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

by Jay Rayner

  “When we consume excess calories,” Sarah says casually as she sweeps from one side of my rippling belly to the other, “they are stored as fat, obviously beneath the skin but also within our organs and particularly the liver. That’s how foie gras is made. The geese are overfed so their livers blow up with fat. So, now,” she says with a little too much enthusiasm, “let’s have a look at yours.”

  She throws me a sympathetic glance. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was fattier than normal in the first place, given what you do—even before the week you’ve got coming.”

  She tells me that fat shows up white on an ultrasound, and I turn to the screen expecting to see something akin to the polar ice cap emerge out of the fuzzy image.

  “Well, well,” Sarah says. “You are not particularly fatty there at all. I think we can safely say that Gordon Ramsay would reject your liver for being gritty and unpalatable.”

  As I button up my shirt I ask her if she thinks what I am about to do is madness. She laughs. “No, not at all. I’d do it, given half the chance.”

  “But then you are not as other doctors.”

  “That’s true. I am not as other doctors.”

  We became friends because Sarah was a contestant on the pilot for a BBC television food show called Eating with the Enemy, in which home cooks would cook for and be judged by restaurant critics, of which I was one. She had done something very nice with chorizo, followed that with a pork belly dish, and easily trounced the opposition. As well as being a doctor she gave cookery classes and was pursuing an interest in food writing. When I decided I would be going to Paris and that a doctor should be involved, she was the obvious choice. Sarah quickly volunteered her medical services for free, in return for a nice meal somewhere. That was fine by me. I was always good for a nice meal somewhere.

  My idea was simple. I wanted to do the high-end Super Size Me. In the original documentary, released in 2004, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock investigated the fast-food industry and its effect on American life by eating nothing but McDonald’s, three times a day for thirty days. And if he was invited to Super Size his meal—to increase the portion size for a limited increase in price—he had to do so.

  The high-end version would require me to eat in a Michelin three-star restaurant in Paris every day for a week, and if I was invited to take the tasting menu, I would have to say yes. Partly I wanted to see how my attitude to these “treat” restaurants, which were meant to be enjoyed only rarely, would change if I visited them once every twenty-four hours. But I was also curious about the impact on my physical well-being. Was high-end food any better for you than McDonald’s just because it cost one hundred times more? As a result of the Super Size Me experiment, Spurlock put on 11 kilograms (25 pounds), developed symptoms of sugar addiction and depression, and turned his liver into paté. What would happen to my body if I traipsed from three-star to three-star?

  Admittedly my body would be starting in a very different place to Spurlock’s. At the beginning he was a perfect physical specimen. I too was a specimen, but only of the sort that would be found stowed away in a bottle somewhere in a laboratory to be brought out and laughed at during the Christmas party. Our experiments would also, by necessity, be different. For one, Spurlock had eaten three meals a day in McDonald’s. I could only eat one of mine in a three-star, not least because it cost too bloody much to do otherwise. For the same reason I would only be doing this for seven days rather than for thirty. At the point when I made what I regarded as the selfless decision to eat in the French capital, there were ten three-stars located there, more than in any other city in the world. Two were closed for renovation, leaving eight, and one of those—L’Ambrosie—proved impossible to visit, no matter how willing I was to degrade myself to get a booking. And, anyway, a week felt neater to me.

  Also, Spurlock reduced his physical activity to better match that of the average American during the process. He dropped from walking around three miles a day to 1.5 miles a day. Then again, he didn’t have the responsibility of being a father of two small children and, with that in mind, I was clear that I would continue my workouts—although I believed it brought a certain consistency to the experiment. I would simply be behaving normally throughout.

  I was already pleased to see that the efforts I had made over the previous few months on my elliptical Cross Tracker had born results. No one could pretend I looked like a fit man; I looked like a fit man’s degenerate brother. But when my blood pressure was taken, my underlying resting rate—the diastolic—was 66, considerably better than the average of 80. My systolic, the peak pressure, was way up at 160 as against 120, but Sarah kindly ascribed that to anxiety, brought on by me having just seen my weight.

  I had told Sarah I was the wrong side of 115 kilograms (253 pounds), which was really only a guess because I never weighed myself. I judged where I was by the fit of my clothes. Sarah now saw the scales, laughed, and said, “Oh, yes, that is on the wrong side of 115 kilograms.” (Don’t expect me to give you the number; I may be a journalist, but even I have limits when it comes to the invasion of my own privacy.) Certainly it was a disappointment. I had been working out especially hard in recent months and had even dropped a trouser size. Sarah said a few soothing things about muscle mass weighing more than fat, and I told myself that had to be the explanation: I wasn’t actually fatter. I was just more muscular.

  Yeah, right.

  I also told Sarah that I had developed certain strategies to get through the week in Paris. For a start, other than the two I would eat at the weekend, I would be taking most of the meals at lunchtime because I hoped that would allow me more time to digest the food. Also, I wouldn’t be drinking. I imagined that boozing for seven days straight would be a complete killer, especially as I wasn’t much of a drinker.

  Sarah said, “I think that’s cheating.”

  “Hang on. You’re a doctor, and you’re telling me to drink heavily?”

  “I’m just pointing out the parameters of the experiment. And it’s only for a week.”

  “I might have a glass or two.”

  She said she would call me later that same day with the results of various blood tests, and I made an appointment to see her immediately after my return so she could have another look at my liver, to find out whether it was any more ready for Ramsay’s pan.

  When she telephoned that afternoon she said she had both good news and some that was less so. The good news was that my cholesterol score was just below the average, which was probably the result of all the exercise. I also had a very positive ratio of good-to-bad cholesterol. On paper I should have been a cholesterol disaster; in reality I was a paragon of virtue.

  The bad news concerned my blood glucose. She told me that a score of 7 or above indicates type 2 diabetes, the variety brought on by a combination of genetic predisposition and piss-poor lifestyle (or what I liked to call “my job”). Anything over 6 was into the danger zone.

  Mine, she said, was at 5.9.

  “It has to be said if you put on any more weight, you really could be at risk of tipping into type 2, and that’s something you need to think about.”

  I did think about it, a lot. In the days before I became a food writer, some of the stories I had covered, particularly those concerning the security services, had involved a modicum of risk, which Pat had not liked at all. I talked to strange men in shadowy places. I suspected my telephone was bugged. The usual. Eventually she asked me to stop doing those stories and, believing I had a responsibility to the woman I had married, I said I would. For the same reason, and the more so when our boys arrived, I turned down major commissions to go to Rwanda, Iraq, Kurdistan, and the Laotian-Cambodian border. I could still cover tough subjects, but essentially I believed in living safely.

  Yet here I was, apparently teetering on the edge of type 2 diabetes, a manageable but debilitating disease with explicit consequences for life expectancy. Did not exactly the same conditions apply as to the
threat of gunshot or bomb in a war zone?

  Well yes, I told myself, but this was different. This was a chronic situation, not an acute one. And I was sure I could lessen the impact of my behavior through exercise and by modifying my diet on my return. Of course, I was just making excuses to myself. I was convinced my journey in search of the perfect meal would not be complete unless I went to Paris, and god knows the effort, the begging, the shameless pleading it had taken me to get the consecutive bookings in seven of the world’s greatest restaurants. I couldn’t just cancel the trip after all that.

  Okay. I didn’t want to.

  And so, for the very last time, I pulled down the suitcase and began packing.

  DAY ONE

  Restaurant Alain Ducasse

  It was when the maître d’ overruled my choice of first course in my very first Parisian three-star that I realized just how challenging this experiment might be. Admittedly I had tried to order a dish which was, by anybody’s standards, girls’ food: legumes et fruits cuits/crus, marmelade tomato/truffe. In short, and in English, a plate of vegetables. But was that really such a crime?

  The man in the gray suit thought so. “Let me bring you something else,” he said with a pained expression. “It’s nice, of course, but it is just . . . vegetables.” Well, yes, that’s why I ordered it. Sure, I was usually the paté guy or the spider crab guy, but I had a long way to go here, so I thought . . .

  “I bring you this,” he said, pointing to something else on the menu. “It is cockscomb, lobster, truffle, pasta. You’ll like it.”

  I couldn’t deny that I did, the long-braised and gelatinous cockscombs standing proudly to attention across a plate scattered with impeccable rounds of lobster, slices of black truffle, curls of soft pasta, the whole bound by a rich, defiantly classical butter and cream sauce.

  It was, I realized, the very first dish I had ever liked in a restaurant with Alain Ducasse’s name on it. Usually I made a point of hating Ducasse restaurants, much as I made a point of hating evangelical Christians or people who appeared in Hello! magazine. It was a matter of principle. I had hated Mix in Las Vegas so much, I had considered suicide, just to spite them; in London I had hated Spoon, for its self-conscious hipness and stupid concept, involving a menu written in pidgin English that allowed the punters to put together food items that didn’t deserve to be in the same restaurant let alone on the same plate. I had even hated the venerable Parisian bistro Benoit, which Ducasse had recently purchased, for its lazy, cynical service and its lazy, cynical pricing. Hating Alain Ducasse restaurants was what I did.

  Still, I knew that he must have something going for him. After winning three stars at the Hotel Louis XV in Monaco in 1990, he had opened in Paris, first at Le Parc Sofitel Demeure Hôtel, later here at the Plaza Athénée Hotel just off the Champs Elysées. It’s the sort of ludicrously glitzy place where you might, as I did, see a woman in a Louis Vuitton eyepatch; where just one of the cars parked outside is worth more than your own house. In 2001, Alain Ducasse at the Plaza Athénée won its third star and he became the only chef in the world to have two restaurants with the maximum rating (before becoming the only chef in the world with three such restaurants, when he added the Essex House in New York, which he later closed). He was the king of the globalized chef crew, the master of the diffusion line. I might have hated his restaurants, but a lot of other people liked them.

  Now I was beginning to like one as well. I even liked the curious orange and gray interior, and the exploded chandeliers that scattered the room with shards of light. True, it had some silly affectations: the pull-out shelves built into the seats so women had somewhere to put their handbags, the holders for the menus because, as one of my companions put it, “heaven forefend rich people should have to do anything as strenuous as hold something themselves.” But the service was relaxed and genuinely friendly. They hadn’t even flinched when they saw my friend Joe in his jeans and trainers and T-shirt.

  In the days before my trip I had sent out an e-mail to those in my circle with an equally profound interest in their lunch and the willingness to spend big money on it. I couldn’t afford to buy them a meal in a Paris three-star, I said, but I could give them the excuse to come and have a meal in a Paris three-star. A whole bunch of people had said yes, starting today with Maureen, a London restaurant PR who made a habit of coming to Paris to eat, and Joe, a food writer and magazine editor in his late thirties, who was famed for dressing like a bloody teenager.

  “I’m a good test of the service, actually,” he said, defensively. “If they treat me well despite what I’m wearing, it’s a good place.”

  “You are,” I said, “the canary in the mineshaft.”

  “Exactly.”

  Soon I forgot about his garish T-shirt as we focused on the menu. As well as a few spectacular dishes involving caviar and the like, clearly priced in such a way as to appeal to deposed world leaders looking for the means by which to spend the wealth they had plundered from their former subjects, the menu listed nine dishes priced at the 85 euro ($125) mark. Although it wasn’t specifically pointed out to us, we could also have three of these plus cheese and dessert for 220 euros ($325) as a tasting menu. In the twisted, looking-glass world of the Paris three-star, this is what is known as a bargain.

  “Here’s the question,” I said. “Have I been offered the tasting menu?”

  “It has been placed before you,” Joe said.

  “But does that mean we should have it?”

  They both looked at me as if I were an idiot. Of course we should have it: nine dishes, three people. Do the math. We could eat the whole menu.

  So we did, sharing every plate with each other as we went. There was the spider crab, in its shell, topped by a sweet-savory foam that was like inhaling the taste of the sea; there was the tranche of turbot with the old-school red-wine sauce that I found myself spooning from its little jug straight to my mouth; the perfectly cooked piece of sea bass with the citrus sauce; the deep pink pigeon with the mustardy crust, the sweetbread with girolles mushrooms. There was nothing startling here, nothing unusual or showy, just clean refined neoclassicism. I decided I might be in for a rather thrilling week, the more so when the waiter fumbled a piece of lamb and sent it flying through the air in a gentle parabola.

  I have always loved these moments. High-end restaurants are meant to keep the world at bay. They are meant to be a place where the real world does not intrude. And yet, every now and then it does, in all its glorious and random untidiness. At Jean-Georges in New York I once saw a waiter upend an entire shot glass of something white and creamy over a diner. Now I watched as a waiter took a spoon and fork and used them to chuck a piece of what was probably the most expensive lamb on the planet across the carpet.

  But even that moment was upstaged by the arrival of my dessert, a classic rum baba, the sponge deep glazed and laid in a gold-plated bowl so the reflection of one against the other seemed to make the baba glow. A trolley laden with bottles was brought to the table. I was invited to taste any number of the twenty different rums to find the one I wished to have poured onto my dessert. I tasted just the two before choosing something with hints of vanilla from Venezuela. A jug of light whipped cream was placed before me, the one to be introduced to the other. I did as I was told and it was, of course, delightful, the light boozy sponge playing catch in my mouth with the chilled cream. It was the gastronomic equivalent of that moment at the end of the day when hot, tired feet touch cool, crisp linen bedsheets.

  Even so, all I could think as I ate it, the only words that kept playing in my head were: “Blood glucose 5.9, blood glucose 5.9.” Even without the medical statistics, this sort of experience might be a cause for guilt, especially for a Jewish boy with a suspicion that his life had taken an unworthy turn; with the awful blood-sugar reading it was a psychodrama on a plate or, to be more literal, in a gold-plated bowl.

  Afterward I stood outside on the ritzy Avenue Montaigne, queuing for a cab in the early autumn s
unshine, and gave myself a talking-to. What was the point of doing this if I was only going to feel bad about it? How could a man whose job was the investigation of pleasure be so diffident about it, so uncertain, so unwilling to give himself to it? Or was it that sense of shame, that sense of badness, that made me enjoy it all the more? Or, to put it another way, just exactly how fucked up was I? Casually, more as a way to pass the time than anything else, I turned on my mobile phone.

  There was one voice mail. It was from Sarah Burnett. The message crackled, as if she had called while on a train, but I could still make out what she was saying. There had been a mistake in the communication of some of the blood test results. The fax had got mangled, the digits muddled.

  “Your blood glucose is actually 5.2 . . . which is fine. Nothing to worry about.” She said she was looking forward to seeing me in a week’s time and told me to enjoy myself in Paris. I grinned, closed my phone, and decided I should do as instructed.

  DAY TWO

  Guy Savoy

  It is a warm Saturday night, I am half cut on champagne, and I have just worked out the whole point of three-star restaurants. It is all about the peas. Not peas in general. Not just any peas. These peas, the ones in the bowl in front of me, here at Restaurant Guy Savoy by the Arc de Tri-omph. They are just so . . . so . . . damn pea-ish. This dish is the very essence of the pea, it is pea incarnate, a veritable hymn to the pea.

  And to think I almost didn’t order it. Our waiter, Hubert, had made such a meal of selling the pea thing to us, I wanted to choose something else just to spite him. After all, how good could a pea get? It didn’t even have a pulse.