by Jay Rayner
But there were other stories, which belonged only to us children. When I was six or seven, my elder brother had somehow convinced me to go downstairs, while our parents were sleeping on a Saturday morning, to cook him breakfast: bacon seared to crisp, fried eggs, maybe a sausage or two. I did this week after week, usually standing completely naked in the kitchen. My parents told me they never smelt it because the effort of raising three children exhausted them and on Saturday mornings they were dead to the world. They only discovered what had been going on when I spilled a pan full of boiling fat all over my hand, suffering massive burns that demanded hospital treatment. My mother had feared I would be scarred for life though, fortunately I was young enough and fleshy enough to heal quickly. I was always more than fleshy enough.
“Some things I got wrong,” Claire said. “As you piled on the weight when you were a teenager, I banned sweets and chocolates. Of course, all I did was turn them into a form of contraband.” My father, who has a sweet tooth, was famous for hiding behind doors to eat his beloved chocolate so he wouldn’t be seen by the kids.
“The fact is, love, you’ve always been a foodie. I remember for your fifth birthday you were insistent on having frogs’ legs. So you did. And when you had finished them, you made the meatless bones dance up and down the table.”
“Are you really telling me I’m just greedy?”
My mother nodded slowly. “Yes, dear, that you have a certain instinct to greed.”
They cleared our main courses and brought the dessert menu, which was full of crèmes brulée, rum babas, and hazelnut parfaits. My parents said they had eaten enough.
“How about a little melon and mint sorbet?” I said to Claire. “And two spoons?”
Claire smiled indulgently. “Why not, darling,” she said. “I’m sure I could manage a little sorbet.” She was often good to me like that, my mother.
I couldn’t argue with Claire’s diagnosis. A few years ago, I had found myself at JFK Airport in New York, waiting for a flight home with a member of one of the Internet food boards to which I belonged. Our flights were delayed, so we pulled up to the bar and ordered some of their spareribs. The moment they arrived we could see they were awful: gloopy sauce, meat of indeterminate species let alone vintage, all of it precooked and heated through. Together we shared the ribs and went to work.
“Do you ever think,” asked my friend, between bites, “that really you don’t have any standards at all? It’s just that you’re willing to spend money to get the good stuff?”
My mouth was full of sparerib so I nodded my agreement. Sometimes, in my hungriest moments, I felt I wasn’t really a connoisseur at all, just a greedy man with an expense account.
Still, at least I understood myself a little better. But what of other people? Why did they go to high-end restaurants? My argument that the restaurants enabled those on average incomes to buy a wealthy person’s lifestyle for the few hours they were at the table worked, but only up to a point. What if you actually were a wealthy person? What then?
I knew just the man to ask. His name was Marlon Abela, he was thirty-two years old, and he was worth somewhere in the region of $400 million. He didn’t just eat in restaurants all the time. He owned them as well: In New York, he owned an Italian place called Avoce, and another, just outside the city, called Gaia. In London he had three businesses including a hyper-expensive Japanese kaiseki restaurant called Umu.
Abela and I had fallen out over Umu. Not long ago the press announced breathlessly that three restaurants in London were now so expensive that average bills per head had passed the £100 ($200) mark. I had written an article for my newspaper in defense of the costly dinner, but had pointed out that the experience had to be worth it. Umu was one of those in the £100 club and, I said, it was not worth it. The quality of the fish might be great, the dishes well thought out. But if dinner was going to cost that much, eating there had to be one of the most memorable experiences of your life, and Umu hadn’t been that for me.
Abela was not pleased. He got his people to call me and organize a lunch there, to prove I was wrong, but he kept postponing the date until I said we should just leave it. The next day there was a knock on my door. Outside, was a motorcycle despatch rider, with four bamboo boxes.
“Compliments of Mr. Abela,” he said, and handed them over.
I opened them up. Each one contained an immaculate selection of what I recognized to be some of the best sushi available in London: shiny sweet prawn and sea bream, otoro and uni and unagi. I liked sushi. Hell, I loved sushi, but there was no way I could eat all of this by myself. I was reduced to wandering my street, trying to foist high-grade sushi on my fellow home-working neighbors. (One, responding with delight, said she would put it in the fridge and have it for her supper that evening. She looked a little bewildered when I told her ferociously that if she really was going to do that, she couldn’t have it; that it had to be eaten NOW!)
Abela and I hadn’t spoken since he had sent me London’s most expensive take-away, but he eagerly agreed to meet for dinner and suggested we go to the Green house, the modern French restaurant in Mayfair that he had purchased a few years before. Under Abela its already substantial wine list had expanded to 3,100 bins, certainly the largest in Britain if not Europe. If it was made from grape juice and in a bottle, it was on the list. The Greenhouse had a Michelin star and had been marked by the guide as the potential recipient of a second. The modern dining room was paneled in expensive glossy wood and looked like the kind of place in which self-confident men sipped dribbles of Burgundy from bucket-sized glasses and casually made decisions that would plunge millions of people into poverty.
Abela was waiting for me at his table, to one side of the room. We had met once before, when I had profiled him for Gourmet, and then, as now, I had been impressed by the ease with which he occupied his portion of the world. He had inherited his money from his Lebanese catering mogul father, and had grown up for the most part in France, spending his entire life around restaurants. When I asked him to name his first Michelin three-star experience, he laughed and said, “Maxim’s. Paris. My father always liked to spend New Year’s Eve there. I must have been five or six.”
Abela was now famed for eating in his own restaurants night after night, for ordering most of the menu as a method of quality control, and then for finishing it all. He favored a uniform of crisp jeans, open-necked shirts, and blazers and was a dispiritingly normal size for a man who consumed so much. If I hadn’t liked him, I concluded, I would have hated him.
“So,” he said. “Shall we have some fun? Shall we open a few wines?”
I told him I was in his hands. He rattled off the names of bottles I didn’t recognize, and engaged in a long discussion with his sommelier about what was good right now and what was not. I asked him what we were eating.
“No idea,” he said. “But it will be fine.”
The menus were brought. “Really,” I said, “I would be honored if you would order.” This was partly politeness on my part, but also a calculated ruse: I wanted to see what he would do, given complete freedom in his own joint. It struck me that I could be on for something very special, the notion of specialness now being my quarry. I was chasing special, hungry for special, though I worried that special was now destined to remain forever out of reach.
Abela grinned and opened his menu. “Let’s do this,” he said, like a man mounting the highest diving board. He turned to the silver-haired French maître d’ who was standing by the table, leaning in as if fearing he might mislay a word. “Bring us a couple of the langoustine and one of the foie gras for the table. One of the summer truffle and one of the egg. Bring the egg and the summer truffle after the langoustine. How’s the Dover sole today? Is it good? It’s good. Great. Bring us the Dover sole. And one of the veal, but the veal at the end. Oh, and I forgot, the roasted snail. Bring that with the langoustine.” We had already been told there was a special tonight of a whole guinea fowl—a pintade, in French—stu
ffed with ricotta, spinach, and truffles, served like the Dover sole, for two. “And bring us the pintade as well.”
I looked at him. “Did you just order the whole bird on top of everything else?”
He lifted his hands, palms forward, to reassure me. “It will be fine. It’s a small bird.” It wasn’t.
Next, the wines. Something sweet and crisp and Austrian to start, which was listed at a mere £80 ($160) a bottle. After that a 1996 Montrachet, costing £595 ($1,200), but Abela didn’t like it. “It’s gone. Too old. Can you smell the sulfur at the end?” I said I could, to be polite and to sound sophisticated, though I couldn’t.
“We’ll get another,” he said, and he chose a 1997 Montrachet worth £325 ($675). That one he liked. “It’s good, isn’t it?” he said. “It will go well with . . .,” and he waved toward the dishes that even now were arriving: giant langoustine tails, with a slippery purée of peas and mint, dotted with cubes of a mint-infused jelly; a slab of an absurdly rich foie gras terrine buried beneath a leaf-fall of summer truffle shavings alongside pebbles of a clear bitter jelly flavored with cocoa; something fiendishly clever involving a shell of cooked poached whipped egg white infused with fresh herbs, surrounding a center of liquid yolk; a dish of roasted snails on top of confit pork ribs; a platter of soft polenta dressed with an intense veal reduction and another shrubbery of truffle shavings. Most of the food had to be dug out from under (mostly tasteless) truffle shavings before they could be eaten. I commented on the volume.
“They’re probably being a little more generous because it’s us,” he said, knowing how ludicrous this statement was. Of course it was because it was us.
I asked him what he thought the purpose was of restaurants like this.
He thought for a moment. “Imagine if they didn’t exist. That there was nowhere for that special moment. It’s not something you want to do every day, of course, but you want it to be there.”
“You do it every day.”
“It’s my job. It’s my passion.” And then, “I just love what I do. I love good food and wine. It’s always been a part of my life. It may be a bit sad. I may be a bit extreme. But that’s what I do.” Quite simply put, by deciding to invest the riches he had been left by his father into his own set of catering businesses, he had turned eating into a career. He thought for a moment. “It may not be the most worthy profession in the world, but it’s also not the most unworthy.”
I wondered if I could adopt that as a personal mission statement: I’m not as bad as some people.
Now the main courses. First the whole Dover sole, a foot and half long and half that across. It was displayed to us like a painting up for auction before, in a series of neat nips and tucks, the fillets were off the bone and on a plate in front of us. As that was being served, a dish of the roast Aubrac veal—pink meat, crisp fat, a little light jus—arrived between us.
“We can’t possibly eat all this,” I said. Most of my starters had already gone back half finished. I was appalled but at the same time intrigued to discover that there were in fact limits to my greed and I was, right now, being introduced to them.
“Just taste,” he said. Attacking the meat. “Isn’t that great? Isn’t that the best? It will go very well with the Kistler Pinot Noir from California. Have you tried it before? It’s very good. And what about this sole? It’s such a meaty fish.”
The monologue was constant, like the commentary on a sports game. As each dish arrived, and I ate less and less of each one, I began to feel that I was disappointing him. There was Abela, with his slender hips and narrow chest and multimillionaire bonhomie, valiantly defeating each plateful. And there I was pushing the food around, surrendering with a whimper. Sure, he sent some food back, but I began to suspect he was doing it to make me feel better.
He insisted on cheese and grumbled when the trolley headed to another table before us.
“They’re paying customers, Marlon,” I said. “Ought they not be served first? After all, we’re probably consuming the entire profits from that table.”
Abela grinned and leaned into me conspiratorially. “We’re eating the profits from a number of tables, believe me.” Now he ordered dessert: a mille-feuille of earthy tasting tonka bean parfait with praline and whisky ice cream, a plate of shiny black chocolate leaves atop a chocolate mousse with salted caramel ice cream and shards of peanuts, which he said was the kitchen’s take on a Snickers bar; a black rectangle of more chocolate with praline ice cream, which he said “the ladies love.” Each plateful was beautiful until I shattered it with my spoon, cracking off a corner here, splintering an arrangement of crisp chocolate sheets there, tasting now but not eating. Into my mind came the image of a spittoon of the sort used at a wine tasting, only filled to the brim with masticated high-class desserts. I felt queasy.
I said, “Doesn’t the waste upset you?”
“That’s why I try to eat everything.”
I nodded and, taking the hint, tried another spoonful of the re-engineered Snickers bar, but it was too much. It was a tragedy, or at least it was if you had an overly developed interest in your dinner: I had been served a great meal. I had been served a truly fabulous meal. The problem was it had been hidden away beneath enough food to make up more than three others.
I decided to take refuge at Le Gavroche, because nothing bad could ever happen there. When it first opened in 1967, good food was literally illegal in Britain. Most of the ingredients the brothers Albert and Michel Roux needed were not available. Albert was forced to dispatch his wife to Rungis market in Paris, where she stocked up on foie gras and truffles, goose fat, and duck breasts. She stowed it in the boot of her car, drove back to the nearest channel port where, because of desperate British customs laws that forbade the importation of anything that tasted nice, she risked being turned away if the contraband was found. When that happened, she simply drove down the coast to the next port until she was able to board a ferry. From such determination had been born a legend: Le Gavroche was the first restaurant in Britain to win one, then two, then three Michelin stars (though it had returned to being a two-star, when Albert Roux had handed over the kitchen to his son Michel Jr. in the 1990s).
There is nothing else like Le Gavroche in London, nothing quite so classical or old school. When it is 8:30 p.m. in London it is 1967 at Le Gavroche. I would never forget my first proper meal there, notionally booked to celebrate my wife’s birthday, though shamefully arranged so much more with my own interests in mind than hers. I had eaten woodcock served in the traditional style, the head bisected and impaled on the breast by its long, thin beak. I marveled that such a grotesque and fabulous dish was still available from a London kitchen. It also tasted nice, the delicate skull crunching beneath my teeth to release the soft brains.
I had returned to Le Gavroche many times after that, and thrilled at the work of the maître d’, Silvano Giraldin, who, in a masterful piece of theatrical misdirection, would receive your order without taking a single note, leaving that to the boy positioned ten feet away just in earshot. I loved the soufflé Swiss with its ballast of Gruyère cheese, and the sweet indulgence of the omelette Rothschild. Mostly I loved the set-price lunch that included half a bottle of seriously good wine per person, all of it at a smaller charge than the cost of just the food at many lesser places.
In my head there was a map of London, of my London, described entirely by its restaurants: Covent Garden was for Rules and Joe Allen. Over in Smithfield was St. John and Comptoir Gascon. In Mayfair was The Square; in Kensington, Petrus; and here, on Upper Brook Street, in a basement decorated in antiquated shades of red and green, the tables heavy with garish animal sculptures fashioned from silver cutlery, was Le Gavroche, where nothing bad ever happened.
So I came here now to eat their impeccable duck terrine, and their lamb chops and their own ice creams from the ice-cream trolley, the oval scoops arranged on the plate like the petals of a flower, and regretted for a moment the loss of innocence that repetition of exper
iences entailed. For nothing would ever match the arrival of that woodcock at the table.
It struck me now that in the days before a visit to an apparently classy restaurant, we fictionalize ourselves. We imagine ourselves at the table as the wittiest, most tasteful and, of course, happiest version of ourselves that it is possible to be. The problem was that few restaurants can ever deliver on that anticipation, and even if it could, like heroin or crack, the buzz is never as good the second or third time around.
It was inevitable, really. Traveling the world through its greatest restaurants, in search of the perfect meal, had made me question the very point of them. It wasn’t that I was sated. It is one of the glories of the human condition that we are made to be addicted to food. If we don’t get a fix at least once or twice a day we are mad, bad, and dangerous to know, and a little after that, we are dead. It was more to do with the whole process of the restaurant meal. It suddenly seemed so feeble, so ephemeral when examined so closely. I felt like a straight man doubting his sexuality, like a priest questioning his vocation. Was I really losing my religion?
I decided there was only one way to find out: I had to test the high-end restaurant experience to destruction, take the once in a lifetime and make it everyday, make it ordinary. Only once it was stripped of all notions of specialness, I decided, could I truly understand what it was all about.
It would not be a simple venture. It would demand a certain commitment, not to mention shedding loads of cash, but I knew exactly how to do it. I also knew exactly where to go.
SEVEN
PARIS
DAY ZERO
It is the day before my trip to Paris and I am lying on an examination table in a consulting room at one of London’s most expensive hospitals, my shirt hitched up to just below my ribs. My friend Sarah Burnett, a highly regarded doctor, is running a sensor coated in water-based jelly across my stomach and studying an image on a monitor beside me. She is managing to do this without looking appalled, which is kind.