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

by Jay Rayner

  By now, unsteadied by my submarine ride and baffled by the décor, I am expecting heroically bad food and the first dish I order doesn’t disappoint. The menu is divided into “classics” and “modern” and, being an idiot, I order a starter from the latter. It is listed as soya mud crab ravioli with truffle mango mayonnaise. What arrives is two piles of crabmeat, beneath not pasta, but a flap of amber jelly, which reminds me of something you would put on a burn victim’s wounds to soothe the pain. The sweet, sickly mayo doesn’t help matters. I stare at the aquarium and wonder whether the sharks will forgive me for the waste of such prime seafood when those lobster crackers go flying and the waters break.

  After that I start eating from the classics menu and things improve greatly. There is a rich, lobster bisque heavy with brandy (because in Muslim Dubai, alcohol is legal in five-star hotels and private clubs), which is spooned from a silver tureen at my table. There is a piece of John Dory, with a light sage sauce and then a solid piece of turbot in a ripe, gratinated seafood sauce full of mushrooms and prawns. Even allowing for the model of the Burg al Arab hotel realized in puff pastry that arrives with it, this dish is a wonderfully old-fashioned piece of work; the sort of thing that would have appeared in the dining rooms of Paris before nouvelle cuisine took hold in the 1970s and creamy cheese sauces like this went through the culinary equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

  There’s something sweet about it. They have a state-of-the-art simulator, a fish tank that is a wonder of engineering, and a modern menu full of foams and jellies and weird flavor combinations. But here, where summer temperatures often reach 45 degrees Centigrade (113 degrees Fahrenheit) or higher and rarely drop below 21 degrees Centigrade (70 degrees Fahrenheit) even in winter, what they do really well is soups full of brandy and cream, and white fish in cheesy, flour-based sauces.

  Driving around Dubai I keep recalling an old Frank Zappa song called “Cocaine Decisions.” It’s about fat-wallet businessmen spinning mega deals while speeding on the white stuff, and if that was how this city had come into being, it would make sense. It feels like a giant game of SimCity made real, created by someone who’s been up for a month bingeing on chemical stimulants. Except that Dubai is madder than that, because the decisions that have shaped this place were made by Sheikh Mohammed, a good Muslim boy who doesn’t drink let alone bury his face in piles of cocaine like Al Pacino did at the end of Scarface.

  Presumably the head of the Dubai ruling family was unmedicated when he decided that his kingdom needed an entirely new downtown area of fifteen skyscrapers, all to be built at exactly the same time, including the Burg Dubai, which will eventually be the tallest building in the world (though nobody would say how tall; they didn’t want anyone else to build something taller before they had finished).

  He must have been in control of his senses when he chose to build the Jumeirah Palm, the man-made island in the shape of a palm tree measuring five kilometers by five kilometers (3.10 miles by 3.10 miles) with room for 1,500 villas, where they are putting up the Kempinski Hotel that I saw the model of while I was in Moscow. And another palm double the size with more fronds. And a third, complete with an island in the shape of Arabic script that spells out a line of the poetry he likes to write: “Take wisdom from the wise—not everyone who rides is a jockey.” They are the only words in any language that can be read from space.

  Plus there are the developments still to be completed: Falcon City of Wonders, with its full-sized replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, and the leaning Tower of Pisa; or the Dubai waterfront, which will help extend the coastline from a mere 70 kilometers (44 miles) to over 1,500 kilometers (932 miles); or The World, another set of man-made islands in the shape of the globe, so that you could buy Australia or France or Germany and build your dream house on it (though not Israel; there is no Israel in the Dubai world).

  Before arriving I had looked at the place on Google Maps, and from fifty miles up it had a twisted kind of logic. Now, on the ground, there is no logic at all. It is a chaos of cranes and car-clogged motorways and construction workers in blue and orange jumpsuits working night and day. The population of Dubai is now around 1.5 million and only 15 percent of that is native Emeratis. The rest are immigrants, here to build the dream.

  I am aware that the same friends who were appalled by the notion of me going to Las Vegas to eat would be equally dismayed by the thought of coming to this massive building site for dinner. I, however, have decided to be optimistic. After all, great restaurants are an invention of cities. Conventional wisdom has it that they were born in Paris after the Revolution when the chefs to the newly beheaded aristocracy found themselves in want of employment. Recent scholarship, most notably by Rebecca Spang, author of The Invention of the Restaurant, has argued that this was just another example of the legend-making in which the world of gastronomy so easily indulges, creating kitchen heroes from lowly cooks and imbuing humble ingredients—the mushroom, the oyster—with quasi-mystical significance.

  Spang traces the word “restaurant” back to a restorative medicinal dish rather than a physical institution where people were fed. All interesting enough, but she still allows Paris its central significance, and rightly so. It is not in the fields where the raw materials are farmed that the greatest number of great restaurants have ever been found. It is in the cities, where people with spare cash congregate. That is one reason why, as a city boy down to the last knotty, twisted helix of my DNA, I am fascinated by them. I have always seen the restaurant as a mark of civilization. As Sheikh Mohammed is attempting to build a great city, hereon this narrow stretch of sand tucked in between Saudi Arabia and the sea, it seems reasonable to hope that it will also be a good place for a man like me seeking good food. Or at least food.

  In the 1950s, long before anybody had thought of serving lobster bisque in the Middle East, only 6,000 people lived in Dubai. It was little more than a trading post, with a reputation for the wild pearls that once grew in the oysters on its seabed and for the smugglers who liked to sail dhows full of contraband up the creek. It was the ruling Maktoum family who decided it could be much more than that. Though oil was discovered offshore in the 1960s, it was in relatively small amounts. Instead, the Maktoums decided to focus on trade. In the 1970s they dredged the creek and built huge docks, and set up free-trade zones to attract investment. None of this softened its rough edges. Dubai still had something of the frontier town about it, and continues to do so.

  When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian Mafia poured into the old town, recognizing it as a place where they could buy and sell anything. In 2004, when news broke that a Pakistani government scientist, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, had been selling nuclear secrets to North Korea and Iran, it was discovered that many of the deals had been made through front companies in Dubai. It is still rumored that containers full of contraband—gold, weapons, narcotics—flow through its docks every day, and terrorist money trails have regularly been traced into the city and back out again.

  This is not the Dubai that Sheikh Mohammed wants you to think about. He doesn’t want you to come to Dubai for a little light arms dealing—or at least not just for that. He wants you to come here for dinner. He has declared that, by 2010, 15 million tourists should be coming every year to experience capitalism’s unfettered bounty. In service of that aim, Dubai’s massive construction companies, which are all either fully or partly owned by the royal family (despite the fact that they compete with one another), are building ever bigger apartment developments, and shopping malls and five-star hotels. The Jumeirah Palm alone will, when it is finished, be home to thirty-two new five-star hotels. And every one of those will, in turn, be home to multiple restaurants.

  This is why I have a free suite at the five-star Grosvenor House Hotel down by the marina, my very own white Mercedes limousine to drive me around town, and a butler called Rajesh. I can’t claim this was unplanned. Startled by the prices in Moscow, I had decided to look closely at my finances. I had concluded that if I
really was to avoid taking complimentary meals, I would have to make a few policy decisions. Firstly, I would have to eat by myself in the seriously expensive places, as I had done at Al Mahara. Secondly, I would have to shamelessly take any other nonfood freebies that came my way, and the hoteliers of Dubai, desperate to promote themselves, hadn’t been slow to come forward with generous offers.

  Granted, the butler was a bit unnecessary. I really didn’t need him to deliver up the fresh trays of canapés every afternoon (though I did like the foie gras pâté on toast), and there was no way I was going to let Rajesh polish my shoes, however much he begged. The moment he clocked my cheap man-made soles, he would have had me for a fake. Still, it was nice to have the sitting room and the two plasma-screen televisions. It was also handy to have the big white car to take me to the Mall of the Emirates so I could have a look at the 400-meter indoor ski slope, complete with real snow, and study the menu at St. Moritz, the Swiss café at the bottom. Although I had come to Dubai in winter, the temperature was still in the mid 20s Celsius (upper 70s Fahrenheit). And yet, at St. Moritz, you could get a fondue.

  Before my trip I had met chefs across London who were working on ventures in Dubai or who had been approached about sweetheart deals. Guillaume Rochette, the catering recruitment consultant who had been supplying chefs to Moscow, now had an office in Dubai, too, and talked excitedly of the money to be made there and the deals to be brokered. Dubai, he said, was about a commodity called “lifestyle,” and an expression of that lifestyle was restaurants. Alan Yau said he had plans for four or five places in Dubai, and the British celebrity chef Gary Rhodes had just signed a deal, regardless of the fact that his whole career was based on a style of hearty cooking—Lancashire hot pot, oxtail stew, mutton pie—that drew on the traditions of a temperate Northern European country.

  It didn’t matter that there was less access to local ingredients here than in Las Vegas. It made no difference that the place was bereft of cultural context; that even the rare examples of Arabic architecture felt as artificial as the ski slopes. Dubai had a hunger for wealthy people, and wealthy people have a hunger for food.

  For one British chef none of this was news. He had spotted what was happening in Dubai years before anyone else, opening his first restaurant outside Britain in 2001 at the Hilton Dubai Creek. By all accounts Verre wasn’t bad, either. The local edition of Time Out had given it numerous awards, and whenever I asked locals to list the best restaurants in the city, it was always among the top five. As a result bookings were notoriously hard to come by. Happily, though, I had managed to secure one. It was time to visit a Gordon Ramsay restaurant.

  I first ate Gordon Ramsay’s food in 1995 when he was cooking at Aubergine, a restaurant in London’s Chelsea. It would suit the narrative if I could now claim it was the best meal I had eaten up to that point, but it wasn’t; a remarkable place called Le Champignon Sauvage in Cheltenham still held that honor. (Oh, that mint chocolate soufflé!) But there was no doubting the talent at work. I remember a single, fat lobster raviolo in an intense shellfish velouté, versions of which would become one of the chef’s signature dishes.

  At the end of the meal there were three tiny crème brûlées, flavored with thyme, marjoram, and basil, though the waiters did not announce this. They insisted we had to guess what the flavorings were. I thought this more than a little cute: I didn’t go to expensive restaurants to guess my pudding. Still, they were good.

  A few years later Ramsay had an argument with his employers and walked out, taking the entire staff with him. Backed by £1 million ($2 million) of his father-in-law’s money, he reopened at the site of a nearby restaurant called La Tante Claire, on Royal Hospital Road, which had boasted three Michelin stars. In 2001, Ramsay won his own third star and, while he had not embarked on his full-blown TV career by then—he was still slagging off chefs who dared to moonlight on the small screen—he was already gathering notoriety. He had appeared in a fly-on-the-wall documentary series, Boiling Point, in which he managed to use the word “fuck” as a noun, verb, adverb, and adjective and, just occasionally, as an expletive. He threw Joan Collins out of his restaurant for the sin of being in the company of the scabrous restaurant critic AA Gill. He telephoned newspaper gossip columnists to tell them exactly what he had just done.

  It was later the same year that the scale of his ambition became obvious: He announced he was taking over the dining room at Claridge’s, arguably London’s grandest hotel. The Claridge’s restaurant, which was derided by some critics for having too many tables and for turning them too quickly in a desperate grab for profit, never managed to go beyond a single star, but Ramsay seemed unconcerned. He began eating up the hotel dining rooms of London, using the cooks who had been with him since Aubergine days until, by 2007, he had interests in eight (plus two pubs).

  Ramsay published cookbooks. He wrote newspaper cookery columns. He took up sponsorship deals with everyone from crockery manufacturers to high-street liquor retailers, and discovered that television wasn’t so bad after all. He fronted the reality show Hell’s Kitchen both in the UK and the U.S., and made multiple series of Kitchen Nightmares in which he went into failing restaurants, turned them around, stripped off to the waist, and said “fuck” a lot. His face, which didn’t so much look lived-in as under multiple occupancy, was everywhere.

  Inevitably questions began to be asked about how much cooking Ramsay now did. The chef had a stock answer. “People ask me who does the cooking when I’m not there and I tell them it’s the same people who do the cooking when I am there,” he told me in the spring of 2006. “I remember being asked that question by a journalist in a very expensive Armani suit. I asked her whether she thought Giorgio had stitched every single seam on her suit. Obviously not.”

  There were also questions over the food itself. Back in the midnineties, the appearance of herbs that would normally be associated with savory courses, in desserts like those crème brûlées, was modish, forward thinking, almost cutting edge. But even back then a new movement was developing quietly that would eventually make a basil crème brûlée look as staid as a rum baba. A few years before, a young Catalan chef called Ferran Adria had put a tomato on the end of a bicycle pump, blown it up, and created, to his surprise, a tomato foam.

  At his restaurant El Bulli, a gruelling two-hour drive north of Barcelona, Adria began experimenting. He investigated the science of food and the conventions of the restaurant. He created hot savory jellies, and aromatic foams that sparkled on the tongue before disappearing to nothing, leaving only the echo of flavor. He broke away from the traditional three courses to serve twenty, thirty, even forty tiny bites. He used sous vide machines to cook under vacuum, paired savory with sweet, and was hailed as the founder of a movement in cookery as groundbreaking as nouvelle cuisine had been in the 1970s. Almost a century after it had revolutionized literature, music, and the visual arts, Modernism had finally come to the kitchen.

  Within a few years others were pursuing similar ideas. At The Fat Duck in the uber-English village of Bray, the self-taught Heston Blumenthal put white chocolate and caviar together, served a pudding of smoky bacon ice cream, and made a dish of snail porridge, all of which eventually won him his third Michelin star. In the mountains of France, Marc Veyrat gave diners syringes with which to inject their food with sauces made from foraged herbs and wildflowers, and in New York at WD-50, a chef called Wylie Dufresne made a deep-fried mayonnaise. No meal cooked by any self-respecting with-it chef was now complete without foams and jellies and savory ice creams and meat and fish cooked at low temperature under vacuum.

  Ramsay stuck rigidly to his neoclassicism; to his fillets of beef with Madeira jus and his caramelized tarte tatins of apples with vanilla ice cream. He was convinced there was a market for it and it was hard to argue with him, as new projects were announced with dizzying regularity. In the autumn of 2006 he celebrated his fortieth birthday by opening a restaurant in New York and revealing plans for further restaurants in F
lorida, Los Angeles, Prague, Dublin, Amsterdam, Paris, and Australia. It looked like Ramsay was intent on conquering the world.

  That summer his flagship restaurant, Gordon Ramsay at Royal Hospital Road, had been closed so the dining room could be renovated and the kitchen upgraded. Ramsay also announced he was putting in an £80,000 ($164,150) webcam system. “That way I’ll be able to see what’s going on in all my restaurants around the world,” he told me. “We’ll have clocks up for the different time zones, too. It will look like a fucking investment bank in there.”

  By then it was clear that the Royal Hospital Road restaurant, with its three Michelin stars, was no longer just an expensive place where people went for something to eat. It was the rock upon which an entire brand had been built. This made a kind of sense because the economics of the Michelin three-star restaurant had become increasingly unsustainable. While Michelin was notoriously coy about the criteria upon which they based their awards, it was generally understood that, for a restaurant to win three stars, it had to have a staff-to-diners ratio of at least one-to-one. If there were forty-four seats, as there are at Royal Hospital Road, there had to be at least forty-four staff, as indeed there are. Making a profit with this sort of head count is very tough indeed, so for many three-star chefs their flagship restaurants had become loss-leaders, out of which other profitable businesses—cheaper brasseries, outside catering operations—could be spun.

  This made Verre in Dubai intriguing. After all, if a major factor in the luxury experience is the number of people you are able to employ then, in a place like Dubai, where labor is relatively cheap, it should be easier to deliver a high-quality experience. Shouldn’t it?