Through the Children's Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  “Thanks, Peter,” Dan said dryly. “I'm going to tell that to everybody in the kitchen tonight.”

  One morning as Dan and Peter and I walked around the market, I complained about how little meat was on offer. “Well, for the best veal, you have to meet Amy, this woman upstate,” Dan said. “You know, most veal is white, and it's sort of awful and immoral how they raise it, because they want white meat. But she has a dairy farm, and instead of getting rid of the male calves, she just, well, she brings them up like her own children.” Dan's eyes glowed. “They're grass-fed, and she lets them run as free as you or I. It's a hard sell for a restaurant, because it's a reddish meat and customers expect white, but it's absolutely delicious, and she's a completely admirable person. I mean, she's amazing, the way she treats them. She really brings them up like her own children.”

  “She brings them up like her own children until they're nine months old and she slaughters them,” Peter said equably.

  I soon became a convert to the limited palette and small victories of the green market. I started coming home with a satchel filled with New York City produce: scrappy, hard-necked, stressed-out.

  “We're going to have greens with scapes and ramps,” I announced.

  “Can't we just have chicken fingers?” Luke asked.

  “Scapes and greens and ramps: It sounds like a Ted Hughes poem,” my wife said dubiously.

  * * *

  Over a few dinners and many post-market breakfasts, I came to know the chefs involved in the game, and thought that I had begun to glimpse something about their curious mix of entrepreneurial savvy, high principle, sensual engineering, and mordant despair. There was, for instance, a story Dan Barber loved to tell about the moment he thought he had identified the Times food critic William Grimes incognito in his restaurant.

  “So by this point, I know, I mean I know, that this is Grimes. I mean, it's obvious, he's coming in night after night, he's trying different bits of the menu, very professional—it's obvious that the guy is a food critic, and I see him and I sort of recognize him.” A visit from Grimes determines a restaurant's mood, because a Grimes review will determine its future. Dan Barber paused, and there was a quick, is-this-okay-in-front-of-a-civilian? glance between him and the other chefs before he went on. “We even put it out over the credit-card line. That's this informal system a couple of chefs have where they fax the fake credit-card names of the Times critic to all the other restaurants.” He shrugged. “So the very next day, Grimes actually calls from the Times and asks for a wine list. Now, this guy, let's call him Mr. Hudsucker, had taken a menu with him—but not a wine list! So, I mean, now we're getting obvious.” He went on, “That Friday, a ‘Diner's Journal’ article comes out that lists all the dishes Mr. Hudsucker ate at the bar! So, okay, the next week H. M. Hudsucker makes another reservation, and we flip over backward for him, creating all these tasting menus, and the servers going through hula hoops. You have to be careful about that stuff, of course, because it's like the Enigma secret—you want to use it, but you don't want it to be obvious you've broken the code. Anyway, finally, someone comes into the kitchen and I say, ‘That's Grimes!’ and he says, ‘No, it isn't. I know Grimes, and that's not Grimes.’ And I say, ‘That's not Grimes? Then who the hell is that?’ Later, a waiter went over without my knowing it and said, ‘You seem so, uh, passionate about food, Mr. Hudsucker, are you in the business?’ And he said, ‘What business?’ And the server said the food business. And Mr. Hudsucker said, ‘The food business? I'm in the insurance business. I just like it here.’

  “And the really terrible part of the story is that he came back and we didn't do anything for him—not because we 're malicious. It's just, just that at this point we're sort of disillusioned with H. M. Hudsucker, no fault of his own. And he walked out upset. It's ironic because … he was the ideal diner! He ate like a food critic without being one! The ideal guest.”

  Cooks, I learned, indulge the gaping outsider—I want to run away with the circus!—without even trying to explain to him what they know too well, that the tricks are easy; the hard part is preventing the clowns from committing suicide and the lion trainer from getting in bed with the ringmaster's wife. They're glad that people like the circus, but they understand that the circus is not the show; the circus is the ring around the show.

  Though cooks worry about food and carp about critics, they obsess about their staffs. (I once saw Dan Barber struck dumb—speechless and incapable of movement—by the news, conveyed to him at the morning market by one of uptown's snazzier French chefs, that he had just hired away Dan's first-rate general manager.) This is partly because they have to, or there will be no one there to serve, but also because, just as good baseball managers know that an awful lot of what looks like pitching is really fielding, restaurant owners know that a lot of what tastes like good food is really good service. “The thing is, what's a good taste is a feeling, not just a sensation,” Peter Hoffman said once. “So if you're feeling welcomed and warm, right then the food tastes better—the whole feeling is better, and you're not going to start prying apart your sensations, unless you're a writer. You just know you're having a good time, and you tell the next person, ‘The food's wonderful there.’ Once we had a girl seating people, and some friend of the house came in and she said, ‘Just a minute, please.’ Just a minute, please. Not rude or anything—but, for that person, everything we 've been working to build up about Savoy is gone in that moment.”

  The craft secret, I realized, was that the craft was not the secret. There are lots of good cooks. The quality of the cooking in a good restaurant really depends on the daily preparation of a context, a hundred small sensations that precede any one bite and transcend it. The understanding that the food was not the thing from which all else came but the thing to which all else led was shared by all the harried and overworked cooks in the jeu.(The chefs who owned restaurants felt it most keenly, of course, but even those who worked for other people knew that the quality of the cooking depended on choices that were made before the cooking even started. No cook will ever talk about “a great recipe.”) Philippe Bertineau is the perfect Frenchman—he was the original sous-chef at Daniel—and the American cooks looked on him as their Horowitz, their technical genius. He has the worried, harassed, ironic eyebrows that French cooks always seem to have. He grew up on a farm in the Poitou-Charentes region, and was perplexed by the American cooks’ belief that their doctrine was a doctrine rather than a revealed truth. “On the farm where I grew up, everything came from the farm,” he told me. “Where else could it come from? I can't believe how impatient Americans are. They want to start”—he shrugged and made a mournful “O” with his mouth—“oh, mixing trout and cumin seed after they've worked in the kitchen for a day, before they know how to fillet a turbot.”

  Sara Jenkins, it turned out, was the daughter of an American foreign correspondent and grew up in Spain and Lebanon and on a farm in Tuscany, and she practiced Tuscan farm cooking with an exceptional sincerity and purity of spirit. She believed in the doctrine with the conviction of someone who has given up “sophistication” in order to believe. She was a true Daughter of Alice, with the wide-eyed, militant innocence of the Salvation Army girl in Guys and Dolls.“I think anything can be delicious if it's really fresh and seasonal,” she told me once over coffee. “I've always had problems with frog, for instance, until I went to Cambodia one summer. And, I mean, you may think you don't like frog, but what you don't like is frozen frog. These Cambodian frogs had been caught and skinned only minutes before, and it was … Once you've had fresh frog, you have a completely different feeling about what frog can be.”

  Romy Dorotan, the Filipino cook of Cendrillon, had been working part-time at a restaurant in Philadelphia while he got a degree in economics at Temple in the seventies. One day the cook quit, and he had to take over. He managed, he explained, because he had read a lot of books by the gloomy British sensualist Elizabeth David. “She really showed me the way,” he said.
“I would read a bit of Elizabeth David every day, and her writing gave me the courage to cook.” It turned out that it was Romy who had been the Courtine reader.

  I was drawn to Dan Barber, though, because, alone among the cooks, he had what every doctrine ought to inspire, and that is doubts, and not just doubts but Doubts. At the time we were going to the market together, Food & Wine named him and Mike Anthony two of the best new chefs in America, and they posed on the cover in their whites. But he still wasn't sure he wanted to spend the rest of his life cooking. He is in the position of a trombone virtuoso who never exactly intended to be a trombone player. “I mean, do I really want to spend my life doing this?” he said one morning. “It's incredibly hard to have a happy family life if you're a cook. I've heard about people who have, but I've never met any. And the money—I mean, we make money, but you could make more money by investing it in a CD.” Chefs, like writers, are wrung out by the work. “It's insane, insane, insane, insane,” one said cheerfully. “All cooking is monotonous,” another said. “No matter how varied you think your technique is, you always end up taking something flabby and making it crunchy on the outside, tender on the inside. Food is always crispy out and tender in, over and over and over again.”

  Dan even had doubts about the doctrine. One spring morning as we were walking through the market, we saw some hydroponic tomatoes. The other cooks walked right past them. “Now, this is a problem for me,” he said, stopping in front of the red pile. “You see, I mean, here it is a nice day, it's a hot day, and someone is going to come in and ask for a tomato salad, and a steak, and I'm going to have to be the virtuous guy who tells him, ‘No, you can't have it.’ I mean, is that a slightly weird role for me to be playing? The tomatoes are good, this local guy is growing them, and I have to be too goddamn virtuous to serve them because they aren't dirt-grown in August? It worries me a lot, so I'm always trying to make compromises. I mean—Alice, forgive me, but I don't know if I always want to be that pure. Tonight we'll do a cold tomato soup with coriander—and we'll press that on the tomato-hungry public.”

  Peter walked over to the tomato stand. “The way I see it,” he said, “it's part of the pleasure of the seasons—waiting. I want to be satiated with tomatoes when tomato time comes. I want to wait.”

  “Yeah, but the stockbroker or whatever doesn't want to wait.”

  The conversation turned to a new restaurant that had just opened, three stories high and full of restaurant theater (specially designed uniforms, that kind of thing).

  “I love that stuff,” Dan said brightly.

  Peter stopped. “You're … kidding, right?”

  “No, I'm not. I love that stuff.” He shrugged. “I guess I'm not reverent enough.”

  It would be easy to be irreverent about what might be called the snob appeal behind the doctrine. All status, including the status of what we eat, depends on invidious comparison. At the turn of the last century, when only the wealthy could obtain out-of-season ingredients—strawberries in December, oranges in August—hothouse fruit had the prestige that organic fruit has now. When anyone at any time can go to the Food Emporium and shop for cherries and raspberries, glory attaches to someone who has the leisure to go to a market and shop for ramps and rhubarb.

  But then all values in real life get expressed as manners; the mistake is to think that values are only manners. Everything is a show; what matters, as the bishop said to the mermaid, is what you're showing. “Seasonality,” whatever snobbishness it may express, also expresses a desire to connect, to a region, a place, a locality. (The larger, ecological point of the doctrine, that agribusiness is bad for civilization, is, of course, independent of the aesthetics of taste, but that point, in turn, could be met by the counterpoint that agribusiness of one kind or another is, on a desperately overpopulated planet, necessary for the survival of civilization at all. And this conversation can turn round and round over a dinner table until you are hungry again.)

  * * *

  After a two-month marination in the farmers’ market, I had come to my own conclusions about what in the market was affectation and what real gain. Some things that you could find outside the market—oranges and lemons and pineapples and onions, red and yellow, and eggplant, and the tougher cuts of beef and pork, even raspberries and cherries and fresh herbs—were perfectly okay in their supermarket form. Other things, though—strawberries, potatoes, asparagus, fresh peas, green beans, poultry—had come to seem to me so inferior in their mass-produced versions that they ought to be made to do a perp walk from the produce bin to the compactor.

  The list I finally decided on for the menus was composed of pale or delicate things: veal, trout, day-neutral strawberries, green garlic and its scapes, mustard greens, small sour cherries, snap peas shelled. The veal would be Amy's child-raised veal and the trout from Max Creek farms at the market. (Of all the things I have loved to eat, trout seems to me the one that has almost disappeared from the world of tastes; farmed salmon is pleasant if uniform, but most farmed trout doesn't even taste like fish.) I threw in sorrel because I love it, and also because I have seldom seen it used except in a sauce for salmon. Since there was no starch, I allowed each cook to fill in as he or she wanted to.

  The week after I chose the ingredients, we went from place to place, to see what each cook had made of the writer's list. As it turned out, each one created something far more individual than you could have imagined from the list of ingredients I'd e-mailed. At this point, of course, I should give out recipes, or at least pass around a platter of hors d'oeuvres. But I will do the best impression I can of Robert Courtine's sonorous style of assessment and boldly unleash a raft of exotic metaphor. So let it be said that Philippe Bertineau's version of the menu was a visit to a region of France: The innards of the veal, sweetbreads and kidneys, were crisped above the crunchy snap peas; on one side, a little blush of color, the sour cherries were recused from dessert and turned into a chutney. Although Bertineau cooks high, his references are to regional cooking: All French food aspires to the condition of country cooking; all haute cuisine pines for the farm where it began. His trout was stuffed with the mustard greens, so that the sweetness of the fish was set off by the startling spice of the greens, and he snipped the sorrel with scissors and used it in a chiffonade, rather than the expected imitation of sorrel sauce.

  Sara Jenkins turned the same list into a July day in Tuscany. Her veal got minced up, yet not dumbed down, into a ragù, and she mixed her mustard greens with fresh ricotta over rigatoni. A poached or sautéed trout was, I think, too finicky for her country heart, and so she served smoked trout as a starter, on bread. It was an American's Tuscany, perhaps, but all flax and terraced fields nonetheless. Romy Dorotan seemed to turn everything toward the East, with sudden juxtapositions of cool courtyards and hot sunlight (the farm-raised veal was curried; the sweet trout heated with cayenne; the baby fennel chilled with watermelon ice), and yet the more time you spent with his menu, the more its European and Davidian origins emerged. Though the ambitious juxtapositions of flavor were Eastern, the idea of bringing those juxtapositions forward, rather than leaving them lurking in the shadows of tradition, was entirely French.

  With the two chefs I knew best, not just their origins but their entire characters were evident. Peter Hoffman, whose commitment to the idea of the menu was most intense, made the most intensely committed menu. It was, if anything, too intense, too varied: He marinated the brook trout, for instance, so that it became a kind of superior, briny herring, and then married it with the mustard greens. We liked his dessert best of anything: a sour-cherry-and-day-neutral-strawberry compote, simple and sweet and acid, with buttermilk ice cream. Even Dan Barber's doctrinal doubts, I would insist, could be tasted in the menu he prepared with Mike Anthony. They shelled the snap peas and turned them into a sublime sweet-pea puree with yogurt and fresh herbs. It was a cultivated dish masquerading as a rustic one, from the market, certainly, but not entirely of the market. Their veal was slow-roasted in
the Parisian manner, with the mustard greens and garlic reduced to a single resonant tang.

  Like I say, I should give out recipes. But, failing that, I can hand out an insight. It was not a game. The metaphor of the jeu, at least, was all wrong. Cooks have no time for games. They do what they have to do. I had not created a game for them to play. I had created one more stress in a life of stresses, and they had turned it into a taste.

  * * *

  When the week of the menu was done, I had the cooks over for Sunday brunch. They looked at one another's menus: Part of the pathos of their work, I realized, was that they were too busy to eat out much. Dan couldn't make it. A Con Ed power failure had hit his restaurant on Saturday morning, and he and Mike had spent the whole day distributing their produce to other people's fridges, then had to spend all Sunday collecting it.

  The cooks asked how it had been for me, and the only metaphor I could come up with was a homely one. I said that it had been like listening to each of them talk; and then, as they ate and argued, something else became clear to me. Searching for an occult connection between cooking and writing, I had missed the most obvious one. They are both dependencies of conversation. What unites cooks and writers is that their work flows from the river of human talk around a table. People cook to bring something to the table; people write to keep something that was said there. I enjoy the company of cooks, I realized, because I love the occasions they create for conversation.

  Everyone agreed to try the game again in the fall, and, over bagels and lox, Peter said that he and his wife, Susan, had decided to remodel Savoy—to take out the beautiful candlelit room and put in a bar and new decor, with framed black-and-white photographs, to make it more accessible to the Armani shoppers who now fill Soho. Their idea had always been to make a first-class neighborhood restaurant; now that the neighborhood had changed, they'd have to change, too. Cooks, it struck me, are even more immediately vulnerable to life's difficulties than writers are, and life, though it looks tender on the outside, is very crunchy on the inside, which may be why we prefer it with food.