their disdain. How could Las Vegas be regarded as a great restaurant city when it had no local food culture upon which to draw?

  I see the appeal of the cult of locality, the idea that for a restaurant to be any good, it must draw its produce from nearby. I cannot deny that, over the years, I have eaten some fantastic meals that took their ingredients from as close by as possible. I remember once eating a plate of shellfish at a restaurant in Scotland, while outside, just a few feet from my table, the small boat that had landed them bobbed on the ebb and flow of the tide. There is no doubt that the location added to the experience. And location was all at the Auberge de L’Ill. But a commitment to locality, to what in its truest form the French refer to as le terroir—the soil—can also lead to an ossified gastronomic culture. Visit Toulouse and every restaurant will offer cassoulet. In Marseilles it will be an endless list of expensive but mostly indifferent bouillabaisses, and in Strasbourg you can eat anything you like, as long as it is choucroute. It is provincial pride, for pride’s sake.

  The definition of local also seems to be surprisingly elastic. The country inns of France might well get their ingredients from within a five-mile radius. Chez Pannise, in Berkeley, California, which, for more than thirty years, has noisily pursued a doctrine of organic produce, grown by local suppliers, expands the concept of local to include the Chino Ranch, in San Diego, 500 miles away. The fact is, most of us in the developed world live in cities, and the ingredients we eat are always going to have to come from somewhere else.

  Very early one morning, during my stay in Las Vegas, I went out to see the cargo operation at the city’s airport, which is housed in a set of steel sheds off a dusty avenue on the edge of town. In the cold rooms of the cargo handlers I saw boxes of prime fish from the Pierless Fish Corp in Brooklyn. There was meat from Hawaii, and oysters and clams from Boston. There were boxes of tuna and sea bass. There was food from everywhere. And every few days or so, a box would arrive containing lobsters from Brittany because the man once named the chef of the century thinks they are better than the ones from Maine. As he sees it, once the lobsters are in the air, it doesn’t matter how far they fly, so he might as well have the best. That, it seemed to me, was the most important thing about restaurants in Las Vegas. All the ingredients might come from elsewhere, but they are of the highest quality available. It’s all the best non-intensively reared, free-range, and organic fruit, vegetables, meat, and fish.

  Alongside this admirable commitment to quality is another concern, however, about the impact of all that airfreighting on the environment. I want to say it’s something that doesn’t bear thinking about but, of course, it does, and at some point I will have to think about it.

  For now, though, I am being stared at by one of the world’s leading chefs as they bring me a slice of his thinly cut veal, which, unlike the lobsters, has come from only a few states away. It is a fantastic piece of meat, soft, sweet, velvety.

  Just as we finish the veal, Robuchon indicates a black-and-white photograph sitting on the shelf beside my shoulder. There is Robuchon, grinning madly, and next to him is a tall woman with shiny hair and more than her fair share of teeth.

  “Céline Dion,” Robuchon says enthusiastically.

  I look at the picture again and, of course it’s her; she has a residency at Caesars Palace, in a theater specially built for her. The table we are sitting at, Robuchon says, is Céline’s table. It’s where she always sits when she comes, which is often. She always comes in the back way.

  Céline Dion! Oh, God! Why couldn’t it have been someone else? Elton John would have been fine. I wouldn’t have minded sitting at his table. Or Wayne Newton. Or the guy who plays the crab in the Cirque du Soleil production that is running at the theater just outside the restaurant. But Céline bloody Dion? If it had been my call, I wouldn’t have built her a theater. I would have built her a maximum-security cell for crimes against music. Clearly, Robuchon loves her. He adores her. It is proof, if proof were needed, that you should never get to know your heroes.

  Thankfully, a short while after our Céline Dion moment, Robuchon is called away to meet a table of Japanese diners who, remarkably, are not only paying for dinner, but have bought a bottle of a 1957 Château Latour. We can relax at last but, however ungrateful it sounds, the joy has gone out of the meal. Partly it has been the stress of sitting with the chef. Partly it was our own fault. Our booking was for 8 p.m., which was too late for a menu this long, and now, close to midnight, we are both flagging.

  We consider commandeering the petits fours trolley and riding it out the doors but there are just too many staff working the room. We’d never make it. We even suggest we’ll give the petits fours a pass, but the waiters look appalled. They promise it will only take a minute or two. It doesn’t. They insist upon introducing every single one of the twenty-five options: the sake meringues and the red-wine tuiles, the caramel chocolates and the macaroons and the nougat. I have no recollection of what they are like. By that point all I wanted was to sleep.

  The next morning I awoke and spotted, at the end of my bed, a vast breast of brioche. This, a loaf the size of my own head, was the going-home present, a perfect symbol of the excess of Joël Robuchon at the Mansion: After the meal of the night before, I can’t imagine anybody being able to do justice to a brioche this big. Still, I like to show willing. I pull off a lump and chew. It’s pretty good.

  Over the following days, I work my way around the restaurants of Las Vegas. I go to Bartolotta at Wynn, which will soon be named one of the best new restaurants in America, and have fillets of red snapper with miserably small clams and dried-out mussels for $32
. I visit the Mesa Grill at Caesars Palace and try a fine spicy tuna tartar with hot sauce and avocado relish, and an uninspiring Caesar salad. One morning I am taken on a tour of what will eventually be the site of Guy Savoy Las Vegas, the first restaurant from the Michelin-starred chef outside of France, which is also at Caesars. It will be managed by his son Frank, who takes me to a dusty corner of the building site and points to a spot that, he says, will be occupied by the best table in the room.

  “Why will this be the best one?”

  Frank, who is a tidy young Frenchman in a pastel-colored sweater despite the Vegas warmth, smiles, excitedly. “My father’s restaurant in Paris is only two miles from the Eiffel Tower, but you cannot see it.” He points out the window. “But from here, you can.” I look up. We are just across the road from the Paris Las Vegas Hotel, complete with a quarter-sized replica of the Tower. It is clear that Frank Savoy loves Las Vegas.

  That evening I take the lift to the sixty-fourth floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel; not long afterward, I am considering throwing myself back off again. Suicide might seem a drastic response to a bad restaurant—and Mix at the Mandalay Bay is very, very bad; it’s a jazz riff on bad; a master class in the finer points of bad—but at least the sight of a diner plunging to earth would wipe the smirks off the waiter’s face. Mix belongs to Alain Ducasse, who is the only chef to have had a trio of restaurants with three Michelin stars, in Monte Carlo, Paris, and New York. (He has since closed the New York outpost.) He has a couple of dozen others, too, in Switzerland and London, Beirut and Hong Kong, among other places, plus here, at the top of this tower.

  It is so high up that the stove had to be flown in, slung beneath the belly of a helicopter. There is a long, shiny bar area with the best view of the city, and beyond that a huge white space, hung with glass baubles, with, at one side, an open kitchen so you can watch the chefs do terrible things to fine ingredients. Allegedly, the restaurant and bar cost over $20 million to create. Now they have to recoup that investment, by charging astonishing prices. Personally, if I had been paying, I would have preferred a mugging; at least when you’re mugged you aren’t left with a nasty taste in the mouth.

  I take an instant dislike to Mix, not least because it saves time: I hate the moodily lit white-out of a space. I hate the barman who can’t mix a good cocktail, the booming music, and the homemade peanut butter that comes with the bread and makes me think the poor cow was milked unnecessarily. I hate the white cube that houses the men’s toilets and which is dirty and scuffed, and littered with discarded paper tissues. Mostly I hate the food. In the middle of the menu is a list of “Alain Ducasse Classics,” which, allegedly, are served at his restaurants in Paris and Monte Carlo.

  A tranche of seared foie gras is so overcooked, it crumbles away in the mouth. Lobster is served “au curry” in a sickly sweet sauce, flavored with something that reminds me of the seasoning mix from a pot of instant noodles. Tasting it, I think the entire Indian subcontinent would have grounds upon which to sue the restaurant for defamation of its good name. Starters at Mix cost around $25. Mains are priced between $35 and $50 and top out at $75. I know I said I don’t mind restaurants charging big money for high-end experiences, but the food does have to be edible. It’s a minimum qualifying standard.

  I check out the wine list, which is full of big-name wines at bizarre prices. For example, there is a 1961 Château Latour. It’s listed at $8,416. Why not $8,400 or $8,450? Where did the random $16 come from? I call over the sommelier.

  “We just mark up everything 300 percent,” he says, with a “What are you going to do about it?” look on his face.

  “What? Even the big stuff?” Generally in restaurants, wine markups decrease the more expensive they become. A 300 percent markup would be standard for the $30 bottles, but with the big numbers it’s just about realizing a reasonable cash sum.

  I look at him, slack-jawed. “How do you get away with this?”

  He shrugs. “What can I tell you? It’s Vegas.”

  I want to punch him. By now, I want to punch a lot of people. Mostly I want to punch the other customers, not just for being stupid enough to eat here—and on a Wednesday night, the place is packed—but simply because of who they are. I survey the room and, not for the first time I find myself wondering gloomily about the types who go to expensive restaurants, and whether I too might be one of them.

  The next evening I was to eat at the Vegas branch of Nobu, where, I had heard, they serve Château d’Yquem by the glass for $65. I wanted to order it but, despite having paid for very little so far, I decided it would be poor form to suddenly put my hand in my pocket. This, after all, was Vegas; if I wanted to taste one of the greatest white wines in the world, there was only one way to go: I had to win it. I would do so at the poker table.

  A part of me knew the scheme was doomed from the start, and had been even before I arrived in town. Every Friday night, in our house, our eldest son Eddie gets to stay up late and eat dinner with his parents. It was part of a cunning plan to inculcate him into his parents’ obsession with food. When he was six, we had introduced him to a classic daube and to a pork and chorizo stew. In the course of many Friday nights he had eaten a rack of lamb roasted with honey and toasted almonds, and the finest egg pasta with clams and flat-leaf parsley. There had been roast duckling in a red wine and blackberry sauce, pizzas that we had made from scratch, and skewers of grilled octopus. He had eaten the lot. We were creating a monster in our own image.

  The Friday night before I flew to Las Vegas had been a particularly important one, as far as I was concerned. It was the first night Eddie ate real steak, served medium rare, so it was good and pink in the middle, and he had loved it. He had even shown up my wife’s phobia for fat, which I have always told her is where the flavor is in steak, by enjoying not only his own piece of lean rump, but also some of my richly marbled rib eye. I was very proud.

  Afterward, as all responsible parents do, we set about teaching Eddie to play poker. The game was Seven Card Stud and, sadly, I cast a pall over the evening by beating everyone. It really wasn’t my fault. It was the cards. In three hands I ended up with four aces, a hearts flush, and a king-high full house. After the third of those hands I turned to my wife and said, “And those are going to be the best cards I will see for the next ten days.”

  So it proved, or almost; the one good hand I got, I threw away because I was so overwhelmed by the speed of the game. In 1995 when I played poker in Vegas it was a laid-back affair; it was possible to stay at the table for a few hours with just $20’ worth of chips in front of you. It was also a game of marginal interest as far as the casinos were concerned, because their cut was so small. Now, though, poker is huge business and in the vast poker room at the MGM Grand, where I was staying, pale young men in baseball caps, who spent the rest of the year playing poker online, hunkered down behind piles of chips so high, they recalled Devil’s Mountain from Stephen Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  Back then, the game of choice had been Seven Card Stud, which I knew well. Now it was Texas Hold ’Em, which requires both greater experience and skill, neither of which I had. The betting can also be complicated. On my first hand, remarkably, I pulled a diamonds flush, and was so startled that, with just one guy left in, I flipped my cards before the last round of betting.

  “That’s a hell of a tell,” one of the others said, referring to the involuntary movements that inexperienced players make to give away a good hand.

  The other player folded and, blaming fatigue for my error, I pulled in a pot that was about half the size it should have been. After that it was all downhill. Within minutes I lost every cent of those winnings as well as the $100 I started with, most of it to an Australian who, back in Sydney, was press officer for a well-known politician.

  I told him I was a journalist and he said, “That makes it extra sweet. What’s your beat?”

  “Mostly I write about restaurants.”

  He looked me up and down
with disbelief. “That’s a job?” Quickly I left the table.

  So I did not get to drink Château d’Yquem that evening, but I did get to drink chilled sake. I ate paper-thin slices of Kobe beef, which had been seared and dressed with yuzu and chives. There were oysters with salsa and yellowtail with jalapeño, a tuna tartar—but of course—and their famed black cod, marinated with sweet miso, served in my honor with a tranche of foie gras, the two buttery ingredients proving excellent companions. I decided I liked this Nobu very much. I had eaten at the London branch a couple of times and, while the food had always been good, there was something about the fashionista and international celebrity crowd who thronged about it that made the experience dreary. In Vegas, Nobu is located in the Hard Rock Hotel, which is away from the Strip, and the room, with its wooden fretwork screens, has a cozy intimate feel. It’s a place you go to eat rather than a place you go to be seen to eat.

  Part of the pleasure of the evening was my companion, a veteran professional poker player called Eric Drache, with whom I had hooked up through a mutual friend. Eric, now in his sixties, has won millions and lost millions. These days he makes his money producing poker tournaments for television, and scouring the footage for hands that will make good TV. In the old days, though, he liked to live by the seat of his pants and, alone among the poker pros on the circuit, liked to spend his winnings in good restaurants. He was the kind of man who would buy himself a first-class plane ticket even though he couldn’t afford it, and then pay for it at the other end when he had won the game. He almost always won the game.