by Jay Rayner
Standing here, dry ice curling around my ankles, I am reminded of a London bookshop event about food writing that I once took part in, alongside Anthony Bourdain, author of the abrasive cook’s memoir, Kitchen Confidential. A member of the audience had asked a question about Japanese food, and Bourdain, who had pronounced himself a devotee, said that most people misunderstood it. For example, he said, “Sushi, is not about the fish. It’s all about the rice.” I nodded sagely when he said this, looking out at the crowd of tattooed, bed-haired, leather-clad maniacs who seem to follow Bourdain wherever he goes. They were hanging on his every word. Disagreeing with him didn’t seem like a good idea, not in front of this crowd, so I mumbled “all about the rice” and nodded again.
As I watch this curious ritual, this silent adoration of the tuna, the truth strikes me. Sure, good rice is important. Good rice is vital, but only as a minimum qualifying standard. As far as I can see, it really is all about the fish. Indeed here, in this shed, I feel as if I am seeing the very essence of Japanese food laid bare. It is about what the chef started with, not what appears at the end. If the ingredients aren’t good enough, the food won’t work. This might seem like a truism, applicable to all culinary traditions, but it isn’t. There are whole categories of dishes in French cookery, for example—big stews like coq au vin or a daube or cassoulet—specifically designed to make something magical from the most veteran and uninspiring of ingredients: the pensioned-off cockerel, the tough, overworked part of the cow, the saggy, fat-bound belly of the retired pig.
Japanese cookery, on the other hand, is simply about the quality of the fish on the market shed floor. It’s about the cult of the ingredient, which is something I always felt I understood. And I felt I understood it because of the vinegar.
I need to explain this, and to do so we will have to go back around six decades, to the period immediately after the Second World War, when a young woman called Denise de Choudens came to Britain from the town of La Chaux-de-Fonds, near Neuchatel, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. She worked as an au pair and, in time, married, had children, and became my mother-in-law. It is possible that the latter was not part of the original game plan.
Denise lives now in the West Midlands, where my wife, Pat, grew up, but there has always been a bit of her family’s sensibility—involving the stomach, mainly—located in Switzerland. It was by meeting Pat that I came to understand, for example, that a cheese fondue is not just some kitsch cliché from the seventies. I discovered the joys of viande des Grisons, wafer-thin slices of air-dried beef that could put a carpaccio to shame, and of rich cheeses and silky chocolates.
Then there was the vinegar. There is nothing special about Kressi vinegar with fine herbs, which is to say, it is neither rare nor exotic, at least not in Switzerland. Kressi is a mass-market brand. It is on the shelves of every supermarket in the land. But it does have a special taste. Forget about other white wine vinegars with their numbing, metallic acidity that forces you, involuntarily, to expose your gums when you taste it. Kressi has a relatively low acidity (about 5 percent compared to the standard 6 or 7 percent). It is salty and has a light herby lift at the end. There is no better salad dressing than olive oil, a crunch of sea salt, and a modest splash of Kressi.
Naturally my mother-in-law introduced her family to the joys of Kressi, for it was as much a part of her landscape as the wildflowers in the meadow above the house. When Pat was growing up they would visit her mother’s family in Switzerland once every two years and, on return, the boot of the car would contain a good few bottles; enough, they always hoped, to see them through until the next trip. But, of course, they would run out, for the true number of bottles needed to cover their consumption seemed absurd, and they could never bring themselves to dedicate that much space in the car to the pursuit of the perfect salad.
Thus after a year, or perhaps fifteen months, disaster would strike Pat’s childhood home. The Kressi would be finished and they would have to go cold turkey. For this is the tragedy of Kressi: No one in Britain sells it and they would never find a suitable replacement, because there was none.
I met Pat in the 1980s, and I was welcomed into her family. This meant I inherited the Kressi obsession. Is it really that good? Yes, I think it is, but then most of us have a specific taste or flavor that roots us or reminds us of who we are. The British obsession with Heinz tomato ketchup or Hellmann’s mayonnaise is barely the half of it. I know someone who has to have her fridge at a particular temperature, so that the milk is cold enough to remind her of childhood. For others it is not just English mustard but Colman’s English mustard. It must be Bird’s Custard, McVite’s Digestives, a dinky bottle of Tabasco. A store cupboard without one of these small objects of culinary necessity is an empty cupboard. This is how I feel about Kressi. When it runs out I feel like a bit of my life is missing.
One day a few years ago we finished the last bottle of Kressi, a souvenir from a work trip to Gstaad. This time, however, I was determined to do something about it. I contacted the commercial department of the Swiss Embassy, which confirmed that no, nobody imported Kressi. I telephoned a very good Swiss restaurant in London called St. Moritz to see if they had any, but they didn’t. I felt like an addict trying to score my next fix.
That didn’t stop me. If we couldn’t get it brought into the country, we’d just have to make an effort to find a replacement here. Over two weeks we tasted seventeen different white wine vinegars. Some were as rough as a gravel track. Others were passable, but no Kressi. A chardonnay vinegar made my teeth ache. From a high-class food emporium in central London, I bought a “vinaigre de vin blanc grand cru” because it sounded smart, but it wasn’t. It hurt to taste it. I went to the famed Selfridges food hall and bought organic vinegars and vinegars made with champagne because it sounded classy and one flavored with bog myrtle because I was desperate. There was a Moscatel vinegar that was okay and a supermarket’s own label that wasn’t.
That’s when I had the notion. We now live in the age of budget air travel. How much could a ticket to Geneva cost? Could it be cheap enough to justify a day trip to buy vinegar? I decided it could. The turnaround time on the ground would be only three hours but that, I was sure, was more than enough time. Taxi to the supermarket, stock up, and return. I emptied my sports bag in preparation and imagined myself being stopped at customs with two dozen bottles and having to plead innocence on the grounds of gastronomic imperative.
And maybe I would have been stopped at customs were it not for one small problem. The day I went to Geneva, it was closed. Completely and utterly closed. It was a bank holiday. I had done my research on the net. For example, I had noted that I shouldn’t go in the same week as the G8 meeting because of potential violence in the city. But nowhere—not on the Web sites I looked at, not in my diary, which usually carries this vital intelligence—did it mention a bank holiday. When Geneva observes a bank holiday, it does so properly. The city was like something out of one of those sci-fi movies where everybody has been struck down by a mystery virus. The only thing that moved in the neat and tidy streets was a hot wind off the lake.
Still, I wandered, hoping against hope that I would find one shop that could sell me Kressi. I felt like the least intrepid journalist in the world. For months my colleagues had been risking life and limb covering a desert war in Iraq. And me? What was I doing? Looking for vinegar in a closed city.
“If your plane crashes on the way home,” my wife said, when I telephoned her for moral support, “no one will say your death was in a good cause.”
I went into a restaurant in the hope that I might be able to buy their stock, but they had none to sell. There was, however, one supermarket in the city that was open, the maître d’ said, at the train station next to the airport. I jumped in a cab and yes, indeed, there in the station was the supermarket and yes, it was open—and packed. The entire population of Geneva appeared to be in there, trying to pick up those vital items that the antiquated Swiss commitment to
religious holidays had contrived to deny them. I fought my way through the crowds, feverishly checking each aisle for my blessed Kressi until I reached the correct shelf, the vinegar shelf, and discovered—they were sold out.
I ended up sitting in the departures lounge of Geneva’s airport, at the end of a long, hot day, with an empty sports bag at my feet, cursing my wife because I didn’t have the heart to curse myself. If I had never met Pat, if I had never married her, if she had never made me a bloody salad, none of this would ever have happened. It’s all her fault. As the time passed, I became more philosophical. Perhaps this was the way it was meant to be. Kressi vinegar had spent the past forty years being elusive. It had always been out of reach and it had decided to remain so.
At the time, of course, I felt foolish. No man who has flown to another country simply to secure a limitless supply of a good taste, only to come back empty-handed, can feel otherwise. Here in the Tokyo fish market, however, I begin to feel better about the whole thing. These men with their spikes have been up all night, and are standing in a freezing shed eyeing up fish both the size and cost of a small car, all because people like the way it tastes, and they do this every day. By comparison, my vinegar trip feels like the effort of a rank amateur, which is exactly what it was.
As dawn broke over Tokyo, the daily auctions began and the tuna sheds filled with the ringing of handbells and the shouts of men bidding against one another. I was there with Jeff Ramsey, a chef from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. He suggested we follow a fish back from its place on the floor, to the purchaser’s stand in the main market hall. We chose a huge hunk of sashimi on the bone, which the new owner said he had just paid around $10,000 for, and watched as it was heaved onto a wooden trolley and guided away through the clatter and noise of the market at its busiest. We crossed the jammed avenue between the tuna auction sheds and the main covered market, made our way past stalls of octopus and squid and bubbling tanks with huge penile molluscs of a sort I had never seen before, to a small stand in the center of the hall.
Three middle-aged Japanese men gathered around the fish, which, in one deft action, they had slipped from trolley to slab. They looked again inside the belly cavity, then fetched a thin, seven-foot blade and set to work quartering the animal, one man holding the tail, another the head as if, in this last moment, it might finally try to get away.
“This is the first sight they’ll get of the otoro,” Ramsey said, referring to the most highly prized fat-marbled belly cut, the quality and quantity of which would justify the money spent. A single long cut had already been made down the middle of one side of the fish, from head to tail. Now, without lifting it out, they turned the blade ninety degrees and moved down toward the underbelly of the fish. The hunk of deep purple muscle, shading to pink and then the white and pink stripes of the otoro, came away in one piece.
“It’s looking good,” Ramsey said, with a slow nod of his head. He was a very happy man, standing here amid these lumps of the world’s freshest fish.
Ramsey was a good person to have as my guide. He is half American, half Japanese—his mother was born in Hiroshima only a few months after the atom bomb was detonated—and was classically trained as a sushi chef in Washington, D.C. Later, like so many other young chefs, he became intrigued by the modernist cookery of Ferran Adria at El Bulli. A few nights earlier I had eaten at his restaurant at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.
At the Tapas Molecular Bar he served me a dish of crispy beetroot shaped like a ball of frizzy pink wool, and another of clear jelly noodles with the exact flavor profile of Parmesan linguine, and a bowl of gazpacho sprinkled with shards of olive oil flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen. There had been a tiny and delicious fillet of wagyu beef cooked under vacuum for six hours and then shoved in a canister of nitrous gas so that, for reasons that escaped me, it came out fizzing, and a jelly of miso soup on a spoon. It was an entertaining meal and, while not every dish had worked, I admired the effort. Still, this was not what interested me most about the Tapas Molecular Bar or Jeff Ramsey.
As we watched the tuna being quartered I said to the chef, as casually as I could, “Tell me about the accusations of plagiarism that were made against you.”
Ramsey looked at me wearily, took a deep breath, and said, “The lawyers tell me I can’t talk about that.”
In April 2006, a detailed post about Jeff Ramsey and the Molecular Tapas Bar appeared on egullet.com, arguably the most established and influential of the online food-discussion boards, with over 15,000 registered members and more than 1.3 million posts on every aspect of the international food scene, from the latest restaurant openings to the fundamentals of Thai cooking. It is the place for people who think the next most important decision they will make is what to have for lunch. Naturally, I hang out there a lot.
This particular post carried extra weight, as it was made by Steven Shaw, a former lawyer turned food writer who was one of the site’s founders back in 2001. Shaw had been contacted by José Andrés, the El Bulli–trained chef at a restaurant called Minibar in Washington D.C., where Jeff Ramsey had worked for more than a year before moving to Tokyo. At Minibar, two sittings of six diners at a time eat at a counter and enjoy a multicourse tasting menu of modernist fancies. Andrés had come across a blogger’s account of their meal at the Tapas Molecular Bar in Tokyo and had been struck by the similarities: two sittings, seven diners at a time, all at a counter and with a list of dishes that looked familiar.
“All told,” wrote Steven Shaw, having reviewed the menus of the restaurants side by side, “15 courses of the Tapas Molecular Bar menu turn out to be near exact copies of Minibar dishes. Some have minor plating variations, but they are fundamentally copies.” Andrés served “beet tumbleweed.” Ramsey served those “crispy beets.” Andrés served “pineapple and salmon ravioli.” So did Ramsey. Andrés served “hot and cold foie gras soup.” Ramsey served “foie gras soup—chaud froid.” The similarities went beyond names. Shaw also posted photographs of dishes from both restaurants and, as he said, it was hard to distinguish between them. Andrés was so furious that he consulted lawyers who in turn approached the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, demanding they pay him to license his dishes.
Though Ramsey had been ordered not to discuss the issue, friends of his said he was distraught about the controversy. They pointed out that he had been allowed just three weeks in which to launch the Tapas Molecular Bar and said that, understandably, he had fallen back on dishes he already knew. Ramsey also told friends that he had openly announced to diners that some of the dishes on his menu had come from Minibar but that this had gone unreported.
The charges levelled at the Tapas Molecular Bar were not isolated. Another egullet member called Sam Mason, the pastry chef at the highly regarded avant-garde New York restaurant WD-50, also noted similarities between dishes being served there and those at another restaurant called Interlude, 10,000 miles way in Melbourne, Australia. For example, WD-50 served a dish of “pasta” made with minced prawns, reconstituted using transglutaminase, an enzyme that works like an adhesive on proteins. Interlude served exactly the same dish. Other dishes at Interlude appeared to have been lifted both from Minibar and from Alinea in Chicago, which had just been named best restaurant in America by Gourmet magazine. Interlude’s chef, Robin Wickens, had worked unpaid at Alinea for a week.
Wickens responded to accusations of plagiarism by arguing on egullet that he had never said the dishes were his own, and that he was simply picking up ideas he had come across elsewhere and evolving them.
“The evolution part might be where you are coming up short,” responded Mason sharply.
Apart from being the kind of intense, bruising, fetishistic row that the food world loves, it also points up an intriguing development in haute gastronomy. For most of the twentieth century Europe’s great chefs had not competed against one another to create new dishes, but to produce the best possible versions of old ones. The great French chef Auguste Escoffier had established the repertoire
at the beginning of the twentieth century and everybody who came after was intent only on keeping it alive. It was about who could cook the best Sole Veronique or Tournedos Rossini.
Places like El Bulli and those that followed have changed all of that. These restaurants want to confound your expectations, an increasingly difficult trick to pull off, as diners specifically go there to have their expectations confounded. Customers want to be shocked, or amused or disconcerted. They want foamed palate cleansers “cooked” in liquid nitrogen that disappear into a cloud of ice-cold vapor as they hit the tongue, or a dish of caviar that turns out to be tiny beads of a porcini-flavored jelly. Nobody goes to these places looking for better versions of the same. They don’t want comfort food. They want discomfort food.
The result is a huge market in innovation, and one that certain chefs are determined to protect. They see their creations not merely as things that might be nice to eat, but as both their Unique Selling Point and as independent revenue streams that could secure their pension. Homaro Cantu, the award-winning chef at Moto in Chicago, has devised a piece of edible paper bearing the image of cotton candy, which tastes of candyfloss. The paper also carries the following message: “Confidential Property of and © H. Cantu. Patent Pending. No further use or disclosure is permitted without prior approval of H. Cantu.” As the journalist Pete Wells pointed out in Food & Wine magazine, this meant that Cantu was claiming ownership of the food you had paid for even as you were eating it. (God knows what he would do if you were unfortunate enough to later throw up; might this not be regarded as the unauthorized release of commercially sensitive information?) The chef is apparently attempting to copyright or patent more than a dozen of his food ideas even though patent attorneys are divided over whether it’s possible to do so.
To meet this feverish market, a new kind of customer has developed, aided by new technologies. In the old days the committed eater would visit a grand restaurant and perhaps bring back a copy of the menu. If they were really fanatical they might hang that menu on the living room wall and then bore the tits off anybody stupid enough to ask them whether they’d enjoyed their dinner there.