The Juice (31 page)

At some point we’re given a single honeysuckle blossom on a small plate and are instructed to pull off the stem and suck it. Again, we can’t help laughing. In fact we laugh through much of the meal. The honeysuckle teases forth memories of childhood; the nectar of the blossom, almost certainly enhanced, is far more intense than I remember it from those long-ago summers, though when I ask Ferran about it later, he is uncharacteristically cagey about what was actually in it. The marinated rose petals with artichoke foam are not a complete success; they tasted exactly the way roses smell, but I discovered that I don’t really like rose petals, and perhaps that’s a good thing to know. The sprig of marinated pine, on the other hand, is delicious. Since my last unpleasant experience eating a sprig of pine some forty-five years ago, back in the days when I tasted almost everything I encountered in a spirit of childish open-mindedness, I didn’t think I’d ever want to have one again, but I was wrong.

In the nights that followed my evening at El Bulli, I dined at two Michelin one-star restaurants in Barcelona, including one run by a disciple of Ferran’s, and I found myself disappointed to be back in the realm of conventional cuisine. It’s like climbing behind the wheel of a Camry after spending the day driving Ferraris at
the company test track in Maranello. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it’s like returning to the present day after spending a few hours in some utopian future complete with antigravity and previously unimagined erogenous zones. This feeling gradually fades, thank God, and I’m able to enjoy retro food once again. But I can’t help hoping that Adrià changes his mind and that I get another chance to try whatever he’s up to. In the meantime, I comfort myself with the thought that much of what I otherwise eat will be greatly influenced by his work, past and future.

When I first met Lora Zarubin, I could never have imagined that we’d find ourselves locked in adjacent cells in the police station of a provincial French town at three in the morning. In fact I never thought I’d see her again after our disastrous first encounter, which took place in 1995 at the Grill Room of the Four Seasons. My friend Dominique Browning had recently been appointed editor in chief of
House & Garden
, and she’d decided to ramp up the magazine’s coverage of food and wine. She’d already hired Lora as food editor, and Lora was quite adamant that there should be a regular wine column. Dominique, a longtime friend, knew this was a passion of mine and thought it would be interesting to have someone outside the field write about it. When she proposed me, Lora and some of the other editors were aghast. I was known, among other things, for writing about people who abused controlled substances, and I was written about in the New York gossip press as one of those very individuals, a monster of ego and excess. Lora found it hard to believe I knew much about wine. Certainly I had a reputation as a party animal; no one had ever accused me of being a connoisseur.

When we got together for lunch with Dominique, I confirmed all of her worst suspicions. The night before I’d been out until the wee hours with Bret Easton Ellis, and I was not, as we say of certain
wines, showing very well. There in the Grill Room, surrounded by moguls sipping mineral water, I felt seriously misplaced and miscast. Mort Zuckerman, Mort Janklow, Martha Stewart, Henry Kissinger, and a downtown fuckup brat-pack novelist. Even on the best of days this wouldn’t have been my scene, or my hour to shine. I wasn’t really in the mood to talk about wine, much less drink it. My olfactory acuity was at a low point. However, I was eventually able to impress Lora a little, despite my condition, correctly guessing the provenance of a glass that was given to me blind, surprising myself perhaps even more than Lora. One would have to say her admiration was grudging at best, and I believe Dominique gave me the job over her protests, but suddenly we were colleagues. Neither one of us could have predicted how intimate that association would become.

It was strange we hadn’t met earlier; for an all too brief spell in the late eighties her eponymous restaurant in the West Village was one of my favorite dinner destinations, although I don’t recall that I ever met the proprietress. At the time downtown restaurants were divided into those places where you went to see and be seen and those places where you went for the food. Although Lora’s had a surfeit of celebrity patrons—Madonna was a regular—the food was the real draw; it was a homey place, the menu startlingly simple and refreshing at a time when chefs were competing to see how many diverse and incompatible ingredients they could cram into one dish, when every meal seemed to be topped with something along the lines of raspberry chili cilantro vinaigrette with green tea anchovy sorbet. Ah, yes, the eighties. Who can remember them? Strangely enough, I do remember a sublime grilled chicken I had upstairs at Lora’s. When I first saw the menu, I didn’t know what to make of it, so devoid of frills, flourishes, and furbelows. Where the hell was the chipotle mango pesto, the raspberry mole? (When I later learned she was from San Francisco, and was friends with Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame, the whole thing made a little
more sense.) Over the course of a few visits I noticed that the menu changed almost daily and was based on seasonally available ingredients—much less common then than it is today.

Some six years after Lora shuttered her restaurant and shouldered debts she’d be paying off for years to come, I was hired to write the wine column for
House & Garden
. Her other reservations aside, Lora was appalled to discover my lack of knowledge and enthusiasm for California wine, and she dispatched me there to begin my education, the first and last trip I made by myself for the magazine. It’s possible she was trying to sabotage me by arranging my first-ever professional appointment with the winemaker Helen Turley, a.k.a the Wine Goddess, a notorious perfectionist and curmudgeon, but, scary as it was, I somehow managed to survive that tasting without entirely revealing my vast reserves of ignorance. In subsequent years I learned a great deal from Turley and her husband, John Wetlaufer—not only about tasting and viticulture, but also about the importance of taking milk thistle to protect the liver and how to sauté fresh foie gras. That first trip Lora also sent me to a little place in Yountville called the French Laundry. I’d eaten at Rakel, the chef’s short-lived venture in downtown New York, but I was totally unprepared for the wildly inventive, multicourse orgy Thomas Keller was conjuring nightly at his new West Coast post. Later, I shared many feasts with Lora there, after days spent at wineries in Napa and Sonoma. Although she usually objected to overly elaborate cuisine, she was one of Keller’s earliest and most enthusiastic fans.

From the start our respective roles in the Condé Nast hierarchy were ill defined. As food editor and full-time employee, she had a kind of supervisory role over my column, although she had no editorial background, and my columns were in fact edited by a literary intellectual named Elizabeth Pochoda, friend of Philip Roth’s, late of
The Nation
. I guess Lora thought of herself as my boss, whereas I thought of her as my assistant. Luckily, I knew
more about wine than she did. Not much more, but enough. On the other hand, she had an extraordinary palate; she was a great blind taster and could parse out the scent and flavor components of wine better than anyone I’ve ever known. She was also a great cook and utterly passionate about food; I didn’t know all that much about food, wine’s alleged boon companion, and Lora was to become my tutor in the joys of cooking and eating, although not without a fight, or rather many fights, along the way.

I’m still not sure how Lora became my travel companion or convinced Dominique to pay for her to accompany me on all wine-related trips. She must have suggested that I couldn’t be trusted on my own, and it’s true that I’m very absentminded and badly organized. Lora is the opposite. I don’t want to say she’s anal-retentive, but I can’t think of a better phrase at the moment. She organized the trips, made the calls, held the tickets until the gate, and drove the rental car. She hated my driving and early on banned me from the driver’s seat. Apparently, I bounce up and down on the accelerator in a way that’s conducive to nausea. I was happy enough to be the navigator and happy to have everything taken care of. For the next twelve years we logged tens of thousands of miles across Europe, the States, and South America. We visited the best winemakers in the world: Angelo Gaja, Robert Mondavi, Richard Geoffroy of Dom Pérignon, Bruno Borie of Ducru-Beaucaillou, Marcel Guigal, Helen Turley, and Baroness Philippine Rothschild. We became friends with many of these people, some of them early in their careers. We dined with them at some of the best restaurants in the world, drank too much with them, and even flirted with some of them. At least I did and would have gotten lucky on occasion if not for Lora’s interference. Determined not to see me sleep with anyone I shouldn’t be sleeping with, she claimed it wasn’t professional, but her own vehemence seemed strangely personal, her ostensible jealousy all the more interesting since she’s gay.

Lora somehow must have thought that she was in the closet when we first met, or else that I was too much of a heterosexual clod to notice alternative sexual bents. About two years after we started working together, we were on a wine trip in the Napa Valley, and she made me sit down and watch the two-hour “coming out” episode of
Ellen
, Ellen DeGeneres’s nineties sitcom. “Well, hon,” she said afterward—she called everyone “hon”—“can you guess what I’m trying to say?” I pretended to be surprised, and we had a weepy, huggy scene, then opened a bottle of Champagne. I became the confidant of her love life, and she of mine. My third marriage was starting to unravel during our early years on the road, and Lora listened to the whole story. And I, in my turn, heard the story of the breakdown of the great love of her life, a few years before.

Food was an important part of our bond, almost as important as wine, though we didn’t always agree on what, or how, to eat. Lora believes in simplicity of preparation and presentation. She loves to grill over an open fire and has often told me that our most memorable meal was an
asado
, a cookout of virtually every part of a recently living cow, washed down with some now forgotten Malbec, on the slopes of the Andes in Argentina. And indeed, as soon as she reminded me, I remembered eating beef liver on a stick, looking up at the snowcapped Andes after a vigorous horseback ride in the foothills, wondering how it was that the most romantic moments of my life seemed to be shared with my prickly lesbian friend.

Our quasi marriage had a surrogate daughter named Bessie, Lora’s high-strung fox terrier, who usually traveled with us and barked incessantly at everyone she encountered along the way. I’d visited the new puppy the day Lora brought her home, and she subsequently greeted me with hysterical displays of affection, but she didn’t seem to have much use for most other humans. Grateful as I was to be singled out, I was also frequently embarrassed by the
way she treated the rest of my species, and more than a few hangovers were exacerbated by that high-pitched bark echoing through the confines of a wine cellar. One winemaker expressed a wish, sotto voce, to toss her into a bubbling fermentation tank.

Bessie was happiest when it was just the three of us, on the road, or in a French restaurant where she could lie under the table and collect scraps. When it comes to restaurants, Bessie is definitely a Francophile. Lora also likes French cuisine, up to a point: she believes that some of the best restaurants in France have no Michelin stars, that these are the places most likely to serve honest, regional food, whereas I also love the haute cuisine and drama of the two- and even three-star establishments. We were always struggling and clashing on this front. As she told a friend recently, “Jay believed in treating himself well, very well. We might have had four hours of wine tasting along with eating the food that gracious vintners always offer, but Jay had to end the day with a two-star meal. Often Jay ended up eating alone or inviting a stranger to join him, even if that stranger spoke a language he didn’t in a country we knew little about.”

One night we agreed to go to a famous two-star restaurant in Avignon, and though as I recall it was initially her idea, in the end it was hard to know whom she was madder at—me or the chef. “This food’s so phony,” she said, loud enough for everyone in the restaurant to hear. “It has no soul. It has no sense of place.” She was right about that one, though she grudgingly came to admire Alain Ducasse’s three-star restaurant in Paris, one of my favorites, even as I came to see the point of her no-star crusade. One of the best meals we ever had was a lunch at a place she somehow knew about, Elisabeth Bourgeois’s starless restaurant in Provence, sitting out in the courtyard surrounded by birdcages and trees laden with cherries. We started out with the best tomato soup I’ve ever had, accompanied by a local Viognier, and later, after one of the best meals I’ve ever had in my life, we drove a few miles up the
road to visit the man who’d made the Viognier and taste more of his wine.

Our split on the Michelin issue might have partly reflected the fact that she was the keeper of the expense account, the one who had to go back to New York and try to justify the $900 meal at Taillevent. In a way we both became prisoners of our roles, me playing the part of the spoiled epicure, Lora taking the part of the disciplinarian, although we were sometimes able to see the humor in the clash. Not infrequently we would drop the roles and collaborate, for example when we saw a particularly amazing bottle of wine on a list, calculating how much Condé Nast would be willing to bear and how much we would thereafter chip in together to get what we wanted. Such was the case when we were dining at Beaugravière in the Rhône Valley, which is famous for its wine list and for its way with black truffles in season, when, naturally, we arranged to arrive. (Or I should say, Lora arranged to arrive, since I was incapable of this kind of forward planning.) We knew that the 1989 Château Rayas on the list was a relative bargain at around $200, knew also the magazine would never spring for that
and
the truffles, so we asked the proprietor to divide the bill, half for
House & Garden
and a quarter for each of its trusted employees.