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

by Jay Rayner

  Early on the day I ate at Verre, I went to meet the head chef, a bald-headed, cheerful Mancunian called Jason Whitelock. When Verre first opened it was overseen by Angela Hartnett, one of the cooks from Ramsay’s Aubergine days who would eventually go on to take over the Connaught for the group. Whitelock had never worked for Ramsay before taking on the position at Verre, though he said cooking the dishes was not difficult. He was in constant contact with Ramsay’s executive chef, Mark Askew, in London, and Ramsay himself came over twice a year. The real problem was the ingredients.

  “Don’t eat the veal tonight,” he said. “My original consignment got rejected at customs because the labels weren’t right.” Bureaucracy was the curse of his life, he told me. All meat coming into Dubai has to be halal, literally permissible under Islamic law, which means, among other things, that it has to be drained of blood (as with koshered meat). This may make it virtuous to Muslims, but to greedy men like me, it’s disastrous. Cooking halal meat so it is not completely tough or dry requires real skill.

  “Under the Dubai rules it needs to go through customs no more than two weeks after slaughter so it also can’t be aged,” Whitelock said, with a sorry shake of his big domed head. Later he showed me a piece of beef, which, he told me, was actually pretty good compared to some they had received. Drained of blood, it was a peculiar shade of pink, more like veal than matured beef.

  He could use pork, but he needed a special license for it and a separate kitchen in which to prepare it, plus everything had to arrive by air. Back in Britain he was used to receiving shellfish that were still alive when they came into his kitchen. “In the two and half years I’ve been here,” Whitelock said, “I haven’t seen a langoustine move.” Then there was local taste. Some ingredients simply didn’t sell. If he brought in pigeon, he told me, they would lie in the fridge for a week, neglected by the customers until, in desperation, he would turn them into a terrine. “And then I would eat the terrine.” He also found himself serving a lot of meat well done. “It kills us to overcook meat like that,” he said. “But you have to give the customers what they want.”

  What about the staff? Bar the four or five Europeans supplied by Ramsay, the rest were generally from the Indian subcontinent. “They are great,” he says. “They are not like British cooks who constantly want to change things. They have no interest in that. They just want to do it the same every time. Problem is on their days off they go away and eat these serious curries. It blows their taste buds. You really have to watch the seasoning after that.”

  It does not make me relish the prospect of the meal to come, and nor does the setting. Granted, the Hilton Dubai Creek looks better at night than it does by day but, even so, it still has something of the seventies disco fantastic about it. Everything is chrome and angular black leather sofas and spotlights. All the lobby lacks is a mirror ball and Gloria Gaynor tottering on roller skates in tight spandex. Upstairs, the dining room is reached through an automatic door that hisses and puffs on its hydraulics with such regularity during the meal that it begins to sound like a patient on a respirator in an intensive care unit. Even allowing for the trademark Ramsay shade of purple the dining room itself still manages to avoid exuding glamour, much as Dick Cheney has always studiously avoided exuding glamour. Above the main banquette is a shelf bearing a straggly line of white tinsel and miniature plastic Santas. It says much that, in this setting, it doesn’t look out of place.

  Mostly, though, I am struck by the people. Outside on the pavement I had been in an Emirate on the eastern seaboard of the Arabian Peninsula. Inside, I might as well be in a small commuter town in southern England. There is one Emerati couple. He is in traditional white flowing robes and headdress. She is veiled over her head and up to her chin, revealing only the smallest patch of beautifully made up face. Other than that, the dining room is full of the mousy, white, English middle classes sitting nervously opposite one another, speaking in hushed voices, as if terrified that an overly demonstrative Continental waiter is about to do something to them they will find humiliating or baffling or both. There is an uneasy stiffness to these couples. They all look like they think tonight will end in an argument.

  These people had come for the Gordon Ramsay experience, and if the man himself had popped out of the kitchen and told them all to fuck off, just like he does on TV, they would probably have been quite happy.

  Instead, they have to deal with a tall, garrulous Italian called Lucca, who keeps clapping his hands together and jovially asking people how dinner is going. Clearly they hate it. They abhor it. They want Lucca to go away. This is a constant failing of the English in restaurants. They don’t like being waited on. They find the whole process excruciatingly embarrassing, more akin to an internal examination by an unfamiliar doctor of the opposite gender than a part of the dining experience to be relished; as if every part of it were designed not to enable them to eat nice stuff but to make them look like total idiots. An offer of bread is to be treated with suspicion, the tasting of the wine an obvious and blatant trap. (It’s why the English middle classes don’t complain when things go wrong in restaurants, preferring instead to whine incessantly only when they’ve left the place and there’s nothing that can be done about it.)

  Here they sit now, this type I know so well, eyes scanning the menus furiously in search of things designed to catch them out. They mutter at one another about the fortunes of Manchester United and the weather—really! They do!—and steer clear of any dishes using words they think they might mispronounce.

  The food, though, is good. In places, it is better than good. It is sparkling, in its unshocking, very familiar sort of way. There is a crystal-clear minestrone, bursting with flavor, over a single-cheese tortellini. There is a complex dish of scallops and braised pork belly, a re-engineered surf and turf, with seared watermelon that shouldn’t work but does, on a bright, ginger velouté. There is a firm piece of halibut, with a risotto that is so little rice and so many other things, it barely deserves the name but which holds its corner against a powerful lobster sauce. There is a fillet of that beef that is surprisingly good, tender, and flavorful despite having been drained of its life-force. It comes with a slab of seared foie gras and a few other things besides. At the end there is a crème brûlée—sans herbs—with leaves of dried strawberry tucked in under the crisp burnt-sugar top so it resembles a flower.

  Noble to the end, I work my way through these last delicate petals. The unavoidable truth is, however, that I have been served an absurd amount of food and I am now very full. I’m not sure there was any way around this. Although I had insisted upon receiving a bill, I had secured my booking through Gordon Ramsay’s PR company. This meant that, while they might not be comping me, they were determined I was going to get the works. At the beginning of the meal Lucca had handed me both the basic menu and the grandly titled seven-course Menu Prestige at £67 ($140) a head. (“What a blatant, cynical piece of upselling,” wrote one British restaurant critic of the Prestige when she came across it at the Royal Hospital Road restaurant in London. She described it as merely “a way of making the punter who doesn’t choose it feel like the poor relation. What are they getting? The ‘Menu Déclassé’?”)

  “If you don’t order the Menu Prestige,” Lucca said, with what I thought sounded like a hint of menace, “the chef’s still going to send you out some extra dishes.” I had no reason to doubt him. The same had happened at Al Mahara and would, I was certain, happen elsewhere, too. These extra courses, these chef’s gifts, were unrefusable and unleavable. I had to eat them. Under the fierce glare of the kitchen’s attention I had to eat everything. I ordered the Menu Prestige. After all, I told myself, compared to the same deal at Royal Hospital Road, where it was £110 ($225), this was practically a bargain.

  It was still too much food. At meal’s end I felt not so much as if I had been served my dinner as assaulted by it, and dinner had won. All I could think about, as the artificial respirator of a door puffed me out into the ho
tel foyer, was just how much work I would have to do in the gym the next day.

  I have never been thin. There is a picture of me taken shortly before my sixth or seventh birthday party, all toothy grin and flowing cravat (the Bar Mitzvah outfit was not without precedent), and looking at it, I can see my weight was probably about normal. I don’t recall feeling normal, even then. I did not come from a family of normal people. Normal people were thin, and we were certainly not that. I would like to attribute this to something hidden in the genes: a couch potato of a metabolism specifically engineered to cope with the harsh winters of Eastern Europe from whence we had come, by storing as fat any of the scarce calories that came our way. As various members of my immediate family have struggled with their weight over the years there might indeed be something in this, but the truth is far simpler. We overate. Arguably my mother put too much food on the table at times, but she was pushing at an open door. In my family, when she lifted the serving spoon, we all lifted our plates.

  I recall dieting for the first time when I was about eight, a curious and mathematically taxing regime that involved giving scores to the various food groups and then attempting not to go over a given total of units for each day. At twelve, I went on an egg diet that made my breath stink. Only when I was sixteen, and my waist had topped forty-four inches, did I achieve any measure of success, though not with a carefully designed program. I simply ate less. Of course the weight crept up again and, over the years, I would have to intervene with my body much as the United Nations has had to intervene in chronic, intractable civil wars.

  Eventually, appalled by the notion that I should find a sensible diet for life, as experts insisted—a diet for life? Give me death—I decided exercise was the solution. This was, frankly, bizarre. As a child, the appeal of sports had been lost on me. Partly this was because I was very, very bad at them. Everybody else knew it. Team captains didn’t so much avoid choosing me as hope that if they didn’t look in my direction, I might not be there. Back then I thought ball control meant wearing tight underpants, and took every opportunity I could to not run anywhere after anything.

  In adolescense I bunked off games with like-minded friends and we hid in the woods, learning to smoke and frying cheap sausages over a camping stove. On the one occasion I was forced to participate in sporting activity, I was so appalled by the idea, I signed up for golf. I was rubbish at it, of course, but at least I didn’t have to take my clothes off.

  One day in my late twenties, I went into the local gym, climbed onto a step machine, and found I liked it. The step machine didn’t judge me. The step machine didn’t laugh at me if I fell off, or if I pressed out a paltry eighty calories of burn. Plus I could watch TV while I did it. This seemed the ideal solution and, with modest alteration to my eating habits, eventually had an effect.

  Then I became a restaurant critic. You don’t need to have a degree in physical fitness and nutrition to recognize this as a very bad idea. It was like putting a smack addict in charge of the medicine cabinet. I spoke to one of my predecessors in the job, who said he had put on two stone (28 lbs.) in three years, and attributed it all to the desserts. I knew another restaurant critic who did it for a dozen years and put on almost eight stone (112 lbs.). I comforted myself with the thought that these were previously thin people who, like curious virgins unacquainted with the clap, had no idea of the consequences of the world into which they were diving. I was different. I was already promiscuous at the fridge. I knew what eating could do, understood the mathematics of calories, and was determined not to let the bitter calculus of food get the better of me.

  Still, it was a challenge. The main issue was time. Visiting the gym took so much of it that I had begun driving rather than walking there; in short, I had started avoiding exercise to take exercise. So I cancelled my gym membership and bought a huge Nordic Cross Tracker, a great chromium thing of handles and paddles, with a digital screen that pulsed out flashing digits in diodes the color of blood. I positioned it in my office at home behind my desk, as an encouragement. I asked my accountant if I could claim the substantial cost against tax.

  “I’m afraid not,” he said. “The truth is, you don’t need to be thin to do your job.”

  “Perhaps not, but I do need to be alive.”

  My accountant laughed. “The Inland Revenue does not care whether you live or die.”

  I swallowed the cost and went to work. My day job was meant to have only two stages: Eat, then write about it. To this I added a third: Atone on the Nordic Cross Tracker. I was and always have been godless. Nevertheless I now had my own confessional, a place where, instead of Hail Marys, I cracked out twenty minutes at level six, with another fifteen to follow. At the end, as the endorphins flowed, I slipped gently into a state of careless rapture.

  By the time I had decided to investigate the globalization of high-end restaurants I knew exactly what the project meant and concluded that, wherever I went, I would need access to a gym. As a result I was not only eating all over the world, I was also working out all over the world. Each gym had its own character. In Las Vegas, at the MGM Grand, it was full of flinty-eyed executives from the convention circuit, flicking through brochures as they used the treadmill. The Moscow gym had been an afterthought of a windowless box in the basement, and the only other users were late-middle-aged American businessmen, working the steppers tentatively, as though their medical history already listed three minor heart attacks.

  In Dubai, where all the users were lissom and tanned young women, the gym looked out over the chaos of the building site that surrounded the Grosvenor House Hotel. New tower blocks were going up, crusted with cranes and warped, rusted-steel reinforcements, and roads around them could only be readily identified by the lines of traffic cones that snaked about their fringes. The building sites were so chaotic, so brutal, that I found it impossible to imagine them as anything other than a work in progress. Completion was impossible to contemplate.

  I felt something similar about myself. The meals I was eating were so full of hidden traps—unexpected courses, platters of unordered amuse bouche, and pre-dessert—that it seemed unlikely that I would ever catch up, however hard I worked out on the machine. Pieces of gym equipment—treadmills, steppers, cross trackers—have always been about running fast to get nowhere. For me it felt doubly so.

  Still, the morning after my Gordon Ramsay meal, I boarded the Grosvenor House’s Cross Tracker and went to work, determined to fight the good fight. Part of the concern was not just with what I had eaten at Verre but with what I was due to eat that lunchtime. I was very keen to try some Emerati food. I wanted to know what the locals ate. Sure, I could and would try Lebanese, which is to Middle Eastern food what French is to European, but I was certain Emerati would be different. Most people scratched their heads or laughed at me when I inquired. It was unlikely I would get to meet an Emerati person during my trip, they said, let alone eat a few of their specialities.

  I was determined, though, and eventually found my way to the Dubai World Trade Centre Club, perched at the top of the Dubai World Trade Centre Tower. They had a restaurant up there on the thirty-ninth floor that served a menu of “international cuisine.” That sounded terrifying, but it turned out they were also one of the biggest caterers for high-class Emerati weddings in Dubai, and traditional Emerati cooking was increasingly popular. They would love to serve me a banquet, I was told by Ed Barnfield, the club’s British PR man. He told me this with such enthusiasm, such gusto, that I became anxious. The word “banquet” sounded ominous. I suggested to him that the chefs really should not overdo it on my account. I was met by the e-mail equivalent of hollow laughter. I had requested Arabic hospitality, and Arabic hospitality was what I was going to get.

  I am standing in front of a camel-sized oven, in the aircraft hangar–sized kitchens at the back of the Dubai World Trade Centre exhibition halls. It is the only camel-sized oven in Dubai and the executive sous-chef here, a Jordanian called Khalel, is understandably proud
of it. The oven, which was built to his design, is twelve feet long, eight feet high, and six feet deep. They can cook four camels in here at once, he says. He is a solid man whose face is heavy with geography—big cheeks, deep jowls, full lips, furrowed brow—all offset by long, feminine eyelashes. When I express surprise that they can cook four camels at once, even in an oven as big as this, he says “baby camels.” Let them grow too old and the meat is tough as shoe leather, apparently. The best meat, he tells me, “is 25 cm [10 inches] under the hump.” I store this piece of information away. It might come in handy one day.

  We have not eaten camel today, though it is just about the only thing we have not been fed. I feel a little queasy standing here in front of this oven. Every now and then the flavors of one particular dish from the banquet repeat on me, and not in a good way. I find this flavor so unpleasant, so repulsive, that I wonder whether I’ll ever be able to rid myself of it. My mouth has been violated. To distract myself, I try to calculate how many people one could cook in an oven like this, and I conclude about eight, lying side by side. It doesn’t help.

  Most of the meal was fine, though hardly Emerati. The catering company, like so many of the businesses in Dubai, is run by two thrusting, young Indian executives—Indians are the biggest single ethnic group here—called Sethu and Rakesh. They are determined to show me a good time. They want me to know about the enormous weddings they have catered, and the variety of foods they can offer—they have teams of chefs from China, Thailand, and Morocco, among other places—and the enormous numbers of animals they have slaughtered. “For the biggest wedding we ever did, we had to slaughter 900 lambs, forty camels, ninety deer, and twenty cows,” Sethu says proudly. That fed 7,000 people.

  We had eaten lunch at the top of the Dubai World Trade Centre, in one of the rooms behind the second biggest advert in the world, which carries the face of Sheikh Mohammed and covers the whole building. Or, to be more precise, I got to taste a sequence of dishes that were so numerous, the varied forkfuls added up to one meal. On the table, awaiting us, there were bowls of hummus and baba ghanoush and a rich, long-simmered tomato paste flavored with walnuts and chili, home-cured salmon and seared prawns, and an Iranian salad of cucumber and yogurt, a bowl of tabouleh, that traditional mix of chopped flat-leaf parsley dressed with lemon juice, and another of the Lebanese salad fatoush, in which the vegetables are layered with crisp, curling slices of toasted pita bread. There were lamb and chicken kebabs roasted in Indian tandoors, dainty cheese or meat burek—small pies—and vegetable Samosas from the Punjab.