A Moveable Feast (13 page)

This reckless desire to reinvent his menu every year is really what makes El Bulli special – but it also ensures that it will reflect Adrià’s sometimes outlandish current culinary obsessions. You could argue that his menu of thirty-nine tastes would be improved with some serious culling, but in a way this would be self-defeating because you learn as much about Adrià’s approach to food from the missteps as from the winning dishes.

In the end, restaurants are like cravats – your favourite depends on your mood and your needs at that particular time rather than which has the prettiest pattern. But thinking back on all the wonderful meals I have enjoyed in my life, for me, thanks to its reckless pursuit of the new, El Bulli has to be considered the leader of the pack. As this long-anticipated pilgrimage comes to its end, I am convinced more fervently than ever that a meal here should be the aspiration of any serious foodie, even if, or perhaps because, you will careen from dishes that plunge you into paroxysms of pleasure to those that may confound or even
disgust you – undercooked kidney anyone? A meal here will never be boring and will always leave you asking why, how and is this is the future of food?

As I finish these thoughts, the irrepressible maître d’ returns with my now-spotless jacket. It’s the sartorial equivalent of Adrià’s culinary magic. At El Bulli, I think, nothing is as it seems.

Postscript: In the year after my June 2009 visit, a couple of significant changes occurred. In April of 2010, the Danish restaurant Noma displaced El Bulli in the top spot on
Restaurant
magazine’s list. Much more shockingly, and sadly, in February of that year, Ferran Adrià announced that he would be closing El Bulli in 2012 and would concentrate instead on setting up a university of gastronomy. In retrospect, I’m enormously grateful that I was able to make my pilgrimage when I could. But now I’m wondering: perhaps his university will be pilgrimage-worthy as well …

Anthony Bourdain is the author of the bestsellers
Kitchen Confidential
, A Cook’s Tour
and
Medium Raw
. His work has appeared in the
New York Times
and the
New Yorker
, and he is a contributing authority for
Food Arts
magazine. He is the host of the popular television show
No Reservations
.

I love old school, hometown places. When it comes to Manhattan, this means places like Katz’s Deli, and Keen’s, and Russ & Daughters, uniquely New York institutions that have survived the brutal caprices of style and changing tastes – and are still worth going out of your way to patronise. Let me make this clear: ‘old’ does not necessarily mean ‘good’. Just because it’s a ‘New York institution’ doesn’t mean you want to eat there. If it did, New Yorkers might have actually eaten at Tavern on the Green – and Luchows would still be open.

Peter Luger? You can have it. Grand Central Oyster Bar? Good luck. The places I’m thinking of just happen to be
institutions. They just happen to be old. Newer, more … pragmatic enterprises couldn’t or wouldn’t do what they’re doing. Most – if not all – of these places are dinosaurs, among the last of mostly extinct herds that once, long ago, ruled New York’s concrete jungle. But these remaining eateries, though perhaps no longer ‘culturally relevant’, and certainly not ‘hip’ – and about as far from ‘trendy’ or ‘hot’ as anything could be – are in fact what make New York special. All are still great after all these years.

I contend they deserve love and respect from anyone serious about food or about having a good time. Good food is always ‘relevant’. Manganaro’s Grosseria and that awesome time warp of a French restaurant, Le Veau d’Or, are businesses that would very likely be more profitable selling sneakers or tube socks or designer cupcakes. They hang on – in a particularly unfriendly economic climate – for the simple reason that they’re owned by magnificently stubborn people who happen to own their buildings.

Manganaro’s is a bit of vintage Italian-America that people raised on a more al dente, post-Batali, northern-inflected, lightly sauced, meatball-free Italian cuisine might not appreciate. But it’s a vital step back in time, another world, and an essential one to remember and to cherish. If you don’t like the spaghetti with red sauce and meatballs in the back dining area at Manganaro’s? If you don’t ‘get it’? You’re just not drinking enough red wine.

There is better French food in New York these days than that they’re serving at Le Veau d’Or. But if you can’t have one of the kooky-great times of your life at this absolutely untouched-by-time frog pond – with its delightfully irony-free, sixty-year-old menu? Then you really have no true love for French food – and certainly nothing resembling a heart. It’s the bistro that time forgot – a last link to a golden age of tableside carving, curly parsley as state of the art garnish and desserts last seen in the pages of the
Larousse Gastronomique.

Snobs will no doubt carp that Katz’s has been covered to death on TV and in films – and they will groan (accurately enough) that every damn lazy-ass food writer from elsewhere looking to cover the ‘real’ New York (in an afternoon) will write about their few bites of pastrami at this downtown institution, make a few oblique and obligatory ‘When Harry Met Sally’ references and move on. But there’s a reason Marco Pierre White, for instance, loves the place – and why so many people keep going back: not
just
because they ‘don’t make ‘em like that any more’ – but because it’s damn good pastrami. Period.

The herring and smoked and cured fish they sell at Russ & Daughters would be just as desirable if the store were a spanking new gourmet shop – instead of a century-old institution that grew up from a street cart. The product speaks for itself. Russ & Daughters occupies that rare and tiny place on the mountaintop reserved for those who are not just the oldest and the last – but also the best.

I do make allowances for personal history, for the sentimental attachments and wilful blindness that come with growing up with a particular kind of food. On a recent return to Hop Kee in Chinatown, I was – before moving on to the more delicious and authentic delights of the ‘phantom menu’ (supposedly reserved for Chinese patrons) – unable to resist the charms of the clunky, corn-starchy
kwailo
classics I’d first encountered as a kid. It had been a long, long time since I’d had an egg roll, or wonton soup, or a scary-bright sweet and sour pork – and by this time, after having eaten all over China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan – that old-style ‘not really Chinese’ stuff had become genuinely exotic again. For those of you less inclined to nostalgia, I highly recommend the whole flounder and the crabs.

My point? Patronise these places and you not only honour Manhattan’s rich culinary and cultural tradition – you give yourself permission to relax and have a helluva good time.

Matthew Fort’s food writing career began in 1986 when he started a column about food in the
Financial Times Saturday Review
. In 1989 he became Food and Drink Editor of the
Guardian
, a position he still holds. Since then he has written for a wide variety of British, American and French publications. He was Glenfiddich Food Writer of the Year and Restaurateurs’ Writer of the Year in 1991, Glenfiddich Restaurant Writer of the Year in 1992 and Glenfiddich Cookery Writer of the Year in 2005. In 1998 he published
Rhubarb and Black Pudding
, a book about the Michelin-starred chef Paul Heathcote. His second book,
Eating Up Italy
, was the Guild of Food Writers’ Book of the Year in 2005. His new book,
Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons
, a food portrait of Sicily, won the Premio Sicilia Madre Mediterranea in 2009. Currently Matthew is a judge on
The Great British Menu,
and he co-presents
Market Kitchen
with Tom Parker Bowles.

Dorego’s, there’s nowhere quite like it. Never has been, I dare say. One of a kind, it’s a sort of a bar, a sort of a restaurant; seedy, louche, easy-paced, open-hearted, democratic, with the beauty of
the truly idiosyncratic
sui generis
– although that’s not a phrase you’re likely to hear in Dorego’s. It looks out over the point where the Keiskamma River meets the Indian Ocean, one of the world’s great views. It’s a place out of time, of dreams, memories, reflections – and a solitary pelican.

There’s a sign on the left-hand side of the main road, about an hour out of East London in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, as you head north towards Port Alfred. The sign is chipped and faded, a bit battered by time, weather and human usage. It reads ‘Hamburg’. Usually there are a few goats tugging at the scrub with absent-minded madness on the verge, and one or two people waiting patiently for a somewhat unpredictable local taxi.

Follow the sign and turn off onto the dirt track that lollops in a leisurely fashion across land undulating in voluptuous curves on either side; bare grass, smooth, stitched from time to time by fences of wire or scrub, pocked here and there by squares of tilled earth. You pass clusters of huts, some thatched, some topped with corrugated iron, all painted in the vivid pastel blues, yellows, pinks and greens and bold geometrical patterns favoured by the local Xhosas.

Go slowly, with a certain amount of trepidation, partly out of respect for the uncertain surface of the road, and partly because from time to time rangy cattle move with elegant nonchalance across your path, taking no heed of your impatience. Or there are goats to scatter, or groups of people to edge around. A
buckie
– a pick-up truck – passes at speed in the other direction. The dust thrown up by its wheels hangs like a plume of smoke in the hot air; the brilliant sun shines through it in a golden haze.

Presently, down to your left, a kilometre or so away, a river,
the
river, comes into sight. Keiskamma means ‘puff adder’ in Xhosa, the language they speak hereabouts, because the sinuous curves of the river mimic those of the snake. You can see how the river uncoils across the flat base of the valley, the land on either
side green and fertile, squared up into fields, before rising quite sharply to escarpments on either side, along one of which you are driving. The river is broad, half a kilometre across perhaps, as brown as the tilled earth in the fields, glossy and smooth.

And then, up ahead, suddenly the rough track disappears beneath tarmac and you can see houses on the near riverbank, a bit retro, suburban, painted white for the most part, a warning that Hamburg is just around the next bend.

Not that there’s much to the town, really. This part of South Africa was part of the Siskei, one of the ‘independent’ homelands set up at the height of the apartheid years following the doctrine of separate development established by Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, president from 1958 to 1966. Except the Siskei never developed in the way the rest of South Africa did, and Hamburg was never developed at all, unlike the more famous, white, seaside towns – Knysna, Plettenberg Bay, Cape St Francis.

This is a fact about which I, for one, am supremely happy. It has kept the place unspoiled by crass commercialisation and contemporary vulgarities. Hamburg is a time capsule of white vernacular architecture of sixty years ago, modest, kindly, unshowy by today’s standards, a bit tight-arsed if truth be told. In recent years, though, one or two brave souls have built more modern houses and painted them in myriad hues, picking up the colour sense of the huts speckling the surrounding land, respecting the spirit of the place.

Pass the straggling town, past Mrs May’s Hole in the Wall for Fresh general store, and the ramshackle hotel, the town’s only one, and suddenly the road, having hugged the riverbank, swoops up to your right and away from the river. On your left is a dirt track that continues to keep faith with the river, broad and flat. Bounce along this and it leads you out towards the estuary proper, past a sparsely occupied camping site spread out below a line of thick, dark green coastal scrub, to Dorego’s.

In a sense, Dorego’s is more impressive at a distance than it is close to. It’s a large, solid, square, single-storey wooden building on stilts as massive as a rugby prop-forward’s thighs, beneath a classic thatched roof. A
stoep
– verandah – runs around the front and sides, with wooden steps leading up to it.

Assuming it’s open – not always a safe assumption with Dorego’s, as opening hours tend to follow a whim of particular individuality – you enter through the door into a broad open space, dark after the brilliant glare of the outside. In front of you there’s a pool table, in a remarkable state of preservation, given the battering it gets nightly from Dorego’s well-oiled if not well-heeled clientele – although you do need to lift one end of it if you want the balls back at the end of your allotted time. To your right is a small bar manned by Leslie.

Leslie, in some ways, is the heart and soul of Dorego’s. The place is owned by Dorego – I never learned his Christian name – a Portuguese refugee from Mozambique. Or rather it was owned by him until last year, when too many years of sitting in his sweat-sodden singlet and grubby shorts, his massive paunch resting on his thighs, guzzling Castle beers throughout the day and sharing news, views and tales of the old days with his oddly assorted customers, finally caught up with him and laid him in his coffin, leaving the diminutive Mrs Dorego and Leslie to look after the place as best they could.

Leslie is a large man with a moon face, which is sometimes hard to make out in the crepuscular gloom. He always moves at his own pace, deliberate in the most deliberate sense of the word. I have never seen Leslie hurry, even when the customers are five deep and clamouring for their first, or one hundred and first, drink of the day. Beer is the preferred tipple, cans of Castle mostly, kept chilled in an antiquated ice-cream freezer behind the bar. There’s a small supply of Amstels for the better class of toper, a curious range of spirits to mix with Coke, and wine, in
place of which you would be advised to drink aftershave. And these Leslie dispenses with placid benediction, never hurried, never flustered, never quicker, never slower.

There are a few ramshackle tables with ramshackle chairs ranged around the single space that serves as bar, pool hall, talking shop and, when the occasion demands, restaurant. Or you can take your drink out onto the
stoep,
and lean against the railings and look out over the river.

It’s late afternoon, mid-tide. The wide sand flats look like unrefined caster sugar, pale amber-gold. The blue-brown-slate water wanders, apparently as leisurely as Leslie, scrolling this way and that in a series of generous curves between the sandbanks. Black stick figures punctuate different points of the riverscape, fishermen out after cob and grunter. There are a couple of business-like boats moored mid-stream. More fishermen. Away to the right, the river speeds through a narrow channel and then spreads out into a broad front, a quiet insistence confronting the booming, bullish, cream-capped rollers of the Indian Ocean, creating a great churning mass of conflicting currents.

And somewhere, on one of the sandbanks, is the solitary pelican. Now, pelicans are gregarious birds. Normally, they move in twos or more, formations of pelicans skimming just above the waves like squadrons of avian Pegasus flying boats. But not this one. Oddly, he’s never been given a name. He turned up on his tod years ago, and has remained here ever since. There have been the occasional rumours that he had found a mate at last, but these have always proved chimerical. I don’t think Hamburg’s solitary pelican is gay. Like some humans, he just prefers his own company. He is what used to be described as a confirmed bachelor and, as such, has become the mascot of Hamburg. If Hamburg had a crest, a solitary pelican would be on it.

And, suddenly, there he is, gliding effortlessly down onto the river, ruffling the smooth surface briefly, waddling up a sandbank,
stretching his wings and shaking his feathers before sinking down onto his tummy and tucking his great bill back along his body and dozing off. He seems to have eaten well.

And so should we. The violent African sunset, with its concatenation of colour, has turned the river to the purest, rippling, liquid gold. In a few minutes it will be dark and the sky will be silvered with stars, the velvety blackness pricked with lights from the houses. The brightness thrown by Dorego’s will throw shadows across the grass around.

The menu at Dorego’s is even less extensive than the drinks at the bar. There are fresh oysters, from just along the coast. And then there’s a choice of
piri-piri
chicken,
piri-piri
fish or steak, the unique feature of which is a fried egg on top, Hamburg’s plebeian version of
escalope de veau
Holstein, if you like. And chips and salad and ice cream. That’s it, although if you ask ahead, you can get spicy Portuguese sausages and
bacalhau,
salt cod.

But food isn’t about frills and fancy gear and plate poetry. Food is about time and place and people and memory, people and memory most of all. That isn’t to say that the food at Dorego’s isn’t top notch – of its kind. Mrs Dorego, diminutive and neat as her husband was the reverse, masterminds the kitchen, and the oysters are silvery, slippery, saline, shot through with iodine. Now try the chicken. It’s pert and singing with spice, and as your teeth break the skin with a crisp rustle, you find there’s the sweet, earthy harmony of a bird that has lived a brisk, outdoor existence.

Not the chicken? Well, the fish, cob or grunter depending on the day’s catch, has the muscular firmness and sparkle of something that, just a few hours before, was finning its way through ocean or river currents. And if the steaks aren’t exactly buttery tender, as you chew, the amiable, musky juices pressed from the fibres of the meat make you realise that, when it comes to flavour, you may have to work at it, but you’ll take a touch of toughness over tenderness every time.

And so we gather, John and El and Lindsay and Lois and, in no particular order, Sarah, Emma, Lulu and Dana, and John Kincaid and his brother Morkel and anyone else who happens to be staying or shows up, and me. Someone chivvies Leslie about the drinks, and the arguments and laughter and conversations and teasing and all the other hullaballoo of family life start up again, and food arrives, two plates of oysters, gone in a twinkling, the shells stacked up in tottering towers, and tonight someone had the good sense to order up those sausages and
bacalhau.

You can tell there’s a fine sensibility at work in the kitchen, a cook who knows the pleasures of robust flavours and big textures and generous spirit. And for those who can’t quite get their minds through the fiery heat of the sausages or the rich, rank, boiled-wool perfume of the salt cod or its macho saltiness, there are the
piri-piri
chicken and the steaks and the fish and chips, characteristically pale and soggy, and the excuse of a salad. But who cares because the warmth is there and the humour and the sense of well-being and affection and love, and I know, just know, that this is a time and place and people I will remember forever, and that one day I will call it all to mind and write it down just as I remember it.