by Ruth Reichl
We didn’t talk much—just ate the food and watched the carts and listened to the activity in the big room. “I am so happy,” Diana said, sighing, when the bowls were empty. “It was lovely to have your company. Please be my guests.”
“That’s out of the question,” I replied.
“But it would give me such pleasure,” she said.
Wondering how to stop this argument, I had a sudden thought. “I have a great favor to ask of you.”
“Yes?” she said, raising an eyebrow.
“I want to order a banquet. I need your help.”
The eyebrow went down. When I explained the purpose of the banquet, her lips curved into a small smile. “The chairman of the New York Times Corporation?” she breathed. “I would be very honored.”
I had forgotten how much the Chinese respect status. When Diana summoned our waiter and asked for both the bill and the banquet manager, she looked positively regal.
The man who presented himself was not impressed. He was young and sharp, with his hair slicked back, his tuxedo pressed, his shirt starched. He doled out a supercilious smile meant to tell us how lucky we were to have his attention.
Diana took his measure, swept him with a cool look, and spoke in a commanding tone we had not heard before. He stuck his hands in his pockets and gave a deliberately careless answer.
Diana’s face turned to ice and her voice became a bark. The man was startled into standing at attention. She said something in an even sterner voice and he stood up straighter. Ten minutes later, when he pulled his card out of his pocket, all the starch had left his body.
She glanced at the card and handed it to me. “Now you give him one of yours,” she said in a different voice, one that said she was tired of all this and ready to depart. The man respectfully accepted my card, saying in careful English, “I can promise you, ladies, that this will be a banquet to remember.” Diana nodded a curt dismissal and he shot off before she could change her mind.
“What did you say to him?” I asked Diana.
“I began by informing him that you desire to have a banquet for some very important people. A dozen, I said—is that about right?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But it must be, more or less.”
“He asked if you were willing to spend three hundred dollars.”
“That’s so cheap!”
“An insult,” she said, flicking it away with disdainful fingers. “But merely the opening shot in the negotiation. I replied, very casually, ‘Oh, we might spend more. Maybe even five or six hundred dollars.’ Then I paused and said, so low that he had to ask me to repeat it, ‘They might even spend eight hundred eighty-eight.’ That impressed him. It’s a big number and eights are lucky to us. It showed him that I was a serious customer.”
“What did he say to that?” I asked, fascinated.
“Oh, he was impressed. He said, ‘Well, for that I could do a lobster salad.’”
My face fell. “Lobster salad? Who wants lobster salad?”
Diana laughed. “Please do not look so sad,” she said. “We were negotiating. Of course I told him that was not what we had in mind. I said”—and here her voice took on the contemptuous tone she had used with the banquet manager—“I see you don’t have anyone in the kitchen who is capable of cutting vegetables. Too bad. I thought this was supposed to be a good restaurant. Oh well, there are plenty more we can try.’”
“What did he say?”
“He was very quick to contradict me. Of course, he said, of course their people could cut vegetables. And then I said that we only wanted the banquet if the head chef, the dai si fu, was going to cook it. I said that we needed a person who understands the way to treat important people.”
“What did he say?”
“He said that he could accommodate us. He said that last night they did a banquet where they served a phoenix with five thousand feathers on its back. That’s a complicated cold plate. He said that the night before they served pandas at play, with pandas made of tofu, playing with carrot balls. It sounded quite ornate; the beasts were cavorting around a gelatin lake on which daikon swans were swimming. The landscape was dotted with broccoli trees and there were paths made of cold meats and walls built of sugared walnuts.”
“Wow!” I said. “Sounds impressive.”
“Perhaps,” she conceded, “but I think he was just talking. It’s a famous dish and I don’t believe that they really served it. So I yawned and said, ‘Pandas at play is pleasant. But don’t you ever do anything original?’”
“You didn’t!”
“I did! And then he said that if we were willing to pay the men in the kitchen for their trouble he was sure they would produce something really special, something no one had ever seen before.”
“Oh, good,” I said. “Joe will like that.”
“I asked him what he took us for, that of course we intended to pay the men in the kitchen. We hardly expected them to do extra work for free. I said that we were entertaining big shots, white people who spend much of their time in Hong Kong. I threw down a challenge. I said that all my friends say it is impossible to get good food in Flushing.”
“Did that impress him?”
“Definitely.” Diana’s smile flashed briefly. “That is when Raymond asked for your card and gave me his. He went back into the kitchen to make up a menu. He will fax it to you this afternoon.”
“What do I do then?” I asked.
“Send it back!” she replied. “Whatever he offers, you must not accept it. He’ll think that you don’t care, or that you don’t know what you’re doing. You have to tell him it’s not good enough, challenge him to be better, fax him back, change the menu a few times, be demanding. That’s how it’s done.”
“I never could have done this without you,” I said.
“I know,” she replied. “And now I don’t feel badly about allowing you to pay for my lunch. But I must go; I want to buy some superior shark’s fin and fermented tofu. They will tide me over until I come back.”
We walked out of the restaurant, going in opposite directions. Not until the subway doors had closed did I realize that I had neither her last name nor her number.
“Some reporter you turned out to be,” said Carol.
The menu arrived a few hours later. Carol and I stood by the fax machine as the document, half in ornate Chinese calligraphy, came rolling off the machine.
I read the first dish and rejoiced; Raymond had suggested the many-feathered phoenix surrounded by jellyfish, spicy pork kidney, beef shank, pork shank, little fried fish, jellied eels, thousand-year-old eggs, smoked fish, and squid with celery. “He took Diana at her word!” I said.
“Maybe,” said Carol, “but what’s this?” Her finger was pointing to the next line. “Egg rolls?”
I shuddered. It was an insult.
“And this?” she said. On the line below the white-cut chicken and the eight-treasure winter melon soup was lobster salad.
“These sound good,” I said, noting the next line: fried roe shrimp and whole steamed flounder with its own fried bones.
“Yeah,” she said, “but look at this! It sounds like some tired dish from Chinatown.” Her finger was resting next to something called steak kue. It was followed by Peking duck and fried rice served in pineapples. The finale was sweet dim sum.
“Diana didn’t get all that much respect!” I said.
“He must be testing you,” said Carol. “But at least he offered the phoenix with a thousand feathers.”
I crossed out the squid and substituted baby octopus. My pencil slashed through the insulting egg rolls and replaced them with steamed scallops in the shell, with XO sauce. I left the chicken, but asked for shark’s fin soup instead of winter melon. I put Dungeness crab with ginger and scallions where the lobster salad was, and replaced the fried shrimp with live boiled ones.
“I sort of like the idea of the flounder,” I told Carol. “Do you think my honor will be compromised if I accept it?”
“You can’t change everything all at once anyway,” she said. “You have to leave something for the next go-round.”
“Okay, but the steak kue, whatever that is, has to go immediately. And Peking duck—does he think I’m a fool? In a Cantonese restaurant? I’m asking for red-cooked pork belly and crispy chicken.”
I watched the fax slowly move through the machine and take its message off to Flushing. Ten minutes later I had my reply.
Raymond offered fried soft-shell crabs in place of the Dungeness. He didn’t have any baby octopus and he wondered if my guests were going to be happy with the pork belly; perhaps I’d like to try some roast baby pig?
“You can’t have the pig and the crispy chicken,” Carol pointed out. “Maybe you should change the chicken to something more elaborate.”
Each time a dish changed, the entire menu had to change with it. It was an oddly pleasurable process. After the first flurry of exchanges everything slowed down, and for a few days we proceeded at a languid pace, a relaxed Ping-Pong of flying faxes. When it was all over I had raised the ante (shark fins are expensive), but the chairman was going to get a spectacular meal.
I called Joe’s secretary and left the message that I had found the restaurant and finalized the menu. When, I asked, did Joe want to have the banquet?
She called back to request a copy of the menu.
“He wants to see it?” I asked stupidly.
“That’s what he said.”
I shrugged and put the document into one of those interoffice envelopes we were always being exhorted to use to save paper.
For a few weeks there was an ominous silence from the third floor. I began to worry. When Joe finally called, he was not reassuring. KB Garden Restaurant, he said flatly, would not do.
“Why?” I asked. “The food is wonderful.”
“Yes,” he said, his voice dry and unfriendly. “But I went there.”
“You actually ate there?” I asked, surprised.
“Yes,” he said. “It is not at all what I had in mind. Were you aware that they serve their banquets right in that enormous room? The food was good enough, I suppose, but we need something better for the chairman. We need a private dining room. You’ll have to find another restaurant.”
“Does he think I have nothing better to do?” I fumed. “I don’t have time to go running out to Flushing every day to find a restaurant just to please him!”
“Ruth,” said Carol, “you have time. Or you have to make time. Unless you want to have nothing but time. If you know what I mean.”
I did know what she meant, but I resented it. Everyone else treated me as if I were the Princess of New York and here was this guy reminding me that he was my boss, that I served at his pleasure. It made me prickle with irritation.
Each trip on the Number 7 train made things worse. I was following every lead, trekking out to Main Street every few days. But the places with good food weren’t good enough for the chairman; they were too big, too cold, or too shabby. And the ones with décor worthy of such an august personage had food that was not fit to eat. I was in despair. Time was running out.
And then Ken Hom came to town.
When I first met Ken we were both living in the Berkeley flatlands on very little money, both madly in love with food. He had a reputation as both a cook and a tour guide. Poor people bragged about being invited to his house for meals. Rich people bragged about the remarkable tours he arranged for them in Hong Kong. “I always wished I had the money to go along,” I told Carol, “but eating at his house was pretty wonderful.”
“I’ve heard of him,” she said. “I think Craig mentioned him. He said he was a terrific cook.”
“He is, but now he seems to spend most of his time in France. He’s got a fourteenth-century château he’s been restoring.”
“Where’d he get the money for that?”
“He’s England’s best-selling cookbook author. He had some cooking show on the BBC, and his books sell by the millions.”
“But does he know anything about Flushing?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Probably not. But if anyone can find out, he can. After all, he was just a kid from Chicago before he became Mr. Hong Kong. Joe seems to think Flushing is just like Hong Kong, so I’m going to ask Ken to pretend that it is.”
Ken’s publicist thought that a food tour of Flushing was a swell idea; she assured me that her client was well acquainted with Queens. I believe the words she used were “knows everything there is to know.” I doubted that, but I was certain that by the time we met, she’d make sure he did; after all, a story in the New York Times is every p.r. person’s dream.
Ken arrived in a limousine. He jumped out, wearing what looked like a million-dollar suit set off by a long white silk scarf. “Look at you!” I said, kissing him.
“Look at you,” he replied, and we both burst out laughing. I climbed into the cozy car and promptly forgot that I was supposed to be the New York Times.
“Can you believe that they pay us to do this?” I said.
“Shh,” he whispered, looking more like an excited adolescent than England’s hottest celebrity chef. “We can’t ever let them know that we would do this for free.”
Where did Ken find out so much about New York’s newest Chinatown? I’ll never know. He whirled me through Flushing as if he had grown up there, introducing me to men whose nicotine-stained fingers beckoned us into hidden rooms with tanks of improbable fish. He found fruit and vegetables I had never seen before in New York—durian, mangosteens, galingale—and women came whispering out of the darkness to offer mysterious packages of spice. We ate Sichuan food so hot that each bite sent shock waves through my body, and funky Fujianese dishes laced with musty red wine paste.
We drank beer and whiskey, and he beckoned me down rickety stairs into restaurants where mine was the only white face. Eating a bowl of soft noodles with a mysterious crunch, I discovered that the long white strands were laced with tiny crabs. As my teeth dissected another shell, I thought, finally, that Joe was right, this really was an Asian city, once you penetrated the invisible wall.
It was very late at night when we got to the Taiwanese restaurant. Was it the fourth meal, the fifth, the sixth? I had lost count, but I had also lost all interest in food. Undaunted, Ken ordered a platter of spareribs, and when they appeared my appetite came with them; they were thin and crisp, absolutely irresistible. Great bowls of beef and noodle soup, thick with five-spice flavor, came next, and I ate that too, along with bracing platters of clams with basil.
It was past midnight and customers were still coming through the door as the air grew thick with smoke and the strangely lonesome Chinese music grew louder. I thought that this would be the place to bring the chairman, but I knew I was only thinking that because it was late and I was tired and happy and filled with too much Chinese whiskey.
There was no traffic going home, and the road beneath us was an unbroken ribbon stretching back to the city, the wheels turning in a comforting thrum. “Let’s have another adventure soon,” said Ken when I stumbled out of the car. “Come to France. Let me cook you a really fabulous meal. Just wait ’til you taste my duck!”
Nice piece,” said Carol a few weeks later, when the article about my adventures with Ken appeared. “Sounds like you had fun. But wasn’t the whole point to find a restaurant for the banquet?”
“How could I tell him that the places he took me weren’t fancy enough?” I said. “I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to insult him.”
Carol wasn’t fooled. “You just forgot. You were having too much fun.”
I acknowledged this with a rueful smile. “Don’t worry,” said Carol, “I’ve had another idea. The last restaurant in your article made me think of it. What about Taiwan?”
“What about it?”
“Did you ever ask any of the Taiwanese officials where to eat?”
It was an excellent notion. The people from the Taiwan mission to the United Nations we
re very helpful. The woman with whom I spoke said that her own favorite restaurant might be just what I was looking for. It was not large. And yes, if she remembered correctly, there was a private dining room.
Carol and I were on the next train.
Flushing First Taste was small, with a kind of shabby elegance meant to convey seriousness. Cloths covered the tables and three solemn gods presided over the back of the room, which could be closed off for banquets, keeping watch over a locked case filled with expensive bottles of whiskey, Cognac, and Scotch, each carefully labeled with a customer’s name.
The chopsticks were of good quality, a promising sign. And the dishes that we ordered—paper-wrapped chicken, crisp, tiny pork ribs, pea shoots cooked with eggs in chicken fat, steamed fish fillets in rice wine—were all wonderful. Carol and I looked at each other.
“Do you think?” I asked.
She nodded. “This,” she said, “is definitely the place.”
But I had learned my lesson; this time, I took nothing for granted. I gave Joe’s secretary the address of the restaurant and waited for his call.
When it came (he approved), I moved to the next step and began planning the menu. Remembering Diana’s advice, I went back to Flushing for a meal and started the negotiation. And then the faxing began.
It took three days, but at the end I had a menu that was surprisingly similar to the one I had negotiated at KB Garden Restaurant. I proudly sent the final product to the third floor.
“You aren’t going to believe this,” I told Carol a couple of days later.
“Let me guess,” she interrupted. “Joe wants to rewrite the menu?”
“He doesn’t think what I’ve chosen is sufficiently splendid for the chairman. He’s taken charge and everything has become fancier. Now there’s abalone on the cold platter. We’ve replaced the squab with stuffed blue crabs and the duck with baked lobster. And instead of baby pig we’re having salt-baked crab.”