The Man Who Ate the World (15 page)

This is why I have a free suite at the five-star Grosvenor House Hotel down by the marina, my very own white Mercedes limousine to drive me around town, and a butler called Rajesh. I can’t claim this was unplanned. Startled by the prices in Moscow, I had decided to look closely at my finances. I had concluded that if I really was to avoid taking complimentary meals, I would have to make a few policy decisions. Firstly, I would have to eat by myself in the seriously expensive places, as I had
done at Al Mahara. Secondly, I would have to shamelessly take any other nonfood freebies that came my way, and the hoteliers of Dubai, desperate to promote themselves, hadn’t been slow to come forward with generous offers.

Granted, the butler was a bit unnecessary. I really didn’t need him to deliver up the fresh trays of canapés every afternoon (though I did like the foie gras pâté on toast), and there was no way I was going to let Rajesh polish my shoes, however much he begged. The moment he clocked my cheap man-made soles, he would have had me for a fake. Still, it was nice to have the sitting room and the two plasma-screen televisions. It was also handy to have the big white car to take me to the Mall of the Emirates so I could have a look at the 400-meter indoor ski slope, complete with real snow, and study the menu at St. Moritz, the Swiss café at the bottom. Although I had come to Dubai in winter, the temperature was still in the mid 20s Celsius (upper 70s Fahrenheit). And yet, at St. Moritz, you could get a fondue.

Before my trip I had met chefs across London who were working on ventures in Dubai or who had been approached about sweetheart deals. Guillaume Rochette, the catering recruitment consultant who had been supplying chefs to Moscow, now had an office in Dubai, too, and talked excitedly of the money to be made there and the deals to be brokered. Dubai, he said, was about a commodity called “lifestyle,” and an expression of that lifestyle was restaurants. Alan Yau said he had plans for four or five places in Dubai, and the British celebrity chef Gary Rhodes had just signed a deal, regardless of the fact that his whole career was based on a style of hearty cooking—Lancashire hot pot, oxtail stew, mutton pie—that drew on the traditions of a temperate Northern European country.

It didn’t matter that there was less access to local ingredients here than in Las Vegas. It made no difference that the place was bereft of cultural context; that even the rare examples of Arabic architecture felt as artificial as the ski slopes. Dubai had a hunger for wealthy people, and wealthy people have a hunger for food.

For one British chef none of this was news. He had spotted what was happening in Dubai years before anyone else, opening his first restaurant outside Britain in 2001 at the Hilton Dubai Creek. By all accounts Verre wasn’t bad, either. The local edition of
Time Out
had given it numerous awards, and whenever I asked locals to list the best restaurants in the city, it was always among the top five. As a result bookings were notoriously hard to come by. Happily, though, I had managed to secure one. It was time to visit a Gordon Ramsay restaurant.

I
first ate Gordon Ramsay’s food in 1995 when he was cooking at Aubergine, a restaurant in London’s Chelsea. It would suit the narrative if I could now claim it was the best meal I had eaten up to that point, but it wasn’t; a remarkable place called Le Champignon Sauvage in Cheltenham still held that honor. (Oh, that mint chocolate soufflé!) But there was no doubting the talent at work. I remember a single, fat lobster raviolo in an intense shellfish velouté, versions of which would become one of the chef’s signature dishes.

At the end of the meal there were three tiny crème brûlées, flavored with thyme, marjoram, and basil, though the waiters did not announce this. They insisted we had to guess what the flavorings were. I thought this more than a little cute: I didn’t go to expensive restaurants to guess my pudding. Still, they were good.

A few years later Ramsay had an argument with his employers and walked out, taking the entire staff with him. Backed by £1 million ($2 million) of his father-in-law’s money, he reopened at the site of a nearby restaurant called La Tante Claire, on Royal Hospital Road, which had boasted three Michelin stars. In 2001, Ramsay won his own third star and, while he had not embarked on his full-blown TV career by then—he was still slagging off chefs who dared to moonlight on the small screen—he was already gathering notoriety. He had appeared in a fly-on-the-wall documentary series,
Boiling Point,
in which he managed to use the word “fuck” as a noun, verb, adverb, and adjective and, just occa
sionally, as an expletive. He threw Joan Collins out of his restaurant for the sin of being in the company of the scabrous restaurant critic AA Gill. He telephoned newspaper gossip columnists to tell them exactly what he had just done.

It was later the same year that the scale of his ambition became obvious: He announced he was taking over the dining room at Claridge’s, arguably London’s grandest hotel. The Claridge’s restaurant, which was derided by some critics for having too many tables and for turning them too quickly in a desperate grab for profit, never managed to go beyond a single star, but Ramsay seemed unconcerned. He began eating up the hotel dining rooms of London, using the cooks who had been with him since Aubergine days until, by 2007, he had interests in eight (plus two pubs).

Ramsay published cookbooks. He wrote newspaper cookery columns. He took up sponsorship deals with everyone from crockery manufacturers to high-street liquor retailers, and discovered that television wasn’t so bad after all. He fronted the reality show
Hell’s Kitchen
both in the UK and the U.S., and made multiple series of
Kitchen Nightmares
in which he went into failing restaurants, turned them around, stripped off to the waist, and said “fuck” a lot. His face, which didn’t so much look lived-in as under multiple occupancy, was everywhere.

Inevitably questions began to be asked about how much cooking Ramsay now did. The chef had a stock answer. “People ask me who does the cooking when I’m not there and I tell them it’s the same people who do the cooking when I am there,” he told me in the spring of 2006. “I remember being asked that question by a journalist in a very expensive Armani suit. I asked her whether she thought Giorgio had stitched every single seam on her suit. Obviously not.”

There were also questions over the food itself. Back in the midnineties, the appearance of herbs that would normally be associated with savory courses, in desserts like those crème brûlées, was modish, forward thinking, almost cutting edge. But even back then a new movement was developing quietly that would eventually make a basil crème
brûlée look as staid as a rum baba. A few years before, a young Catalan chef called Ferran Adria had put a tomato on the end of a bicycle pump, blown it up, and created, to his surprise, a tomato foam.

At his restaurant El Bulli, a gruelling two-hour drive north of Barcelona, Adria began experimenting. He investigated the science of food and the conventions of the restaurant. He created hot savory jellies, and aromatic foams that sparkled on the tongue before disappearing to nothing, leaving only the echo of flavor. He broke away from the traditional three courses to serve twenty, thirty, even forty tiny bites. He used
sous vide
machines to cook under vacuum, paired savory with sweet, and was hailed as the founder of a movement in cookery as groundbreaking as nouvelle cuisine had been in the 1970s. Almost a century after it had revolutionized literature, music, and the visual arts, Modernism had finally come to the kitchen.

Within a few years others were pursuing similar ideas. At The Fat Duck in the uber-English village of Bray, the self-taught Heston Blumenthal put white chocolate and caviar together, served a pudding of smoky bacon ice cream, and made a dish of snail porridge, all of which eventually won him his third Michelin star. In the mountains of France, Marc Veyrat gave diners syringes with which to inject their food with sauces made from foraged herbs and wildflowers, and in New York at WD-50, a chef called Wylie Dufresne made a deep-fried mayonnaise. No meal cooked by any self-respecting with-it chef was now complete without foams and jellies and savory ice creams and meat and fish cooked at low temperature under vacuum.

Ramsay stuck rigidly to his neoclassicism; to his fillets of beef with Madeira jus and his caramelized tarte tatins of apples with vanilla ice cream. He was convinced there was a market for it and it was hard to argue with him, as new projects were announced with dizzying regularity. In the autumn of 2006 he celebrated his fortieth birthday by opening a restaurant in New York and revealing plans for further restaurants in Florida, Los Angeles, Prague, Dublin, Amsterdam, Paris, and Australia. It looked like Ramsay was intent on conquering the world.

That summer his flagship restaurant, Gordon Ramsay at Royal Hospital Road, had been closed so the dining room could be renovated and the kitchen upgraded. Ramsay also announced he was putting in an £80,000 ($164,150) webcam system. “That way I’ll be able to see what’s going on in all my restaurants around the world,” he told me. “We’ll have clocks up for the different time zones, too. It will look like a fucking investment bank in there.”

By then it was clear that the Royal Hospital Road restaurant, with its three Michelin stars, was no longer just an expensive place where people went for something to eat. It was the rock upon which an entire brand had been built. This made a kind of sense because the economics of the Michelin three-star restaurant had become increasingly unsustainable. While Michelin was notoriously coy about the criteria upon which they based their awards, it was generally understood that, for a restaurant to win three stars, it had to have a staff-to-diners ratio of at least one-to-one. If there were forty-four seats, as there are at Royal Hospital Road, there had to be at least forty-four staff, as indeed there are. Making a profit with this sort of head count is very tough indeed, so for many three-star chefs their flagship restaurants had become loss-leaders, out of which other profitable businesses—cheaper brasseries, outside catering operations—could be spun.

This made Verre in Dubai intriguing. After all, if a major factor in the luxury experience is the number of people you are able to employ then, in a place like Dubai, where labor is relatively cheap, it should be easier to deliver a high-quality experience. Shouldn’t it?

E
arly on the day I ate at Verre, I went to meet the head chef, a bald-headed, cheerful Mancunian called Jason Whitelock. When Verre first opened it was overseen by Angela Hartnett, one of the cooks from Ramsay’s Aubergine days who would eventually go on to take over the Connaught for the group. Whitelock had never worked for Ramsay before taking on the position at Verre, though he said cooking the dishes was
not difficult. He was in constant contact with Ramsay’s executive chef, Mark Askew, in London, and Ramsay himself came over twice a year. The real problem was the ingredients.

“Don’t eat the veal tonight,” he said. “My original consignment got rejected at customs because the labels weren’t right.” Bureaucracy was the curse of his life, he told me. All meat coming into Dubai has to be halal, literally permissible under Islamic law, which means, among other things, that it has to be drained of blood (as with koshered meat). This may make it virtuous to Muslims, but to greedy men like me, it’s disastrous. Cooking halal meat so it is not completely tough or dry requires real skill.

“Under the Dubai rules it needs to go through customs no more than two weeks after slaughter so it also can’t be aged,” Whitelock said, with a sorry shake of his big domed head. Later he showed me a piece of beef, which, he told me, was actually pretty good compared to some they had received. Drained of blood, it was a peculiar shade of pink, more like veal than matured beef.

He could use pork, but he needed a special license for it and a separate kitchen in which to prepare it, plus everything had to arrive by air. Back in Britain he was used to receiving shellfish that were still alive when they came into his kitchen. “In the two and half years I’ve been here,” Whitelock said, “I haven’t seen a langoustine move.” Then there was local taste. Some ingredients simply didn’t sell. If he brought in pigeon, he told me, they would lie in the fridge for a week, neglected by the customers until, in desperation, he would turn them into a terrine. “And then I would eat the terrine.” He also found himself serving a lot of meat well done. “It kills us to overcook meat like that,” he said. “But you have to give the customers what they want.”

What about the staff? Bar the four or five Europeans supplied by Ramsay, the rest were generally from the Indian subcontinent. “They are great,” he says. “They are not like British cooks who constantly want to change things. They have no interest in that. They just want to do it the same every time. Problem is on their days off they go away and eat these
serious curries. It blows their taste buds. You really have to watch the seasoning after that.”

I
t does not make me relish the prospect of the meal to come, and nor does the setting. Granted, the Hilton Dubai Creek looks better at night than it does by day but, even so, it still has something of the seventies disco fantastic about it. Everything is chrome and angular black leather sofas and spotlights. All the lobby lacks is a mirror ball and Gloria Gaynor tottering on roller skates in tight spandex. Upstairs, the dining room is reached through an automatic door that hisses and puffs on its hydraulics with such regularity during the meal that it begins to sound like a patient on a respirator in an intensive care unit. Even allowing for the trademark Ramsay shade of purple the dining room itself still manages to avoid exuding glamour, much as Dick Cheney has always studiously avoided exuding glamour. Above the main banquette is a shelf bearing a straggly line of white tinsel and miniature plastic Santas. It says much that, in this setting, it doesn’t look out of place.

Mostly, though, I am struck by the people. Outside on the pavement I had been in an Emirate on the eastern seaboard of the Arabian Peninsula. Inside, I might as well be in a small commuter town in southern England. There is one Emerati couple. He is in traditional white flowing robes and headdress. She is veiled over her head and up to her chin, revealing only the smallest patch of beautifully made up face. Other than that, the dining room is full of the mousy, white, English middle classes sitting nervously opposite one another, speaking in hushed voices, as if terrified that an overly demonstrative Continental waiter is about to do something to them they will find humiliating or baffling or both. There is an uneasy stiffness to these couples. They all look like they think tonight will end in an argument.